Honeymoon in Tehran: Two Years of Love and Danger in Iran

by Azadeh Moaveni

  I had written openly about Mr. X in my book, violating many taboos at once: I revealed that such meetings took place (most journalists in Iran had a government minder, though they never admitted it), disclosed their content, and, perhaps worst of all, described in a book of nonfiction the secret thoughts I imagined he harbored. Part of me felt relief at having exposed him, voiding the insistent admonitions that “no one must know of our meetings.” Mr. X now existed on the page, and this somehow took away the power of secrecy he had always cultivated. But surely he would be furious and seek to avenge himself.

  “Yes, this afternoon is convenient for me.” I hoped that my dread didn’t show in my voice.

  We spoke only long enough to plan our meeting. Nasrine volunteered to take me, and I coached her in the code that I had used with my former driver, Ali, who had taken me to so many of these meetings. After ten minutes, she was to call my cell phone. If I answered, “Yes, I’ll be back in time for lunch,” it meant there was no cause for alarm. “I’m going to be late, don’t wait for me,” meant something had gone terribly wrong, and that she should immediately start making emergency calls and try to rescue me.

  Nasrine stopped the car at the top of the street, and pressed my hand before I stepped out. My heart beat swiftly as I searched for the hotel Mr. X had described, and my mind whirled with grim possibilities—Mr. X could permanently ban me from reporting in Iran; he could confiscate my passport and bar me from leaving the country (even the state equated an overlong stay in Iran with incarceration); send me to a court that might then send me to prison; or, in my direst imaginings, immure me in the room and inflict unspeakable punishments.

  I passed up and down the street’s length twice more, and even asked two passersby, but no one had heard of the apartment hotel. Suddenly I remembered that Mr. X had given me a building number as well as the hotel’s name, and with that I quickly found it—six stories of unmarked white cement. What sort of hotel was this, unknown to the neighborhood and mysteriously unlabeled? Its anonymity seemed to confirm my most hysterical suspicions. My hands began to shake, and before I summoned the courage to climb the stone steps, I breathed deeply and told myself young women from California were not typically victims of political murder.

  Someone buzzed the door open from inside, and I entered a small lobby presided over by a young man in sandals. I never knew what to say in such situations. In the past, Mr. X had often summoned me to meet him at secluded (though clearly marked) hotels, with instructions no more precise than “Be there at two P.M.” The truth—“Hello, my name is Azadeh and I’m here to meet a government minder whose name I’ve been told never to repeat aloud, although we all know it’s a pseudonym anyway”—sounded awkward.

  “They’re waiting for you in apartment five on the second floor,” the young man said, sparing me. I said thank you and gazed at him with a winning expression, one that I hoped radiated innocence and established me as a productive, indispensable member of the global community, the type of person he should definitely try to help, should he hear screams from apartment five.

  The elevator door opened onto the second floor, and I adjusted my headscarf before a hallway mirror, tucking strands of hair away, as though such attentions might somehow influence what would happen to me. Mr. X opened the door and ushered me inside. Such empty, furnished apartments—the type of place where Japanese businessmen would stay to negotiate oil deals that Washington would later veto—lent a bizarre, corporate coziness to the setting.

  “Would you like tea or coffee?” Mr. X asked, busying himself in the kitchen. He poured us both tea, and then took a seat at the dinner table across from a plate of cream puffs. Eating pastry under duress was another hallmark of my meetings with Mr. X. During our initial encounters I had refused to eat anything, reluctant to provoke the nausea I usually felt. But this caused him offense, and I began to accept whatever I found on the table, eager to win his good humor.

  His shirt was buttoned to the top, and his hands, hairy and blunt, fiddled with a pen.

  “I have read your book,” he began. “And the question I have is this: what is this ash-e gooshvareh [earring stew] of which you write? We have no such stew.”

  It was a dish I had mentioned my grandmother once made while visiting California. Like so many Iranians, perhaps a third of the country, she belonged to the Azeri ethnic group, whose cuisine included many unusual, laborious recipes distinct from Persian cooking.

  “It’s Azerbaijani,” I replied.

  “Okay.” He looked unconvinced.

  Someone knocked at the door, and Mr. X opened it to admit his partner, whom I had described in my book as Mr. Sleepy. In our meetings he was usually either asleep or menacing, the bad-cop foil to Mr. X’s slithery inducements and intimidations.

  We spoke very briefly about my book tour. Mr. X offered me a cream puff. And then he made a gesture of wrapping up his papers.

  “We would like you to know that we consider your book worthy of appreciation,” he said.

  I sipped tea silently, waiting for the condemnation that would surely follow. But Mr. X and Mr. Sleepy began smiling openly, as though they were having tea with a favorite aunt.

  “So didn’t people ask you, if Iran is so repressive, then how do you write these critical articles and travel back and forth?”

  “Yes, I was asked this all the time. And I told people that Iran tolerates some measure of dissent, that this is what makes Iran so special.” I went on to describe Iran as an island of Persian practicality in a sea of brutal Arab dictatorships.

  I could tell from their expressions I had replied well. It occurred to me that just perhaps, they both enjoyed appearing in a book, albeit as henchmen of a repressive regime.

  “It is true, we are enlightened people, and we believe in democracy, freedom of expression.”

  “Of course.”

  “So do not be worried. Go back to America, and tell them we are democrats.” He leaned forward, and began gathering his papers in a sign that we were finished. “You are yourself proof.”

  “Thank you,” I said, picking up my bag. Then I said goodbye, walked out the door, and ran out into the sunny street. I inhaled the diesel fumes, the waft of fried herbs in the breeze, and felt triumphant. This country, my sad, troublesome homeland, perhaps it wasn’t altogether as bad as everyone thought.

  On the way back to the car I stopped at a headscarf shop and bought Nasrine and me pretty cotton veils in celebration. As I recounted the conversation to her, though, it sounded entirely too easy. Perhaps Mr. X really was as accepting as he’d seemed. Or perhaps my book had angered him, and he would punish me in time. For the moment, I simply accepted his approval as a blessing. When I got home, I phoned everyone I knew to gloat.

  That evening, I shared my good news with my aunt’s neighbors Lily and Ramin Maleki. Mr. Maleki was Iran’s most accomplished translator of English literature, a gentle, erudite man who in the fantasy Iran of my imagination would hold the post of minister of culture. Lily, his beautiful wife, was a publisher and writer of considerable charm. Their home was a salon for writers, directors, and intellectuals, as well as a place where you could discuss Samuel Beckett, smoke indoors, and be offered all manner of delicious sweets, from fresh maca roons to walnut-studded nougat. They were as excited about my nonpariah status as I was.

  They invited me to stay to dinner, one of the quick, delectable meals Lily fashioned out of a quintessentially Iranian cookbook, Ashpazi az Sir ta Piaz, an exhaustive collection of recipes—from Indian curries to Persian puddings—compiled by an Iranian writer who cooked his way through a long prison sentence under the Shah.

  Our dinner conversation touched on the upcoming election, but just barely, for although the outside world was interested in its outcome, the race had generated little excitement among Iranians. In the two previous presidential elections, 1997 and 2001, the moderate cleric Mohammad Khatami drew Iranians to the polls with his cheerful magnetism and broadly attractive promises of politic
al and social liberalization. His landslide victories were widely interpreted by Iranian analysts and the outside world as mandates by the people of Iran for building a more democratic society, one more at peace with and accepted by the international community. But the conservative establishment—fundamentalist clerics and bureaucrats influential within the regime’s myriad institutions—blocked Khatami’s liberal policies. People grew disillusioned with the regime as a whole, and with the electoral process as a means of reform. By now, many Iranians had come to view elections as a ceremonial act, an empty practice that lent a veneer of democratic consent to the mullahs’ absolutism. By boycotting the race altogether, many believed, Iranians could reject the entire system of Islamic rule.

  The lackluster ballot also contributed to this widespread apathy. The three top candidates were equally lacking in personal charisma and fresh vision: Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, a former two-term president, was a graying mullah notorious for his personal corruption, as well as for institutionalizing graft within the regime; Mohammad Ghali baf, the former national police chief, came across as untested and vaguely junior; Mostafa Moin, a former minister of education, reminded most people of a librarian.

  Although I opposed a boycott—the differences between the candidates were meaningful enough, I felt, to warrant making a choice—I understood the lure of opting out. The reformists, mired in internal squabbles, had failed to agree on a single candidate, and were fielding two, equally gray and uninspiring. The presumed leader, Moin, though outspoken on human rights and democracy, was worryingly silent on economic matters. Rafsanjani, a crook with a record of failure as president, was a catastrophe wrapped in a disaster. To understand how Iranians felt about him, you must imagine him as the equivalent of a Richard Nixon who also happened to sink the American economy. And the conservative—well, hardly anyone took him, or any conservative candidate for that matter, seriously. Khatami’s 2001 landslide, in which he took 80 percent of the vote, was interpreted by most Iranians as a loud rejection of Islamic conservatism in politics. Public support for his policies—dialogue with the United States, democratic governance, and cultural and social reform—indicated that the majority of Iranians wanted an open society run by a secular government. As one prominent conservative told me that year, “We need to go out into the wilderness for a long time, and figure out how we can one day return.”

  This was the disappointing array of choices Iranians faced in the spring of 2005, which is why that evening, rather than discussing the future of our country, we talked about novels. Before long, we were engrossed in a discussion popular in Iranian literary circles: had Ayatollah Khomeini’s fatwa crushed or kindled Salman Rushdie’s talent?

  “Azi jan, what would you like to do this Friday night?” My aunt Farzi poured me coffee at breakfast, and began her attempt to fill my precious two weeks in Iran with social activities. My reporting trips in the past had often lasted a month or longer, and she was accustomed to planning multiple dinners for me with all her friends.

  “I’m going to be very busy this time, so please don’t make any plans for me,” I said. I hurried my way through a chewy piece of barbari bread, and went to dress.

  Certain I would be pressed for time, I had begun scheduling appointments the first day of my arrival, assuming I could keep or cancel them pending the outcome of my encounter with Mr. X. That foresight meant I already had two full days of interviews arranged and could start working immediately. My editor at Time had assigned me only one piece, a long essay illustrating how young Iranians lived and how they saw their futures on the eve of this important election. Given the striking apathy I had already encountered, this kind of article seemed to me the real story, a gritty look at what young Iranians actually cared about, since they didn’t care about politics at all. I would spend two or three days talking with young people, and then stitch their stories together.

  I rifled through my suitcase and pulled out a wrap dress, which I pulled on over a pair of jeans. I slid on a pair of sandals, kissed my aunt goodbye, and ran out to the waiting taxi, arranging my headscarf in traffic. The Khatami government had eased restrictions on women’s dress so thoroughly that I gave little thought to what I should wear. When I first visited Iran as an adult, back in 1998, I spent the entire stay in a shapeless black manteau (literally, a coat, after the French word for the same) that reached my knees. I was twenty-one at the time, and wearing baggy folds of black made me keenly unhappy. By 2000, however, the women on the streets of Tehran had shed their dark robes for slim, fitted manteaus in brilliant colors and chic styles, simple tunics, and clingy ensembles of halter dresses worn over turtlenecks. This development, though perhaps superficial, brightened my spirits considerably. It was one of the myriad small things that when stacked together made daily life lighter and more livable. Back in 1979, Khomeini had urged Iranians to procreate wildly to bolster the revolutionary nation, creating a demographic bulge; the millions of young Iranian women in their late teens and early twenties shared my sentiments. That was one reason why they reelected Khatami in 2001 with such a wide majority.

  Although the permissiveness mattered deeply, Iranian women were concerned about far more than their head covering. Not a single one of my Iranian girlfriends would have said her life was more meaningful simply because she enjoyed more flexibility in matters of fashion. The loosening of strictures on dress, however, reflected the Khatami government’s tolerance of women pushing for equitable legal rights and access to public space. Women had begun doing aerobics in parks, petitioning for equitable legal rights in parliament, and organizing around issues from polygamy to domestic abuse. In short, the government that tolerated the pink veil also tolerated a grassroots women’s movement of considerable vigor. It was this that women cared about, rather than whether their veils were now brighter, transparent, pushed back on the head, or designer.

  But I, like so many women, took for granted what had changed under Khatami. This was for two simple reasons: I didn’t know Iran at the height of the revolution’s repression, in the 1980s; and it was not nearly enough. It was not enough for a society with 90 percent female literacy, whose women received 60 percent of the college degrees awarded each year. They considered themselves entitled to all the freedom and opportunity women enjoyed in the world’s most advanced countries. The gap between their expectations and reality still loomed so great that a few millimeters of progress, on most days, hardly seemed to merit notice. When I arrived at Café Naderi in downtown Tehran for my appointment that day, for example, I sat by myself in the central room, lit a cigarette, and leafed through an independent newspaper that provided a reasonably balanced window onto both Iran and the world. Back in 1998, when I first tried the café’s Turkish coffee, a girlfriend and I, dressed in our black sacks, were relegated to the back room, reserved for women unaccompanied by men.

  Now I sipped my coffee and scanned the room. Bookish young men with goatees occupied nearly half the tables, but nowhere did I see the student activist I was there to meet. The café, situated on a crowded stretch of Revolution Street, still attracted artists, professors, émigrés, and freelance intellectuals, drawn to its rose-colored walls, vaulted ceilings, and leafy garden, as well as its literary legacy: Sadegh Hedayat, Iran’s foremost modern novelist, had frequented the place in the 1940s, back when they served perfectly thick Turkish coffee, and the United States had an embassy nearby.

  “Ms. Moaveni, I’m sorry I’m late.” Mr. Amini sat down opposite me, arranging his hands formally on the table, and assumed a resolute expression.

  We ordered slices of buttery tea cake, and talked about how the student movement—once influential enough to spark the student riots of 1999, the most serious wave of unrest since the revolution—had fizzled out, its leaders terrorized by the security apparatus into abandoning their activities, or going abroad. Mr. Amini, like my relatives and so many other Iranians, had passed through the cycle of hope, anger, and boredom that these days characterized people’s attitude toward
politics.

  He described friends who had spent time in prison, how they endured solitary confinement and modern forms of torture—weeks’ worth of sleep deprivation, mock executions, heads stuck in vats of sewage, fake newspapers that reported the arrest of Khatami himself.

  “I’m not voting,” he said flatly, stubbing out a thin Bahman cigarette, named after the Iranian month in which the revolution “became victorious,” in the regime’s parlance. “I want to give a signal to the reformists. I want to tell them that they no longer reflect what people want. Not voting shows that I don’t accept a system where the president doesn’t even have the power to direct a budget.”

  As we stepped out into the street, pausing near a tree where a hawker sold contraband DVDs of American and pre-revolutionary films, Mr. Amini turned to look at me. “Do you realize how impossible it is to compete in Iran, in a place with no rules? Everything in this country is based on connections, on your relationship to people in power. People like me, we can’t even compete in this game. Do you realize that at the current salary of a university graduate, it would take me eighty years to buy a flat in a decent part of town?”

  I didn’t know what to say. I only wished that I had paid for our coffee, though he had refused. Mr. Amini was right about his pros pects. A modest flat was now beyond the budget of the average middle-class couple; only Iranians supported by their parents, or those few who belonged to the upper middle class, could afford to own their own place before their forties. I wished we had spent more time discussing this, a matter that most young people thought about every day and that was surely more pressing than the question of Islamic reform.

  Mr. Amini waved goodbye and disappeared into the bustle of Revolution Street, a yawning thoroughfare north of Islamic Republic Avenue. In the ten minutes it took to find a taxi, the polluted air seemed to coat my contact lenses with a grainy, oily film. As we drove north, I could scarcely see the Alborz Mountains before me, for the city, as usual, was trapped beneath a noxious brown haze. The Alborz range runs like a wall across the north of the country, and its lofty peaks include the world’s fifth highest ski resort, complete with gondola lift and rustic stone hotel. While the mountains mitigate the ugliness of the endless expanse of low-rise apartment blocks, they also block the Caspian winds blowing from the north, producing a thermal inversion of pollution that annually kills thousands of Iranians from respiratory diseases.