pumping iron, sticking out his chest. (He was growing a beard, though not fast enough for his liking). In school, he delivered harangues, handed round pamphlets. He organized prayer meetings in the playground. If he wanted to pass on a message to another boy, he would walk into the boy’s class and whisper the message to him – the teacher would pretend not to notice.
Mr Zarif’s boys got two of Cagney and Lacey’s favourites into the school store, and asked them some questions. They learned that Cagney and Lacey was a closet Communist. Shortly after, quite a senior person from the Revolutionary Guard arrived at the school. He spent a long time in the principal’s office. Cagney and Lacey was called in and invited to resign. The following day, at his word, ten of Mr Zarif’s lads surrounded the Communists; there were bleeding noses. The hammers and sickles got fewer.
(Sitting on his heels: ‘The peace and munificence of God be on Muhammad. Greetings on us and the right-acting servants of God. The peace and mercy and munificence of God be on you.’)
A few months after the Revolution, the Communists planned a meeting that was to be addressed by a high-up Communist from Tehran. Thanks to a spy he had planted among them, Mr Zarif got wind of the meeting. He went early and got a good spot near the podium. Just as the speaker was being introduced, Mr Zarif ran onto the podium and landed a good one on his nose. Before anyone had time to react, he hurled himself into the section of the crowd that was thinnest. He was small enough, and fast enough, to get away with only a broken rib.
At the beginning of November 1979, radical students allied to the Imam seized the American Embassy in Tehran, taking the staff hostage. The students announced that they would release the hostages only when President Carter handed over the Shah, who had been allowed into America for cancer treatment. Bazargan resigned; his government had been trying to repair relations with the US. After Bazargan’s departure, the Imam placed the government directly under the control of his kitchen cabinet, the Islamic Revolutionary Council.
Mr Zarif was delighted: he remembered that the Revolution was made up of steps.
Nowadays, when people think of the mullahs’ revenge, they think of Sadegh Khalkhali. There were scores of clerics who were more important than him; they actually took decisions, rather than implemented and interpreted the decisions of others, as Khalkhali did. Many of these mullahs were easier on the eye than Khalkhali; they had politer turns of phrase, more impressive qualifications. Khalkhali was a poor kid from the Azeri northwest, short on education outside the seminary, rotund, bald and coarse.
During the Shah’s time, Khalkhali had upset people by writing a treatise depicting Cyrus the Great, founder of the Achaemenian empire and a figure whom the Shah admired, as a sodomite. He’d been imprisoned and internally exiled. Then, a few days after the Revolution, Khomeini appointed him to be a judge in the revolutionary court that was to try beneficiaries of the old regime and opponents of the new one. Khalkhali toured the country, trying monarchists and counter-revolutionaries. (Over a three-month period, he claimed to have condemned more than four hundred people to death. They included former senators, a radio presenter and a mob leader.) His pugnacious, fat face became as famous as his jokes, which often featured references to executions. V. S. Naipaul, who visited Khalkhali at the height of his notoriety, likened him to a jester at his own court.
Khalkhali made an indelible impression on Elaine Sciolino, an American journalist who witnessed one of the trials he presided over; she remembered him in a book she wrote two decades later. To counter the extremely hot weather, Sciolino recalls, Khalkhali removed his turban, cloak and socks, which must have made him look like a turnip. He sat on the floor and picked his toes while hearing the evidence against a defendant. He repeatedly left the room during the testimony of witnesses.
His most famous victim was Amir Abbas Hoveida, and Khalkhali must have enjoyed that bit of business. Hoveida was Khalkhali’s antithesis, thirteen years the Shah’s prime minister, a man whose Northampton brogues Khalkhali could not, before the Revolution, have dreamed of polishing. Hoveida was a francophone, but he also knew Arabic – the Arabic of Beirut society, not the Qoran. Even after their divorce, Hoveida’s wife made sure that a fresh orchid reached him every morning for his buttonhole. He’d not been personally venal or murderous, but he’d closed his eyes to the atrocities of others. Khalkhali charged him with waging war on God and corruption on earth. Over two court sessions, separated by several weeks, Khalkhali pounded the defendant’s moral ambivalence like saffron under a pestle.
At lunchtime on Hoveida’s last day, Khalkhali reports in his memoir, the prisoner was treated to a repast of rice, lamb and broad beans. Khalkhali claims to have made do with bread and cheese. (Next to photographs of him, excessively crapulent, this ascetic self-portrayal is unconvincing.) During the afternoon session, Khalkhali didn’t allow Hoveida a defence counsel, nor was a jury present. As the presiding judge, Khalkhali didn’t pretend to be impartial; in the vehemence of his harangues, he rivalled the prosecutor.
By trying Hoveida, Khalkhali jabbed his finger in Bazargan’s eye. Bazargan disapproved of the revolutionary court – he was planning for Hoveida an exemplary trial that would establish the Revolution’s reputation for justice and moderation. But Khalkhali, who plausibly claims to have taken hints from Khomeini, had different ideas. He gave orders that no one was to be allowed out of the prison where the trial was taking place. To ensure that word didn’t reach Bazargan, he locked the prison telephones in a fridge. And so Hoveida was sentenced and shot in the prison courtyard. His final words were patrician, and a bit surprised: ‘It wasn’t meant to end like this.’
Khalkhali’s theatre travelled on. It gave perhaps its most memorable performance at a famous shrine in south Tehran. Khalkhali and two hundred revolutionary militiamen set out to destroy the Pahlavi family vault, which was in the shrine’s precincts. Khalkhali was opposed by the government and by the resilience of the granite structure. The spades and picks used by the Revolutionary Guard proved insufficient. Khalkhali called for reinforcements. (National television was already on site to record his endeavour.) Bulldozers and cranes arrived, but the tomb withstood. At ten o’clock that night, the valiant revolutionaries went home to bed.
In his memoir, Khalkhali craves his readers’ indulgence: ‘Perhaps you don’t grasp how strong they’d made this tomb.’ But he was not deterred; the tomb would have to be blown up, by degrees. And when, after twenty epic days, the job was done, and the dust of imperial bones blended with the smell of cordite, ‘the sound of cheers and joy rose from the people, and the enthusiasm and joy were indescribable’.
You can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs. That might be Khal-khali’s epitaph.
Today, Mr and Mrs Zarif are coming to lunch with us, here in Elahiyeh. I wonder what they will make of Bita, my wife, and what she’ll make of them.
Elahiyeh is a desirable suburb on the slopes of north Tehran. It used to be so green that, even in midsummer, you had to sleep with a light blanket. The British and Russian embassies kept grand legations in Elahiyeh, to which their respective ambassadors decamped in the spring. Now, the compounds remain but most of the gardens have been built over. Elahiyeh is rarely more than two or three degrees cooler than the dustbowl of south Tehran.
Elahiyeh’s name is derived from the name of God in Arabic, Allah, but few places in Iran are more reputed for impiety. Behind entry gates crowned with barbed wire, illicit booze is consumed and dancing committed by mixed assemblies. Anecdotal evidence suggests that sex happens between men and women who aren’t married to each other. The Islamic Republic is an avoidable botheration.
In the Shah’s time, the area was inhabited by suave monarchists who built Swiss-style chalets. Fearing for their liberty after the Revolution – many of them had taken part in the Shah’s oppression, or dipped into the public purse – they fled. The new regime appropriated their houses and grounds, building on them or turning them into, say, a sports club
