At the Eskan Shopping Center, famous for its café where teenagers flirted over ice cream desserts, we examined sleek hydraulic strollers. I had insisted on buying a stroller—it seemed essential somehow—though I did not know where it would be used. Since 1979, when the Tehran municipality began renaming each street and freeway after war martyrs, the city’s sidewalks had fallen into disrepair. Sidewalks had formerly been maintained by the city, but now the owner of each building was responsible for the stretch of sidewalk in front of it. As a result, sidewalks now varied in quality, appearance, and most unfortunately, height. Yards of rustic cobblestone might suddenly drop several inches to a path of aging asphalt. Walking down a basically flat side street, one stepped up and down, up and down; it was impossible to use a stroller (or a wheelchair or a walker) in most neighborhoods. Even had it been possible, it wasn’t safe, because the authorities had also permitted sidewalks to become de facto motorcycle lanes.
After we settled on a fancy stroller that appeased my pregnancy consumption needs, a model that unfolded automatically in a color called Capri, we drove to Mehr Hospital for my first weekly fetal monitoring session. Mehr, one of the city’s older hospitals, was never mentioned when people were discussing where in Tehran one should receive treatment, but it was one of the few hospitals in the city to own and use fetal monitors (acquired at Dr. Laleh’s insistence).
As I took off my shoes to enter the maternity ward, the nurse told Arash to wait outside in the hall. I supposed allowing him to be present during my actual labor was generous enough, and that it was unreasonable to expect him to be admitted to the weekly checks. I waved goodbye cheerfully, following the nurse to a bed where I would lie perfectly still for twenty minutes to ensure an accurate reading. I inspected the area minutely. It was clean, though it resembled a hospital room from the 1950s. Even though this was the maternity ward, there was no pastel wallpaper, no plants, no curtains patterned with fuzzy sheep, none of that cozy baby aesthetic that is meant to off set the clinical hospital setting and create a “natural, family-centered experience.” The nurses all wore forest green tunics, magknaeks, and beatific smiles, lending the ward an alien atmosphere, as though it were part of a hospital for science fiction characters.
Once I was strapped down and the machine began beeping, I turned to greet the woman occupying the other bed in the room. I assumed, because she was attached to similar equipment, that she was also undergoing a routine check, but from her frantic phone conversations (“Traffic? I don’t care about traffic. Get here now!”) it became evident she was in labor. Her nails were freshly manicured and she wore ample mascara: in the view of Iranian women, childbirth is no excuse for lax grooming. She must have been in an intermediate stage of labor, I couldn’t tell exactly, but it was clear she was in an epidural-induced haze. She spoke incessantly and without inhibition about how she felt neglected by her mother, who had stopped by the previous week only four times with home-cooked meals, about the husband who had insisted on attending a business meeting and was now caught in traffic. The chief source of her distress, however, was the fear that her chosen baby name was in jeopardy.
“I had chosen Som, which is a beautiful name, don’t you think? … A Shahnameh name that sounds modern … and can you believe it, my brother-in-law, two nights ago, he tells me that it is banned, because it is too close to Sam, like Uncle Sam. … Banned! My Som! I cried for two whole days, because, you know, I’ve been calling him that for months, he is Som to me, he can’t just become something else. …” She continued in this manner for ten minutes, her voice rising in hysterical peaks.
I kept trying to summon the nurse to return, as I could no longer bear lying on my back. I had read in my pregnancy books that one should definitely, positively never lie on one’s back after the first trimester, and here I was, supine, at the instruction of medical professionals who should have known better. My arms ached from propping myself up into a reclining position, but the nurse never walked past and there was no call button. I considered yelling for help, but I wasn’t sure what I would yell and I was afraid of being impolite. My heart was racing, thudding in my chest as though it might burst, my arms trembling, the sweat trickling down my forehead. The epidural woman wouldn’t stop chattering, and suddenly I wasn’t sure I could breathe anymore. That’s when I realized I was not just very, very upset, but having an actual panic attack. This awareness helped calm me down, and I relaxed my arms, reclining limply on the rough cotton sheets.
I don’t know whether it was the woman’s neurotic prattle or my own unacknowledged fear of giving birth in an atmosphere that still felt somewhat alien that had overwhelmed me with such a sudden, intense anxiety. What I did know was that I felt suffocated. Was there no point where such conversations would end? Can my husband come in or not, Can we pick this name or not, Can I wear this scarf or not, Can I enter this building or not? Of course, the fact was that there was no such point. That was the nature of totalitarian regimes. Previously, I had believed that this need not define my experience of life in Iran. This perspective was the key, I believed, to not living as a victim. But I was having difficulty maintaining it in the face of repeated violations. Perhaps under the moderate Khatami this attitude was progressive and empowering; under Ahmadinejad, it amounted to self-delusion. I emerged from the maternity ward wan and stiff, and Arash canceled his afternoon meeting and took me for a walk in Sayee Park. We bought steaming beets from a street vendor and ate them quietly on a bench, the sweet flesh staining our lips. He told me that in the hallway he had seen a sign announcing that the hospital admitted unwed mothers. Was this even legal? Did other hospitals practice such lenience? It was impossible to know.
That evening, the news announced that the four-hundred-person state committee that had fanned out across the country in search of the new moon had reported a sighting. This meant that starting that evening, the entire country would commence a three-day holiday on the occasion of Eid-e Fetr, the holiday that marks the end of Ramazan. In Arab countries, everyone in advance knew exactly when Ramazan was ending. This made the final day of fasting pass more quickly, the thirsty hours easier to withstand in the knowledge that they were the last. It also enabled people to plan holiday travel ahead of time. This was the way of sensible countries, but not Iran, which preferred to announce three-day holidays at nine o’clock the evening prior.
Sometime during the days that followed, I decided it was time to alert Mr. X that I would be having a baby. He needed to know that I would be on leave from work, that I would be turning off my mobile phone, and that I would not be calling with minute updates about my next story. I harbored a slim hope that this news would end our relationship. A close friend of mine, a reporter for an important American newspaper, had received a permanent dispensation from her dealings with Mr. X on the occasion of her first child’s birth. Upon discovering she was pregnant, he bade her farewell, asking her to halal him, to forgive him for any trespass or distress he had caused. She had never heard from him since. I somehow doubted this would be my fate, but one never knew. He received the news cordially, offering congratulations and making no reference to our recent contretemps.
CHAPTER 16
Journey to Shiraz
Our baby boy, Hourmazd, was born on a November day so extraordinarily clear that the great peak of Mount Damavand, usually obscured by brown haze, loomed with ethereal dignity. You could actually see how it sloped into the Alborz range, which merges into the mountains of Anatolia and the Caucasus. It was on such a morning centuries ago, according to ancient Persian myth, that Arash the archer shot an arrow all the way across the plains of central Asia, establishing the boundary of Iran to the east. Iran had lost in battle to its archenemy Turan, and the Turanians, instead of imposing a boun dary on the defeated nation, proposed to limit its territory to the radius of an arrow’s flight from Damavand. The mountain was considered the very heart of the Persian empire, and is endowed in Persian mythology with almost sacred status. It is for the heroic a
rcher that my husband is named.
The hospital did not permit men to enter the regular maternity ward, and though Dr. Laleh and the nurses smuggled Arash in for my delivery, it would not have been possible for him to linger. He was allowed, though, in the wing reserved for foreign diplomats, so I stayed there overnight. The room cost twice as much as one in the regular maternity ward, and there was nothing fair about our ability to buy our way around the rules. By lunchtime the next day, flowers crowded the floor and every surface. A couple of my relatives called to congratulate us, but whispered that they would wait a few weeks to share the news with others, so that an appropriate amount of time would elapse between our wedding and the baby’s arrival. I privately considered them cowards, but said nothing.
My friends in America sent urgent e-mails asking about the experience, still in disbelief that I was having a baby in Tehran. I told them that once I was within the antiseptic confines of the maternity ward, my delivery followed the routine procedures standard across the modern world. I can only recall two exceptions. One, I was forced to wear a long, thick, billowing hospital gown with puffed sleeves, meant to preserve the modesty of a woman being delivered by a male doctor. My one irrational moment during labor was to refuse this gown, and it took Arash ten minutes to convince me to put it on. Besides being hot, uncomfortable, and ugly (in photos I resemble a Soviet nuclear scientist), it, unbelievably, did not open in the front. For the next twenty-four hours I repeated to every nurse, in a daze, “But why not? How am I supposed to breast-feed?”
The second exception involved the nurse’s chatter as she guided me through the extremely intimate procedures that are performed on a woman’s body ahead of delivery. I expected she would maintain a respectful silence, but instead she chided me in a thick Rashti accent for being in Iran. “But I cannot understand why you have chosen to live here. In America, is there not freedom? Here we have none. Why didn’t you just stay there?” According to my American pregnancy guides, the nurse should have turned on a relaxation CD or suggested I soak in a bath, not probe my choice of theocracy over freedom. I had not bothered to read any Iranian pregnancy books, and I wondered whether they catalogued all the small details of comfort that should be provided to a woman in labor. People in Iran, like all people living under authoritarian regimes, were usually preoccupied with big ideas. Whether waiting at the bus stop or preparing a woman for labor, they contemplated hypocrisy, ethics, and personal responsibility with the focus people in America devoted to the minutiae of eating, exercise, and The Sopranos. In the past, I’d found Iranians’ political engagement exhilarating, had seen it as a richer, more thoughtful way of being. But it was starting to feel too intense, the burden of people who, given the option, would have preferred the luxury of conversations spent vilifying gluten.
Hourmazd is the Middle Persian form of Ahuramazda, the Zoroastrian god Iranians worshipped before they were forced to convert to Islam. My father was greatly irritated by this choice of name; believing that it would be unpronounceable outside Iran, he felt that we should have chosen something easier on the western tongue. I considered Hourmazd easy enough to say (Hūr, like “tour,” mazd with a short a, like “jazz”), but for his generation, such compromises of identity were a natural part of acculturating in the West. But that trend would soon make endangered species of any Iranian names considered too long or challenging for non-Farsi speakers, I told him. Indian immigrants in America seemed to have no qualms about bestowing complex, long names upon their children. Why were Iranians so quick to shape their culture to the West, rather than push the West to adapt?
Arash and I faced no problems registering our son’s name, though we took a giant box of pastry to the registry office just in case. Everyone smiled and cooed at Hourmazd and wished him a long, healthy life. He acknowledged their attentions with a tranquil yawn, and I privately felt thankful that the first bureaucratic encounter of his life, the registration of his name, had not required bribery. On the way home, I gazed at the murals and billboards of turbaned ayatollahs as though seeing them for the first time, and almost felt the urge to cover Hourmazd’s eyes. I asked Arash how we would explain them, when the question arose years down the line. “We will say they are eastern Santa Claus,” he said.
LJecember 2006, the month after Hourmazd’s birth, was a deeply satisfying time for those Iranians disappointed in Ahmadinejad’s performance, a sizable and ever-growing percentage of society. In the eighteen months since he took office, the president had managed to weaken Iran’s frail economy, provoke U.N. Security Council sanctions, elicit the threat of American military attack, alienate members of his own party (who broke off and started a front against him), offend the ayatollahs of Qom, and trigger the first serious student protest since 1999. Fifty activists burned an effigy of the president during his visit to Amir Kabir University; they set off firecrackers and interrupted his speech with chants of “Death to the dictator!” Their outburst reflected the widespread frustration also displayed during that month’s city council elections. Millions turned out across the nation to vote against Ahmadinejad’s allies in what amounted to a major, unequivocal setback for the president and his policies. Reformists, having absorbed the lessons of their presidential defeat, fared well throughout the country, capturing twice as many seats on Tehran’s influential council as Ahmadinejad’s supporters.
I did not vote in the election; I was so crushingly exhausted from the sleepless nights of nursing Hourmazd that I couldn’t even make a cup of coffee without burning something. I delighted in the election results from the confines of our apartment, where we were preparing Hourmazd for his first visit to the pediatrician.
It was an overcast morning, and we left early to reach Qaem Magham Street on time. The pediatrician, Dr. Abtahi, one of the most respected in the city, practiced at Tehran Clinic, a hospital that claimed to be modeled after the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota. Though she had trained in Iran, Dr. Abtahi was half German, and her fluency in German and English made her as popular with foreigners as Iranians. In her waiting room, Iranian grandmothers in floral print chador sat alongside the impeccably dressed wives of European ambassadors, pointing to the same fuzzy lobster mobile to distract their screaming children.
In the examining room, I gingerly peeled off Hourmazd’s bodysuit as Dr. Abtahi began lining up glass vials of vaccine. I mentioned that we were flying to Germany the following week and asked for advice on how to protect the baby’s ears from the fluctuating cabin pressure. “You’re flying next week?” she asked, putting down the needle and turning toward me. “If so, why are you getting him vaccinated here?” She proceeded to explain that Iranian vaccines were of an outmoded type liable to cause fever. And whereas in advanced nations several vaccines are combined in a one-shot cocktail, Iran’s were one vaccine per shot, so Hourmazd would have to be stuck with needle after needle. I had wondered why there were several vials, but it hadn’t occurred to me that all of them were going to be serially injected into my tiny, nine-pound baby.
Dr. Abtahi suggested we have Hourmazd immunized in Germany and bring back the remaining doses for her to administer in Tehran over the course of the year. He would be spared fever and the unpleasant impression that doctors were needle-bearing tormentors in white coats.
Dr. Abtahi had not overtly criticized the government on that score, only remarking that “Iran, along with Bangladesh and Afghanistan, is the only country left in the world to still be using such vaccines.” Af ghan istan is a destitute country ravaged by war, with a GDP of $22 billion; Iran is an oil-rich nation with a GDP of $600 billion. It was simply staggering that despite its vast resources, the Iranian authorities could do no better for their children than the precarious government of a virtually failed state. The regime’s inadequacy at this most basic level was what made the majority of Iranians despise it so. They saw, in each toman spent on groups like Hezbollah, a toman not spent on modern vaccines.
We swiftly agreed to her suggestion, determined as most parents would be
to spare our baby bouts of fever when it was within our means to do so. I dressed Hourmazd and watched with relief as the vials disappeared back into the refrigerator. It was only the next week in Cologne that we confronted the monumental complexity of our decision. Arash spent two days shuttling between doctors and pharmacies, explaining our rather irregular need to buy and transport vaccines. We learned that, to retain their potency, vaccines must be kept within a precise temperature range at all times from the place of manu facture to the point of administration. They are vulnerable to damage from light as well. Tranportation requires what is called a “cold-chain system,” involving special monitors, insulated containers, and dedicated trucks and refrigerators. To secure Hourmazd’s vaccines, Arash and I would need to devise and execute our own improvised cold-chain system.
As though this were not difficult enough, after our second day in Germany Arash needed to attend to work, the ostensible purpose of our trip, so the remainder of the search fell to me. I do not speak German, and Cologne numbers among the German cities with a militant Islamist problem. It was the seat from where a radical onetime associate of Osama bin Laden, a Turk known as the Caliph of Cologne, had organized followers to wage holy war. It was, in short, one of the last places where you could comfortably stride into a pharmacy and say, “Hi, I’m from Iran and I’d like a year’s worth of live vaccines to take on a plane!” In the end, by deploying much charm and many introductions from local friends, we succeeded. A foam ice chest and some ice packs constituted our picnic version of a cold chain.
The next challenge lay in getting our ice chest home. We needed to take a train to Frankfurt, and from there a direct flight back to Tehran. Before departing, we calculated the total length of our journey and worked out precisely at what times the cooler would need to be placed in the on-board refrigerators of both the train and the plane. Although we both held non-Iranian citizenship, we were Iranians flying to Tehran on our Islamic Republic passports, demanding to carry live germs aboard crowded means of mass transport. With every additional minute it took to explain our situation to security officers and transportation staff, our anxiety mounted. The ice packs melted, Hourmazd screamed out of boredom, and the people behind us in line inched back as though we had confessed to carrying Ebola virus. We finally managed to board the plane, handed the vaccines over to the flight crew to refrigerate, and collapsed in our seats, elated at having carried out a seemingly impossible mission. But as the plane began its slow descent to Tehran, a flight attendant thrust the cooler into my lap, half an hour early. She flounced up the aisle before I could tell her the vaccines needed to remain cold until landing, and each time I attempted to stand an irate flight attendant barked at me to take my seat. We stared miserably at the glowing “Fasten Seatbelt” sign as the plane descended, coping with the situation as most couples would, by arguing.
Honeymoon in Tehran: Two Years of Love and Danger in Iran Page 30