Camelia Read online

  My mother’s devoted love for the Shah was rooted in her childhood. Time and time again we’d heard her tell the same story of meeting him as a young girl in her hometown: “Jamaran was a village surrounded by wheat fields. Its roads were so quiet that if a car sometimes broke the silence, it was usually the Shah traveling between the palace in Sa’adabad and the palace in Saheb Gharaneyeh. Wherever I was, when I heard the sound of the Shah’s motorcade far off in the distance, I would run so fast that my heart would almost burst out of my chest. I ran to where the desert began just so I could wave at him from the roadside, and the Shah would always wave back. One day, as I was coming home from school, I saw him driving alone with his queen. Suddenly taking leave of my senses, I ran in front of his car in a frenzy. It screeched to a halt, and he got out.

  “I was afraid, but the Shah spoke kindly, running his hand across the top of my head, ‘My dear girl, this time nothing happened, but you must never again run out in front of a car like that.’”

  Then she’d stop, let out a sigh, and shake her head sadly. If my father happened to be passing within earshot, he’d pick up where she left off. “And then the Shah said he’d take a shit for you and tomorrow you should send him a plate so he can fill it up!” My father didn’t care for the mullahs or the Shah, but he preferred the Shah’s government to the mullahs. Naturally, Kati and I took our cues from our mother, and we didn’t understand the riots and slogans. Why would people want the Shah to leave? My mother would say, “It comes from having everything they need or even too much of it.” But it was we who lived content in the capital and had everything: water, electricity, telephones, modern streets, and highways. My father had a high-paying job that allowed us to spend all of our summer vacations in Europe. We rode around in a nice car and ate expensive food and bought our clothes in London from Harrods where my mother once tipped the salesclerk fifty pounds. We spent every summer in London and sometimes my mother would take me along on a winter trip just to shop at the Christmas sales. The price of oil had soared to the highest point in history, and the Iranians we knew were better and better off every day.

  What did we know about the neighborhoods called Halabiyabad in south Tehran, where people lived in houses made of tin gas-cans? Or about the villages without drinking water? Many towns had neither electricity, nor proper roads, nor schools, nor hospitals, nor did they meet even the most basic standards of hygiene. The people were fed up with the excesses and wastefulness of the Shah and his family. How many people had been forced to spend years being beaten and tortured in prison as political detainees? We didn’t know, and we didn’t want to know.

  On one of those illusory days when it seemed that the chaos had quieted under the control of Doctor Shahpur Bakhtiar, Kati and I went with our mother to visit our grandmother in Jamaran. On our way back we stopped at Mumtaz, the fabric store. My mother was looking for some fabric to make a winter coat. Of course it had to be in black, because she was still mourning the death of my grandfather. Mumtaz had the best quality fabric. I remember how my mother would always look for crepe chiffon there and my aunt Turan, for silk.

  The shopkeeper was busy unrolling the fabrics one by one across his counter when suddenly the earth trembled, and we heard a frightful noise. The Shahanshahi Guard was processing with pomp and circumstance along the main avenue from Sa’adabad Palace toward Meidan Tajrish. Soldiers were riding atop the tanks, covered in iron and armed to the teeth. My mother was drowning in patriotic joy. Then the sound of gunfire tore through the air. A revolutionary group had ambushed the parade, and the guard was returning their fire. The customers retreated to the back of the store in a huddle with a few disoriented people tumbling in from the street. I hid in my mother’s arms, and we waited out the firestorm. When we finally emerged, someone told us that a man had been killed. Another man took a bunch of carnations from the vendor across the street and started placing the flowers on the pools of blood. People were chanting “Death to the Shah” and “Martyrs have been struck down.” From then on, my mother decided we would stay at home and follow the revolution on the TV screen.

  FEBRUARY 1979

  “Vay be halat-e Bakhtiar agar Imam farda nayad; moselselha birun miayad” (Woe to Bakhtiar: if tomorrow the Imam does not come, the machine guns are coming out). Doctor Shahpur Bakhtiar, the prime minister, had closed Mehrabad, the main airport, to prevent Khomeini’s arrival. He even threatened to shoot his plane down. Khomeini said he’d take that risk. Bakhtiar gave his resignation and announced his intention to leave for France to prevent civil war and further bloodshed.

  Ayatollah Khomeini, the leader of the revolution, landed in Iran on an Air France flight on the morning of the first of February. Millions of excited Iranians, women and men, had gathered at the airport to greet him. In response to a journalist who asked how it felt to be coming back to Iran after nearly fifteen years far away from his homeland, Khomeini replied that he didn’t feel anything special, and this astonishing statement became a headline all over the world. Later, after the victory of the revolution, the image of him emerging from the plane, with a large entourage on the steps of the aircraft, became historic. It was shown year after year during the commemoration of the revolution. Every year the photo closed in, as his companions disappeared from official history, killed or pushed to the margins, until no one but Khomeini, his son Ahmad, and the pilot remained in the frame.

  I remember well how the blue and white Chevrolet carrying Khomeini kept stopping to greet the millions who wanted to see him up close—their leader who had spent years in exile, first in Iraq and then in France. When Khomeini arrived in Tehran, he went straight to Behesht-e Zahra and proclaimed, “Mohammed Reza Shah has laid waste to the cities and populated the cemeteries.” He sounded the glad tidings of freedom for the people of Iran—glad tidings of abundant water and electricity and the equal partitioning of oil revenue.

  Only two weeks had passed since the Shah left Iran, and the military bases had not yet been surrendered. At first, loyalist soldiers put up resistance. But the air force was at the beck and call of the Imam, and the army bases were quickly secured. Most soldiers joined forces with the people and put flowers in the barrels of their rifles. The people would chant, “Baradar-e arteshi, chara baradar kushi?” (My brother in the army, why do you kill your brother?) Exactly ten days after Khomeini’s arrival in Iran, the revolution was declared victorious. Iranian television proclaimed, “Div chu birun ravad, fereshte dar ayad” (When the devil goes out, the angel comes in).

  My uncle Manuchehr (really my father’s first cousin) was an officer in the Bureau of Investigation and worked at the Tehran Police Department. He was over at our house a few weeks after Khomeini arrived in Iran, and he pointed out that one of the men escorting Khomeini’s Chevrolet was a thief, a fugitive with a long record. They’d been after him for months, and here he was on television, swerving on a motorcycle in front of the Imam. My sister and I were fascinated. Every time they showed a segment on Khomeini’s reception we’d run up to the television screen and point out to everyone the notorious thief. Uncle Manuchehr later told us that this same thief had become a person of importance and visited police headquarters of his own accord. He proudly greeted the force, and no one had the courage to say a word, let alone arrest him.

  Ayatollah Khomeini was in the moon. In the evenings everyone turned their heads toward the sky. We couldn’t see anything. I gazed at the spots on the surface of the moon and strained to make out Khomeini’s frowning features, but I didn’t see anything. My father said, “Isn’t anyone going to ask these donkeys what that good-for-nothing is doing up there in the sky?” But Avid, my Uncle Bizhan’s, and my older cousin Omid had started going to prayers. Omid wore a carnelian ring on his hand, and they could see Khomeini in the moon, too. When I stubbornly insisted that Khomeini was a donkey, Omid would bite his lip and hang his head. They had just moved to a new house in a desert area called Shahrak-e Gharb. Their yard was covered in shallow ditches filled with rainw
ater and tadpoles, and my father would bring a large stick when we visited to beat off stray dogs. The barking dogs would chase after our car for a long way as we drove off. My uncle said that this was soon to become the best neighborhood in all of Tehran.

  It was a good time to settle old scores. The papers were filled with pictures of the victims of the firing squads swimming in blood. All you had to do was become a familiar face at your local mosque and then report that your neighbor was a SAVAKi. The first to be executed was the former head of the SAVAK, General Ne’matollah Nasiri. But all sorts of personal animosities and grudges were pretenses for taking revenge. Every day, people—some innocent, some bearing varying degrees of guilt—were delivered in groups to the revolutionary execution unit. There were neither courts nor defense attorneys; a council bearing the name Revolutionary Justice approved the executions on the spot. The name of one of Khomeini’s disciples, Hojjat ul-Islam Sadeq Khalkhali, was enough to make your hair stand on end. It was even rumored that he personally executed former prime minister Amir Abbas Hovida.

  We were at the mercy of the goodwill of our neighbors, the same neighbors who painted “SAVAKi” on our walls. We had yet to hear from many of my father’s relatives. Many had fled, some had left the country, and the fate of still others was completely unknown. We passed our days and nights in worry and disquiet. My father took up a tile from the bedroom floor and dug out a cavity deep enough to hide a plastic bag filled with banknotes and our mother’s gold jewelry. He brought home something we’d only seen in movies—a long, wide, double-edged sword called a qama. My father placed this fearsome weapon with its black leather sheath under his pillow, and he said to us, “If our house is attacked in the middle of the night, we will defend ourselves with this qama.” When our father was at work, Kati and I would push aside his pillow to stare at it.

  Instead of making me feel safer, the qama gave me nightmares. I had the same dream every night, a cartoonish vision in which soldiers with long spears would come to attack, riding on white horses, and there I would be on the ground trapped between their long legs. I would wake up with a start, remembering the sound of the slogans chanted by Nima and Mani, the two boys from next door who only six months before had been eating ice cream and laughing with us by the sea in Brighton. But instead of the revolutionaries, it was my young uncle, Ali, who came to our house late one night with a sandbag full of weapons and hid it in the closet where my mother kept her clothes. We listened to my father and my uncle identifying these weapons: Uzi, Kalashnikov . . .

  The next day, my father called Katayun and I and softly told us, “Girls, be careful not to tell anyone that we have weapons in our house. You mustn’t breathe a word of it even to your friends. And never go into your mother’s closet.” We both nodded, but from then on our greatest source of amusement was to go to the closet and look at all the different kinds of weapons, having no idea where they came from or what they might be used for. Years later I learned that they had been taken in raids on army bases during the climactic days of the revolution. Then one day, maybe in that same month, my uncle came back in the dark of night and carried away all those heavy weapons, putting in their place a Colt and a bag full of cartridges. The Colt took its place next to the double-edged sword. We were ready for anything.

  MARCH 21, 1979

  That year, when Nouruz, the Iranian New Year, came it seemed most of the country was in great spirits—the people had resolved this was their first “spring in freedom.” But my family was lost and confused. We had a piece of land in Karaj near the palace of the Shah-Dokht Shams Pahlavi, bought from the private office of the princess, and we planned to build a new home there. My father believed this neighborhood would come to be much more convenient and fashionable than the desert where my cousin Omid lived. The first Tehran metro line would run right by our house—assuming that we were allowed to hold onto our land. But we had to wait and see how the Imam would decide our future.

  My extended family was split as their fortunes radically changed. Large quantities of money and property were being seized by the Revolutionary Courts.

  My father was a shareholder and director of the sales department at a dairy plant called Shir-e Pak, half of whose shares had been held by an American company. Those shares were taken over after the revolution by the Mustazafin Foundation. Many in the factory where my father worked had become revolutionaries and joined the Hezbollah and were keeping tabs on one other. At the factory, a new office of supervision had been instituted by the new government’s internal intelligence division, and the director, Agha-ye Khabiri, a well-educated, competent, and respected man who was my uncle’s brother-in-law, had been dismissed and Agha-ye Mutlabi, who was the driver of the doogh vending truck, had been made the director of the factory. Agha-ye Mutlabi, a chubby man with an enormous gut who twirled a tasbih around his fingers and spoke Persian with difficulty through a heavy Turkish accent, had connections to relatives of Ali Khamene’i, an important revolutionary figure and close friend of Ayatollah Khomeini.

  Those who participated in the revolution were reaping the benefits, but we, like many others, were slowly losing grip on our wealth. My mother’s aunt Fakhri had her home repossessed for the crime that her husband had been Agha-ye Khan Malak Yazdi, the chief of the wealthy association, the Pious Department. In contrast, my maternal uncle Ali, by virtue of being with the Revolutionary Guard, ended up with a fine piece of land behind the Shah’s palace on Niyavaran in Shemiran, and brought his young wife, Iran-Dokht, to live there.

  He’d fallen in love with her a few years before, at the beginning of the revolution. He was fixing Mader-jan’s rooftop in Jamaran, when he spied a green-eyed fair-skinned girl visiting a neighbor. Fair skin is very unusual in Iran and considered highly attractive. My mother and Mader-jan refused at first to go and ask for her hand. She wasn’t Jamarani nor Tehrani, so she was a peasant to my mother. Finally the rest of “Jamaran” convinced them. At that time, it seemed everyone was related to each other in some way, so Iran-Dokht was literally marrying into the town, not just the family. The whole family followed tradition and went to propose to the northern people of Shahsavar. Everything was arranged quickly, maybe within a week, when usually even a fast wedding would take months (my sister’s would later take a year). Iran-Dokht’s step-mother immediately agreed to send this seventeen-year-old girl to marry—though she hadn’t even finished high school. Her parents wholeheartedly gave their innocent daughter to one of the Imam’s guards. I liked her as soon as I saw her; she was so beautiful, and I pitied her for not having a mother. Her beauty charmed us, and our prejudices turned to sympathy as the Jamaran family opened their arms to her. At first Ali and Iran-Dokht moved into a small room in my mother’s cousin’s apartment. They didn’t mind the cramped conditions because they were so revolutionary. But then this attitude was rewarded with a splendid plot of land.

  In contrast, my aunt Turan, my father’s sister, was afraid to go out in her chic peach-colored Mercedes Benz with its royal plates. The Revolutionary Guard would stop expensive cars to check the identities of their owners. Usually, they’d seize the cars and take the drivers away to the Komité. My aunt’s husband, Uncle Musayyeb, who was also my father’s cousin, had been the highest-ranking member of our family under the Shah’s government. He’d worked in the Shah’s personal office as “His Majesty’s Calligrapher.” He would write His Majesty’s letters in elegant script for the Shah to sign. The walls of my aunt’s house on Khiaban-e Fereshteh were covered with her husband’s calligraphic renderings from the Ruba’yat of Omar Khayyám, and with exquisite miniatures of their older daughter, Gita. Their second daughter, Mahta, had a beautiful face and was being groomed to be the wife of a man of distinction. In fact, it was even whispered among our family that perhaps one day she would make a fine wife for the crown prince, Reza. Only a few hours before the Shah fled Iran, the royal car came for Uncle Musayyeb. The Shah summoned him for one last private meeting. The subject of this conversation has alw
ays remained a secret.

  My father’s family took great pride in the notion that not only was their family’s honor and history not less than that of the royal family, but was in fact even more distinguished. My paternal grandfather’s cousin was Amujan Timsar, “Dearest Uncle the Major General.” He had been the security chief of Tehran and would boast that he had had the title “His Majesty’s Private Guard.” We all knew his daughter Mahnavaz, who was the same age as my aunt Turan, had once been approached by Queen Turan, Reza Shah’s third wife, for marriage with the Shah’s half-brother, Shahpur Gholamreza. And we all knew that her family had declined this offer because Shahpur Gholamreza was a playboy and a philanderer and not worthy of their daughter.

  Our proud family didn’t go to the polls during the last two days of March to cast our votes on the new constitution of the Islamic Republic. But we heard on the first of April when the constitution was approved by a majority of the country, 99 percent to be precise, and Khomeini proclaimed it the “first day of God’s government.” Fresh waves of arrests swept the country and the executions continued. Our ever-present television constantly broadcast interrogations of those condemned to execution, exposing the “traitors to the nation.” Then one night, we were shocked to see the image of my grandfather’s cousin Agha-ye Sayf-Allah Shahandeh. He had been the editor in chief of a magazine now linked to the imperial government. He had gone into hiding, and we had heard that he had recently been arrested along with his daughter, Guli. My father, astounded, remarked harshly that he must have been severely beaten since his whole face was swollen. A dazed Agha-ye Shahandeh confessed like a parrot to treason, monarchist sympathies, and spying for foreign powers. They executed him and held his funeral at an undisclosed location.