Living together was far too unsubtle, and none of my friends in Iran had even considered the idea. The enraged parents, the dashed marriage prospects, the perhaps vengeful backlash from a culture still hung up on the “honor” of its women aside, living together was also financially out of reach for most couples. Part of the reason young people uniformly lived at home until marriage, even if they married in their thirties, was to save money for an apartment. Very often couples who wedded late still needed help from their parents to start an independent life, and the notion of living together unwed … well, it just contravened sensibility and practicality too much to be considered by even the city’s most notorious playboys and party girls.
Arash, like most Iranians who had returned from the West as adults, lived alone. But his apartment was on the third floor of a building in which his parents and sister also lived. After the revolution, when single-family houses were razed in favor of apartment blocks, and traffic made the city unnavigable, many families opted for such living arrangements. Most of my married friends lived in family buildings or at least on the same block as their parents.
Neither of us really took our parents’ reactions into consideration when we decided to cohabit, probably because I was twenty-nine, Arash was thirty-five, and we were both westernized enough to think this meant we were beyond parental oversight. His parents, though far more traditional than my family on the surface (they spoke undiluted Farsi at home instead of English, were fond of Iranian culture, and did not affect the lifestyle of the international elite), took the news with rather elegant composure and warm acceptance. His mother invited me to lunch as though it were the most natural thing in the world, noticed my favorite things to eat, and wordlessly added them to her shopping list and cooking menu, as though she had overnight acquired a third child who deserved to be doted upon.
My parents reacted less sanguinely. “They will hunt you down in the street and throw acid on your face,” my father warned ominously over the phone from California. “You will be disfigured for life.” He had only visited Iran once since 1979, a brief trip during the grim 1980s. He thought Tehran was overrun by Taliban-esque fundamentalists who had nothing to do but detect and purge sinful living-together couples. My mother’s concerns, predictably, focused on propriety over safety. “I warn you, Azadeh, his parents may act like they don’t have a problem with it, but deep down they consider you loose, a girl of easy virtue, and they will never, ever permit their son to marry you.”
Though my mother had spent the majority of her more than sixty years in California, and though she was at home driving to and from the organic grocery store on its spacious freeways, she had never quite come to terms with the essential Americanness of her personality. Her identity remained a puzzle to many who knew her, and probably to herself. In some respects, her biography was American in its show of independence. She asked for a divorce when I was only a few months old, launched a second career in psychiatric nursing when I started elementary school, and lived with seeming disregard for everything that was expected of her as an Iranian woman. She did not keep house with particular tidiness and she failed to match her china, preferring instead to visit the local ashram and participate in a local peace network that promoted better ties with the then Soviet Union. She might have been a character in a Woody Allen film, so thoroughly did she embody the neurotic charm of a hypereducated, urban American.
I told my parents they were being absurd and paranoid and, worst of all, were cloaking their own disapproval in safety concerns and worry over the hypothetical, imagined disapproval of Arash’s parents. “It’s really very amusing that after three decades in California, after attending Berkeley and studying gestalt and becoming American enough to obsess about food, you are still as conservative as the most conventional Tehrani parents,” I said during one conversation. They maintained their stony, long-distance censure, and I ignored them, preferring to concentrate on do-it-yourself sponge painting, my antique kilims, and other elements of apartment décor.
Although neither Arash nor I had any reservations about our decision, we were well aware that it was something we should disclose only selectively. We told our very closest friends and relatives, but hid our living arrangements from the rest of the world—our colleagues at work, the officials we both dealt with professionally, the neighborhood merchants. This involved a rather small degree of subterfuge. I maintained the pretense of living with my aunt in Elahieh and asked most work contacts to call me on my mobile phone. My aunt, a sympathizer and confidante, pretended I was out when I received calls at her house, and relayed messages punctually.
The only problem was, Mr. X never left messages. I had returned the mobile phone I’d been using, on loan from my uncle, and was still waiting for the mobile line I had bought in 2000 to be reconnected. Meanwhile, it would be unthinkable for Mr. X to call my aunt and say, “Please let your niece know that her minder at the Ministry of Intelligence called.” I assumed that when anyone besides me answered the phone, he simply hung up. I worried that he might grow suspicious if I never picked up the phone at my aunt’s. To ward off any problems, I made a point of calling him more frequently myself. Either the ministry was less paranoid than usual or Mr. X was busy with more important charges, for our conversations were shorter and more procedural than ever before. My side often went like this: “Hello … Are you well? … May you not be tired. I’m calling to say that I’m reporting a story on the election results. I will be speaking to the following analysts. … You don’t want to know anything else? Very well then. May God protect you. Bye.”
With Mr. X thus taken care of, hardly any obstacles remained. For the most part, no one noticed or asked questions. It was common for dating couples to be publicly inseparable, at least in middle-class and affluent neighborhoods, and everyone assumed they retreated to their separate homes at the end of the evening. And so, with very little apprehension and much delight, I took up residence in Darrous, a neighborhood of north Tehran just below the hills of Qeytarieh. The area had changed significantly since 1979, its story in many ways the story of how Tehran was transformed by the revolution. Eshrat khanoum, Arash’s mother, grew up in Darrous, and during her girlhood in the 1940s, the quarter was composed of villas surrounded by orchards of mulberry, apple, and plum trees.
The neighborhood’s location, its shady avenues and gardens, made it a desirable place to live. Before the revolution it became popular among foreigners, perhaps also because it was where the American community in the city built a sort of country club for tennis and socializing. In the 1990s, the mayor of Tehran, Gholamhossein Karbaschi, oversaw the city’s large-scale transformation, permitting the razing of old villas and the construction of apartment towers and high-rises. Within a few years, Darrous’s population quadrupled, as pious merchants from the bazaar (bazaaris, as they were known) and other affluent religious families took up residence in the new towers. Despite their piety and ostensible disregard for western culture, bazaaris were afflicted with a deep inferiority complex. They envied the social eminence of more worldly Iranians and they wanted the status that living in Darrous afforded. They brought with them a culture of religious observance entirely new to the quarter. The new buildings were often columned monstrosities adorned with Koranic calligraphy, a style that illustrated what happened when piety, class anxiety, and large bank accounts collided.
The influx of such residents had gained the area a special reputation among the clerical and administrative elite. Once, when an official overheard me asking a messenger to send some documents back “home” to Darrous, he nodded his head in solemn approval. “A very fine neighborhood, indeed,” he said. “Home to the very aseel [noble] families, the very best people.” The neighborhood’s old families and merchants, however, were of different opinion. The new residents, while respectable enough, behaved with a sort of vulgar hauteur, like social climbers abusing their servants. Eshrat khanoum, for example, treated the merchants in Hedayat Square, the neighborhood’s cen
tral shopping area, as colleagues. Her children had grown up with theirs and all had respectfully shared space for decades. By contrast, the chador-clad wives of the new residents tended to burst into the small shops barking orders, waving their hands about, insulting the produce, and shrilly issuing demands (“Give me parsley! Mint! Don’t you have anything better than that, it’s wilted! Where do you keep your good tarragon? Give me the good herbs, do you hear?”). The merchants bowed their heads, said, “Chashm [Certainly], Hajj khan oum,” and glared as their heels clicked in retreat.
Naturally it did not escape the attention of the merchants in Hedayat Square that Arash was associating with a new woman. They craftily tried to deduce the nature of our relationship by calling me “Mrs. Engineer” or “Mrs. Zeini” so that I would correct them. When I refused to oblige, they turned their efforts to Arash: “Your fiancée likes strawberries; why don’t you take a kilo for her?” To shop with a girlfriend or boyfriend in Hedayat Square was tantamount to announcing one’s courtship to the entire neighborhood, and I found myself buying fruit elsewhere, hoping to maintain a sense of relative anonymity.
Because all the merchants in Hedayat Square recognized me, I circled around its backstreets when walking Inuk, Arash’s husky. The government, in keeping with strict Islamic tradition, considered dogs ritually unclean and banned them as pets. Secular Iranians considered this absurd, like so many of the government’s laws, and acquired toy poodles and other small dogs as pets. For some years, it had become trendy for women in north Tehran to travel about the city with their lapdogs as accessories. This incensed the regime, whose clerics bellowed against short-legged dogs at Friday prayer, and also led to dog-napping for ransom as a new genre of petty crime. I kept to the backstreets partly to hide Inuk from the view of Hedayat Square, whose merchants might think less of the family for keeping a dog as a pet, and whose shop clerks, with knowledge of our address, might hatch dognapping plans.
Oometime that summer, perhaps in early August, Mr. X contacted me to request a meeting. Though nearly all our interactions are etched in my memory, for some reason the physical details of this particular encounter elude me. I suspect this is because he neither tried to intimidate me, blackmail me into revealing information he wanted, or warn me of his ministry’s displeasure with my work. As our meetings went, it was remarkably civil, almost benign.
Though I cannot say exactly where we met—surely an empty hotel room like the others across the city where we had convened in the past—I do recall our conversation.
“How do you see Iran’s future these days?” he asked. Mr. X was always keen to know how the press corps viewed the country’s prospects. It was as though he needed to fill out a form each month at the ministry: “Please tick one of the following. In [blank for the month], do journalists view Iran as: ▪ a failed theocracy ▪ a rising regional power ▪ a nascent Islamic democracy ▪ an oil-rich Third World mess.”
I replied blandly, explaining that we needed to wait and see what the Ahmadinejad era held in store.
From there, Mr. X subtly turned the subject to Shirin khanoum. He asked about her safety; had she been receiving threats recently? I mentioned her state-appointed bodyguards, since she herself spoke publicly about them.
“Does needing to have these guards scare her?”
“Shirin khanoum doesn’t scare easily,” I said. This was untrue—I had seen her almost terrified on certain occasions—but the truth was nothing Mr. X needed to know. He looked at me expectantly, as though waiting to hear more. “She seems to be handling things very professionally,” I added.
He asked nothing more, and we spoke briefly about other matters. Before long, after perhaps just thirty minutes, he began wrapping up his notes. Usually our meetings lasted an hour and a half, but that day Mr. X seemed especially relaxed. Perhaps the ministry, suspended between the outgoing administration and the new, lacked a particular mandate. Pleased to be released earlier than usual and without having suffered any emotional distress, I waved goodbye and hurried out into the Tehran sunshine.
My memories of that summer bear so little connection to the days that were to follow that they seem almost of a different Iran. As peculiar as it may seem, the nation’s politics hardly seemed to matter. Perhaps that is not entirely right, for surely they mattered, but that summer they remained unchanged. This interregnum allowed us to imagine life would simply limp along, the status quo of the past few years in place: an economy whose failings were buffered by subsidies and manageable inflation; cultural life that was controlled by philistine censors but that permitted creativity on the edges; social permissiveness that made the pursuit of happiness, in the form of dating, outings, and parties, fraught but possible. Iran was not yet at peace with the world, but neither was it at war. It was a time, in short, when Iranians had the luxury of tuning out the factional squabbles of their ruling mullahs and focusing on their personal concerns, as if the two bore little relation to each other.
For many, in the month of July, no concern mattered quite as much as making wine. Since the regime outlawed alcohol, Iranians who drank—a not inconsiderable portion of the population—coped in a variety of ways. Most were content to consume homemade aragb, a hard liquor made easily from raisins. Beer lovers fared worse, for beer was hard to make at home and expensive to buy from the bootleggers who delivered orders door-to-door. But for the many Iranians who drank wine, the prohibition offered up an opportunity they may never have contemplated otherwise: making their own. The state permitted the 400,000 Iranians of Armenian Christian origin, one of the country’s biggest though dwindling religious minorities, to produce and consume wine, and most Muslim Iranians had for years bought their wine from trustworthy Armenians. Some housewives who still made their own jam and pickles simply added winemaking to their seasonal labors.
One day in high summer, when grapes reached their peak, we set out in search of the shahani, a grape whose dusky purple skin and pink flesh produce a full-bodied, deep red wine. The shahani grape did not enjoy an international reputation like its cousin, the grape of Shiraz—which is thought to be the ancestor of the French syrah and before the revolution had been exported to vineyards across the world—but we enjoyed its flavors nonetheless.
“Aren’t you thankful for the Islamic Republic?” I asked Arash as we left for the main produce market of the city, Maidan-e Tareh Bar. Farmers from throughout the country sent truckloads of summer fruits and vegetables to the sprawling expanse of parking lots. There, wholesalers sold to produce merchants serving the capital’s fourteen million inhabitants. “If this were a normal country, we would probably live our whole lives without once making our own wine,” I said.
We were directed to the lot where the grapes could be found, and began threading our way through the stalls, covered in piles of crates overflowing with grapes of myriad variety. I noticed other Iranians dressed in city clothes—distinct from the produce wholesalers and retailers—picking through the fruit. It was a practice as old as the revolution, it turned out, to go shopping for wine grapes. The wholesalers smiled conspiratorially, selling their grapes with the ease of shrewd businessmen aware they sat on the dominant end of the supply-demand equation.
This open-mindedness was an inadvertent effect of nearly three decades of repressive, Islamic rule. By intruding upon people’s private lives in the name of religion, the regime had managed only to make its own petty meddling unpopular, creating an unprecedented, deep-rooted appreciation in the most conservative pockets of Iranian society for the rights of the individual, however at odds with Islamic sensibilities. I had not witnessed such tolerance anywhere else in the Middle East, and I suspected it was one reason why Iranian immigrants in the West tended to assimilate more seamlessly than those from other parts of the Islamic world. For most Iranians, Islam had become a matter of intensely private importance, not a prism through which you negotiated personal identity or cultural anxieties.
This more evolved, salutary relationship with religion arose
partly also from the regime’s haphazard imposition of its strictest codes. The grape hall of the produce bazaar was just one of many corners of Iranian life that the regime had neglected to infiltrate. It had simply forgotten to dispatch its agents to intimidate the wholesalers into stricter oversight of their sticky clusters. I imagined ways in which it could do this: “Mr. Qazvini grape merchant, do not sell grapes to anyone whose clothes do not bear produce stains, who is using a sedan or other noncommercial vehicle for transport, and, in cases where you are not certain, ask for a ta’ahod, a signed promise, that the grapes will be used only for fruit bowls, vinegar, or juice.”
As I envisioned such interventions, we trudged among the stalls, bending down to squish grapes whose skin resembled the dark purple of the shahani, checking to see whether the flesh and its juice were red, as the variety is meant to be, or white, which marked a variety similar in appearance that produced a blush wine.
“You’ve come too late,” a vendor told us, as we made a second circuit with hands that were sticky but disappointingly unstained. “The shahani usually finish by eight. If you want khomreh [meaning jug, the traditional vessel in which Iranians store wine] grapes, you need to arrive early.” So we drove that same day to Qazvin, a city about 165 miles northwest of Tehran, and in the recesses of its cozy bazaar found enough crates of shahani to yield the equivalent of two barrels. By the time we loaded the trunk, we were covered with dirt and ravenous, and finding all the restaurants in the city already closed, bought a loaf of fresh barbari and some salty white cheese, and drove out to nearby Alamut, a mountain fortress on the central plain.
Honeymoon in Tehran: Two Years of Love and Danger in Iran Page 9