“Mistakes are good, as they are the chance to learn something,” he says, and we change position and go some 150 feet back toward the pier. A good decision, as within a few minutes the bells are jingling.
Darius reels in a roughly twenty-five-inch-long sea catfish. Saler stomps on it and hits it on the head with pliers until it stops floundering. A few minutes later Masoud gets lucky and after a short tug-of-war lands another catfish on the stones. Now we’re in business!
By first light, a milky, blurry sunrise, we have caught four catfish, a Hamour (a kind of grouper), and a bream.
We walk a few minutes to the fish market nearby and have our catch filleted. The man is particularly rough with the catfish, deliberately cutting off large chunks and throwing the rest into a container outside as if disgusted with it. “Fish without scales are not halal according to Islam, and believers are not allowed to eat them,” Masoud explains. The bag with filets he passes on to Darius; he’s not such a strict observer.
After staying up all night and with just a few hours’ sleep on the carpet, the best place to recover on Kish is to have a lazy day at the beach. After all, the island is supposed to have the prettiest beaches in Iran. Masoud has to work, so I travel alone to the northeast. I need caffeine, so I order a ZamZam cola, made in Iran, which tastes like Coca-Cola but with more sugar and less fizz. The moniker is interesting, as Zamzam is the name of a holy well in Mecca. A strange idea to give such a name to something as all-American as cola.
On the bike path girls pedal past on bikes with low-slung seats. Here girls don’t have to worry about getting into trouble with the moral police. On Kish the regulations are more relaxed than elsewhere in the country. Female vacationers stroll barefoot on the beaches, wear sandals or skin-tight leggings. I even spot one without any head covering at all, which would be unthinkable in any other Iranian city. Motorboats pull rubber dinghies full of screaming tourists through the surf, a couple of girls and boys play beach soccer, and cameleers wait for customers. In a wooden pavilion a musician with a goatee finds a groove on his daf, a flat, round drum, but when a patrol car stops nearby he quickly packs away his instrument.
Sitting two tables away from me is a fifty-year-old lady with a light green hijab, a leopard-print silk scarf, and a huge silver wristwatch. She is listening to “Wind of Change,” her cell phone resting against her sunglasses case so that the speaker is directed toward her ears. There is a bowl of chips, a pack of Kent cigarettes, and a plastic beaker of tea on the table. Klaus Meine sings about hope, about a better future. More bikes roll by, and the palms bow to the quite respectable breeze. Kish is well known for its winds. Catamarans are often forced to beach because of the choppy conditions.
Then we get talking. Her name is Afsaneh. She moved from Tehran to the island seven years ago.
“I love the fresh air, the sea, the relaxed atmosphere,” she says. Twice a week she takes a walk to the beach. “I enjoy walking a lot—Tehran’s too dirty, too much smog.”
As if this were a keyword, she lights up a cigarette. Women aren’t permitted to smoke in Iran. More “Wind of Change” emanates from her cell phone, words about the wind of change blowing into time’s face, the same way a stormy wind would ring a bell of freedom, and I’d love to believe it. But Kish is hardly the moral laboratory for the future, rather a temporary place of escape, an isolated exclave of small freedoms, like a vacation with grandma and grandpa, where the kids can run wild and are allowed to eat more candy, but tougher rules apply as soon as they return to their parents.
So that the Iranians don’t notice that the additional freedoms are the best thing about their Kish stay, there are shopping centers, motorboats, ghost trains, and a seventy-hectare amusement park, complete with a bird garden and a dolphinarium. I ask Afsaneh about the dolphins cleaning their teeth.
“Yes, it’s true, and one dolphin can paint. The pictures cost between US$1,000 and US$8,000,” she says.
Impulsively, I play with the idea of buying a dolphin. How much would you have to pay for such a creature?
“A million American dollars,” she replies.
Okay, at an average of US$4,500 per painting, I would have almost redeemed my costs after two hundred paintings. I dismiss this business idea and buy myself an ice cream, instead.
Then I go and take a look at some world-famous soccer players. The road leading to the beach is flanked by larger-than-life plastic caricatures. The FIFA World Cup is soon to begin, and Iran has qualified for the first time in many years. Messi and Neymar have a lot of hair and little face. The athlete marked Mesut Özil, however, with a small tuft of hair, a gigantic nose, and huge bulging eyes, resembles something you might encounter during an excursion in a glass-bottom boat. Maybe the dolphins painted him.
THE NEXT MORNING I’m awoken by Pitbull and Masoud, a marriage made in hell. My place to crash was on the carpet directly beneath the TV, and at 7:30 AM my host has the brilliant idea of playing a music video of the American rapper at nightclub volume. Like an aerobic trainer with ADHD he dances through the apartment, singing along to Pitbull’s “Rain over Me” at the top of his voice. With that din you could probably raise the dead—and a sleeping tourist, for sure. In the clip a BMW Z4 hurtles through a desert landscape with more than a little likeness to Kish.
“It’s time for breakfast and Nature Day!” Masoud bellows cheerfully. In contrast to me, Masoud is obviously a morning person. By “Nature Day” he means Sizdah Be-dar, the conclusion of the two-week Nowruz festivities, an Iranian public holiday when everybody spends the day outdoors and picnics.
Mahbube 1 and 2 quickly spread a plastic sheet on the floor and deck it with pita bread, goat cheese, and homemade carrot jam. After a quick breakfast we fill the picnic hamper with a few items from the fridge and go down to the street to find a cab. A Toyota instead of a Z4 roadster, but the driver knows a thing or two about racing. We stop at a section of the shore with a rocky beach and wooden pavilions with solar panels on the roof—they are already occupied; we are too late. So we spread our picnic rug on a stretch of sand, and Masoud places a few pieces of chicken with a saffron-lemon marinade on the grill belonging to the nearest pavilion.
Children are the best language teachers in the world. I get involved in a game of pointing to objects and naming them in Persian and English with Saler and Saba. The kids enjoy it so much that they don’t want to stop. We repeat the terms until I can say: sea (daryâ), sky (asemân), cloud (âbr), fish (mâhi), sun (chorschid), apple (sib), ear (gosch), nose (bini), eye (tscheschm), and auto (mâschin). Our strolling along the shore does Saler’s language skills some good, as up until now his English repertoire has only consisted of the perfectly pronounced “How are you?” and “Get out of my face, asshole!”
Exactly a year ago, on my first trip to Iran, I also celebrated Nature Day, but with Yasmin and her family. Roughly fifty people had gathered together in a garden surrounded by high walls outside Tehran. We played volleyball and danced forbidden dances to Persian pop music, and inside the house there was whiskey. The streets outside the capital were completely covered by picnic blankets and tents—every piece of derelict land became an outdoor feasting area. When 30 or 50 or even 60 million people leave their secure homes and party just for one day, a state of emergency reigns in Iran.