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excellent Shahs like Cyrus and Abbas, but that was long ago. The last two dynasties spilled a great deal of innocent blood in order to win or keep the throne. Imagine the monarch Agha Mohammed Khan, who orders the entire population of the city of Kerman murdered or blinded—no exceptions. His praetorians set energetically to work. They line up the inhabitants, slice off the heads of the adults, gouge out the eyes of the children. In the end, despite taking regular breaks, the praetorians grow too exhausted to lift their swords or knives anymore. Only thanks to this fatigue do a remnant of the people preserve their lives and eyesight. Later, processions of blinded children leave the city. Some, wandering around the countryside, lose their way in the desert and die of thirst. Other groups reach inhabited settlements and, singing songs about the extermination of the citizens of Kerman, beg for food. News travels slowly in these days, so the people they meet are shocked to hear a chorus of barefoot, blinded children singing about whistling swords and tumbling heads. They ask what crime Kerman committed to earn such cruel punishment. At that question, the children break into a song about the offense, which was this: Because their fathers had sheltered the previous Shah, the new ruler could not forgive them. The spectacle of processions of blinded children arouses universal pity and the people do not refuse them sustenance, but the wanderers have to be fed discreetly and even secretly, since the little blinded ones, having been punished and stigmatized by the Shah, constitute a sort of peripatetic opposition and all support for the opposition is punishable to the highest degree. Gradually, sighted urchins attach themselves to these processions as guides for the blind children. Then they wander together, seeking food and protection from the cold and carrying the tale of the destruction of Kerman to the farthest villages.
    These, he says, are the grim and brutal histories we hoard in our national memory. Tyrants won the throne by force, climbing toward it over corpses, amid maternal lamentations and the moans of the mortally wounded. The issue of succession was often settled in distant capitals, and the new pretender to the crown would enter Teheran with the British and Russian envoys supporting his elbows on either side. People treated such Shahs as usurpers and occupiers, and when one knows about that tradition one can understand how the mullahs managed to spark off so many uprisings against them. The mullahs would say: He, the one sitting in the palace, is a foreigner taking his orders from foreign powers. He is causing all your miseries; he's making a fortune at your expense and selling out the country. The people paid attention to this because the words of the mullahs struck them as the most obvious truths. I don't mean that the mullahs were saints. Far from it! Many dark forces lurk in the shadows of the mosque. But the abuses of power and the lawlessness of the palace made the mullahs into advocates of the national interest.
    He returns to the fate of the last Shah. Back then, in Rome during his exile of a few days, Mohammed Reza has to face the fact that he could lose the throne forever and swell the exotic regiment of dispossessed royalty. That thought sobers him up. He wants to cast off the life that he has been squandering amid pleasures and distractions. (Later, he writes in his book that in Rome the sainted AM appeared to him in a dream and said: Return to your homeland so that you can save the nation.) Now a great ambition is born in him, a yearning to demonstrate his strength and superiority. This trait, too, my interlocutor says, is most Iranian. One Iranian will never yield to another. Each believes in his own superiority, wants to be first and foremost, wants to impose his own exclusive
I. I! I! I
know better,
I
have more,
I
can do everything. The world begins with me,
I
am the whole world in myself.
I! I!
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