The elephant had been clinging to a rope for months, swinging from the rafters of a disused factory outside the Iranian capital, waiting for an audience to turn up.
He was made of fibreglass, not flesh, part of a surrealist art exhibition that was supposed to open in June. Then Israeli warplanes struck, marking the start of a blistering 12-day war that also drew in the United States. The show was postponed and the artists, unable to return home, were stranded at the gallery.
Every night they pulled chairs into the courtyard to watch “the fireworks”, as the gallery owner, Houman Dayhimi, tartly put it – missiles streaking across the sky, the dark glow of explosions with a terrifying orchestra of booms and thuds. Reality took on the air of the art show.
“It was surreal,” Dayhimi said.
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Like many Iranians, Dayhimi was used to bending to the vagaries of geopolitics. A decade earlier, his gallery space, the Dayhim Art Society, was a sprawling furniture plant with 700 employees. Then US sanctions forced it into bankruptcy, so he filled its workshops with artworks and the offices of tech start-ups.
Even so, this latest flash of hostilities with the United States and Israel, at a time when Iran’s regional influence was crumbling, appeared to signal a volatile new path.
“We know that change is coming, but we don’t know what or how,” Dayhimi said. “And that’s what makes it worse. It’s so unpredictable.”
Nearly half a century after Iran’s revolution, people are accustomed to navigating the fraught space between the dictates of their government, pressure from foreign powers, and their own identities and desires.
Signs in upmarket restaurants order women to wear the hijab, yet are roundly ignored by young diners with flowing hair. The internet is censored, so people use VPNs to scroll through Instagram and TikTok. US sanctions make for a thriving black market.
Religion was strangely muted. Over eight days in July, I hardly saw a cleric on the streets, and rarely heard the three-times daily call to prayer, even though Iran is a theocratic republic.
[ Iran’s leaders turn to a new brand of nationalism after Israeli and US attacksOpens in new window ]
Certainly, there was plenty that conformed to Iran as advertised. Many women covered their hair. Black-clad police officers patrolled on dirt bikes. Giant murals depicted official heroes – stern-faced clerics, slain generals and nuclear scientists – and designated villains. “Down with the USA” read the slogan across an American flag dropping cartoon bombs.
But there were also, just a few streets away, splashes of beauty or history on walls covered in images of flowers or ancient Persian warriors. And while “Death to America” rang out at Friday prayer, some Iranians confided that they didn’t agree, even since the cartoon American bombs became jarringly real.
During our trip, the city had a wounded air, its sangfroid shaken by a war that few had anticipated, or wanted. Residents said they felt rattled, and worried about what might come next.
A diplomatic ghost ship of sorts was moored on Taleghani Street in the form of a long, two-storey building. Once it was the epicentre of hostilities between Iran and the United States. Now it is a museum.
The sign over the front door still reads “United States of America embassy” complete with a crest of a soaring eagle. But the lobby is dominated by images of skulls and crossbones and a ghoulish Statue of Liberty. Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, stared from a poster in the corner, a faint smile playing on his lips.
The hostage crisis of 1979, when Iranian students stormed the US embassy and held 52 Americans for 444 days, was the foundational trauma between Iran’s rulers and the United States. It set the stage for decades of smouldering hostility during which the Americans cut off diplomatic ties and the Iranians sought to write their own version of that history in the halls of the deserted embassy, now officially known as the “US Den of Espionage Museum”.
After buying my ticket for $1.40 (the prevailing price for foreigners), I entered via the Roosevelt gate, as it was once known. A path led through an overgrown garden, where street cats lounged under the pine trees. Charred helicopter parts were stacked on a plinth, wreckage from a failed rescue mission when US military aircraft collided during a sandstorm in 1980, killing eight American service members. “The sands in the desert were God’s agents,” read an inscription.
Upstairs, the ambassador’s office had been carefully preserved – leather chairs, a handsome desk and immaculate American flag. (Iranian factories produce thousands of US flags every year, mostly to be burned at street demonstrations.) A portrait of a smiling former president Jimmy Carter hung from a wall.
“Carter paid the price,” remarked our guide, Amir, a 21-year-old military conscript, referring to the role of the crisis in Carter’s failed re-election bid in 1980. Like many in a country where self-censorship is common, he requested we use just his first name.
At the end of the hall, beyond a steel door, lay the main focus of the museum: the CIA station. In 1953, the CIA backed a coup that ousted an elected Iranian prime minister and installed Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, an intervention that stoked intense Iranian suspicion of US motives in 1979. Now, an array of vintage American spy gear was on proud display. There were compartmented rooms, machines to encode and decode messages, satellite transmitters, eavesdropping equipment, industrial shredders and devices that, according to the exhibit label, were used to forge passports and licence plates.
Waxwork figures sat beside a mound of shredded paper, in a depiction of the painstaking, years-long effort by Iranian students to reassemble shredded US documents found inside the embassy, later published in several books.
The Iranians liked to call the American hostages “guests of the ayatollah”, and exhibits in the museum stressed they had been treated fairly. In the embassy hallway, a line of portraits offered descriptions of each hostage, including details of their post-crisis careers and lives, some written in an almost fond tone. In fact, many hostages later complained of psychological abuse and physical mistreatment during their ordeal.
The message of the museum is clear: Americans were only interested in meddling in Iran, not helping it.
Still, it has a limited audience. The museum welcomes about 5,000 people every year, mostly tourists from Russia and China, Amir said. Even that flow had dried up since the war in June. During our tour, there was only one other visitor.
On the way out, a museum manager presented me with some merch: A plaque commemorating Gen Qassem Soleimani, the Iranian commander killed in a US drone strike in Iraq in 2020. Then I took at a break at the Boof Cafe, a smart little coffee house that recently opened on the embassy grounds.
Photos of Charlie Chaplin and Marlon Brando adorned the walls. The owner, a soft-spoken man in his 60s, offered a warm smile but was wary of talking politics. “That’s up to the politicians, not ordinary people like me,” he said of the tensions between Iran and the United States.
He pushed my order – an iced Americano – across the table. It was delicious.
Beyond the old embassy, hints of American culture were on open display. Songs by Pixies, the Boston rock band, played in a Starbucks-style coffee shop. A vintage Lincoln Continental was parked in the lobby of my hotel. Young men clustered in darkened gaming cafes to play Grand Theft Auto.
If the museum was the past, most people were preoccupied by the present, in particular the daily struggle to survive, and how it had got worse since relations with the US took a sudden dive.
Siyavash Naeini cursed as he manoeuvred his modest taxi through the city’s infamous traffic. Snapp!, the ride-hailing app that is Iran’s version of Uber, was barely functioning, he grumbled.
The authorities were jamming GPS signals in the city to make it harder for Israeli or US warplanes to locate potential targets. But that also made it near-impossible for customers to hail his cab. Since June, his business was down 70 per cent.
Naeini, 59, couldn’t afford to stop. He had been diagnosed with cancer – “terminal,” he said matter-of-factly – and needed the money to pay for the drugs that kept him alive. “Since I started chemotherapy, I can’t feel the pedals very well,” he said, idling at a stop light.
He got the drugs at subsidised prices from a government-run pharmacy, he said. But sometimes supplies ran out, forcing him on to the black market, where prices were 10 times higher. It was cleaning him out. “My wife sold her jewellery,” he said. “I sold our rugs.”
As we pulled up to our destination, I offered my sympathies. Naeini brushed it off. He didn’t want pity, he said. It was just the struggle of life.
Then he drove away, scouring the streets for his next customer.
We were standing near the British embassy, where a sign read “Babbi Sandz Street”. The street was named for Bobby Sands, a member of the IRA who in 1981 died on hunger strike in prison in Northern Ireland. In Iran, Sands has joined the pantheon of martyrs.
The enthusiasm for Bobby Sands has taken some unorthodox forms. Just before midnight I stopped for dinner at Bobby Sands Burgers, a fast-food restaurant on a hilly street in northern Tehran
Lionising martyrs has become a key part of Iran’s political culture. As well as ordaining enemies, such as the United States, the authorities anoint national heroes said to share the values of the Iranian revolution. It can also be a way of irking rivals. The British embassy had to move its entrance to an adjacent street to avoid having its address named after the hunger striker.
Until recently, Egypt’s embassy in Tehran was on a street named after Khalid al-Islambuli, the extremist who assassinated Egyptian president Anwar Sadat in 1981. In a sign of warming relations between Iran and Egypt, the name was changed in June.
The enthusiasm for Sands has taken some unorthodox forms. Just before midnight I stopped for dinner at Bobby Sands Burgers, a fast-food restaurant on a hilly street in northern Tehran. A line of diners stretched down the street, waiting to order burgers and fries over a counter that was decorated with neon images of the hunger striker.
“Bobby Sands stood for freedom and liberation,” the manager, Kia Garabandi, told me. “Iranians can relate to that.”
With so much turbulence around, others preferred to focus on the future instead of history, hoping it might bring a kind of deliverance.
At a memorial for the head of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard, who was killed in an Israeli strike, a mourner told me he welcomed the war. He said it would bring forward the moment when a religious saviour known as the Mahdi would return to earth, turning everyone into Muslims.
“Even you,” he said, jutting a finger in my chest.
Others are not holding their breath for any saviour to appear.
In downtown Tehran, students crowded into an artsy gathering spot called the Cafe Godot, named after the Samuel Beckett play. “It’s an existential tragicomedy,” remarked the cafe owner, Homayoun Ghanizadeh, a well-known movie and theatre director. “Iranians can relate to that.
“Just like in the play, every day a messenger comes and says: Godot won’t come tonight, but he will surely come tomorrow night. And the next day, it all starts over again.”
“In my view, the Islamic Republic is also in a state of waiting,” he said. “Although their Godot is quite different from the one ordinary people are waiting for.”
This article originally appeared in the New York Times
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