“He was a political prisoner under the Shah,” Arash said, under his breath. “Look at the books.” The bookshelf behind the desk was lined with numerous copies of three books, all authored by Hajj Agha. “Thirty Years of Resistance, Imprisoned and Tortured on 25 Occasions” read a line of sticker-tape underneath the mug shot on one cover. I leafed through the index, learning that in his years as a young, radical mullah organizing against the Shah’s unpopular reg ime, Hajj Agha had kept company with Iran’s foremost revolutionaries, holding court at the legendary Hosseiniyeh Ershad, a religious center that was a platform for the famous ayatollahs of the day. “See, he’s practically a celebrity,” Arash said.
Hajj Agha riffled through our papers, scanning the faded power of attorney through a pair of thick-rimmed black glasses. “This power of attorney bestows the right of signature over matters of finance and property only,” he said, the folds of his turban precise and creamy white, as if pressed from an icing tube. “There is a separate power of attorney for marriage, and that is what you need to bring me.”
My hands began to flutter, tucking imaginary strands of hair under my headscarf. I wondered whether I would have been able to talk my way through this were I able to speak more refined, native Farsi, or whether the situation required a man-to-man resolution. I suspected the latter, as somehow Hajj Agha did not strike me as the sort of man accustomed to bargaining with women over their futures. Arash settled back into the loudly patterned sofa, arranging his limbs in the relaxed pose that I knew meant he was preparing to negotiate; he would unfurl long, ornate sentences of Farsi that bore little relevance to the matter at hand yet that indirectly conveyed both the urgency of our position, and how far we were prepared to go to remedy it. He excelled at handling these moments, which so frequently occurred in Tehran—situations that seemed intractable owing to a rigid regulation or someone’s fixed position, but that he managed to maneuver around with flattery and creative problem solving. It was a matter of speaking their language, he always said, though he was German enough at heart that the hours involved, the tea drinking, and the sycophantism incensed him.
Hajj Agha listened patiently, but in the end it fell to his son, Mohammad, so thoroughly a child of the Islamic Republic, a shifty composite of piety and cunning, to suggest a solution. We would produce a faxed, handwritten letter from my father (they would provide the text) authorizing our marriage, and my uncle would be permitted to sign in his stead, on condition that within sixty days my father would present himself in Tehran and sign the official certificate himself. I inserted myself into the conversation, explaining that my mother was in Tehran and would be happy to attend and vouch for my father’s permission. Given the irregularity of our situation, I felt it couldn’t hurt to bring along physical proof of parental blessing, to ward off any sense that ours was an illicit love match made without their approval. I didn’t imagine Hajj Agha needed to know that my parents were divorced. “That’s a very good idea, my daughter, it would be helpful to have her here,” he said.
The only problem was that for the next two days we couldn’t find my father. I dimly recalled some mention of a backpacking trip, but couldn’t be sure, and in my irritation imagined him reclining in a meadow high in the Sierra Nevada, smoking and reading a John le Carré novel. I phoned my mother to tell her we would be signing the aghd contract any day now.
“But it’s Moharram!” she said. It is in the month of Moharram that Shias commemorate the martyrdom of Imam Hossein. My mother had rediscovered her devotion to Islam in recent years, a shift for which I credited geography. She lived in Carmel, far from any sizable Muslim population and from the reality of life in a theocracy. Thus removed, she could freely enjoy the faith’s finer spiritual qualities without the unpleasant dogmatism of its mullahs and other stern adherents. The decades she had spent straying from the faith had distanced her from the fine points of observance, so now she tended to overdo her fidelity. Islam, its Shia and Sunni sects alike, permitted marriage on any day of the year. It could perhaps be considered inauspicious to marry during a period of mourning, but given that we were compelled by circumstances, and given that the idea didn’t offend Hajj Agha, I felt she should relax her position.
“The mullah doesn’t have a problem with it, why should you?” I demanded. “Do I need to start calling you Mesbah-Yazdi again?” In recent years, when my mother’s piety bordered on the reactionary, I had begun teasingly calling her by the name of a famously fundamentalist ayatollah, Ahmadinejad’s main clerical champion.
Unmoved, she wailed about how our timing disrespected her values, how no one who was adam-hesabi, good people, got married at the notary anyway, how there should be at least some pretense made of khaste-gari. This custom, by which the groom’s parents formally visit the bride’s family to ask for her hand in marriage, was no longer as widespread as in her youth. Many couples knew each other too well before marriage for such formalities, and our ages and independence made the idea quite preposterous.
I reminded her that it was also Norouz, a celebration of joy and rebirth, and that she could focus on this instead. I told her that a great deal had changed since the Iran of her era, and that her expectations were now passé. I recounted the case of my cousin Ghazal, who was married to the nephew of Jalal Al-e Ahmad, a famous social critic of the 1950s and 1960s who had devised the term “westoxification” to describe how Iranians had abandoned their traditions in their pursuit of modernity. You couldn’t find a family more traditionally religious than the Al-e Ahmads, but Ghazal and Ahmad had not involved their parents in any khaste-gari.
It frustrated me that, in many ways, my mother remained more conservative than the parents of my friends and relatives in Tehran. The Iranian diaspora community in the West had remained frozen in the mind-set of the 1960s and 1970s, the era of its emigration. My mother, for example, and the mothers of many of my Iranian-American friends, had frowned on our having boyfriends in high school; they thought their daughters would be corrupted by such forward American ways. But most middle-class moms in Tehran, nudged by the country’s changing social mores into revising their expectations of young people’s behavior, accepted boyfriends as a fact of life. How ironic, I thought, that the Iranian women who immigrated to the West and bene fited from its education and its freedoms clung to their paternalistic traditions, while those who’d stayed in Iran, under the thumb of the Islamic Republic, accommodated to the ways of the younger generation.
In today’s Iran, the signing and reading of the aghd, the marriage contract, was a procedural matter and it often took place weeks or months ahead of the actual ceremony and celebration. Many couples needed the extra time to find and furnish an apartment; others were waiting for the groom to finish his military service.
Characteristically skeptical of all my pronouncements, claiming I reflected only the views of an alien, westernized fringe of Iranian society, my mother remained perturbed, opposing. In her politics, she was an American liberal, reflexively skeptical of what the U.S. media reported about Iran. Like many Iranian-Americans, she believed that reporters like me should not write openly about Iranian young people’s liberal lifestyles, their openness to the West, and in particular, how their despair over the slow pace of change sometimes led them to hope for a U.S. intervention that would unseat the mullahs. Such coverage, they believed, would be used by hawks in the Bush administration who, in seeking a military confrontation with Iran, argued that in the event of a U.S. attack Iranians would rise up against the regime (this was a delusion of course, Iranians were staunch nationalists and would always side with their own rulers, however abhorrent). I understood this view, but disagreed with it entirely. You could not ignore the legitimate frustration of millions of young people for the sake of thwarting hawks in Washington who might seek to exploit it.
But beneath the leftist contours of my mother’s personality, there also lurked an Iranian matron’s bourgeois regard for propriety, and a Shia Muslim’s enthusiasm for sacrificing sheep o
n religious occasions. Often it seemed to me that I couldn’t locate my mother amid the swirl of her values; they were unworkable, too disparate to be contained in one person. The enmity between Iran and America saddened her; poverty in Africa saddened her; the class stratification wrought by first-world capitalism saddened her. The Germans have a term for the condition of perpetual sorrow over the state of the world: Weltschmerz. My mother was the queen of Weltschmerz. And, once fixed in a particular position, she refused to budge.
I told her about all my middle-class friends who had married without khaste-gari. In exasperation I finally said that if Jalal Al-e Ahmad’s nephew didn’t represent Iranian society sufficiently for her tastes, I didn’t know who would. In the end, I abandoned my case, because it occurred to me we weren’t really fighting about contemporary marital mores or the etiquette of the religious calendar. My mother often resorted to battles over abstract values when she wished to avoid thinking about matters that upset her. Once I phoned her from the roof of my hotel in Baghdad, just weeks after the U.S. invasion, because the cracking sound of sniper fire scared me. It likely scared her, too, but rather than console me she rebuked me for covering the war for Time instead of for The Progressive. What really concerned her now was my marriage itself, the marriage of her only child to a man who lived in Iran and thus posed a threat to any hope of my eventual return to northern California. I presumed that, like her opposition to my reporting and living in dangerous places, this, too, would pass.
CHAPTER 9
Honeymoon in Tehran
Finally, having cleared the many religio-bureaucratic obstacles in our way, we were ready to get married. My father had returned from the mountains and faxed us his permission. My mother still demanded we wait for a propitious date on Islam’s calendar, but I assumed her dissent was mostly for show. Meanwhile, Hajj Agha had disappeared. I tried phoning him, but his mobile phone was either off or out of range. Eventually, sometime after nine in the evening, Arash got through, but the line crackled with so much static he could barely make out what Hajj Agha was saying.
“You’re where? Khorramshahr?” Khorramshahr! What was our mullah doing hundreds of miles away, in a war-ravaged city on the border with Iraq? We called Mohammad for an explanation. He said his father was on his annual sermon tour of southern Iran. Why could he not be in Tehran like most proper mullahs, busy attending passion play reenactments with their families and enjoying the stew of lamb, split peas, and dried lime that was traditional Moharram fare? Hajj Agha perhaps still subscribed to the Ayatollah Khomeini’s view that “every day is Karbala” and believed the holiday was a time to rekindle Iranians’ Shia zeal. He would not return for at least a week.
“But I don’t think Hajj Agha would have performed your aghd anyway,” Mohammad said. “This is not really our line of work.” It turned out Hajj Agha had been planning all along to refer us to another notary, one who was not above entering a slightly irregular marriage into his oversize book of contracts. By assisting us in this way, he was both doing us a good turn and securing for himself a sizable commission. Mohammad told us he knew a mullah in Khorasan Square, a grimy neighborhood in south Tehran, who would be pleased to perform our aghd. We phoned my uncle to apprise him of the change of plans, but he refused to venture anywhere south of central Tehran. “You will do yourselves no good starting your life together in such an area,” he sniffed with a patrician finality.
This did not deter the resourceful Mohammad, who summoned the backup mullah uptown, reminding us that this would require more generous shirini, the literal term for sweets that was also a euphemism for a bribe. We arranged for everyone to assemble at the office of Hajj Agha’s notary at four o’clock.
I phoned my mother two hours in advance to give her directions, assuming that her protests were mainly melodrama and that she would show up when she was supposed to. But she refused to come to the phone, conveying through auntie emissaries that she was napping. I knew she was not asleep. Probably she was taking revenge, in hopes that her absence would disrupt proceedings whose timing she considered a slight. I wanted to hide my exasperation from Arash, preferring him to believe that my mother’s pleasure at our marriage was undiluted, but he could hear me exclaiming (“Napping? That’s the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever heard. You should be ashamed to repeat it. Tell her to come to the phone now”), and later, as we drove through the eerily empty streets, I disclosed that my mother would not be joining us. He saw how upset I was, and patted my hand. “Don’t worry about it. She’ll come around eventually.”
On the way we stopped in Qeytarieh to pick up Arash’s best friend, Houshang, who would serve as his witness. He jumped into the backseat, observed our tense expressions, and quickly adjusted the iPod to a Manu Chao album. “Smile, please, you’re both far too solemn.” He offered us some of the noghl (sugar-coated almond slivers) he had brought along, and then recounted the details of his niece’s job interview earlier that day with Iran Air, the state carrier. Many government-owned institutions still asked religious-ideological questions during interviews, as a way to screen out the impious or hypocrisy-averse. The interviewer asked Houshang’s niece for the average length in meters of a kafan, the shroud used for Islamic burial. She told him that an airline should be asking questions about safety and first aid, not burial attire, and walked out.
At the age of forty-seven, Houshang devoted most of his affections to his nieces and nephews. He had vowed never to marry, squirmed out of any relationship that lasted longer than a month, and regarded us, on the brink of permanent entrapment, with affectionate sympathy. His gargonnière loft studio, embedded in a particularly conservative corner of Qeytarieh (a neighborhood near our own), could not accommodate a wife, and that was as he had designed it, along with the rest of his life. When I first met him and heard him hold forth on the incompatibility of marriage with a life devoted to Art, I assumed it was the sort of cocktail chatter one could expect from any artsy photographer-filmmaker wearing a lime-green Lacoste polo shirt and drinking mango-infused aragh. Freelance art photography was a favorite path of bored, affluent twenty- and thirtysomething socialites; once a year they held gallery parties to exhibit their work, and they affected “careers” that did not require them to rise before noon. But Hou shang, though fond of grand pronouncements, was not a north Teh ran dilettante. The males among that company had either been shipped off to the West during the war with Iraq, or managed to buy exemptions from military service. Houshang had enjoyed no such privilege; he was, in fact, a shahid-e zendeh, literally a living martyr, an appellation bestowed to war veterans who had survived the gravest dangers.
Sometimes when he told stories of the war—how soldiers harassed scorpions into biting them, for instance, because a scorpion bite earned two weeks’ automatic furlough; how during long sieges he and his troop mates subsisted on the leaves of onions they had planted earlier—I could not quite believe such hardship had been endured by the urbane, Luis Buñuel-obsessed man before me. I wondered whether Hou shang’s time at the front had made him wary of emotional entanglements, but he never let on, even to his closest friends, always deflecting intimate questions with glib asides, claiming he could not be bothered to drink tea and make provincial small talk with a wife’s relatives.
My uncle Shahrokh called to say he was just a few blocks away, and by the appointed hour we were all in place save my mother, whose absence no one remarked upon. The backup mullah arrived ten minutes late, dressed in a frayed, mustard-colored robe that cloaked his generous proportions. He addressed us in the nasal tones of a lifelong opium addict, and oozed into Hajj Agha’s chair, listlessly playing with his prayer beads. His assistant, an energetic man with wiry black hair, took charge of our papers.
“You aren’t related to Mr. Ali Moaveni, are you?” he asked my uncle.
“Yes, he was my father. He passed away three years ago.”
“May God bless his soul, and what an honor this is indeed, this opportunity to be of service to his kin!” Th
e assistant beamed, examining us all with new respect. Arash, Houshang, and I exchanged amused glances. We often said that in a Tehran of fourteen million, Iranians were linked by only two degrees of separation.
I took it as an auspicious omen that in this overflowing city someone who remembered my grandfather Pedar Joon would by chance preside over our marriage. In 2000, during his final days, when the pace of his daily walk down Villa Street had slowed and he grew forgetful, my elderly grandfather’s dying wish had been to see me married. To advance that goal, he had pressed me to enroll in classes at the University of Tehran (“no place like college to find a husband”), and, when I showed no signs of progress, to list the qualities I required in a mate, so that he could more effectively take up the search on my behalf. At first I had taken the list as a joke, but during a summer trip to the Caspian he demanded it in earnest, pausing near the spot where I read Rohinton Mistry’s novel A Fine Balance in the shade of a palm tree, shaking his wooden cane with a sly smile. “You are neither fat nor ugly, and both your family and career are distinguished,” he often repeated, baffled by my spinsterhood.
The assistant briskly placed a marriage contract before us and asked which provisions he should amend. A generic contract leaves space for a husband to accord his wife certain privileges which the law enabled Iranian women to secure from their husbands: typically the right to divorce under particular terms, to travel out of the country alone, to acquire a passport. The basic contract, I noted, granted me the right to petition for divorce only under certain conditions, including “the husband’s committing bigamy without his wife’s consent, or unfair treatment of his wives;” “the husband’s involvement in harmful addictions that would make life difficult for the wife;” and, curiously, “engaging in occupations found inconsistent with the wife’s prestige.” The juxtaposition of such abstruse language, alongside notations such as “the husband has no other wife,” struck me as particularly Islamic Republic: at once prudish and indecent.
Honeymoon in Tehran: Two Years of Love and Danger in Iran Page 17