LITMIR.BIZ

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by a tank. Another said he was electrocuted when the enemy diverted power into the marsh …’

      Mr Rafi’i paused; he’d seen someone he knew, a bald man holding a watering can over a grave.

      Mr Rafi’i called out: ‘Salaam Aleikum!’ The bald man smiled and beckoned us over. Mr Rafi’i introduced him: ‘This is Mr Mousavi, and that’s the grave of his nephew who died on the last day of the War. The great Creator saw fit to draw him to his breast …’

      ‘Thanks be to God,’ interrupted Mr Mousavi dutifully.

      ‘I was explaining to Mr Duplex here,’ said Mr Rafi’i, ‘the reason why these boys went.’ He turned back to me. ‘Boys like Mr Mousavi’s nephew – Amin, wasn’t it? – were in love with justice and God. Right, Mr Mousavi?’

      ‘That’s right,’ said Mr Mousavi. ‘The last time I saw him, he said – it was the end of the War, we thought he’d been spared … he said he was sorry that God hadn’t judged him worthy of martyrdom …’

      ‘Mr Duplex,’ Mr Rarf’i said, ‘you must know it’s an honour to be martyred; not everyone gets called.’

      Mr Mousavi went on: ‘God heard him and took him on the last day of the War.’ His expression went dead. He was awed by the severity of God’s kindness. I looked at the photograph of Mr Mousavi’s nephew. A normal kid, with 1970s bouffant hair and a beard and a spiky shirt collar. I looked along the line of photographs, at his neighbours. They had the same confidence; God wouldn’t let them lose.

      Mr Rafi’i and I went back to the grave of the boy whose body hadn’t been found. ‘At the end of the War,’ he said, ‘some of the old soldiers volunteered to go back to the battlefields and try and find the bodies of the missing lads. They even crossed the border, into Iraq. They used their knowledge of the sites, and their memories of the battles, to find the bodies. Then they dug them out and brought them back to their families.’

      ‘So they found him?’ I asked, gesturing at the grave.

      He nodded. ‘Five years after he died, they found him – his father told me. His trench had taken a direct hit. The strange thing is, his face was preserved, perfect. There was no smell, either. You know, the body decomposes and produces a smell. There was none of that …’ He looked at me closely. ‘Do you believe what I am saying?’

      I wanted to believe him. Perhaps. It was fantastic, no? I nodded vaguely.

      He started to cough, weakly, like a kitten. His face had got redder. A sort of yellow scum had accumulated at the corners of his mouth.

      I said: ‘Shall we sit down?’

      We walked towards the trees. Mr Rafi’i laid his packsaddle on a grave. As we sat down, I said: ‘Among Christians, it would be considered offensive to sit on a grave or walk over someone’s grave.’

      Mr Rafi’i was breathing a little easier. He grinned. ‘The soul cannot be sat on.’

      Something made him remember a young seminarian, Hamid, during the War. ‘He was sixteen years old. He was a good boy: pure! They were all pure, back then.

      ‘I remember – such a fine looking boy! Like the moon! He had an accident – I’ve forgotten what it was – and his front teeth were smashed in. I said he should go to the dentist and get his teeth repaired, and he said: “I’m not going to bother, because I’ve been summoned.”

      ‘A few days later, we went out to try and get an idea of the enemy’s strength in our sector. We were twenty-two of us, in a column. As we set out, Hamid kissed me on both cheeks. He smelt of cologne, and he’d put on clean clothes.’ If you’re going to meet God, there’s a protocol to be followed.

      ‘The Iraqis were on the heights above us. When we came under fire, we hit the deck, and Hamid was next to me. I noticed my leg was hot and I thought, ‘I’ve been hit’, but something stopped me looking down. I was afraid. Then, a few seconds later, I felt that my groin and stomach were also hot and wet, and I looked down and I saw I hadn’t been hit. It was Hamid’s blood. I looked at his face. He smiled, and slept.’ Mr Rafi’i looked up at the sky, to the bending tops of the cypresses and pines. ‘You have to be clean, to be a martyr.’

      Anticipating my next question, he said: ‘God didn’t want a grizzly old sinner like me.’ The sprite laughed with us.

      I asked: ‘What did the men do, before they went off to battle? Did they pray? Were they silent? Did they chatter to try and settle their nerves?’

      ‘I remember, before one operation, my battalion was given leave to go to the nearest town, to the public bathhouse. Normally before an operation you do your martyrdom ablutions and ask God to let you come to him. At any rate, everyone went along to the baths – we must have been about four hundred people. And I got a shock, I can tell you, because the lads in the bathhouse started mucking around, splashing each other with cold water. Afterwards, someone told me you could hear the shouts and laughter from down the street.’

      ‘Did you joke around and splash, too?’

      ‘No, it’s not correct behaviour for a cleric to behave like that. I washed myself quickly and left.’

      ‘How many of the boys who went to the bathhouse are still alive?’

      ‘There can’t be more than a few dozen alive now.’

      He got out a bottle of water from his pack and took a swig, making sure his lips didn’t touch it. Then he handed it to me. He said: ‘So, you’ve come to Isfahan to learn about the War?’

      I said, ‘I hope to come to Isfahan several times.’

      ‘You should meet Hossein Kharrazi.’

      ‘Who’s that?’

      ‘He’s over there.’ He gestured behind him. ‘I’d take you myself, but I need to have my injection. With your permission, I’ll be on my way. Just go over there, and ask where Kharrazi is. Everyone knows.’

      ‘Does he work here?’

      Mr Rafi’i smiled gently.

      After he’d gone, I went over to the area he had pointed to. I started walking up and down the lines of graves, reading the inscriptions and trying to find Kharrazi. After a while, I came across a group of people standing in front of a grave. It was identical to the other ones, but had more flowers. Flowers from a shop, some wild flowers and some plastic ones, too.

      Shortly after the Revolution, Iran’s mainly Sunni ethnic minorities started to demand administrative, religious and cultural autonomy – even, in some cases, independence. In the north-east, the Turkmens of Turkmensara; the Arabs of the south-western province of Khuzistan; the Baluchs on the border with Pakistan; Kurds living adjacent to Turkey and Iraq; all tried, using violent and diplomatic means, to persuade Khomeini to dismantle the centralized bureaucracy that the Shah had bequeathed him. Before the Revolution, Khomeini had promised freedom for all. That was before.

      The worst violence was the Kurdish violence. The Kurds had welcomed the Revolution because they hoped to influence its course; the Shah’s departure would not serve them unless the new regime recognized their historic separateness. The Kurds have more ethnic and cultural affinity to the Persians than they have to the Arabs and the Turks, their other hosts in an ancestral home the size of France, but they have been taught by history to distrust them all. The Kurdish imagination is littered with memories of betrayal and misery, much of it self-inflicted.

      There’s no reason to suppose that Khomeini rejected the regional stereo-type of Kurds as murderous and untrustworthy. A fear of separatism, as much as his hostility to left-wingers and liberals, had persuaded him, shortly after the Revolution, to set up the Revolutionary Guard. When the Kurdish violence broke, Bazargan and some of his allies favoured conciliation; Khomeini and the clerical hardliners wanted to send in the Revolutionary Guard. Hossein Kharrazi, along with some fifty friends and acquaintances, got ready to fight.

      Kharrazi was the

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