Misreading Tehran

TEHRAN The mullah asked the Korean: "What's your idea about Iranians?" The question was rhetorical, a greeting between veterans of a shattering week. The mullah was among a small army of clerics overseeing the burial of perhaps 40,000 people in three days, victims of a catastrophic earthquake in southern Iran during the final week of 2003. The Korean was a rescuer packing for home after finding no survivors.

"You are closer than us to the United States," the mullah said in a voice a half-measure louder than necessary. "So do whatever you can to them on our behalf."

The Korean's smile remained in place.

"Tell the Americans that you saw the clergy burying the bodies in Bam. We are very expert at this. Tell them: 'We will bury you, too.'

"If graves are required," he said, "we have one for Bush."

If the destruction of Bam was like a ghoulish cartoon -- a mud-brick city reduced to uniform brown heaps that no earthquake expert recalled ever seeing before -- here was a cartoon within a cartoon. The mad mullah kept grinning and glancing toward me, the intended beneficiary of his diatribe. A second cleric cleared his throat in embarrassment. "This is a good situation," said a third, "for everybody to understand that human beings really need each other."

What's your idea about Iranians? Almost everyone I encountered in my 10 visits to the Islamic republic over the past 3 1/2 years resembled the mortified colleagues of the mad mullah: gracious, hospitable, apparently genuine in their regard for ordinary Americans and reasoned in their criticism of Washington. Years before the Bush administration's recent and surprising agreement to Tehran's request for negotiations , Iranian officials were likely as not to close an interview with a sidelong bid for some contact, any contact, between the two governments.

Perhaps that's why, in scanning my recollection for scenes that might encourage the understanding that eludes both countries, what stands out are the extremes, outliers such as the lanky, intense cleric in the Tehran crowd gathered for the free food and festival on the 26th anniversary of the Islamic Revolution. Every few steps, he bent at the waist, plucked a paper Iranian flag from the ground and tore the emblem from the center. Then he kissed the scrap and stuffed it in his pocket.

The emblem contained the word ''Allah," he explained, and a close reading of religious texts dictated that it should never touch the ground. His son, who looked about 7, gazed at the street littered with thousands of the paper flags, then up at his father, struggling for comprehension.

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You tend to do that in Iran, a place that newcomers invariably describe as not what they expected. The reality turns out to be less severe -- less like the billowing black chador so irresistible to photographers: big, vaguely frightening and often in counterpoint to the more nuanced background scene it overwhelms.