One of Dario Javaheri’s daughters told me thirty-some years after the fact that her father had seen the writing on the wall long before Khomeini returned to Tehran. The tenuous peace that prosperous Jews had made with secular Persians would evaporate. His wife’s parents were committed to stay. His parents, may their memory be a blessing, were still buried in the rubble of the 1968 earthquake.
Packing as many diamonds, other gemstones, and finished goods as they could into whatever hiding spaces suppressed-indignity would permit, and it permitted many, Dario, his wife Vida, and all but his eldest child prepared to flee. Dario let his beard grow unkempt. Vida and the girls didn’t wash their hair.
On a cloudy day in December 1978, they bid their farewells behind closed doors. Then their driver took them to Qazvin, Zanjan, and after 600 kilometres, to Tabriz where they had dinner at the home of their longtime family friends, the Javans. There they switched cars, drivers, and clothes, hoping that the colorless worn-out attire they’d put on might let the hawk’s eye seek out richer prey. In the middle of the night they left for the Turkish border another 300 kilometres to the northwest. The little girls slept. Dario and Vida were silent. They passed Marand and the turn-off to Qarah Zia od Din before dawn. A little light came over the horizon behind them when they drove through Maku and stopped in Bazargan.
With their counterfeit Turkish passports, well worth the glorious rubies that had paid for them, Dario and Vida, each carrying a sleeping child, stepped outside into freezing but clear air. Their driver loaded two modest suitcases into a taxi headed for the border less than two kilometres uphill. Unceremoniously, without so much as waking, or appearing to wake the girls, they survived passport control. From there they walked through the iron gates into Turkey where they found a rusted minibus of a taxi to make the final forty-minute drive to Dogubayazit. In the privacy of the little van, Dario and Vida could finally look at each other, eyes wide, eyes wet, embracing, clasping two of their daughters, and cry, and gaze as Dylan said it best, upon the chimes of something something. Two days later, with all the loot disgorged or otherwise removed, they were in Ankara where they bought proper clothes for their flight to Paris.
Dario’s sister, also named Vida, had, in the service of Rezā Shāh Pahlavi, emigrated to Paris a few years earlier with her husband, Arsalan, then the Vice President for European Affairs of Petrochemical Industries, Ltd. There they raised their two girls and made the home-away-from-home for Dario’s eldest, who attended a Catholic day school with her cousins and other daughters of France’s business elite.
Themselves children of the wealthiest jewelry merchant in Iran, Dario and his sister had been educated in England and France. Dario had raised his own young family in the same multilingual mode, speaking three languages at home in Tehran from the moment the first baby, Arianna, was born.
In Paris, Dario and Vida bought a big house in the 19th arrondissement and opened a small storefront on the Boulevard Saint-Germain in the 6th. Arsalan had assimilated into France’s industrial boardrooms and was saddened but unharmed by the collapse of Pahlavi Petro. The two families, French-speaking, well-employed, and optimistically matriculated, were safe and sound while they worried about those left behind. Together they watched on TV and wept as their home country went to the dogs.