We walked along the Stadtpark, where she and Father had danced the waltz, past the opera house and the very exclusive Sacher Hotel and Café Mozart. Vienna was an occupied city, divided into American, British, French, and Russian zones. One evening when we were going home, a group of Russian soldiers boarded the tram. An old man was sitting in the front, holding an empty tin in his hand. One soldier grabbed the tin, put it on his head, and ridiculed the old man. Even as a child I felt his shame and humiliation. Frightened, we got off at the next stop, ran to another street, and waited for an hour in a café before making our way back to the house.
Vienna was a wrenching three-week hiatus during what turned out to be an enchanted eight-month stay in Prague with Uncle Max. I saw beautiful shops, beautiful homes, and elegant hotels and restaurants. I saw my first puppet show and my first children’s play. Mother took me to the opera to see La Bohème and Madame Butterfly. I was given dazzling picture books and toys. I loved the food and the sweets. In the spring, when we boarded a train for Ankara, where a cousin of my father served as the Iranian ambassador, then another train to Baghdad, and finally a bus to Iran, we left my fairy-tale city behind.
TEHRAN
By the time we returned from Europe, Father had decided to leave the academic world of Karaj and to join the Ministry of Agriculture. I was almost seven years old. Between the time I was seven and eleven years of age, we moved three times, each time to a slightly larger apartment, but for me life was becoming increasingly restricted. I had no garden in which to play and run around, except when I went to Grandmother’s house or visited friends in Karaj. I was enrolled in Jeanne d’Arc, a Catholic school run by nuns. We followed a double curriculum—French in the morning and Persian in the afternoon. In the morning, I learned about the Alps and the Pyrenees, the river Seine and the river Loire. In the afternoon, I learned about the Zagros and Alborz mountains, the Zayandeh Rud River in Isfahan and the Karkheh River in Khuzistan.
My last year at Jeanne d’Arc coincided with the struggle led by Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh to nationalize Iran’s oil industry, then controlled by a British enterprise, the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company (AIOC). The nationalization campaign pitted Iran against both the powerful company and the even more powerful British government, which was the majority shareholder in AIOC. The entire country was caught up in the David-and-Goliath struggle. Political parties—Mossadegh’s own National Front; the Communist Tudeh Party; the ultranationalist Sumka Party, whose members, fascist-style, sported black shirts; the Toilers Party, headed by a politician from my family’s ancestral home, Kerman—vied for popularity and power, while their adherents in secondary schools and Tehran University clashed with one another on the streets. New, highly partisan newspapers appeared and were shut down. Mossadegh, hugely popular, made fiery speeches before massive crowds on the great square outside the houses of parliament.
Even as an eleven-year-old I was caught up in these currents, as were the rest of the students at the normally staid Jeanne d’Arc. We had all become politicized and wanted the British out, and the oil industry in Iranian hands. Mossadegh was our hero, and we, like other students, took up the shout, “Ya marg, ya Mossadegh”—“Death or Mossadegh.” Politicians considered insufficiently ardent on the oil nationalization issue, including Mossadegh’s predecessor as prime minister, Ali Razmara, were assassinated. Razmara had signed an oil agreement with the despised British that ardent nationalists considered a sellout of Iranian interests; parliament rejected the agreement. His murder brought the mindless violence close to home. Razmara’s daughter was a student at Jeanne d’Arc, and on the day her father was found dead, the whole school poured out into the schoolyard in sympathy with our classmate. Even the strict nuns could not keep us in the classroom.
The AIOC was finally nationalized by an act of parliament in March 1951, ending in one stroke decades of British control of Iran’s most important industry. The country was jubilant. The Iranian government sent a team of officials to take over the oil company operations. It invited the majority of the British employees to stay on; but the British, in a huff and hoping to cripple the Iranian oil industry, pulled out their technicians and staff. The Iranian team was led by Mehdi Bazargan, a political colleague of Mossadegh, who nearly thirty years later was to become the first prime minister of the Islamic Republic. My father joined the team, seconded from the Ministry of Agriculture to head the oil company’s agricultural department. Mutti, Siamack, and I moved with Father to the city of Abadan, where two years later, my sister, Hayedeh, was born.
ABADAN
Abadan was the heart of Iran’s oil industry. At the time, the Abadan oil refinery was the largest in the world. The very air smelled of gas and oil; at night, from almost any vantage point, one could see the flames from the flared gas of the oil wells licking at the tall chimney that towered over the refinery. The oil industry was by far the city’s largest employer, and employees lived in oil company housing and socialized in oil company clubs. Abadan had also been, in many ways, a very British city. Thousands of Englishmen had worked for the AIOC and lived with their families in Abadan. There was Iranian staff, too, but with few exceptions the senior management and technical positions were held by Englishmen. The English and the Iranians worked together but led separate lives. The English lived in Braim; most of the Iranians lived in Bavardeh, a totally separate housing development. The English frequented the Gymkhana Club, the Iranians the Iran, Bavardeh, and Golestan clubs. The laborers, poorly paid Iranians despite AIOC’s high profits, lived mostly in shantytowns. Abadan had its own halabi-abad and hassir-abad, “tin town” and “straw-mat town,” named after the shacks made out of flattened oilcans or straw mats that were laid across scaffolding of sticks and wood.
When the oil industry was taken over and the British driven out, all these facilities were seized by the Iranian government. When we arrived in Abadan, we were assigned a house in the upscale Braim district.
Abadan had a different feel to it than Tehran or Karaj. I associated Tehran with the mountains and the plains that ran south and east to the Kavir Desert. The air was hot and dry in the summer, crisp and cold in winter. There was no hint of the sea, no touch of dampness in the air. Abadan, by contrast, was built on the Shatt al-Arab, the border river between Iran and Iraq, and abutted the Persian Gulf. It was a port city. There were palm and banana trees as well as lush bougainvilleas. The local people were dark-complexioned, seafaring. Most spoke Arabic and Persian with a pronounced Arabic accent.
But for a curious child, Abadan meant a recovery of freedom. Our house had a large garden surrounded by hedges. My parents joined the Boat Club, with its clubhouse on the riverbank built to resemble a boat, and the Golestan Club, within walking distance of the house. I could check out all the books I wanted from the club library. Mother didn’t read Persian, and Father was too busy to notice. At the age of thirteen I read Victor Hugo, Anatole France, Albert Camus, John Steinbeck, and Ernest Hemingway in translation, as well as a great many Persian novels. It was in Abadan that I developed my love for literature.
Despite the long British presence, there were no bilingual schools in Abadan, and I attended the local Persian elementary school. I walked into the schoolyard on my first day and saw students crowded around a little boy, perhaps eight years old, lying on his back with his legs in the air. The assistant principal was caning the soles of his bare feet. I was horrified. Jeanne d’Arc had been strict, but punishment had meant sitting alone in a corner or being banished from the classroom.
Yet the oil company itself retained a strong British feel to it. Senior Iranian staff who had worked for the AIOC and studied in England often spoke English to one another. They sent their children to English boarding schools. At the card table, my parents’ new bridge partners referred to clubs, hearts, diamonds, and spades, rather than trèfle, coeur, carré, and pique, the French terms common among their friends in Tehran. Mutti arranged for me to take English lessons with a private tutor.
Since the summers in Abadan were very hot and humid, we would come to Tehran for a month, staying two