Academy

I thought of the weeks as junior maître d’ as a training period. I had made mistakes. I would improve. I would learn French inside out. I would ask the international guests more interesting questions. I had already seen the senselessness of typing quotations from books at the end of the menu. I had stopped trying to flirt with Parivash. Soon, I would buy a new suit.

Ahmoud, however, had seen enough, and he sacked me. In the letter of dismissal, he said that I ‘had not carried out my duties in the way expected’. I was horrified. In my town, in my family, the worst thing that could ever be said about you was that you had not carried out your duties in the way expected. If my father had known that I’d been sacked, he would have blushed with shame. Better to be dismissed for theft, assault or indecent exposure than for falling down on the job.

I left the hotel after a final breakfast—Ahmoud insisted on the breakfast—and lugged my suitcase into town with tears running down my cheeks. I was struggling to put together a story that my father might accept. ‘Dad, it seems I just wasn’t cut out to be a maître d’, French was a big problem, Dad—I couldn’t really speak French all that well, and my suit wasn’t the proper sort of suit.’ And so on. Excuses. My father would see that I was just making excuses. He would say, ‘You didn’t want to get your little pink hands dirty.’

Without money, it was difficult to know what I could do. I couldn’t sponge off Jo and Randall, who were busy establishing their own lives. I saw them now and again, and it was obvious that we were no longer all in the one boat. I booked into a cheap hotel and went out to find a job. Making my way along Boulevard Pahlevi, one line of work after another suggested itself, only to be dismissed. I couldn’t be a baker, for example. I couldn’t start up a small restaurant. Maybe I could get a job as a shop assistant on the basis of my experience in the Myer Emporium, but what about language? I could barely make myself understood in Farsi. I came to the office of Iran Insurance, and called in to see Houshang.

‘Well, it’s not surprising, is it?’ he said, when I told him I’d been sacked. ‘You are too young for such work. Also, you stopped paying attention to Parivash.’

‘But you told me to!’

‘No. I told you that you would not succeed. I didn’t tell you to stop. You insulted her.’

‘Is that why I was sacked?’ I was suddenly dizzy with hope. My father would easily, easily accept me losing my job because I had refused to sleep with the manager’s wife. I could tell him that the manager’s wife was bad tempered or ugly, and he would say, ‘Not to worry, not to worry,’ and put it all down to the malice of a scorned woman.

‘No,’ said Houshang, ‘Ahmoud intended to sack you after four weeks. As soon as he hired you, he knew that he was wrong. You looked foolish.’

He had a suggestion. I should go down to the Iran–America Society office and see if they needed teachers. ‘Have you been to university in Australia?’ he asked, in a way that suggested that the only acceptable answer would be ‘Yes’.

‘Yes,’ I said.

‘Good. Speak to Louis at the Iran-America Society.’

The Iran–America Society office was on Boulevard Pahlevi. I had only a vague idea of the business of the place. I found it was a goodwill society and that it ran an English-teaching academy. Louis was lounging with his feet on his desk and his tie loosened. He looked like a private eye. I gave my name and told him that Houshang had sent me.

‘He’s a cunt, isn’t he,’ Louis said genially. ‘Ladies’ man. I must be jealous. What can we do for you? Sit down first.’

‘I want to teach.’

‘Teach what?’

‘English.’

‘Suits me. What’ve you got? BA? You look a bit young.’

‘BA,’ I nodded. I knew what it was.

‘Not a limey, are you? Australian? Something like that? What university? Doesn’t matter. Gimme your passport.’

Louis studied my passport for a minute or more without betraying any surprise. The date of birth would have shown me to be one of the few Arts graduates of my age in the world.

‘I can give you three classes. You take each class four times a week. You’re taking over from Janey. Gone AWOL somewhere. You start tonight. Don’t tell me that’s too soon, okay? If you don’t do it, I have to. It’s not too soon, is it?’

‘No.’

I had time to skim the textbook. I walked into a classroom on the second floor in which twenty students, all my age or older, sat in silence with their books on their laps. There were no desks. I felt a rush of power. I was to spend quite a number of my future years teaching kids of just this age, but never again with the authority that buoyed me up that day.

After the class (on prepositions, with reference to a chapter from Tom Sawyer) a number of the students gathered around me, smiling shyly.

‘Mister Roberts, you trousers too small for you.’

‘Mister Robert, Ostraya far very far!’

‘I shake you hand, Mister Illman.’

‘Beatle, Mister Robert! Music, Beatle!’

‘My students,’ I wrote to my father that night, ‘are quite friendly. I am glad that I changed my career because the people were not so friendly as this at the hotel. Also, a woman there wanted me to do something I didn’t wish to do.’

Louis proposed an advance on my salary, and I accepted. At the hotel where I’d put up, Reza the manager, a good-natured boy of eighteen who had been given this responsible position by his uncle, slapped me on the back when I told him that I was now working as a teacher. A vernacular news service as rapid as the Internet conveyed information all over town, and Reza, who spoke English, confessed that he’d known of my teaching job at the society before I’d told him. But he hadn’t wished to spoil my pleasure in telling him. In Shirazi culture (as I would learn) it was considered vulgar to spoil someone’s surprise. I was never able to gauge whether I had succeeded in telling Reza anything about my circumstances that was not already well known to him.

What pleased Reza about my job was the salary. I would now be able to pay my hotel bill. He had, he said, been troubled when I’d booked in. He knew I had no money. He may have been required to throw me out. Now he was happy. He paraded me before the group of friends and relatives hanging about in the hotel office. These little groups of the unemployed, the unemployable and the retired gathered all over Iran. At the heart of the group you’d find a single occupied individual, but even he was occupied in such a desultory way that the distinction was hardly noticeable. Worry beads were counted, cups of tea ordered from a café.

Anything at all will fire the interest of these masters of enforced leisure. With Reza translating, they asked me a series of questions about the distant land of Australia, and each reply was met with either polite nods or short rounds of applause, with the hand not holding the teacup or cigarette beating a light tattoo on the thigh. Inevitably, the highlight of my account was a report on the stature and leaping prowess of the kangaroo. The bi-cameral parliamentary system baffled them, but they were interested in the Queen. Reza could not translate the word ‘stupid’; I had to provide approximates.

‘Fool.’

‘Fool?’

‘Silly.’

‘Zealy? What is zealy mean?’

‘Mad.’

‘Ho! Mad?’

He translated ‘mad’, to the delight of the audience. It was, I think, a close neighbour of a term they would have wished to apply to the Shah. The laughter had a guilty-gleeful sound to it. I wanted to show just how bold I could be, perhaps telling the audience that my Prime Minister was also mad, but Reza thought it best to change the subject. He called over Ali, the hotel dogsbody, a tiny, toothless man with floppy ears like oven mitts, and told me that Ali was now my servant. ‘You give Mister Ali three toomans,’ Reza whispered. Since I had the money, I immediately offered it. Ali’s gestures of obeisance embarrassed me. But I could not resist telling my father in my next letter that I now had a servant. ‘I treat him very well,’ I wrote. ‘I disagree with slavery.’

The green island was as far away as ever, but at least I was supporting myself with the sweat of my brow. Sitting on my bed in my narrow little room, I wrote to my father every other day. What I craved was some endorsement from him; some recognition that by collecting a pay envelope each week, I was shaping up as I should. I had been collecting a pay envelope each week since I left school, of course, but now I was doing it in a foreign land. I thought some special mention should be made of the fact.

But my father’s replies, much less regular than my own messages, only made me sad: ‘Dear Bobby, We received your letter and we are very glad that you are well. It has been raining for a fortnight here so I am not able to get on with relaying those pipes below the pumping station as I need dry weather as there is a lot of digging which is very hard in the rain when the trench keeps filling. Doug Cornish and I went down to the tailrace a couple of night ago and took four brown trout (largest three and a half pounds) which goes to show as I always said that the brown will bite in the rain but the rainbow will not. I didn’t understand what you were saying about the Hotel. Bertie asked about you, you can get that job back when you return if you wish. Kendra asked me to say hello to you. I looked in the Atlas for Iran in the Mid. East, but it isn’t there, as this is an old Atlas perhaps in your next letter you can say where it is, if possible. I had some contact with Arabs in the war and I can warn you to be careful in all your dealings as they are inclined to be very, very tricky and cunning …’

The sky was blue each day. The sun shone. The city offered a riot of the exotic. At the turn into the market, an aged man in a rag of a turban stuffed the heads of three snakes into his mouth and stood, arms outstretched, while the long bodies of the serpents twisted and lashed. A tribesman down from the hills suddenly commanded his legion of wives and kids to fall to their knees to honour an eagle circling above. A parade of zealots, showing the whites of their eyes, advanced through the bazaar in little bunny hops, the better to torture their feet with the sharp pebbles in their shoes. A group of gaudily dressed women who were said to be Gypsies danced a jig on Pahlevi with their hands cupping their breasts.

But my father’s letters made the world and its variousness seem utterly beside the point, as if I would know life only by stirring offal in Bertie’s copper. And it seemed I could put aside ideas of love, delight and desire as the husband of a jewelled princess, because Kendra Phillips from fourth form, with her genial freckles and raucous laugh and her three little bad-boy brothers, was the girl who had my number, knew the plain facts about me. Kendra had liked me. My embarrassment had puzzled her. She didn’t see anything mystical or attractively tragic in me at all.

News from home and the sadness it set working was one cause of distress. The mullahs were another. They were busy about the city each day, turning a censorial gaze on hemlines, hairdos and the tardy piety of the merchants in the marketplace. Their glares did not cause the Shirazis much alarm, but when they glared at me I felt spooked. They scowled at my pointed shoes and long hair, and shouted at me and made broad, sweeping motions with their arms, which I took to mean, ‘Get back to Gomorrah, kid!’ With their brown robes, white turbans and identically barbered beards, it was impossible to tell them apart. I’d escape from one at the end of Pahlevi, and a half-hour later his look-alike would be sneering as I entered the Shiraz Jazz Café at the other end of town.

Houshang laughed when I told him. ‘Silly people,’ he said. ‘Don’t worry. They’re harmless.’ Waking one afternoon in the hotel’s courtyard where I was sunbaking, I found a pair of them squatting silently beside me. Disgust and lust contended in their expressions. When Reza appeared he salaamed and smiled obsequiously for the mullahs, but turned an exasperated eye on me. The mullahs withdrew slowly, lips pursed and eyes glittering.

‘Mister Robert, so bad!’

‘Pardon?’

‘This!’ And Reza plucked at my red Speedos.

‘I’m sunbaking.’

‘No! No no no!’

‘Not allowed?’

Reza glanced left and right before leaning close to whisper, ‘These men cruel. Cruel? You understand?’

‘Cruel?’

Reza mimicked a person wielding a whip. ‘Bang! Bang bang!’

‘Oh,’ I said.

Reza rubbed his behind, then brought his hand to his mouth and blew on it—to show, I think, the heat and pain that would have been concentrated there after a dash of the lash.

‘Okay,’ I said, wiser now.

My students at the Iran-America Society made attempts to educate me. After class, a group of them would walk me along the streets, pausing every so often to make a point.

‘Who is this, Mister Robert?’ They were nodding towards a tall, thin young man strolling languidly near the bazaar.

‘I don’t know,’ I said.

‘Beheshti, taking your money.’

Shamshiri, a cheerful, bespectacled boy of sixteen who had established himself as the cleverest student in any of my classes, rubbed his hands together then cast what I understood to be imaginary dice onto the sidewalk.

‘Hoo! Beheshti too smart!’ said Nashi.

‘Beheshti is looking for you,’ said Shamshiri.

‘For me? Why?’

‘For all English persons, for Americans, for Peace Corps. Shiraz people never trust him. Foreign people trust him only.’

‘Too smart, Beheshti!’ Nashi said again, admiringly.

We crossed into the bazaar and found Beheshti settling down to a hookah in a café. My students greeted him gaily then nudged me forward.

‘Hi,’ I said, and Beheshti, smiling charmingly, extended a long, white, prehensile hand.

‘Give Beheshti ten toomans, Mister Robert.’

I gave up the ten toomans, reluctantly. The instant the note touched Beheshti’s fingers, it disappeared. He didn’t palm it or manipulate it in any way. He simply made it vanish. My students hooted and slapped their thighs and crooned with amazement. I, too, expressed my surprise. But when I asked for the note back, my students looked at me blankly.

‘Your toomans gone, Mister Robert. Beheshti too smart.’

‘But I only gave it to him because you told me to!’

Shamshiri, ushering me out of the café, spoke of the experience as if it were a valuable lesson for me. It was impossible for me to tell whether I was the butt of a joke or the victim of my students’ naivety. I would not have needed any warning regarding Beheshti. He looked to me exactly like the crook he was.

Next I was required to meet an oddity of a different sort—a man who was said to be the only atheist in Iran. His name had come up when I was chatting with my students. They had wanted to know if I was Jewish, and if I was not—that is, if I was a Christian—how come I didn’t wear a little cross around my neck like every other Christian? I said, nonchalantly, that I was an atheist. It took half an hour to make clear what an atheist was. The students chortled gleefully, as if my stupidity, which had already provided them with so much delight, had just revealed a new and even more thrilling dimension. The idea that there was a god who was not Allah seemed to them complete nonsense, but tolerable nonsense, as if you’d declared yourself a member of the Flat Earth Society. The earth was round, no question, but if you persisted in believing it flat, best of luck to you. But to deny the existence of any god at all was like saying that the earth was not round and not flat, and in fact didn’t exist. A name was spoken. Pissing themselves, my students let me know that here, here in Shiraz, another such atheist dwelt, name of Hakemi, only fellow in Iran stricken in the same way as I was.

Hakemi was a spectacle-repairer, and worked in his house on the hill near the Parki Saadi. We marched across town to meet him. I was expecting someone witty and ironic, someone with his tongue in his cheek and the twinkle of a lively intelligence in his eye. Hakemi wasn’t like that. He was bad-tempered, shrill and impatient. As near as I could tell, his opening message to my students was that they piss off. They took no notice. Then followed a shouting match, a real treat for my students but obviously trying to Hakemi. Eventually the matter at hand was broached. Here’s our teacher, an atheist and an idiot like you, you silly old bastard, so what do you think about that?—or so I guessed the introduction was made, judging from gestures. Hakemi, who didn’t wear glasses himself but obviously needed to, squinted at me with his beaky nose about an inch from my face. ‘Jesus,’ he said to me. ‘No Jesus?’

Now, I didn’t wish to deny the historical existence of Jesus. But translation would be a problem. So I replied, mildly, ‘Jesus, yes, God, no.’

‘Jesus yes, God no?’

‘Yes.’

This response seemed, I think, a bit fishy to Hakemi. He stood with his lips pursed and his head cocked to one side, thinking.

‘Jesus yes, God no?’ he said again.

‘Yep.’

‘Hakemi,’ he said, jabbing his finger into his chest, ‘Mohammed no, Allah no.’

‘Mohammed no, Allah no?’ I said.

‘Mohammed no, Allah no.’

Hakemi looked pleased with himself. He’d established a standard of unbelief that left me looking like a quibbler. But my students had obviously prepared themselves for a more interesting afternoon. Nashi stepped forward, and roused Hakemi all over again. I asked Emmilef to translate.

‘Nashi tells Hakemi you are saying God is mad.’

‘Me? I didn’t say that!’ But I knew where this nonsense had come from. When I’d told Reza at the hotel that Queen Elizabeth was mad, the comment had become known to all my students. Nashi had decided that what I’d said of the Queen could equally be considered my judgement on the god I claimed did not exist. ‘I said the Queen is mad. Not God. I didn’t say God is mad.’

Hakemi, however, had seen a way to get his teeth into the seat of my pants. I had been revealed as a mere casuist. He barked back something that sent the students into hysterics. Shamshiri was being encouraged by the others to translate, but he seemed reluctant.

‘What’d he say?’ I demanded.

Prodded, punched and cajoled by the others, Shamshiri finally came through.

‘Hakemi is saying you are having no brains …’ (and here Shamshiri touched his temple) … ‘and no … this …’ (pointing at his crotch).

‘No balls?’

‘Yes. Bollis. No bollis. I am sorry Hakemi is saying this to you, Mister Hillman.’

‘Tell Hakemi,’ I said, stung, ‘that I’ve got plenty of balls. Tell him I say no Jesus, no God. Nothing. Okay?’

‘No Jesus, no God?’

‘Right.’

Shamshiri, shrugging, gave Hakemi my new position. Hakemi waved a hand at me dismissively, and said something that delighted the students all over again.

‘Now Hakemi is saying you are same as a woman, Mister Hillman!’

‘I am not!’

Nashi whispered something to Shamshiri, who then whispered it to me.

‘Mister Hillman, say to Hakemi he is monkey face!’

I might have, but after a few seconds’ reflection I decided it was beneath my dignity to go on with the argument. In any case, Nashi had started his own brawl with Hakemi and was shaping up to punch him. He had to be dragged out of the house by the other students, with Hakemi raining insults on him. I last glimpsed Hakemi standing in the doorway with his arms folded, looking triumphant.

The students also thought it imperative that I meet a friend of theirs in the National Police, a lieutenant named Rasheef. He was in uniform when I first met him. I did not require the warning they gave me about staying on the good side of such a man. Rasheef, in his early twenties, had the swagger of a schoolyard bully enhanced by his employment in the office of licensed thug. He was a friend of my older male students, boys of eighteen and nineteen, but how they had come to know him so well was never explained. Houshang’s conjecture was that Rasheef had probably befriended them, rather than the other way around. They all came from well-to-do families, and he would have seen advantage in this.

We met at the home of Nashi’s married older brother, Adeem. In a small courtyard behind tall mud-brick walls, dishes of food were served over a period of hours. I have come to enjoy the sort of food I was offered that day, but it was a hard ask for me, aged seventeen, to keep a smile on my face while washing down fare made from ingredients I had not heard of with a spirit that smelled like turpentine. A bottle of tomato sauce would have made the world of difference.

A tabor and a fiddle were fetched late in the afternoon. Adeem, a renowned singer, took the stage. I sat listening for an hour or more to what sounded to me like the human voice mimicking the sound of water running down a plughole. The students were blissed-out, but Rasheef became restless. He called for the fiddle, and clowned with it in the manner of a man known to introduce grave reprisals when an audience disappointed him. The students laughed like hyenas. Encouraged, Rasheef asked for his pistol and passed a riotous half-hour cocking the gun against our temples. There was more hilarity to come. He had some ‘sex books’ to show us, which turned out to be a couple of medical volumes. With a great deal of sniggering, Rasheef displayed coloured plates of the female genitalia.

The next day, my students drove home the lesson of that appalling afternoon: Rasheef, like Beheshti, was a bad man. Signatures of sincerity and insincerity change from culture to culture, of course, and I couldn’t pick either in Iran. Houshang tried to explain to me that attempting to achieve two contradictory aims at the one time was a typically Persian thing to do. The boys, he said, were probably trying to show off their powerful buddy in the National Police, while at the same time warning me to watch out. He said that Rasheef, unlike the mullahs, was properly dangerous. If he shot me in the back of the head and left me in the hills, no one would report finding my body. But why would he want to shoot me in the back of the head? Who could be less harmless than me? ‘He likes you,’ Houshang said. ‘He might ask you to do something for him. Perhaps you will say no. Then he doesn’t like you.’

‘Do what for him?’

‘I don’t know. The police are corrupt. Rasheef makes friends with foreigners. I don’t know what he wants with them.’

As it turned out, Rasheef did have a task for me. One evening, after my last class for the day, Nashi nervously asked me to walk with him down to the National Police headquarters. The other students shrank back, shrugging and muttering. But I felt very little apprehension. I had done no wrong. And if Rasheef asked me to do something I didn’t want to do, I would refuse, and maybe he would be surprised at my strength of character and decide not to shoot me. There was also my trump card. I was an Australian. We were a nation of people to whom things did not happen.

At the police station, Nashi, more jittery with every passing minute, spoke briefly with a burly constable, gesturing towards me as if I had tagged along unbidden. I gazed around at framed portraits of the Shah, which hung everywhere. Rasheef emerged from his office and welcomed me with a smile. He told Nashi to get lost.

Once in his office, Rasheef himself seemed to me to grow almost as nervous as Nashi. He pointed at an ancient musket mounted on the wall, then took it down and invited me to sight along the barrel. He showed me a curved sword and encouraged me to touch the blade. ‘Shop?’ he said. After a moment’s puzzlement, I said, ‘Sharp’.

‘Sharp?’

‘Sharp. Very sharp.’

‘Very sharp?’

‘Very sharp, yes.’

‘Very sharp.’

Rasheef then stood on one foot and raised the polished boot on the other foot.

‘Show,’ he said, pointing at the boot. ‘Show. Yes?’

‘Boot,’ I said.

‘Bood?’

‘Boo—t. Boot.’

‘Boot. Not show? Boot?’

I pointed to my own Beatle shoes. ‘Shoe,’ I said. Then, pointing to Rasheef’s footwear, I said, ‘Boot.’

Rasheef shot me a suspicious glance. Then understanding dawned. ‘Ah!’ he said, throwing his hands up to the ceiling. ‘Show, little, boot—big!’ he looked at me for confirmation.

‘Shoe, little,’ I said. ‘Boot, big!’

He was delighted. He clapped his hands together and chuckled.

Serious once more, Rasheef stood before me and put his hands on my shoulders. Enunciating each word so carefully that his moustache was drawn up, then down, then stretched from side to side, he said, ‘You … teaching … Rasheef … the English. Hokay?’

‘Sure!’

He gazed at me in that unreliably sentimental way common in brutal men, spicks and specks of comradely love gathered up and held briefly in a misty film.

‘Good!’ he said. ‘Very good!’

No sooner was I back on the boulevard than Nashi jumped out from behind a tree.

‘Ho! Mister Robert! Mister Rasheef no hurting you!’

‘Of course not!’ I said.

As I made my triumphal way down Pahlevi, more and more of my students appeared from the shadows. Shamshiri, looking sheepish, was the first to ask the reason for the summons from Rasheef.

‘He wants me to teach him English,’ I said.

‘Mister Rasheef will pay you excellent?’ he asked.

This question reminded me that payment hadn’t been discussed. Something about Rasheef’s manner, as I reflected on it, made me think that money was probably not part of the deal. The mullahs lost interest in me. Rasheef became my pal after a half-dozen vile English lessons during which he mastered the names of all the female body parts.

Without distractions, my craving for love resurfaced. I’d given up tagging along with Houshang on his visits to Persepolis. The sight of so many classy women stumbling back after a tryst behind a pillar with Houshang was souring my belief in the transfiguring power of love. Sex for these women seemed nothing more than a holiday activity. Then one afternoon in my Upper B class, Shayda Ashadi smiled at me. Shayda was pure poetry—dark-eyed, blushful, heartbreakingly pretty. Also very intelligent. She had written an essay on birds that concluded with the line, ‘A bird is like our heart.’ That line by itself had torn a huge hole in my guts, but the smile was the real killer. I thought, Oh God, she loves me!

Wasting no time, I wrote her a letter asking her to meet me in the library after my last class. I handed her the letter as she was leaving. It was the birthday of the Persian poet Saadi, and that seemed propitious. My last class passed in a blur. Dear God, I prayed silently, if you let me have Shayda Ashadi, I will gladly die a painful death at your convenience—after a couple of years with her, say. Or if that’s too much to ask, a couple of months. I waited in the library for Shayda. I barely breathed. My heart had stopped beating altogether.

Shamshiri wandered in wearing an embarrassed smile. He had the letter I’d written to Shayda in his hand.

‘Is Shayda coming?’ I asked, knowing that she would not come, couldn’t come, had been forbidden to come, had fallen into the hands of the mullahs, perhaps had even killed herself.

‘Mister Hillman …’ Shamshiri began.

‘Yes?’

‘Mister Hillman …’

‘She’s not coming, is she?’

Shamshiri lifted his hands, shook his head. He gave me the letter.

‘Mister Hillman, this is not possible in Iran. This is not possible. She is very sorry.’

I slumped back to the hotel like a zombie. Honouring the tradition of the broken-hearted in the hour of grievous loss, I cried myself into a stupor and considered dashing my brains out against a hard surface.

Late in the evening, Houshang pushed open the door to my room. He stood staring at me with his arms folded across his chest.

‘Louis called me on the telephone,’ he said. ‘He would have come himself, but he was afraid he would kill you.’

‘He can kill me if he likes,’ I said.

Houshang looked up at the ceiling and sighed. I was sitting hunched on the side of my bed in my Speedos. My proper underpants were drying on the line in the courtyard.

‘My poor dear friend,’ said Houshang, lowering himself onto the one available chair after removing my garments from it with an expression of distaste, ‘why have you insulted Miss Ashadi in this way? After all I have told you? Do you know who she is? Of course you don’t. Her father is very wealthy. He is very sophisticated. Otherwise he would have had you beaten very badly. But you have broken his heart. Have I not told you that no Iranian girl will go out with a foreigner unless she has lost her virginity? You have called her a prostitute by asking her to come with you. It is a bad insult to her, and much worse to her father and to her mother. She will never come to your class again. No Iranian girl will come to your class again.’

‘I love her,’ I said.

‘Then why did you insult her?’

‘I only wanted to tell her how I felt.’

‘Fortunately,’ said Houshang, ignoring what I considered the most important issue, ‘you are very young. Mister Ashadi has taken this into account. But you must write a letter of apology. I will tell you what to say.’

And he did. I sat at my typewriter and took dictation. Whenever I objected to the phrasing—I would never myself say, for example, ‘Much foolishness is to be found in the young’—Houshang struck me on the back of the head with his hand. When we were done, he took the letter, folded it neatly, and told me to walk along Pahlevi with my eyes averted twice a day for the next week to show my contrition. I told him I would do no such thing, but he knew me well enough to feel confident that I would.

He was right about the girls abandoning my classes. The next day, Louis showed me a list of almost forty names—all girls who had withdrawn. They had been placed in other classes. Louis, who took the view that the whole disaster had been about sex, asked me why I didn’t just bang the Peace Corps girls. ‘That’s what they’re here for, Mister! Get wise!’

My students—the boys—also took the view that the whole business was about sex. Not long after the Saadi’s Birthday Massacre, they invited me to a party. These ‘parties’ (I had been to a couple) were fairly severe trials of your goodwill, unless you were Iranian. Nothing happened rapidly. About an hour before the food was ready, you were invited to sit down and eat. After eating, you sat just where you were for a further hour, singing the praises of your host. As an honoured guest, a singer and a man with a peculiar twanging instrument may sit before you performing some old Persian saga of love and woe, the singer driving you nuts with his exaggerated gestures. All the while, your host is whispering a translation of the saga into your ear: ‘Now come Ali. Very unhappy, he, not liking for his sister to marrying this man, very bad man, face ugly like monkey … Ho!—Ali kill him! Ali cut off his head! Ha! …’ I accepted the invitation, taking it as part of my penance.

But it was a different sort of party that my students had in mind. Their delicacy had prevented them spelling it out. They took me in a taxi to an area out along the airport road where the city’s prostitutes gathered. This location (I came to know this later) palliated the sensibilities of the city fathers. They argued that since only immoral foreigners and maybe a few vile Arabs would want to associate with prostitutes, business could be transacted on the way to the airport, before the disgusting clientele flew away to somewhere else. But the truth was that the wealthy Arabs and immoral foreigners preferred the classier women found in the city itself; the airport road prostitutes served the ordinary Shirazis, on the cold, hard ground beside the highway.

We were six in the taxi. My students, as good Muslims, didn’t drink alcohol, but it was no sin to pour Raki down the throat of a Christian. I was drunk by the time the taxi pulled up at a barren area where moonscape desert peaks stood silhouetted against the night. Three or four other taxis were already parked. The rollicking students—high on 7 Up—struggled to push their heads out the windows, calling lewdly to dark, immobile shapes covered head to foot in burkas. Two of the shapes eventually responded. After a few minutes harsh bargaining, the women clambered into the taxi. They quickly mastered the boys with slaps and oaths, then showed their faces to me. It was impossible to see much in the darkness of the taxi, but the driver fetched a torch from the glovebox and shone its beam on to each face. One of the women had perhaps already celebrated a fortieth or even a fiftieth birthday. The other was young and pretty. I attempted to kiss both of them but only succeeded in getting my ears boxed. ‘These ladies don’t want kissing,’ Shamshiri whispered to me. The older woman made a long angry speech as the taxi took off, gesturing towards me with an open hand. Shamshiri was obliged to tell me once more, ‘You must not kiss these ladies, Mister Hillman.’

We arrived at last at an orchard (so it was explained to me), surrounded by mud-brick walls as high and imposing as those of a fortress. One of the students, Mashid, was the son of the owner of the orchard. Mashid jumped out of the taxi and shouted at the ancient wooden gate that barred our entrance. A voice responded, and the gates were slowly eased open by an old man dressed in rags and patches. Mashid and the old man bickered in the taxi’s headlights, the argument becoming more and more animated. Finally, the old man hobbled over to the taxi and thrust his head in through the window. He studied me sceptically, making clucking noises with his tongue.

The old man’s objections apparently overcome, we bundled out of the taxi and headed into the orchard. The dark bodies of trees stretched away downhill. A night wind in the boughs filled the air with a sound like waves breaking on a beach. Around a gurgling fountain, the students parleyed with the women over money. Mashid kept throwing up his hands and walking away from the negotiations, only to return with ever-more heated complaints. Shamshiri, maintaining a scholar’s disinterested manner, wandered over to me to ask mildly if I required only one or both of the women. I said, ‘Both.’ Shamshiri returned to the parley, conveyed my message, and a sudden silence replaced the haggling. All eyes were turned to me. Then the students began to applaud and laugh.

‘Ho, Mister Illman! Ho ho, Hrobbat!’

The conference resumed, with more shouting than ever.

‘One,’ said Shamshiri, approaching me again. ‘For two, most expensive.’

‘Okay, one,’ I said.

‘Which one you like best, Mister Hillman?’

The two women stood glaring at me—the pretty one and the one old enough to be her mother. I wanted the one who was young and pretty, but did not wish to hurt the feelings of the older one. So I chose the mama, to the surprise of everyone.

A shed was found for us, the floor covered in rotting apples. The mama hoisted her burka, lay down on the apples and signalled for me to make haste. I made what haste I could, but the Raki had numbed my body and all I could think of was getting back to the hotel and going to sleep. The mama hissed angrily in my ear as I laboured away. My students gathered around and shouted exhortations. At last I was done, and the mama heaved me aside and raced to the fountain to wash herself, trailing a string of curses.

Once we had returned the women to the airport road, Shamshiri felt at liberty to disclose that Shayda’s father had paid for the evening’s fun.

‘That was nice of him,’ I said.

‘Now he will tell Shayda that you do this sex with these ladies,’ Shamshiri added.

‘What? Why!’

‘Shayda will be thinking you are a very bad man.’

All of the students seemed satisfied with this outcome. They encouraged me to accept the wisdom of the arrangement, patting my back and hugging me. I was mortified and the next day hurried to hear Houshang’s opinion.

‘No, I don’t think so,’ he said, when I asked him if Shayda’s father had paid for the prostitutes. ‘But maybe.’

‘To make Shayda think I’m bad?’

‘Perhaps.’

‘Why does he want her to think I’m bad?’

‘Miss Ashadi was very upset.’

‘Because I wrote her that letter?’

‘She is a little bit modern. Perhaps she likes you.’

‘Oh, God!’

‘It’s better,’ Houshang went on in his languid way. ‘She will go to the university in Tehran. She is going to study sea creatures. She is a modern young woman. We need many modern young women in Iran.’

Heartbreak is awful, but at least it gives you a reason for living. I went about as a rejected suitor for a month or more. Much of the time, I was in tears. I re-read A Farewell to Arms and relished the final scenes where Catherine loses her life in the hospital. It was a solace to have something in common with Lieutenant Henry. I had loved, I had paid.

With increasing distaste I carried on with Rasheef’s English lessons. The illustrations in the medical books so dominated them that I couldn’t help feeling that he had no interest in English except as a medium of pornography. I’d been required to write out every colloquial term for the male and female genitalia that I could think of. ‘This is the dick of a man … This is the cock of a man … This is the tool of a man …’ Rasheef would sit at his desk, huddled over the sheet of paper on which I’d written these obsessive messages, struggling to get his lips and moustache around the words. It was not very inspiring work, even allowing for the mild thrill I felt when Rasheef came to a term I’d made up: ‘This is the miggy moggy of a man … This is the winny wunny of a woman …’

But it was the thug in Rasheef that properly distressed me. I was in his office with him one afternoon, working on the list, when a subordinate barged in, shoving a boy of about twelve before him. The boy stood cowering, head hanging low, while Rasheef and his underling muttered together. Without warning, Rasheef belted the boy on the side of the head, knocking him across the room. I half came to my feet, but was motioned to sit down. The boy trembled over to Rasheef again, and was again belted. The malice that Rasheef radiated kept me in my seat, my legs gone to jelly. He hit the boy about six times, each blow as heavy as the last. Nobody spoke a word. When the boy was taken away, Rasheef looked at me and made a strange face—he seemed to be imitating a sad clown, mouth turned down. I realised that he was imitating me. He sent me on my way with a pitying look—reminding me to return the next day.

My failure to stand up for the boy who’d been beaten so cruelly made it impossible for me to approach Rasheef when my work visa ran out. Performing a service for him was one thing; asking for his help was more than my stomach could cope with. I decided that I would simply leave Iran. I would make my way to Pakistan, to India, to Ceylon. My old Ceylon plan was still intact: make some money as a journalist, take a boat to Mombasa, another boat to the Seychelles, locate the gentle, bare-breasted women of those islands, relax in the warmth of their love forever. I noticed that I no longer endowed the Seychelles women with anything hectic in the way of libido. It would be enough if they simply cradled my head on their cushiony breasts, whisked away flies, stroked my cheeks with gull feathers. And yet even as I conjured this tender vision, I had ceased to believe in it. Now, I merely yearned for it to exist.

With my suitcase packed and my green suit freshly pressed, I made the rounds of my friends. Randall, thriving now at the hospital, where even the surgeons deferred to him in moments of crisis, listened to my plans with a frown.

‘I was beginning to think you’d got some brains,’ he said. ‘You’ll get slaughtered.’

‘I’ll be fine.’

‘No, kid, you’ll get slaughtered.’

Jo, studying me without much interest from behind the reception desk at the British Council, told me that if I had attempted to leave Shiraz without having repaid her all that I owed her, she would have had me forcibly detained. Since I had repaid her, there seemed little point in the telling.

‘You should go back to Australia and finish school,’ she said.

‘I don’t want to.’

‘Your parents should jolly well have you fetched back! Honestly, children like you running loose in a place such as this!’

I attempted to kiss her on the cheek, but she yelped and punched me. Then her self-righteous anger disappeared. Her shoulders drooped and her eyes went silver with tears. ‘Honestly, Robert. Listen to me. None of us should be here. It’s foolish. It’s not an adventure, it’s simply foolish. One hates to admit it. But there it is and here we are. Go home and be sensible. Please.’ She gave me one of the egg and pickle sandwiches from her lunchbag to take with me.

Houshang, on hearing my news, went straight into sage mode. ‘A journey east or west is taken in one’s own company. Robert in Pakistan remains Robert. We are together with ourselves forever.’

‘Thanks for everything, Houshang.’

‘You should remain here. Perhaps you could make a marriage with Miss Ashadi.’

‘You told me she was going to Tehran to study sea creatures!’

‘Who knows? Indeed, who knows?’

‘I’m not even a Muslim.’

‘Yes, that would be a great difficulty. Besides, her father would punish you severely if you approached her.’

‘Goodbye, then.’

‘Goodbye my dear friend.’