The evening was warm, and we smoked silently in Shirin’s office. I didn’t say anything about the day’s news. All I could think about was how tremendously composed Parastou seemed, given that her parents had been murdered, and that the man considered responsible had just been appointed to head a key government ministry.
When I look back on the early months of the Ahmadinejad era, my recollections of this evening are more vivid than any other, mostly because it was so tinged with fear. For Shirin and Parastou, but for Shirin especially, these appointments were not simply a distressing shift toward radical governance but tantamount to a renewed death sentence. When a man you believe plotted and sought your death is put forth to head a crucial government ministry, it is difficult not to consider this a license for him to return to his fatal agenda.
The government had assigned Shirin two security guards, allegedly out of fear of an attack on her life. Recently the guards had told her that the police had received credible information of an imminent threat, and had instructed her to begin wearing a bulletproof vest outside.
“What do you think,” she had asked me earlier that week, “should I wear it? Or perhaps they’re just trying to intimidate me.” She often asked my opinion on such matters with an intense, hushed air, as though hoping the scope of my contacts and work as a reporter might endow me with special insight into her situation. I always felt my responses were inadequate.
“It seems to me,” I had replied, “that if they’re that concerned you should first be driven in a bulletproof car, no?”
Our debate went around in circles, and we concluded that one cannot properly assess the security prescriptions of a government that itself previously conspired to kill you. The presence of the two guards, with their shadow of stubble and their collared shirts buttoned to the top, lent an unnatural air to the evening. They accompanied us to dinner, sitting on a nearby raised bed at the outdoor restaurant in Darband. We spoke in low tones so as not to be overheard. Parastou reminisced about the revolution, about the high esteem in which the Ayatollah Khomeini had held her father. Shirin’s husband warned her about eating carbohydrates in the evening and teased me about avoiding the fresh onions everyone else munched along with their meal. As dinner came to an end, I realized I would have no chance that evening to speak to Shirin privately. I had wanted to tell her about the incident at the jeweler and ask her advice, but this would have to wait.
We filed out of the restaurant and into the crowd of families and young couples strolling through Darband. The warm night air was filled with the calls of vendors selling wheel-size, paper-thin rolls of dried-fruit roll-up, and children loudly begging their parents for ice cream. A couple recognized Shirin khanoum as we walked toward the car, and stopped to greet her excitedly. With her work appearing less frequently in newspapers (cautious editors were likely trying to avoid stories that would get their papers banned), and with the online news site she wrote for now censored by the authorities, Shirin khanoum’s presence in Iranian life had grown muted in recent months. Watching the shining faces of the couple who were speaking to her, I realized just how successful the state campaign had been. Even I, her coauthor, charged with noticing her role in Iranian society, was guilty of forgetting just how much she meant to people.
I ordered a pomegranate martini, leaned back into plump velvet cushions, and surveyed the latticework of the mashrabiya (a wooden shade) lining one end of the lounge. Through its ornate pattern I could see the glistening waters of the Persian Gulf. The sun was setting over a landscape of cheerful palm trees, and on all sides of the room stylishly dressed Iranians held light conversations, picking at stuffed olives and Mediterranean tapas, the ice of their cocktails tinkling. Arash and I were meeting his friends Homayoun and Gita, and of course we were not in Iran. Along with hundreds of thousands of other Iranians in search of a freer life and superior business opportunities, they had moved to Dubai, which had become a sort of Persian satellite in the United Arab Emirates. Just a hundred miles south of Iran’s southernmost point, Iranians had created out of Dubai, effectively, an Iranian city; the distance lent itself to commuting, the government permitted unrestricted travel, inexpensive airlines made the short trip occasionally affordable for even middle-class Iranians, and a sprawling Iranian embassy facilitated all this coming and going, making the emirate accessible as a hub of capital and culture. Painters we knew now regularly held gallery exhibitions in Dubai, and Homa youn, the musician son of Iran’s foremost vocalist, Mohammad-Reza Shajarian, had chosen to establish himself there.
Looking out at the gulf’s placid waters, I was struck by the peculiar twists of the region’s history. Today, all these Iranians had fled the repressive Islamic rule of their homeland for an Arab state, while in the seventh century, it was the Arab conquest of Persia that had delivered Islam to Iranians in the first place. Stripped of their ancient religion, their literature, and their history, the Persians sought to preserve vestiges of their old traditions over centuries, crafting poetry and myth around their epic kings and resisting the invaders by simultaneously adapting and Persianizing their faith and language. Fourteen centuries later, it was Dubai, an Arab outpost the size of Rhode Island, that was generously hosting Iranian painting and music, while homegrown Islamic theocrats labeled the fine arts “western garbage.”
As our drinks arrived, we briefed Homayoun and Gita (both of whom drank iced tea) on the short space of time since Ahmadinejad had taken office.
“The only truly annoying thing actually happened to me this very morning on the way to the airport,” I said. After I’d hoisted my suitcase onto the belt of the women’s security check earlier, a female security guard in chador took me aside.
“Too short,” she barked. “Sleeves, manteau, jeans. All too short.”
That summer, the police had announced they would “deal in a serious manner” with women who flouted “proper” Islamic dress codes. They had made this pronouncement every summer for the past seven years, and not once had the rules actually been enforced in a “serious manner.” Women continued wearing short coats and pushed-back veils, treating the announcement like the toothless paternalistic griping they had been subjected to as teenagers on the way out the door. That year, the judiciary and another branch of the police had even contradicted the police department’s warnings in newspaper interviews, insisting the country’s security forces were focused on financial corruption and serious moral issues, such as prostitution.
“I’m accustomed to traveling in this manteau, and frankly, it’s not that objectionable,” I told the guard. Compared to what young women wore about the streets of Tehran, it was positively demure.
“Don’t you read the newspaper?” she said.
“Yes, don’t you? The head of the judiciary contradicted the police warning.”
“Well, you’re just going to have to take something long-sleeved out of your luggage and change.”
“I’m going to miss my flight, and I don’t have time for this,” I said curtly. When I had first arrived in Iran, fresh and green from northern California, I had obeyed like a schoolgirl in such situations, naïvely deferential to authority, certain the worst could not happen to me, of all people. Only when the worst (arrest, near arrest, public humiliation, and so forth) befell me, repeatedly, as a result of my submissiveness, did I learn to respond like the Iranian young people of my generation: with loud, shrill confrontation. This was the rather simple trick by which my friends—indeed, most young Iranians—managed to evade the bullying ways of the Islamic system: by shouting down its enforcers, daring them to engage in hostile, full-fledged confrontation. It sounds counterintuitive, but it was actually effective. Very often the authority figure in question was either too young, cowed, bored, or poorly paid to deal with an angry female whose shrieks typically gained her the solidarity of passers-by.
I described this kind of resistance in my first book as the culture of “as if,” a mode that involved behaving “as if” most of the regime’s rules
did not exist. Although it was technically illegal to reveal locks of hair, listen to western music, read censored books, and consort with members of the opposite sex, Iranian young people rendered these restrictions meaningless by ignoring them. In pushing back this way, they had reasserted some control over their daily lives. If you had asked me at the time, I would have said that it meant the authorities would never again be able to impose their harshest codes, that the days of telling Iranians exactly what to wear, say, watch, and do were over. The mullahs could not, after all, do battle against an entire generation, I thought.
The rebelliousness of Iranian young people often led outside observers to conclude that they were willing to confront authority in more meaningful, or more overtly political, ways. But I never found this to be the case. Every few months an editor at Time would ask whether we could do an “Iranian youth at boiling point” story, and I would explain that Iranian youth weren’t even heating up yet. That they were willing to shout down a police officer or flirt during a public Islamic ritual meant mostly that they were concerned with freedom in their immediate ten-foot radius. Beyond that, the risks involved in rebellion swiftly outgrew the rewards. Busy investing in the logistics of emigration—the English proficiency tests, visa applications, and language courses—many young people envisioned their futures abroad, and were unwilling to compromise those hopes for the sake of somehow changing Iran, a notion they considered chimerical, costly, and best left to a future generation.
The localized subversion they practiced was not unlike shooing away mosquitoes in high summer. The pests would buzz off momentarily, perhaps drawn to the neighbor’s porch light. But they would always be back, until someone mustered the energy to seek a more enduring solution.
At the airport on my way to Dubai, the guard let me pass through to the gate, though she first made me sign a ta’ahod promising not to repeat my offense. Certain she would toss it out without a glance, I signed it Googoosh, the name of a famous Iranian pop diva, and headed out to find Arash. If the ease with which one entered or left the airport was any measure of whether the government was tightening or loosening its controls on women’s dress, the incident was worrisome. It was unheard-of to be asked to sign a ta’ahod at Mehrabad, the capital’s main airport, but we were flying out of the new Imam Khomeini airport (IKIA), located in the desolate stretch of desert between Tehran and the holy city of Qom. “What a difference a vowel makes,” I’d said to Arash, pointing to the freeway signs directing us to IKIA. “Just imagine, if that second ‘I’ were an ‘E,’ what kind of country this would be.” IKEA, after all, could supply Iranians with more of what they actually needed.
With its vaulted ceilings, its tunnels to the planes, and its smart café serving cappuccino and berry tart from Tehran’s finest bakery, IKIA matched the standards of the developed world’s airports. Unfortunately, it had been designed to meet the travel needs of Iran circa 1980, and the decades of delay in its construction made it rather useless. IKIA was far too small to function as the chief airport of a nation of seventy million, and on many mornings the outgoing flights quickly overwhelmed its capacity. The lines for the departure hall’s handful of two-stall bathrooms, for example, were grounds enough to merit the commissioning of another two terminals.
Built largely in cooperation with the Revolutionary Guards, the airport had been embroiled since 2004 in the conflict between Iran and Europe over the country’s nuclear program. The Guards were a military force distinct from the conventional army, and notorious as the trouble-making arm of the Islamic Republic; they oversaw the country’s ties with Islamic militant groups and were accused by the United States of destabilizing the fledgling Iraqi government. Inside Iran, their economic clout had expanded in recent years, and now major infrastructural projects, instead of being sourced to firms with technical expertise, were granted directly to the Guards. European countries, irritated by Tehran’s diplomatic antics, balked at letting their carriers fly in and out of IKIA, citing a runway problem that they privately admitted was manageable. The Europeans’ ban on the new airport would almost certainly be dropped in the months to come, but in the meantime it reminded Iranians that their government had lost its credibility in the world.
As I recounted the airport run-in, I hastened to add what I considered an important detail. “Ahmadinejad himself doesn’t support this kind of harassment,” I said. “He said in a public speech that our country’s problem is not the hejab, which I think made him look quite sensible.”
At the time, I believed Ahmadinejad. I thought his practical approach to hejab (which in Iran refers to the practice of women covering their hair) was a cunning way to win over educated, urban Iranians who would be wary of his hard-line religious views.
Arash, Homayoun, and Gita looked at me skeptically, but I continued, arguing that the harassment at the new airport didn’t represent a new wave of repression but only the heavy-handedness one should expect of establishments run by the Revolutionary Guards. Like so many people at the time, reluctant to brace for the worst, I looked everywhere for hopeful signs that under this new president perhaps our lives would not change so dramatically.
After three days in Dubai, Arash and I returned to Tehran. On the way back from the airport, we stopped to eat liver kabobs near the old slaughterhouse district of the city. As we pulled the succulent meat off the skewers, I gazed around at the plastic tables of the fluorescent-lit dive, at the photos of Ayatollahs Khomeni and Khamenei hanging on the wall, and felt a pang of intense doubt. Was this the life I really wanted? I wasn’t uncertain about being with Arash, of course; traveling together had only underscored how well we fit and how close we had become. But did I truly want to live in Iran again, given how uncertain the country’s prospects seemed? If Ahmadinejad turned out to be intolerant of criticism, the climate for journalists would likely deteriorate. And I couldn’t imagine myself living in Iran and not working as a reporter. But since work and study tied Arash to Iran for at least the near future, I saw no choice for myself but to stay put and hope for the best.
One afternoon a couple of weeks later, Arash called me from his office. “Is everything all right? You haven’t noticed anything out of the ordinary today, have you?” No, I replied. Why? Nothing special, he said. We’ll talk when I get home.
We never discussed anything private or sensitive on the phone, for we were certain the lines were tapped. I knew that the authorities had tapped the phones I used back in 2000: Mr. X occasionally revealed information he could not have had without access to my private conversations. And since I had moved in to Arash’s apartment, the quality of the phone line had deteriorated. The crackles and hums, which mysteriously afflicted only our line, not the others in the building, convinced me we were being listened to. That the authorities knew we were living together did not concern me particularly. If one day they decided they wanted to toss me into prison, a spotless record of celibacy would not deter them. Now I impatiently waited for Arash to come home.
“I was followed the whole day,” he said, immediately upon opening the door. He had first noticed the man in the morning, lingering outside the door to the office building. Arash’s alertness to detail was exquisite, bordering on preternatural. At a glance he would notice the faulty knot in a silk carpet, the minute flaw in an intricate piece of jewelry. But the man who followed him stood out so dramatically that he surely wanted to be noticed. He had worn a polished suit, a bright tie, and dark sunglasses, and he was closely shaven. You could walk the streets of Tehran for an entire day and not encounter a man with such appearance, for though shaving had become commonplace (strictly observant Muslim men wear either a beard or stubble), the tie, as a western accessory, was still unwelcome in public space. In addition to his striking attire, the man had a memorably hooked nose.
He was still standing across the street when Arash left the office; he surfaced again near the entrance to a building where Arash had a meeting, and indeed he appeared outside every place Arash went the rest of
the day. “Are you sure it hasn’t to do with you?” I suggested hopefully. “Some textile mischief?”
While I had been monitored by Mr. X since the moment I began working in Iran, I had never, to my knowledge, been followed. The incident at the jewelry stop was the first indication that my movements were being watched, and Arash’s experience was the first time someone close to me had been followed. To be harassed for your own work, which you have chosen of your own free will knowing the consequences, is one thing; it is entirely another to feel the impact of that choice in the lives of those close to you. For the first time, living in Iran seemed truly dangerous. I felt miserable that I had inflicted this upon Arash, however indirectly. Though it was not my fault, I also felt somehow ashamed.
Honeymoon in Tehran: Two Years of Love and Danger in Iran Page 11