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

by Azadeh Moaveni

  That day I wore a loose manteau to our appointment, purposely concealing my pregnancy. So many officials I met, even reformist types, chastised me for working while pregnant that I had stopped mentioning that I was expecting, nodding shamefacedly when they mentioned that I had gotten fat. Somehow I especially did not want Mr. X to know that I was pregnant until absolutely necessary, as though by withholding this information I was safeguarding my nonexistent right to privacy.

  I arrived early and sat in a far corner of the lobby of the hotel, a grand place that had been designed by a court architect under the Shah. I had brought along Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past to help calm my nerves, escaping into a world as distant as I could imagine. I so lost myself in its pages that I stopped looking at my watch altogether, and only when my cell phone rang did I realize I was late. Having lost ground in the meeting before it had even begun, I walked across the lobby to where Mr. X and a new partner sat waiting at a table off to the side, near a series of vaulted windows facing onto a landscaped garden.

  The appearance of the new partner unsettled me. Unlike both Mr. X and his previous colleague, whose grooming, manners, and neat pressed attire gave one the encouraging impression that they were not from the goon branch of the ministry, the new partner was altogether more worrisome in appearance. His stubble, outmoded glasses and shirt, and shifty bearing made him resemble the men who ordered people beaten up at demonstrations. He appeared sullen and never once met my gaze, instead dipping into his bowl of ice cream with studied concentration.

  “As you can see,” Mr. X began, “this is hardly an appropriate venue for us to be conducting our business. At this very moment we could be noticed by anyone in this lobby, which is hardly acceptable.” He had previously made the same point on the phone, as though to suggest that in meeting privately he was actually doing me a service by protecting my public reputation. I responded that if our meetings bolstered the security of the nation, I would not mind at all if anyone noticed them. He brushed this aside.

  He made a show of waiting long seconds for the waiter to stride away after taking our orders, and spoke in an exaggeratedly low voice that made it difficult for me to follow his bureaucratic language.

  “The only thing that remains is for you to work on convincing your husband,” he said. “This simply cannot be a regular option. If you continue to insist, this meeting will be our last. If you cannot cooperate properly, it is better that you do not work at all.”

  He was as chilly as I had ever seen him, the increasing assertiveness I had noticed over the previous months evident in the way he held his stocky frame. I had often wondered, during in-between moments, whether he derived satisfaction from threatening me. Did he have a sadistic personality, or was he just a decent man stuck in a particularly unpleasant job? Having watched him drive away in a faded Peykan, that sad, boxy vehicle of the Iranian working class, having spoken to the chirpy young daughter who sometimes answered his cell phone, I had felt the latter. Sometimes he even displayed flashes of humanity in our discussions. Once, exasperated and angry, I stopped circling around what I wanted to say and just blurted, “How can you expect me to trust you with the identities of my sources when your ministry just two years ago was murdering people?”

  Unprepared for this, he responded as though hurt, his brown eyes taking on an expression of sincere distress. “Don’t you think we’ve also had to live with that black history? Tainted by association in the eyes of the people in our neighborhoods?” That exchange softened my view of him, for his character had peeked through his interrogator’s clinical civility, and the glimpse suggested that he had a conscience. Even when Shirin khanoum warned me never to let down my guard, never to believe that an agent might act in my interest, I reserved judgment. Mr. X, I reasoned, was a human just like any other. Surely he felt remorse, had some sense of fairness. But now I was not so certain. After years of watching me, of stuffing my intelligence file with useless notes about my comings and goings, he knew full well I was no security risk. The waiter returned to offer more coffee. I fantasized that he could guess the nature of our meeting and that he felt a deep, silent sympathy for my position, thinking, “What a tragedy that this gentle, ladylike young woman must consort with the henchmen of this villainous state.” I gazed at him imploringly, but he walked away to refill the sugar cubes. I desperately turned to my last card, carefully saved for just such a moment.

  “Perhaps you do not wish to know about an American organization that is seeking to establish cultural ties with Iran?” To satisfy Mr. X’s unquenchable thirst for information to scribble in his wire note pad, I often memorized bland news items that were widely available to the public, but that sounded just interesting enough to merit inclusion in his reports. Most Iranian officials do not speak or read English, so they lack immediate access to much of the world’s media. Very often when I called officials for quotes immediately after a major incident affecting Iran, they pressed me for information, eager to know how the world was responding. The state’s translators included only small doses of information in Farsi-language bulletins, and often officials heard about important stories, press releases, or commentaries a full week or two late. I could tell Mr. X was learning English, but I still managed to share many items of news that sounded fresh to his ears.

  He nodded for me to continue, but did not appear impressed. A few minutes later, surveying my half-full cup of coffee, he inquired, “Does its quality not meet your standards?” This was of course unkind, for it implied that I was the sort of person who imposed “standards” on mass-produced instant coffee. Like many Iranians, Mr. X harbored a serious class resentment toward those more comfortably off. He should have directed the feeling at the state, whose policies cemented existing class divides, and at the officials who spoke disparagingly of the “low-class” Iranians who had voted for Ahmadinejad. (One actually used this term with me, uttering it in English as if to underscore his contempt.) But instead, he often took it out on me. “The coffee is fine; I’ve just had enough.”

  Once I had exhausted whatever innocuous tidbits I had stored in hopes of tempting him to compromise, our session drew to a close with Mr. X shuffling his notepad importantly and asking whether I had any final concerns to discuss. I bade him a mumbled, hasty goodbye and hurried out of the hotel, eager to feel the autumn air, to close my eyes in the solitude of the taxi ride home.

  It occurred to me that perhaps Mr. X’s intransigence reflected an institutional tightening of the journalistic reins in Iran. Other reporters I knew had had their press credentials revoked, and foreign journalists were finding it harder than ever to get visas. Only a small cadre of Iranian reporters for western organizations, composed of those who had been working in Tehran for years and whose track records met with overall approval, were still working regularly. It was clearly a time when the regime would prefer to see no coverage at all of domestic discontent, but the authorities were practical enough to know they could not shut down the media entirely. As I belonged to this group of old hands, my credentials could not be easily revoked. My work was considered balanced, and there were officials at the Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance who would advocate on my behalf. But should I voluntarily endanger my clearance by making what Mr. X would paint as an inappropriate request—well, that would be a different story.

  Back at home, I quickly wrote an e-mail to the director of the foreign press office: “I don’t understand why they are being so difficult. I think my request is reasonable, to meet in an official or public location. Why do they refuse me this? I will discuss it with my husband and see what he thinks. I think in an Islamic country where I wear hejab and follow the rules of Islam, it is unfair that those rules apparently don’t apply in the one case that I actually need them.”

  In preparation for my fast-approaching due date, I spent an hour each morning wobbling through the neighborhood, hoping to prepare my body for labor. Though I hadn’t gained much weight, I was usually winded after fifteen minutes. T
raveling at a leisurely pace allowed me to pay more attention to the area than I ever had before. I lingered near the leafy intersection where the last century’s foremost female poet, Forough Farrokhzad, was killed in a car crash. I examined one of the neighborhood’s few remaining traditional houses dating from the 1930s, a crumbling brick villa where a reclusive older woman, an ex-dissident who had been imprisoned under both the Shah and the mullahs, now taught yoga.

  One morning, as I turned left from the store where I bought soy milk, I caught sight of a new billboard looming above a busy intersection. It was an advertisement for Dolce & Gabbana, featuring a rather exquisite espresso-colored handbag and a pair of pointy alligator-skin heels. It seemed an odd location for such a billboard, since that stretch of Shahrzad Boulevard usually hosted demonstrations protesting the latest “Zionist-American” injustice. Bearded Basiji types held sit-ins, chanted, “Death to America,” and painted American and Israeli flags on the street, watching with satisfaction as cars drove over them. But the billboard remained untouched by graffiti or other vandalism, as though it were the most natural thing in the world for Italian designer marketing and Islamic militants to share real estate.

  The marketing of designer goods was not new to Tehran. The city’s ubiquitous street vendors sold “Jogio Armani” sunglasses, and fashion billboards hung over parts of the city inhabited by upper-class Iranians. This privileged caste included senior civil servants and those connected to the regime and in a position to receive its special, wealth-enabling privileges, from import licenses to unmolested passage for smuggled goods. Their habit of conspicuous consumption made their streets the appropriate place to advertise Louis Vuitton luggage.

  For those connected to a regime that proclaimed a revolutionary ideology of championing the dispossessed, flaunting financial status by way of European fashion labels was at best awkward. It also ran contrary to the tradition of conservative bazaari families, who did not allow their lifestyles, apart from their spacious houses, to reflect their bank accounts. Our neighbors across the street, for example, though inhabiting a spacious villa easily worth $4 million, lived ascetically.

  Dolce & Gabbana were soon joined by Escada, which debuted over the local square, advertising “casual luxury look” accessories. The billboard hung next to a full-size plastic palm tree, which glowed at night in the square’s central patch of lawn. According to rumor it jammed the neighborhood’s satellite dishes. The next week, a full-scale Benetton boutique opened nearby. The first day, as they hung up the Benetton sign and filled the windows with satin flip-flops and beach totes, I stood outside gawking, wondering what the Afghan day laborers waiting on the corner thought of the giant posters of blond women dancing. I incorporated the Benetton shop into my daily route, and each day found myself surprised that it still stood. It was not, for the most part, a Benetton sort of moment in Tehran. But the blond women did not last the week. On Friday, I saw that the tops of their heads had been chopped off (presumably as punishment for not wearing veils). Though they had been decapitated from the nose up, their frozen smiles still beckoned shoppers into the busy store.

  In the course of my walks, I recalled Shirin khanoum’s memories of Tehran on the eve of revolution, in particular how the uprising was fueled by working-class and middle-class resentment of wealthy Iranians’ opulent life style. She had recounted how she and her girlfriends, conscious of the underlying injustice, used to linger outside expensive French restaurants where they could not even afford dessert. Such experiences po liti cized her generation, sparking a revolution that punished and purged the wealthy elite. The Islamic Republic had reproduced the very same conditions: one caste lived in superlative comfort while the vast middle and working classes struggled. And while this certainly provoked indignation, the feeling was tinged less with a sense of injustice or politicized anger than with covetous entitlement. The young female equivalents of Shirin khanoum and her friends did not begrudge those dining inside gracious restaurants their privilege; they simply aspired to sit on the other side of the glass.

  Because young people were disenchanted with politics and thoroughly cynical about the possibility of change through political activism, their desire for a better life remained an inchoate longing. It never occurred to them to redress the situation by organizing and speaking out against the status quo. As they saw it, that was what their parents had done in 1979, and look what they had accomplished. Instead of protesting, the young turned to pyramid schemes and shady real estate transactions. As long as my generation remained concerned with achieving the upper class’s material success, rather than somehow challenging the corruption that enabled it, I did not see how very much would change in Iran. Though particularly vile, Islamic plutocracy had never seemed so well entrenched.

  I spent an entire weekend lost in such thoughts, as Arash was away on a business trip to Tabriz. The night he was meant to return, he called to tell me Iran Air was running a Tupolev aircraft on the flight back to Tehran, where it usually used Airbuses. The Tupolev is a shoddy Russian plane with a worrisome record of plummeting from the sky at the slightest mechanical malfunction. Because American sanctions bar Iran from purchasing Boeings (or even European Airbuses, which contain American-made parts), the country’s fleet of aircraft grows more decrepit each year, and the government has no option but rickety Russian planes. It had become almost commonplace for passenger planes to crash, leaving no survivors. I told Arash I preferred him to take the bus rather than risk his life on a Tupolev. The bus took fourteen hours, and he called every two or three to complain at its slow progress.

  That same evening, the retired colonel’s son upstairs threw a party. Sometime just before midnight, plainclothes police, or perhaps Basij, arrived to break it up. I heard the click-clack of heels and frantic whispering in the stairwell. The guests were hiding between floors, frightened of arrest. I wondered whether I should open the door and let them hide inside our apartment. But what if the police found out and came pounding on our door? Would I then be arrested as well? I chose not to let the guests in: I heard no scuffling from upstairs, so I preferred to believe the party was being broken up peacefully. Having just prevented Arash from flying on a deathtrap, with my delivery just a few short weeks away, I had no wish to expose myself to whatever authorities were raiding the party. I turned the lights off, telling myself there was no shame in my decision.

  The beginning of that October marked the start of Ramazan, the Muslim month of fasting. I could not fast because I was pregnant, but I would have been disinclined to do so anyway, so thoroughly disenchanted had I become with Islam. I knew I could not blame Islam itself for the laws that had made getting married so complicated, the opium-addicted mullah, the polygamy references in our marriage contract. Nonetheless, I felt they had worn away at my ties to the faith, leaving me more detached than ever before. Perhaps with time, I could heal this rift, demarcating my own private Islam as separate from the state’s punitive caricature.

  I tried to read books written by reformist Muslims, channeling my resentment into intellectual engagement. But the books failed to move me, and I found it significant that most of these reformers lived in western countries. Free from coping with Islamic realities each day, they could devote their energy to refashioning the faith from afar.

  I visited fasting relatives over iftar (the meal that breaks the day’s fast), hoping to observe something in their behavior and outlook that might suggest how they managed to preserve their faith. But nothing in the way they broke their fast with dates and tea and discussed the day’s headlines revealed this inner, spiritual calculus. I remained estranged from the festive time of year I had once so keenly enjoyed; only four or five years ago, in Beirut and in Cairo, I had flitted from iftar to iftar, a veritable Shia socialite. This felt like the distant past of another person, so wide a gulf had opened between me and the religion I once absorbed in my grandmother’s lap.

  On an overcast day toward the end of Ramazan, Arash and I went stroller shoppin
g on Vali Asr Boulevard, threading through the crowds in line for halim, a turkey and wheat stew that is traditional fare during the month of fasting. It seemed to me that everyone paused to observe my waddle down the sidewalk. “Haven’t they ever seen a pregnant woman before?” I whispered to Arash. As my stomach expanded, I often searched for other women in similar stages of pregnancy on the street, wishing to feel less alone in my new, spherical form. But as my pregnancy advanced I saw fewer and fewer, until it became evident that very pregnant women simply did not go outside much. Although the Islamic revolution stressed motherhood as the central role of women’s lives, although it described in lofty terms the sanctity of bearing children, somehow the physical presence of an extremely pregnant woman was not quite appropriate.