Camelia

by Camelia Entekhabifard

  On the flimsiest pretenses, the “second of Khordad” newspapers (referring to the date of Khatami’s election), were being shut down one by one and their contributors dragged to court. Zan had been banned from publishing for two weeks based on charges made by the head of police security, Mohammad Naghdi, in response to an article that accused him of having been involved in an attack on two prominent governmental figures. Several of my more provocative articles were put on hold indefinitely after the ban was lifted. It seemed that every day we were about to run a piece I’d written on the re-virginization of girls in Tehran, we’d hear the newest reports of Hezbollah sympathizers demonstrating and attacking newspaper offices. Faezeh would loom over my editor, Agha-ye Balafkan, and say, “Tomorrow they’re coming down on Zan, so pull this piece from the issue. Schedule it for next week.”

  One of the most inflammatory pieces I was working on at Zan would never be published in its pages. Everyone knew about my series of trips to the holy city of Qom. Before I finished the article, Zan was shut down permanently and I was in detention, where my interrogator asked me again and again, “What were you doing in Qom?”

  A co-worker tipped me off to this sensational story as a way of repaying my help in obtaining an identity card for his daughter. He was a specialist in religious issues and would write religious polemics refuting cases where Islamic jurisprudence was abused. He was a hojjat ul-Islam who would wear short-sleeved shirts and jeans—the only indication of his religious status was his full beard. When he showed us a picture of himself in a robe and turban, I couldn’t help gaping in surprise. He had named his baby daughter Saghar, literally, “a cup for serving wine,” and no registry would issue an identity card. He had gone to court, bringing with him books of poetry by Hafez and Khomeini as evidence in his favor but all to no avail.

  “Get ready,” I’d said to my mullah colleague, who sat with his arms wrapped around his knees in despair. “We’re going together to the registry on Khiaban-e Niyavaran. I’ll get you the card.”

  “It’s no use. I’ve been there, too.”

  “But now we’re going there together.”

  At the registry, I told him to go sit in the corner and stay put. I put on a big, coquettish smile as I went up to the window. Half an hour of flirting later, I handed Saghar’s identity card to her father. In return, he gave me a gift fit for a journalist: a terrible story to tell about the lives of women prostituting themselves in the religious city of Qom. He’d been a student in Qom and knew the right places to go, so he volunteered to help me make the trip.

  FEBRUARY 1999

  Before I visited Qom, I started by investigating prostitution in Iran’s bigger cities. In Tehran I was introduced to a nurse who performed illegal abortions in her middle-class home. She worked in a hospital during the day. The new Renault sedan she had bought with the money she made in her off-hours sat outside. One afternoon, she allowed me to pose as her assistant and watch one of the operations.

  The patient entered the nurse’s home, where dirty dishes were piled up in the sink and the smell of old cooking oil filled the air. The nurse asked her, “Did you shave?” The young woman said no, she had only trimmed her pubic hair. The nurse sent her to the bathroom with only an old razor and common soap. She came out again and the nurse told her to come into the bedroom, where the woman stripped and lay down on the examination table, her face white with fear. She spread her legs apart and dug her nails into the hands of the friend she had brought along for support.

  The nurse injected her patient with an anesthetic, placed a plastic bucket on the floor below her, and began her work. The girl’s face and body twisted and turned in pain. She screamed for her mother. Suddenly the nurse stopped. She called the girl a slut and told her to shut up. “If you scream,” she said, “I will leave you just as you are.” Her friend stuffed a piece of cloth into the girl’s mouth. Instantly, the white cloth turned red as she bit her lips from the pain. Blood seeped out from between her legs, running down into the plastic bucket as the nurse yanked and twisted with her metal forceps. When it was over, the girl’s friend had to help her to her feet. Dazed, she staggered out of the room.

  JULY 1999

  “Welcome to the City of Blood and Uprising.” Only about an hour from Tehran, Qom is like the Vatican for the world’s one hundred million Shi’a Muslims and home to the seminary where mullahs are groomed for their chosen vocation. My guide motioned for the driver to stop at the tollbooth so we could pay the entrance fee. I walked out and adjusted my black chador.

  Wrapped in their own black chadors, I could see the women—“the hidden attraction of Qom”—milling among the crowd. There was nothing to set them apart from the flow of students, teachers, and bureaucrats. It was their purpose that made them different—that they had come to agree to a sigheh to lie beside a Muslim man for a few miserable minutes and earn the pittance that sustained their wretched lives. It is for this that Qom is known as a place of both pilgrimage and pleasure.

  When I went to visit Qom for the last time, Zan had been shut down only a few months before. I was planning to leave Iran within ten days to return to America and I knew that coming back to the holy city put me in great danger. The situation for reformist papers wasn’t getting any better, and every day more and more journalists were losing their jobs. But this article had become so important to me that I couldn’t just set it aside. I knew that if I could take down these women’s stories, with the help of Faezeh or the foreign journalists I had befriended around the globe, I would find a newspaper or magazine to publish them.

  My investigations soon led me to the Sheikhan cemetery located in the courtyard of an ancient mosque in the city center. The burial ground is not far from the resting place of a masumeh, whose shrines draw seas of pilgrims every year. The women sat silent and motionless on the dirt graves, so entirely covered in their chadors that only their faces and hands revealed that these pitiful masses of fabric were in fact women. From the four corners of the courtyard, clusters of young seminary students clad in the traditional turbans, robes, and mantles worn by mullahs teemed into the courtyard, some smiling as though they were setting off on vacation, others looking at the women to see who was new. Some surveyed the pictures of the martyrs from the war with Iraq that were displayed everywhere, but most of them surveyed the human wares. A thin young boy, with a watering can in his hand, washed the floor of the courtyard, looking for a customer in need of an introduction.

  I didn’t need his help. I approached them myself. A woman named Mehri pulled her chador aside for me, and I could see she was a young woman in her midthirties, her hair streaked with cheap blond dye, her brightly colored blouse cinched tight to reveal her cleavage. Her face was a mess of garish makeup that betrayed her poor, rural background. Another woman I spoke to could hardly have been more than twenty. When the women uncovered their faces, the murmurs of the young men hovering around us intensified. With their lips they recited blessings, but their eyes were glued to the bare faces and necks of the women. In Shi’a Islam, a man who intends to marry—even if only for a day—is allowed a single glimpse of the woman’s face to make his choice. These brief unveilings would be their only chance.

  My presence among the women was disturbing to the students’ otherwise casual approach. I wanted Mehri to step outside the cemetery to speak with me, but I told her I was worried that the men would get suspicious. She fixed the seminary students circling around her with a look of anger and contempt. “I don’t care,” she said, almost spitting. “I hate these kids.” Safely outside the courtyard, she told me how she had ended up selling herself. She had been married to a truck driver who died in an accident a few years before, leaving her to take care of seven small children and a teenage daughter who had a baby girl of her own. She also weaved carpets, but the money was never enough, so three times a week she would take the bus to Qom. While she talked to me, she looked my driver and guide up and down to see if they might be in the market.

  Need,
sadness, and regret filled her eyes. She smelled pungently of sweat; she was soaking after hours of waiting under the hot sun. She told me that in the tourist months of summer she might take a temporary husband three times a day. “Locals don’t pay much,” she said. “Outsiders are better customers.” I asked her where these “marriages” are consummated. “If they have a home, they take me there,” she said. “If they don’t, we go to the New Cemetery.”

  A cloud of dust and wind churns through the ancient, forgotten New Cemetery, which is located outside the city limits. No one goes there anymore to visit the dead, only the women with temporary husbands in tow. For a few minutes, until the man is finished and they have their money, they lay their bodies next to their client on an old wooden bed covered with a thin mattress. Inside the dusty, cob-webbed tombs, they receive between 20,000 and 40,000 rials ($2 to $4). The participants no longer even follow the rules of the sigheh, which call for a mullah to read a particular blessing. The man just calls, and the woman comes to him. The temporary brides are supposed to remain celibate for three and a half months after each divorce to ensure they aren’t pregnant, but many disregard this convention. They have no choice. They need money to survive.

  They make what passes for a living, enough for their own needs and those of their children and other loved ones, away from the prying eyes of neighbors. None of them believes in selling her body, and unlike prostitutes in other parts of the world who try to attract customers by baring more of themselves, these women clutch their chadors more and more tightly from shame and humiliation. At least in the cemetery, they feel secure. “The home of the dead is a safe place to be,” Mehri says.

  MARCH 1999

  As part of an internship program funded by the European Union, I joined nearly thirty other young reporters from all over the world in the main hall of Radio Free Europe in Prague to participate in a month of intensive training in radio journalism. The Persian-language division, Radio Azadi, had been launched recently and had become known in Tehran as “Radio Overthrow the Government.” After the welcoming ceremonies, a Mr. Calhoun, the director of Azadi, introduced me to the other Iranian staff members. They had all left the country years before, and it was eye opening for them to see a woman from the Islamic Republic with such a modern European appearance. Especially a reporter from Zan, closely connected to Faezeh Hashemi.

  I’d promised myself that I wouldn’t ask anyone what their name was or where they lived, that I’d focus only on my work. The Iranian reporters used false names on air, and it was clear that many were terrified they might expose their families in Iran to risk. I’d take the train straight from my hotel to the radio station to attend daily workshops. The only money I made was about twenty dollars a day for food and transportation. But slowly the staff warmed up to me and asked me to go to lunch with them on their break, if only because with my little book full of telephone numbers, I could breath new life into their programming. At first they only showed me around. Then they wanted to take advantage of my connections and have me produce a program for them.

  “You can use a false name like everyone else.”

  I knew it would help keep me safe, but I didn’t want to use a false name. Why should I stay undercover? I was already well known in Tehran, and I wanted to use my own name. The temptations of being a commentator, of the microphone, of having a far-away audience listening to my voice, it all got the better of me. I compromised. “Salaam dear listeners, this is Camelia Nakha’i and you are listening to Radio Free Europe, Radio Azadi from Prague.”

  I turned into an unofficial but vital member of the radio station. With Gholnaz I’d sit in street-side cafés and drink coffee and eat carrot cake, chatting about Iran and girlish things like fashion and makeup. With Ardalan I joined the nightlife, drinking tequila in the bars downtown and dancing. I remember how happy I was, feeling I was joining the group, thinking everyone was being friendly and open. On only twenty dollars a day, I still bought a small fresh bouquet of wild violets every morning from a lady who sat outside the train station, and I’d fix them to my wrist or the collar of my jacket, or sometimes put them in my hair. I was blind to how unhappy most of the Iranian broadcasters really were. I couldn’t yet understand how terrible it had been for them to flee Iran under death threats or how hard it was for them to see me acting careless and free with my opinions with a bunch of flowers tied around my wrist. I often talked on the phone with Faezeh and defended her against their criticisms of her father. A week before the end of the internship, Calhoun said that if I was interested, he would hire me and I could stay in Prague. It was an attractive offer—the most a newspaper reporter in Tehran could hope to make was a hundred thousand tomans a month (about $120 at the time). A stable future earning three thousand dollars monthly and living in Prague hovered before my eyes—while Zan and my struggle for civil rights beckoned from Iran.

  I explained to Mr. Calhoun that I first had to travel to America to cover a trip planned for Faezeh to speak at the Asia Society in New York and that I then had to go to Iraq to interview Saddam Hussein. I had sweated for months trying to get a visa to Iraq and it had finally come through at the Iraqi embassy in Tehran. A German television reporter, Faramarz Qazi, offered to send a crew with me to Iraq and to buy the license to broadcast my interview. I felt I had to do this historic interview even if Radio Free Europe offered me the best job in the world. But I decided that from Iraq, I would return to Prague, and I was elated as I left Calhoun’s office. A girl working in the Persian division asked me when I was going back home. I smiled and said, “I’m hired. I’m staying here.”

  Then a couple of days before I was scheduled to leave for America, Calhoun asked to speak with me in private. He was playing with something on his desk to avoid eye contact with me. “I’m very sorry to tell you that there is strong opposition to your working here. The women who work here say that if we hire you, they will resign. You have such close ties to Iran that they’re afraid you’ll disclose their identities. Unfortunately, I have to tell you that I can’t offer you the job.” It is always hard to hear such a thing said to you—to lose a job, to fail an exam—but as my father once told me, those losses don’t make your life. I shrugged my shoulders, strangely more relaxed at first than angry, strangely glad to be released from the decision. I realized then that I wanted, more than anything else in the world, to be in Iran working at my newspaper. But I was also afraid, as I realized that the reason I hadn’t turned down the offer originally was that I was nervous about returning to Tehran. My voice had been broadcast over a foreign radio station. Certainly Faezeh would help me, I assured myself; when we met in America I could explain everything to her. Yet I pictured the faces of the women I’d worked with at the station. Had they lied about their fear out of jealousy? Or was I really the only one ready to take such a risk? I was suddenly furious.

  “They’ll have my scalp in Tehran. Why did you let me produce a radio program for you? Why did you let my voice be broadcast? These people who wear black overcoats and hats to come to work so they won’t be recognized, these people who are afraid to even sit by the window in case they are targeted for revenge by agents of the government . . . How did they not think that it’s possible I might get into serious trouble in Tehran just like they would?” I looked boldly at Calhoun. He was playing uncomfortably with his fingers.

  “You produced the show under the name Nakha’i. They won’t know who you are.”

  “How many Camelias do you think there are there in Iran? And Nakha’i is my family name.” The story of our name was told daily in our household when I grew up, the tale of the famous feud surrounding my grandfather, and we all struggled between the two last names, introducing ourselves as “Entekhabifard,” then immediately explaining, “We were Nakha’i, but our grandfather changed it over a family fight.” The Nakha’i name was well known and respected, and many of us were angry to lose it. I’d long wished I could become a Nakha’i again, and the broadcast was a way to become, in that mome
nt, the person I’d always wanted to be. I didn’t believe Calhoun was ignorant of the significance of my last name and certainly must have known the threats I’d face returning to Iran. I went back to my room, and of all the friends I thought I’d made at the radio station, only Ardalan called to help calm me.

  APRIL 1999

  I’d met Dr. Hushang Amir Ahmadi on my first trip to America, when I’d interviewed him for Zan. He was a close supporter of Hashemi Rafsanjani and had taken a stance against Khatami, proclaiming he was a powerless figurehead and that the real money was behind Rafsanjani. It was Rafsanjani, according to Dr. Ahmadi, who had the power to warm relations between the United States and Iran. He had devised an elaborate program to bring Faezeh to New York, to speak at Asia Society and to meet a number of congressional representatives in Washington as well as the first lady, Hillary Clinton. I’d flown directly from Prague, and as I walked into JFK international airport, I saw FBI agents waiting for Faezeh, who they expected would be coming with me.