On the wall of Ahmad’s bedroom there is a sheet with a handwritten saying on it. Traveling is like flirting with life. It’s like saying: You are beautiful and I love you, but I have to go. A good idea: I have to go, too, and disappear with the next taxi. I contacted Sofia because she had written in her profile: If u r interested in music and language u will have some good experience with me. And because she’s learning German. As I wrote that I was interested in Iranian instruments, she suggested showing me a music school and gave me the address for the cab driver.
At 10:27, three minutes too early, I’m standing in front of the door. Sofia is a wispy young lady dressed in a mustard-colored gown with an Indian-style pattern and ballerina shoes. The twenty-six-year-old manages to look both extravagant and traditional at the same time. Her eyes and lips are heavily made up but not overdone, like the fashionable young prefer it. I read in a survey that Iranian women buy more makeup than women in most other countries, and this can easily be ratified by a tour of any city here. The motivation to make the best out of that little bit of skin that is shown must be huge. Iran is also the world champion in the number of nose jobs performed.
Mr. Amini, the music theory teacher, leads us via a courtyard to the classrooms. We are allowed into various classrooms for a few minutes and listen to private concerts. Teenagers in black-and-white school uniforms beat with virtuoso precision on the tonbak, a goblet drum, and play the dulcimer-like santur, the kamancheh, a bowed string instrument, and the tar. The teacher hands me a tar, a wonderful instrument with the fingerboard made from camel bones; the body, in the shape of a figure 8, is carved from mulberry wood, with a thin membrane of lambskin stretched over the top. It is played with a small brass plectrum, with a grip for holding it made from beeswax, which sticks to the fingers. The tone is full, percussive, and sometimes jarring, similar to a clunking guitar. It is love at first sound, and I decide that I must get such an instrument.
“Where did you learn to play the tar?” asks Sofia, and suddenly I feel very Iranian.
“It’s very similar to a guitar and so not too difficult for me.”
She has an idea. “Would you like to do a guitar workshop with the children?”
“Sure!”
Mr. Amini agrees to do it the day after tomorrow, then we say goodbye and go on a short tour of the city. Isfahan is famous for its bridges over the Zayanderud, the “River of Life.” At the moment, however, it’s a dead river without a drop of water. A strip of desert that bisects the city. On the opposite bank there are a couple dozen pedal boats with swans necks as figureheads, high and dry on the riverbed.
“The government redirected the water, and nobody actually knows why. Maybe because fields had to be irrigated elsewhere. It hasn’t rained much, and everything has just withered. We don’t even know when we will have water here again,” says Sofia. On a bank there is a No Swimming sign like a bad joke. Imagine Paris without the Seine or London without the Thames.
Green parks border on the river, and ancient grand stone bridges cross it. Now they are just decorations without practical use; you can just as easily walk to the other bank 15 or 150 feet either side of the bridges.
I ask Sofia if she’s not annoyed that the water has been switched off.
“I don’t think about the government,” she says. “It’s just a strain. Many people grumble the whole day. I simply get on with my life.”
“And the moral police? Your shoes are pretty risky. I can see your ankle.”
“Quite a lot of my outfit is risky—the makeup, even the color. But I work as an English teacher for girls of elementary school age, and the children love it when I wear colorful gowns. It’s only the school directors who have problems with it.”
She works at a private school, where only affluent parents can afford the afternoon classes, which cost 1 million toman a year ($400).
“I will ask if I can bring you as guest teacher.”
From: Mona Hamedan
III miss you so much, you are really really kind & friendly, ich le be diech;-)
To: Mona Hamedan
I miss you too!! Too bad we had so little time in Hamedan!
We end our walk at Naghsh-e Jahan Square, where we meet André and Luciana from Brazil. They also contacted Sofia and, like me, were passed on to Ahmad. The two young doctors have a video camera, which they give me to film them doing a three-second dance routine ending with them both screaming, “Elves in Isfahan!”
“We do a vlog where we present ourselves as elves on a trip around the world, and in every city we make such a clip,” they explain. “And what do you do?”
“I’m working on a book, with pencil and notepad.” I feel like a relic of bygone traveling days. All that is missing is telling them that I travel by coach and horses, pointing at one of the nearby carriages offering tours of the square.
It is getting dark, so we say goodbye to Sofia. Ahmad picks us up in his car and drives us to Khaju bridge, sandy yellow in the light of the night illuminations. “You’re lucky I know a few secrets.” He informs us that the bridge has thirty arches, fifteen on each side, and “that number corresponds to the Juz, or equal parts, of the Quran.” Above each arch there are different floral designs made from decorative tiles. He then shows us what he calls the “oldest telephone in the world.” At the end of the arches there are some tiny holes, and if you hold your ear to them you can clearly hear what someone has whispered into a hole diagonally opposite. Even the elves are impressed. We walk to a life-sized stone lion guarding the entrance to the bridge. In its jaws there is a human head. “That is a symbol for the power of the government over the people,” says Ahmad quite matter-of-factly, as if it were a perfectly normal metaphor for the governors and the governed. “But now I’m going to tell you something really incredible! Have you seen a cat by night? How the eyes light up?” He points to an identical lion on the opposite bank of the dead river, three hundred feet away. Where its human head should be, two spots of light can be clearly seen. “You won’t believe this but I once dreamed that the eyes glisten, and I came here and it really was just as I had dreamed it.” We can’t explain the phenomenon; it must be some sort of reflection of the lamps at the entrance to the bridge.
Iran, spring 2014. A lion king with spotlight eyes eats human heads and guards the dried-up River of Life.
“Do you feel like some lamb’s head?” asks Ahmad suddenly. “Or are you vegetarians?”
All three say no. So at this late hour we head for a corner restaurant in which a fat man with a bloody apron heaves braised lambs’ heads from a huge cauldron with a kind of spade. This is served with a side plate of pita bread and a cloudy, fatty soup, on top of bits of brain, cheek, and jaw. Other pieces of offal appear on the table. “I always call the lungs ‘hand towel,’” says Ahmad. “Because they have a surface just like terry cloth.” They taste better than hand towels, but only just.
On the drive home he has one last highlight up his sleeve, just for me. Ahmad shows me a road sign with Freiburg Avenue on it. Quite a surprise, as I have become so used to all the Shariati-, Beheshti-, Azeri-, and Imam Khomeini streets, whose omnipresence is the cause of much confusion on street plans. “There is only one street with this name in Iran. Freiburg is twinned with Isfahan,” Ahmad explains.