Save for one trip in the early 1980s, he had stayed away for nearly three decades, declining to appear at his father’s deathbed or to attend either parent’s funeral. Convincing him to fly to Iran on such short notice would be virtually impossible. “Ask him if my mother’s signature will do,” I whispered to Arash, who shook his head. Mothers played little role in the legal lives of their children. Their names did not appear on children’s identification forms and passports, and their permission was irrelevant in all the instances where a parent’s consent is required (foreign travel, contracts for ownership of land or other property). Although my mother, the woman who raised me single-handedly for eighteen years, was actually in Tehran, her signature would be as meaningful to my marriage contract as a doodle.
The only option, the mullah explained, would be to secure a power of attorney from my father authorizing a male relative to sign on his behalf. Once he had such a document in hand, he assured us, he could marry us within a few hours. This solution seemed reasonable enough, until I investigated the website of the Islamic Republic’s interests section in Washington, housed within the Pakistani embassy. (Because the United States and Iran had severed diplomatic ties in 1979, Iran lacked a formal presence of its own.) I found that my father was not eligible to sign a power of attorney. To be eligible, he would need to apply for a newly instituted national identity card. (This “national” card, introduced with much fanfare and at great expense, was, unfathomably, decorated with Arabic/Islamic graphics—a reminder that the Islamic Republic identified more with its Islamic character than with its distinct Iranianness.) As it happened, few official institutions accepted the card as identification, and the government was constantly admonishing its own bodies through state media to recognize it.
It had taken me eight months to receive my national ID; I could only imagine how long the process would take by mail in the United States. That step aside, the power-of-attorney paperwork itself involved a daunting number of procedures that surely could not be completed in under a month’s time. The endless downloadable forms blurred before my eyes, and I put my head down on the laptop in frustration.
Arash twisted my ponytail about gently, pulling my shoulders back up from the keyboard, grimy from coffee spills and cigarette ash, and boiled water to make us tea. During such fretful times we consumed cup after cup, quiet except for the occasional sound of my front teeth biting off a corner of a small chunk of sugar cube. In the Iranian style, one sipped tea through the sugar, allowing the granules to dissolve on the tongue, their sweetness mingling with the slightly bitter brew.
“I have an idea,” Arash said. “Let’s get married somewhere abroad, and bring the documents back with us.” That way we would have proof of marriage, its date still within the bounds of what might be a reasonable period of conception (I was only about six weeks pregnant). We could then take our time having it all officially translated in Tehran.
“That’s brilliant!” I clapped my hands in excitement, relieved to have found a solution, and privately pleased, though I didn’t say it, at the chance of restoring some allure to our forthcoming union, which had devolved into a drab, bureaucratic muddle. “I propose Monaco.”
“Monaco?” Arash snorted. “Why not Liechtenstein? If we’re going for miniature states, let’s at least pick one that’s German-speaking.”
“Liechtenstein doesn’t connote anything to me,” I said. He left me to stay up late researching the regulations of evocative, cozy European nations, distracted only by the occasional wet-nosed nudging of our beagle London, signaling his need to relieve himself on the balcony. His friend and ally Geneva, the St. Bernard puppy, was not yet housebroken and frequently rose from a seated position to reveal a veritable lake of urine. At three months, she was already a very large puppy, and would soon need to join Inuk the husky, who lived most of the year in Lavasan, at Arash’s family house. By around one A.M. it became clear that most western countries simply do not allow nonresident foreign nationals to traipse in and secure marriage licenses. The exceptions were Cyprus and Malta, both of which seemed unappealing to me for no particular reason. These prospects sent me shuffling to bed dejected, kicking the dogs’ chew toys off the rug along the way.
Arash was brushing his teeth the next morning when I announced the results of my search. “I know we can’t really be choosy. But isn’t there something seedy about a Maltese marriage?” By this point it was becoming obvious that I was obsessing over the perfect destination as a way to avoid thinking about what might happen if something went wrong—if I ended up miscarrying, for example, or if someone discovered I was pregnant before I could produce proof of my married status. Both of us participated in this diversion. Before leaving for work, Arash darted back into the room: “Nepal. Nepal is perfect. Research.”
I was weighing whether the current unrest in Kathmandu was severe enough to disrupt the authorities’ usual marriage procedures when the phone rang. It was my father’s brother, my uncle Shahrokh, calling to invite us to a dinner. I accepted quickly, then launched into a diatribe about how the regime’s paternalism was forcing us to consider the most inconvenient, far-flung options for a simple legal procedure. Most of our relatives had tactfully declined to ask why we were in such a rush, why we couldn’t simply wait for the months it would take to either persuade my father to come to Iran, or wade through the various bureaucratic requirements that would enable someone to sign in his stead.
“You know, now that you mention it, I think I actually have a power of attorney from your father,” my uncle said on the phone. “Let me go to the office and see if it’s still in my files.” Shahrokh was the only sibling on my father’s side to remain in Tehran after the revo lution, and this had made him responsible for the thankless task of pursuing family assets appropriated after the revolution. This had required a properly notarized and processed power of attorney that, if still valid, might be the answer to our plight.
That evening Shahrokh stopped by our apartment with a copy of the document, pleased to be facilitating our matrimony and thus our happiness, but equally glad to be encouraging the production of more nieces and nephews (little did he know) to frolic about the vineyard in Sonoma he was planning to build when he retired. Perhaps out of discretion he refrained from asking the obvious question: why we were suffering through this maddening, woman-hostile bureaucracy, when we could have flown to San Francisco and gotten married at city hall. The whole procedure would have taken an afternoon, we wouldn’t have needed anyone’s permission, and I wouldn’t have needed to anticipate polygamy clauses in the contract. In short, I would have the assurance of being married under a legal system that functioned as it was meant to, justly, and that safeguarded my basic rights. But the truth is, all justice systems, not just those of dictatorships such as Iran, are vulnerable to failure. Arash had experienced that firsthand in a California divorce court two years prior, and he was reluctant to expose himself once again to the vagaries of American justice.
He had told me when we first met how acrimoniously his four-year marriage to an Iranian-American—someone not unlike me—had ended. They had been married in California, and their major conflict in the divorce had centered on custody of their young daughter, but soon money emerged as an issue as well. As the stakes grew higher, the divorce devolved into a family feud, for Arash and his ex were cousins. The court ended up giving full custody to his ex-wife, a judgment I found both unfair and suspect once I read the court documents. Arash’s experience jarred me deeply; I had, perhaps naïvely, assumed that an American court would never act so unjustly, at least not in personal matters like divorce. I understood why Arash was reluctant to enter into another American marriage, and I did not press the point.
Although being married in Iran made me uneasy, two factors helped me agree to the idea: We would eventually be able to register our marriage in Germany, which meant that we would have recourse to the laws of a modern European democracy. Also, in recent years the Iranian government had revised
some of its most discriminatory child custody codes. In practice, Iranian women still encountered serious obstacles in the courtroom, but matters had improved considerably. These realities combined to keep us on our present course, despite its manifold irritations and absurdities. On one or two occasions, when the complications piled upon on each other, I felt momentarily disoriented, wondering how I had come to be in such a situation, in such a place. But I told myself that the future is always uncertain, that the best marriages in the most civilized places can devolve into mercenary duels, and that no justice system functions with impeccable fairness.
Since Shahrokh never asked why we had not considered the California option, the evening passed without any reference to this sad history. We drank tea and discussed relatives, and my uncle left for a dinner party. Assured that we now possessed all that was required to officiate our marriage, we ordered pizza and settled in to watch a DVD of Desperate Housewives, which although presumably banned was circulating around half the city with Farsi subtitles. Iranians, like people the world over, were titillated by mystery, and being prone culturally to uphold warm social manners even when with people they disliked, identified with the malaise of the suburban drama.
I he next morning we arrived at the marriage health bureau, prepared to undergo tests to prove that we were not carriers of Mediterranean hemophilia (a blood disorder that afflicts some Iranians) or substance abusers. Cartoonish antidrug posters covered the walls, part of the government’s growing effort to address the country’s heroin problem, the world’s largest according to the U.N. World Drug Report. The four other couples waiting comprised disparate social types, from clearly pious (chador/beard) to secular and middle-class (dyed blond fringe/body builder). An older, plump woman was there with a much younger, feckless-looking man—the sort of pair that would strike one as a green card match, were this a country where legal residency was in demand. Only those compelled by irregular circumstances, it seemed, would be getting married over the Nor ouz holiday.
After completing our tests, we were directed to wait for the man da tory premarital class. The term suggested something like couples counseling—instruction in communication skills, or perhaps on what to do when the romance faded. But I could not imagine why that would require couples to be separated by sex. I sat down in the women’s classroom, where the instructor launched into a description of the anatomy of the female reproductive system, not unlike the weekly sex education class that I had giggled through in the fifth grade. She waved about a blue condom, explaining the various forms of birth control available to brides-to-be. From a drawer she removed a heap of birth control pills; “Pay special attention to these,” she said, holding up a strip of tiny pills for what she called “urgent contraception.” I realized she was referring to emergency contraceptive pills, sometimes called morning-after pills, which can prevent pregnancy after unprotected sex. All five of the women she addressed, including the chadori and a slim young woman wearing a nautical headscarf, took notes attentively. How impressive, I thought, that the Islamic Republic of Iran promoted the use of controversial up-to-date contraception.
For all the state’s conservatism, it ran an extraordinary family planning program. Although in the early days of the revolution the Ayatollah Khomeini had encouraged Iranians to procreate with abandon in order to boost the numbers of soldiers available to fight in the war against Iraq, the regime had reversed the policy in the early 1990s as part of its postwar reconstruction drive. You could buy birth control pills over the counter for the price of a candy bar, and more than one of my Iranian-American girlfriends had me ship their yearly supplies to them in New York or California.
The instructor finished the birth control lecture with an admonition: “It’s very important that you don’t get pregnant too quickly. You should wait at least two or three years and see whether your marriage is going to work out. If you don’t have a child, you can easily get divorced after a couple of years and reenter society with your prospects intact. That’s not going to be the case for a divorced, single parent.”
What she said was harsh, but true. Most single mothers faced tremendous challenges in Iran. From the lack of affordable day care to the impossibility of living on one meager salary, the difficulties were steep enough to keep the majority of women in bad marriages from seeking legal release. A divorced woman unburdened with a child, however, would fare well in comparison. With the stigma of divorce receding, she could easily remarry, provided she lowered her standards a shade.
The instructor sat down behind the wooden desk, adjusted her caramel-colored maghnaeh, a hoodlike headscarf, and proceeded to impart the most surprising lesson of all. “Ladies,” she began, “you must also derive pleasure from sexual interactions. This is natural and nothing to feel ashamed of. Don’t be embarrassed to ask your husband to be patient. If he does not know, you can tell him: women’s bodies are different. They are built differently, and this matters. Why? Because for women, arousal takes longer.”
Since when had the government concerned itself with women’s sexual fulfillment? Since when had it, in fact, acknowledged that women had sexual desires at all? This seemed rather at odds with the authorities’ general hostility toward pleasure and the flesh. Perhaps alarmed by the rising rates of divorce and of urban prostitution, the state had decided to shore up the institution of marriage rather than simply make it a yoke held in place by repressive divorce laws.
“Does anyone have any questions?” the instructor asked.
The woman in the nautical scarf raised her hand. “I’ve heard that you can pick up bacteria by giving a man a blow job. Is that true?” She spoke self-assuredly, with no hint of embarrassment.
“If both you and your partner have tested negative for STDs, then no. But if you haven’t been tested, you should use a condom.”
Two other women asked similar questions about sexual health. I found it striking how comfortable everyone seemed with the frank discussion, as though at a Planned Parenthood session in San Francisco. At the class’s end, the instructor passed out bags filled with starter packs of several types of contraceptive pills. She then directed us to the nurse’s office next door for the final check on our forms, a tetanus shot administered by a woman in a white coat. The other women pulled up their sleeves, but I fiddled with mine, stalling until they had all gotten their shots. When they had gone, I explained that I was pregnant and would prefer to skip the live vaccine. I was afraid any other objection would be waved aside, and something in the nurse’s kindly manner as she administered the shots gave me confidence. “That’s fine,” she said, smiling broadly. “Congratulations.” She initialed the box, and sent me on my way.
Once reunited with Arash, I discovered that his class had learned about contraception by watching an instructional cartoon. After the film, the instructor counseled the class to regard sex more holistically “He told us that for women, sex is an emotional experience. That we shouldn’t just roll over and go to sleep when it’s over.”
“Really!”
“There’s more. He said that if we were more attentive afterward, our marriage would improve outside the bedroom.”
We drove through the overcast morning to the notary’s office, to announce that our paperwork was complete and to set a time for the proceedings. The office was situated on the south side of Zardosht Street, a thoroughfare in central Tehran dotted with medical clinics and florists. We climbed up a narrow staircase, and Arash opened the frosted glass door, only to have the handle inauspiciously come off in his hand. We bent over trying to fix it, whispering, and I couldn’t escape the feeling that we’d been cast in an absurdist comedy. The handle hastily affixed, we entered a long hallway lined with shoes and slippers. That shoes were not permitted inside signaled a mosque atmosphere, natural enough given this was a mullah-notary, but a minor crisis for me: I had not imagined needing to remove my boots, and had paired a pink argyle sock with a plain black one. Hoping no one would look below my knees, I stepped onto the machi
ne-woven Persian rugs, which smelled like two decades’ worth of unwashed feet. Inside, hanging fluorescent lights cast a sickly corporate glow on white stucco walls covered with mirror mosaics of palm trees. The place had the air of a kabob palace in Fallujah.
The notary, whom we would call Hajj Agha as is customary, greeted us warmly and introduced us to his son Mohammad. A series of photographs—prison mug shots of Hajj Agha—formed a column beside the palm tree mosaic. In these, Hajj Agha’s head was shaved, his expression was scowling, and he looked about forty pounds thinner than the avuncular and portly man before us. Wondering why our marriage officiant had a prison record and especially why he used that fact in his décor, I nudged Arash to look up at the photos. He nodded and turned his attention back to Mohammad, a young, wily mullah-notary in training who acted as his father’s assistant.
Honeymoon in Tehran: Two Years of Love and Danger in Iran Page 16