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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780367007119 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Taylor & Francis |
| Publication date: | 05/07/2019 |
| Pages: | 254 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.88(w) x 9.00(h) x (d) |
About the Author
Edward Shirley served as an Iranian specialist in the CIA's Directorate of Operations. He has published articles in The Atlantic Monthly and Foreign Affairs. In order to protect himself and others, the author chose to have this book published under a pseudonym.
Read an Excerpt
THE TRENCHES Istanbul, 1990
Unable to find a taxi, Ahmad had hobbled from his hotel. His destination, the American consulate, isolated by unmarked one-way and dead-end streets, was hard to find. He hadn't noticed the neighborhood's tired beauty--its belle epoque apartments and hotels a century in decline. The past had given way to congested streets, honking homicidal drivers, cracked concrete sidewalks, and belly-dancer joints with broken neon signs. When he saw the American flag, machine-gun-toting Turkish guards, pea-green walls, and a visa-information bulletin board in Persian, he saw the Promised Land.
Wet and dirty from the incessant, coal-laden Istanbul winter rain, Ahmad was visibly relieved to see me. He was not your usual Iranian Revolutionary Guardsman: having lost a leg, having lost hope, he wanted to immigrate to America.
When I guided him into my room and asked him in Persian to be seated, Ahmad knew he'd found the man he was looking for. My greeting had reassured him as my predecessors' had not. When Iranians meet an American who speaks Persian, they assume they're meeting the CIA. Among the Middle East's most devout conspirators, they believe that American intelligence is everywhere, all-knowing, and of course Persian-speaking.
Anyone who has crossed paths with the CIA knows the truth is nearly the opposite, but Ahmad's assumption about my employer, at least, was correct. I had come to Turkey to talk to Iranians on behalf of the United States government; I had also come to pursue my own quest to understand better the Muslim mind and soul, particularly its militant Shi'ite Iranian version. I wanted to peel the Persian onion--the obligatory appetizer that resembles the many-layered Persian character--down to its core.
The Revolutionary Guard Corps, or, as it is known in Persian, the Sepah-e Pasdaran, is the protector and military will of Iran's mollahs. I'd met several ex-Pasdaran in my three years in Istanbul. Most were from the cadre of short-term draftees. Ahmad, however, had been a professional, the hardest of the hard core. He'd traveled by bus from Tehran to Istanbul, a wearying 1,200-mile trip across Iranian Azarbaijan, Kurdistan, and the 700-mile Anatolian plateau. He'd come to Istanbul, like thousands before him, because Iranians do not need visas to cross the frontier. Istanbul--with its foreign consulates, visa forgers, and underground refugee railroads--offered dissident Iranians the chance of immigration to the West.
"What can I do for you?" I asked Ahmad as he slowly lowered himself into the chair directly facing mine. His worn black polyester suit and graying polyester shirt buttoned at the collar had become the unofficial civilian uniform of Iranian men in the Islamic Republic. When he sank into the heavily cushioned chair, unable to control his descent without his right leg, he grabbed the bulbous armrest hard to regain his balance. I glanced at his folded pants leg, collapsed like an accordion. Four heavy black hand-stitched knots in the corners of the last flap held it together.
He finally raised his face, averting his eyes from mine, a traditional Persian reflex before a foreigner. He had pale-brown skin; a thick, stubby black beard only slightly shorter than the hair on his head grew high on his cheeks. It was the face of a serious fundamentalist--everything paid homage to his eyes. However, Ahmad's eyes were not Khomeini's. They were tired, and they were almost kind.
"I want to see America," he said calmly.
I felt his anxious hope in his lowered eyes, not in his words. Outside my window, I could hear the afternoon visa applicants forming lines in the streets, Iranians and Turks shouting at each other, the former always angry at the latter's quicker entree.
"I like America. I am a friend of America."
"Am I the first American you've ever met?" I asked.
"My older brother knew many Americans before the revolution. He had many American friends, and he spoke English well. But you are my first American."
There is probably not a single Iranian who does not want to talk to America. The more militant, the stronger the desire for "the Great Satan." Iranians are more attracted to devils than to angels. They are fascinated by America's power, wealth, and optimistic, very un-Iranian dreams. They crave our recognition; our strong approval or our disapproval, or, most confusing, both at the same time. Fascinated by human faults, like their Zoroastrian forefathers they believe life is an open playing field, and Evil has at least an equal chance of winning. So much the better, then, to listen to what Evil has to say.
Ahmad had joined the Guard via the Basij, ragtag outfits of militarily untrained young and old men who backed up the slightly better trained Revolutionary Guard Corps during the eight years of the Iran-Iraq War (1980-88). Basij means "mobilization." Lightly armed except in faith, tens of thousands of Basijis became martyrs against Iraqi minefields, machine guns, tanks, and flaming oil pits. Ahmad became a Basiji and then a Pasdar because he wanted to die for Islam and Khomeini; he also joined up because he was bored.
Ahmad's Tehran--a vast peasant ghetto of uneducated young men alternately dreaming of women, wealth, and a new puritan Islamic order--offered few options. Serving God had seemed easily the most compelling and accessible. Ahmad was sixteen when he entered the Basij, nineteen when he entered the Guard. He had grown up near the Paradise of Zahra cemetery, famous for its martyrs' graves and a fountain that in the early war years spewed blood-red water in tribute to those who gave their lives in battle.
Ahmad had been too young to fight against the Shah or to occupy the American embassy in Tehran. If he'd been a few years older in 1979, when the revolutionaries seized the embassy for the second and last time, Ahmad definitely would have been there. He'd hated America, the Third World's worst oppressor and the backer of the Shah.
"Why do you want to see America?"
"My cousin lives there. In Austin, Texas." He pronounced the name reverently, then unconsciously touched his right hip a few inches above his stitched-up pants leg. "He told me the best doctors in the world are there. I want to walk again, and he told me I could find a new leg in America."
Ahmad's war memories were the keys to his mind. He had often dreamed of his grieving family visiting his grave, ululating as only the relatives of martyrs may. He kept volunteering for small-unit missions behind Iraqi lines. Yet, unlike most of his comrades, Ahmad kept coming back. As the war dragged on, more and more of his compatriots perished, "dying in pieces," as Ahmad put it--legs and feet ripped off by minefields; bellies, chests, and heads torn open by artillery.
The war defined Ahmad, gave him an identity and a community he never had in Tehran, where he was simply poor. His Shi'ite faith and his Iranian identity became more powerful as the war became more brutal. Then, on a routine night raid, a mine blew his right leg off. Crippled, no longer fighting for God, Ahmad returned home, honored but discarded. It was 1987, eight years after the revolution, four years since Ahmad had mobilized for martyrdom.
I wondered at what moment he'd begun to consider the idea of going to America.
"Are you willing to help me understand Iran, your Iran?" I asked. "If you help me understand your past, I will be indebted to you. You will have done me a great kindness, but you should know now that the United States government may not be thankful. You shouldn't talk to me if you believe by doing so you will get a visa to America. I don't give visas to make people talk. Talk to me because you want me to listen."
"I'd hoped I would find an American who would want to listen," Ahmad said evenly. "I have seen much that you should know about. I want to talk to you, and I hope your government will appreciate what I have to say."
Iranians rarely tell linear stories, with a beginning, a middle, and an end. The Persian approach is circuitous; past and present can alternate rapidly, with subjects and objects intertwined, making it difficult to determine who really deserves praise, and who blame. It is thus virtually impossible to have a valuable short conversation with an Iranian. Hours are often required before the listener can know the primary players and get a vague idea of their interconnections, and much longer to assess the story's plot--usually the clash of Good and Evil.
Ahmad didn't plead. Unlike so many of his countrymen, he had not come to beg. Fate had been cruel to him; America, a just land, would want to right a wrong.
For Ahmad, as for most Iranians, things and people were viewed as essentially either good or bad. A change or nuance in character and action, whether for better or worse, would often be ascribed not to moral indecision or haphazard emotion but to deceit. It is a striking disposition in a people who excel at living in that shaded middle ground where an exceptionally kind act can be followed by the most repulsive cruelty. With each day's news about yet another discovered conspiracy or calamity--and there are always hundreds of conspiracies and calamities animating daily Iranian life and gossip--countries, politicians, and clerics are ever being reborn as devils or saints. When Ahmad lost his leg, his wartime identity, his brother, and in 1989 Khomeini, his understanding of the world became more fluid. Good and Evil kept reversing.
While he was with me, he was exactly what he said: my friend.
"Tell me what you want to know," he said calmly.
No matter what I answered, I knew very well that Ahmad would believe I could give him a visa. I could do anything. But I began with the truth, so that when we finished, Ahmad might realize I hadn't deceived him. One-legged leftovers of the Iran-Iraq War had little value to the CIA: Ahmad would never see America courtesy of Langley. Though some in the Agency disagree, deception and coercion are highly overrated tools. Efficient only in the short term, they quickly corrode all those involved. And Iranians often respond well to Americans because they cannot believe anyone can be so beguilingly, stupidly honest and open.
"What do you dream of?" I asked hesitantly. Such a question could strangle our conversation if Ahmad thought I was searching for a means to hurt him. But he did not seem to mind my curiosity--he indulged it.
"The war and women. But mostly women. For me the war is constant. I see it when I'm awake; I see it when I'm asleep. It's not really a dream or a nightmare anymore. It's just there."
Now twenty-three, Ahmad had never slept with a woman. He had never seen a grown woman nude. He had no firm idea of what a woman's genitalia looked like. He desperately wanted to have a woman to marry because his ignorance was exhausting him.
"When you think of America, do you think of women?"
"Yes," he replied, averting his eyes slightly. "Tell me, do American women hate Iranian men?"
"I've seen hundreds of Iranian men with American wives," I replied.
Ahmad smiled. According to State Department consular officers, every other blond in Southern California was marrying an Iranian.
For Muslim fundamentalists, the West's greatest crime is the way it individualizes women, inflaming their already narcissistic appetites that blind them to the role of motherhood, which requires dependence on men. Since medieval times, Islamic theologians have called a woman, because of her sex and her superior powers of entrapment, the most serious challenge to a man's fidelity to God. The veil hides and restrains a woman's passion, which perpetuates the species; take away the veil and the entire revolutionary order falls. Thus, the West encourages dangerous behavior in society's most vital, unstable element.
Islamic society has a highly fragile consciousness. This sensitivity can strike a Westerner as odd, given the unrivaled success of Islam's social order with vastly different peoples from Morocco to Java. But this success has made Muslims acutely conscious of threats to the binding essentials of their faith. Much of the violence, anger, and rabidly anti-Western language of Muslims arises from a concern for an ordered home--the birthright of every man. The militant senses in his own bridled lust the potential for disorder if the veil is lifted outside the home, if women and men act out their dreams--that is, if they behave like Americans.
"Do you still love Khomeini?" I asked Ahmad.
"No, not anymore. But I once loved him more than my father. Khomeini was the Imam, he was my Guide."
"Your guide to Islam? Weren't you a practicing Muslim before he became the Imam?"
"Khomeini taught me that a good life is a life of suffering. That the oppressed poor must not be scared of death. We are the true descendants of the Imams who gave their lives for Islam. WAR! WAR UNTIL FINAL VICTORY! is what I wore on my battle headbands. Khomeini taught me that purification could only come for me and my family through my death in war."
Despite his wounds, Ahmad did not flinch at those words. They briefly rejuvenated him--the fraternity and purpose, the warm comradeship of annihilation.
Ahmad, like most young revolutionaries, saw Khomeini as a personal interpreter of Shi'ism's glorious and bloody past, its early history of recurring pain and disappointment. With the violent death in 661 of Ali, the fourth caliph ("successor to") and nephew and son-in-law of the Prophet Muhammad, a mystical belief in the right of Ali's family to rule Islam was born. With the violent death of Ali's son Hosein, martyrdom became ingrained in Shi'ism, which exported the idea into the consciousness of the larger Sunni world.
For the revolution's true believers, Khomeini was a spiritual descendant of Ali, Hosein, and their ten successors--the dozen Imams who constitute the foundation of Twelver Shi'ism. The final Imam, the last rightful ruler of the world, "disappeared" in 874.
For many young Iranian men, Khomeini had surpassed his twelve predecessors. In a triumph of millenarian justice, he'd brought down an unrighteous Shahanshah, the King of all Kings, who no one thought could fall. And in Khomeini's war against the infidel Saddam Hussein, Iran's young men would redeem Ali's and Hosein's sacrifice of thirteen centuries before.
No less important, Khomeini was Ahmad's access to modernity: the oil wealth to make Iran a superpower and a new egalitarian order that would allow Ahmad to rise. Innumerable things available in the West would surely be made available and permissible in Iran by clerical rule.
Most crucially, Khomeini would give Ahmad access to women. As odd as it may sound to a Westerner, Khomeini was seen by Ahmad, and many other young men, as a divinely ordained matchmaker. Thoughts of women begin early in the Middle East; the separation of the sexes ensures precocious thoughts of marriage. Ahmad, between his-death-wish dreams, burned with desire for women. Veils and combat increased the desire. Offering a share in his victory and rule, Khomeini had promised Ahmad and his compatriots enough status to marry beautiful women--the type Ahmad imagined ayatollahs wed. Ahmad had dreamed that the revolution would bring him nonstop licit sex, and as many children as he wanted. He would be what his father never was: a proud man, a virile warrior whose sons would follow him into the millennium.
"And after all that you have seen, what does it mean to you to be a Muslim?" I asked. "Can a Muslim be an American?"
He did not reply. He crossed his hands at his hips and moved his eyes off mine, waiting.
"The clerics," I said, "constantly talk about how 'we Muslims' must do this or that in order to protect Islam from the West. It appears that anti-Americanism has become a new pillar of the faith."
Ahmad winced at the mention of this. The rules of ta'arrof and gozasht encourage Iranians to behave well, to prefer a hundred indirect questions and answers over possibly offensive direct ones.
Ta'arrof has no adequate English translation. "Etiquette" captures some of its ceremony and tact but little of its depth and hold over the Persian mind and language. Gozasht is tolerance, a generous disposition toward the failings of others, particularly foreigners. Both concepts have been battered by a revolution that finds virtue in bad manners. But despite all the crudeness and violence in contemporary Iran, the two qualities remain strong, even in Revolutionary Guardsmen.
Setting politeness slightly aside, Ahmad tried to explain his faith. "Americans can be Muslims. Anyone can be a Muslim if he accepts Muhammad as his Prophet and the Qur'an as the Word of God. They believe the American government is anti-Islamic, not the American people. They believe the American government wants to deny the Prophet's mission and oppress the poor, to stop people from converting to Islam."
Ahmad once again began employing "they," the pronoun behind which Iranians always seek cover. But in this instance, "they" meant the clergy.
"Do you believe that?"
"I don't know."
"Well, is the West Christian?"
"Yes."
"Is the West also Jewish?"
"Of course. Jews are the world's oldest people. They're more clever and rich than Christians, so they run the West."
"Yet you want to move to America. Why would a Muslim want to live in a Judeo-Christian land with so few mosques?"
I expected another wince. Instead, he sidestepped me. "I know America gives visas to Muslims. You don't have to become a Christian to live in America, do you?" Ahmad asked anxiously.
Millions of Muslims live in the West. Four million in France, three million in Germany, two million in Great Britain, perhaps as many as eight million in the United States. Most came for economic reasons, but the migration has not been easy intellectually. Islam, unlike Christianity, is not essentially a matter of conscience or spiritual acrobatics. The Qur'an, the literal Word of God, reads in many passages like an administrative manual. Its divine inspiration, like that of the Jewish Talmud, is legalistic, explicitly aimed at building a community through law. Even the most irreligious Muslim immigrant can feel guilt in a secular foreign land where the muezzin's call is muffled by public ordinances that protect the tranquility of non-Muslim souls.
"Of course you don't have to convert to live in America," I said. "I just wanted to know whether you would feel comfortable living in a non-Muslim land."
Ahmad dropped his eyes to the floor. "I don't care."
Ahmad was a practicing Muslim. Somewhere there had to be guilt, so I searched. "You've grown up in a Muslim land. Your family, your friends are all Muslims. Your words, your jokes, your memories are touched by Islam. You dream of non-Muslim American women, yet you want your American wife to be Muslim, with the same values as your sisters. You'll find none of your ethical order in America. So why do you want to go to a land that will rob your children of their grandparents' faith?"
Ahmad's eyes told me I would now get a longer response. They weren't angry. They were moving backward in time. "I don't need mollahs anymore. I know when you look at me you don't see a soldier. You probably think I have exaggerated my past because you see in front of you the 'dropping of a dog.' But I was once the best of the Pasdaran. I burned to die for Khomeini and for my country. They promised us a better life. They promised us God's grace after death.
"Well, I am alive, and my family weeps for me. My mother and my sisters coddle me like a child. My mother can't look at me without lowering her head because she hurts so much inside. Do you know what it is like to see your mother cry for you every day?
"I was a Pasdar and now I often soil myself when I go to the bathroom. I can barely walk to the park five blocks away without puffing like an old man. Every night in my dreams I see myself whole, and I still sometimes try to rise at night or in the morning, forgetting about my missing parts. But I don't rise. I just flop or fall. I once killed four Iraqis on a single mission, one of them with only my hands. Now a child could beat me and I could not resist. I am supposed to take care of my mother, not the other way around. Look at me. I am everything an Iranian man should not be."
Ahmad's voice cracked and he turned his face away.
Once again, I felt uneasy. I'd become a confessor--but I inflicted pain without absolution. My questions left Ahmad in worse shape than before. I kept asking myself: How do you peel an onion without tears?
What is a Muslim? If Ahmad had still been a revolutionary, he would have answered the question differently. He would have spoken of power and social conscience. To a radical, Islam means pure, unstoppable power. It is absolute Good in a battle to the death with absolute Evil, the West. It is the ennobling of the poor, history's truest Muslims, and the merciless punishment of the sacrilegious rich; it is Justice. It means a reversal of history, the restoration of the Muslim spirit and community as they were before the Ottomans lost power and allowed the Christians, the Jews, and their treasonous Muslim agents to rule the Middle East.
The Iran-Iraq War and its afterlife had drained Ahmad of contemporary ideology and language. What remained were traditional roots. One is a Muslim, period. Islam is the last stop in man's religious evolution.
Ahmad no longer wanted to be on Iran's brutal front line of politics and faith. He'd left Iran because so many questions no longer made sense. With his faith no longer under siege, a certain serenity had returned. However incongruously, an older understanding of Islam remained, like America, a means of hope.
My conversations with Ahmad had taken me where my former university teachers had not. Every time he winced, digressed, or averted his eyes to the floor, I put down a marker. Without such a map, I could never have dreamed of going to his country.
A twisted irony: Ahmad wanted to go to America to escape the revolutionary problems that were pulling me toward Iran. I wanted nothing more than to live in his hometown, he in mine.
Curious Midwestern boys always dream of escaping home. From an early age, I'd wanted to travel and to live abroad. My mother and grandmother had raised me to leave the nest. My father had given me three thousand 35 mm slides of his early-1950s around-the-world motorcycle ride. An uncle who'd grown up in an Eastern European Jewish ghetto had fascinated me with the remnants of his many languages. Another uncle, a sea captain, had sailed everywhere it was warm.
By high school, I desperately needed to wander and my father's slides had given me an idea. The veiled women, mosques, and bazaars of the Middle East had captured my curiosity more than the castles, palaces, and sculptured gardens of Europe or the costumes, temples, and wars of the Far East. Being Jewish, I thought the Islamic world, which traced its faith to Abraham, was a natural choice. Arabs, Persians, and Turks--three different peoples united by Islam--had built the Muslim Middle East. In college, I decided to start with the Arabs, the Prophet Muhammad's first holy warriors, and work my way forward through the Persians and Turks.
"Does your cousin in America help your family financially?" I asked Ahmad when he told me of his decision to return to Tehran.
It had been several days since we first met, and Ahmad had failed to obtain a U.S. visa from a consular officer. According to American immigration law, a consular officer cannot give a tourist visa to an intending immigrant; all who apply are guilty until they prove their innocence. Even if Ahmad had tried to deceive an officer about his intentions, a one-legged, unemployed, twenty-three-year-old Iranian male could never overcome the presumption that he wanted to immigrate. And Ahmad had not tried to deceive. Without immediate family or a needed skill--and Ahmad had neither--he had no chance at a right of passage.
I could do nothing for him. The CIA was interested in whole Iranians, active-duty Guardsmen who wanted to return to the Islamic Republic. It cared not at all about the casualties of war. A lengthy debriefing should be done. Some financial compensation, perhaps. No more.
I didn't do a debriefing. Though Ahmad was an existential gold mine, he had no current information about the Guard Corps. The Agency, an incurious, bureaucratic institution with a very short attention span, wants information no older than yesterday with as few subjective distractions as possible. Ahmad's insights into the revolutionary Persian mind would have little currency among clandestine operatives and analysts, who strongly prefer answers to who? what? when? and where? over why?
With a visa out of reach, Ahmad could try the "Iranian Express." But he had neither the money nor the physical strength to travel by Istanbul's underground refugee railroad to the United States. The going price was twelve thousand dollars and the difficult voyage would take two weeks. From Istanbul to Madrid, where he would change planes for Havana--Castro ran "rest stop" hotels for Iranians illegally on their way to America--then by boat to Florida or by plane to Mexico. Or, alternatively, direct by air from Madrid to Mexico City, a "tour bus" to the border, then into the Promised Land on crutches at night. Even if he'd had the twelve thousand dollars, Ahmad did not want to hobble his way surreptitiously into the States.
He also did not want to stay any longer in Istanbul. The Turks scared him, and there was no honor and little sympathy for a crippled Persian. I imagined what his days were like: trying to navigate the trenches that had once been the streets of Beyoglu, the Istanbul neighborhood where Ahmad had found a cheap hotel room five days earlier. The city government was tearing up the streets, laying pipelines for the Russian gas that would--according to theory and everybody's hopes--diminish Istanbul's lethal coal pollution in winter. To a crippled Ahmad, the familiar chaotic streets of Tehran, where thousands die every year in traffic accidents, seemed far safer.
"Yes, my American cousin sends us money," he admitted, when I pressed him about his livelihood. "The family would have a harder life without his help."
"How many years has your cousin been in America?"
"Many. He left before the revolution."
"Was your cousin for or against the Shah?"
"He was against. Everybody in my family was against the Shah."
"But he has not returned to Iran since the revolution?"
"No."
Again short answers. I'd obviously hit a nerve, so I waited.
"My cousin left to go to university. He protested in America against the Shah. But he did not come home when the Shah fell. He had to finish his studies."
"Was he worried about the mollahs? Did he associate with anticlerical as well as anti-Shah groups in America? Did he--"
Ahmad interrupted. "He is not scared of the mollahs. He has no reason to be scared. He loves us, but he has his own business, in computers."
"Iranians are never too busy for their families, are they? I'm sure he spends far more on telephone calls than he would on an airline ticket. Why hasn't he come home to see his family and you?"
"I don't know."
Ahmad again moved his hand across to his right hip.
I knew Ahmad couldn't explain his cousin's behavior. He didn't understand it. His cousin was another lost hero. Not dead like his older brother, but equally out of reach.
"Is he ashamed? Ashamed of having studied in America while his cousins and friends fought in the war?"
Ahmad lifted his eyes from the floor. "He was a committed revolutionary. He was never a coward. I know some of my cousin's former friends at Tehran University. They went wild when the revolution came, but they've suffered since. Many are dead. Those that are not hang out all day, talking about how things have gone wrong. How the revolution was betrayed."
"Do you still talk to them, Ahmad?"
"Before I joined the Basij they used to come and see me, but once I volunteered they stopped. They looked down on the Basij. Too many peasants without brains."
"Who are your friends now?" I asked, fearing Ahmad's reply.
"No one comes to see me now. Except Mehdi, my cousin's closest friend. He told me that America and England sent Khomeini to destroy the Shah in order to let loose Islam against the Soviets. But he thought America had tired of the clerics, and without American support the clerics could not last." He paused. "My cousin thinks that, too. Maybe he will come home if the clerics fall."
Most Iranians believe in conspiracy almost as much as they believe in God and poetry. Conspiracies, the more convoluted and illogical the better, are essential medicine for the perpetually unlucky.
"Have you told your cousin in America how difficult it is at home? Have you told him how much you miss him?"
"No. He knows how much he means to us. He calls and writes regularly. I can tell he is homesick. I often dream of him in America Of the big house where he lives." Ahmad smiled. "With a swimming pool."
I spoke to Ahmad all afternoon that last day. He didn't want to let go of me and the last-minute hope that America would forgive him his sins and let him in. I knew I was stealing his time and giving him virtually nothing in return, but I couldn't stop asking questions, listening to Ahmad zigzag through his life as he'd once zigzagged through the Iraqi front lines.
Oddly enough, Ahmad didn't blame me for his visa problem. Iranians expect very little happiness in life--one reason they zealously seek refuge in poetry and physical pleasure. Fate had simply intervened cruelly, as it had always done.
I'd kept my Guardsman far too long. Istanbul, a Balkan city, grows dark early during winter. And Beyoglu's dug-up streets were poorly lit. Ahmad could easily break his neck in the darkness and, for obvious reasons, I couldn't walk him home. So I ended our conversation.
For the last time, Ahmad rose slowly from his chair. For the last time, I extended my hand when he faltered. And as each time before, he politely refused it.
When we were at the door, he handed me a small package, wrapped in a brightly colored Turkish newspaper.
"It is not a bomb," he murmured, to break my hesitation.
I opened the package and found a bag of very large pistachios.
"They're Iranian, not Turkish," Ahmad quickly noted.
I smiled. "Thank God."
I thanked him several times for the gift, shook his hand, and opened the door. Ahmad pivoted and swung on his one crutch down the corridor. As he opened the street door, he turned and said for the last time, "May God protect you." Khoda hafez, Persian for goodbye.