My Life as a Traitor: An Iranian Memoir

by Zarah Ghahramani

  Behnam excused himself and shuffled his way past the knees of my friends and his friends. I thought he was going for good. I looked around at my friends, all of them chatting cheerfully, eating popcorn, negotiating the twists and turns of courtship with poise and grace. Why couldn’t I be like that?

  Underlying the features of courtship in my own country, the age-old elements of boy-girl relationships, common to all cultures, still endure. Once again, I was attempting to talk two languages, just as I did when, as a child, I taught myself to speak the language of the Islamic Revolution and the far more fluent language of indoor life. But that had been years ago. Now I found it so difficult to pick up this new, circumlocutory language of courtship. That was what made me envious of my friends. I sat there brooding on my self-consciousness, or whatever it was that prevented me from saying in a natural way the sweet or clever or devious or coy things my friends said to the boys they wanted to encourage.

  Behnam came back. He had fruit juices for both of us. I somehow managed to give him a smile—such a simple thing and yet, for me, so hard! We didn’t say a word for the rest of the movie.

  I had fallen in love with someone I couldn’t even talk to. After that agonizing evening, Behnam and I saw each other now and then, but I stayed away from him whenever I could without seeming rude, because I was terrified of being rejected. He remained courteous and considerate, always inquiring if he could give me a lift to one party or another, but I usually declined. Wretched and fed up with myself, I finally decided to talk to my mom. I knew that she would listen sympathetically and have something sensible to say, something intelligent, free from dogma. My mother’s advice was direct: next time I was asked to a party by Behnam, I should say yes. My mother assured me that he would be getting the better deal, that I was a beautiful girl, that any man would bless the day I came into his life, and so on. Of course, one talks to one’s mother in order to be reassured in this way, to be flattered, to have one’s self-confidence restored, and that was the effect of my mother’s advice on me.

  It is customary in Iran to find some roundabout way of asking a girl out. Behnam didn’t invite me to parties; he would ask me if I needed a lift. The next time he asked me that question, I said, “Sure, if it’s not out of your way.” The evening unfolded in the manner of a scene in a paperback romance, I am happy to report; I would have no complaints if the whole of life, for everyone, imitated a paperback romance. Everything was perfect: me, him, a beautiful Tehran night, music, stars. On the way home, Behnam parked the car in a quiet street in the north of the city with the stark Alborz mountains rearing above us like huge cardboard cutouts. Even at that late hour, the racket of the city was still audible. Tehran is a machine that throbs along dully after midnight, then rouses to an earsplitting cacophony in the morning. I love the idling sound of late-night traffic from the city. I love the shouting and arguing and cursing and honking of the daytime, too, but the nighttime has its own special allure. I was perfectly well aware that Behnam wanted to kiss me, and I’m ashamed to say that I was not above engaging in that girlie, teasing thing of making the man wait a little longer, enjoying the power of it, knowing with certainty that I could ask him to run barefoot around the block if I wanted to, and that he would sigh and complain but obey. “Listen to the rumble,” I said. “It never stops. No, not ever. Don’t you love it?”

  In my own sweet time, we kissed.

  I fell hopelessly in love or, I should say, more hopelessly in love than ever. Behnam’s tenderness, his attentiveness to my moods, his courtesy and consideration made me feel as if we two were the most important, and certainly the most glorious thing happening on Earth; that we were a milestone event in the life of the universe. And then along came politics.

  I must explain that the business culture of Iran under the mullahs creates mutants, people who have two heads. Businessmen are by nature pragmatists; their gaze is set not on some undefined shape away in the distance but on a very strongly defined shape not that far away at all. They deal in the concrete. They may not always be hostile to poetry, but they are not themselves poets. And this, I think, is true of the business mentality all over the world. But businessmen may also be sympathetic to the things that poets and visionaries clamor for, such as liberty and justice. In Iran, you can’t do business without the support of the regime, in one form or another, including the tacit, and you will not get any support from the regime if you are openly sympathetic to poets and visionaries. So you hide your sympathies, as Behnam did. You never say a word to contradict the policies of the mullahs. But the danger is that you will become what you do; that your silent sympathies will wither for lack of expression, and even though you continue to whisper your qualified approval of the kids in the streets crying out for change, your heart, your mind, and your soul are the captives of the mullahs.

  Behnam was first and foremost a businessman, a business pragmatist. He and his father managed a very profitable petrochemical company, his father handling the American end, Behnam the Iranian end. He was a trusted member of what is known as “the community,” the corps of Iranian businessmen sanctioned by the regime to maintain the nation’s involvement in the world economy. Those in the community are on permanent probation. The unspoken understanding is that the members of the business community will not be required to trumpet the regime’s ideology, but they will also not ever voice criticism. It is a bit like the tacit agreement that informs some marriages, particularly celebrity marriages: fidelity is not an expectation, but any messing around must be done in secret; it must never reach the front pages.

  Although I was aware that my politics didn’t meet with Behnam’s complete approval, I wasn’t much concerned. After all, Behnam barely had time for politics; he was so busy making deals and troubleshooting on his cell phone that it was a wonder he could find time even to notice what was going on in the wider world. But what I didn’t realize was that Behnam, for his part, didn’t consider that my politics amounted to much, didn’t believe that I had much emotional investment in the things I said I believed in. It was therefore a terrific shock to him when he heard of a speech on reform I’d made before fellow students at the university. He was outraged. He found me walking down a corridor and pulled me into an empty classroom.

  “What in God’s name have you done? Are you insane?!”

  “I made a speech. I said what I believe. Is that a problem?”

  “You know that I’m in the community. You know exactly what I do. You knew it even before we became close.”

  “Is it necessary to shout at me?”

  “Zarah, what in the hell is going on in your head?”

  “Would you please tell me why you think it necessary to scream at me?”

  “That’s the last time, and I mean the last time you do such a stupid thing. I want you out of this shit! Do you understand? I want you out of it. What you did before you knew me is your business, but now it’s different. I don’t give a damn what you did before you knew me. You get out of this shit now, and you stay out! Do you hear what I’m saying, Zarah?” I wasn’t to know it at the time, but the next time someone shouted at me in this way would be in Evin Prison.

  Behnam telephoned me the night following our argument, but I wouldn’t speak to him. I felt ill with shock and disappointment. There was no question that I loved Behnam, but his outburst had confused me. Love, by its nature, is hostile to change, even to alteration. In Shakespeare’s famous sonnet, “love is not love/which alters when it alteration finds,” but I wonder how true that is. Love is deep, certainly, but so is conviction, including political conviction. I was sick at heart, because the things that had the deepest hold on me were at war with my affections. When I made my speech about reform, I was not attempting to establish myself as fashionably radical. I was speaking about issues that seemed to me as crucial as love. Surely love is about the liberty of the soul, and my politics were also about the liberty of the soul. It would be true to say that I had no real expectation of being kidnapped
in the heart of Tehran and hustled off to an interrogation cell. I did know that making that speech meant trouble, but it was trouble of the sort you can’t avoid.

  After that initial argument, we fought almost every day, Behnam and I. I defended myself; he attacked my politics. He wanted me to quit the university and prepare myself for marriage. For me, that was out of the question. I was ready for romance, certainly, but I was by no means ready for the conventional sort of marriage that Behnam appeared to have in mind. Even asking me to quit my university studies implied that he thought my education was utterly beside the point. Maybe he thought literature was a waste of time, too. What I wanted for our marriage, if we were to have a marriage, was kissing, hugging, and a great deal of reading. I imagined a solid wall of books before I imagined a nursery. Our bickering was only ever suspended when Behnam answered his cell phone. I would be sitting beside him, listening to him chat with well-known members of parliament, and sometimes with people so elevated in the regime that I was stunned at the ease of his conversation with them. I said to him once, “Is that who I think it is?” Behnam responded by telling me that his business dealings had nothing whatsoever to do with me, or with us as a couple.

  All the while, I was developing a more complete comprehension of his true position within the business community. What I had at first been unwilling to concede—that Behnam was, for all intents and purposes, part of the regime—I grew closer and closer to admitting. Behnam was quite willing to agree that Iran’s unelected Council of Guardians, originally appointed by Khomeini, was the de facto ruler of the country, since they could reject any bill passed by the elected parliament. He would also concede that the regime was content to subvert the constitution in any way it liked, that it maintained a secret police force as disgraceful as SAVAK, that corruption within the higher echelons of the regime ran rampant, that women had less legislated freedom than slaves. None of this mattered to him; or I should say, it didn’t matter enough.

  But no sooner had I admitted that the man I loved was in effect my political enemy than I began that process, common to women all over the world, I believe, that is supposed to conclude with the conversion of the beloved to one’s point of view. Women marry alcoholics, telling themselves that they will change them, that love will change them; they marry wife beaters, believing the same thing—the beloved fellow will see the light; they marry philanderers, believing that constant affection and the daily evidence of one’s devotion will see the beloved settle happily for blissful domesticity. It is almost an occupational hazard of being female, this profound conviction that love will bring about desired change. Perhaps it is a form of egocentricity. Perhaps there is a type of arrogance in women which compels them to believe that love is so vital that even a benighted fool will eventually give up his appalling habits. There is certainly no evidence to support this conviction, not anywhere in the world that exists here and now or in history. Setting one’s better judgment aside to marry a man on the basis of one’s convictions about the goodness in him rising to the top like cream on milk is surely a folly.

  And yet I took Behnam to political meetings. I gave him the chance to see the obduracy and intolerance of the regime. I introduced him to friends whom I thought might have the eloquence to persuade him to a happier point of view. But he would leave halfway through the meetings, or get into bitter arguments with my friends. He was leading his own resistance against my personal reform movement. Finally, my friends begged me not to bring Behnam anymore. They were fed up with his captiousness and sarcasm and his mulishness. At the same time, he helped the reform movement financially, which was generous of him, of course, but, in another way, not so generous. He was buying me off, in effect; he was saying, “I’ll do what I can with money, but really, your politics repel me.”

  My mother met him and liked him well enough. And why wouldn’t she? He was a man of tremendous influence. He could make a telephone call and get fines canceled, disputes settled, parking tickets voided. He spoke on a daily basis with some of the most powerful figures in the nation about the import of chemicals and about business in general, relaying information from his father in America, making arrangements to sidestep trade embargoes. He wore a suit, he was well groomed, he spoke politely. My mother saw in him a protector for me, and when all is said and done, mothers everywhere are inclined to opt for sons-in-law who will provide for their daughters and keep them out of harm’s way. And of course, I had told her how much I loved him, so she was thinking of my heart, too. My father hadn’t met Behnam at this stage of our relationship; I had the feeling that the meeting, when it came about, would be awkward, and I’d been avoiding it. Behnam, for his part, seemed to me to be happy to postpone any interview with Dad. The thing was, my mother was happy to see me marry into the establishment. But my father? He’d be far more critical of Behnam’s links with the country’s puppet masters. It was politics once again. For my father, political convictions were a crucially important feature of a man’s (or a woman’s) makeup. They were not something adopted for the sake of expedience. And I was my father’s daughter when it came to politics, although I placed the emphasis on personal liberty more pointedly than he did.

  The relationship stumbled along, dominated by bickering and disagreement. I had no intention of simply walking away from Behnam, but at the same time, I found it impossible to imagine our life together. My mother, my brothers and sisters, my nephews all took it as settled that I would marry Behnam, and that we would make a terrific couple. After all, in Iran a young woman would not normally accept a suitor unless she intended to marry him, and although my family was less conventional in that way, it must have seemed to them that I would have to be insanely fussy if I didn’t marry Behnam. For me, it was all a puzzle. I loved a man I could not marry, but I didn’t have the character simply to stand up and declare with sincere pride that I could not commit myself to a marriage that would not make me happy.

  In this desperately conflicted state, I agreed one day to accompany Behnam to a wedding party. The groom was one of his friends. One part of me wanted people to see us together, being a couple. So I dressed in the way I would normally dress for such an occasion—modestly enough but not conservatively. There were degrees of female religious observance in Iran, advertised by the severity of attire. One could dress to demonstrate the undiluted fundamentalism of one’s husband, leaving barely a square inch of skin exposed, and one could dress to show proper respect for the statutes of the state without going overboard: a vestment worn to cover one’s form from shoulders to lower calf in any of a half dozen fairly subdued colors; a scarf to cover the hair; a little lipstick, some eyeliner, some blush. Between these two extremes (so far as public exposure was concerned) lay a dozen variations. The choice of attire and grooming served roughly the same purpose in Iran as in many other societies, including the West. What long hair and blue jeans were to kids in the United States in the sixties a pale blue vestment, pale green scarf, and pale pink lipstick were to young women in nineties Iran.

  So far, so good. I was dressed comfortably, and I assumed no one would take offense. But on the way to the party, Behnam stopped the car in an out-of-the-way place and produced an extremely orthodox version of a chador, such as only the most devout Iranian women wore: a severe black garment that covers the entire body, including most of the face.

  “What’s this?” I asked.

  “I want you to wear this tonight,” he said tersely, “and I don’t want a religious, political, historical, or any other kind of lecture about it. I want you for who you are, Zarah, but when we’re with these people, we have to be like them. Okay? No ifs, no buts.”

  I drew a sharp breath, looked at the uncompromising set of Behnam’s jaw, thought about it for a half minute or so, then capitulated. It was just for now, I promised myself.

  At the party, all the women were dressed exactly like me. Anyone glancing at the small crowd of us conversing together and segregated from the men would have been hard put to tell one
woman from another. We were advertising, as a group, satisfaction with the regime, with its rules and dogma, just as women at a Republican Party fund-raiser, particularly a fund-raiser in the Bible Belt, in the United States would do now. No man would bother asking me (or any other woman at the party) my opinion on any political, social, or cultural subject. There would be no point; it would be assumed that my opinion would endorse the government’s and the clergy’s position on everything: foreign policy, the obligations of Muslim women, the untold benefits to Iran of the Islamic Revolution. And it would be the same, I would imagine, at this Bush fund-raiser in the Bible Belt I have just plucked out of the air; any woman wearing an immodest Versace dress would be barred from entry; every woman could have her opinions on almost every issue assumed. But it vexed me almost to madness to know this. It made me ill. I wanted to scream, “It’s bullshit! I’m wearing this thing because I was made to!” I looked across at the influential men in the male salon, and I knew that some of them would have been responsible for imprisoning certain of my friends.

  It was a farce, and I was a fraud. I took a deep breath and walked straight into the male salon. All the men fell silent. I was stared at with as much astonishment as if I’d suddenly jumped onto a table and started dancing with my chador hitched up to my thighs. Behnam, distressed, apologized to the man he’d been talking to. “Sorry, hajji, she’s my fiancée.”

  He took my arm and marched me out of the salon. “What in God’s name do you think you’re doing? Do you know what reputation means?” Behnam spoke in that tone of outraged conviction, so false, that I had learned to detest.