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In Tehran (Oct. 14th)

In Tehran (Oct. 14th)

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My first full day in Tehran I spent at the offices of the Iranian National Observatory … Project. Project, because the observatory does not exist yet. The building itself has just been constructed, and people have moved there only a few weeks ago; arriving at the front door I was greeting by a paint-stained astronomer, and I almost half expected to be asked to help out with the building work. The building is even further north than the guest house, in a hilly wooded area at the end of a long dirt track. The building grounds were taken from the Shah after the revolution, like so much of the land now belonging to the IPM (The institute for physics and mathematics).

But … Tehran? Although the area around the guest house is filled with expensive and modern apartment blocks, the dramatic backdrop of dry desert mountains and the black-clad women crossing the street made it clear to me, leaving the IPM that morning, that this was not a European city. I admit that I was perhaps just a little apprehensive when I was first invited to a workshop in Iran, almost three years ago; that trip never happened because of Ahmadinejad’s election and a subsequent mass resignation of University staff. With the exception of the traffic, however, Iran seemed to me one of the most unthreatening places I have ever visited. But what did people really think?

We had lunch at large table in the INO gardens. I ate a delicious kebab with rice (which I would soon become very familiar with) and a very interesting yoghurt drink. We admired the large blackboard extending all along the outside wall of the building, perfect for those long difficult equations but perhaps less useful for an observational astronomer. Perhaps a clear giveaway that the institute’s director is a theoretical cosmologist.

Everyone was talking about Ahmadinejad’s television appearance the previous evening. In fact, his face was the first I saw on an Iranian television set: arriving late at night at the IPM guest house I found the guards at the gate house intently watching the presidential broadcast. At the lunch table, although I don’t speak Farsi, it was clear from the tone of the conversation that Ahmadinejad’s pronouncements were not taken very seriously. They also told me that there was a certain apprehension each time one of these television appearance was scheduled — who knows what ridiculous pronouncement would be made which would damage even further Iran’s standing in the outside world?

I thought of Viktor Strum, nuclear physicist living in totalitarian Russia in Vassily Grossman’s epic ‘Life and Fate’ which I had just finished reading, and I even went so far to tell a little of his story to those at the dinner table. Thankfully however the parallels with that epoch and today in Iran are slender. “We can say anything we want here” affirmed one of the physicists at the dinner table, “it’s just not so certain anyone will pay any attention to us.”

Lunch was over, and returned to my computer to continue preparing the course which I would have to give in a few days.

Arriving in Tehran – in the taxi!

Arriving in Tehran – in the taxi!

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The cavernous Imam Khomeini airport seemed almost deserted. I disembarked from the plane, retrieved my bag and passed through customs control without incident. But I had a lingering doubt in my mind — would there be someone to meet me at the airport? I had been told by the astronomer who had invited me that there would, but the secretary who booked my flight never mentioned this to me. There would be someone there, right? I had no map; “Google maps” for Tehran shows the intricate, sprawling mess of Tehrani streets as a single crossroads. No data.

In the end I need not have worried. As soon I left the baggage area I was met by a smiling pot-bellied man holding up a big card with ‘Dr. McCracken’ written on it in 40-point type. This was my driver to the institute. Hello welcome! Where are you from? Well, I am from Ireland, but I live in Paris. Ireland! I worked in England for two months, in London, with my brother. (We were walking down the echoing empty halls of IKA. We took the lift. My driver talking into his mobile phone. He passes me his mobile phone.) Here is my brother, Amir, he says, I speak to the voice on the telephone: Hello! How are you? Are you in London? No, I am in Tehran. We can meet! My brother will give you my number, he says. Nice to speak to you, I reply. Thank you! I hand back the mobile phone. These people like to speak — and to speak to foreigners!

In the taxi, we rolled through a maze of empty roads and autoroutes in the middle of what as far as I could tell was open desert. Through the window, I saw a lone planet and the moon’s pale disk low on the horizon following our taxi faithfully towards the city. It was around ten o’clock in the evening.

By ten thirty, soon after I had seen the first few buildings of Tehran, we had stopped: gridlock. Our taxi idled in heavy fumes of very incompletely combusted petroleum products, and I reluctantly rolled up my window, because the night air was pleasantly warm. I was beginning to get an inkling of Tehrani traffic. Beyond the cars I could see a maze of buildings most of which seemed to have been built in the last fifty years or so, but even so there was still that wonderful feeling of strangeness that always comes after an aeroplane flight to a country you have never been to before. In only five hours, everything changes.

After another half an hour or so, a gleaming, glittering tower appeared on the horizon. From a disk near the gracefully tapering peak needles of light shone and flickered. Was this the Iranian Tour Eiffel? My taxi driver became more and more exited. Very nice, very nice, beautiful, he muttered to himself repeatedly under his breath, all the while craning his neck to see the tower, like an excited child approaching the north pole just before Christmas. There is a very big party there tonight, he told me. Tonight is opening night. Then I realised we were actually driving right towards the tower. We passed the security barrier, drove to the foot of this immense luminous tower. Here is my brother! my driver exclaimed. I shook hands with small man in a dark suit. Hello! I said, Nice to meet you. I won’t take up your time, he told me. Welcome. If you need to contact me, here is my card. Have you eaten? He will take you to a restaurant. I thanked him, but I wanted to see my bed before my dinner. And we left the tower, and in an another half an hour I had arrived at the IPM.

Arriving in Tehran – In the aeroplane

Arriving in Tehran – In the aeroplane

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I’m now a good five thousand kilometers to the east of Paris, in the Iranian capital city, Tehran. Tehran! I am here to teach at a school in observational astronomy. The Iranians have ambitions to build a three-metre class telescope, but almost no-one here has any experience with real data; most astronomy in either the hard-maths variety of theoretical cosmology or observations of nearby stars using detectors at least a generation out of date. So a change of culture is needed, really; modern observational astronomy with modern detectors and modern data reduction software. And no matter there is no telescopes just yet: there are gigabytes of data freely available over the internet — the only problem is downloading it. Despite the fact that the IPM (Insitute for Physics and Mathematics, where the school is being held) has amongst the fastest network connection in the country, we struggle get above a few hundred kb/second. But then I am used to my office in Paris not far from the centre of Renater, the French networking agency, so I am a bit spoiled. I will be spending almost two weeks in Tehran before flying to Shiraz for a few days.

So that is why I am here, but I didn’t talk about how I got here — at the very comfortable IPM guest house, from where I am writing these words. Well — by aeroplane of course. Iran Air run a direct flight from Paris Orly to Tehran twice a week. I thought for about two seconds about Nicolas Bouvier and his trip to Tehran from Geneva in his Fiat Tupelino — but i wanted to arrive this year at least, and I had sadly sold my opel ascona many years ago.

The aircraft cabin seemed modern at first: the plane’s age was revealed by an ancient in-flight entertainment system. I was reassured by the presence of it seemed at least half a dozen airline pilots in the seats in front of me. I felt strangely relieved that there was no useless in-flight magazine that I would waste my time idly flipping through. I watched attentively (at first) the in-flight film, in Farsi with English subtitles, but as the flight wore on it became harder and harder to follow. (After the extremely tedious ‘man from London’ by Bela Tarr which I subjected Marie-Laure to last weekend I felt I could sit through anything). It seemed to be the story of a young girl, a psychology student, who works with old people and who becomes intrigued by the painting of a veiled woman who may or may not be connected with one of her patients. The film shows many broad tree-lined boulevards, elegant buildings and also features a lot of driving (something normal in Tehran — as I am sure I will describe in the next few days). Noticing the odd colour cast of the film (surely a feature of the in-flight entertainment system), the cars that most people seemed to be driving and all the chunky cream-coloured plastic telephones everyone used, I was convinced that the ‘action’ of the film took place sometime in the 1970s — until an e-mail address was exchanged, and I realized that we were really some time in the last decade or so. But — as I said — my attention wandered. This I realised was partly because of the English translations (and partly because of the extremely wooden acting), which seemed to be almost transliterations more than translations. Given the very different word order in Farsi, almost everyone spoke like they were reciting lines of poems, with the subject buried at the end of each sentence. But very soon after we arrived in Tehran, at the Imam Khomeini Airport.

Descending beneath Paris: second part, at minus 25

Descending beneath Paris: second part, at minus 25

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The first impressions deep underground are always the same: it’s damp, cold and dark. Wellington boots are an essential element of clothing. The tunnels are very close to the level of the water table, and flooding is frequent. In certain tunnels the water level can easily reach waist level, although thankfully we avoided those. The water is a silty white colour, full of limestone dust.

But passing through the hole, further into the tunnel, you should pause and look around: the surface of the walls are smooth and well-preserved. Here, we were at almost the southern limit of this particular segment of the network, and we would have several kilometers to march before we got to where we wanted to be — near Denfert Rochereau, underneath my house, near the Observatory.

The underground passageways for the most part follow faithfully the above-ground streets, as a consequence of an arcane part of French law: anyone who owns a bit of land on the surface also owns what is below. So no boring tunnels under other people’s houses: the tunnels would have to be where the streets already were. At times, this leads to some strange effects, as the tunnels in places were constructed hundreds of years ago and were given the names of above-ground streets which no longer exist, or which do exist but which changed their names.

We followed one such street, the Avenue D’Orlean, which is now the Avenue du General le Clerc at street level. Walking down the narrow tunnel of course I kept my eyes to the ground but my friend leading us was inspecting carefully every inch of tunnel and ceiling. He showed me an inscription on the wall, some ancient graffiti — someone had scrawled “la republique ou la mort” — ancient revolutionary graffiti dating back a century or two. Above ground, everything changes, but down here at minus twenty five metres below, all is frozen preserved, perhaps like astronaut footsteps on the surface of the moon.

republiqueoulamort.jpeg

We made a tour of a few of the more well known sites in the 14th — old rooms packed to the ceiling with ancient human bones, student wall murals dating back a few decades, plaques proudly announcing to a public that hasn’t been down here for a century or more the names of the engineers who built the walls and tunnels and pillars absolutely essential to keep the new Paris metro disappearing into a large hole. For almost any construction work to be carried out in Paris one of the first things one must do is find out just what is exactly beneath your feet, and build down there, too.

We emerged into the fading evening light after spending around eight hours underground. It is always strange be once more in a world with light and colour where there are trees which move in soft summer breezes and one can hear the distant sounds of the city, birds singing, people talking, cars in the street. All so different from the silent, dark, frozen parallel Paris which we left behind but which remains very close…