their heads in thanks. The birds rested for a few hours, then flew off. And the women, who spent the whole day, the whole month, the whole year, the whole of their lives in the village, weaving rugs, the women who never got a chance to leave Saffron Mountain, wove those birds into the patterns of the carpets.
Another motif that made its way into their carpets was the cuneiform script.
The illiterate women of Saffron Village used the secret language of the cave’s relief to weave their hopes and longings into their carpets.
Sometimes the carpets depicted a foreigner in a hat riding to the cave on a mule and holding a sheet of paper filled with cuneiform.
At the end of the 1930s the women suddenly began weaving a completely new pattern into their carpets—a train. A train trailing smoke as it snaked its way up Saffron Mountain.
Nowadays the carpets show a bomber flying over the village, dropping its deadly cargo.
Though the women didn’t realise it, the train and its trail of smoke symbolised a shift in power. In those days Reza Khan, the father of the last shah of Iran, had the country firmly in his grip. There was a centralised dictatorship. Reza Khan was a simple private who had worked his way up to general. What he lacked in education, he made up for in ambition.
In 1921 he staged a coup. Announcing that the Qajar dynasty had come to an end, he declared himself the new king of Persia. From then on, it was to be known as the Pahlavi kingdom.
Reza Shah wanted to weave the country into a new pattern. He wanted to transform the archaic kingdom of Persia into a modern nation orientated towards the West. That meant new businesses, modern schools, printing presses, theatres, steel bridges, roads, buses and taxis, not to mention radios and radio stations that would broadcast, for the first time in Persian history, the magical voice of a singer:
Yawash, yawash, yawash, yawash
amadam dar khane-tan.
Yek shakh-e gol dar dastam
sar-e rahat benshastam.
Be khoda’ yadat narawad az nazram.
Softly, softly, ever so softly,
I walked past your house and
Sat on the roadside with a flower
In my hand as you passed by.
God knows I shall never forget you.
Reza Shah wanted more. He wanted to change women’s lives overnight. From one day to the next, women were forbidden to wear chadors. Whenever they went out, they were expected to wear hats and coats instead.
He wanted everything to happen quickly, which is why he governed the country with an iron hand and stifled all opposition. On his orders, the poet Farokhi had his lips sewn shut because he’d recited a poem about women who stumbled and couldn’t walk without their chadors. During Reza Shah’s reign, many writers, intellectuals and political leaders were thrown in jail or murdered, and others simply disappeared.
According to the opposition, Reza Shah was a lackey of the British Embassy in Tehran and had been ordered to modernise the country for the benefit of the West. In the eyes of the imperialists, he was merely a soldier, a pawn to be used in the struggle against the Soviet Union.
Whether or not he was a British puppet, one thing is certain: he wanted things to change. In his own way, he was determined to radically reform the country, but he was a soldier, a brute. Everyone was terrified of him.
Reza Shah hoped that his most important projects would be finished before his son succeeded him.
The train was one of his pet projects.
During the twenty-five hundred years in which various kings, sultans and emirs had ruled the Persian Empire, no government official had ever come to the mountains to take a census of the inhabitants. Now that Reza Khan was shah, however, he wanted his subjects to carry identity cards.
Throughout the ages the imams had controlled the mountains and the countryside. Now the populace had to contend with a gendarme, a man in a military cap emblazoned with one of Reza Shah’s slogans, a man who answered to no one but His Majesty.
Reza Shah needed an army that obeyed him unquestioningly. And that army needed soldiers whose names and dates of birth were listed on identity cards. So, for the first time in history, the exact number of boys in Saffron Village was recorded. The vital statistics were entered in a book, which the gendarme kept in his cupboard.
Thanks to Reza Shah, Aga Akbar also was issued with an identity card. At last, his full name was officially on record.
• • •
To realise his great dream, Reza Shah ordered that a railway be built from the southernmost part of the country to its northeastern border. Right up to the ear of the giant Russian bear, to be exact. He knew that the Europeans had the most to gain from this route, but he also knew that the rails would be left behind long after those Europeans were gone.
The railway tracks crept through the desert, over the rivers, up the mountains, down the valleys and through the towns and villages until they finally reached Saffron Mountain.
The iron monster started to climb the mountain, but was forced to stop halfway, when it came to the historic cave with the cuneiform inscription. The building of the railway had disturbed the cave’s eternal rest. More importantly, the engineers were afraid that if they blasted through the rock with dynamite, the cave would collapse.
The cuneiform inscription, their ancient cultural heirloom, was in danger. The engineers feared it would crack. They panicked. The chief engineer didn’t know what to do. He didn’t dare take a single risk. He knew the shah would have him beheaded if anything went wrong.
With trembling hands, he sent a telegram to the capital: CANNOT PROCEED WITH RAILS. CUNEIFORM BLOCKING ROUTE.
The shah read the telegram, hopped into his jeep and had himself driven to Saffron Mountain. After a long night’s drive, the jeep stopped at the foot of the mountain. The local gendarme offered the shah a mule, but he refused. He wanted to climb the mountain himself. Early in the morning, before the sun had struck the mountain peak, Reza Shah stood at the entrance to the cave. Wearing a military tunic and carrying a field marshal’s baton under his arm, he checked on the progress of his dream.
• • •
“What’s the problem?” he asked.
“Your Majesty—” the chief engineer began, trembling. He didn’t dare go any further.
“Explain it to me!”
“Th-th-th-the rails have to go past here. I’m afraid that … that … that …”
“Yes?”
“I-I-I would like Your Majesty’s permission to … to … to relocate the cuneiform relief.”
“Relocate it? Shut up, you stupid engineer! Find another solution!”
“We’ve done all the cal-cal-cal-culations, checked out all the options. No matter how we do it, the dynamite could destroy the cave.”
“Find another route!”
“We’ve explored every alternative. This is the best route. The others are virtually impossible. We could make a huge detour, but …”
“But what?”
“It’ll take longer.”
“How much longer?”
“A number of months, Your Majesty. Six or seven months.”
“We haven’t got that much time. We can’t lose a day. Or even an hour. As for you—get out of my sight, you idiot! ‘Impossible’— is that the only word you engineers know? Six or seven months?