Are you ready to go, my friend Reza asked me with a quizzical look. Yes, I said, let’s get out of here. His answers were way too long, weren’t they, he said apologetically, as we walked out into the park. He doesn’t know how to talk in sound bites yet, but don’t worry, we’ll get him media-trained. I looked up at the sky, tugging the ends of my veil to hold my head back.
Reza had arranged the interview, as he often did for journalists working in Iran. He worked for the Ministry of Culture in some capacity that I never quite understood, though it was clear he had to have influential friends, because functionaries of the ministry came and went, but Reza stayed put. Whatever it was that he did for the ministry was his day job, but he was an intellectual and scholar at heart and was working toward a doctorate at Tehran University. Reformist politicians and editors, like Asgharzadeh, were his friends, the liberal Islamists with whom he bantered about Western philosophy.
Reza was in his late thirties, lanky, with a brooding manner. He was obsessive about privacy, spoke in a low voice, and was convinced that intelligence agents were following his every move. Within the reformist clique, the one-time revolutionaries who had undergone a change of heart and decided they liked freedom, Reza was particularly broad-minded. Many reformists didn’t really care about Western thought, they just learned the theorists (John Stuart Mill for dummies) so they could say the fashionable things and be invited to conferences in Europe.
Necessarily, their intellectual inquiry, their appreciation for notions such as the rights of the individual, was utilitarian and only marginally sincere. But Reza explored out of a deep and generous curiosity, and actually applied the logical extension of his explorations to the breadth of the world around us. He saw how the political conservatism of the Islamic regime was bound up in its fear and hostility toward women and their sexuality. He was alone in this. The other reformists refused to discuss such matters, and teased Reza like nervous schoolboys.
He offered to give me a ride home, but I said I’d rather walk. I couldn’t bring myself to go back yet. My aunt would be tossing a salad for dinner, and my uncle would arrive with a stack of newspapers, eager to discuss what had been said that day by the men, like Asgharzadeh, who ran the reform movement. The movement. I wondered when we would stop calling it that, this movement that didn’t move. I walked loops around the park, past the old men sitting on the benches, and the young couples on the grass. I told myself reformists, just like any other politician in this regime, had to call people like me foreigners because it was politically necessary for the future of the Islamic Republic. And it wasn’t just me, I reminded myself. Secularists, nationalists, anyone who was not with them was against them. Dividing the country in this way made it easier to rule authoritatively, neatly sidestepping criticism by labeling critics anti-revolutionary or un-Iranian.
Mr. Asgharzadeh was not the first or last person to call me a foreigner. Most of the time, I smiled patiently, pretending not to care, but one day, tightly wound up from another “interview” session with Mr. X and Sleepy, my interrogators, I burst into tears at the lunch table. Why do people keep saying this to me? Khaleh Farzi looked startled, and rose immediately to pour me a cup of hot tea from the samovar. At what point, I asked her, will I stop being considered an outsider? I live here, I breathe the pollution, I suffer the bureaucracy, I carry the passport, both my parents are Iranian, and I know more about Shiism and Iranian poetry than half the girls my age.
Khaleh Farzi tried to console me. “Do you suppose people mean to hurt you, by saying such things? Look at it from their perspective. They think all the exceptional people have left. Can you see it’s almost a compliment?” But I refused to understand. If I felt alienated in America—considered to be from an imagined land of veils, harems, suicide bombers, and wrathful ayatollahs—the only fair compensation was that somewhere else I would be ordinary, just like everyone else.
The day before, my photojournalist friend Dariush and I had argued bitterly over foreignness. Since our neuroses complemented each other with perfect, destructive harmony, we managed to argue grievously over nearly everything, but our most serious confrontations were over Iran. I knew when Dariush called me a foreigner there was no subtle compliment lurking behind this categorization. Don’t demand what’s not yours, he told me peevishly. You weren’t here during the war, when Iraqi warplanes were flying over Tehran. You didn’t have to run into bomb shelters, or duck when windows shattered, or call around to see if your relatives and friends were alive, the mornings after. You don’t know what we endured. So don’t show up here and start calling yourself Iranian.
Stop being such a victim, I hissed back. So there were occasional bombing raids. Do you think you’re the first people to deal with war? What if you were Lebanese? In Beirut, the fighting was street to street. You had to pass through ground combat zones to get to school.
Worried by the noontime outburst, my long silences, and my growing tendency to disappear for afternoons without explanation, Khaleh Farzi asked me to stay the night. The evening wore on, and time slowed to drips, as we shuffled through the newspapers, and watched a German travel show on mute. Time behaved capriciously in Tehran. Sometimes successive days would click past each other rapidly. Sometimes the minutes and hours seemed to swell, their passage slowed by the blurring sameness of cloistered days inside.
Khaleh Farzi lived in the leafy neighborhood of Elahieh, in the northern half of Tehran called Shemroon. Tall trees shaded the narrow streets, still lined with graceful two-story villa-homes, surrounded by gardens and lattice or stone walls. A few blocks away, there was hidden an old house with an expansive garden where people gathered on summer nights for my most beloved pastime—smoking ghalyoon, a water pipe filled with fruit-scented tobacco. On summer evenings, an accordion player wound his way through the alleys, intoning mournful old songs to the rich, organ-like wails of his instrument.
That night, as I lay awake with my regular nocturnal companion, the dictionary, I thought I heard noises outside the window—a suspicious cacophony of barking dogs, banging drawers, and moans that began around one or two A.M. Khaleh Farzi had mentioned hearing odd sounds in the middle of the night before, but her husband and I had both ignored her, dismissing what seemed just another grievance to level against the Starbucks-lacking Islamic Republic. We had discussed the noises one morning over breakfast, after Khaleh Farzi, convinced of her own hearing, had proceeded to investigate. She began by asking the gardener next door to whom the old, deserted house belonged, and returned with eyes sparkling with bemused mortification.
“Azi, can you believe it, his son is the Iranian consul in Milan, . . . the son . . . of a gardener. . . . Milan! . . . His wife asked me to stay for tea. . . . She was really nice, poor woman, . . . but I said no.” Snootiness momentarily distracted her from the haunted house next door. “Do you think his wife wears chador on the streets of Milan?” she continued, envisioning the consul’s wife tripping down the Via Montenapoleone, past the couture houses, in house slippers and a chador smelling of stew.
“But what about the house?” I asked.
“Oh, the house. It’s in the hands of the Ministry of Intelligence.”
Like many of the old villas still standing in Tehran, the house had been confiscated from its owners during the revolution and was now officially owned by the regime. Khaleh Farzi made it her business to know exactly who the old houses in the neighborhood had once belonged to, and could give expert, narrated walking tours (“Here lived the under-secretary to the ministry of petroleum . . . ”). She acquired such information by approaching whoever happened to be outside during her daily walks, and brightly asking, “Excuse me, who was this house stolen from?” One day, she posed the question, rather unwisely, to a man quite clearly pious, and quite clearly not a descendant of the original owners. He screamed at her. “Stolen? What do you mean stolen? This house was liberated, and we’ll keep on liberating and liberating until we liberate them all!”
In the early mont
hs of that year, 2000, an investigative journalist writing for reformist newspapers was slowly revealing the details of an important series of murders. Two years before, four dissident intellectuals had been brutally killed. The Ministry of Intelligence, the public was now learning, had sent death squads that butchered them in their homes. The journalist had also disclosed that it was in the old houses of north Tehran, in the hands of the ministry, where the torture sessions, forced recantations, and planning sessions behind these schemes were conducted.
The dictionary fell closed, as I recalled this conversation and tried to pretend I heard only silence. My heart jumped into my chest, as the door to my room creaked open. Khaleh Farzi, looking like a schoolgirl in her flannel nightdress, stuck her bobbed head in. “Azi, pssst, get up and come to the window, I think they’re torturing someone,” she whispered.
“Er . . . no . . . let’s just leave it.” I turned to my other side, and stared down at the knots of the carpet.
“No really, come,” she insisted. And so I relented, climbing out of bed, and following her to the windowsill, where we perched, peering through the thin white iron bars, over the overgrown weeds, into the backyard of the house.
The barks of the dog were unusual—frantic and angry—and through the dimly lit, dirty window came long, sustained moans, the unmistakable sounds of a human being in pain. Khaleh Farzi stared at me, smug and horrified: “See, didn’t I tell you . . . ? I told you it was haunted, . . . that it was a government safe house.” I tried desperately to control the fear sloshing inside me, and I came to speak, but my tongue was paralyzed, as in dreams where one is being murdered, but cannot scream.
“We have to call 911,” I spluttered, grasping about in the dark for the rotary phone. “Hah! The police? Listen to you! They’re already there. Those are the police,” she said triumphantly, all her resentment unhappily avenged by that hopeless moment when we faced the grim possibilities: a) we were mad and paranoid; b) next door a man was being tortured, or dealt with cruelly, with the sanction of the state; c) if b, then it must perforce go unnamed, uninvestigated, untold. It was unreal, unnerving. We released our tight knuckles from the window, and returned to my bed. Staring at the ceiling, we clasped each other’s hands, and lay silent until the barking ceased, the sun rose, and we finally fell asleep.
After that night, I began to turn inward, doing most of my interviews over the phone, relying on journalist friends to alert me when important news broke. The weight of the world outside, on top of my own interior interrogations, threatened to overwhelm me. Categories of experience that had previously existed clearly in my mind—like “unbearable,” “unacceptable”—lost their meaning, when everyday I saw the unbearable being borne, the unacceptable being accepted. Concepts that had previously obsessed me, like East and West, became so intricate and layered that they inflated into swollen constructs, and floated away.
It wasn’t just that one incident at Khaleh Farzi’s, it was the accumulation of layers of strain. The stories I wrote about most frequently—newspaper closures, arrests, show trials, crackdowns—were pockmarked with sadness of the sort that lingered with me always. My interrogators, Mr. X and Mr. Sleepy, were a shadowy, unnerving presence in the backdrop of my life. Tehran was difficult, a city that like a minefield demanded a constant, intense vigilance, and I wasn’t so set on denying that anymore.
That summer, as the dry, heavy heat descended on central Tehran, I decided I couldn’t live with Pedar Joon anymore. The BBC office, where I had a desk and worked out of, was a nearly one-hour commute each day during rush hour. Most days, after sorting through the newspapers and talking to sources on the phone, I moved about the city—attending student demonstrations at universities and reformist lectures or stopping by a newspaper that was about to be shut down. Half my days were already spent in the car. When time came to make evening plans, I contemplated the long trek back to north Tehran and usually opted to stay home. Since I was already in my hermit phase without the added excuse of traffic, and since socializing at Pedar Joon’s wasn’t comfortable for anyone involved, getting my own place seemed like a good idea all around.
Once I calmed Pedar Joon’s concerns about my living alone, as well as my ongoing spinsterhood (no longer considered a joke, but a serious affliction) I moved to a cozy one-bedroom apartment in Kamranieh. There were two reasons why I chose it. First, it had a magnificent, oak-lined walk-in closet, and to me ample closet space equaled fabulous apartment. Second, the bathroom had atmosphere. Deep tub, antique turquoise tiles, soft lighting.
But my bitter sense of displacement followed me everywhere, to the bazaar, in the expression of the merchant who sold me pillows to decorate my new apartment, to my new neighbors, who watched me move in, with looks of pity and curiosity on their faces, eyeing this girl from America who had chosen to live alone. I gave up searching for myself, and for what constituted the real Iran, whatever that meant. Instead, I dedicated my days to one task alone: decorating my apartment.
My relatives came to visit, and admired the traditional architecture, built around a central garden courtyard. But they all said I was paying too much. I countered that I would probably expire in Tehran without a nice apartment, and given that I didn’t have medical insurance, it was probably worth it.
My American friends got suspicious when I told them. They sent emails demanding to know how a young, single woman could live alone in Tehran. They didn’t believe half the things I told them about Iran, which they assumed was a slightly more cultured version of Saudia Arabia, and began to suspect that I was holed up in Rome spinning elaborate fantasies with a Tehran dateline.
The apartment soon became my world—a substitute for the world outside, to which I seemed not to belong, unfit to understand—and so I figured, it might as well look sublime. I bought plants, chose fabric for bedspreads, hunted for antique tiles in the bazaar, commissioned a table, and mounted track lighting on the ceilings. I put a bronze statue of Antigone on the mantle, and stared at it from every angle for an hour, then moved it across the room, and stared at it there. The objective was to create an interior space where East and West fused with elegance, and the apartment became a canvas on which I could endlessly practice different combinations.
When friends called, I refused to go out. The heat of high summer made the dangerously high pollution especially toxic, and I hated coming home caked with sweat and dust, my veil scented with car exhaust. Come visit me, I suggested to the dwindling number of friends who continued to phone me, long after I had ceased returning calls. Reza was one of those friends, though our friendship perpetually surprised me. We never acknowledged being on close terms publicly. At events where we encountered one another, we nodded stiffly and walked in separate directions.
It took him a long time to trust me. His advice, especially in those early months, guided me through a system of mysterious, potentially dangerous, unknowns. It was from him that I learned most Iranian journalists were routinely interrogated by intelligence agents (Mr. X was not just my cross to bear), and that they were all constantly forced to rat on one another. That I should never let down my guard even with my closest journalist friends, because they would lose their jobs if they didn’t inform, and because they had families to support they had no choice. Certain things I already knew, like watching what I said on the phone. But Reza suggested I get a second mobile number and keep it on reserve, so I would have a clean, untapped line in case of emergencies. The sort of thing that wouldn’t occur to me until I needed it, when it was too late.
He taught me how to recognize a “plant”—a person who casually inserts himself into your life, discreetly offers you tantalizing scoops or sources, or who seeks private information, all with the purpose of entrapping you, or securing material to fatten the file with your name on it, in the event that one day it would be used against you. Evading such people, knowing in what public situations I would be assessed, and how, were not instincts that came naturally to me. But they were required for rep
orting in Iran without triggering suspicion.
Speaking over our mobile phones, which were certainly bugged, we used a code. “I’ve printed out an article for you” meant I need to see you immediately. “I’m not that busy today” meant I’ll be home in the evening, come by. In person, after exchanging a few pleasantries, we both turned off our phones, and removed the batteries—supposedly the phones could be used as listening devices. I thought he was paranoid and treated all his cautionary measures lightly, until his friends—reformist editors and intellectuals—began getting rounded up.
The hard-line judiciary started arresting activists, and intellectuals whose opinions were considered criminal, on a regular basis in early 2000. The process was methodical. Among the first to be arrested were the influential thinkers whose work inspired and propelled the reform movement. Once they were behind bars, the judiciary moved against the prominent editors and journalists in the pro-reform press, who discredited the conservative clergy each day in their newspapers.
The campaign was designed to make the personal cost of political opposition untenable, and it worked. The prison sentences varied between one year and ten. And then there was the blackmail. The hard-liners collected intelligence about their targets’ private lives—extramarital affairs, old scandals—and threatened public humiliation unless the activists in question agreed to sign documents confessing to and apologizing for their “crimes.” This systematic abuse eventually crushed the reform movement. Many activists simply gave up their political work, in return for promises that they and their families would be left alone. Others went to the West for year-long fellowships that became permanent.
Lipstick Jihad Page 14
