Everybody Loves the Assassins (Cont.)

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Everybody Loves the Assassins (Cont.)


	Kicking back in the Elburz: left to right, Shahram, the author, and Abbas Jafari meadow-camping at 9,000 feet. (Rob Howard)

IN GARMRUD, where the Shahrud pours out of the mountains, we rented some mules and prepared to take a run at the peaks, moving north, over passes that rose to 10,000 feet, before dropping to the Caspian Sea, the world's largest lake, at 92 feet below sea level. We were following, more or less, in the footsteps of Freya Stark.

While Abbas negotiated for mules, the Duck and I spoke with a variety of locals. They'd seen any number of Europeans before, but they'd never met any Americans, a fact that made us momentary celebrities. Did we like Iran? Had we been treated well? We answered in the positive. The men shook our hands and then, in what I found to be a singularly emotive gesture, placed their right hands over their hearts.

The mules, three of them, were loaded, pulled along by two boys, one about 14, the other a few years younger. We set off walking along the Shahrud, through a canyon of towering rock. We were strolling along a dirt road, newly built and as yet unopened. Suddenly a purple Paykan, the Iranian national car, a kind of failed Fiat, sped past. The driver must have skirted the roadblock below. He slammed on his brakes and nearly backed into us. There was a brief, argumentative negotiation with our young mule drivers. The driver of the purple Paykan and the four people with him wanted to rent our mules, which were the last ones available in Garmrud. The driver didn't care what we had paid, he'd double the price. The boys, to their credit, refused.

Abbas turned off the road, and we

The locals had never met any Americans before, a fact that made us momentary celebrities. The men shook our hands and then, in what I found to be a singularly emotive gesture, placed their right hands over their hearts.

began rising into the Elburz at the seriously aerobic and slightly hysterical pace of more than 1,000 vertical feet an hour. We negotiated a number of cruel switchbacks and scree slopes until, about 2,000 feet above Garmrud, we arrived at the village of Pichibon, whose name means "the end of the switchbacks." There were a few adobe homes, and some men in cowboy hats loading mules. It had a kind of American Southwest flavor to it, except that all the women were dressed modestly in approved Islama-wear instead of turquoise and denim. One of them asked us if we had seen her relatives on the trail. It became clear that these were the people in the purple Paykan who had tried to buy the mules out from under us. Shahram said we'd seen them, and they needed mules. Two boys and four mules were dispatched to pick them up.

We camped in an enormous grassy meadow at about 9,000 feet. Spread out on all sides of us was the unexpected splendor of the Elburz Mountains, rising in this neighborhood to more than 12,000 feet. Glaciers glittered on the shoulders of the highest peaks; it was an entire Switzerland of show-offy, snowcapped summits.

Abbas cooked a dinner of rice and canned stew, then tried to pile my plate, and the Duck's, completely full, leaving almost nothing for himself or Shahram. This is a kind of self-abnegating variety of well-mannered courtesy so common in Iran that it has a name: ta'arof. Over the past week, it had become clear that unless we absolutely refused extra food, the Iranians would never eat.

"No," I said to Abbas. I said it three times, until Shahram said, "Don't ta'arof."

"I'm not ta'arofing," I said. "You're ta'arofing."

"Am not," he said, both of us ta'arofing our asses off.

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