2 - Golpayegan, 1966–1970

Summary

An Olive Branch with a Cardboard Cover

The book I was hiding in my jacket was cloaked in an unassuming light brown dust jacket. It was late fall 1969, I was eighteen, and the anonymous volume tucked in my pocket had just been given to me by Mr Eshraghi and Mr Amjadi, my high school literature teachers in Golpayegan. The young teachers had lent me the book on the strict condition that I refrain from so much as mentioning it or the transaction that brought it to my pocket to anyone. They had approached me in the hallway earlier that day to ask that I join them in the teacher's lounge during our lunch hour. All of our teachers shared the one large room as their office. The space was almost always empty during the long lunch break, as most teachers returned home to have lunch and rest. Although the two Tehran transplants had arrived to Golpayegan only three months earlier, they had quickly made an impression on us students for their refusal to disavow, even in the face of our small-town strictures, their Marxist convictions. In both history and Persian literature classes, they offered what they called a materialist analysis of texts, events, and Iran's political and cultural elite. No other teacher in Golpayegan dared use a term like materialism, except perhaps to characterize an excessive desire for wealth and lack of spirituality. Eager to enter their orbit, and despite my ambivalence about their being from Tehran, I had approached Mr Eshraghi and Mr Amjadi not long before the encounter that brought the book to my jacket to share an unsolicited five-page statement professing my fondness for the leftist Iranian writer Bozorg Alavi and his latest novel, Chasmhayash. Once we had gathered in the lounge, Mr Amjadi and Mr Eshraghi dispensed with all niceties and spared no words in telling me they found Alavi's romantic storytelling puerile and my appreciation for his work misplaced. At the end of this excoriation, however, was an olive branch. Mr Amjadi and Mr Eshraghi asked if I would care to read a short book of their choice, a proposal I immediately accepted. They slipped me a slim, brown-covered book, noting that I needed a proper political education.