Baghdad without a Map and Other Misadventures in Arabia

by Tony Horwitz

  “See what?” The scene seemed as anonymous and depressing as that in every other café I’d visited.

  He nodded his head in the direction of a woman at the next table, who wore a floral head scarf. “She is not so Islamic,” he said. “If she was, she would be wearing brown or black.”

  He tipped his head at the woman sitting beside her. “What do you see?”

  I saw a belt wrapped at the waist, giving her otherwise shapeless coat a slight hourglass effect.

  “The belt,” I said.

  “Very good. Keep going.”

  The coat ended at mid-shin, and from beneath it poked tight blue jeans and Reebok running shoes. Her companion wore black lace stockings and high heels.

  I nodded meaningfully. “Now look at the man,” Payon said. “See how one of the women leans close and the other does not? The second woman, she is only for cover, so the others can flirt.”

  A waiter arrived with coffee, and Payon paused before decoding the rest of the café. One woman—very risqué—allowed her bangs to slip out from beneath her head scarf. The men were all clean-shaven. If they were real believers in Khomeini—real “Hezbollahis”—they’d sport at least three days’ stubble, a symbol of Islamic humility. At another table, a man and woman glanced furtively into each other’s eyes, an intimacy not normally permitted in public. Through Payon’s expert lens, the innocent coffee shop was gradually revealing itself as a den of illicit seduction.

  “You see, we have learned a few tricks in ten years,” he said. There were other deceptions, which he ticked off on his fingers:

  Sitting away from the window to avoid detection by passing patrols.

  Borrowing a baby when going on a date to ward off demands for marriage certificates.

  Buying tickets separately at the movie theater, then slipping beside each other when the lights went down.

  Masquerading as a taxi driver so you could cruise the streets in search of single women.

  Periodic crackdowns made it risky to attempt even such oblique contact between the sexes. But Payon felt confident, after scanning the scene in the coffee shop, that the atmosphere was loosening up.

  “Perhaps soon,” he said, “I will take a chance and come here with my girlfriend.”

  * * *

  The coded scene in the coffee shop became the leitmotif of our week in Tehran. Arab countries had made me accustomed to indirection. But Persian subtlety was of another order of magnitude. Shiite theology holds that the world will be redeemed by the return of the twelfth imam, a religious leader who vanished in the ninth century, without a successor. Shiites believe the imam never really died; he is in “occultation”—hidden but present. Understanding Iran was like finding the twelfth imam; the truth was there, somewhere, if only you could peel away the onionskins of obfuscation.

  Persian invitations typified this obscurity. As in Arab countries, Iranian hospitality was immediate and abundant. Except that offers rarely led to anything. A man who invited me to dinner didn’t show up, as planned, to drive me to his home. A student we invited for coffee didn’t appear.

  Fear was a factor, but not the only one. “In Iran, an invitation must be repeated three times,” explained a dissident whom I will call Sharam, one of the few people I met who honored our rendezvous. “It’s proper to say no the first two times and then if it’s offered again to say yes.”

  Sharam had gone to college in the United States and been mystified by blunt American ways. “I was surprised to find in the United States that yes means yes and no means no,” he said. “This seemed very rude to me.” The problem was particularly acute with women. If she immediately said yes to an invitation or advance, what did this mean? “And if she said no, well, I’d assume it was really a deep yes. She actually wanted me.”

  Sharam offered to take us to a party in north Tehran. As usual, the invitation was cryptic. “I think,” he said, “you will find it interesting to see what goes on behind closed doors.” Sharam picked us up at the hotel just after nightfall. His wife sat beside him in the front seat, hooded and silent. We drove to north Tehran and parked in front of a brown stucco duplex. Sharam knocked lightly on the door and it opened just enough for us to slip inside.

  “Sharam! Maryam!” the hostess cried, kissing them each on the lips. She was wearing a silver miniskirt, which matched the streaks in her carefully permed hair. A coatrack in the foyer was draped in black; in north Tehran, women left their chadors at the door. Maryam peeled hers off instantly, as a child might discard an itchy sweater. “Ah, much better,” she sighed, shaking out long curls. Like the hostess, she wore a short skirt and a sleeveless, low-cut blouse. Turning to take Geraldine’s chador, she smiled broadly and gave us each a kiss on the cheek. “In the car I could not greet you properly,” she said.

  There were twenty guests arrayed around the living room, nibbling pistachios and tapping their feet to a Madonna cassette. The music played at low volume. Thick dark curtains were drawn tightly across the windows.

  “Let me offer you some of Iran’s finest,” the host said, handing me a glass of clear alcohol. The vodka was raisin-based and made by Christian Armenians, who were permitted to drink at home and used the privilege to produce bathtub booze for other Iranians. In the four days since we’d boarded Iran Air in Frankfurt, I hadn’t tasted alcohol or seen the hair, neck, arms or legs of a woman other than Geraldine. Now, taking it all in at once, I felt an exaggerated intoxication, as though I’d walked into a drunken orgy instead of a weeknight cocktail party in the suburbs.

  The same overblown naughtiness infected the guests. The women, most of whom were in their mid-thirties, wore tight, frilly skirts, none of which reached as far as the knee. Some added black lace stockings and spike heels—the sort of vampish, costumey getup a sophomore might have worn to a campus disco at a Midwestern campus, circa 1975. Farrah Fawcett hairdos and blood-red lipstick completed the effect.

  The male guests looked much as they would have on the street, except they were all clean-shaven and one wore a loud plaid tie (most Iranians disdained ties as an emblem of the decadent West). Male modesty in Iran required only long sleeves and loose trousers.

  “For us, it is not so liberating to dress up,” explained an engineer named Farshad. “So we drink too much instead.” He drained his vodka and winced. “In the West I would pour such stuff in the sink.”

  Farshad had studied engineering at a Baptist college in North Carolina and returned just before the revolution. “I didn’t think it was possible for people to be so ignorant and backward,” he said of his American classmates. “Until I came home.” He started a consulting company, but after Khomeini seized power, four of his six partners fled overseas. Farshad stayed, he said, because the exodus of trained Iranians and foreign technicians put a premium on the skills of those who remained. “In the West, I would be nothing special,” he said. “But here I am a big fish.” He chuckled. “A big fish in an ocean of crazy people.”

  Most of the guests had known each other since high school, and they met at each other’s homes about once a week. It was relatively easy for wealthy Iranians to travel abroad, and holiday souvenirs littered the coffee table; a German tennis magazine, Italian fashion catalogues and a photo album showing the party’s host and hostess in Japan. The guests took turns devouring the pages with almost pornographic pleasure.

  “It is a little sad, no?” Farshad said, following my gaze. “It becomes a little boring like this, week after week. But what else is there to do? Go to the mosque?”

  Our conversation was interrupted by a little girl running into the room and leaping into Farshad’s lap. She wanted her father to change the videotape she was watching. I followed the two of them to the back of the house, where four children sat on a bed, eyes riveted to a cartoon on the television screen. It was Popeye, dubbed into Farsi. Most Western programs were prohibited in Iran, usually because they showed women with their heads uncovered, or c
ouples kissing.

  “Things are getting better,” Farshad said, changing Popeye to Pink Panther. An actress had recently appeared in a Tehran theater wearing a wig instead of a veil. And he’d seen a Bogart movie aired on late-night television. “This, for us, is glasnost.”

  Farshad’s daughter was nine and had already assumed a dual personality. At home, her parents drank vodka and watched bootleg videos smuggled from the West. At school, she wore hejab, sang Khomeini songs and said nothing of her parents’ behavior. But Farshad worried about her approaching adolescence. Would she rebel against us or against them? Which would make life more difficult for her? And for the first time he was thinking of taking his family out of Iran for good. “You cannot spend your whole life behind closed curtains, drinking bad vodka and listening to low-volume Madonna.”

  We returned to find the others digging into a vegetable stew spiced with mint and thyme. Home-cooked food in Iran was the best I’d yet sampled in the Middle East. Over dinner, the guests quizzed Geraldine and me about the funeral. They seemed surprised by our account of the size and sincerity of the crowd, and also depressed. “I thought they were using wide-angle lenses,” Farshad said of the Iranian television broadcasts. “The crowd seemed much too big.”

  The conversation confirmed the impression I’d begun to form while wandering Tehran’s streets—that there were two completely separate cities, one poor and devout, the other bourgeois and disenchanted. North Tehranis were frozen in time, like White Russians or French monarchists, left on the sidelines by revolution.

  But as usual in Iran, nothing was as clear-cut as that. Most of the guests said they’d originally supported the revolution, and although they came to hate Khomeini, they found it hard to rejoice at news of his death.

  “I cried and had to take a Valium,” Maryam confessed. Farshad had reacted similarly. “I poured myself a glass of vodka and said a private toast. But mostly I just felt hollow.”

  Khomeini, for all his fanaticism, hadn’t abused power to enrich himself or advance his family. But the guests’ grudging respect for the imam had another source. They felt the same pride as other Iranians when Khomeini thumbed his nose at the rest of the world. The imam had even issued one last rage from the grave, bequeathing on the United States and moderate Arab states a final benediction in his will: “May God’s curse be upon them.”

  “The superpowers thought they owned us, and he stood up to them,” Maryam said.

  Sharam nodded. “Imagine someone telling you for decades that you should wear Western clothes, have Western values, think Western thoughts,” he said. “Then someone stands up and says, ‘Fuck you! We have a culture and history of our own.’” He paused, gazing into his vegetable stew. “Khomeini gave Iran some self-respect. It was a very exhilarating ten years.”

  The room went silent for a moment. Then the hostess came in from the kitchen, bearing cups of Turkish coffee. “Don’t forget to read your fortune in the grinds,” she said gleefully. “It’s un-Islamic!”

  The others laughed, draining their vodka. I caught Geraldine’s eye. Is this place confusing, or what?

  Iranians, like Arabs, eat late and don’t linger long once the dinner is done. It was midnight when the guests got up and said their goodbyes. The women stopped at the door to collect their chadors; miniskirts and streaked blond curls disappeared beneath anonymous hoods.

  “We will see you next week, yes?” the hostess asked Maryam. She nodded, pulling the veil tightly beneath her chin and heading into the night.

  * * *

  The rules of everyday commerce were as veiled as those regulating social life. A few days after our arrival, when shops began to reopen, I lost myself in the dingy maze of covered streets that run through Tehran’s Bazaar-e-Bozorg, the Grand Bazaar. At first glance the market resembled an Arab souk, with each cramped alley devoted to a different product: metalware, plastic goods, clothes, carpets, nuts and spices, worry beads, watches, chadors. Motorcyclists raced between the stalls, adding exhaust fumes to air already ripe with saffron and incense. In the carpet bazaar, old men crouched by ancient looms, working thread by thread on silks from Isfahan and Qum so finely wrought that there were five hundred knots to each square inch of rug.

  But the surface bustle concealed a curious absence of actual buying and selling. There were almost as many merchants as shoppers, and most storeowners showed little interest in luring passersby into their shops. Instead, they sat clustered together, smoking and sipping tea, and chatting in lowered voices.

  I navigated out of the bazaar and stopped at a building labeled “Chamber of Commerce.” It seemed a curious, shah-era dinosaur. Since I was on assignment for The Wall Street Journal, I decided to pay a visit.

  “Always we are happy to talk with Wall Street,” declared an amiable official, showing me into his office. He wore aviator glasses and a frayed seersucker suit, and proudly showed me his graduate degree in systems analysis from MIT. Waving out at Tehran’s smoggy skyline, he added, “This city is bursting with opportunities.”

  I took out my notebook, and the official chatted nonstop for an hour. About his years in Cambridge. About foreign business prospects in Tehran. About an upcoming trade fair. About the gluttony of the West. About the prevalence of bestiality in Europe. And about America’s sick attachment to material things. “If you want spiritual peace, it is enough to have one television set,” he said. “Iran wants your technology but not your promiscuity.”

  As the conversation degenerated, I decided that the prospects for foreign business in Iran were not so good.

  But the official did offer one insight. I told him about my visit to the market and asked how it was that the bazaaris survived.

  “Survive?” he said. “They thrive. The bazaar is the healthiest sector of the Iranian economy.”

  Most of the shops were fronts for the bazaaris’ actual business: loan-sharking, black-marketeering and currency speculation. All those men who appeared to be idly sipping tea were actually cutting deals worth millions of riyals. As usual, the truth about Iran was in occultation, hidden but present.

  “You must remember,” the Chamber of Commerce man said, seeing me to the door, “that ‘bazaar’ is a Persian word.”

  * * *

  “Bizarre” seemed a more appropriate word for Iran. On our last day in Tehran, I was tapping out a story when the telephone rang at the Laleh Hotel.

  “Hello,” I said. There was nothing at the other end. “Anyone there?”

  A woman’s voice came on the line and said timidly, “Hello. What your name?”

  “Tony. Who are you?”

  “Merced.”

  Had I met a woman named Merced?

  “Toady,” she continued, “what are you doing?”

  “Tony. T-O-N-Y. I’m sitting on the bed.”

  “Sitting on the bed,” she repeated. “Toady, what color your eyes?”

  “Do I know you, Merced?” Silence again. “Who are you?”

  “I am student of economics. I just begin university.”

  “Why are you calling?”

  “Just to talk. With a foreigner.” She paused. “With a man.”

  “Merced, how did you get my number?”

  She giggled. “This is secret.”

  “Where do you live?”

  “This is more secret.” She giggled again. “Toady, you are married?”

  “Yes.”

  “What her name is?”

  “Geraldine.”

  “This is very beautiful name. She is beautiful?”

  “Yes.”

  She paused. “Toady, what color your eyes is?”

  “Blue. Bluish-green.”

  “What color your hairs is?”

  “Blond. What color is yours?”

  “This is secret.” The giggle again. “Toady, you come to Iran more?”

  “I hope so.”

  “I must go no
w.”

  The phone line went dead. I lay back on the bed. The conversation gave me an odd sense of déjà vu. It took me a moment to locate the memory. It was the black-veiled woman in the Empty Quarter: “I love you,” she had said. “I love you always.” Two years later, I was lying on a lumpy bed in the Laleh Hotel, still fielding conversations I could not begin to comprehend.

  17

  EXODUS FROM EGYPT

  Metal Fatigue

  I believe in doubt. I believe in keeping clear of believers.

  —DONALD HAYS,

  The Hangman’s Children

  In the cool of the Cairo day, when the sun lay low across the desert, I liked to pull on a pair of tired sneakers, strap a Walkman to my waist and run around a track circling the soccer field beside my apartment. The track was a pleasing ocher, the field a soothing splash of green amid miles of ferroconcrete. Teenage Egyptians pole-vaulted over a five-foot-high wire and onto a mattress that exhaled dust each time they landed. Except for a mosque abutting one corner of the oval, and women in Islamic veils resting their elbows on the fence, I could have been jogging around a high school field in Lubbock, Texas, or Butte, Montana.

  The only Western cassette on offer at the local music shop was a bootleg disco tape with pulsing beats and songs such as “Sexual Healing” and “Ring My Bell.” Heading out at sunset, I usually hit the track just as the evening call to prayer wafted out from the mosque’s minaret.

  “God is great!” came the muezzin’s call.

  “Get up! Get up!” Marvin Gaye growled through my headphones.

  “There is no God but God!”

  “That’s the way, uh huh uh huh, I like it, uh huh uh huh.”

  By the time I’d made my third or fourth turn around the track, men in turbans had fallen to their knees, bowing toward Mecca.

  “Mohammed is the messenger of God!” the muezzin cried as Patti Labelle cooed in my ear. “Voulez-vous coucher avec moi, ce soir?”