I stared at Maman, who stared at the mustached woman. Maman pulled her shoulders up and gazed at her with blazing eyes. Shouldn’t you be going after the thieves who’re robbing the country blind? Her voice was high and forceful. Caterpillar woman flinched. Okay, she said, just sit down, open your legs, and wiggle. For years, that encounter fascinated me. I devoted free minutes, in the backseat of the car being shuttled to Farsi lessons, waiting to be picked up after school, trying to invent ways to smuggle jewelry out of Mehrabad. Then I would run them past my parents. What about a secret compartment inside the heel of a shoe? Tucked inside a Cabbage Patch kid’s diaper? Stop thinking about stuff like that, sweetheart, my dad would say.
I wondered if he and I would ever travel through Mehrabad together.
Finally, the loudspeaker called my flight to board. As soon as I stepped onto the plane, I tore the scarf off my head, a motion that felt no less wonderful with months of repetition. The lights of Tehran disappeared into distant flecks as the plane ascended, and I pressed my forehead against the vibrating window, until they were fully out of sight. I had called no one to say I was leaving, because in my mind, I was not prepared to leave. Uprooting with the conscious intent of transplanting myself to New York would have taken me weeks. Had I known the move would be permanent, I would have roamed the streets disconsolately, trying to memorize the bends in my neighborhood, the clean, frigid smell in the air after a night of snow. Worst of all, I would have had to call each friend, each relative and source and acquaintance, and say goodbye. I am leaving, as you always knew I would, leaving you behind.
Tormented by jet lag, I rose every morning well before dawn, and sat by the window of my Upper West Side sublet, waiting for the first rays of sun to shine on the Hudson, trembling with loneliness. I was no stranger to this city, whose streets I knew well from years of visits and extended stays, where I had cousins, close friends, and even a chelo-kabob crew that met once a month for dinner at Persian restaurants around the city. But after two years in Tehran, where the combat zone of everyday life made people dependent on one another for constant spiritual fortification, I was used to my days being suffused with intimacy. In Tehran, at any given hour in the day, at least four different people could have told you where I was, what sort of mood I was in, and what my plans were for the evening. Here, I could die of food poisoning from takeout, and no one would find me for days.
Living in Tehran was like being stuck in an elevator all the time, the snug common rut almost eroding stranger as a social category. In comparison with the fullness of those hours, my days in New York were a disconcerting, cold void. No one called to complain that the garbage man was now asking for a bribe, a conversation that would begin as a gripe and dissolve into jest.
While the intimacy of daily life retreated, work inflated in proportion. Soon after I came to New York, the magazine hired me as a writer on the world desk. After two years in the field, working at the Time Life Building in midtown lent a welcome but unsettling composure to my days. I wrote and reported on the same stories—militant groups, U.N. sanctions, al-Qaeda, weapons of mass destruction, Afghanistan—but I couldn’t smell or feel them. Interviews were easy. Sources called back. The phone wasn’t tapped (I think). No one proposed temporary marriage. But my life felt empty.
One weekend, in an effort to cheer me up, my cousin set me up with a colleague, an investment banker named Matt. We met for drinks. Like so many Americans, Matt’s perception of Iran was skewed. You can drive there? he asked. Wait, hold up, that means you can go outside? I didn’t blame him for not knowing, but I also didn’t have the patience for these conversations anymore. I was too angry to slow down and explain—angry that to be a Middle Eastern person in this era meant you were maligned and condemned, occupied and threatened, all ambiguity discarded.
We were having dinner at a steakhouse with vaulted ceilings, and the enormity of the meat that arrived on our plates distracted me. Matt’s cuff links shone. I was wearing a thin blouse, and felt myself shrink with cold. The stories that plopped out of my mouth sounded self-consciously exotic, in this robustly corporate atmosphere. Matt didn’t really know how to respond. That doesn’t sound like it checks out on the old safety meter, he said gamely. Do you just have a Hemingway-ish thirst for adventure?
No, I said, it’s not just me. That’s ordinary life. I could have taken the time to explain, to illustrate this strange-sounding world and fill in the lines of the axis-of-evil caricature. But I couldn’t work up the energy. I was being sullen, and I knew it, but I couldn’t be anything else. The starched table felt like a witness stand, and my role was defendant, to argue why my story contradicted the one on Fox News. Matt sat back, swirling the red wine around in his glass, waiting expectantly. He did not feel obligated to speak for the Bush administration, for the pro-Israel lobbies. Why then, was I expected to speak as an envoy for the Middle East? I had no desire to be an envoy.
Before I moved away from California, my energy for explanation was boundless. At the slightest sign of well-intentioned curiosity, I was eager to share that Iranian women could drive and have bank accounts and work, that the population was modern and sophisticated, that we spoke Farsi and did not by and large consider life cheap and support suicide bombings. But before, the curiosity wasn’t tinged with such confident suspicion, this mix of pity and mistrust.
By the time dessert arrived, we had retreated from these uncomfortable subjects, toward the common ground of things—Italian weavers of cashmere, Florentine paper.
I stared at Matt’s hand against the white tablecloth, searching for character clues. It struck me that it would take months to know one another properly, without having our deepest selves tested and displayed on the way home by a terrorizing run-in with the komiteh. When we walked out of the restaurant, I did not immediately reach for a pack of gum, to cover the martinis on my breath. It hit me with novel certainty that no one would stop us outside and ask how we were related. We could plan to meet again any evening of any week, without shifting plans to avoid the death anniversaries of imams, or other inauspicious nights.
How unaccustomed I had grown to American life, where my Iranian instincts served no purpose. When a bank clerk told me to come back in three days, my instincts buzzed “Obstacle!” and I tried to figure out how to bypass him, used to a system where you were constantly navigating blocks, until I realized he actually meant it. Not having to react this way, not having to think and maneuver as much, did not feel great, as it should have. Mostly it all felt too free, too oppressively light.
I noted the unhealthiness of this thought, and chalked it up to withdrawal pangs from a life overabundant in adrenaline. After a few weeks, the nightmares stopped. In Iran they had become so regular I no longer thought of them as nightmares. They were simply my dreams, always bad—of standing next to President Khatami being shot, getting his blood splattered all over me; of being strangled by my own head scarf, running out the door and having it catch on the knob.
I moved downtown to be closer to my two cousins, Pouria and Alidad, and our proximity to each other made Tribeca feel comfortingly village-like. We could stay up late drinking wine and watching Fardin movies, old Iranian black-and-whites, and arrive home on foot in minutes. During the week we were all busy frantically succeeding at our jobs—apparently the only mode of being for serious people in New York City—but we blurred through weekends, inseparable, in a continuous whirl of brunches, movies, drinks, and dinners.
My best friend from junior high school, an American, asked me if living in the U.S. felt different after September 11. Not really, I said, except that my cousins and I are turning into our parents. But the truth was that we cocooned in the shelter of each other’s company, as an ever-yawning gap developed between our inner sense of reality and the world around us. Now we felt—again—as though our lives were touched by a historical event we had no part in, but were somehow tainted by. Like the hostage crisis, which forced every Iranian in the United States to walk aroun
d with a scarlet letter of association, September 11 and the “axis of evil” revitalized suspicion and hatred for the religion, however secularly, we belonged to, and the part of the world we did not live in, but were shaped by and whose citizens we looked like.
Pouria might be a banker, hailing a cab down to the financial district each morning, or Alidad a corporate lawyer, merging and acquiring, but they were rather obviously young Middle Eastern men—the villains in the post-September 11 history of the world. We grew resentful enough, and paranoid enough, that we stopped mentioning September 11 in public.
People, our own friends, confessed the strangest, most insulting things, without any intention of offending (“I was sitting next to this guy on the subway, saw him reading the Koran, and wondered whether I should call the police, since the terror alert was on yellow”). You had to wonder what they were thinking, and why it was suddenly okay to think and act like this. What other people, what other religion, could you so openly slander?
After a two-hour brunch one Sunday morning in the Village, our waiter told us the owner of the restaurant was Moroccan. As he stacked our plates on his arm, he gave us a look, like surely you agree, and said, “He’s cool, but Muslims these days, who knows what they’re really thinking. I had an Iranian girlfriend, and I just had to get rid of her.” He actually said that.
Often it was like that—stupid little stings—but sometimes it was cruder and more disturbing, like when I called my aunt in California and was told that some redneck had punched my uncle (the gentlest soul you could imagine, an avid baker) in a mall parking lot over a parking space, bloodying his nose and calling him a dirty Arab. What if suddenly the country turned on us, we wondered, like it did on Japanese-Americans during World War II? We mused about this half-jokingly, as we did about our mothers, who were all deciding where to move when they finally came for us. Mine said Vancouver. Alidad’s said London.
We spent the week around colleagues and work friends, for the most part, concealing what we really thought, remaining silent when outrageous things about Islam and fundamentalism (aren’t they the same thing?) and the Middle East were said in our presence, and we were expected to agree, or not notice. And like our parents, who drifted through the 1980s, Iranian in America, with polite masks, and then rushed home to the kitchen table, to vent, and argue, and exercise their real selves, we did the same. Except at restaurants and bars, rather than the kitchen table. Raw with a week of pent-up frustration, on Friday evenings we drank far too much, and yelled at one another, upset enough that the waiter would hover nearby, waiting for one of us to pause mid-screed, so he could deposit a plate and mutter “Yellow tail sashimi with jalapeño” before scampering away.
Even our conversations took on familiar dynamics—the ebb and flow of frustration and resignation—though we often pretended detachment, and were careful to interrupt ourselves to gossip and decide on skiing versus island vacations. It did not really work, this attempt to mix serious and uncomfortable subjects with the effervescent, urbane tones we usually spoke in. This was supposed to be the inheritance of our generation, the privilege of shedding history. We were supposed to be citizens of the world, comfortable everywhere, released from the concerns of political conflict. Our lives were supposed to make up for our parents’ lives.
We became predictable, in our now distinct modes. Alidad was the deliberate and aggressive one, maneuvering the discussion around with disdainful purpose. Pouria got steely and quiet, and asked lots of questions, because he didn’t have the time to read enough, to arm himself with facts, and the bareness of his intellectual defense incensed him. Generally, I was defensive and jumpy, because Alidad would at some point have slammed his glass down on the table, and attacked me as propagandist for the U.S. government (“Can you stop talking in Time-ese?”). Like our parents, who saw a conspiracy in every corner, we too developed the unattractive tendency of paranoia, though we despised ourselves for it all the while. If an airline lost Alidad’s plane reservation, he became convinced he was being monitored by the FBI, his travels disrupted by some software at CIA headquarters that automatically canceled last-minute plane travel by people with Ali in their name.
When the conversation relaxed, we lingered over port, smoked, and discussed exit strategies. Alidad plotted a move to London, where he insisted the base level of ignorance would be elevated a few notches, and where you could criticize Israel without being called an anti-Semite, damaging your career and becoming a social leper. Pouria speculated about oil and power, as he had decided to retire at forty and devote the rest of his life to writing a book about neo-imperial energy politics. I dreamed about buying an old house in Beirut, and renovating it with friends, making a home in the only city I knew where the duty to fight occupation and the passion to live richly were sustained with equal energy. Around the edges of these evenings, I felt it creeping up again, the shadow of history, dogging the next year, the next decade, each decision. At the end of these nights, we filed out into the street, throats sore from talking, and headed toward an intersection to hail a taxi. I walked in the middle, linking us together with my arms, trying to extend the intimacy that had risen up between us, like an invisible shield, another hour, another block.
As the weeks passed, it became clear that I would not be going back to Tehran. I called finally to announce this to my relatives. Khaleh Farzi had a spare set of keys to my apartment, and she went over and packed my life up into boxes. The apartment went to Siamak, as we had originally agreed, upon discovering it together, falling in love with its view of Tehran, and co-signing the lease.
Still, five months later, on an exploratory mission to see if the ground had firmed up, whether it might be possible for me to return permanently, I boarded a plane to Tehran. I expected it would still be difficult to work, and that I would have to go through the ceremony of leaving that I had avoided the first time around, with my unannounced, middle-of-the-night departure. So I arrived in Tehran, bracing myself for the emotional drain of multiple good-byes, desolate at the prospect of becoming one of the ones who left for good. But one of my first mornings back, as Khaleh Farzi and I were drinking coffee, the phone rang.
“Your grandfather passed away last night”: it was my father’s voice over a crackly line. He spoke in that clinical, over-enunciated tone he reserved for anything Iranian and emotive, as though he was explaining the pathology of a complicated cancer. “The service is in four days. In my opinion, there is no need to interrupt your work to return. You know how I feel about this mourning business. But your mother might feel differently.”
Because my mother was a professional weeper (she had wept her way through the last decade, for Iraq, for Bosnia, for Afghanistan, and, eternally, for Palestine), because she wore all-black for 365 days when her mother had died a decade earlier, I didn’t bother to check.
And so I returned to the airport. This time, as I gazed at the city disappearing below, and ticked off another deferred farewell to Iran, it occurred to me that perhaps there would never be a proper good-bye. I thought of my Agha Joon, my grandfather, and how strange it was to be leaving Tehran, the city where he spent his career and raised his children, to bury him in California, a land he passed through like a ghost.
He should be buried in Tehran, or in his home province of Azarbaijan, where everyone spoke Farsi with the same gentle, Turkish lilt, or in Shiraz, near the tomb of his beloved Hafez. Certainly not in Los Gatos, at an interfaith cemetery surrounded by tract homes and a strip mall anchored by a Borders. But perhaps he wouldn’t mind, I told myself; maybe he would just blink widely and repeat a few lines of verse about untethered spirits.
I had visited him in the nursing home the last time I was back in California. Oh, how my cousins and I tortured our parents over that nursing home. You said they were only for Americans, for savages who didn’t care about their old people, we accused them. Their faces pinched, pale with pain, they blamed each other, and everything else they could think of, for why it had come to pa
ss. The truth was that like most Americans, they had jobs and could not suspend their lives to care for their sick. They were living their American nightmare, at one of those exile crossroads where bitter reality stares you in the face—when you are forced to confront the fact that the temporary stay has become permanent, that you will never smell the old smells again, that there is no other life to regain.
The nursing home’s peach, textured walls, its room filled with the shells of men and women, sapped the remains of Agha Joon’s spirit. Tacked on the wall behind his bed were instructions, written out by my mother: Please include yogurt with Mr. Katouzi’s meals. I saw that note, and felt my stomach cramp with pain, because I knew then that he would die. He would rather die than keep breathing with the knowledge that he was a burden.
My mother referred to him pointedly in these notes as Mr. Katouzi, lest some young nurse accustomed to the easy familiarity of such places venture to call him by his first name, Gholam-Hossein. Should this happen, I warned my mother, he might have a stroke on the spot, murdered by indignity.
Frail, surrounded by strangers, unable to communicate in their tongue, Agha Joon was stranded at an antiseptic, alien rest stop on the way to death. And he knew it. When I went to visit him, he played the usual game, decades old, of not recognizing me, until I stepped right in front of him and bounced up and down, Manam, manam! It’s me, it’s me. A real fog seemed to have replaced the make-believe one.
Lipstick Jihad Page 28
