by M.G. Warenycia
I had finished a late day of lectures for a pair of summer courses I was teaching—this would have been the summer of 2004. I had skipped lunch. Something in the combination of the sweltering July evening and the residues left by the daily news directed that hunger towards the cuisine of climates that the weather, the languidly streaming crowds of pedestrians, and the slow-descending crimson sun suggested. A colleague of mine, Professor Weisbrot, had been singing the praises of a Persian restaurant on College Street west of Spadina Circle that had opened a couple years earlier but was only then becoming popular. Professor Weisbrot – Helen – is something of a ‘foodie’ and had dragged two thirds of the department to this joint over the course of a semester. A busy schedule and a plethora of habitual dining spots help me from joining in the foodie team’s adventures, but now I found myself on College west of Spadina, so, hey, why not?
It was easy enough to find ‘Bademjan’; the sign with swooping gilded script on a background of purple and blue mosaic tiles would have given it away even if the sign had no English on it. Customers were few on a Thursday afternoon and the staff moved at a glacial pace. I was left with a pot of tea to await my meal and with no smartphones back in those days, I contemplated my surroundings. I wondered if the knowledge that people will spend most of their time looking at their phones is partly behind the identically bleak, dental-surgery décor that practically every restaurant that’s opened since 2008 is afflicted with. In contrast, the Bademjan was a veritable Where’s Waldo feast for the eyes. The walls were trimmed with carved wood panelling and festooned with a cornucopia of photographs, tapestries, paintings and souvenirs. More impressive still, a section of the dining area was built into a raised platform where guests could sit on hand-woven carpets (I can tell) at a low table in the traditional fashion.
Unfortunately, the carpet table was only for parties of four or more, but I already loved the place nonetheless. I was one of the many thousands of Westerners who travelled along the so-called Hippie Trail, back when it was safe to do so. Before the fun came to an end with astonishing abruptness in 1979, you could travel, as a university-educated Western tourist, all the way from Istanbul to Kathmandu. Some went seeking enlightenment at the feet of shaggy gurus, some to smuggle drugs (eh, the stuff you could get through an airport back then!), most to take them, and some for sheer adventure. In my case, it was assignments for the U of T or National Geographic. Either way, the experience left a deep imprint on those who grew up in white-bread suburbs of the modern industrial West—remember, we didn’t have the internet back then, or so many TV stations—suddenly finding themselves in a world where there might be no electricity, no television, no telephone to call home, no 911 if you ran into an emergency, no supermarkets; where people still lived according to the soil and water and immemorial traditions…things that were no more than academic concepts to us adventurers. I say adventurers, but you were in a hell of a lot less danger lodging with Pathan tribesmen than you were, in that era, hitchhiking through our own Pacific Northwest—all the serial killers they had back then, yeesh!
After nearly half an hour, the ash e doogh and albalu polow made their appearance, brought to my table not by the waiter but by a plump, middle-aged man with a walrus moustache whom I knew from Helen’s descriptions and the Toronto Life Restaurant of the Month article framed beside the table was Rostum Esfandiari, the owner. I gave him perfunctory congratulations, “my friends love eating here” and so on. He smiled sleepily, stopping on his way back to the kitchen to twist and angle his head, staring at something—probably at me, from how he scurried away when I returned his gaze.
The meal was decent, sure enough, but the décor overpowered the experience of the food. It’s not that Mr. Esfandiari had too many rugs. I thanked God at least one restaurateur hadn’t gone the IKEA route. No; it was one particular item among the whole garish ensemble that caught my eye and wouldn’t let it go. It was a coin, set on green velvet in a glass case. There were many artefacts from what Rostum and his ilk universally regarded as the ‘good old days,’ when the benevolent monarch whose visage watched, stern-eyed, over Bademjan’s diners yet looked down upon their homeland, ruling with wisdom, tolerance and peerless aesthetic sense. The coin was much, much older than the Shah of Shahs…or at least appeared to be. Shifting my chair to get closer, I studied it with —not to boast—the full battery of knowledge accumulated from perusing countless museum collections and personally participating in as many excavations. Contrary to the common-sense assumption, the more scrutiny I gave it, the more faith its appearance inspired. I had half a mind to casually make an offer in my capacity as an expert in such subjects, trying as much as possible not to let on that there was anything strange in a stranger offering to buy a random bit of somebody’s restaurant’s decoration. There was nothing strange or irrational in my excitement—not to anyone who could recognize a tetradrachma of the time of Alexander the Great. Rudely stamped into an irregular blob of silver (I was sure it was real silver) was the image of Herakles, a.k.a. Hercules, right profile, with a beak-like nose and a lion’s pelt over this shoulders. No date was indicated—there should be no date on an authentic drachma of the period. There were a couple nicks and tiny gouges, especially on the circular ridge where the edge of the stamping die would have struck and on the largest areas of plain surface. Yes, a forger can replicate wear marks like that, and, if he’s faking such an old coin and he has half a brain, he will. These marks,, though, were grimed with tarnish at the same rate as the rest of the coin, and the slight softening of some of the more prominent details of the portrait argued for natural processes of erosion. Then again, it could have been struck from poorly engraved dies and, anyhow, it wasn’t like interest in Alexander sprung up yesterday. Two hundred years ago, when Neo-Classicism was the rage, some enterprising innkeeper might have recognized that there was profit to be made in having dug up a few coins or other knickknacks connected with the Macedonian general and hawking them to European dandies taking a side trip along the Grand Tour. It was possible, but, who knows? I quickly discarded the thought of trying to bargain with the coin’s owner. He seemed like such a gentle, genial guy, it would have been wrong to take advantage of his ignorance like that. Besides, he was a friend of a friend. Still, if I left without getting a definitive answer…
“You are enjoying your meal?”
“Huh?” I turned my head (which was almost pressed against the wall) and saw Esfandiari right there, his dozy eyes managing to lift a brow in surprise. I had to mention it now…
“You are a professor, at the University?”
“Oh, uh, yes, I am. How did you…?”
“I remember your picture, maybe from television, maybe your friend who likes to eat here showed me.”
We slid into a long conversation. It turned out that Mr. Esfandiari, although he’d studied some kind of engineering, was well-versed in some of my own subjects and took a particularly passionate interest in history, especially anything that helped fuel his innocently zealous patriotism. It was a good seven or eight minutes before I thought to bring the discussion back to the coin. “This coin here, it’s not real, is it? I mean, I’d feel uneasy having something like that just hanging on my wall, where anybody could come along and, well, go figure.”
Esfandiari shrugged. “Some of them were. This one? Hard to say.”
“Some of them?” Was he implying that some Alexander the Great tetradrachmas are real, while others are facsimiles sold as souvenirs to tourists? That would make sense. Like bronze Buddhas you buy in Chinatown; might be Qing Dynasty, might be cheap factory. Then again, as is sadly often the case, there are plenty of locals who would trade their patrimony for a little foreign currency, whether on the banks of the Amazon or in a Cairo marketplace. The authorities mostly do their best, but, in a place wracked by revolutionary upheavals or corruption, the law’s dragnet is full of holes.
“Have a look, if you want. Perhaps you can tell me.” He removed the coin from its case and placed it on the tablecloth in front of me.
No matter how many times you have done it, there is always a thrill in coming face to face with an object of great antiquity. It’s hard to describe: a bit of awe, a mildly giddy pride in holding something rare and mysterious and immensely valuable; a sense of connection with those who have lived before any of today’s states (in their present form, anyway), before any of the cities of this young continent’s foundations were laid. Somebody more superstitious might attribute it to spiritual energies transmitted from the person who made or originally used the object. It’s hard to discount them when (if) you ever feel it for yourself. The verse of the coin was the correct image of Zeus, seated on a throne, with the words “ALEXANDROU BASILIKON” embossed. Nothing in the wear pattern or weight of it supported any conclusion other than that it was a genuine piece from 320 or so B.C., worth, depending on various factors, somewhere between $2,000 and $4000 US. “I can’t believe you have it just hanging there on the wall.” I laughed weakly, incredulous.
“If you cannot believe it, then that may be why no one has stolen it yet—not that my customers are the people to steal, or else I should have no rugs, no paintings, or anything else nice put up here.”
The idea that we might stumble by sheer dumb luck upon a valuable chunk of history is a daydream that’s simultaneously exciting and anxiety-provoking. If there’s ‘buried treasure’ out there, we might want to kick ourselves for not being vigilant and missing an opportunity for instant fortune and fame. We also feel tempted to rush out to every curio shop, abandoned farmhouse and estate auction just to be sure we don’t miss out on something that our special knowledge will allow us to recognize in what is a heap of junk in the eyes of the Philistines. And it is worth it, too, or at least that’s the thought that itches at our conscience. A comparatively small investment of time and effort and, voila, fabulous riches await. Better not to think about it. But, when it’s right there in front of you, what are you supposed to do? “You never checked if it was authentic? Do you mind my asking what you paid for it?”
“Nothing,” was the answer. His expression showed it was a source of puzzlement for him, too. “A gentleman I know wanted to get rid of it, and I thought it would go well with the design theme.”
“Sure, but this is the sort of thing you’d expect to see at an exhibit in the R.O.M. I think they did one on Alexander, to tie in with the movie, two or three years back or something. The person who gave it to you told you it was a fake?”
Esfandiari rotated his head like an inquisitive owl, pondering the wad of tarnished silver, all the while keeping his hands at his side, as if to avoid any impulse to touch it. “To tell you the truth, I often wondered myself. I would always say, ‘but Rostim, would he have given you a real one?’” His chest heaved and his forehead wrinkled. “But, he was not in a healthy mind when he gave it to me, so he might not have known himself.”
“Ehhh, you wouldn’t mind telling me the story, would you? Sounds like a pretty good yarn.” If it was believable, maybe he would take a cheque…
“It came from Fars Province,” he began. “A very ancient land; it is from there that we have the name for the language, Farsi, and, via the Greeks who took a province for the whole country, we have Persia and Persian. Ancient, indeed!”
“This came out of Persepolis, then?” I anticipated him. Visions flashed in my mind of the colossal ruins of the Sassanid capital conquered by the Macedonian warrior-king, where, roughly twenty-three hundred years later, another Emperor held the greatest party humanity has ever known, assuring his predecessor (mistakenly, sadly) that he might rest in peace, for a bright future awaited their land.
“Not exactly. Ah, I should say, I have a friend—his name is not important. He is ruined now, but he had a business in Dubai. Something to do with cargo ships. Started maybe 1980, ’81. He left after the Revolution, like me, only he was able to bring out more money with him. It was still expensive back then, but it wasn’t the futuristic city of skyscrapers and man-made islands that you see on television today, not until a few years ago. My friend, he had a son, maybe twenty-three, twenty-four at the time. This was 1990-something, maybe ’97, ’98. Before 9/11, for sure. His name, the son’s, was Farhad. He had been educated at the University of Toronto, which is supposed to be the best, because his father did not have to worry about pennies and nickels as does a humble restaurant owner. Of course, he would do a Masters, PhD when the time came, but he wished to take a Gap Year, as they call it, to rest form his studies.
My friend wanted him to learn the family business because it was tradition. That is how things are done. Hence, Farhad found himself in Dubai, learning the ropes. This was the summer, in the month of July, in fact, like now. Very hot, very boring. You can imagine, a young man, like that. Really, he had grown up here, in the City, in the West. He liked clubbing, the discotheques, chasing the ladies. Now he was stuck in a place that was very religious, especially back then. United Arab Emirates: those people, they don’t play around. No alcohol, the women all covered up! You didn’t have that in Iran, not in my day. Who says the world is always in progress? Agh! Naturally, he had hobbies. Cars, art, collecting antiques, carpets and exotic crafts to bring back to Canada. He was an artist himself; he did painting, sculptures. Therefore, he enjoyed surrounding himself with objects of beauty and he also made a fair pile of cash on the side selling parts of his fluctuating collection here and in Europe.
‘The bazaars there, they are really something. Maybe if you stuffed Kensington market inside a mall—a dozen, a hundred Kensington Markets—you would get something like them. Yes, they are the original shopping mall, which we invented. You can find everything, including things you did not know existed. Here, there is metalwork; craftsmen hammering brass plates. You can buy swords and daggers that a blacksmith made centuries ago, or last week. Rugs, obviously, and food. Ahhh, the food! And everything is done to be beautiful, a treat for the senses even if you never take a bite. The pyramids of fruit, the rainbow of spices heaped into colourful cones, the silver and gilt trays of pastries—I am getting fat reminiscing! Modern goods, too: electronics, video tapes, anything you want or could want. Everything is crowded and cluttered together, but that is part of the attraction. The parts merge into a whole, like the dots in an Impressionist painting. Now, because of the different laws and the way business is conducted, you will find things that would never be sold in the Eaton’s or the dollar store, and the prices are what you can negotiate. Maybe you lose, maybe you are tricked—there are many promises but no warranties. But, maybe, if you are clever and sly and have the sixth sense for the bargain, you will score a real treasure. This Farhad was a clever young man and there was not the surplus of foreign tourists and expats in those days, so many was the occasion when Farhad discerned the wealth hidden to the Arab merchants; disguised wealth which he alone knew that he could realize if and when he could get it out of the country.”
“The government—of Iran, I mean—they mustn’t be too happy, what with their national heritage being shipped out and sold to people living in the Great Satan or its lackeys,” I remarked.
“Of course they are unhappy. The Islamic Revolution does not like such things and they are not shy like the courts here about imposing harsh sentences for violators. And, oh, I do not mean only jail sentences…although, an Iranian jail, my, my…what you have here, it is not jail; it is a joke! However, the UAE is not Iran, and, after eight years of war with Iraq, the mullahs could shake their fists but they were tired and broke. What could they do? Most everything Farhad bought and sent home was from Iran. There are rich folks in North York who will pay you enormous sums for a sentimental trinket; for a fragment of their country, when it was great.
A friend, a young lady who he knew from university back in Toronto, she had hunted that she wanted a Persian tea set. The pot, like a samovar, with the glasses in metal holders. She must have been pretty, because he could have bought her something in any strip mall that caters to the community, but instead he went to the bazaar thousands of miles away, to get her one that was more authentic. Not more authentic, I suppose, but certainly much fancier. There was a dealer in silverwork, an émigré, like us, whom he knew and trusted to always provide top quality goods.
He goes to this dealer, “What have you got for me today? I’m searching for a tea set, for a young lady. It must be graceful, elegant, and, above all, it must be something she could not find in a store.”
“I have just the thing,” the dealer says, and he shows Farhad a very fancy one, Qajar Dynasty, he says, finely chased, or, here is one in the style popular with the desert nomads…While the shopkeeper is explaining, Farhad sees something that makes him forget the tea set, forget the girl. Or maybe he was thinking of a different gift for her, even more lavish: three coins, also silver, and not any ordinary coins.
“Are those real,” Farhad asks.
“Of course!” replied the dealer. “All of my wares are the truest and most genuine articles of their kind.” As if to say how the devil he could ask such a question. There are many stories that are too good to be true, and a coin from the days of Alexander the Great which is not in a museum but is readily available for you to hold in your hand and purchase if you see wish…you could be forgiven for thinking it among them. The prices, too, were low—not low enough to prove they were counterfeit, but lower than an honest businessman would expect to pay. On the other hand, Farhad told himself as he fought to suppress his excited breath, the dealer, he knew, had tried and failed to obtain an immigrant visa, and he had no family abroad, so he could not himself assess what would be the price in a more lucrative market. Farhad employed his eyes, his fingers and the jeweller’s loupe which he kept in his pocket; he smelt it; put his lips to it and weighed it against other objects which he could be sure were pure silver upon the dealer’s scales. No matter how hard he tried to prove to himself that the coins were fakes, each test only reinforced their authenticity. He bought all three at once, jealous that some other shopper should possess his insights and snatch a share of the windfall. The dealer smiled, remembering that he had sold to two other customers, and Farhad, who had bought three coins at once, was the first who purchased without haggling. “Your father and my father are friends,” the dealer offered, feeling guilty for his customer’s naiveté. “Take your pick of the tea sets; a bonus gift, no charge.”
Farhad, however, had long since forgotten the tea set. He did not want to let on what a gold mine he thought he had happened across, but there was no way around it. He had to ask the dealer where he sourced the coins from. Whatever the source was, it must have been cheap, for the dealer to turn a profit reselling them at such a fraction of their international price.
“I do not mind telling you,” said the dealer. “Since coins are not my stock in trade, nor, with the political situation how it is, do I think I will be returning anytime soon. I did not find them myself. They were brought to me when I was helping out at my cousin’s stall in the Vakil Bazaar, which is the great market in Shiraz. This man came by who had a few things to sell. I bought. I have no idea where he got them, though.”
Farhad was a more intrepid soul than the fretful old silver dealer. He immediately formed a plan to travel to Shiraz himself. Had he known there were such bargains to be had, he might have gone sooner, angry mullahs and Revolutionary Guards notwithstanding. What was the name of this Shirazi silver merchant who wanders about selling millennia-old artefacts and how would he get in touch with him?
At this, the dealer became reticent. To tell the whole truth, he was not a merchant; in fact, he was a peasant, and a shabby, rough-cut one to boot. A Lur, based on his accent and physiognomy, though he was dressed as any labourer of the slightly more prosperous sort that you see in Iranian cities. Maybe he was a trucker. A lot of those hill tribesmen become long-distance truck or bus drivers, which would make sense for him to bring in items picked up on his travels. The rustic was not a sharp bargainer. The dealer nearly felt a pang of guilt (he liked to remind Farhad how guilty he felt) over the smallness of the sum he paid to the man who, quite possibly, could not read ordinary Farsi any better than he could Bronze Age Greek, but he washed this feeling away by reminding himself how sums that seemed modest for such rare objets d’art would nevertheless be a boon to the Lur’s no doubt numerous and hungry family, who would never know the true value of a tetradrachma but would thoroughly appreciate a couple extra loaves added to their daily bread.
Farhad asked what other marvels this mysterious Lur had on offer which the dealer failed to snap up, but, no, the coins, all of the same type, were all that the man had to trade. As far as the dealer could figure it, the man came to the Vakil Bazaar solely to exchange the coins, of which he never brought more than one or two on any one occasion. He had bought five of them off him by this point. “They are very poor people, those Lurs,” the dealer speculated. “On top of which they live frugally. Bringing the coins in one or two every few months ensures that he gets the best possible price for his finite property, compare to if he were to sell them off in large batches.”
The green monster was alive in Farhad’s heart. He knew what he had to do. He packed a suitcase, hiding in its lining and on his person all the US dollars he could carry, including many thousands borrowed from a friend in Canada, taking a passage on the next seaworthy ship that was sailing to Bandar Bushehr. This young man, who knew what it was like to travel aboard luxury yachts, riding in a rotting diesel-belching cargo ship full of machinery parts…but, when one has a goal in mind…From Bandar Bushehr, he went by road to Shiraz, which is up the highway inland. It is a bit city, Shiraz, the second city of Iran. Although he did not know anyone there, he could be assured of a hotel room with a clean bed and decent security. The conditions were not nearly as bad as he imagined from hearing his parents’ stories and watching the news. Shiraz had not suffered so badly as the western provinces from the bombing and missile attacks in the war with Iraq and it was far from the borders and the hotbed of unrest and espionage in Tehran, which is perhaps why the customs and policing seemed lax, or perhaps he had simply come with too many misunderstandings.
This is not to say he was perfectly at ease. No matter his name or that he could speak the language, growing up in Toronto versus growing up in Iran, especially after the Revolution, it is two different worlds. There was no chance of anyone mistaking him for a local, whether in his clothes or how he carried himself, there was not hiding it and it put him on edge, especially with the stories of the government using hostages as bargaining chips against international sanctions. He calmed his worries by spending most of each day at the Vakil Bazaar, which did not disappoint: a fabulous place, truly, like a painting of…who was that famous Orientalist…Jean Leon Gerome. There, in a familiar environment, he felt more safe, and the pickings were much richer than what he was used to getting in Dubai, which were all through middlemen twice and thrice over. In particular, the ivories and gems on which national customs often put restrictions impressed him, and he was sorry he had not brought more cash. Too bad, there is a limit how many US dollars one man can smuggle with only his suit and suitcase. He had succeeded in bringing thousands for the serious business. The inevitable bribes to police and petty officials he would pay with rials, more of which could be wired to him by his friends if required. For three days, he would leave his hotel, eat breakfast in a café, then spend all day at the bazaar. He wondered if the trip had been a waste, but he was too afraid to ask more than the vaguest, more innocuous questions of the bazaaris. The grapevine, how quickly it turns into a snake!
On the fourth day, as he was about to leave to het lunch, he caught sight of someone who he was completely convinced must be the man the silver dealer in Dubai had spoken about. Sixth sense, perhaps. But he did know, because it was the man. This fellow was tall, strong, like most Lurs; a thick moustache, wearing a sweater and leather jacket: very much how you would expect a long distance trucker, the kind who drives between Tehran and the provinces, to look. This man, however, he went straight for the section of the market where they trade in metal jewellery and handicrafts. He did not move with haughty swagger, in the manner of an experienced merchant. He looked fully like a coarse peasant, the patriarch in his home who is suddenly out of his depth amid the colours and lights of the big city which makes his heart shrink and his step clumsy. Farhad watched from a hidden spot in the crowd. The fellow greeted some of the bazaaris, but he did not seem to bargain with any of them at first, preferring to approach other market-goers, who were caught off-guard by his entreaties. It was not till fifteen minutes had passed that he shuffled up to one of the bazaari’s tables and emptied something out of a tiny drawstring bag onto the counter, shielding it with his hands and body. The merchant, doing Farhad no favours, hunched down to peer at whatever it was and, with almost no discussion, pulled a wad of bills out of his coat pocket and pressed the lot into the Lur’s palm. Alas, the merchant grabbed up the object just sold and jammed it inside his coat. Farhad hurried to the stall from which the Lur had departed. He asked the merchant who the man was.
A mistake. “I don’t know him. There are thousands of people who come here to buy and sell. How can I know all of them?”
“But you…you dealt with him, thirty seconds ago.” Farhad did not want to admit to having observed the whole process and how it implied that the merchant had an intimate bond of trust with the stranger.
“I deal with many people, or else I should be poor. Do I look like a policeman?” the merchant added special menace into the last word, as if he expected it to put Farhad into fear that he might bring the police into the matter.
“Sorry, no, no, of course not. But at least, if you can tell me what he sold you? Can I see it?”
“Sold me what?” the merchant’s eyes flamed. “I bought nothing from him. Only a customer who looked and did not find what he sought.”
“But I s—“ Farhad’s heart was pounding like a jackhammer now; the non-answer of the merchant made him all the more desperate to speak to this mysterious peasant. He saw the shine of a leather-clad shoulder at the mouth of a passage and forced his way through the crowd, seizing hold of the man’s jacket and calling breathlessly for him to please halt. The man spun round and with a lightning motion seized Farhad’s wrist. His hand was big and calloused, the pinkie like your or my thumb. The strange man’s expression, with only slightly less swiftness, broke into the warmest and heartiest of smiles as he realized that he who had tugged his sleeve was no foolhardy robber, merely an eager businessman of some kind. With the gentleness of a strong man towards one who is too weakly to be a plausible opponent, the Lur shepherded Farhad to as secluded a spot as could be found in the great bazaar. Farhad was too overwhelmed by adrenaline to beat around the bush, and so he made his purpose known, saying that he had heard of from a friend in Dubai, who had bought coins from him, that the Lur was a supplier of ancient artefacts, the one to seek out if one was ever in Shiraz.
The Lur, who introduced himself as Haidar Khan, blushed beneath his windburnt skin, explaining that, as Farhad could surely tell having now seen him, he could not be called a trader by any stretch of the term; he did not even have a stall in the bazaar. He was from a village in Kunderuz County, several hours’ journey to the northwest. Normally, he worked the fields in the village, driving a truck in the winter, although, whereas formerly his family had two vehicles, now there was only a van, which was mostly in the hands of his brother. Work was neither so plentiful nor so well-paid as in his father’s time. He freely admitted to selling old coins when money was short or when there was a wedding or funeral, or someone had fallen ill, but never more than two or three at once and usually only one. If life in the village had an advantage besides freedom, it was that nothing one did or ate cost much. In fact, he had sold one of the two coins he had brought with him that day.
This Haidar Khan was self-effacing and denied all pretensions to special knowledge in his side occupation. All he had, he said, was a great amount of luck, for if the merchants had not told him so, there was no way he would have known that the coins his father left him were of any more value than others of their size, hue and weight. Farhad did not mention that the coins sold for substantially more outside the country.
“Your father left them to you, eh?” Farhad picked up on the slip. That considerably narrowed the possibilities for their source and the quantity that would likely be available. “Your father had a bunch of thousands-of-year-old silver coins, and he worked as an itinerate labourer? I guess he quit when he found them. Was he one of the men brought in to work on fixing up Persepolis, and did he take the coins from there?” The ruins of Persepolis were located only forty-three minutes’ drive away—even less, following the aggressive local driving habits. It would not have been surprising if a poor labourer, happening upon a stash of old coins or precious stones, or anything small and valuable, decided to pocket it when the foreman wasn’t paying attention. Farhad knew people in the construction and renovation business and heard anecdotes like that all the time. The assumption he expected Haidar Khan to share was that the authorities would consider anything dug out of Persepolis to be national treasure and therefore subject to confiscation. Farhad would play wise, but it was well that the thought was planted in Haidar Khan’s mind. “However many you’ve got, I will buy them all. Cash. US dollars.”
Actually, Haidar Khan told him, somewhat nervous but not angry or afraid, that was precisely the story he told most potential buyers, something about Persepolis in the 70s, because they would more easily believe his goods were authentic and be less apt to raise a fuss, since they also did not wish to risk trouble for trafficking in antiquities. In reality, the coins came to him indirectly, through his grandfather, but by so unusual a route that nobody would believe him unless they saw the relevant site for themselves. If someone should be persuaded thus, then they might rob his family (he feared only the state on this point, as the villagers were all armed enough to slaughter mere burglars). It would also lead to the inevitable nonstop barrage of requests for money from relatives near, distant and false, as well as the revival of every decades-old village feud over a stray sheep or an incorrect field boundary. It was better to live as a poor man, content in the knowledge that one has riches for an emergency, than to live as a rich man, with the knowledge that one is soon to become poor. Farhad could not argue with Haidar’s logic.
“Err, how many do you have, then, and are they all of the same type as this one?”
“About three hundred,” Haidar Khan replied nonchalantly. “Though, I have brought sixteen here and sold them, so there are sixteen less than that number.”
Farhard was astonished. If he acquired them and sold them quietly, bit by bit, to a museum here, an auction there, why, here was an investment! The profits would easily run into the six figures. Two hundred eighty-odd coins, if all tetradrachmas in good condition, like the Dubai silver dealer had shown him, times a conservative estimate of $3000 US a piece…You realize, back then, you could buy a house for two hundred fifty, three hundred thousand. Now, you probably have to add a hundred-fifty thousand on top, but that would get you a decent house back then, when the market was at its bottom. An S-Class Mercedes, with taxes and fees, was barely over one hundred thousand. “What price would you charge, if I bought all of them? Then you don’t have to work about the cops stealing them, or travelling into the city to sell them. Cash, one time. You could buy up all the land and sheep in your village.” Farhad used terms the tribesman could appreciate.
The wheels were turning in Haidar Khan’s head. He turned away for a split second, as if to gather courage to make a bold demand: “One hundred…one hundred US dollars, for each coin. That is my price.”
Farhad had to use all his self-control to mask the laughter trying to escape onto his face. When he returned home he could sell the coins at auction for thirty or more times that, and, if he got lazy he could waltz down to the ROM or whatever was the major museum in a city he happened to be visiting and sell a handful, although the price would not be nearly so high. “Your father,” he asked, as the man himself was not old enough; “You didn’t answer me about him. He was a worker in Persepolis? One of the guys clearing out around Cyrus’ tomb, when the Shah…?”
“I did tell you that it was only a story I told. The real version, ah, well, for that…a public place like this, it is not suitable.” Haidar Khan told Farhad to meet him at the main bus station in two days, in the morning. They would take the long-distance bus to Kazerun City and from there they would get a local to give them a ride to the village, which was north of the provincial city. He mentioned the name o the village, but in his less-than-perfectly Persian-literate head, Farhad could not associate the sound with any name he had seen on a map before, not to mention that the Lurish accent is harsh and matches only loosely with standard Farsi. Haidar Khan was quick to add that he would not find the village on any map, which was why he would accompany Farhad for the duration of the journey. It also got cold in the hills at night, so Farhad was advised to bring extra clothes.
Farhad was excited by the opportunity, so much that he could not sleep that night. He paced his room. He tried to fall asleep by watching the grainy television, but it was no use. Genuine Alexander the Great coins—and he had seen for himself they were genuine—he pressed one of those he bought at the market in his palmd and looked it over again and again. It was the real deal. What a plan for making a quick buck and feeling cool and cunning while doing it. Then again, basically three hundred coins at $100 US each. It was an excellent price for the article in question; a price at which an honest man would be ashamed to buy. But three hundred…and US dollars, so, in Canadian that would be more than $130 each. When he went back to Canada from Dubai, he was going to buy a condo, one of the ones you can see on the waterfront, Lake Shore Boulevard. He had the downpayment. As for the girl he was dating, no one would come out and say it, but it was expected they would move in together. She was smoking hot, too. A hundred other men were ready to treat her as a princess should he show the slightest weakness. He had also intended to trade in his old Honda for a new BMW 3 Series. You have to bear in mind, those condos, before everyone was obsessed with the idea, they were $150,000, $200,000 tops, and his credit was unimpeachable, so he could get away with a low downpayment. He would have to ask a friend to wire him some money the next day. Of course, he would repay him when he made it all back.
Despite Haidar Khan’s warning, he poured over a map, a decent one that showed the roads well. Haidar’s description of the village put it somewhere in the eastern foothills of the Zagros Mountains, before they peter out into the Dasht-e Kavir, the empty desert which occupies the centre of the country, all the way to Afghanistan and Pakistan. Based on what he remembered from history books, Alexander’s troops would have marched through the general area, on their way to the Persian capital and, later, to India. Too, it would not be strange if a merchant had carried the coins when him when he retired to the village (if it were his home) or if, on business travels, he met with foul play…No, he couldn’t think about such things. Besides, it was almost the 21st century, Iran…was a safe country for travellers? He took the wisest course of action and swallowed some Benadryl, then went to bed.
The next day, Farhad returned to the Vakil Bazaar and, taking advantage of the fact that Haidar Khan was back in his far away village, he inquired of the bazaaris what they knew of him. Though he knew he had no solid reason to suspect the Lur, he was nevertheless surprised at the unanimously favourable testimony he heard. The burly tribesman was nobody’s regular supplier of anything—it was true that he was, as he said, no merchant. Regardless, he had come around often enough that most of those in the section where jewellery and precious metal goods were sold knew him by sight. Several of the merchants had purchased from him and many more were witness to this fact. The odd time, it was a tribal carpet or a piece of dowry jewellery that had parted from its intergenerational possessors, but the most notable were the coins, which all the silver dealers recognized as more valuable than their seller imagined, and which they, being honest gentlemen who did not like to take advantage, were content to offer $120 or $130 US (in rials) for. Tourists were few and far between, but one might sell the same coin to a foreigner for $400 to $800, hence it was a profitable arrangement. All the fourteen or eighteen coins sold (nobody could agree on the number) had been subjected to the most thorough inspection; all had been proven to be originals, not forgeries.
Farhad slept without aid that night and was ready and eager when he met Haidar Khan at the bus station at 9:30 a.m. Unfortunately, there was a hiccup, and the bus which they had thought would leave for Kunderuz at 10:45 did not arrive. Haidar Khan was terribly embarrassed and got into an argument with a driver who infuriated him with his greasy insolence. The argument almost came to blows when the driver told them, as if it was nothing, that there would be no bus to Kunderuz that day, but Farhad intervened and assured Haidar that it really didn’t matter; they could hire someone to take them. The cost would be more, but, given the deal he was looking to make, it was a trifle. Haidar was taken aback; it would not be easy to find someone to go all the way to the village, but, if Farhad would pay…
City-bred men would balk at the idea of venturing into the Zagros Hills, among the scowling tribals, every man jauntily hefting a four-foot-long ‘Berno’ rifle, just waiting to blow the head off any stranger who should stare too long at his beautiful unveiled wife. Thankfully, many Lur drivers ran the route to Shiraz, as it was closer to home than Tehran, either as their main occupation or for side cash. Haidar Khan dragged Farhad between dingy cafes and grimy diners, asking around, until finally they found a private minibus driver who was willing to head out that way. The fee he asked was higher than Farhad had anticipated paying, but as he explained, the roads were terrible and he had to account for the cost of a burst tire or broken axle, should they strike a boulder or run into a ditch. “Just don’t drive so fast,” Farhad suggested. “We have plenty of time.” In fact, it was almost 2:00 p.m. and Farhad was getting anxious.
The driver laughed and wagged a hairy arm at him. Drive slow and steady, yes, then it will be dark and you will run into a ditch or boulder no matter how careful you are. And if you should have to stop and change a tire then? Bandits! Wolves! Unless Farhad planned to bring guns…Farhad sighed and paid up.
The roads were as horrible as described and it took much longer to reach the village than the map indicated. By the time they left Kunderuz City, the sky was already tinged with orange. For the last half hour, the scenery was nothing but dusty hills covered with patches of thorny vegetation, the trees no bigger than large bushes, dotted here and there by clusters of low, rectangular huts that looked as if they had grown out of the ground itself. The Zagros peaks were always on the horizon, but a few twists and turns and undulations in the road and any trace of civilization was soon lost to view. Farhad enjoyed hiking in Canada to ‘get away from it all,’ but here he wished that ‘it all’ was close at hand. He kept telling himself, merchants as savvy as any in the world had never had a faithless dealing with this man leading him out into the hills and back in time.
They reached the village right as twilight was descending. Haidar Khan apologized profusely for the journey having taken so long, but, of course, there had been no buses, so the alternative would have been to wait another day or two. Farhad couldn’t have endured that. Farhad’s host, as such folk will do, made further apologies for the humbleness of the conditions and was very sorry that there were no hotels in the village; all he could provide was a room in his own miserable residence, although he knew Farhad’s refined nature was not meant for such hardships as spending a night there. No one needed to say that Farhad must spend the night, at this point. Most of the houses were of mud brick—it would be a dream for an archaeologist—two storeys at most, with courtyards to keep the goats, chickens and children in, and the wolves and jackals out. Three or four houses—the richest families in the settlement—were made of cinderblocks. Haidar Khan’s family’s house was one of them, although the courtyard wall was made of the traditional mud brick, plastered and whitewashed, except the portions on each side of the gate, where cinder blocks were used.
To Farhad, it resembled something he would see in a movie or a story about suffering people in the countryside whom one should donate to uplift them. If it wasn’t for an antenna for a TV and a van pared beside the chicken coop, you couldn’t tell if you were in the 20th century or the 12th. The women and children came to greet and gawk. Haidar Khan ordered his wife and daughters to prepare a big meal—there would be other guests coming as well. He was rough, almost violent when he spoke to his woman. Farhad figured that he was trying to show that he regarded his guest as important and felt bad about putting him through the hassles that had occurred in the day.
The best carpets and dishes were laid out. The children of Haidar Khan’s household and others peeked and giggled from behind the doorless portals around the living room. The repast presented qualified as a feast. The hill folk work up hearty appetites and their women know how to cook. If you have ever tried Kurdish cuisine, it would be similar to that. The men—men and women dining separately—were the sort, who we don’t see much here, who still use their strength to earn their bread. Most had spent a lot of time in Tehran and other cities, or in the oil facilities on the Gulf, so their speech wasn’t as hard for Farhad to understand as that of the women. Eating from the same dishes as these warlike fellows from another age and sharing in their laughter, Farhad felt a bit of their manliness rubbing off on him. It was pleasing. Apparently this was a day when several of Haidar Khan’s cousins—all the people in such villages are related—had returned on hiatus from whatever jobs they were doing in faraway places, hence the stories told were numerous, the cups of tea even more so, and it was three hours before dinner was over and each retired to his house.
Ten o’clock at night is not a very late hour for us, living in the metropolis, where people go clubbing and drink in bars until 2:00 a.m. But out in the rural areas of the world’s hinterlands, where there are no bars, no discotheques and no such thing as a night shift, when it is two or three hours past dusk, you already feel that it is late indeed and that you had best not stray abroad. And in places like there, in the foothills of the Zagros, you do not know who or what is lurking in the darkness; who owns those eyes you caught a glimpse of, twinkling in the alleys of the pistachio groves. On the one hand, Farhad was glad the houses had walls around their yards and thick, sturdy outer doors, and that the men had plenty of guns. On the other hand, even as the meal sat heavy on his stomach, when he saw the bleak little room where he was to sleep, which had no light switch on the wall or running water, the cheerful mood of suppertime swiftly faded and he saw truly how alien he was among these rustics, any one of whom could snap him in two with their bare hands. It took all his courage, when Haidar Khan came bearing a jug of water and a kerosene lantern, to remind his host about the matter he had come for.
Haidar Khan was not in the least reluctant. “Oh, no problem,” he said. “Only, I thought you might prefer to wait until tomorrow. It is night already. In the morning, you can examine the coins with the aid of daylight.”
Farhad did wish for daylight—for multiple reasons—but he could see what would happen already. If he delayed his leaving till he had examined all the coins in the sharp sun of day, it would be close to noon when he would be ready to leave. Then, the rickety van (he assumed the one parked in the courtyard would be his ride back to Kunderuz…he’d made up his mind that he would do the Kunderuz-Shiraz leg by himself) would give trouble or be short of fuel. Then they would hunt for another driver, who would be willing to take them, but only after he saw that his goats were pastured and the maize weeded. Then they would have a meal and it would be too dark to set out, and he would be stuck, imprisoned there for another night. No, no, no! He would examine the coins now, get it over with, and they would leave as soon as possible after dawn. Inwardly, Farhad started to suspect that there might not be any coins; that it was all a ruse to lure him out to the village, far from the reach of the law, he who these bumpkins must think rich. According to their mud-huts-and-goats standards, he was. Why they would wish to do such a thing? The cash he has brought under his jacket and in his suitcase gave the answer. Farhad waited in his room, staring out of the tiny window, which had no glass in it, only wooden bars. He studied the hills, blue-grey in the moonlight, rough as scouring pads, folding upon each other into ravines black as ink. He could not remember which direction the road was in relative to where he sat. If he tried to flee and ran in the wrong direction, he would be running for longer than a man could survive on the water he could carry. His eyes were glued to the window, scanning for any movement in the fields and orchards, which he would catch whenever he blinked or began to turn away, as if the creatures out there (if he wasn’t imagining them) could read his face even as he sat in the lightless room. His ears were attuned for any sound of activity that would accord with safe and healthy expectations: the opening of cupboards, a jingling of metal, maybe the prying up of paving stones or the knocking of bricks out of a wall. He heard none of those things; only voices in guttural accents and the soft groaning as of a heavy object being carefully dragged across the floor.
Minute passed like hours until at last Haidar Khan appeared in the doorway holding a wooden chest, which he heaved onto the table. “Here they are,” he announced. “Besides the ones I have sold already, of course.”
Farhad lit the kerosene lamp and fiddled with the wick until a warm yellow flame gleamed through the filthy glass. The chest was tall; more cubic than rectangular. Scales of lacquer clung to the porous wood; the brass furniture looked about to jump off. He opened the chest and saw that the coins were wrapped in rolls of greased paper blue paper tied with twine, not unlike an old-fashioned version of the rolls of coins people use to take small change to the bank. A scrunched wrapper lay in one corner of the box and the roll beside it was shrunken, the twine knotted much closer to the middle and less expertly than on the full rolls: the coins which Haidar Khan had already sold in Shiraz. Farhad gulped. He was afraid to offend, especially in the situation he was in, but his pride caused him to hate even more the idea of being taken for a dupe. “I am not saying they aren’t genuine,” he said, as casually as he could manage; “But they can’t have come like this; not originally.” The chest and the paper wrappers were old and weathered, to be sure, but there was no chance they were 2,300 years old.
Fortunately, Haidar Khan took no offense. No, they had not been like that originally. His grandfather had packed them that way, so that they were protected from damp and so he could tell at a glance if any coin went missing. Each roll held ten coins, all Alexandrine tetradrachmas, so all the bundles were the exact same size and weight.
“I see,” Farhad nodded soberly, putting aside one coin and untying an unopened bundle. Picking over it with his jeweller’s loupe, fully conscious that his condo downpayment, BMW and impending marriage depended on his judgement, he was certain that the coin was genuine. “Persepolis? Sorry, I know you explained it but I don’t recall. Too much excitement. It was your grandfather who worked there?”
No, no, Haidar Khan corrected him with only the faintest hint of being caught off guard. That was only a story for the merchants. The real story, which he could now comfortably tell, was, on the face of it, more fanciful, although when one considered the likelihood of an ordinary labourer sneaking a hoard of precious artefacts under the noses of the Shah’s security service, it was actually more credible.
Many years ago—this would be in the time of Reza Shah, not ‘the Shah’—in this village, in the structure, quite a bit more primitive, which once stood in the place of the house they were in, there lived a man named Bakur. This Bakur was old, the oldest man in the village, and was notable even among the frugal tribesmen for his Spartan habits. He was considered a scholar, by local measure, because he could read and write and had worked in the civil service as a surveyor, back when the Qajar Dynasty sat on the throne. He still collected a pension, owing to friendships he had made in higher places, which meant he had cash. Most peasants in those days rarely used cash money—where would they get it? People did not have ‘jobs’ like they do nowadays. To live, one grew and made things or did services for other individuals using one’s personal skills, for which there were no degrees or certificates. One only got cash money by working in the towns or for the government. So, people said that Bakur was rich. It was speculated that he had sources of wealth besides his savings and pension, as the silver he paid was sometimes in coins bearing pictures and symbols different from those which the Qajars stamped on their official tender, and, being illiterates who feared to travel much beyond their tribal lands, they could not investigate further. Bakur had several daughters but only one son. This son took after his father in intellect and won himself a minor post in Tehran. He did not follow his father’s character, however, and was addicted to the fast life in the capital. When he would visit, he would be in a black suit, silk tie around his neck and patent leather shoes that gleamed as if dipped in liquid diamond. You could not tell him from a farangi; even his face was pale from too much time in the office and opera house. His wife’s appearance scandalized even the boisterous Lur women and, it is told, her complaints about the villagers and their backwards and unhygienic ways could fill a book, had any of them been able to write it. Bakur wanted his son to be near him and hoped that the couple would give him grandchildren to cheer him in his old age. Of course, he was proud of his son’s career, but Bakur was a Lur hillman at heart and the pull of tradition and the desire for respect in the eyes of his fellows was stronger than the glow of any title his son might achieve or the prestige of whatever apartment address he might occupy in Tehran.
The son would have none of it and the daughter-in-law even less. Following a particularly vicious argument, the son was not seen again. Haidar Khan’s grandfather was at the time only just married. He lived two houses away from Bakur and often did odd jobs for the old man, sometimes bringing him food cooked by his wife and sitting with him for tea, as Bakur’s wife had died you and, with his daughters married off to other villages, he had no one to help him with chores. Haidar Khan’s grandparents worked hard, but times were tough and Bakur noted their poverty and that they had no family to help them. Come, live with me, he said to Haidar Khan’s grandfather one day; live with me as father and son—for you can see that the son I have is not worth the name, no matter his extensive learning. Take care of me in my old age, he promised the couple, and, when I am gone, my wealth will go to you.
There was a tale that Bakur gave Haidar Khan’s grandparents, in addition to the house and lands, a hoard of silver coins that he had found in a cave in the nearby hills. One afternoon when Bakur was out surveying the area, a sudden thunderstorm drove him to take shelter in a cave, where he found some clay jars. His education allowed him to recognize that they were amphorae, from the Mediterranean, and quite ancient. Half-jokingly, he checked to see if they might contain some well-aged wine and poured out…silver coins! To bring the huge, heavy jars home would require several trips and would be very obvious, but if he smashed them and filled his rucksack with the coins, he could carry them concealed and no one would be aware of their existence. Moreover, no one would come across the jars and wonder if they might have contained something and if he (who was one of few people with a reason to be in that remote spot) had anything to do with it.
Bakur intended to inform Haidar Khan’s grandfather about the coins, but the young man happened to be in town when Bakur fell ill. Bakur would not reveal where he stashed things to anyone else and, since there were no telephones and they had to send a messenger to the town, Bakur died before Haidar Khan’s grandfather could arrive back in the village.
“But, if this Bakur fellow never told anyone where he kept the coins,” Farhad, who was engrossed by the story, asked; “How is it they are before me right now?”
“That,” Haidar Khan explained, “Goes back only a couple years, not long after the war ended.” He said that Farhad should recall that Haidar told him the present house was not the original structure, although the floorplan and size were not vastly different. In Bakur’s lifetime, the house had been made of mud bricks. Now it was of cinderblocks.
“The wall around the courtyard, though…” Farhad foresaw what Haidar was about to say.
Haidar smiled. The house had a wall in Bakur’s day, too, which was daubed with mud and whitewashed as required to keep it standing. Importantly, rural folk did not have cars back then, let alone vans and trucks. When Haidar Khan’s brother acquired the van which he drove for work, they could not fit it through the original gate. It was cheaper to knock down a mud wall and replace the missing portion with cinderblocks and a wider gate than it was to replace a vehicle lost to theft, so that is what they did. When they were smashing down the abutment where the old gate attached, out falls this chest with the coins wrapped up inside in greased paper, to protect them from moisture.
Farhad had to smile, too. What a tale! And he held a piece of it between his fingers! To be sure, the money that he would pay was not a fortune in modern times, but to these poor souls it would seem a lot. As he was having that very thought, Haidar Khan asked him, with the utmost delicacy, if he would not perhaps agree to a price of $150 per coin. After all, he had seen how difficult were the conditions they lived under, and, after the war and with all the sanctions and so on, jobs were few and far between. One-fifty. That would bring the price to $42,600 US; more than $55,000 in Canadian money. It was all the money he had on him, besides spare change for food and the return trip. He groaned and wracked his brains, but, in doing so, his eyes wandered to the window and the forbidding hills shrouded in night’s gloom. He understood that it would be unwise to haggle. Besides, he would earn it back several-fold. He handed over the money, Haidar Khan left, and he went to bed. Sleep did not come. They had his money, these Iranian hillbillies. He had their silver coins. But what did that matter, seeing as he was in their house, in the middle of the night, hours from civilization—perhaps even farther from sympathy? They knew he was a foreigner; a fish out of water. They were probably not so ignorant as to be unaware that, in smuggling so much foreign currency into the country as he had paid them with, Farhad had committed a serious breach of customs laws and so could find himself in an Iranian jail as a political hostage. Accordingly, he had probably not told anyone where he was going. That assumption would be true. If Farhad disappeared, his family and colleagues would be telling them to search in Shiraz. He reasoned himself into the expectation that his hosts would come into his room and murder him as he slept, keeping both the US dollars and the ancient silver. It was the most logical chain of events. He lay frozen, his heart accelerating at the sound of a beetle scuttling across the carpet beside his pillow or an owl flying past his window. Whether he eventually slept or not, the next thing he was conscious of was the bright blue square of the window and that he was able to see the walls and the table: it was morning.
It took every ounce of focus to wait as the household had breakfast. He himself ate nothing, claiming the feast the night before overwhelmed his stomach. His heart obtained no rest on the journey to Kunderuz and it was agony to submit to Haidar Khan and his brother’s offer to walk him to the station. Alas, he did not know where it was, and he feared robbers. He feared his guides, too. Normally, when you are showing someone the way, you walk in front of them or beside them. Haidar Khan walked in front and his brother walked behind Farhad. The streets were too narrow for him to lag back behind Haidar’s brother. Farhad made sure to get on a bus with some uniformed soldiers riding on it. The government, if they found what he was transporting, might confiscate it for themselves, but they would not murder him over it. In his hotel, he packed the rolls of coins into the lining of a suitcase, where the extra weight could be assumed to come from his personal effects. Tightly wrapped in their paper packets and squeezed on by the padded fabric, they did not jingle. Only when he got back safely to Dubai did he feel relief.”
“He made out swell, then?” I have declared, half asked. “Hope he didn’t charge you auction price for this one.” I marvelled again at the Alexander tetradrachma that reposed upon the tablecloth.
Esfandiari tut-tutted. “No, no, he neither charged me full price nor had a heart o aggressively seek full value for the four or five that he had.”
“Four or five?” I was confused. “Thought you said he bought nearly three hundred of the things.”
“Four or five that were genuine, not counting the sixteen Haidar Khan had traded in the bazaar. He was approaching the end of his stash…”
“But—how? Didn’t you say your friend, or your friend’s son, the Farhad guy, that he examined them and that he knew something about coin trading?”
Esfandiari insisted that, yes, Farhad had examined the coins—some of them, and he was a skilled numismatologist, no doubt about it. That was the trick; the juice in the orange. A handful of coins were real historical artefacts. How they came into Haidar Khan’s possession was anyone’s guess. Maybe his dad snatched them while at an excavation in the ‘70s, like Farhad first guessed, maybe they were found in a cave by some surveyor or goatherd. Not impossible; that’s how they found the Dead Sea Scrolls. The renovated wall in the courtyard might simply have been convenient, suggesting part of a story to Haidar Khan. The stuff about his grandfather…who knows? Who can know? All in all, it’s not far-fetched that someone, finding himself the lucky possessor of twenty or so ancient coins to enrich his impoverished self might figure out that there’s more profit from selling three hundred than twenty-two. The genius was in how he did it, being honest where he had to be—never trying to pull a fast one on the shrewd and well-connected bazaaris, for instance. Establish a reputation for honesty with people who you know are going to be the first ones anybody is going to go to for an opinion—that was a good start. Taking his mark—Farhad—out to the village was the next step: let him get in so deep that he would be inclined to deceive himself rather than back out. Don’t take him immediately; give him two days to stew in his own expectations. Haidar Khan would also have enough experience of the wider world to know what an urbane yuppie like Farhad would think about him and his fellow villagers: backwards people who dislike outsiders and are prone to violence, especially against those outsiders. Picking a day when he knew there was no public bus running to Kunderuz, then stalling for time while finding a driver ensured they would arrive at their destination late in the day, compelling Farhad to spend the night. The accumulated frustrations, the mounting anxiety of being alone at night, laden with cash, among strange and hostile people…all this wore on Farhad’s nerves, while the overt hospitality the villagers showed him would fill his heart with conflicted emotions: a soft young man like Farhad would one minute be trembling, thinking he was about to have his throat cut, then he’d be wracked with guilt for harbouring suspicions about the innocent, kindly country folk. He’d have no spare room in his mind for anything else.
The sun having set, there being no electricity, what kind of lighting would he have to judge the coins by? He would look at them; none but a saint could resist the impulse. A candle or a kerosene lamp will do to read by, I suppose, but there’s a big leap between reading a printed page that’s designed to be read and the professional appraisal of an antique coin, trying to detect the subtle clues left by the counterfeiter’s hand. Tying the coins up in wrappers like that was another element of the Lur’s strategy. It was perfectly plausible as a thing somebody might have done in the past, and the long, secretive trip ahead, it was a way of helping guarantee that Farhad would only get through vetting a few of the coins instead of spending all night untying the bundles, leaving himself a loose, noisy mess while he strained to determine their authenticity in the feeble, colour-distorting light of the kerosene lamp. Psychology!
After such a night, it was a safe bet that Farhad would not take out the coins again until he had left Iran. As for any threat of him returning afterwards to complain to the Iranian police and get them to go after Haidar Khan (if that was his real name) in a village h couldn’t locate on the map, all because he’d allegedly ripped off Farhad on some antiquities which Farhad smuggled out of the country…Yeah, that had about a snowball’s chance in hell of happening. “Guess your friend’s son didn’t get his BMW and condo?”
“Nor the girl,” Esfandiari chuckled wistfully.
I left the Bademjan with my belly and thoughts both well-fed, along positive vibes for an immigrant restaurateur who, if he wasn’t able to smuggle his wealth out of the Old Country like his friend, at least managed to bring some wits. Sometimes, the younger generation would be better off inheriting the latter.
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Snow to Sand: Poetry, Stories and Musings from Canada, the Caribbean and Ukraine 