Now I could see how much of my journey back had been directed to this very point—the point where my relationship to Iran was bilateral, not negotiated through a third party (my mother) and at the mercy of our turbulent relationship. Before I came to Iran, my mother essentially was Iran to me. During her long stretches of estrangement, I felt exiled from Iran as well. No matter how many Iranian restaurants I dragged my friends to or Iranian films I sat through at art-house cinemas, I hadn’t been able to fill the cat-shaped hole in my life.
Looking back, I saw that my return to Iran was partly to preempt my fear of a loss I knew was inevitable. One day my mother would die, and with her my Iran would disappear. Once, when we were driving together from Carmel to San Jose, I shuffled through the tapes in the car, and slipped a tape of classical Iranian music into the stereo. The drawn-out twang of the sitar filled the car. She smiled softly. “Do you remember,” she asked, “when you were little, and told me, ‘Mom, it’ll be sad when you die, because no one will listen to this music anymore’? I think you will.”
That summer of 2001, the summer of the cockroach, was a time-marker for both my life and Iran. It was the last summer Iran would be boring old Iran, and not a member of the “Axis of Evil,” the Bush administration’s rogue-state triptych. It was the last summer the country would have relative calm on its borders, instead of the wars that were to come, in Afghanistan and Iraq. It was the summer I stopped tormenting myself with such enthusiasm, and began to admit that Iran was disappointing me horribly.
As the mullahs waged a multi-front war on fun, stirring rumors of a cockroach menace and siccing the morality police on cafés, young people’s hunt for entertainment found a new outlet: post-soccer match celebrations. The regime considered exercise healthy and virile, and the national soccer team represented Iran in a sport associated with populism, all worthy in the regime’s calculations. So celebrating the team’s victories became a pretext for kids to pour into the streets, make noise, and be young. Eventually, people even began “celebrating” the team’s losses and dismal wins over inferior teams.
It became such a phenomenon that the media started covering soccer nights as news stories. The evening Iran played the United Arab Emirates, I packed a reporting satchel and got ready to go out. The Iranian team performed badly and failed to secure a spot in the playoffs. But teenagers poured out onto the streets as though we had won the World Cup. Hundreds of thousands of people descended into the Tehran night, under a velvety sky occasionally lit up by lightning. Najmeh, my anti-smoking journalist friend, and I drove over to Shahrak-e Gharb to check out the celebrations. The square was thick with teenagers and families, waving Iranian flags, honking their horns, setting off firecrackers, and chanting “Iran!”
Police in riot gear lined the square, eyeing the crowd uneasily. People were so high-strung and excitable that any spontaneous gathering could easily morph into protest against the system. The security apparatus knew this, and often preemptively disbanded crowds, before they could turn.
I have a bad feeling about this, I said to Najmeh. There are too many police. Moments later, a teenage boy on a motorbike shot through the crowd, crying “Death to Khamenei.” The police didn’t move, but they shifted uneasily in their positions. Emboldened, another teenager ripped a small tree out by the roots, tied an Iranian flag to its branches, and brandished it in the air. A procession of hundreds began following him down to the main square.
Najmeh and I followed, until we saw two young men dousing the lawn of the square with kerosene. Run, I yelled, grabbing her arm. We sprinted back up the boulevard as giant flames engulfed the square behind us. Najmeh glanced over her shoulder to make sure I was close behind her. Azadeh, roosarit! she cried, your head scarf! The scarf had slipped back slightly, exposing my hair. Najmeh was always immaculately covered. She could be fleeing a burning building, or a burning square for that matter, and stay modestly put together.
Suddenly, without sounding a single warning, the police stormed the square. They charged in all directions, swinging their batons. They moved into the crowd of middle-aged women and children, beating them on their backs and legs. They beat trees.
Najmeh and I climbed up an embankment and huddled against the wall of a nearby apartment building. We thought we were safe, never thinking the police would spread out so far. But they did. They came storming up the hill, just meters away from us. I stood paralyzed. This cannot actually be happening, I told myself. This is a very bad movie. You will snap out of it in a second, and realize you fell asleep on the couch. But then I felt Najmeh’s nails digging into my arm, as she grabbed me and pulled me further up the hill. I tried to run sideways, so I could watch my back while moving. But it slowed me down. They were nearly on top of us now, so I turned to sprint.
Before picking up Najmeh that evening, I had run miles at home on the treadmill, and my legs felt like jelly. They were too tired to carry me. Really, you would be such a fool, I scolded myself, if you couldn’t outrun some pudgy Iranian cop. Thud. I heard the sound of a wooden baton slam against my neck, before I felt the pain. Thud. My tailbone. Thud. Thud. Thud.
I doubled over, but I kept running, weaving between shrubs and trees, trying to escape more blows. Naj, I screamed. I couldn’t see her anywhere. My veil twisted around my neck, and I pulled it off, so I could see all around me. Everything blurred. I saw men and women fleeing, heard cries and the stamping of feet. Finally, I reached a small park, near the back door of another apartment building. By now I was above the melee. I turned to see Najmeh trudging up behind me, her face splattered with black tears of running eyeliner. Naj, they hit me, I repeated over and over, lightly touching my fingers to the throbbing in the back of my neck. I know, she said. They hit me, too. We held each other for a few seconds.
The scene from the hill was flashing before me. I had seen a girl, about twelve, being beaten and the image filled me with a wrath I had never experienced. I screamed, using the foulest Farsi I could manage, cursing the police, the system, the revolution. Najmeh rocked back and forth on a park bench, clutching her stomach. I thought she was crying again, until I realized the sounds were belly laughs. Oh no, I thought, she’s hysterical. Do I have to slap her?
Azadeh, she gasped, you can’t say those things, anatomically, those are male curses. The woman was amazing. If you woke her up from a nightmare, she would speak in correct, full sentences. Whatever, they deserve it, I said.
Slowly we walked up a creek bank parallel to the road, and peeked through fences to see if we had come far enough. A few teenage boys ran into the creek, scooped up rocks in their T-shirts, and ran back out onto the street, flinging them at the police. But they were no match for batons. Fifteen minutes later, the police had cleared the main avenue. If we walked back to the square, we would probably be detained, but it was the only route home.
A green Paykan slowed near us, and Najmeh begged the family inside to take us as far as the expressway. As we drove toward the square, she told me not to look outside, but I couldn’t help it. I saw about ten young men lined up against a fence being savagely beaten, their arms above their heads. In the square, a group of those arrested—at least forty—sat crouched on the ground in a circle, heads down, awaiting the security buses that would take them away.
“Baba, are they beating these people because they’re not husband and wife?” asked the little boy in the car, as he gazed out the car window, transfixed.
“No, baba jaan, it’s because the police are afraid of them,” replied his father. He did not explain, and the little boy went quiet.
The family dropped us off beyond the square, where we scanned for a taxi at the freeway entrance. Naj, I know that you’re going to hate it, I said, but I think at this moment, I really deserve a cigarette. She glared wordlessly. I took the pack from my satchel, lit up, and as if on cue, cars began pulling up alongside us, heckling, offering rides. Islamic dress codes made it difficult for women to dress in a totally distinct fashion, so prostitutes distingu
ished themselves to potential clients with coded signs. One was to hold a plastic bag in the left hand. Another was to smoke in the street.
Najmeh gritted her teeth. She ignored the cars, but her full, arched eyebrows grew closer and closer together, until I thought she would go cross-eyed. Do you want me to put it out? I whimpered. Yes, she exploded, they think we’re jendehs, whores! I crushed the cigarette under my foot, and looked up at the sky, hoping for some sort of divine intervention. How was it possible to be thrashed with a baton and solicited sexually in the space of thirty minutes? I felt like I was trapped in a Quentin Tarantino movie. What would happen next? Maybe we would get run over by a car, and then auctioned off in the ambulance?
It took two hours to get home. The scene in Shahrak had repeated itself in squares all over the city, and the streets were locked with traffic. After spending half an hour immobile on an overpass above Vali Asr, contorting in various positions that didn’t pressure my tailbone, I got out of the car to walk home. All along the overpass, people had turned off their engines, turned up their stereos, and were dancing between lanes. High above the street, protected by a parking lot of cars, they were safe. It was the first time in Iran I had seen that many people dancing anywhere besides a living room. My body ached. I needed to get home.
For an entire week, I did not leave my couch. I simply could not sit. Outside my apartment, life ground on as usual, with the bizarre sameness that followed severe mass disturbances. Perhaps for a couple of weeks, illegal satellite dishes would not be raided, coffee shops would be left alone. Maybe the price of bread and meat would drop, or state television would show Harry Potter in the evening. With these token gestures, the system would twist the valve to let out just enough pressure. This time the regime masterminded a slightly more creative official response to the riot: a mammoth confection. After the next soccer match, the government baked a towering, fifty-layer pink and yellow victory cake, requiring some 12,000 eggs and 1,200 pounds of chocolate. They transported the cake to the lawn on Azadi Square, near the soccer stadium, and distributed it by refrigerated trucks all over Tehran. Reformists said nothing about the cake but instead raised questions about the system’s core problems: the multiple power centers within the Islamic regime, the imperviousness of its legal structures to amendment. The discussions went in circles.
Stranded on my couch, I expected a little sympathy from Siamak. He offered none at all. He said I should stop being neurotic, and sent me emails that read: “u LIKE drama too much baby. Must-stop-drama.” Lately, he took this patronizing tone with me.
I rose every few hours to pull up my nightgown, and stand before the mirror, monitoring the dramatic evolution of my bruises. The colors shifted as spectacularly as a sky at sunset, from inky purple, to iris blue, to a sickly olive-yellow. The more everyone brushed off the incident (“So, I hear you got a little spanking . . . teflak, that’s too bad. . . . Can you do lunch Wednesday?”), the more obsessed with them I became. I lay face down on my bed, over a white sheet, and made Khaleh Farzi take pictures of them.
Siamak was not getting the message. What I wanted to explain, were he to give me the chance, was that we had a moral obligation to care when awful things happened to people around us. That by treating beatings, lashings, or checkpoint arrests as commonplace—ordinary, like going to the ATM—we were becoming dehumanized to the sickness around us. A heightened threshold of suffering was necessary for getting through the day, but mentally, we had to retain some sort of perspective. Of how a functional government should behave. Of what was unacceptable. Otherwise, we would become like those blasé reformists, who would look you in the eye, and say: “Look at how much progress we’ve made . . . See! I’m wearing short-sleeves. . . . Could I have worn short-sleeves ten years ago? . . . No! . . . What are you whining about human rights for? . . . Aren’t we better than the Taliban? Than the Saudis?” Yes, there would always be some junked, lost country we would be superior to, but that wasn’t a proper ambition, was it?
Siamak and I lamented many things, but most of all how the revolution had lowered Iranians’ expectations. How it made them dream more modestly. Iranians considered a soulless shopping mall like Dubai, in the Persian Gulf, the height of modernity. There were few sights more painful than watching Iranians shopping in Dubai, gaping in awe at this trussed-up backwater, wondering whether someday, in the distant future, Tehran would be lucky enough to approach a fifth of its greatness.
Why did Iran’s vision have to contract so minutely? When did we start dreaming so small, start considering violence against our bodies normal? For the average citizen of Tehran, years, possibly a lifetime, would probably pass without an arrest, a beating, or some other random, unearned act of brutality. But the potential still colored the mental context in which everyone lived.
I could not say these things to Siamak. He was too busy drafting a PowerPoint presentation about the new investment law. So instead I told Reza, who came to visit me the very next day. He brought strawberries and the new James Bond movie on DVD. When he called to tell me he was going to do this, I told him I didn’t have a DVD player, and so he brought one of those, too. All morning, he treaded back and forth between the living room and the kitchen, bringing me cups of tea and heating towels to put under my neck. He, like any normal human being, considered it a tragedy that police would beat unarmed women and children. At least they should invest in a giant water hose, he mused, fiddling with the television wires. After all these years, they still haven’t figured out how to control a crowd of people without bashing their heads in.
Watching him, I was struck by how evolved he was. Though he had always lived in Iran, there was nothing traditional or dogmatic or chauvinistic about him. He was always criticizing something, having absorbed essays and books that I only managed to skim. We had more in common than I ever expected, the same taste in ideas, the same conclusions about people. Once upon a time, at the very beginning, I had assumed he was an archetypal Iranian male—raised to believe he was the center of the universe, deserving of women’s constant, tender ministrations—who concealed his sexism with jargony intellectual debate. How wrong I had been.
I had been wrong about Siamak, too. When I first met him, I was convinced that Siamak, the U.S.-educated consultant, was necessarily broad-minded, in every realm of his life. When these judgments collided with reality—Reza’s worldly intellectual openness, Siamak’s boring, airhead girlfriends—I was embarrassed to admit how deterministically I had viewed them both. How quickly I had outlined dictums about the sort of life or person I wanted, so naively convinced I would think that way forever. As I came to understand all of this, I slowly let go of the belief that Siamak was my perfect Iranian-American alter ego, without whom I could never be whole and at home.
Siamak was precious to me, touched my life in a special way, because no one else’s history had paralleled mine so closely—American cities, Cairo, then Tehran. We shared that kindred bond I had with my cousins, woven from the intimacy of shared experience. As with them, I didn’t need to continually recompose myself before him, because he had grown up in the same sort of living room. But this kind of bond is what made people family. It was wholly separate from the question of who could make the grown-up you happy, with whom you could fall in love. Just because on paper, and in the eyes of others, we were a suitable match did not mean his soul would sing to mine, or mine to his. I had to let him go.
I was too proud to discuss how excruciating it had become, just getting through the day; how the beating had grafted itself on my consciousness, putting my senses on an exhausting, permanent danger alert. In the full light of day, at the produce market, the rev of a motorcycle engine sent my heart racing so fast I could hardly see.
Covering crowds, the vigils or lectures where confrontations with the Basij or the police were inevitable, was like rubbing gravel into an open wound. If a group of people began moving quickly, if a line of police shifted positions, if a Basiji raised his voice, I started to run aw
ay, my feet driven by raw, lizard-brain reflex. On multiple occasions, covering demonstrations, I sat trembling three blocks away, pestering my friend from the BBC on the mobile phone to tell me what was transpiring. “Don’t be silly, Azadeh. Get back here,” he would say. “There’s absolutely nothing happening.” But I couldn’t. I had seen how you could go from absolutely nothing to having your neck smashed in bare seconds. There was no way to predict when things would spiral out of control. No way to know if that night the Basij had been instructed to intimidate or attack. I wasn’t sure how to deal with this skittishness. How to forget the cockroaches.
CHAPTER NINE
Not Without My Mimosa
When we saw the wounds of our country
appear on our skins,
we believed each word of the healers.
Our ailments were so many, so deep within us,
that all diagnoses proved false, each remedy useless.
Now do whatever, follow each clue,
accuse whomever, as much as you will,
our bodies are still the same,
our wounds still open.
Now tell us that we should.
you tell us how to heal these wounds.
—FAIZ AHMED FAIZ
It was September 14, 2001. For three days, I had not budged from a twenty-yard perimeter of my television. A moat of empty water bottles and apple cores surrounded the couch, the single piece of furniture on which I now ate and slept and lived. It was as though a close friend that no one else here knew had been murdered, and suddenly all the nice people in my midst had been transformed into cold monsters, unmoved by death. The phone rang as it usually did, with invitations to dinners and lunches. Life proceeded as normal, though for me time had slowed, and even the tree outside my living room window somehow looked different.
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