by Rolf Potts
It was the spring of 2009 and we had no idea of the turmoil that was coming. We couldn’t know that, only months later, people would take to the streets to protest the manipulated results of a presidential election, only to see their uprising brutally crushed. Many would be arrested, many raped, bludgeoned, shot dead. We didn’t know the face of Neda Agha-Soltan yet, the student who would lie dying in a street in Tehran, blood streaming across her cheeks, a sniper’s bullet in her chest.
The apparatus of the Islamic Republic of Iran received the American bride with theatrical coldness. The photograph in her visa showed Gypsy smiling, and the immigration officer might have liked it. But he didn’t open her passport. It was enough for him to see the golden eagle and the gilded words “United States of America.” He grabbed the passport, gestured harshly in one direction and said, “Come!”
He led us to a desk where two men in elaborately embroidered uniforms were sitting, frozen in straight posture. They carried themselves with an abrasiveness that suggested they were in charge of handling sensitive cases. I presented my German passport, but they waved me off. I pulled out our marriage certificate, but it didn’t help that it carried the seal of the City of New York. One of the officers took Gypsy’s passport and disappeared, the other pointed to a bench by the wall and said, “Wait!”
We sat on this bench like defendants. It didn’t surprise us that the American received special scrutiny, just like Iranians are singled out whenever they try to enter the U.S. But we were convinced that they had vetted Gypsy before issuing her visa, and the same was probably true for me. We didn’t have anything to hide and knew that our governments would be there for us if we needed help. But after twenty minutes in abeyance, we became nervous. We began to strategize how to react if they separated us.
That is the frame of mind where dictatorial regimes like to have their visitors. They give you time to think, and watch as you slide into irrationality. Gypsy was now a woman without a passport, stateless in an arbitrary state. The officer kept staring at us from behind his desk; that seemed to be his task. Gypsy leaned over my shoulder and whispered, “My heart is going to jump out of my chest.”
After a while, the other officer returned with Gypsy’s passport. He placed it on the desk and took an inkpad and a sheet of paper out of a drawer. Then he asked for Gypsy’s hand. Printed on the paper were two large and ten small squares. He took Gypsy’s hand and pressed the tip of her fingers on the ink pad, then on the paper—the individual fingerprints in the small squares, the whole hand in the large squares. When he was done, he pushed the passport across the desk and smirked. He seemed to enjoy the fact that the American now had to run around his country with ink on her fingertips, like a criminal.
I waited for him to ask for my hand, but he wasn’t interested. When I asked why he took Gypsy’s fingerprints but not mine, he looked amused and said, “Because America does it.” Our eyes locked and we both laughed at the absurdity of the games governments play.
Gypsy and I got on a bus that took us into the city, and the first thing we saw were the illuminated minarets of the Khomeini Mausoleum, piercing like lances into the night sky. Khomeini followed us wherever we went, always watching. Our hotel in Tehran was named after Ferdowsi, a revered Persian poet, but we only ever saw Khomeini. He gazed at us from the wall behind the reception desk, and on the way to the elevator we passed a Khomeini painting and a Khomeini bust, then listened to an instrumental version of “Careless Whisper” as we ascended to our floor. Even the elevator music was from the time of Khomeini.
We entered our room and saw two single beds, a picture of Khomeini hanging in the middle. We thought it was a misunderstanding. Perhaps they had given us separate beds because Gypsy had not shed her family’s name. We went back to the reception and explained to the concierge that we were on our honeymoon and would like to sleep in the same bed. He gave us a mystified look and said that Iranian couples sleep in separate beds.
We dismissed this Iranian tradition and pushed our beds together under Khomeini’s beard. Then Gypsy undressed in front of him. The ayatollah had to look at a number of things during our honeymoon. Maybe that is why he always stared at us with such a grim face.
The next morning, as we walked around Tehran to get a feel for life in the city, Gypsy caught a glimpse of her reflection in a store window. She stopped, spun around and said, “I look elegant.” It was a tender moment that demonstrated how porous the mullah’s banishment of sensuality from public life was. They didn’t seem to understand that the shrouds into which they forced women are like frames that emphasize their beauty. Or maybe they did.
In the afternoon, Gypsy and I argued about something, and she went for a walk by herself. I shouldn’t have let her go, but it seemed like a good way to release some of the tension the all-pervading restrictions had caused between us. After an hour she came back to our room, stirred up. She dropped her purse and said, “They’re hissing at me!” She was talking about the men. Gypsy was used to this in the streets of Santo Domingo, but there was something playful about the hissing of Dominican men. They would explain themselves. The hissing of Iranian men was desperate, and they didn’t say a word. Their speechlessness frightened Gypsy.
The men’s desperation made me think about the unintended effects of the dress code. Coming from Berlin, where I had tired a bit of women with candy-colored hair walking around barefoot and holding bottles of cheap beer, I appreciated the proper way Iranian women dressed. But I wondered if the strictness of the code created a suppressed erotic tension in the streets. There was a sense of the men feeling strangled, of wanting to break out, and I could see myself as one of them.
Gypsy studied the women and learned how they pushed the dress code’s boundaries. The closer she looked, the more skin she saw. She noticed women who pushed their headscarves so far back that they almost fell off their heads. She saw sleeves that ended at the elbow. She glimpsed skinny jeans under overcoats cut so tight that they revealed more than they covered.
Gypsy remained covered; she didn’t want to be seen as the loose American. Every morning, she disappeared under her overcoat and closed it all the way up to her neck. She spent more and more time in front of the mirror, and despaired over how far she could go. One particularly hot morning, she stood in front of me and asked, “Do you think I have to wear the coat?” I thought so and pulled up her coat’s zipper. Gypsy looked down on herself and, sounding crestfallen, said, “I’m oppressed.”
I, in contrast, felt almost liberated. I was aware that there is also a dress code for men. (When you Google “male dress code,” the suggested search automatically includes “Iran.”) But I was in no danger of being targeted by the chastity squads. The very style that had often earned me teasing from my friends—crisply ironed shirts rather than T-shirts, no bright colors, and never, ever shorts—was in perfect sync with the mullahs’ definition of decency. I also lacked the dramatically spiked haircut popular among young men, for which some of them have been arrested. I was behind the Iranian curve, though, with my rejection of Texan-size belt buckles, and bell-bottoms that seemed to come straight out of Saturday Night Fever.
In the streets, the visible women stood in stark relief next to the invisible ones. The women that I once heard two young Iranian men call B.M.O.s—black moving objects—fluttered around completely covered up, showing only their eyes. “They could become pregnant and nobody would notice,” Gypsy said. We soon learned that there are many things the invisible ones can do under their shrouds.
When one black moving object walked past us, we caught a glimpse of her uncovered feet in her open shoes. Her nail polish was a seductive scarlet. The discovery changed the way I looked at women. I began to understand the burning of Iranian men for a woman’s ankles. They are the erotic zone in a disembodied country.
We began to see the abyss behind the veil, the revolts in the details. And then we saw two women prancing around the lobby of our hotel, dangerously uncovered. One of them had Cindy
Crawford’s hair and mole; she wore boots with heels capable of impalement. The other one had Amy Winehouse’s winged eyeliner and aura of emaciation; she purred without pause into her phone. We saw this as our chance to join one of those infamous illegal parties raging behind Iran’s closed doors, with dancing, alcohol, and other sins. But as we got closer, we stopped in our tracks. They were either transvestites or transgender women, pushing the boundaries in the safety of a hotel frequented by Westerners.
Deceit has always been the cloak of lovers in Iran, long before Khomeini seized power. The door of an old teahouse in the city of Yazd, an architectural jewel in the heart of the country, reminded us of that. In the old Persia, houses had separate door knockers for men and women. Men used a massive rectangular piece of iron to knock, while women touched a slender ring, announcing their arrival with a softer, gentler sound. But what was meant to keep men and women apart, opened the door for men who wanted to be with their beloved behind the façades of chastity. They knocked as women.
Khomeini didn’t like the blurring of the line between man and woman, and he sought clarity. In 1984 he issued a fatwa allowing transsexuals to change their sex. To him, transsexuals were prisoners caught in the wrong body. He set out to liberate them and bestowed penises on male women, and vaginas on female men. It is a lesser-known part of the Ayatollah’s legacy that the Islamic Republic of Iran has a budget for sex changes, allocating the equivalent of $122,000 for each person diagnosed with “gender identity disorder,” the regime’s term for transsexuality.
Khomeini became the god of plastic surgeons, and not just for transgendered people. The shroud under which he forced Iranian women reduced them to faces. He focused the male gaze on the one part of the female body that men could study in detail, and they were beguiled by the darkest eyes, immaculate brows, and beautiful noses. I liked the Iranian nose; there was something regal about it, mystical. But I made the same mistake as Khomeini. Many Iranian women don’t want a nose that stands out from the frame of their scarf, a nose that exceeds the conventions of the West. They dream of a generic nose, a line in the face. This is how the Ayatollah created a promised land for plastic surgeons. For a few thousand U.S. dollars, they plane every bump in the Iranian face.
The operated women weren’t hiding. We saw them everywhere: in the streets, in teahouses, at the mosque. They couldn’t wait to exhibit their bandaged faces and show others that they were able to afford a small nose. The operated nose is the Iranian woman’s Gucci purse.
And the nose was only the beginning. Step by step, plastic surgeons were conquering the body of the Iranian woman. After diminishing the nose, they moved on to pumping up lips and breasts to desperate-housewife levels. The veil turned out to be one of their best marketing tools, emphasizing the visible results of their work and covering the ones not to be seen.
The men, in a rare reversal, were beginning to follow the women’s lead. Many of them are less educated than most women. They skip college in order to chase fast money, hoping it will enable them to purchase a captivating bride. But when it came to nose jobs, they were slowly catching up, showing off their freshly operated noses just as proudly as the women.
Gypsy shared my affection for the Iranian nose; she didn’t like the operated men. Once, I saw her holding a rial bill dominated by a portrait of Khomeini. She moved her thumb across his face, as though she was caressing him. “He was a good-looking man,” she said, gazing at Khomeini. She found his nose beautiful.
We traveled south and followed the road of addiction. The highway between Tehran and Kerman is the main artery of the drug trade in Iran, where an estimated 5 million people are addicted to opium and heroin. We didn’t see any of that. All we saw was a dry, rocky landscape dotted by an endless gallery of portraits of supposed martyrs, sent to their death in the war with Iraq. Their faces lined the road like advertisements for an unnamed product.
At one rest stop, we saw a different kind of gallery. A truck driver opened the door of his cab, revealing that he was surrounded by pictures of half-naked women. When he got up, the body of another half-naked woman materialized, life-size and printed on the red cover of his seat. He had been sitting on her lap.
The mullahs have divided love into the allowed and the forbidden. Allowed love is a corset that suffocates lovers. That is why many seek refuge in forbidden love. Couples are not allowed to have sex before marriage, but if they do, there are solutions. Nobody ever asks the groom if he is still a virgin, and the bride can have her hymen stitched back together for a few hundred dollars.
Money is an important substance in Iranian love, a currency with the power to surpass the value of passion. The parents of a bride can demand a large sum for their daughter. The groom’s family in return purchases the bride with a money-back guarantee, in case the marriage fails. A woman’s value is meticulously assessed in the arithmetic of the law. In life, as a bride, she is most precious. But if she dies and somebody is culpable in her death and forced to pay blood money, she is worth only half as much as a man.
I gazed at Iranian love like a world behind glass. I was traveling around the country with a woman who had chosen me at a time when I had neither money nor the promise of it. I didn’t have to pay for her, and I was allowed to find out if I liked sleeping with her before I married her. My love life began to feel like a province of privilege.
Sleeping with a man who is not her own can be deadly for an Iranian woman. An extra-marital affair can also lead a man into death, but he can rely on the masculinity of the Iranian state of law. In court, a woman’s word, like her life, is only worth half as much as that of a man.
That was the other Iran. We didn’t see it, but we heard of it. While we were savoring our honeymoon, seven women and two men were waiting to be stoned to death for adultery and sexual indecency. Their stonings were suspended, but when the time comes, the accused have to descend into a pit—the women down to their chest, the men down to their hips. The stonings have a strict choreography, and the stones must not be too big. Justice is supposed to descend slowly upon the indecent.
I have done things in my life that could have gotten me stoned in this country. My indecency had not gone unpunished, but I had gotten off comparatively cheap. I remembered the force with which a betrayed girlfriend once hit me in the face. I remembered the gentle stoning I received from Mandana. She threw the other woman’s letters at me.
Later that night, Gypsy and I walked around Kerman and saw a house with two blinking hearts on its façade, melting into one. We suspected something wicked going on behind these walls, and sneaked inside. But the club of hearts was not a hotbed of vice; one couldn’t buy love there, at least not the fast way. It was a wedding ballroom, but one with a twist. The Iranian hierarchy was turned upside down in this house—the women were celebrating upstairs, the men downstairs.
The bride was beautiful. She had eyes black as coal, and the classic Iranian nose. She was dancing in a strapless gown. I never saw her; I wasn’t allowed to go near her. Gypsy told me about her, after a group of giggling women had taken her upstairs. I was sitting downstairs with the other men, staring at our juice glasses.
I felt dirty in this aura of purity. The separation of men and women and the banning of alcohol and lust were the opposite of everything that was welcome at our own wedding. We had placed the voluptuous Turkish woman next to the divorced German man, hoping for attraction. My bride danced with other men. We drank Dominican rum in large amounts, and at five in the morning, a gay male friend was passionately kissing a woman.
All that was taboo in the lonely hearts club. The women offered Gypsy sweets; the men were brooding in their juice quarantine and ignored me. I felt like inciting them to storm the women’s floor, but I learned that there were other ways for them to find solace. For Shiites, Iran’s overwhelming majority, marriage can be a wide-open field, at least for men. There is room for up to four wives in their marriages, and if that is not enough, the husband can expand his portfolio with “te
mporary marriages.” This kind of marriage may last up to ninety-nine years, but the more popular version lasts only a few hours. That is why Iranians also call it a “pleasure marriage.”
The pleasure is the man’s alone. He is not obliged to tell his wife about a temporary marriage, and all he has to discuss with his pleasure wife is the price. No written contract is required, which is also a pleasure for a man in a country where his word counts twice as much in court as that of a woman. If the man wants to, he can strike a temporary marriage agreement that includes how often he wants sex. The woman, however, is not entitled to any sexual demands, and she must not be married. She only has to be at least as old as Aisha when she became the third wife of the Prophet Muhammad. Aisha was nine.
The temporary marriage affords men a diverse sex life, where no adultery and no children out of wedlock exist. The wives in temporary marriages are usually divorced women, who are damaged goods in the permanent-marriage market. They need the money, and hope that the man stays with them for more than an hour, perhaps even leaves his first wife. They discreetly signal that they are available for a temporary marriage by wearing their chador inside out.
Wherever we went, we realized that this is not the norm but, rather, a possibility. It felt like a wand invented by a male-dominated regime trying to show a way out to the very men it is stifling, and we were reminded of that at the lonely hearts club, where the pleasure was the women’s alone.
It was almost midnight, but there was still light inside the shop. An elderly woman wearing a black chador stood in front of a white wall, perfectly placed between portraits of Khomeini and Khamenei. When I stopped to take a photograph of her with the ayatollahs looking over her shoulder, she gestured for us to wait and called to someone in the back of the shop. Out came her smiling daughter, and a perilous conversation ensued. She told us about her forbidden love.
