Beckett’s Basement and Another Angel - Monday, February 15th

Soon we had arrived at Al’s family home. A well appointed apartment block in a smart Tehran neighbourhood. Once inside I was introduced around his close and extended family. Before I had time to breathe I was engaged in conversion by his ebullient uncle Reza, a civil engineer who had been working in Los Angeles for the last 20 years.

He had an opinion on nearly every subject and was not afraid of expressing himself with a kind of frenzied gusto that meant just watching him articulate thought was a small pleasure in itself.

Ali had heard of a free guesthouse in the city specifically for travellers like me. A few quick searches on the web and we had the telephone number of Reza, the community’s mysterious overseer. His only photo was black and white and of a bald man with a very stern expression, dressed in a black suit. I was sceptical to say the least.

To my surprise he picked up phone and he said I could swing by at all hours. It was exceedingly casual. After taking down the address me and Ali could both enjoy the rest of our evening without worry.

More of the Shiraz in plastic bottles was brought out and poured into wine glasses so large they could have taken an entire litre. Al and I then made our way to the basement where I was greeted to the sight of a 25m pool and an adjoining jacuzzi. It was shared by the building but rarely used after 10pm.

The room was presided over by an enormous glass roof which would have born marvelous star gazing were this not the pollution capital of the middle East. We poured more Shiraz into China teacups (the glasses weren’t allowed to travel) and toasted to a fantastic Valentines day.

The setting for a definitely not homo-erotic Valentines boozy Jacuzzi

Confronted by the obvious homo erotic setting for our our evening drink we naturally spoke about women for the duration. Having had our fill of wine we retired upstairs to a delivery kebab. Al had ordered from the best place in town and each course came freshly vacum sealed.

It was certainly better than anything London had to offer. He advised me to add an egg yolk and a spice called Sumak to the rice. That took it to dimensions I never thought a kebab could be privy to. It’s coming to London with me (sorry Laura).

It turned out that one of Al’s many relatives was heading to his place very near where this halfway house was, so I was offered a lift. Al and I had a very protracted and definitely not gay goodbye hug and I was off to my new diggs for the night.

Al’s relative spoke fluent French as a few of the older generation do around here so we were clucking like a pair of old hens by the time the Peugeot’s engine started. Charles Aznavour blasted through the radio as we raced through Tehran and I once again was mulling over just how surreal my situation was. Little did I know what was in store.

We arrived at a normal enough looking house in the centre of town and I buzzed the doorbell. At this point I had so little primed of my expectations that a mustachioed dwarf dressed in a nappy would not have been a total shock.

Instead, I was greeted by Reza himself, suspiciously more follicled than the picture that had made him look like a dead ringer for Ernst Blofeld. He asked me where I was from then pointed to the basement and then shuffled away upstairs.

The basement was hard to take in at first. A large, open plan room the size of a 5 a side pitch covered and I mean, completely and utterly covered, ceiling et al, in posters with photos of various sites around Iran. Not a single inch of wall had been untouched. The room was lit by two lone, naked, halogen bulbs that dangled lazily from the ceiling. In the middle was a large assortment of tables that looked like they had been salvaged from an artist’s studio. The only person in the room was sat, glued to a laptop and didn’t seem to notice that I was even there.

He was a bearded chap in his late 20s, wearing horn rimmed specs a plad shirt and sporting an artificial hunch so tightly pronounced that he looked like he was trying to hide in himself.

I began to extract some basic information from him, which was hard as he talked in a drole monotone while fixing his gaze at the screen and didn’t seem particularly keen to crane. It turned out that he was called Ali and was essentially the Turkish version of a hipster.

He had been an accountant for an art foundation until he was made redundant at the start of the year and was neck deep, it seemed, in the throes of a total nervous breakdown. It turned out that it was his birthday today and I’ve never seen anyone quite as miserable about the fact. He had just accessed Facebook for the first time in over a month.

“I hate you” he droned, as he flicked through each birthday message. There was so little passion in his voice that even Siri would have probably given him an earful for being such a bore.
“I hate you….I hate you.” The messages went on and on while I stood silently and began looking for the exit upstairs.
Then there was a deep, lengthy pause. Surely he was done?

“I hate all of you.” The words rolled coarsely out of the back of his throat.

As this was going on I couldn’t help but feel that someone had dropped me into one of Samuel Beckett’s lesser known theatrical indulgences.

“What did you do for your birthday Ali? Have you been in the basement all day?”
“There was a German girl. She came. But she’s gone now.”

As the scene was reaching a peak weirdness, a Dutch bloke called David walked on set. A new arrival, phew. To his credit David was quite sane. Although, as far as I could tell, his occupation for the last four years had been organising a festival that was meant to have 7 million attendees over 21 days… That no one had ever heard of.

“It’s going to happen organically” he exclaimed. I didn’t want to tell him how to do his job but getting that many people together over 21 days may require more than just telling people that it’s going to happen. Anyway. I’ve never organised a festival so who am I to point fingers.

So as to quietly make the point I asked him what the biggest single music gathering in history was. Apprarenty the crown went to Rod Stewart’s famous Red Square concert. 3 million unfortunate Russians actually turned up to hear him sing. “He appears three times in the top ten ” said David.
“Well, you might just about have a chance then.”

The dorm already had occupants so we had to use torchlight to navigate. Inside it was low ceilinged, narrow, with barely room to walk between the wooden beds. As David and I shuffled along, the room narrowed and the air became heavier, and ever so slighly feted. Finally we reached the end after passing several rows of snoring heaps, dodging laundry lines and the occasional spiders web.

The beds weren’t really beds but resembled open coffins, except of course, that coffins have padding. This had a pillow that felt like it was filled with bars of soap and a sheet in place mattress which really worked wonders at softening the wood. David and I were so close that we could practically feel each others breath. To make matters worse a plague of mosquitoes had really taken to the climate, and the pillow had something crawling on it when I put my head down.

As the great Billy Butress once said, you pays your money and takes your choice. So, if something is free, it’s usually for good reason. It has to rank as one of the worst nights of sleep I’ve ever had.

I packed as soon as I was up the next day. The only person awake was the missing piece of the Beckettian puzzle. A rotund and exceptionally pale German girl sat frantically scrawling on a pad of paper, alone, illuminated by the same swinging, naked halogen bulb. She had a mystery injury that prevented her from walking (where the hell was she last night?!) And didn’t look up from her scribbling while feeding me scraps of information on her situation.

I was so desperate to leave Beckett’s Basement that I didn’t shower. I needed natural light and sanity.

I hit Tehran with only three goals for the day. 1. Get my phone to work. 2. See the grand bazaar 3. Get out of Tehran.

The first phone shop I went to was staffed by two charming girls who attempted to deal with Irancel for me while I sat and waited. An old chap with a giant grey handlebar tache sat mute next to me. I turned around and as if by magic, he was grinning and holding a cup of tea for me. For the life of me I never found out where he got it from as there was no tea making kit anywhere in that room.

The girls couldn’t fix my phone and I left smiling, full of sugary tea and many fake Oreos.

Thankfully, en route to the Bazaar, I met a gentleman man called Reza on the metro platform who helped me nail the first two of my day’s goals.

As a brief aside, you may have noticed that a lot of people in Iran are called Reza. The simple answer to that is that most men were called Reza before the revolution, named after the first Shah. Almost no one under the age of 35 here bears the name.

Reza was around the same age as Nima had spent most of his life in Boston. He had qualified as an engineer from MIT, so to say he was bright was an understatement. It’s such a testament to the intellectual prowess of this country that so many of its citizens have achieved degrees from Ivy League schools. Domestically alone, Iran is the second highest producer of trained engineers on earth. Quite a feat.

I told Reza that I needed to get my phone working and he promised that he would not leave my side until this was done. But first he would treat the to lunch at one of the bazaar’s most celebrated haunts. The name of this restaurant was literally translated as ‘The old Islamic Scholar’. Another hint at their nation’s obsession with education.

Reza, like everyone else I had met felt a personal responsibility for me and even paid for the meal. True to his word he gave several hours of his time away to make sure that I had a working phone. All the while he educated me on Iran’s culture, traditions and peculiarities.

It was another of the many emotional goodbyes I’d had on the trip. It was so hard to articulate just how grateful I was for all of the many kindnesses I had received. It really was overwhelming at times.

After more bazaaring I nipped in a taxi back to the dreaded basement. Truth be told, Tehran itself is without much in the way of charm as a city. There are a few sites and museums of note but it should be a place you pass through, not a place to camp down. The experience of being in it is exhausting in itself and I looked forward to escape that evening.

The plan was to make my way south to Esfahan, a more relaxed and better historied city then Tehran. On my way there I would stop in a small oasis city called Kashan, three hours bus south of the city.

Back in the basement I met a six foot, eight inch tall Lithuanian with a large earring called Roka. He had a skittish disposition that he assured me was due to two days withput sleep. Having not had a good night of sleep since Thursday I could empathise.

It turns out that he had arrived from the airport at 5am and had spent the day with Ali, which I think accounted for the majority of his eccentric behaviour. Upon hearing my plan to leave right then and there for the South, he asked if he could join.

So I left Tehran with a new, giant travelling companion. The Vladimir to my Estrsgon. I only hoped that Iran had a coach that was big enough to fit him.