“President Khatami is the light of our eyes,” he replied. “Let me sort this out.”
From outside the room I heard his voice crackling over the walkie-talkie: “No, they have press cards. She’s covered properly. . . . Yeah. . . . Her veil is simple. . . . No, no makeup.” In moments our things were retrieved, and I was left explaining various terms I had jotted down in my notebook. Another search of the car produced nothing incriminating. “Nothing? Not even a tape, to justify the trouble?” teased our moderate savior. As I thanked him, and prepared to drive off, he asked a parting question: “So, who do you think is going to win?” I nearly choked. “Well, opinion polls conducted by impartial observers suggest Khatami. But what do I know?”
Leaving the barracks, we saw that the shoes were still outside. For ordinary Iranian teenagers, the evening could prove far worse than it had for us. We were picked up because we were Iranians, but released with no scars more lasting than shock, because we were journalists. As counter-intuitive as it might seem, I had the weight, however contested, of a government ministry and a foreign publication behind me. The crimes of the others there—playing music, showing hair, consorting with the other gender—could carry fines, whippings, and, always, humiliation. For all of us, the outcome was capricious.
As we drove away, I asked Dariush whether it was not a relief that under Khatami, such run-ins happened a couple times a year, instead of every weekend. He gave me a searching look. “However infrequent, I do not find any consolation in the fact that my fate is determined by the whim of an armed sixteen-year-old.”
About six months after I came to Tehran, I put my labors of self-interrogation to rest, happy to nominally consider myself Iranian from America, but mostly happy to just live, and not consider myself so much, the more the Iranians in my world treated me as one of them. At last, I was normalized. And like any proper immigrant, I celebrated my fresh assimilation by criticizing new arrivals. Did you hear that girl’s accent? I would whisper odiously about some harmless visiting Iranian-American at a party. Did you know she can’t even read and write Farsi? Iranians from abroad were coming to visit Tehran more frequently, and I observed them from the vantage point of those who had never left—an experience more illuminating than a hundred meditations on identity might have been.
The evening after Dariush and I tussled with the law, Khaleh Farzi hosted a dinner party for a relative visiting from Los Angeles, who had Americanized his Iranian name to Fred (Fred, Mike, and Alex being the triad of names Iranian men in the U.S. typically resorted to). She asked us both to come over and recount our adventure for Fred’s entertainment, and as she had promised to serve pomegranate tart for dessert, I consented. I could predict already that Fred would be crass, tedious company. He had left Iran fifteen years ago and, on his first trip back, made sure to speak in affected California tones that emphasized how far he had ventured. “Do guys and girls, like, date here?”
Fred fit an identifiable type—the smarmy, awkwardly assimilated Los Angeles exile exhilarated by his return to Iran, where his dollar had brawny buying power and his passport magnetically attracted young women. He would spend his month here at parties, dangling the possibility of a ticket to America as bait, dallying with women far more beautiful than he attracted in the U.S.
He would remark during regular and cliché sermons that Iran was a vile place, unfit for civilized existence, a trash bin of mosques. He proclaimed the reform movement hadn’t changed Iran at all, yet he was happy to show up and get trashed at the parties it had made possible. Driven by guilt for having left, or by traumatic, early encounters with the regime, or by some nostalgic loyalty to the monarchy—or some combination of all three—he was keen to portray Iran as exclusively static, declining, and repressive.
For many Iranian exiles, this image of Iran was both useful and necessary. For the monarchists, it provided the cultural and social definition of Iran that made calls for regime change (or overthrow) more expedient and attractive to hawkish Republicans in Washington. For artists of Iranian origin, based for decades in New York or London, it lent an air of authenticity to tired, exotic images of women prostrate in pain, stranded on mountains in chador, in all sorts of positions in which most Iranian women—busy working and getting on with their daily lives—rarely found themselves. Because this sort of visual imagery was deemed authentic, depicting the “real” of modern Iranian existence, it was elevated to high art, celebrated in sophisticated, urban settings by important cultural institutions, and always billed as Iranian art, though none of it ever came from Iran. Inevitably, when I visited New York or Europe, someone would suggest attending a performance, or visiting a gallery of this genre, and I generally passed. Was Iran not already considered exotic enough in America and Europe? Why were Iranians, who knew better, producing art that made Iran seem like Saudi Arabia, a place where women actually were covered in black all the time?
In California and New York this dated, self-serving vision was irritating, but in Tehran it infuriated me, because it ignored all the vibrant, important ways Iran was changing. Up close, it meant watching people like Fred condescend to my aunt, to my friends, with his saccharine tone of pity, inquiring after their challenged lives. Because Dariush and Fred were both single men under thirty-five, etiquette dictated that Dariush offer to take him out to a few parties or to cruise Jordan Street (the crowded, social artery of northern Tehran) on a Thursday night. But Dariush ignored Fred all evening, preferring to drink homemade vodka in the kitchen with Khaleh Farzi’s friends. I bugged him about this as we left.
“Would it have been possible to exchange more than three words with Fred?” I asked. At first I thought he suspected some matchmaking scheme on my aunt’s part (visiting Iranian men were often introduced to a slew of suitable girls) and had pouted all night in remonstration. As usual, I attributed the basest possible motive to him and then felt guilty, realizing it had not been that way at all.
“Azi, do you know how many fucking times I’ve been in that situation? With my own best friends from elementary school, who come back from UCLA and want to scam all summer? With my cousins, who treat Tehran as a summer playground, that’s barely palatable for some exotic diversion, then back to the real world where they’ll get on with their real lives, real educations, and real jobs?” he said, shaking his head. “This is my goddam life here, for me this is it, there isn’t anything better lined up. This is the totality of my existence, and I can’t stand being the tour guide of its limited use.”
It was two in the morning when we got back to his house, and all the lights were still on. By that time, it had become blindingly clear that Dariush and I had nothing in common (he didn’t care about Middle Eastern politics; I didn’t care for action movies), and that we found each other insufferable (I thought he was a snobby child; he thought I was a fickle neurotic). Our conversations rapidly degenerated into battles, where we competed for the role of premier victim—he punched walls and screamed about the revolution; I chainsmoked and hissed about exile. It was insipid theatrics, and we should have ended things after the second episode. But shared strains like our recent arrest were dragging out our demise. In the interim, we hung out together around our relatives, whose presence enforced a measure of civility.
His family, the Moghadams, were among the few old, aristocratic families remaining in Tehran. When the revolution blundered across Iran, it brought their charmed, hallowed world crashing down. They literally had not left the house since, if visits to relatives were excepted. In twenty-three years, they had not dined once in public. They saw no one but the oldest friends, and close family. By withdrawing into themselves, they tried to protect the cultivated grace of their lost world from being tainted by the Islamic Republic.
Inside, time stood still. Visiting them was like dropping by Miss Havisham’s, the character in Dickens who sat in her house and collected dust in her wedding dress for years, refusing to put away the cake, or change her clothes, after the moment she was jilted at the
altar. Unable to live in the present, with an almost physical will, they kept scraps of the past, like yellowed invitation cards to brunch at the American ambassador’s, close at hand. In the intervening years, they had become reactionary conservatives, coming to view the revolution as a black hole of evil, Islam as violent and anti-modern, and life in Iran as uniform, uninterrupted oppression. They were blind to the realities that helped produce the revolution, blind to even its minor accomplishments.
Dariush’s parents and grandmother were all insomniacs, playing cards or backgammon late into the night to amuse themselves. Because they despised the Islamic Republic and had confined themselves to the house, they channeled all their mental and physical energy and disappointment into domestic squabbles, which predictably strained the household. Inside, the air smelled like roses, dust, and rancor. Walking through the garden, we passed two vintage European sports cars in various states of decay.
Dariush’s father spent countless, fruitless hours on these cars, tinkering with their rusty engines, trying to locate parts. Every few weeks, he managed to resuscitate one long enough to drive it around the block. His wife thought he was mad to fritter away his life with these cars, but most of the time she was, like so many Iranian women of her age whose lives were turned upside down by the revolution, too zoned out on antidepressants and sleeping pills to care. Thirty years ago, when he was an influential administrator, her husband drove cars like these to work, tennis, and lunch with American friends. His cars were to him what that sad patch of garden was to my grandfather in San Jose—a tender ritual that paid homage to a lost world, a task that kept the hands busy, while the apathetic spirit lived in the past. It was a self-imposed exile, but exile nonetheless—isolating and melancholy, an island in a strange, hostile society.
Under usual circumstances, I didn’t pay much attention to Dariush’s deeper thoughts. They were typically narcissistic in a dull way and involved rating other people’s ancestral lineage and finding them lacking. But that night, he had stopped to have real emotions, and I realized half of what he said about me being too American—in fact, half of what most Iranians said about me in this regard—had nothing to do with me. I supposed I could have paused and tried to pin down what was going on inside him, why it made him feel better to pick on me as an American. But I was honestly too tickled at being able to throw away that brand of criticism, to stop letting it provoke and depress me, that I couldn’t be bothered. It was basically over, anyway.
Election day fell on a Friday, and voting stations around the country extended their hours three times. In Tehran, people lined the streets well after midnight, waiting to cast their votes. The expatriate television networks broadcasting from Los Angeles called the election a sham, since the candidates had been vetted by an unelected clerical body, effectively allowing the system to handpick the ballot. But the millions who stood in lines to vote, babies on hips, toddlers in tow, couples hand in hand, apparently thought it was enough of a non-sham to be worth the effort.
The results were released Saturday evening. Khatami won by 78 percent, and a remarkable 66 percent of eligible voters had turned out to vote. It was nothing approaching pure democracy, but at least people were engaged and believed their vote made some sort of difference. Relative to the rest of the region, this was somewhat significant. In Egypt (an American ally), the sitting president had been re-elected for two decades by a farcical 99 percent margin, and no self-respecting Egyptian would ever conceive of going to the polls. Saudi Arabia (an American ally), a country named after a family, didn’t even bother with elections.
That night thousands of Iranians—families stuffed into cars, couples with babies, teenage girls wearing several extra layers of lipstick for the occasion—turned up on Vali Asr Avenue to celebrate. The traffic barely budged, but no one cared. People turned off their cars, honked their horns, turned up their stereos. Those on foot strolled through the stalled traffic, holding hands, licking ice cream cones, chatting between the lanes. Everyone seemed to be wielding something high up in the air—a gladiola, a balloon on a stick, a flag with Khatami’s face—jabbing it around like a triumphant foil.
I had stepped out of a dinner party for a quick drive through the city, and decided to park my car for a stroll among the crowd. As I walked north, the traffic began to move again, toward Mellat Park. People retracted their arms and gladiolas into their cars, and rolled up the windows. The symphony of horns died down, and I could hear the distant gunning of motorbikes. A block ahead, a group of vigilantes surrounded a car with a Khatami poster on its back window, and shattered the glass with a club.
They belonged to the paramilitary group Ansar-e Hezbollah (referred to as Hezbollahis), whose members were the most ruthless of all the hard-liners’ foot soldiers. Fundamentalists with a brutal streak, they performed tasks—such as beating up students, terrorizing activists, carrying out gruesome assassinations—where even pedestrian thugs like the Basij and the security forces drew the line.
Suddenly the Ansar were everywhere, chasing people on the street with batons. I ran back down the boulevard, past the brightly lit juice and ice cream shops, toward my car. Every few yards, I ducked down a side alley or into a shop, sliding my loose sandals back on, cursing myself for being dumb enough to wear flimsy shoes. If you are caught and clobbered, I thought, it will be social Darwinism at work and you will deserve it. I finally reached the car, slid behind the wheel, and wrapped tissue around my swollen, torn-up feet. I scanned ahead to see where the vigilantes were coming from. They were descending down out of the park in waves. A sea of bearded men dressed in all black, standing shoulder to shoulder as though marching into battle, repeating the name of the supreme leader Ayatollah Khamenei in scary, cult-like intonations.
Once they reached the street, they broke ranks and fanned out, kicking in car doors, screaming all the while. They called the women whores and threatened to tear-gas the crowd, full of children, if it didn’t disperse. At one point, I couldn’t see out my windows, there were so many of them pressed up against my car, their faces contorted. I clicked the power locks and prayed.
Finally, riot police showed up to restore order, but they took their time. First they watched the vigilantes terrorize people for a good twenty minutes, and then they only half-heartedly intervened. Whispering into their mobile-phone headpieces, the militiamen attempted to regroup, but the riot police dispersed them down side alleys, finally clearing the way for traffic. Broken glass and trampled flowers littered the street.
I dragged my shocked, sweaty body back to the party I had left two hours ago, to find my friends sprawled on the sofa watching Friends, the smell of hash heavy in the air. Someone get this girl a drink, one of them said. History rumbled around them, literally right outside the door, and they were more concerned with what Rachel said to Chandler. Iranian television had recently debuted a new sitcom, a sort of Friends in Veils, and they were arguing over how directly the plots had been lifted.
I took my drink into the bathroom, filled the tub with water, and let my feet soak as I tried to understand why some of my friends were so indifferent to the changes unfolding around them. Years of failure and layers of stale rhetoric had emptied the revolution of meaning. The war with Iraq and a decade of bombs and privation had turned them cynical, detached from the doings of the system. To them, upgrading from one brand of mullah to another was not a compelling enough reason to forsake this inner domain, free of pretense and false slogans. Why stand up for the revolution as it lurched to find itself? They would rather stand up for themselves, living in a way that might, after many years, indirectly force some modicum of change on the system.
CHAPTER SIX
I’m Too Sexy for My Veil
I will rise in slow increments.
I will make my face beautiful
like a mirror held to the wind,
let my silk scarf flutter in abandon . . .
I will find myself suddenly in full bloom
and you doomed to rot.<
br />
—SIMIN BEHBEHANI
“The first half of the day, from nine until two o’clock, is reserved for ladies, and afternoons and evenings for the gentlemen. Fridays [the only full day off in the Islamic work week] are men only,” explained the manager of the Farmanieh Sporting Club, who clearly catered to a society of women who had nothing pressing to do before two on the average weekday. Since the monthly dues were the equivalent of a government worker’s yearly salary, it was taken for granted that if you could afford to work out there, you did not work, and therefore didn’t mind being relegated to the margins of the “gentlemen’s hours.”
On most mornings, women in dewy, immaculate makeup marched leisurely on a long row of treadmills, arranged close together to facilitate chatting. They wore an abundance of jewelry while doing this, and the tinkle of their gold bangles created as much background noise as the Kylie Minogue CD that was always playing. The spacious gym had the only properly functioning treadmills in town, and so I went ahead and signed up, despite the peculiar atmosphere, absurdly high prices, and sexist hours.
The gym tried desperately to imitate the sort of gleaming, vast health clubs that dot urban America, but it was run by managers whose only nod to fitness was the velour track suit, and its priorities ended up all wrong. Upon entering, a sycophantish “helper” began following you around, attempting to be your valet through the complicated task of changing into gym clothes. Then there was a nonsensical fixation with hygiene, that required the wearing of four different pairs of slippers in four separate areas. With all this scrupulous attention to detail wholly unrelated to the act of breaking a sweat, the exercise balls were deflated, and the air conditioner malfunctioned regularly.
To me, the oppressive minutiae of rules made working out at the gym stressful in itself. Clearly, it was not a place where people emotionally strained by life in Tehran went for the relief of exercise. So whom did it serve? After a week or two, I realized the club was created by and catered to Tehran’s nouveaux riches, the clerics and revolutionary elite, and their business cronies, who made their fortunes by reserving lucrative state monopolies for their families, and controlling the Islamic charitable foundations that had absorbed the vast assets of the Shah’s government. In the early years of the revolution, they shunned Western lifestyle habits as decadent, but in the last decade, thirsting for the admiration of Iranians and a closer resemblance to the status elite of other countries, they relaxed this attitude.
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