Around that time my grandfather had sent a small shipment of Persian rugs to San Francisco. This had been one of the family businesses back in Iran. Needing more money to support their life, my dad placed a classified ad in the local paper and was pleasantly surprised at the speed with which all of the rugs were sold. He asked my grandfather to “send more rugs!” Soon a shipment many times larger than that first one arrived, and my dad recognized an opportunity.
They moved right across the Golden Gate Bridge to Mill Valley, at the base of forever-green Mount Tamalpais, where my dad set up a Persian rug shop, one of the first in that part of the country. And it was an instant success.
In typical immigrant fashion, he was holding down two jobs: one for the Man, and the other for himself.
One day, tired of the commute, and confident of his business’s growing success, he asked the Emporium for a modest raise, to which he was entitled given his experience in the company. His boss refused to give him one.
He quit on the spot.
That night he went to my mom and told her, “Hon”—that’s what he called her—“our life may not be easy and we may have to eat canned beans for a while, but I promise it will never be boring.”
“That’s why I married you,” she replied, and in my mind that’s when their life—actually, our lives—really started taking shape.
It was 1969 and hippies, especially the ones with money, of whom there were many in that area, loved rugs. And by extension they loved my parents. At that time there were no biases toward Iranians or Muslims, because there were still too few of them to judge.
If anything, my dad, his fellow countrymen, and their culture were admired and appreciated for being exotic, ancient in their traditions while worldly in their ingenuity, and hospitable. If one distills the many stereotypes, that’s how Iranians have been known for centuries. I always tried to recapture that unique national character in my reporting.
My mom knew Iranians and she knew Iran. She wasn’t afraid, but I realized she might have been underestimating what bastards I was dealing with.
We said our goodbyes, and I hoped she’d hightail it to Tehran.
After we hung up, the phone at Cousin Barb’s house rang again. It was Secretary of State John Kerry.
He’d told Iran’s foreign minister, Javad Zarif, in their last meeting that a Thanksgiving call would be well received. Apparently Zarif had enough pull to arrange it. Secretary Kerry had also written me a letter to lift my spirits, but that was never delivered.
The State Department—via my brother, via Yegi—knew my morale was low, but they wanted to send me a message that I hadn’t been forgotten. Some, but not all, of that got lost in the game of geopolitical telephone.
Around that time the State Department and Iran’s foreign ministry had agreed to start a secret set of negotiations for a prisoner swap. Obama’s envoy on ISIS, Brett McGurk, was chosen to lead the American delegations. That phone call was the first act of good faith.
I had been locked up longer than any of the previous dual-national journalists or scholars, and there started to be little signals that I might be released soon.
In an early December interview with France 24, Mohammad Javad Larijani, the Berkeley-educated head of Iran’s human rights commission and older brother to the speaker of parliament and the head of the judiciary, called my detention a “fiasco” and predicted I’d be out within a month.
Christmas 2014 fell on a Thursday and it had been two weeks since all of my contact with the outside world had been cut for getting caught trying to smuggle a note out of prison with Yegi during one of our visits. I had successfully gotten three out so far, and got cocky. The guard on duty that day was apparently paying attention to the surveillance camera for once.
Kazem’s boss, Borzou, told me that getting busted for what appeared to be such a silly mistake was an act so clever that they still couldn’t figure out why I did it. Maybe they were right.
I’d heard rumblings, through Yadoallah, who’d heard from his family, that the international calls for my release were growing louder. Some of the guards confirmed this. If that was indeed the case, the silence from me may have been compelling my family and employers to take more public action. But that was just a guess.
Around eleven A.M., Khosrow, a little guard with a nervous tic—he was always shooing away an insect that wasn’t there—came to the gate of our cell and told me to come with him. It could have been anything: interrogation, freedom—it was Christmas—or Yegi. Whatever it was I didn’t like the not knowing.
He led me in the direction of the visitors’ meeting room so I guessed it was my wife. When I entered the room I paused with mild shock. It was my mom and mother-in-law. No wife. I was happy to see my mom after so many months, but not ecstatic.
It was a hard meeting. My mom was trying to be upbeat and my mother-in-law was nervous but also frustrated; this was not a life challenge she and her family deserved. And I was just angry. More than anything because I was helpless but feeling responsible.
They gave us twenty minutes. I implored my mom to do more to get me out. “These people are crazy,” I told her.
“We’re doing everything we can, sweetie,” she assured me.
“Do more. Faster. I’m going crazy in here.”
When Khosrow came to take me back to my cell I was even angrier. “Why didn’t you tell me it was my mother?”
I would have prepared myself more, mentally. I could have explained that to him, but he wouldn’t have understood. And I definitely would have brushed my teeth.
“It’s Christmas,” he said, with a hand on my shoulder. “I thought it was a good surprise.”
Yadoallah had already been taken to his Thursday meeting with his family by the time I returned to the cell. At a minimum I had a Kurdish feast to look forward to.
His wife would go all out on the days of visits as if it was a celebration, creating the most elaborate meals imaginable: eggplant stew with lamb shank, stuffed grape leaves with lamb shank, meat and potato patties called kotlet.
But today was a special occasion. His family had gone to Dubai to take care of some business there, and they had brought back food from his eight-year-old son’s favorite fine dining establishment.
I saw the golden arches on the bag immediately. I already knew that in that part of the world McDonald’s represents an idea that it could never live up to in real life. It’s freedom, speed, and shopping malls. In Iran, where American brands and chains have been officially banned for decades, it takes on extra significance. It is the one restaurant name that every Iranian—whether they have ever tasted its forbidden fruits or not—knows very well.
No negative connotations whatsoever. It’s a lifestyle thing. If you travel anywhere in the world it’s the first restaurant you go to. If there’s not a McDonald’s there, it’s not a place worth visiting. It’s not something you hide from your friends and family. This is no guilty pleasure. You take pictures of your outing to McDonald’s and you post them on Instagram.
McDonald’s is so seductive that there is a whole body of Iranian sociological work that rails against the McDonaldsization of societies. It is, for none of the same reasons we consider it to be here, the greatest evil. The culinary embodiment of the Great Satan.
When Yadoallah reentered our cell and placed the contents of two McDonald’s bags on our small plastic table, six Big Macs and four cans of Coke, I knew I was about to give the biggest symbolic middle finger to the Islamic Republic I possibly could in my current predicament. And it was Christmas fucking Day.
I put down two Big Macs and a Coke, never even considering that it was anything but the most righteous act I could perform just then.
9
2011
But nothing happened after that Christmas visit. I was in a holding pattern: no court, no visits, no light at the end of the tunnel. This was a jam, no doubt, but I tried to remind myself we’d survived worse.
Two thousand eleven was my har
dest year. Since I’d returned to Tehran in the fall of 2009 my freelancing career had taken off. I was attracting new gigs and cementing my place in the foreign press corps in Iran.
I wrote Christopher Hitchens a letter. His cancer had progressed dramatically at that point, and it was important for me to tell him something he already knew: that he had had a profound impact on my life. I told him, also, about my relationship with Yegi, and how being so close to a young Iranian woman made me simultaneously irate over the treatment of females, but also enthusiastic about Iran’s prospects, as it was inevitable that one day women would run the show.
The Persian New Year was coming and I made plans for Yegi and me to go to Europe. It was all a part of an elaborate scheme to get her into the U.S. on a tourist visa, which we had failed to achieve a year earlier. I knew that if she was given, and then used, a Schengen visa, which allows entry into the eurozone, and returned to Iran before the end of the visa’s validity, her chances of getting an American one would shoot up exponentially.
I had become friendly with the number two man at the Slovenian embassy, who considered me a fellow countryman—I’m a quarter Slovenian, on my mother’s side—and I was exploring opportunities to send young Iranians there. Slovenia was one of the few EU countries granting Iranians visas at the time. Yegi was a perfect test case.
Our relationship was advancing and it was important to me that she start seeing more of the world. Ultimately I wanted to take her to California, first to get to know my family and second to see if she would like it there as much as she expected she would. I had seen the disappointment before of young educated Iranians coming to the U.S., bored by how slow and simple most of it can seem compared to frenetic Tehran.
Meanwhile, I was still enjoying the opportunities of an expat American in a part of the world where we are coveted.
In late January an old high school friend of mine who was working as a lifestyle reporter for a media company in Dubai asked me if I’d fill in for him on a gig because his wife, another high school friend, was days away from giving birth to their first child. Why not?
I was flown, business class, to Cape Town to test-drive the new BMW 6 Series convertible, and put up in a six-star resort at the base of Table Mountain. This is the sort of one-off thing that happens when you can complete a sentence on deadline and live in the Middle East.
I wasn’t even considering going back to a life in the U.S.
On the evening of March 4 I got an email from my brother asking me to call him. I was headed out and wrote back to him that I would be gone for a couple of hours and would like to call him the next day if it was all right.
“I need you to call me tonight,” he responded.
My dad was seventy-one and had been struggling with health issues compounded by a car accident he had in 2009, a couple of months before my move. He’d had a quadruple-bypass operation when he was forty-nine and began to take his health very seriously then, including an extensive exercise regimen, which was disrupted by the car accident.
I braced for what I thought was the worst.
I called.
“Hey, Ali, what’s going on?”
“Hi, Jason. I’m at the hospital. Walker wasn’t feeling well this morning and—” He didn’t continue and I butted in.
“But he’s okay now, right?”
“They brought him here . . .” He trailed off.
“Okay. So what’s going on now? He’s all right now?”
“He died.”
No matter what else I tell you, know that this was the single hardest moment of my life.
Our call didn’t last much longer. My not-even-six-year-old nephew, the sweetest, brightest little man, was gone. I don’t break down emotionally, but I wailed and beat the wall with my open palm and then fist. It was the first time in many months that I’d felt far away.
I called my mom.
“Mom, what’s happening?”
“Oh, sweetie. I don’t know what to say.” She was composed. She keeps it together better than anyone I know, including me.
“I just keep thinking about what you would have done if this happened to Ali or me,” I said through my sobs.
“Well, you need to get those thoughts out of your head. That’s not what happened, and we need to be there for Ali,” she said in a tone I don’t remember hearing very often. Kind but forceful.
“You’re right,” I sobbed. “I’m coming home.”
I departed Tehran out on the next possible flight and arrived back in Marin County the following night. It was horrible. Walker had been hit by a fast-moving H1N1 virus that was too much for his immune system to combat. His death was shockingly sudden.
What is there to say? We were, as a family, completely shattered.
After thirty-eight years at the house on Oak Ridge Road my parents had just moved into a small condo. My dad had run out of luck and couldn’t sustain the massive financial burden of keeping the place afloat, having leveraged the mortgage once too often for cash infusions into his rug business. The new owners hadn’t taken possession of it yet; the only piece of furniture left was a bed in my high school bedroom. I decided I wanted to stay there until the last possible moment.
This place that had meant so much to all of us, I realized, was just a shell. All the energy that came from its being lived in was gone. It was freezing cold and the late winter rain pummeled down. The cascading sound large drops made on the living room’s high and arching roof had been one of my favorite childhood sensations. I cried and cried.
It was becoming clear that Walker’s death, along with losing his hacienda, was the beginning of the end for my dad. While the rest of us tried to handle the situation with whatever grace we could muster, he was being carried away into heartbreak. A couple of days later he had a heart attack.
When I got to his hospital room and sat down next to his bed, he told me that one of the nurses had been there when Walker was brought in and had described the grief that the entire hospital shared that day. I wanted to kill that asshole for adding to my dad’s sorrow.
I didn’t tell Ali at first about the heart attack, but then realized it was worse to hide it.
We had spent too much time at Marin General Hospital over the years. Hajj Kazem had died there and Nana had spent so many stretches there that we’d lost count. We hated that place.
I talked to Ali about Yegi and told him about our Europe plan.
“You should go, and then come back if you can. I’m probably going to need your help here,” he said.
“You sure?” I asked.
“Yeah. Go.”
We didn’t really know it then, but it’s the weeks and months that follow impossible-to-fathom losses that are the most gut-wrenching.
I was in a prolonged haze. I made the decision that I had to keep it together, whatever that looked like. Obviously I couldn’t sleep.
The rain didn’t stop much those few days.
Ali was doing a contract job in San Jose at a friend’s business. He decided to go to work in the middle of the week after Walker died. I drove with him down there one day. I couldn’t believe he was even able to get out of bed.
“It’s good that they have another child to raise,” a lot of people said.
After his heart attack my dad was only in the hospital for a couple of days. “If he stays there any longer he’s gonna die. It’s too depressing,” I told my mom. They released him.
I spent as much time with him as I could, because I thought I could bring him back. I had seen his long and dramatic mood swings before, but it had been years since I had seen him low for such a prolonged stretch. He wasn’t saying “God is great” much.
His neck was in a brace due to the car-crash injuries and his mind was somewhere else.
One afternoon he asked me to drive him to Petaluma, a town about twenty miles north of where we lived, where he had had a shop since the mid-1990s. That was where I had done most of my training in rugs.
He still had the “ru
g annex,” as we called it, a funky wooden building that used to house a local radio station, which was next door to the palatial old bank that the store had inhabited for the past fifteen years. The annex was the opposite of the former bank, which he called “Monarch.” More of a hideout in the shadows of his last shop than an actual business. I hated it there.
We walked in and I was overwhelmed by the number of rugs. By then I understood this business as well as anyone could and realized that some of the inventory had to be there on consignment. I could easily recognize styles that my dad wouldn’t invest in, but would stock, and other trends in items he might buy at bargain prices in an auction, at an estate sale, or as a trade-in. There was simply too much stuff.
I couldn’t stand being there and I took my dad home.
Just like when we first met, twice a day, once in the morning and once late at night, I was speaking to Yegi by phone. She was an absolute rock for me when I most needed it.
“Stay as long as you have to,” she told me. “I will be here.”
It was one of those periods in life that either cements or unglues a relationship. I felt lucky.
She tried to convince me that it wasn’t the right time for us to go to Europe.
“No, we have to go,” I told her. “I’m not sure how long I will be stuck here and if we don’t use this visa who knows when we’ll be able to get you another one.” I don’t think of myself as a very stubborn person, but some decisions stick. It helped that Ali and my mom encouraged me to go. Dad was still too distraught to make decisions or even have an opinion. I was just going to be gone for nine days.
My dad sat on a chair in the living room of this unfamiliar place—there was wall-to-wall carpeting and not a single Persian rug on the rented floor—watching the devastating news of the Fukushima tsunami. Maybe it took his mind off of his own misery. I don’t know.
I kissed him goodbye on both cheeks, not hugging him too hard.
“We need you to get stronger, Dad. Take it easy the next few days.”
He just nodded.
As I walked out the garage he said, “It’s good that you came.”
Prisoner Page 14
