The main river that flowed through Ahar - in the distance women are washing clothes. |
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In the spring I saw a mouse in my house. I watched it run across the kitchen floor, out into the main room, and under my bed. Usef told me about a shop in the bazaar where I bought a small box of poison which I scattered on the floor in the corners. After a day or so some of the poison disappeared.
I gathered up the rest of the poison, threw it away, and forgot about the mouse until the boy came for my laundry. The boy had started coming right after New Year. He told me that his mother, a widow, washed clothes and needed the work to support the family. Usef knew him and confirmed the story. So each week he came, took my clothes, and in a day or so brought them back, clean and neatly folded. The wash-and-wear clothes baffled the woman, and in the case of my pants, she labored to iron out the permanent crease and put in a new one of her own. I never succeeded in communicating through the son that she should not do that, and so my pants acquired two or three creases.
I kept my dirty clothes in one of my suitcases. When the boy came I dumped the shirts and underwear out onto the floor and sorted it. In the pocket of my favorite blue and white dress shirt I found the body of my mouse. Besides the unpleasant smell, the tiny thing had died a messy death, staining the shirt with a heavy brownish mark that covered much of its left front side.
"Can your mother clean this?"
"For sure, Mister."
"Tell her, 'good luck,'" I said throwing the shirt in with the rest of the load.
Two days later the boy returned. I paid him, took the bundle and opened it. My shirt laid on the top. The mother had been as good as her son's word. No trace of the mouse remained. A hole about six inches in diameter indicated where the stain had been.
My clothes began to show signs of wear which I had not expected quite so soon.
"How does this woman wash the clothes?" I asked Usef. "Does she beat them with rocks?" I joked.
"Yes," he answered.
"What do you mean, 'yes?'"
"The women hit the clothes with sticks and rocks. It is the best way to make them clean."
"Next you'll tell me that they do it in the
jube on the main street." The main river that flowed through Ahar - in the distance
women are washing clothes.
"Sometimes," he said, "and sometimes they are doing it in the river."
"The river isn't much better," I argued. "Both are almost sewers."
"But they are using special cleaners, and the things are very good when they are being finished."
Then I realized why my pockets had started to fray, and my undershirts had developed thin spots and small holes.
The next time the boy came, I told him that I felt badly, but that I would not need his mother to wash my clothes any more. I paid for one more week, and then he walked away without saying anything.
About that same time eating in restaurants and having dinner out here and there caught up with me. I developed dysentery. Nothing in Ahar seemed to help although Dr. Adjami did his best. So I sent a telegram to the doctor in Teheran and shortly received a terse reply. "Come to Teheran now!"
Frequent stops along the way made the three hour bus ride to Tabriz tolerable. At the railroad station I bought a second class ticket which entitled me to sit in a compartment with five other people. The train left that evening, due to arrive in Teheran in the early morning.
Dysentery saps strength, dehydrates, and demands the nearness of a bathroom. I sat upright in a corner of the compartment, sick, lethargic, and generally miserable. When the inevitable cramps returned I headed down the outside corridor to the small room at the end of the car that housed the toilet. The steel fixture, Iranian style, sat flush with the floor with just enough room for me to squat over it in the tiny cramped space. On one wall a faucet dripped, the stainless steel floor was wet and slick, and I braced myself so that I would not fall over.
The uneven roadbed between Tabriz and Teheran caused the train to sway abruptly from side to side, to bounce, and to jerk about unpredictably. As we went over a particularly rough spot, and as I crouched over the hole in the floor, I lost my balance, slipped, and fell over on my side. In the process I fouled my pants, socks and shoes.
I tried to clean myself off as best I could. Without soap and only the stingy dripping of water that came from the faucet, my efforts met minimal success. Besides, at that point I felt so awful that I no longer cared. I went back to the compartment and sat in my seat.
One by one the others got up and left so that within fifteen minutes I was alone. I laid down across the three seats on my side of the compartment and slept. Off and on during the night people walking through the train spotted the nearly empty room, came in, sat on the side opposite me for a few minutes, then got up, and left.
In the morning we pulled into the Teheran station. An Iranian driver from Peace Corps waited with his van.
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"Mister," he said when he saw me, "what happened to you?" He made me sit in the very back seat as he drove me to the Peace Corps office where the doctor laughed at me, helped me clean up, took stool samples, issued me some pills, and parked me in a nearby hotel for two days. Then he sent me back to Ahar. On the return trip I had to share the compartment with five people, nobody left, and all of us sat up all night. |
The Peace Corps Office in Teharan |
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I never became accustomed to the slower pace of life in Ahar. In the shops and in the government offices, the people I met asked me questions and took time with small talk.
"We are not living as fast as Americans," observed Usef one day after the father of one of my students stopped us on the street and asked me things like, "How did the boys act in class today?," "Did the boys learn their lessons well today?," and "Are the schools in Ahar like the schools in America?"
"We are liking to talk to people. The shopkeepers and the other men are finding you enjoyable. They are liking to listen to your accent."
It startled me to realize that I spoke with an accent. I always thought of other people - foreigners - as the ones with accents, but never me. It drove home the point that I had to adapt to their culture because I was different. When playing the part of a guest in a foreign country it is difficult keep that thought in mind. I tried to slow down, relax , and enjoy life in Ahar. I found that the people, as in any small community, took an interest in each other, and made time for conversation and even games.
"To play, Mister?" asked Hashem, Mr. Hashemi's oldest boy.
The night after I returned from my quick trip to Teheran Hashemi invited me to dinner. Anxious about my health, he had me there without other company so that he could ask questions and find out how I was doing. His son had just removed the wish bone from a piece of chicken and he held it out toward me.
"To play?" he repeated.
"He is wanting to play a game with you," explained Mr. Hashemi.
"I know what we do with the wish bone at home. What game do you play with it?"
"It is a special part of the chicken. Each person playing is holding one part and together they break that bone. But before they are doing this, they each are agreeing on some gift which they must give to the other person. Which person is winning is getting the gift from the other."
"How do you know who gives who the gift?"
"The breaking of the bone is only part of making the agreement for playing the game."
"It doesn't matter how the bone breaks?"
"No. This thing is not important. After you are breaking the bone, then if he is giving you anything from his hand to your hand, before you are taking it, you must say, 'I remember.' If you are putting something into his hand, before he is taking it, he must say, 'I remember.' The person who is forgetting to say this must give the other one the gift."
"I see. We agree on the gifts now. We break the bone. Then whenever he hands me something, I must say, 'I remember,' before I take it and vice versa."
"Yes."
"What kind of gifts?"
"Some small thing only."
Hashem said something to his father in Turkish.
"He is asking for one or two letters - the envelopes - which you receive from America, so that he can be making more in his collection of stamps."
"I would like a small bag of candy," I suggested.
We agreed, broke the bone, and set aside the pieces. Two of Hashemi's daughters came into the room, walked up to the table, looked at me, giggled, took a few pieces of chicken, and left. When I ate alone with the family they behaved more informally, and I saw the youngest girls, but never Hashemi's wife or older daughters.
"You must eat more rice," said Mr. Hashemi. "It is good if you are being ill. You are being very thin."
I added rice to my plate and then Hashem passed me the platter of chicken.
"I have won," he shouted when I took the platter.
The girls ran back into the room laughing and pointing at me. Everyone seemed pleased that Hashem had defeated me so quickly and easily.
Mr. Hashemi kept tabs on my health, but he stopped inviting me to dinner during Moharam. The followers of the Shi'a or Shi'ite Islam celebrate the lunar month of Moharam [Muharram], the first month of the Islamic calendar. Like Ramadan, it comes ten days earlier each year. Unlike Ramadan, Moharam brought serious ceremonies and rituals that involved most of Ahar's residents.
Moharam, the month of mourning, marked the death of Hossein [sometimes Husain], the Fourth Immum or successor of the Prophet Mohammad. Hossein was the son of Ali [Mohammad's son-in-law] by the Prophet's daughter, Fatima. Shi'ite Moslems follow the descendants of Ali where Sunni Moslems, the major branch of the religion, follow a different line of succession. According to Shi'ite legend, Mohammad felt special affection for his grandson, Hossein. Unfortunately, on the tenth day of the month of Moharam [in the 61st year of the Islamic era, or 680 A.D.] soldiers of his rival, Yazid I the Umayyad Caliph, killed Hossein on the site of Kerbela [Karbala] which is in present day Iraq a few miles west of the Euphrates River. The place is one of pilgrimage for Iranians if they can get there. Enmity between Iran and Iraq even then had cut the flow of visitors to almost nothing.
Especially on the tenth, but throughout the entire month, the faithful demonstrate their sorrow as they remember the death of the martyr. Every night groups of men marched through Ahar's streets chanting and swinging light chains which they slapped against their backs. Others pounded their fists against their chests and everyone wailed, reciting a liturgy of mournful cries. In the school during the day the boys wore black shirts buttoned up tightly. Black flags draped the shops, black bunting hung from the domes of the bazaar roof, and across building fronts.
Throughout the city radios and record players remained silent. At prayer times men gathered at the mosques and chanted or cried openly. Near the Sheikh men gathered to perform the Ta'zieh or 'miracle play' that depicted the slaying of Hossein. Similar to Christmas pageants in the west, the performances followed patterns and repeated lines long established in tradition. Everyone knew all of the words and actions. Nevertheless, each reenactment elicited deep emotion, weeping, and shouting. Extremists actually took knives and cut their foreheads allowing blood to flow across their faces to dramatize their feelings. Like Christian fanatics who have themselves nailed to crosses or wear crowns of thorns on Good Friday, these men hoped that their suffering would bring them closer to Allah. The government disapproved and made such acts of masochism illegal, but in rural communities nobody enforced the law.
In Iran, the demonstration of emotion is a thread that runs deep in the culture. The people are able to summon up feelings and express them in the extreme. Public display of sadness, outrage, sorrow, anger, or just about any other emotion is not only acceptable but encouraged. Religious fervor is ritualized and performed in public and the more exhibitionistic, especially among the conservative fanatics, the better. The people can turn on and turn off these outbursts at will. They have practiced doing it all of their lives. That does not mean that the displays are phony or insincere but only that they are exaggerated and may distort the true feelings of the participants. People in the West are not comfortable with such performances, do not understand their meaning, and too often mistakenly take them at face value.
Many of my students participated in
the marches and the accompanying rites of flagellation. They
hit themselves with chains and fists in order to share the
suffering of the Immum. The came to school exhausted from
marching late each night, bruised, especially their backs,
and even sick. The climax came on Tassoua and Ashura,
the ninth and tenth of the month, the day when Hossein had
been attacked and the next day when he died. On those days
school closed and I stayed home and cleaned house. Usef
explained that the Immum Hossein had been killed by
foreigners and so I, a foreigner, should stay more or less
out of sight. He and the others doubted that I was in any
real danger. Mr. Hashemi emphasized that those in Ahar who
knew me liked me, and that nobody would hurt me. But still,
in such an emotional condition, the unexpected could happen
and everyone urged caution. Boys in the street practicing for the marching during the
month of Moharam.
In my classes I kept the lessons simple. But Mr. Hashemi assured me that I should continue as before and stay on schedule because the boys needed the lessons before they started studying for the examinations. One day Ali Mossadeqhi fell over while reading out of his book.
Mr. Koshtinat came running when I called down the hall to him. We carried the boy to the janitor's room and Koshtinat told me to return to my class.
"What's wrong with the Mossadeqhi boy?" I asked Hashemi later.
"Nothing," he said waving his hand. "He is marching all of the night and he is tired. He is a good boy. We have sent him home for resting. Nothing is wrong. These things are sometimes happening during Moharam. The boys are working very hard for the celebration. It is an important time."
In the days following the Tenth, fewer and fewer men marched. When the month ended, everything returned to normal and as if on cue, it started raining.
Western Oregon is famous for its rainfall. I grew up living with rain a good deal of the time. Northwestern Iran receives almost as much rain as my home town. But in Oregon, while it seldom rains much at any one time, it rains all the time. In Azarbaijan the rain comes only for about a month in the fall, and about a month in the spring, and then it rains heavily. The sky filled with dark clouds bringing lightning and thunder. The roads and streets turned to mud trenches. The teachers and students tracked mud into the school until the cement stones on the floor disappeared beneath its accumulating layers. The men struggled to keep their shoes clean and generally failed.
"Will the rain soak through my roof?" I asked Mr. Hashemi.
"The roof of the school is being made of metal," he said. He picked at spots of mud on his pants.
"No, I mean my house."
"It can do this thing. But I am seeing that your house is being well made, and I am happy that there will be no problems. Perhaps a little rain will come into your house and you will be putting some dishes in those places."
My mud house had a mud roof. To say it that way makes it sound more primitive than it was. Bricks made of dried clay formed the thick walls of the house. Poles about two to six or eight inches in diameter spanned the tops of the walls. A heavy thatching material covered the poles and a layer of dirt at least a foot thick lay on the thatch. Builders then applied a coat of special mud to the top of the house and the outside walls. Made of straw, dirt, manure, and water, the coating dried hard and repelled water to a degree. The slightly slanted roof allowed the rain to run off, at least for a while.
On the inside of the houses large plywood pieces covered the poles and formed the center part of the ceilings in the main rooms. The builders of my house had strung strips of plastic in the kitchen making the ceiling there. Then they applied a layer of white chalk about an inch think to the inner walls, curving it up so that it also became part of the ceiling disappearing and then ending just beneath the plywood. Only the deep recesses for the windows evidenced the fact that I lived in a mud house.
After about a week of rain, a water spot appeared in my main room on the plaster near the door. It steadily grew and started dripping. Three or four other spots appeared, and after a few more days I had little pots and dishes all around to catch the water.
"How long does this last?" I asked Usef between classes in the Pahlavi faculty room.
"In some years it is raining for only a few days. In other years it is raining for many weeks. Only God knows."
It seemed to me that every day brought heavier rain. One morning when it fell especially hard Mr. Hashemi announced that the school would be closed until the time of the final examinations. The teachers smiled and laughed in the faculty room as Hashemi told the boys to go and begin studying.
With about three weeks to wait and with little to do, I decided to take a trip with Mr. Fakhim's roommate, Mr. Dastmalchie. He also taught English in Ahar and he had come to my house a few times for tea. For some reason he wanted to travel north from Ahar through Meshkin to Parsabad on the Araxes River which formed Iran's border with the Soviet Union. Nobody wanted to go with him until I agreed which made him very happy.
Despite the rain and the chance of roads being washed out, we decided to go.
"Beware of the snakes," Usef cautioned before we left. "They are having what you call cobras in those places."
And so they did, but I never saw one.
Heavy rains in the spring brought floods to the road
between Ahar and Meshkin. We left Ahar on a bus for Meshkin.
Swollen streams flooded the valleys along the route and the
bus moved slowly dodging large puddles that filled the dirt
road. We forded streams that ran over large cobblestones
used to keep the roadway in place. Over some the water ran
six to eight inches deep. Usually a three to four hour trip, we
had about two miles left after traveling seven hours. There
we stopped at a large river that flooded the road. The
driver told us to get out of the bus, he backed up, gathered
a little speed, and made an attempt to plow through the
water. For a moment we thought he would fail, but in the end
he kept the bus moving forward and finally drove it up the
bank on the far side. We walked upstream to a place where
the water widened but became shallower, rolled up our pants,
and walked across. Just outside of Meshkin we came to a
second river that had washed away the road entirely. The
driver refused to go any farther, or to turn back, so we
rolled up our pants again, forded the stream, and walked
into town carrying out bags.
Much smaller than Ahar, Meshkin had one hotel where Mr. Dastmalchie and I hired a room for the night. The next morning we left on the 5:30 A.M. bus traveling north to Parsabad. It actually began the trip around 9:00.
The farther north we traveled the lighter the rainfall until it stopped entirely. After a few hours we encountered Shahsavan nomads. Each summer these colorful tribesmen moved their sheep south to the hills of northern Azarbaijan. In the winter they returned north down into the valley of the Araxes River near the Caspian Sea where the weather was warmer. The Shahsavan people traveled in groups with their belongings packed on the sides of their camels. The women wore bright colors and a few sat on top of the bundles lurching forward and backward as the awkward animals lumbered along. The men drove their sheep ahead of or beside the strings of camels. At times sheep filled the road and half-a dozen times a sea of bobbing white heads blocked the road and stopped our bus.
Late that afternoon we crossed a high pass and began dropping down into a broad green valley to the level of the river below. At about 6:00 we reached Parsabad which amounted to nothing more than an outpost on the border.
"I am thinking that this is a city," said Dastmalchie sadly. "On the map it is looking like a city."
"I don't even think they have a hotel," I said looking around.
Parsabad proved to be a small village
But we found a small hotel with clean rooms and we could climb up to its roof where Dastmalchie could look across the river into the Soviet Union a few hundred yards away. On the far side green watchtowers stood like huts on stilts, silhouetted against the sky. We watched them and they watched back.
Mr. Dastmalchie could hardly understand the people we met in Parsabad. While they spoke Turkish, their different dialect made communication almost impossible. In an area crisscrossed by mountains, each valley had its own regional accent and often people could not comprehend someone from just a few miles away. Finally we found an officer from Tabriz. He told us that a few kilometers to the east the river turned north while the border moved directly to the Caspian Sea.
The next day we hired a taxi, the only one in Parsabad, and went to a small government settlement on the frontier. From the moment we arrived two soldiers and a few government workers hovered around us trying to find out what we wanted and watching to be sure that I stayed away from the border. They remembered the incident with the American, Tom Dawson, the year before. They also insisted that I keep my camera in my bag and take no pictures!
Along the northern edge of the settlement, a set of posts, standing in pairs, marked the border. Red, white, and green paint marked the Iranian posts and those on the Soviet side were solid red. Much to the consternation of the soldiers, Dastmalchie and I stood with our feet only inches from the invisible line. In their towers above and a few yards away the Soviet border guards took pictures.
The next day we returned to Meshkin where the rain continued. That night Mr. Dastmalchie said that we should settle our finances. At the start of the trip he had suggested that he pay all the bills and keep an account. Later I would repay him my half. I had some idea of about how much he had spent but, when he told me how much I owed, it was almost twice what I had estimated. I paid, but after that I tended to my own bills.
At the Meshkin bus station they told us that floods had closed the road to Ahar. So we traveled on east to Ardebil where we stayed the night. The next day we left by a southern road to Tabriz. It rained the entire six hours that our bus splashed and bounced over the muddy, sodden route. A few miles out of Ardebil a villager stood in the road waving his hand so the driver stopped. Dastmalchie translated for me, saying that the man asked the driver if he could ride with us for a few kilometers.
"Yes," agreed the driver. "Hurry."
"Wait," said the villager. "I have two sheep. I must get them."
"Sheep!" shouted the driver as he slammed the door in the face of the drenched peasant. "If you do not have a cow and a bull and some goats too we cannot take you on this bus."
Everyone on the bus laughed and we drove away leaving the man beside the road with his two wet sheep.
In Tabriz we learned that throughout
Azarbaijan the heavy rain had closed roads and flooded
villages. We checked at the station where busses left for
Ahar, and they told us that the road had become bad, but
that they would send a bus to Ahar anyway. "When?" "Now," they said. "In just a few
minutes." The American Consulate building in Tabriz
We hurried to the hotel, grabbed our bags, and got to the bus station just as the bus pulled out into the street. They made two villagers move to the back so that we could sit near the driver although not in the coveted front seats. At that point, even Mr. Dastmalchie allowed his prestige to slip in order to get back to Ahar.
About five miles out of Ahar a stream swollen from the rain covered the road. We walked for about a mile, forded the stream, and returned to the road where another bus sat waiting. I welcomed the sight of my little house as we pulled into town. The roof leaked worse than before and in my absence water had filled the buckets I left, making puddles here and there on the floor. I cleaned up the mess and relaxed. The next day the rain diminished and by the end of the week it stopped.
"That God damn Dastmalchie," said Usef when I told him about our trip and how we had settled our finances in Meshkin. "Nobody is liking him and nobody is traveling with him. He is doing this thing to anybody, and he is having almost no friends."
Usef helped me write my final examinations. As the weather warmed and the countryside dried out, the boys studied, walking in the school yard or through the orchards outside of town carrying their books, memorizing the contents. Mr. Hashemi explained that Iranian law required that a direct quotation from the book must answer every question that a teacher asked. I had to make my test conform to that limitation.
The twelfth grade boys took their tests first. These came from the government in Teheran, and they determined whether or not a student graduated from high school. Mr. Hashemi asked me to help monitor those tests which everyone took very seriously. After we seated the boys in Pahlavi's auditorium, a few women from Na Mous came in and sat quietly in desks at the back. Among them I saw Mrs. Mohiempor, their principal. She herself had not yet earned a high school diploma.
Everyone listened nervously to Mr. Hashemi as he read the directions. Then we passed out the tests and the school secretary walked around verifying that the name on the test was that of the person taking it. He put the school's official stamp on each answer sheet. The students worked quietly.
One of the other teachers found two boys cheating. One of them sobbed and pleaded with Hashemi as the principal led them out of the auditorium.
"He will be taking the examination again next year," said Hashemi when he returned. "This is not a serious thing."
"How many times has Mrs. Mohiempor taken the test?" I asked.
"Hashemi thought for a moment. "This is the third year I am thinking. The test is very difficult for a woman."
When it ended, we gathered the tests and the papers, and Mr. Hashemi locked them in his office. Later he sent them to Teheran where the government graded them and returned the results during the summer.
Usef and I gave the English tests to the boys. We had to grade them in the faculty room with at least two other teachers present. Usef explained that this would stop the teachers from cheating.
"In this time," Usef told me, "people may bring gifts to your house. If a gift is coming, you must send it away. The people are thinking that if you are getting some gift, you will give a higher grade to their son's examination. There will be fat turkeys delivered to the houses of some of the teachers during this week. We must all sit together in the faculty room and be grading the examinations so that no teachers are thinking of their gifts and making higher grades for some of the boys."
No gifts ever arrived at my house.
I had to grade the tests using a scale of one to twenty. Twenty represented a perfect score. I found such hair splitting impossible and gave only zeros, fives, tens, fifteens, and twenties.
"It would not be good for an Iranian teacher to be doing such a thing," said Mr. Hashemi when he looked over my grades. "But you are an American and you must be doing this work in the American way."
"What will happen to the students who fail?" I asked Usef.
"At the end of the summer they can be taking the examinations for a second time. If they have been studying, then they will pass. If they are failing a second time, then they must be in the same classes for another year."
"But," Usef continued, "some of the teachers will be selecting boys from the wealthy families and those boys will be failing the examinations at this time. Then the teachers will say to the fathers that if the boys study with the teachers for some time in the summer, and for some money, then the boys will pass at the second time. In this way the teachers are earning some extra money."
"Isn't that dishonest?" I asked naîvely?
"It is a way to be getting some money," said Usef, "and those fathers are having enough. But I am thinking that it is not honest, and I am not doing such things."
I asked Usef what happened when a student failed because I had failed Mr. Hashemi's son, Mehdi.
"Do not worry about that one," smiled Usef. "We will not be here in the summer, and so Mr. Hashemi will be giving the English examinations to those failing boys. His son will pass."
We sat in the faculty room grading papers. Outside the warm sun brought out the green of the mountainsides and the trees around Ahar. In Azarbaijan, the summers are beautiful, cool, green, and comfortable.