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Did that gesture mean he wanted to
slit my throat? Or that Iran was slitting
its own?

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By Mark Mordue

July 23, 1999 | He laughs and says, "Khamenei" in a low voice. Then he makes a slicing motion with his thumb all the way across his throat along with a quick, hacking sound. Then he looks at me.

"I don't think so," I say back to him.

But I hardly understand what I am saying at all, just the sounds of confidence these automatic words somehow conjure, a droll white noise in place of language.

I keep walking and let the door swing shut behind me as we leave the restaurant. Still tingling with the tracheal gesture. Still feeling as if he means me, me who will lose my head in Iran.

Oddly enough, there is no particular menace to the moment.

It all happens so quickly I barely take in the interchange. It almost seems humorous: the bland smile, the smell of baking food, his weary gesturing.

For some time afterwards I still try to take it as a joke. A joke for Westerners fresh to the "madness" of Iran.

Then I wonder again if it is what he wishes. If he wants to see a jihad, "a struggle in the way of God," continued against the infidels now beginning to infiltrate his country as tourists for the first time since the revolution. If he would really like to see my head roll.

My girlfriend and I have sat eating rice with fish, a bowl of salad with a vinegar and yogurt dressing and a plate of mint with two halved onions. It's a typical Iranian meal in a clean, basement-level restaurant in Isfahan, the city of merchants and glass, a place renowned for its crafts and craftiness, its skillful liars.

I talk to the men who work in the restaurant, making self-effacing fun of my guidebook "Farsi" phrases: Where are you from? Hello. Goodbye. I'm sorry I don't speak Persian ("Bebakshid, farsi balad nistam"). One man on his lunch break smiles at me from across the room. The others look on bluntly, staring slowly from the fluorescent, middle-aged weight that seems to color the whole room and drag at the heels of their boots. Moving like men in some invisibly thick soup.

We stand. Go to the cashier. "Chand-e?" I inquire. He holds up a 10,000 rial note. The money changers on Ferdosi Avenue call this "a Khomeini," after the dead Ayatollah whose stern face stares out from it. I leave an extra 1,000 rial tip (about 20 cents). And we start to walk out the door.

That's when the mustachioed, 40-ish man in the washed-out khaki uniform of a cleaner or a dishwasher looks at me and makes his little cutting motion to the throat.

It's not because I'm a lousy tipper.

I'd already heard about this gesture yesterday from a Frenchman who had just visited Tehran. He wasn't clear on the meaning of it either -- if it was a joke or something very nasty indeed.

In Tehran people had done the same thing to him, but they had made a brief whirling motion about their heads as well, to signify the turbans of the mullahs (Islamic clerics), before they too slashed at their throats with their thumbs and laughed.

At first I don't tell my girlfriend about all this symbolic throat-cutting. But eventually I have to mention my goodbye message at the restaurant as we walk off into the silence of the city's 10 p.m. streets. It troubles her, then she says, "Perhaps they mean death to Khamenei?"

Well, do they?

People say there is much unhappiness with the rule of the mullahs in Iran. In the 1998 parliamentary elections for the Assembly of Experts, clerics ensured that the candidates who could run were predominantly conservative. Only 46 percent of the population bothered to vote. It had already been decided behind closed doors by the mullahs. What was the point?

The Assembly selects and appoints Iran's Supreme Leader -- currently Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the similarly named successor to Ayatollah Khomeini -- who controls both the military and the security forces. This is Khomeini's real vision of the world's first Islamic theocracy, an indisputable leader who can interpret God's will with an iron fist wherever and whenever necessary.

President Khatami is an anomaly in this scene, a freak victory in a landslide people's vote that saw 76 percent of the voting population, mostly women and the young, turn out to elect him two years ago. But the conservative mullahs aren't so impressed with a man who studied philosophy in Germany for two years, or with the Western "liberal decadence" he is encouraging.

Khatami lacks real power, yet he has popular support. He balances himself delicately on this edge. As one local told us, "Khatami says such beautiful words. Such beautiful words. But what is really happening in Iran? What is really going on?"

More recent local council elections in March suggest change by stealth. All over the country women and young people managed to get elected, a surprising defeat for the hard-liners. Despite the people's renewed optimism, it remains to be seen whether the executives appointed by the mullahs to supervise these councils will allow them much real freedom.

And so it is that a strange tension underlines Iranian daily life, as if the impetus to open up the country is meeting a firm vice that will only allow it to expand so far. The question seems to be: When will the unstoppable force meet the immovable object?

Next page | The yearnings of the youth