Being in these political situations, when Iran and the U.S. encountered one another, made me nervous. No one came right out and said anything, but everyone acted uncomfortable if you didn’t make your loyalties and politics clear from the outset. If you weren’t obvious about this kind of question and suggested things were complicated (that Iran was a rogue state with democratic tendencies; that the United States made lots of mistakes in the Middle East), the possibility lingered that you were some sort of apologist for authoritarian regimes.
I didn’t know what I thought. About politics. About patriotic duty. About what or whom I should even have patriotic duty toward. Thinking of myself as a hyphenated entity, an Iranian-American, didn’t help in the slightest. It was a sense of self that helped in the banal, day-to-day course of things, but it didn’t erase the question of loyalty at all. It didn’t help you when two things you loved, countries or people, existed at odds with one another.
When I was a girl, when I tugged on my mother’s skirt and made her repeat my favorite story—of her maman bozorg (grandmother), the one who chopped down the mulberry orchard in revenge for being demoted to second wife—I remember feeling outrage at the injustice. In the only picture of my great-grandmother we have, she sits on a terrace, next to a line of hanging laundry, hands folded across her lap, a squinting, uncomfortable expression on her face, as though the chair she sat on was missing a leg. How could this great-grandfather be so horrible, I asked my mother, as to cruelly make maman bozorg a co-wife? Why was it allowed at all?
Maman explained that in the Koran, it says that a man can take more than one wife on the condition that he treats all of them exactly equally. Their quarters must be furnished with equal elegance or simplicity; he must spend an equal number of nights with each. But what about love? I asked. How can he love them equally in his heart? He can’t, she said. The heart doesn’t work that way. And that’s why men should never, ever, have more than one wife. Because the heart is not docile, can’t follow literal instructions, can’t be cordoned off like a garden—this grove for the first wife, this for the second. Sooner or later, emotions blossom or wither in places they shouldn’t, and the pretense of heart boundaries collapses.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Love in a Time of Struggle
In your presence I see the green of my wings,
like the image of grass the feathers of a parrot paint in the mirror,
In the lines that define your being I seek a hedge
to protect the green clove from being trampled.
I grow in your consciousness like a vine,
with my hair covering rooftops, doorstops, and fences.
—SIMIN BEHBEHANI
To be a young woman in the Iran of the Islamic Republic involved a certain degree of uncertainty over one’s identity, or at the very least, over one’s romantic priorities. Most of my girlfriends had no idea whether they had a “type.” In contrast to California, no one fretted much about being unready for commitment, or the passage from dating to dating exclusively. Perhaps in time, quality of life would improve in Tehran, and along with it, quality of dating. But in the meantime, rather than worrying over arcane distinctions in relationship terminology, or the riddle wrapped in an enigma of “Why didn’t he call back?” relationships served a far more vital purpose: taking a fragile identity and anchoring it in a situation or person.
You may think, not incorrectly, that for women relationships the world over involve defining yourself through men. But modern Iran went so out of its way to confuse and complicate the identities of women that this natural tendency became an overwhelming one. The regime fed young people such contradictory messages—women were liberated but legally inferior; women should be educated but subservient; women should have careers but stick to traditional gender roles; women should play sports but ignore their dirty physical needs—that it elevated even basic questions of self (What are my priorities, expectations, needs?) to higher physics.
It was a tough climate in which to be a young woman. It made it hard to know what was truly important to you, what defined you deep down, if all those layers of family/peers/neighborhood/social background/trickle-down-dogma were stripped away. In Iran, a society in flux, every single one of those layers was also undergoing transformation. Constructing a coherent personality out of all the chaos was a formidable task. That’s why my generation of Iranians was called the lost generation. And that’s why for women, searching for relationships was, if not a search for self, a search to anchor a self adrift.
The intensity of life in modern-day Iran added another complication to finding love. You had to find not only chemistry but a partner who wanted the same sort of Islamic Republic experience, both emotionally and logistically, as you. A dating service would have needed to create questionnaires with such questions—Do you want a partner who (check one): is furious and bitter / resigned and placid; externalizes rage / internalizes sorrow; is itching to emigrate / determined to stay; flouts laws regularly / is cautious and obedient; reads five newspapers a day / does not know what year it is; is addicted to opium/heroin / addicted to food, Prozac.
For Tehrani women who dated within their own milieu, such considerations were psychologically complex enough. For those who strayed across borders of social class, the result was something between agonizing and mortifying.
This proved especially true with a distant friend of mine, Fatimeh. She was the very last person you’d suspect would embroil herself in an inauspicious relationship. When she finally did, she had it the hardest of all, because her relationship, or her would-be relationship, really, had to be conducted in secret, away from the watchful eyes of her traditional family.
The first time I met her, we were waiting for a presidential reception outside one of the palaces at Saad Abad—the royal complex built by Reza Shah in northern Tehran. The press pool stood in the shade chatting, and apart from me, there was only one other woman, Fatimeh. It was only the second or third time I had encountered the Tehran press corps, which was full of journalists who had known each other forever, and I didn’t feel comfortable smoking in front of them and the ceremonial guard. I moved to the side of the giant fountain outside the palace, only to find that I had made myself more conspicuous. Noticing the tense way I had my arms folded, Fatimeh walked over to keep me company.
I smiled my thanks to the fascinating, black-clad creature that had appeared next to me. She wore the full-length chador, with an elastic strap over the top of her head, to keep the fabric in place. Underneath each arm, swinging back and forth amidst the folds, hung a camera. She chirped hello, in her cheery, brusque tone, and inspected me with equal curiosity. When the officials finally arrived, I ignored them. Fatimeh was a far more absorbing sight, as she maneuvered her way to the front of the photographers, juggling cameras, clicking with one then the other, somehow managing it all gracefully—under a hot sun—while swathed in yards of black nylon.
She came from a traditional, pious family that was exhibiting exceptional openness by allowing her this independence, letting her out of the house at all hours alone, to pursue her work. They did not feel entirely comfortable with this, but that they agreed at all was one of the not-so-small successes of the Islamic Republic. You have to forgive me this brief historical point, and an unfashionable one, at that, but it’s important to understanding how Iranians were still struggling with the events of 1979. The revolution rolled back the legal rights of Iranian women, but it transformed the lives and horizons of women like Fatimeh.
Under the Shah’s regime, traditional parents like hers would never have let their daughters stray out into society. They preferred to keep them uneducated and housebound rather than exposing them to corrupt, Westernized Iranians who drank, smoke, wore miniskirts, and slept around. The revolution erased all those sins from the surface of society (tucking them under wraps, along with women). In the process, it made it possible for young women like Fatimeh to venture out of the home sphere. They were given the opportunity t
o do something with their lives besides washing dishes and birthing.
A generation of such middle-class, traditional women were educated under the revolutionary republic. But inevitably, their new freedom stalled the day they graduated from university—when they walked out into an ailing economy that offered no jobs commensurate with their qualifications, back to families who expected them to hang their degree on the mantle and stay home. Fatimeh found a job and started working, so she managed to evade the revolving door that had flung so many of her peers straight back inside the house. She was the first woman in generations of her family to have a career, and her work made her feel capable of more. It raised her expectations of what life should offer her. Captivated by possibility, she was trying to negotiate her future within the conventional role her parents still expected her to play.
Fatimeh worked for a new, conservative-owned newspaper, but talked about its stolid headlines and poor design with disapproval. She brimmed with talent. That was obvious from the first time she dropped by to show me her portfolio. She wanted us to work together on feature stories and asked for help getting her photos published in U.S. magazines. In the end, we never collaborated on anything, because Time either used wire service images or dispatched its legendary photographers for special projects.
We saw each other constantly, though, because the months I lived in Iran were dense with news, and the press corps spent endless hours together, waiting for events to start, getting bused around with the president. Fatimeh was totally in love with President Khatami, who in turn had a special affection for her. Once or twice at events, he walked over to say hello and praise her, and her smooth, olive features gleamed afterward for days. “You’re so lucky,” I told her dolefully. The president had never singled me out, except once on his plane, to tell me he had heard I was a very nice girl.
She called me a lot, and it was clear she wanted to be friends. We met for tea during the workday, but beyond that I didn’t know how to include her in my life. It might upset my relatives to bring her over in the evenings, because there would be alcohol around and a stranger in full chador would make everyone edgy, like having a nun in a habit at a cocktail party. Dariush refused to socialize with her, and his father had banned her from the house, on the grounds of her chador alone.
As much as Fatimeh wanted to hang out, she never discussed her personal life with me. She complained about her parents, of course, but about romance she remained silent. I only learned about this side of her when my friend Davar, also a journalist, informed me she had a crush on him. At first I was skeptical. I couldn’t imagine Fatimeh, that intense, purposeful whirl of black chador and camera lenses, having a crush on anyone. Maybe you’re misreading her signals, I suggested to Davar.
But eventually, her ambiguous overtures turned unmistakably forward. Instead of dropping by his office and lingering for hours, she dropped by his office, lingered for hours, and brought teddy bears holding hearts. Flirting with a guy such as Davar was not in her repertoire, and she probably had no idea where it would lead. So she punched him in the arm a lot, and professed to admire his work. She began phoning him on Fridays, suggesting they go hiking in the Alborz Mountains. I hate hiking, complained Davar. And besides, how can I be seen in public with her, wearing that damn chador? Turning her into a proper girlfriend would be nearly impossible.
She had suggested hiking because it was one of the very few activities in modern-day Tehran where people of all different classes and backgrounds came together, trooping up and down the mountains, reclining by riverside cafés. A girl in black chador and a young guy in a bright fleece could walk side by side, attracting little attention. But apart from the mountains, where could they go? A relationship could only get so far, when the venues of its evolution were limited to photo exhibitions and newspaper offices. Even cafés would have been tough. It wasn’t so common to see a chadori woman sipping Turkish coffee with a clean-shaven male in the sorts of cafés middle-class Iranian kids frequented.
The logistics were thorny, but far more complicated was a possible relationship between Fatimeh and Davar. The ocean of difference between them made Davar himself an unlikely choice. He was Christian, secular, middle class, and Westernized, liberal in manner and thought, and an irrepressible partyer. Though on paper, and in person, he could not be more inappropriate for her, I understood the attraction.
Tehran was awash with the male equivalent of Fatimeh. They were journalists and painters, writers and photographers, who had fought in the war with Iraq or were married at eighteen, and were now breaking away from their traditional social backgrounds to enter an intellectual, urban milieu filled with people very different from themselves. The men had an astonishing ability to move in and out of these disparate worlds, hanging onto their evolving personas and sexuality all the while. They easily left their wives and families at home, while finding themselves in the new Tehran.
As a woman, Fatimeh had no such mobility. Her identity as an independent woman, a photojournalist, and a professional in her own right was still wholly vulnerable to the undermining traditions of her family. If she agreed to consider the men picked by her parents—conservatives who would require their wives to stay at home—that fragile new self she had worked so hard to create would be trampled. All this exposure to colleagues like us, people who spoke and socialized freely, who related to one another across the gender divide with an easy openness, had changed her. Davar, she knew, would regard her work as an organic part of her identity, not as phase to be indulged with the expectation that it would end.
How could she not be alienated by that old, familiar world of marriage, babies, and cooking? Yet this other world, to which we belonged, was disturbingly foreign. And Davar was not interested. He wanted straightforward relationships that included sex from the beginning and had no inclination to court a woman like Fatimeh who might never sleep with him at all.
Davar began pursuing a journalist in our circle who was perfectly comfortable going over to his apartment for drinks, and whatever came later. They weren’t dating publicly, so it was not immediately apparent to Fatimeh that the object of her affection was embroiled in a side affair. She did, however, sense that something was amiss.
“So you’re friends with Davar, right?” she would ask me, tentatively and repeatedly, on the phone. Too timid and embarrassed to go further, she let the question hang, hoping I would pick up the subject, and somehow shed light on the behavior of this young man she was so drawn to but did not understand. I could sense she was already feeling pangs of betrayal, even without knowing the full story. He had spent time with her, and to her, those hours meant something, even if no words had been exchanged.
“Davar has been extremely close to his mother since he was young,” I offered lamely. “He has lots of female friends.” My answer sounded vague and useless to my own ears. But I didn’t know, given the lack of emotional intimacy between us, how to broach such intensely personal matters. In retrospect, I wish I had been less elliptical in warning her about their colliding worlds. I wish I had said, Fatimeh, your conception of a relationship radically differs—in assumptions, substance, and practice—from Davar’s. If you judge what exists between you through your attitude, you’re going to get disappointed, if not hurt.
I’m certain part of her suspected there was something between Davar and me. In her world, a man and a woman simply did not call each other by nicknames, hang out in each other’s houses, go out for dinners and to cafés, unless they were engaged. If they did, their parents would have already met and negotiated their children’s potential future. The time alone would simply be a short trial period before marriage, to ensure they did not despise each other.
To disabuse her of this idea, I began complaining about the lack of proper guys in Tehran, making joking laments of my spinsterhood, a refrain in our conversations. Once she realized Davar and I were just friends—that it was possible, indeed natural and common in our milieu, to be platonic in this way—she relaxed. I
t made her feel less vulnerable to know this was normal, and she sought him out more boldly.
Davar, in his thoughtless but still harmful way, must have mentioned to his new lover that Fatimeh had a crush on him. Though the last person to pose a threat to their new liaison was Fatimeh, uncertain and awkward in her chador, the new lover became defensive. I will never forget the afternoon at Davar’s office when we all converged. He and I often met there at the tail end of the workday, to walk to our favorite park to smoke ghalyoon. Fatimeh called to say she would also drop by, with some photos as a pretext. The new lover phoned his mobile, as she had begun to regularly, and when she heard we were all there, having tea together, informed him she would be stopping by as well. Probably resentful of having her status confined to his bedroom, she showed up to mark her territory.
Painfully unsubtle, she arrived decked out in a glittery, evening veil, with lots of eye makeup and a cloud of perfume. She promptly took a seat near Davar’s desk closest to him and made a point of touching him with a casual but proprietary air. Fatimeh looked on, stunned and quiet. The moment groaned under the strain of its awkwardness. It couldn’t have lasted more than fifteen minutes, but our collective self-consciousness seemed to slow time.
Davar blinked at me helplessly. “Well,” I said brightly, rapping my knuckles against his desk, “who’s up for ghalyoon?”
Fatimeh stopped calling Davar, stopped littering his office with little fuzzy ducks and bears. Eventually, she stopped passing by all of our offices, stopped calling with pretexts of photos she wanted to drop off or stories to discuss. She blipped off our screens, and when I asked Davar a few months later if he had heard from her, he told me she had gotten married to “some conservative guy.” But how? I asked. When did she meet him? When did they date? Why had she stopped working? She kept in touch with no one, and we never saw her again.
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