Persian Carpets

Few people went on vacations in 1950s Iran.  To leave the country, one had to pay a hefty exit tax and to travel inside Iran meant driving over miles of rough, unpaved roads with few stopping places.  My family hadn’t taken a vacation together that I remember.  There are pictures of my mother, sister, aunt and uncle at the Caspian Sea before I was born, but in my memory, the first vacation we took as a family was when I was nine, and we went to Hamadan.  That said, my father didn’t join us on this vacation; it was my mother, my two sisters and my baby brother who went.  My uncle drove us there, the one who had taught my mother to drive. Intrepid as my mother was, she wouldn’t have braved dirt roads, flat tires, car repairs, miles of wilderness, and no maps or road signs.  Travelling outside Tehran was a fairly primitive and intuitive affair.  One stopped wherever there was a village to ask for directions and to have punctured tires fixed.  We took food and water with us since there were no eateries on the way.  Villagers may spare an egg and make us tea, but that would have been the extent of the accommodation. 

We arrived in Hamadan in the middle of the night, covered in dust and had to bathe before going to bed. This entailed waking some of the hotel staff so they could fire up the hot water boilers.  The next morning it was time to explore the hotel with its long corridors and elegant dining room.  The hotel’s architecture was Mediterranean in style, with a wide stairway banked by stone lions leading inside.  At the rear there was a large garden with rose bushes, oak trees, and walkways.  Out front, streets were wide, dusty, and tree-lined with many horse-drawn carriages and fewer cars than in Tehran.  Most of the other guests at the hotel were foreigners, and the cuisine was European.  I liked the consommé that they served before the main course, and was happy not to have the usual Iranian stews served on rice that was our fare at home.  Here we had schnitzel, beef stroganoff and cutlets instead, a change I welcomed.

 Among the other guests was a schoolmate of mine, a boy named Wolfgang, there with his mother.  Wolfgang was in the grade ahead of me, but we hung out together, catching grasshoppers and collecting limestones to strike together to make them spark like flints.  This occupied us for hours, and it was the first time that I recall having the freedom to roam and play without adult supervision.  In Tehran in our apartment, there was no place to rove except the street, and that had its perils.  It was liberating to wander through the large hotel garden with a new friend, not with the usual cousins and sisters, and to get a taste of what living in a western country would be like.  Wolfgang was German and Iran was alien to him, but it seemed to me that he was used to playing unsupervised. I don’t know that we exchanged any particular information about his life before Iran, but I felt that he didn’t find it a novelty to roam freely like it was for me.  The only detail I remember about him is that he was large and well-fed compared to Iranian boys, and he told me his name meant the way of the wolf, which seemed odd. My name, which meant nothing, seemed a lot more sensible.

This was a trip of many firsts. It was the first time I experienced an earthquake. Fortunately there was minimal damage from it, but I recall thinking that the shaking was due to my bouncing on the bed.  My one-year-old brother took his first steps on the slick tile in the hotel corridors and kept falling.  He had a perpetual purple goose egg on his forehead. It was the first time I met my paternal grandmother.  She had been in New York to have an operation and stopped on her way back to Baghdad.  My uncle, who had dropped us off in Hamadan, had returned to fetch us, bringing her with him.   I had never met any of my grandparents and I think I was expecting a grandmother out of the Dick and Jane primers that I read in first grade, but mine was quite different.  The surgery she’d undergone had removed some of the bone in her forehead, so half of it was sunken.  My nine-year-old self was both fascinated and intimidated by her appearance.  She was was sweet, but she only talked about her Baghdadi grandchildren and seemed to be focused on returning to them.  She didn’t dote like Dick and Jane’s grandmother. 

My mother had some childhood friends in Hamadan, and we spent time with them; I think that’s why she chose Hamadan as a destination.  One of her friends, with children about our ages, ran the Alliance Française School in Hamadan. I was surprised that there was a foreign school in Hamadan, thinking that Hamadan would be a backwater compared to Tehran, but I liked making yet more new friends.   Their house had a veranda that circled it and we played dodge ball on it.

My childhood nanny also lived in Hamadan, and we saw her.  She had stayed in touch with us through the years, and had visited us in Tehran, but I had never been to her house.  I was glad to see that she lived in relative ease in a modest but sturdy and well-furnished mud house in an apricot orchard. She had always maintained that she was a distant relative of the shah’s, and I was never sure what to make of this, but the fact that she was quite well off gave credence to her claim. This wasn’t as far-fetched as it sounds, since the shah’s father had risen in the army ranks from a peasant private to an officer before assuming (or usurping, depending on one’s loyalties) the throne.  Still, why would a relative of the shah work as a nanny? She was a mystery to me.  We had a picnic lunch with her in the orchard.  She kept trying to baby me, pulling me onto her lap, trying to comb my hair, and kissing my face.  I finally rebuffed her, which was painful for both of us.  I suppose the independence I was feeling on this vacation made me impatient with anything binding.

I was interested in archaeology at the time, and the old buildings in Hamadan intrigued me.  We visited a huge carved lion in the middle of the desert with no other structures.  It was a relic from the time of the Persian Empire, the only remaining ruin in a desert on the outskirts of town. The lion had been anointed with honey and the tradition was to imbed a pebble in the honey on the lion’s head and neck.  I have no idea what the significance of this gesture was, but I performed the ritual, presuming it would bring me good luck.  Many years later when I first read the poem “Ozymandias” I thought of that lion with the vast emptiness around it.

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At some point, someone arranged for us to visit a carpet factory.  Hamadan is well-known for fine carpets, often made with a combination of wool and silk. Outside was the wool washing and dying courtyard.  Bare-legged men, their legs incongruously dyed red and blue below their rolled up trousers, were handling the piles of vivid yarns in enormous steaming  vats, and the smell of wet, hot wool mixed with the chemical smell of dyes hung over the courtyard and stung the nose.  Inside the factory was an open space with rows of backless benches suspended by ropes from the ceiling, with women and children sitting on them, about three or four to each bench.  High windows let in sunshine, thick with dust and fiber motes, and although the sunshine made it look airy, the inside also smelled of wool and was stifling in the summer heat.  I detected the smell of the typical dish that poor people ate, boiled lentils mashed with a little mutton fat, seasoned with turmeric and garlic. 

The women and children had patterns in front of them and were weaving them into the carpets.  As they completed a few rows, they were hoisted up by the ropes holding their benches to the next level on the looms.  The women had on chadors, the traditional Iranian women’s covering that went from their head down to their feet, held in place by biting down on the fold under their chin.  The girls had on shapeless dresses with long sleeves and wore scarves that covered their heads and necks. Their ability to translate the patterns before them into the patterns in the carpet was impressive; to me there was no link between the paper pattern and the threads on the loom, and I couldn’t decipher how they knew where the next knot went and what color it should be.  They worked quickly, choosing the right color yarn, making the knots and then cutting off the excess with blades that were tied to the loom.  They sneaked glances at us as we walked through with the foreman explaining the carpet-making process.  Young girls were desirable as workers because their small fingers could make smaller knots, thus finer carpets, he explained. 

I was recently starting to get a weekly allowance of about 25 cents a week.  I would have had to save for about a month to buy a ball or a couple of weeks to buy a small plastic doll.  I had just been handed my allowance that morning, and had the coins in my pocket as we walked through the factory.  My attention was particularly fixed on the children working at the factory, many of them much younger than me, wan and resigned looking. Some of the women had infants lying beside them, having no alternative but to bring them to work.  Living in Iran in the 1950s, I was daily reminded of my good fortune by the ubiquitous poverty.  I used to have a recurring dream of falling off the balcony of our house and drifting down into a corrugated tin shack and poverty; I would wake myself before I alit.  I knew how lucky I was to be fed, clothed and sheltered, because there were countless children begging on the streets.  And now I was on vacation and also getting an allowance. 

One little girl caught my eye as we walked through the factory, mostly because she dared to actually look at us.  She seemed to be about my age and she paused in her weaving as we walked past and looked directly and defiantly at me.  I don’t know why I felt a connection with her, but on an impulse, I took the coins out of my pocket and handed them to her.  Suddenly the place erupted.  The women and children jumped off their benches and started to clamor around us begging for money.  What I had given the girl was probably the equivalent of a week’s pay or more, and she hadn’t had to toil long days for it. 

At first the foreman didn’t know what had happened.  Then he started berating me for starting a riot as he hustled us out of the factory.  I was bewildered by what my gesture had done and was taken aback by the foreman’s scolding. I had certainly not intended to cause an uproar, only to reach out to a girl whose independence I empathized with. She did not seem to consider herself the detritus of humanity that everyone else in her life would have considered her, and in my way, I think I was hoping to encourage her defiance.

I knew in the outside world that if you gave one beggar anything, you would soon be engulfed by others, but I thought, these people had jobs and were making a living, so wouldn’t respond in the same way. I had no idea how little they made and how every cent made a difference in how much they ate.  As I left, the girl and I looked at each other.  I tried to convey to her that the riot wasn’t her fault and that I was sorry I had got her into trouble.  I hoped she would be allowed to keep the money and her job, but I wasn’t sure she would.  The foreman had already turned venomously on her, since he couldn’t do much more than scold me.

Before then, I was indifferent to Persian carpets, seeing them merely as the furnishings in every Iranian home.  Since then, I have felt ambivalent about them, torn between appreciating the aesthetics and the craft that has gone into creating them and the abhorrence for the immeasurable toil they represent.  As an adult, I know that these carpets have stolen many childhoods, but I also know that those children, born into their particular world, would not have had much of a childhood, and weaving carpets was a means for their survival.