I had a nightmare the other night. We had defeated the IRI and were chasing the clergy down the streets of Tehran. I managed to catch one and shoved him onto the ground. I reached out and pulled his beard off but it kind of came off all too easily. I looked closer and saw that his whole face had come off. It was a mask.
However, it wasn’t the mask that shocked me but what was underneath. Millions and millions of small faces moving around in what used to be his face. I could hear them talking and when I laid my ear close to the “face” I heard them talking persian. They were all talking at the same time and were incomprehensible. I shouted, “shut up or talk with one voice?” There was a moment of silence and then an old cracky voice said,”the clergy mask you removed will not cure your problems. Any one of these small faces you see here can repalce the one you tore away. It is just a mask of convenience. The mask represents all of us here and does what we want. If it stole, it represented the majority. If it took bribes, it did it because it’s what the small faces do when nobody is watching. If it killed, it’s because these faces wanted it to kill.”
I was horrified. I said desperately “Is there no way, no cure?”
“Are we Iranians doomed to tear mask after mask without getting anywhere?”
“Will we ever have a clean genuine face?”, I said falling to the ground. The old voice said “havn’t you been listenning? The mask can only be clean when the majority of faces under it are clean. But be aware, don’t you go buying ready-made faces from Farang. That’s where the whole problem started.”
I was about asking him who he was when someone knocked me on the head and shrank me to a little figure and dropped me into the face. I screamed and woke up. The first thing I did was check my face in the mirror. I saw what I liked because I knew I was not wearing a mask.
