One of Ahar's main streets in the snow with the monument to the Shah's White Revolution on the right. |
On the right,k I am standing in the snow with an entrance to the Ahar bazaar behind me. |
Differences in the way mechanical and technical things worked and a different attitude about such things made living in Iran a challenge and added to culture shock. For example, electrical appliances required 220 volts generated at forty cycles a second. Since the advent of such modern equipment came long after the construction of most of their houses and many buildings, the Iranians ran the wires for outlets, light sockets, and switches over the surface of walls and ceilings. More casual about electricity than Westerners, the Iranians often left bare wire exposed in places where insulation would have been required under building codes at home.
I bought light bulbs in the bazaar. They came from all over Europe but the Yugoslavians produced the cheapest, although they were somewhat odd in shape. One night Val took one of them to replace the burned out bulb in his reading lamp. He went into his room where he usually sat up reading until quite late while I went to bed. Maria, our cat that we had inherited from a volunteer in Tabriz when he left for home, slept on the end of my bed.
I remember waking up because I heard Val shouting and smelled burning rubber. Without my glasses I saw only a blurred shimmering red line running across the ceiling and down the wall. The cat dug her claws through the blanket into my leg, howled, and hissed. Sparks and burning material fell onto the floor, Val continued to shout, and I heard strange popping sounds. Suddenly a bright flash lit up the night outside. Then everything inside and outside quieted down.
Smoke filled my bedroom and despite the cold I opened the doors to the hallway and the outside. Val and I groped around for things in the dark as none of the lights worked. I lit a few candles and looked around. The rubber insulation had burned off of almost every electrical wire in the house. Outside, on the wall of the school, the wires leading to our house had exploded leaving a vivid scorch mark on the side of the building.
In the Pahlavi faculty room the next day the teachers made observations and asked questions.
"He is saying that the mister from America does not understand electricity," translated Usef, telling me what Mr. Janabzadeh said. "He is asking why you have damaged the wires and the school."
"They are saying that every place in the city the lights are being dim because of something in your house," Usef went on. "What are you doing there?"
"There's something wrong," I answered, "but we haven't found out what it is yet."
The teachers laughed. Everyone decided that the Americans had burned up their wires because they did not understand electricity.
Mr. Hashemi scowled, shook his head, and clicked his tongue when he looked at the black smear that discolored the school wall. He clicked his tongue again when he looked at the burned wires and scorched paint inside the house.
"This is very bad," he said to me. "All of it will require much work, and it is costing much money."
"We'll pay the bill," I said which cheered him appreciably. "But we still have no idea what caused it."
That afternoon Mr. Hashemi, Mr. Janabzadeh, Usef, Val, and I watched one of Ahar's electricians rewire our house. We discovered that the house had no fuses or circuit breakers anywhere between it and the main power lines leading into the school which in turn came directly from the power station. Nowhere along the entire circuit had anyone installed any safety device that could arrest the flow of power in case of a direct short.
"Tell him that there must be a fuse of some kind," I said to Usef.
"What is a fuse?"
I explained, and Usef translated. The electrician nodded.
"If there had been a fuse," I explained to Mr. Hashemi, none of this would have happened. The fault is with whoever wired the house in the first place."
Mr. Hashemi remained skeptical and Mr. Janabzadeh repeated that he thought we did not understand electricity.
Then Val and I traced the wires from their entry into the house. They started in my room and ran across the ceiling to my overhead light with a branch, which had remained undamaged, into the kitchen. The main line continued on into the hall, looped through the bathroom and then into Val's room. The burned wires led directly to Val's reading lamp and the new light bulb.
"I suspect," I said to Hashemi and Janabzadeh, that something is wrong with this bulb. Perhaps it has a flaw or a direct short in it."
Usef translated for Janabzadeh who laughed. He took the bulb from me and said that he could make it work because he under-stood electricity.
"Tell him to show us," I said to Usef.
When the electrician finished, he turned on the light in my room and it worked. Janabzadeh went to a standing lamp in the corner, removed the glowing bulb, and replaced it with the one from Val's lamp. Then he turned on the switch. The wires in his hand heated immediately causing him to drop the lamp, breaking its bulb, and setting the curtains near the window that it hit on fire. Then the fuse which the electrician had installed popped, and everything returned to normal.
We put out the fire and surveyed the damage.
"That's why I think there is something wrong with this bulb," I said a bit smugly. "It's good that we had a fuse this time. Tell Mr. Janabzadeh that I appreciated the lesson about electricity."
Usef translated, the puffy vice principal turned red, chewed on his mustache for a while, and then left without saying anything.
The electrician climbed into the window depression where he had put the fuse and said we needed a lesson on how to replace it. The primitive affair turned out to be a porcelain box with two screws inside of it on either end of its bottom. The electrician took a piece of electric wire, stripped off the rubber insulation, drew out one strand of the copper wire, and fixed it inside the box between the two screws.
"This is how the fuse is working," said Usef. "If this thin wire is breaking, you must put here a new one. The man is saying that you must not be touching both of the wire in the box and this other wire at the same time."
Mr. Janabzadeh came into the faculty room the next day while Usef and I drank tea. By then everyone had heard the story about the vice principal and the light bulb.
"Ask him if he will come to our house tonight and teach Val and me about electricity?" I told Usef.
When Usef translated all of the teachers laughed and the angry vice principal left.
"Is it usually this cold?" I asked Usef as we walked together near the bazaar.
"This is the most strange winter," he said. "We are not seeing this much snow and cold ever in Ahar. I can say that this is one for the books."
One of Ahar's main streets in the snow with the monument
to the Shah's White Revolution on the right. On the right,k I am standing in the snow with an entrance
to the Ahar bazaar behind me.
He was so proud whenever he managed to work in some idiom that he had learned.
In the street ahead of us a group of people stood huddled together watching a house next to the lamb butcher's shop. We joined them and looked to see what was happening. Inside two women shouted at each other. Usef listened, talked to a few of the spectators, got a little embarrassed, and finally explained.
"There is a man living in this house. This thing is not being done by many men but he is having two wives. Men are doing this thing in old days, but now the government is saying that it must be ending."
"So, what's happening?"
"The man here is still having his two wives. He is working every day in his shop in the bazaar. When he is gone his wives are becoming angry and fighting with each other about him. Each woman is saying that he is liking her the best and not the other one. They are saying these things in a loud way and every person is hearing them."
"What exactly are they saying?"
"It is not possible to make a good translation. They are talking about some very private things in their life. The one woman is saying that the husband is treating her better than the other one and she is shouting some proofs."
"For example?"
"This thing I cannot translate."
I tried, but never could get him to say more. The people around us listened, now and then laughed, but more often clicked their tongues. Meanwhile some of the neighbors went to the bazaar to tell the husband and he eventually returned along with four policemen. The five of them went into the house and joined in the shouting. Two policemen grabbed one woman and they brought them outside. Each held her chadore tightly in her teeth, continued shouting, and with her hands clawed at the other and at the policemen. The crowd laughed as the policemen, followed by the forlorn husband, struggled up the street to the police station where they went inside out of view.
"What will happen?" I asked Usef as everyone walked away.
"It is not known. The husband is having the women arrested because of the noises they are making. Now perhaps they are talking and making peace in their home. He may divorce one woman or perhaps both of them because they have embarrassed him very badly. He may keep one women to be with his children and marry a new wife.
"A new wife?"
"Mohammad is saying that he can have four. But he must be treating each of them equally. The man is seeing that this is very difficult. I am thinking," said Usef with a smile, "that one wife is enough trouble."
The hardest thing that I did in order to adapt to life in Iran was to force myself to be late. I slowly developed the knack of showing up an hour after the attendants said the bus would leave for Tabriz, or two hours late for dinner at someone's house.
One afternoon in January I planned to go to Tabriz on a bus scheduled to leave at five o'clock. I arrived at the station a little after 5:30 and found it closed. I banged on the gate and the owner came out to see what I wanted.
"I'm going to Tabriz. The bus is supposed to leave at five o'clock. Where is it?
"It has gone," he said quietly.
"But it is supposed to go at five o'clock and it's only 5:30."
He explained that the driver wanted to get to Tabriz before the night and the cold to avoid driving on ice or trouble at the pass. Without warning he left at 4:30. He said they had sent a runner to the school, but the custodians said I had left. So they went without me. He promised me the front seat on the bus that would leave early in the morning. Then he went inside and closed the door.
Val, who had planned to go the next morning, and I arrived at the bus station at eight o'clock. Only a few people sat in the small room waiting. Down the street the competition also had a bus ready to leave. Usually they spaced the busses at intervals at least an hour or more apart but on that day when we pulled out of town they did too.
Each driver rushed to be first at the edge of town where villagers stood waiting. The assistants grabbed as many as they could and both tried to shove as many of them as they could into their bus. Then they slammed the back doors and off we raced down the highway. Our bus led most of the time but the other one tried to pass two or three times. We scattered villagers, donkeys, and sheep as the drivers shouted at each other, sounded their horns, held their accelerators to the floor, and raced on. They both passed individuals or groups or two or three people because each wanting to arrive first at the village stations where larger gatherings of potential passengers waited.
Sometimes the assistants fought over passengers, hitting out at each other but not doing much damage. Before new arrivals could get into their seats, our driver started off bouncing crazily down the road, sometimes with the assistant hanging onto the door which he had not yet closed. Chickens fluttered around under-foot and billows of dust blew everywhere. The busses rattled down the frozen washboard road, neck and neck most of the time. The drivers made a game of it, continuing to wave, smile, and shout insults at each other. All the while a group of men in the back of our bus chanted prayers as loudly as they could, asking Allah to bless the journey and make it safe. On both busses passengers clutched their worry beads and hoped for the best. Val and I felt tempted to join in. We consoled each other that it would at least be a fast trip, if we survived.
Every piece of the buss's engine strained as we climbed the steep road through the pass at Jozabiel. We gained speed as we raced down the west side. The scenery of the flat beyond flew by in record time. Near the outcroppings of salt we scattered a large flock of sheep all over the countryside, terrorizing animals and villagers, but miraculously hitting none of them.
At the little village and caravan station just before the climb up the pass at Payan, we stopped. Everyone got out of both busses, laughed, joked, and went inside the roadhouse where we drank tea for almost an hour. We pulled into Tabriz later that morning, three hours after we left Ahar which was about normal for the trip.
When the bus stopped, everyone got out and had tea. Val
Schultz is standing on the right with the white
hat.
I met Mr. Kashavarz in Tabriz and he invited me to ride back to Ahar with him and his family in his Volkswagen. Val planned to stay another day with friends so I accepted, happy to avoid another bus trip for a while. Light snow fell as we packed the car. Mrs. Kashavarz sat wedged in the back seat with their new baby and their other two children.
We crossed Payan without any trouble and drove easily across the flat past the salt patches. At the second pass the snow fell harder and it already covered the roadway. Part of the way up the hill something happened to the motor; it slowed to an idle and it had no power. Kashavarz worked the controls with no result, looked at me with a weak smile, and shrugged his shoulders. Wind buffeted the little car and heavy snow swirled around us making it impossible to see more than a few feet in any direction.
"This is not a good thing," he said quietly.
"Maybe the gas line has frozen," I suggested. "It happens all the time to the busses."
We got out and opened the rear cover so we could look at the motor.
"You are watching this thing," said Kashavarz over the wind, "and I am doing things inside. Perhaps you are seeing some problem."
I stood chattering in the cold looking at the engine which chugged unevenly.
"I am pushing on the thing that is making it go more fast," he shouted back at me.
Nothing happened. Then I saw a small lever that vibrated in rhythm with the engine but seemed disconnected and hanging free at one end. I pushed it gently. The engine sprang to life and Kashavarz jumped out of the car smiling.
"What thing are you doing?"
"Just this," I said as I pushed on the lever again, making the engine run faster.
"You are holding the thing with your hand and we will be going up this hill," he instructed. "On the other side there is no wind, and we can see the problem better. This is a dangerous place. People are not seeing us here in this snow."
Then he got into the car, put it in gear, and as I depressed the lever, increasing the power, we gradually climbed the steep hill. I held the back bumper with one hand and the lever with the other and ran along, barely able to keep up, never realizing that I determined how fast the car went by how far I pressed the lever.
As we moved along, I saw a wire resting on a greasy shelf under the lever. Whenever Kashavarz pushed on the gas pedal, the wire moved. The screw which had held it in place remained, hanging on, ready to drop if jolted.
"Stop the car," I shouted. "Stop the car."
With all the wind and noise he never heard me.
"I've found the problem," I shouted.
I kept running, afraid that each bump would jar the screw loose, At that point it finally dawned on me that if I let go of the lever, everything would stop. I did and when Kashavarz got out of the car, I showed him the wire, the screw, and the connection on the lever. We put the screw in place, got back in, and drove the rest of the way up the hill.
Near the summit we saw a bus ahead of us, wheels spinning, slowly inching its way up the last few yards to the top of the pass. We sat and waited. Then Kashavarz got out and walked ahead to investigate. He saw another bus coming in the opposite direction having the same trouble. Both drivers wanted to go through the narrow gap and neither appeared willing to stop and give way to the other.
Kashavarz talked to both drivers and somehow convinced them that they should let him go through because of his wife and baby. Reluctantly they agreed, each backed up a few feet, and we scooted by.
As we watched, both drivers resumed their climb, finally coming opposite each other, each hugging his own side of the road. When they were almost even with each other, the one heading toward Tabriz slid sideways into the other one, blocking the road completely.
"It is a good time to hurry away," said Kashavarz putting the car into gear and driving off through the snow. "They will each be very angry, saying that the other should be waiting and letting him pass first. In this time I am happy that I am having this car for my family."