Among the Believers Read Online Free PDF Page B

Tehran Hilton. It was “royal” no longer. The word had been taken off the main roadside sign and hacked away from the entrance; but inside the hotel the word survived like a rooted weed, popping up fresh and clean on napkins, bills, menus, crockery.
    The lounge was nearly empty; the silence there, among waiters and scattered patrons, was like the silence of embarrassment. Iranian samovars were part of the décor. (There had been some foreign trade in these samovars as decorative ethnic objects; two years or so before, I had seen a number of them in the London stores, converted into lamp bases.) Alcohol could no longer be served; but for the smart (and non-Christian) who needed to sip a nonalcoholic drink in style, there was Orange Blossom or Virgin Mary or Swinger.
    Chez Maurice was the Hilton’s French restaurant. It was done up in an appropriate way, with brownish paper, a dark-coloured dado, and sconce lights. On the glass panels of one wall white letters, set in little arcs, said:
Vins et Liqueurs, Le Patron Mange Içi, Gratinée à Toute Heure
. In the large room, which might have seated a hundred, there was only a party of five, and they were as subdued as the people in the lounge. The soup I had, like the sturgeon which followed it, was heavy with abrown paste. But the waiters still undid napkins and moved and served with panache; it added to the embarrassment.
    Every table was laid. Every table had a fresh rose, and prerevolutionary give-aways: the coloured postcard (the restaurant had been founded four years before, in 1975); the little ten-page note pad that diners in places like this were thought to need:
Chez Maurice, Tehran’s Most Distinctive Restaurant, Le Restaurant le Plus Sélect de Tehran
. Six months after the revolution these toys—pads, postcards—still existed; when they were used up there would be no more.
    The pool at the side of the hotel was closed, for chemical cleaning, according to the notice. But the great concrete shell next door, the planned extension to the Royal Tehran Hilton, had been abandoned, with all the building materials on the site and the cranes. There were no “passengers” now, the waiter said; and the contractors had left the country. From the Hilton you could look across to the other hills of North Tehran and see other unfinished, hollow buildings that looked just as abandoned. The revolution had caught the “international” city of North Tehran in mid-creation.
    And I thought, when I went back to my hotel, that there was an unintended symbolism in the revolutionary poster on the glass front door. The poster was printed on both sides. The side that faced the courtyard was straightforward, a guerrilla pin-up of Yassir Arafat of the Palestine Liberation Organization in dark glasses and checkered red headdress.
    On the reverse was an allegorical painting of blood and revenge. In the foreground there was a flat landscape: a flat, featureless land bisected by a straight black road, marked down the middle by a broken white line. On this road a veiled woman, seen from the back, lay half collapsed, using her last strength to lift up her child as if to heaven. The woman had a bloodied back; there was blood on the black road. Out of that blood, higher up the road, giant red tulips had grown, breaking up the heavy crust of the black road with the white markings; and above the tulips, in the sky, was the face of Khomeini, the saviour, frowning.
    Khomeini saved and avenged. But the tulips he had called up from the blood of martyrs had damaged the modern road (so carefully rendered by the artist) for good; that road in the wilderness now led nowhere.
    Also, in this allegory of the revolution, personality had been allowedonly to the avenger. The wounded woman, small in the foreground, with whose pain the upheaval began, was veiled and faceless; she was her pain alone. It was the allegorist’s or caricaturist’s licence; and it wouldn’t have been remarkable if there hadn’t been