Lipstick Jihad

by Azadeh Moaveni

  Reza watched this all happen to his friends with a coolness I could not fathom. Sometimes he would drop by, and only an hour into the conversation would he mention that he had just come from dropping a friend off at prison, or visiting one in hospital. For the most part the regime had dispensed with brutal physical torture, but the emotional harassment, solitary confinement, sleep deprivation, and strange drugs administered in prison wrought a physical toll.

  When I saw exactly how these reformists suffered in the process of a movement so many of us mocked as ineffective, I felt terrible. Iranians of all walks of life called them so many names—collaborators (for working with the mullahs), cowards, incompetents. But they were doing what no one else was willing to do. They were exposing themselves, making their families vulnerable, for the sake of making Iran a tiny bit more open. Yes, many of them were Islamists. Yes, many of them had supported, or still supported, the revolution. But were they not asking for the right things? For the right to free expression, fair trials, and free elections? It was so easy to sit at home and be pristinely secular over cocktails in the garden in north Tehran, or Switzerland, or Washington.

  As the months passed, Reza and I became easier in each other’s company and stopped being so formal and Iranian about everything. It wasn’t easy. He was from a more traditional social background than my family and was unlike all the Iranian men I had ever known. Because he was not suave and Westernized, I was initially suspicious when he talked freely about everything, even sexuality. I worried it was a clever, drawn-out, intellectual ploy to seduce me.

  Sometimes he made me squirm, because he saw right through me and I wasn’t used to that. Typically, Iranian men were too self-absorbed (forever princes of their mother’s domain) to pay close attention to the emotional makeup of a woman they were not related to or sleeping with.

  “You’re Iranian in a superficial way,” he said one day, after I rescheduled one of our meetings for the eighth time. “You come across warm, but your affective nature is really Western. Eastern affection involves generosity with time. You drench people with warmth and charm, to distract them from how miserly you are with your time. You handle minutes like an accountant.”

  Reza was my favorite audience for monologues of alienation. He said I was too intelligent to waste my time rotting at home, wallowing (his word) in my sense of exclusion. “Stop asking if you count as an Iranian. By asking you just make it seem like a question that other people have the right to answer. If you were confident about yourself, instead of tip-toeing around, no one would challenge you.”

  This made lots of sense. Probably my accented Farsi would be less noticeable if I didn’t make such a point of apologizing for it. For hours after a talk with Reza, I’d stop tormenting myself and walk around feeling quite okay about things. But sooner or later, something would distress me (a call from Mr. X, a failed attempt to execute a bank transaction on my own) and I felt shattered and tentative all over again.

  I thought of my family in California and superimposed the question onto them. What if they woke up one day, and decided they were really American? Even if they felt it with all the force of their being, did that mean Americans would suddenly stop considering them foreigners? Maybe identity, to an extent, was an interior condition. But wasn’t it also in the eye of the beholder? It seemed delusional to go about convinced you were a peacock, when everyone treated you like a bear. The contradiction bounced around my head. What percentage of identity was exterior, what percentage self-defined? Was it sixty-forty, like a game of backgammon, sixty percent luck, forty percent skill?

  That winter, when the holidays rolled around, I looked forward to a complete break from all existence, including work. Time scheduled its Man of the Year double-issue for the last month of the year, which meant a long dead stretch for far-flung reporters. For two blessed weeks I could ignore my ringing mobile phone, and retire the tight, fake smile I wore in public, when forced out for an interview. I considered staying somewhere besides my apartment, mainly to escape my maid, who thought it decadent and inappropriate that a young woman should live alone, not work (she thought the laptop was a cousin of the espresso machine), and stay in bed most days. She had started casting me baleful glances and making oblique jibes: “Azadeh Khanoum, what a sweet and kind girl you are. Really, how much I adore you. May God grant you everything you want. May he provide for you, so that you can keep on relaxing at home forever.” Then she would massage her lower back, and ask if I had any khareji, foreign, creams that would heal the ache in her old bones.

  I retreated to Shahabad, the old family home high, high up in the north of the city, almost out of Tehran. My uncle and aunt lived there, but it had a special place in my heart, as the house where my parents once lived together, in the early days of their brief marriage. The house was tucked in the back of a narrow, winding alley off the main road, and its wraparound terrace looked out on the orchards in the back, the line of willows, and the glittering, dark surface of the pool in the front.

  The distance from the cruel, draining hustle and bustle of Tehran was quieting, and the day I arrived, with a small suitcase, I found my aunt, Khaleh Mimi, making jam. Goli Khanoum, the clever and kind woman who had been their servant for decades, walked around purposefully with vats of this, and canning jars of that. The scent of sweet quince wafted through the house, and a great copper pot simmered on the oven, full of the sticky, burgundy brew. The transformation of raw quince into jam was fascinating. The heat turned the yellow, fibrous meat of the fruit into soft red slices that melted in your mouth.

  Khaleh Mimi’s long, light brown hair was pulled back into a ponytail, and she wore a white button-down cardigan over a long, caramel pleated skirt, like a silvery cheerleader. They were driving up to the villa at the Caspian, and after much reassurance that I did, yes, truly, prefer to stay in Tehran all alone, by myself, agreed to leave me behind. My relatives could not fathom a thirst for solitude, and they continually tried to tempt me away to dinner parties, the hair salon, any little outing so I could “just get some air,” as though wanting to be alone made me brittle and sick, like a nineteenth-century hysteric.

  Khaleh Mimi showed me upstairs to my little room, with arched windows that overlook the garden, and the adjoining bathroom with the yellow cupboards my father installed years ago. There was a round tin of Nivea creme by the sink, and I smoothed some over my hands, inhaling the familiar scent, rapping my nails against the blue tin lid. It smelled like my grandmother and every other Iranian woman over sixty.

  Iran was beginning to exhaust me. And like Reza, I was becoming paranoid, wondering whether my emails were being monitored, or if my apartment was bugged. It didn’t help that Mr. X and Mr. Sleepy, the intelligence agents/interrogators assigned to monitor/recruit me, were making me meet them every few weeks. I couldn’t tell anyone, because they had made it clear I should not breathe a word.

  They would phone my mobile an hour before we were supposed to meet and give me directions to some secluded spot, sometimes an empty apartment in a quiet back street. The sort of place where no one could hear you scream. They didn’t like some of my stories, especially the ones with anonymous sources, and demanded I tell them about everyone I had seen, everything they had said. They insisted on knowing who the unnamed sources were, even though I explained again and again that I couldn’t betray their confidence.

  Mr. X, the lead interrogator, was beginning to behave like a jealous boyfriend. He insisted on knowing when I was leaving the country, where I would be going, what I would be doing, and when I would return. When I was in Tehran, he asked what parties I went to, whom I talked to, and who else was there. To show me he knew when I was lying, he portrayed himself as omniscient, fully aware of the fine points of my social life. “Oh, is that the Jon who Hossein introduced you to at Babak’s party?” he would say casually, to show me in one swoop that he knew I was friends with Jon, better friends with Hossein, and a frequenter of Babak’s home.

  When he didn’
t hear from me for a couple of weeks, he would telephone and announce himself with a strange intimacy. “Don’t you know who this is? Have you forgotten me already? You never call. If I don’t call you, you forget about me completely. What sort of friendship is this?” He tried to convince me that I needed him, by planting fears in my mind so he could then offer himself as defender (“By the way, if God forbid you happen to get arrested at the airport or held captive anywhere you can always call me”).

  He cracked mean jokes (“Now, you’d never try to commit suicide, would you?”) and smiled at his own humor. He forbade me to tell anyone of our association, and when I admitted to having told the vice president (hell, you figure if it’s about national security, it’s okay to tell the vice president), he was furious. He held it against me for weeks (“How can I tell you’re really telling the truth this time, since you lied before?”). He hinted at blackmail (“How would your editors feel if they knew you were meeting us all the time?”).

  In all fairness, he did not try to make me feel like a taghooti, an old regime slut. In the clumsy good-cop/bad-cop routine they played, that was Mr. Sleepy’s job. Mr. Sleepy looked me up and down as though I was coated with filth, and then looked away in disgust. Mr. Sleepy was the one who asked if my jewelry was real and raised his eyebrows when I mentioned male friends (in their universe, such a category did not exist) and gave me a look that said, I cannot believe this Americanized, decadent, godless whore actually has a respectable career.

  Worst of all, they made references to my family, casually mentioning where a cousin or an uncle worked, to show me they knew even my distant relatives, implying that even they were vulnerable through association with me. Every session was a battle of wills. I lectured them about journalistic ethics; they lectured me about national security. In the end, I was always shaking and drenched with sweat.

  I had established a routine with my driver, Ali, to call me exactly one hour into these meetings. We had a code. If everything was fine, I said, “Yes, I’ll be home for dinner.” If I said, “No, actually I can’t make that appointment,” he knew to go get help.

  I lived with my memories of these encounters, furious with myself for picking the wrong tactic, for being pliant when I should have been firm, for allowing myself to be goaded. I didn’t budge from Shahabad for days, the longest stretch of my life I have worn pajamas continuously. I was still there when, to my wan dismay, the year 2000 ended. That, unfortunately, involved New Year’s Eve. In the West, staying home alone on New Year’s Eve was tantamount to admitting one was a romantic/erotic failure with no friends. Despite this implication, I could not drag myself out of bed, especially given the range of options: a diplomatic party that would inevitably lead to everyone getting very drunk, and at least one trashed European making the unoriginal confession that he thought the veil was sexy, and could I please keep it on in bed; or a chi-chi Iranian party where the women would be catty and pretend to admire my job, while secretly resenting me for having an independence they never had.

  Unable to sleep, I descended to the kitchen, to find some fruit rollup to suck on while reading. As I peered into the refrigerator, Goli Khanoum accosted me, blocking the entrance with her stout frame, and let loose the lecture that had been brewing inside her. “Why are you always moping about? Are you the first person to be away from her family? . . . Are you the first person to think too much sometimes? No? Everyone praises you so highly, and says you have such a great job. . . . So what’s wrong with you? You’re going to really irritate your husband if you continue like this. . . . He’ll want to come home, and enjoy himself, and what! . . . There you’ll be on the couch, slumped over a pile of books. What about me? What should I say, if I was going to be like you? I’ve lost four children . . . and I’m making do. ... Don’t you think if we all let ourselves think as much as you do, we wouldn’t end up the same way? The point is, we don’t let ourselves.”

  I didn’t know what to say. So I tried to make housewife talk, to appease her.

  “Goli, don’t you think it would be so much more convenient if the refrigerator door opened out into the kitchen, rather than away?”

  “So everything has to be just the way you want it? You don’t like eating dinner. Does that mean your husband doesn’t get to eat dinner either?”

  I couldn’t believe I was standing in a dark kitchen on New Year’s Eve discussing a hypothetical husband. I burst into tears and fled upstairs.

  Tap, tap. It was Goli, knocking at my door. She felt bad for making me cry and knelt down next to me, pushing the ashtray aside. “It’s all this pressure you put on yourself,” she said. “Maybe you can get a nicer job. Don’t any of the ambassadors need secretaries? You would be an excellent secretary!” I leaned my head against her shoulder, inhaling her scent of soap and leaves. It wasn’t really fixable. The act of probing deeply, I realized, was an ingrained part of my California life, a telltale sign of an American consciousness. To not think so much—the stock local prescriptive—was simply not an option.

  I remember with great clarity the day I stopped “claiming” authentic Iranianness. It was a frosty and overcast Thursday afternoon, and the streets were empty, because the official weekend—the second half of Thursday, and all of Friday—had already begun. I dressed carefully, in a simple black abaya, for my appointment with Mr. Abtahi, the president’s chief of staff. He had chosen to meet in one of the Shah’s old palaces, in the Saad Abad compound, and I arrived early, allowing me to wander around the elaborate foyer, examining the inlaid paneling.

  His assistant led me up the winding staircase, into a corner room with windows on both sides, overlooking the gardens. As usual, the table was set with a gleaming bowl of fruit, and a tray of sweets. I flipped through my notes, waiting, and finally heard the rustle of his robes at the door. He settled in the chair next to me, and flashed his playful smile, eyes dancing irrepressibly. He smiled precisely the same way, whether exchanging favorite stories about Beirut, or divulging some explosive bit of news off the record, and sometimes I doubted my own hearing, so at odds was his expression with his words.

  I started with women’s rights, the subject of a piece I was working on, and when we paused to gossip, I asked him, half teasing, half serious, when I might hope to become Iran’s first female ambassador. (I have since learned that one should not ask questions the answers to which one is not prepared to hear.) I expected him to say “Inshallah, one day in the future,” or any other of a hundred polite phrases that would have meant nothing, but acknowledge the validity of the question. He looked embarrassed, and his eyes said: “Why did you have to go and ask me that?” He said nothing. I waited. Say something, anything, I willed him silently.

  It was our ritual, enshrined in our roles, for me to ask unanswerable questions, and him to dance around them, with elliptical half-answers that pointed me toward the truth. But to this question, for the first time in our long history of questions and answers, he made no reply at all. He had always been advisor and friend, as much as a source. Through the best of times and the worst of times, inside the country and out, on weekends and evenings, he answered his mobile phone, agreed to interviews, because he believed in friendship and the importance of being accessible to journalists as a rule, not simply when he needed to spin a point or promote the president. He got me on planes, into private meetings, arranged introductions with senior officials around the region. I knew what he said, or didn’t say, in answer to this question, was for my own benefit.

  And the answer was: No, Azadeh Khanoum, in your lifetime, you will never be an Iranian ambassador. If there are any female ambassadors at all, they will be Islamist, chadori women, certainly not you, a secular, partial Iranian. I don’t say this to hurt you, but because it is the truth, and you should know it. His silence cut me deeply, and I felt foolish for having opened my mouth.

  His position elevated one man’s opinion to an official pronouncement. I tried to detach myself from the moment by writing a headline in my head. Sympathet
ic Envoy of Vile Government Delivers Horrifying But Irrefutable Proof That Azadeh Is an American. The disappointment must have been written on my face, because he made some kindly remark, and held out a plate of green grapes, as though to distract a child gearing up to fling herself to the floor and wail.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Election

  Someone’s coming,

  someone different,

  someone better,

  someone who isn’t like anyone . . .

  And his face

  is even brighter than the face of the last Imam

  —FOROUGH FARROKHZAD

  As the clamor of the crowd grew louder, the toy store clerk put the pink box of Barbie beach accessories on the shelf, and stepped out of his shop to investigate. We had been discussing the ban on Barbie, his best-selling product and birthday gift of choice for Iranian girls between four and ten, when we first heard the cries outside. Thirty yards away in front of the store, about 400 people were gathered, gaping at the sight of a young man, stripped shirtless, with his arms tied above his head to a tree.

  A bearded man in an untucked, long-sleeved shirt, his voice distorted by the echo of a loudspeaker, shouted: “This man is guilty of possessing and selling alcohol.” Then a second man raised a leather whip and cracked it across the young man’s back as he counted, “One! Two! Three!” With each lash, the young man screamed, “Ya Ali” (the name of Shiism’s most revered imam), then of his repentance, and his howls of pain. After the seventeenth lash, his hands were untied. With his head hung low, he quietly dressed himself and leapt aboard a passing minibus. Several other young men in line for the same punishment were tied face down to narrow wood planks for their whippings.