‘But no one thinks Zirzamin is monumental or imperial or anything.’ I shut my notebook again. ‘No one. It’ll go down as a breeding ground for crack dealers and teenage suicides. Even France Info did a story on teenagers throwing themselves off the rooftops of Zirzamin. You think you have to watch your head when you turn a corner.’
‘Yes. But that only makes it even more, more hyper-monumental.’ Tarofi is waving his hands about again, but dismissively and impatiently. He sighs and smiles at me in a resigned, tired sort of way. I now notice Tarofi’s quirky side parting, reminiscent of the distinct style of a French soccer legend whose name I cannot quite put my finger on.
‘Take any traditional part of town. Even if hundreds of pubescent kids chuck themselves out of their bedroom windows on one and the same morning, nobody will say it’s because of the traditional neighborhood, because of little brick courtyards with little goldfish wiggling about in little garden ponds. Whereas in Zirzamin, you will find more human tragedies attached to the name. Why is this? Because of a hundred thousand people inscribing a single space.’ Platini, I now remember. Tarofi’s side parting is exactly the same as Michel Platini’s.
Despite Tarofi’s acquaintance with Stella and his ruminations on the ways of leaving a violent, unmistakable mark in human history, which Stella would indeed have appreciated, I’m bored to sheer nausea. I noisily finish my glass of tea and look up at my host expectingly, waiting for him to stand up and walk over to the kitchen samovar for a fresh kettle, then quietly get up and leave, leaving the door open behind me. I hurry down the stairs to the ground floor, and it is only in the courtyard that I remember that Tarofi really is not the kind of man you would want to aggravate or provoke, but the Mullah’s postmodern palaver and his natty taste in living-room furniture has somehow rendered him approachable and sweet, even human, in a way. I decide to make it up to Tarofi some other day and start walking towards Mehrangiz’s block, breathing deeply, but reconsider the idea of a surprise visit and walk back home.
Barely two hours after sipping Early Grey with Tarofi I’m driving down Enqelab Avenue in Mehrangiz’s Honda, listening to her drone on contentedly about her latest video project, called ‘Twenty’, a fictional piece set in duplex apartments in postmodern skyscrapers in north Tehran. The storyline, or topic, if I understand correctly, is that of a love triangle between two affluent single mothers and an Afghani kitchen help. At some point, the Afghani blows up the Azadi monument with a makeshift bomb, just as the single mothers are sentenced to death by stoning, by a judge played by Jeff Koons in a cameo appearance.
According to the latest version of Mehrangiz’s script, the kitchen help lives in the hollow steel pedestal of an enormous advertising billboard for Nokia cellphones. I know for a fact that hundreds of Afghanis – the lowest-priced and hardest-working labor you can find in Tehran – do indeed dwell in billboard contraptions of the kind, but I consider the story a scam nonetheless. With Tehran one of the flattest metropoles worldwide, setting a vaguely dissenting movie in ostentatious high-rises would amount to little more than a cheap rip-off. A rather typical ploy to earn a pat on the back as the daring, dissident filmmaker, holding moving talks for understanding audiences in progressive European venues with Frida Kahlo retrospectives and glossy catalogues.
So I smile at Mehrangiz and make sarcastic, unfair remarks on bourgeois radicalism, even though I find her suggestion I play the Afghani kitchen boy myself tremendously flattering, even tempting, a unique opportunity to finally put my teenage acting classes to better use. That aside, working side by side with Mehrangiz, I realize, would in many ways be a tactical opportunity, a strategic advantage.
As she takes a left into Shariati Avenue, precisely as I was expecting her to, since Shariati is even more vividly decked with screaming neon than any other boulevard in the city, we pass a telegenic flower stand with a big and beguiling sign, TEHRAN FLOWER in flashing orange. Mehrangiz obligingly parks by the side of the road, walks around the car to the trunk, sets up the tripod and has barely pressed ‘record’ when she’s politely accosted by an inconspicuous man in civilian clothing who just stepped out of a white Range Rover that was parked on the other side of the street. He produces a badge in a transparent plastic covering, the print far too small to decipher under the blinking neon streetlights of pink and yellow, but Mehrangiz and I do make out a color photograph of the inconspicuous gentleman in question, next to the tulip-shaped Islamic Republic logo in green.
As Mehrangiz is soon to learn, the Revolutionary Courthouse, which is just behind the said kitsch cacophony of a flower stand, was only recently firebombed by members of the Mojahedin-e Khalq, a particular blend of trigger-happy Islamic Socialists. The Mojahedin are best remembered for having entertained the nifty idea of bombing their fellow Iranians from within Iraq during the war. This way, they reasoned, they would incite their countrymen to take up arms against the regime, a project I always considered a little too hopeless, a little too vapid and suicidal to be taken at face value. Be that as it may, the Iranian government has long been insisting that the Mojahedin are but one rhizomatic branch of a vast capillary network reaching from Washington DC to London to Tel Aviv to Baghdad to Moscow and on to the enemy within, here in downtown Tehran.
As they walk us toward the courthouse, I’m terrified beyond belief, already apprehending the interrogations, the threats and the Montana Lights.
Friends
A warden takes me by the arm as I slip on my blindfold and step out of the cell. I’m led down several corridors and seated somewhere as a door swings shut behind me. I raise my head to peer out from underneath my blindfold and see I’m facing the wall in a concrete cell with no windows. Half an hour goes by, and I realize I’m trembling with increasing intensity, the muscles in my lower abdomen undergoing unfamiliar jarring motions.
In mythico-historical allure, Shekufeh prison comes fairly close to the football stadiums in Santiago de Chile. Nobody knows the figures, but everyone knows the anecdotes, the many graphic details of how before and after the Islamic Revolution, Shekufeh was the favored locus of systematic torture and countless executions, graphic details I myself have recounted many times over latte macchiatos back in Europe.
The door is opened and shut. Someone pulls up a chair and sits down behind me, while the many graphic details go prancing through my head in a wild and spirited little dance. Mambo or merengue, I think, grappling to maintain that jaded, urbane, ironic inner voice.
‘So. Azizam. Listen closely now’, someone slowly, emphatically croons into my left ear. ‘If you tell the truth, we’ll find a solution for you. If you don’t, it will cost you dearly. Is that understood?’
‘Yes.’ A feeble, high-pitched croak. I sound like an emasculated water toad.
‘So tell me something. The simple truth. Don’t try to act smart. Please. Let’s not waste our time here. Which is better?’ He pauses. And I wait, tracing the spasms in my abdomen. ‘Europe or Iran?’
I hesitate, but only briefly. ‘Actually’, I manage, ‘until yesterday, I would have said I preferred Iran.’ The interrogator chuckles to himself, and I can hear an office chair creak as he leans back in his seat.
‘So why were you filming the Revolutionary Courthouse?’
‘I wasn’t filming the Revolutionary Courthouse.’
‘I see. You were not filming the Revolutionary Courthouse. You were filming –’ he waits for me to finish his sentence.
‘We were filming the flower stand. The one that said TEHRAN FLOWER in orange. Neon orange.’
‘You were filming the flower stand. And indeed, why not? It’s a real nice flower stand, no?’
When Shekufeh is pointed out to curious visitors, all they see are light brown, arid hills at the foot of the Alborz mountains, with one slope separated from its surroundings by a wire fence. From certain rooftops, you can see a handful of buildings that make up the carceral complex, but a large part of the prison actually blends neatly into nature, being built undergroun
d, beneath the hills. It is hard to think of another landmark that is as elegantly ‘less-is-more’ and as imposing at the same time. If fencing on an empty hillside is the architectural understatement par excellence, by merging with Tehran’s stately mountainous surroundings, Shekufeh gains an aura of inevitability. It comes with the city.
Later, in my isolation cell, it is to cross my mind that with a brief jail term and some screaming teledrama in the first person singular, both the Promessa and I could easily capitalize on the merchandizing of tortured dissidents. In most places the world over, Che Guevara as a T-Shirt, the very lamentation of Che-Guevara-as-a-T-Shirt, has become commonplace, and stirring acts of bravado do little more than repeatedly confirm the marvelous potential of the market to accommodate and acclimatize absolutely anything, particularly stirring acts of bravado. I remember an ex-girlfriend who was hired by the Herald Tribune after publishing an article handsomely entitled ‘I Begged the Warden Not to Kill Me’ and leaving the country in a media frenzy, claiming she was about to be arrested and tortured, all over again, any minute now. Unless I’m sorely mistaken, she has recently started writing her memoirs for Penguin.
Perhaps a piece on the ‘Allegorical Allure’ of Shekufeh. ‘Gloomy, oppressive, outwardly unchanging and embroiled in a desperate and so typically Persian attempt to look intimidating and civilized at the same time’ may well make it into *Wallpaper (‘Ironies of Iran’) or even National Geographic (‘Paradox of Persia’).
‘What is your opinion of Imam Khomeini?’
‘I’d say every human being has weak points and strong points.’
‘How interesting. Do tell us his weak points.’
‘He had none.’
‘I see. So tell me, you disapprove of the theocratic state, don’t you?’
‘Why should I disapprove?’
‘You grew up abroad, and you don’t disapprove?’
‘There was a referendum in 1979.’
‘Indeed there was. How observant of you.’
The interrogator is wearing a turquoise suit and beige rubber slippers, sporting a four-day stubble and an impeccable blow-dried coiffe, even after sixteen hours of interrogation, resorting to the most polite and self-denigrating etiquette as he brings tea and sugar and apologizes for smoking. Yet he is perfectly happy to scream, threaten and bang his fists on the table from time to time in a show of exquisite virility. And he is but one among many. The Iranian Information Ministry, I decide, offers the most promising masculine paradigm of our time. A sphere of innocence untouched by the adulterations of media-honed sex appeal, holding many untapped authenticities, a promise of fresh returns of the referent and tantalizing new styles.
Later that night, I look on in handcuffs as they search my Zirzamin apartment, perusing and scrutinizing everything from Moleskine notebooks to snapshots of teenage beach parties, to spiteful letters from an ex-girlfriend, asking obvious questions, none of which I can answer convincingly. Particularly when it comes to photographs of Tehran’s concrete vistas or tacky monarchist memorabilia. How to explain a voguish fascination with generic cities, let alone retro kitsch, to a heavily armed gentleman who is trying to discern precisely which smoke-filled room, which Intercontinental Plot and Scheme you hail from and murmuring sweet little nothings like ‘Really takes an imbecile like you to dig his own grave’.
The heavily armed gentleman points to a ceramic ashtray with a hand-painted portrait of Shah Pahlavi, posing on a US warship with his wife. ‘And what’s with the Shah?’
‘I never liked the Shah. He was the worst thing that could have happened to Iran. I’m serious. I’m not saying that to please you.’
‘You have Shah salad bowls, Shah keychains, Shah wristwatches and Shah coffee cups, but you never liked the Shah. And this is because’, he adds with a hint of fatigued sarcasm, ‘he was the worst thing that could have happened to Iran. And you’re not saying that just to please me.’
‘I mean, the salad bowls, it’s retro. It’s retro and kitsch and, well, jokey, you see. For example, it’s, if you overdo something, if you turn it into a toy, you criticize it. You make it funny. You take control over it. You know?’
‘So you turn it into a toy and make it funny and take control over it. I see. Very nice.’ He points to the Ho Chi Minh postcard. ‘And who’s this gentleman? Are you taking control over him, too?’
‘My grandfather. Maternal grandfather. On my mother’s side.’
At four in the morning, the agents, suspecting the CD collection of containing information for Mojahed comrades in hiding, sit around the coffee table listening to random tracks by Dr Dre and Vanessa Paradis.
After several nights in solitary confinement, I’m no longer quite as apprehensive as I was at the moment of my arrest and discover an unexpected, growing sense of relief at the back of my mind. The state of limbo that comes with incarceration has stripped me of all my deals and duties, contracts and commitments, aside from saying the right things to the right people and getting out as soon as I can. The renovations, the fruitless goose chase for gainful local artwork, the neglected fundraising are all beyond my grasp, and I have but to lean back in my spotless cell, pleasantly helpless, if slightly terrified.
The next day, I’m transferred to a collective cellblock. Listening to my new cellmates’ palaver over black tea and Super Love Magnum Mega Extras, I hear countless cross-comparisons of the many different wards on offer. Shekufeh is a carceral Disneyland, one tremendous selection of hallways, rooms and cellars that can be rearranged at will, anywhere along or beneath the hillside. Silently, discreetly, as Tarofi would put it, from post to neo and back.
Conditions are made to vary drastically, according to whether you’re a man, woman, cleric, relative of a cleric, political, celebrity political, relative of a celebrity political, dealer, smuggler and so forth. Although all sections are overcrowded, some cellblocks are reportedly filthy, while others are immaculate. Some offer grass, opium and alcohol, while in others even pen and paper are impossible to come by. My own block is prim and proper and offers unlimited amounts of hot tea, fresh fruit and dishes such as chicken in pomegranate and walnut sauce, but has no courtyard, and the glaring neon lights are switched on twenty-four hours a day.
Long Road to Reform Leads Right Through Shekufeh, says a headline of a reformist weekly. In the newspapers we receive every afternoon, more and more figures of the democratic opposition are openly admitting that mass incarceration is part and parcel of the reformist bargain. Prison memoirs are apparently le dernier cri, as if the entire intelligentsia were joined in a curious effort to demystify Iran’s legendary prisons, preparing and encouraging people to drop by sometime.
My cellblock holds forty prisoners of all types, all awaiting sentencing. I meet a one-legged army general caught with six hundred pounds of opium, and a Shirazi architect who grew up abroad, whom everyone calls Billy, who was caught with his ‘buddy’s stash of heroin’. I eventually befriend a cigarette smuggler from Kurdestan who quietly mumbles Shirley Bassey songs. But if you stay, I’ll make you a day, like no day has been, or will be again.
Another convict is a handsome, soft-spoken historian with a tasteless goatee who wrote unsympathetically of wartime policies, and was psychologically ministered to for over a month, the treatment involving solitary confinement, permanent blindfolds and handcuffs, twenty-four-hour video surveillance and absurd instructions or violent threats screamed at him over loudspeakers. Yet another cellmate is a conspirator in a $2 million bank scam, who is planning to sue the government for hanging him upside down naked and beating him for days on end until he was a mess of blood and broken bones.
The most high-profile among the prisoners are three young men from Ahvaz who have made a confused attempt to hijack a charter plane. ‘We couldn’t agree on where to go,’ they explain in raucous Khuzestani accents. ‘Some were saying Dubai, others were screaming Damascus, and someone was saying Germany. So we were trying to decide and then this policeman disguised in civilian cloth
ing suddenly just took the gun away from me. That pimp. I was just totally pissed off, you know. What a pimp.’
Since their families also took part in the plot, their mothers and fathers, aunts and uncles are all in Shekufeh awaiting sentencing. One evening, over tangerines, tea and Super Mega Extras, they tell me about last year’s riots in Arab Khuzestan, a result of the annoying coincidence of being the province both poorest in infrastructure and richest in oil. Rioters were burning down government buildings until the area was sealed off by military police and subsequently brought to reason. None of the other cellmates have ever heard of the incident, and I cannot bring myself to believe it really happened, but decide I might ask Stella, if I ever get the chance.
Two other convicts I’d like to get to know, but am introduced to only briefly, are ostensibly members of the Mahdavia, an armed opposition group that strives to hasten the arrival of the Hidden Imam, the Shiite pendant to the Messiah. Since the Hidden Imam is scheduled to appear during a time of unparalleled depravity, the Mahdavia have decided they must topple the very devout and righteous Islamic regime in the hope of sowing some decent corruption and decadence on this earth.
Others are suspected of being old-school Shahists. I cannot help but feel sorry for them. The Iranian monarchists, with their airy nostalgia and nouveau riche frumpiness, are based in Tehrangeles, the Iranian neighborhoods of Beverly Hills and Westwood, Los Angeles, from where the ‘exiled Prince Reza’ occasionally fluffs his feathers and beams passionate radio transmissions to his supposedly countless followers back in Iran. Not quite the German Romantics, but enjoyable nonetheless. All in all, considering the quirky imbecility of both the Mojahedin and the Mahdavia, I feel sorry not only for Westwood monarchists but for any serious revolutionary these days. Who wouldn’t rather put up with the long reformist road through Shekufeh?
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