“We know all the same people. We would throw the best dinner parties. Can you imagine?”
“Babe, I know you too well now,” he replied. “You have no idea what you want. You don’t want a relationship. You want a story to tell over cocktails.”
“That’s so unfair. You don’t want a person either. You want an ornament /chef who happens to have a brilliant intellect. Who happens to want to live in Tehran. That doesn’t exist.”
“I know I’ll have to compromise. Eventually. And I know it’ll be a big-deal compromise. I’m just not there yet.”
I understood precisely what Siamak meant. He didn’t need to say anything more, but he did.
“You’re not really into me in that way. And I’m not really into you in that way. And we both know it. If you don’t want to hear that reason, I can come up with different ones. But that’s really it.”
He was right. The whole point of us being romantically involved was flawed, because I had conceived the idea not out of attraction or spark, but out of a frustration with the confusion in my own life. Rather than admit that Iran was disappointing me and wearing me down, it was easier to concentrate on Siamak, a reassuring dinghy in the chaos. Rather than work through my lingering uncertainties about the place of Iran and America inside me, it was easier to pretend assurance by affixing myself to someone who already had it figured out. In the same way Fatimeh sought the company of Davar, instead of challenging the constricting tradition of her parents. As Mira confused dating a consummate jerk with exploring her sexuality. It would take me a bit longer to see it, but I used Siamak as a refuge from realities I could still not bear to admit: that I would probably feel out of place everywhere, always; that my family would be divided forever, between America and Iran; that I would always feel alone.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Summer of the Cockroach
Get used to opening windows wide to see what the past has done to the present, and weep quietly, quietly, lest our enemies hear broken shards clattering within us.
—MAHMOUD DARWISH
My face pressed into the plastic strips of the beach lounger, and I wiggled my nose into a crack, so I could breathe and maintain this position of optimal sun exposure. My friend Kim unlaced the strings of my bikini top, so my back would tan evenly. No, we were not in Iran. That would have involved what political scientists like to call step-change, a major and significant transformation in a country’s development. I had come to Lebanon to do a story on Hezbollah and had extended my stay for a few weeks, so I could go to the beach with Kim, a journalist friend. We lounged by the freshwater pool, discussing whether she should buy an apartment in Beirut and whether I should buy one in Tehran. She reminded me the Iranian regime was unstable, and I reminded her Israel could reoccupy southern Lebanon.
Real estate did not appear the safest investment for either of us. Our lives, in this region, of this region, always returned to this question: how to put down roots in ground that was so unstable, in ground that was either meant to be temporary, or susceptible to shifts, in response to decisions made by politicians or generals or clerics. Ground that was either being occupied, invaded, liberated, or beginning to tremor, under regimes that seemed destined to collapse.
At the Caspian Sea, where I had chosen not to spend any time that summer, my uncle and his partners had built a gated compound of villas on the waterfront. In our little patch of beach there, I could even swim in a bikini, as long as I waited till I was fully submerged before taking my tee-shirt off. When I told my family I was going to spend the summer in Beirut, they urged me to stay. I thought about all the blissful weekends we’d spent there. We would splash around in the pool, then dry off to play basketball, and grill fresh sturgeon for lunch. When the sun set, we walked laps around the compound and dropped into everyone’s open living rooms for tea, and then played games of pool before gathering for heaps of fresh caviar and ice-cold vodka.
It was idyllic, really, if you could get yourself to stop thinking about what was going on outside, or back in Tehran. That summer in Iran, there was yet another anti-immodesty drive underway. The system issued hysterical public warnings against “decadent Western behavior” and sent police to raid the café scene. For Elvis’s café, that singular place where Celine and I and countless others took special delight in drinking coffee, it was the beginning of the end. Elvis became tense and moody, reluctant to police the behavior of customers who had become friends. Only twice did he ever tell me to fix my veil, each time with his eyes, his whole posture, radiating apology. He hated having to say such things. Yet if he refused, he could be fined if police showed up and found us as we were, too busy talking to notice our head scarves had slipped back a few inches. He began closing earlier and earlier, and eventually shut down.
Rumors raged that bands of Basiji were roving the streets, in search of women wearing sandals and Capri pants. As punishment, they forced them to dip their bare legs in a bucket of cockroaches. Either that, or they sprayed their feet with a paint that took weeks to wear off, so the ankle-flaunting harlots would be forced to wear shoes and socks all summer. When Khaleh Farzi recounted this to me in warning, I laughed it off. Come on, that’s urban legend, I said. For one, Basijis are too lazy to go around collecting buckets full of cockroaches. But the bucket became fixed in my mind. I’ve been petrified of cockroaches since that childhood summer in Iran, when they would come hurtling through the air, miniature avian-reptiles, and corner me in a bathroom leagues away from adult rescue. No, I decided, I would not do a cockroach summer. So I went to Beirut.
Splat. A wet volleyball soared out of the pool and hit Kim in the knee. A little boy in orange swimtrunks trotted over to collect it. I got it, he screeched, in perfect American English. I pressed my eyes into the softness of the towel, and tried to isolate voices in the conversations around me. A pack of young girls walked by, chattering about the boys around them, and where they should go clubbing in Beirut that night. A serious young voice from inside the pool complained about a detested biology teacher. Further back, from the shady grove of trees, middle-aged Lebanese women deliberated whether an absent friend should have her drooping butt surgically lifted.
Their conversations swung between Arabic, French, and English, but it was the variety of English that intrigued me. I heard British accents, and American ones, and among the American accents, I detected distinct strains—native, ten years post immigration, California, New Jersey. Lebanese expatriates rivaled the Iranian diaspora in size, but unlike Iranians, many visited their home country en masse every summer. They returned with their children in tow, and all those Lebanese kids growing up in France and Africa, Canada and America, ended up with a tangible sense of origin. They wouldn’t have to subsist abroad on stale memories and myths. Memories carried you only so far. They faded steadily over time, and were overlaid by fresh recollections and new longings, until one’s consciousness eventually recomposed itself without them. The accents mingled together. Cousins from far away splashed about with relatives who had never left. Their merriment was spontaneous. Young and easy. Borderless.
I wondered, for the thousandth futile time, what would have happened if we had spent every summer in Iran, what would have happened if there had been no revolution. Would my laughter have been this easy, at a crowded pool where my cousins, both the boys and the girls, would have swum together? Would we have felt Iran was ours, felt ties pulling us back, rather than dark fears pushing us away? I thought about my cousins in the U.S. How many of them would bring their no-Farsi-speaking, half-third-generation children to Iran?
That week in Beirut, an editor I knew asked me why Iranians, unlike Lebanese, deserted their country when the going got tough. “We had a war too,” he said, puffing self-importantly on a cigar, “but we didn’t pick up and leave. Why did you?” Intellectually, I could argue with him. You had a war, but no one ever stole your personal freedom. Your city became a war zone, but you still lived your lives. No one crept into your bedroom, into your mi
nd, and tried to insert their hateful morality into every crevice of your existence. These were rational arguments, but they did not wash away the guilt. Of leaving Iran to them, throwing up our hands and collectively moving on. Go ahead, ruin the country. We’ll be in exile, if you need us.
I turned over, and studied the sky. My mobile phone rang, and Kim and I exchanged glances. It was Friday, the day Hezbollah usually staged attacks along the southern border. Hopefully it would not be an editor, watching the wires in London, sending us off to work.
“Khosh migzareh, Khanoum?” drawled a haughty voice. It was Dariush, asking me if I was having fun. I shook my head to Kim. He and I were just friends now, but helped each other out when we could, out of an only-child-with-distracted-parents solidarity.
“Listen, something happened a couple of nights ago. I don’t want you to get worked up over it. But I think you should know.” His voice was calm. “Last night my friend Amin and I were taking a box of stuff you’d left in my garage to your apartment, and we got stopped at a checkpoint on the way. They searched the car, and found a bottle of wine in one of the boxes.” He paused.
“Go on.”
“He had dropped me off to get cantaloupe juice, and was making a U-turn, so he was alone in the car. Amin told them it was his. I caught up to the car, and told him to keep quiet, that I’d say it was mine. But he said it would be less trouble for him than me. The next day he went to the court, on Vozara Street. They fined him thirty lashes. But he was lucky, they let him keep his T-shirt on, and it was thick. He’s fine. We went to a party straight from there.”
My lips parted, but no sound came out, as though I had swallowed a shard of glass. What could I possibly say? Tell your friend I owe him dinner, when I get back to Tehran?
“Azadeh? Are you there? Listen, we’re used to this kind of thing. As a teenager, I don’t think I made it home a single night without getting stopped and smacked upside the head on the way. Stop being so squeamish and American about it.” His voice was even, but tinged with impatience.
“Please tell him, from me, that I’m really, really sorry,” I said hoarsely.
I hung up the phone, pressed my face back into the beach towel, and wept. Someone had been whipped, like a dog, because of my carelessness. For a stupid bottle of wine that I should have remembered to throw away. I lay there for half an hour immobile. Then I uncurled myself, put on sunglasses, and wound my way through the laughing throng to the rocks along the beach. My little fantasy, of one day being in Iran surrounded by this sort of crowd—Iranians from the West, summering at the Caspian with their children—was shattered. It finally hit me: It would never come to pass. There was no sequel to IRANIANS FLEE TEHRAN ON EVE OF REVOLUTION, and I would never write my dream headline (VILE CLERICAL REGIME FALLS, MULLAHS CHARTER FLIGHT TO NAJAF AS EXILES RUSH BACK). Not even if Iran changed tomorrow. Not even if Siamak and I became the most international, perfect Iranian-American couple ever.
Kim and I drove back to Beirut that night to meet friends for drinks. From the second floor of the bar, the breeze floated in from the Mediterranean, the lights of the corniche twinkled, and I gazed down into my Bellini feeling utterly alone. I couldn’t concentrate on a word being said around me, so I left early to walk my regret home.
Along the way, on a decaying building still riddled with bullet holes from the war, I noticed a giant portrait of Ayatollah Khomeini. I stood beneath it, and matched his glare with my own. A group of men at a nearby ATM glanced over at me, curious. I shrugged my shoulders, basking in their bareness before the ayatollah’s sullen grimace. Why are you frowning? I asked him in my head. Everything went your way. You got the country. People saw your face in the moon. I considered sitting down on the pavement to smoke a cigarette in defiance, an anti-pilgrimage. But that was taking things too far. One did not sit on dark street corners, arguing inside one’s head with a dead ayatollah.
I returned to a Tehran that was still under cockroach alert. My mother was in town, having come for a month of summer vacation, and during this time she sniffed around suspiciously, detecting a pro-American tilt to my work. She concluded I was “a tool in the pro-Israel, anti-Middle East mainstream media machine,” and had taken, in between cooing reunions with relatives, to being cool and dismissive of my ideas, my stories, and ultimately, me. Although she had not visited Iran in a decade, she already knew the country she wanted to find—materially deprived by the revolution, but blissfully unsoiled by the West—and she edited reality to fit this conception.
As luck would have it, the month my loudly anti-American mother came to Tehran, I was doing a string of stories on the popularity of American culture. She refused to believe that young people were transfixed with the United States, that American products were growing more popular each day, that young people, tired of the constrained social life prescribed by the regime, associated brand-name icons of American culture, Coke and Barbie, with the freedoms they were denied. When I told her that young people from all walks of life loved American-style burger outlets, and would choose a Coke over an Iranian cola any day, she chose not to believe me.
I tried to persuade her with fact. I explained that fake American fast food was taking over Tehran. That fake Hardees, KFCs, and McDonaldses were swarming with teenagers thrilled to be tasting and participating in a ritual they associated with openness—eating a burger and fries. Burger places exploited this impulse, I told her, modeling themselves, down to the last detail, after American franchises.
At Tehran’s Super Star, which imitated Carl’s Jr., smiling employees wore polo shirts monogrammed with the Carl’s Jr. star, THANK YOU was printed on the swinging door of the trash can, and a comments box solicited complaints. The only design element that would have been out of place in an authentic branch was the discreet plaque reminding customers to PLEASE RESPECT ISLAMIC MORALS. When rumor spread that Super Star procured its buns from an American burger franchise in the Persian Gulf, the crowds only grew.
Just last week, I said, I stood in an hour-long line outside the newest burger place, Apache, while a bouncer regulated the flow of traffic in and out. If you don’t believe me, come next Friday and see for yourself. She snorted.
One of the hottest new shops in Tehran those days was near Khaleh Farzi’s house, in Elahieh. My mother and Khaleh Farzi had not been on speaking terms since 1997, so she had not seen this neighborhood marvel. The store’s name was too risqué, by local standards, to be displayed out front, and was painted instead, in gilt letters, on a dusky rose wall inside: Victoria’s Secret. It wasn’t a real part of the chain, of course (U.S. sanctions forbade American companies from doing business in Iran). Some savvy merchant in West L.A. probably bought out his local VS, threw copyright to the winds, and set up shop in Tehran. Iranian women flocked there to rapturously fawn over delicate silk negligees, lace underwear, and other fripperies. All over the capital, it seemed Iranians were craving consumer symbols of American culture. The scarcity of supply only drove more demand, even for faux versions of everything you could imagine.
I tried to refine the point. Perhaps Maman might understand that young people embraced the “Great Satan’s” products not out approval for U.S. foreign policy in the region but as a way to register their discontent with the religious conservatives who controlled their country. But none of this heartfelt explaining did any good at all, and she just gave me that narrowed, skeptical look that said I feel that you are lying, but because you are my daughter, and we are polite people, I will not point this out to you. “I understand that you and your five yuppie friends feel that way,” she said.
The stories about pro-U.S. sentiment in Iran, she insisted, were concocted by the American media (and its journalist-propagandists, like me) to pave the way for American cultural/political/military/culinary domination of the region. The U.S. wanted to keep Iran either weak and isolated, or weak and dependent. That’s why the CIA overthrew the country’s democratically elected government in 1953. The United States cared only about secu
ring its own interests, along with Israel’s, in the region. Given this, Iranians had a duty to be anti-American. I had a duty to be quiet, and not criticize the Islamic Republic, because in the short term I would be making things easier for a neo-imperial America bent on undermining the country.
If I have to function that way, I told her, I’d rather not be a journalist. The whole reason I do this is to document reality, not cover it up. Besides, why isn’t it possible to criticize both? Do America’s abhorrent Middle East policies somehow oblige us to defend the Islamic Republic?
Our arguments were never-ending. Frequently, they sank to absurd depths. One afternoon, irritated that my work had me undermining Islamic solidarity, she made a theological critique of my outfit as I prepared to leave the house.
“You’re not going out in those sandals, are you?”
“Yes, I am. Is that a problem?”
“You’re disrespecting Imam Hossein.”
“Mom,” I said, “Imam Hossein has been dead for a thousand years. Surely he doesn’t care about my footwear.”
“Fine. Disrespect your culture. People won’t say it to your face, but know, Azadeh, know, that in their hearts, they are insulted.”
I tried to take her censure about my clothes, my understanding of Iran, my work, lightly. Rationally, I knew I was in charge of my reactions. In the split second after a standard maternal provocation (“I regret how bourgeois you have become”), I could choose patience over fury. But most of the time, I regressed in nanoseconds to my disconsolate fifteen-year-old self, mute and wounded at being told she had betrayed her real culture.
The only difference was that now, I was armed with my own arsenal of Iran savvy. This insane traffic that made her shudder? I could navigate it from the top of Tehran to the bottom. With short cuts. The politics she made pronouncements about? I actually understood the fine points and could recite the history of its evolution by rote. When our arguments in Farsi became heated, I no longer had to switch to English, in liquid wrath, to make a point. After months of dislocation, my mother’s arrival demystified what I had been seeking all along—a shared history with Iranians living inside, a history in modern Iran. And now, finally, I was more at home than she was in Tehran, street-smart in the city where she grew up and that she now no longer recognized.
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