LITMIR.BIZ

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piecing together the shredded material. Some of this, they were able to claim, implicated their domestic rivals in CIA plotting. This was helpful to Khomeini, who used the findings to discredit his opponents.)

      The organizers of the exhibition had placed dummies of American diplomats around a table, in a soundproof room that had apparently been used for secret meetings. As a visitor to the exhibition, you stood outside the room, which was made of two thick panes of glass with a vacuum between them, and looked in at the Americans. They wore ties: a Western affectation. They were seated on chairs: a kind of enthronement. They had crossed their legs, or splayed them, showing off immodest American crotches: canine. As you stood there, pressed up against the glass, and viewed their washed-out complexions and ugly auburn hair, you could imagine them talking over ways to control Iran, to defeat Islam. At the end of the working day, you could imagine them drinking beer and taking a slut for the night. That was what Americans did, wasn’t it?

      We carried on south. We crossed a flyover. On one side, the houses had not been fully demolished – just enough to allow the flyover to be built. They were half-houses. The upstairs rooms still had wallpaper. The grid of south Tehran started to take shape. Scraps of yellow and turquoise tile were visible on the older façades, and rust-coloured roofs. There was less building activity in this part of the town and more traffic. The women mostly wore chadors. A different town, conservative and claustrophobic.

      Sometimes, I’ve wondered what it would be like to live here. There would be a mode of conduct, proximity to the neighbours, a feeling of impermanence. These old communities are under attack – by unemployment and highly adulterated heroin at fifty cents a hit, by women who aren’t family and the influx of migrants from the provinces. Nothing stays the same. A neighbour leaving, another taking his place, a divorce, a business success, an iron ball crashing into a corner shop.

      The defences are religion and the watchful eyes of neighbours, the chador and Islam. If the community is an island, and if the roads and bazaars full of strangers are the sea around them, then people behave themselves on the island and swim free in the fathomless waters of moral decay.

      Then, we were caught in the bazaar traffic. Small vans carrying carpets and cans and wooden palettes on their sides. Men pushing carts: the porters, the lowest form of bazaar life. The day before, the bazaar had closed its doors in protest at an aggressive speech made by President Bush. It was to show America that Iranians were united in their continued hatred for the Great Satan.

      As we approached the South Terminal, I looked out for a large black building, a plant that produced vegetable oil, which I was used to seeing at the roadside. But the factory was doubled over – in pain, badly winded. The roof had collapsed. One of the chimneys had toppled.

      I got out of the taxi, holding my bag, and turned to face the Peugeot drivers.

      ‘Isfahaaaan! Isfahaaaan!’

      One of them came up to me. He had a bronze complexion, purplish lips. ‘Isfahan! Leaving right now!’ His face was convulsed by the opiate’s bonhomie. (In Iran, the masses have both religion and opium.) His hand gripped me insolently.

      I picked another driver, one with a clean moustache and an ironed shirt. The back seat of his Peugeot was occupied by a man in his twenties and another chap with a beard. I took the third place. A young couple shared the front passenger seat and fed each other crisps.

      We moved off. The driver shifted position in his seat, hunched over the wheel. He flicked the gears with his palms and ran his hands through his shiny hair. There was a short conversation about what music we would listen to. The field was narrowed down to the titans of Turkish pop: Tarkan or Ibrahim. Ibrahim won. The driver pushed Ibrahim into the cassette player with the tips of his fingers. He lit his cigarette, but not before putting it in a mahogany-coloured holder. Every elegant move seemed designed to beguile the senseless boredom of his hours. We left south Tehran.

      The sun in my eyes; Ibrahim lamenting through his moustache; the proximity of the five others; cigarettes; the speed and a rococo driver.

      I thought: why don’t I have a car? Now that baby’s on the way, well have to get a car. Must be air-conditioned. But expensive! Government monopoly over car making, and demand far exceeds output: prices artificially high. Paykan? Forget it; Bita would sooner walk. Best alternative? Eight grand for a Kia Pride, a Korean-designed paper cup set on Smarties.

      I was feeling sick and we were pelting along. We were driving through Zahra’s Heaven, the main cemetery in south Tehran. Seventy thousand dead soldiers in there. Other fathers’ sons, other men’s exercise, mirth, matter.

      Then we were speeding down dust tracks that had been thrown across fields of barley. We could follow the asphalt, but that would take us through the tollbooths at the beginning of the motorway. This way, we’d emerge onto the motorway a few kilometres beyond the tollbooths and cruise for free.

      We skidded onto the motorway. One hundred and fifty kilometres an hour, in an Iranian-built GLX 2000. Tired driver, straight road; he could fall asleep at any moment. One careless bolt, cruelly loosening. That’s all it would take. I looked at the other passengers. The bearded chap was silently mouthing an invocation, again and again, using dead time to accumulate credit with God. The couple had fallen asleep entwined. No one was thinking about seat belts. If we had to brake suddenly, we’d be scattered over the tarmac.

      MR DRIVER, HAVE YOU CONSIDERED THAT EVERY ACTION HAS A CONSEQUENCE? WHAT DO YOU THINK OF CAUSE AND EFFECT?

      The thought of never seeing my wife again. Or the little one, when he/she emerged. Right now just walnut size or strawberry size or whatever. A thing, not a person, but promising. Something I will love, and will love me, even if I prove to be unworthy.

      MR DRIVER, WHY ARE YOU DRIVING SO FAST?

      I tapped the driver on the shoulder.

      ‘Mr Driver?’

      He looked at me in the rear-view. He turned down the music a little bit and said: ‘You don’t like Ibrahim?’ The young man was looking at me.

      ‘No, no, Ibrahim’s fine, I was wondering, could you drive at a more … er’ – I groped for the word – ‘reasonable speed?’

      The driver’s expression in the rear-view mirror was puzzled. What did ‘reasonable’ mean? What did I want him to do?

      He put his foot down. The speedometer gave up the ghost.

      I was in Isfahan, zigzagging towards the Shah’s Square. (New name: the Imam’s Square.) I was on my way to meet a cleric called Mr Rafi’i, to talk about the War. Bobbing above the surrounding houses was the blue dome of the Mosque of the Shah (new name: Mosque of the Imam), which dominates the southern end of the square. As I walked I passed iron gates that led into new tenements, or into an old courtyard that may have contained a fig tree and a tethered goat. The tight turning streets were still and baking, and my mouth was dry. I wanted to be close to the mosque, with its shadows and ablutions pool, and its moist revetments.

      The normal way into the Shah’s Square is through the roads and lanes that feed it from east and west, or from the bazaar, which debouches into it from the north. But my hotel was south of the square and I didn’t feel like walking half its length before entering it from the side. I was trying a short cut. Having approached the mosque from behind, I would surely come across a passage or lane that ran alongside it, and that would take me into the square. I pursued the dome.

      After a few minutes, I rounded a bend and met a massive brick wall. Lying in the dust, there were bits of broken tile – yellow and turquoise and blue. I realized I was under the tiled dome; it had moulted faience. I was standing at the foot of the rear wall of the main dome chamber.

      If you approach the east end of a Gothic cathedral, you’ll come across the apse’s satisfying bulge, some gargoyles, a ribcage of flying buttresses. The Ottoman mosques are mystic spheres; whatever your viewpoint, there is always a painstaking accretion – of domes and half-domes, ascending to the main dome, and thence to heaven. Both have been conceived sculpturally. You’re allowed to approach from all directions. But here: this rude wall!

      When

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