I burst into tears, humiliated and angry over the loss of my interview and the deadline I would now miss. I despised myself for losing control before the guards, and ran back to the taxi. Once inside, I wept openly.
The taxi driver looked up from his newspaper, astonished. “What has happened, madam?”
“They said … they said … that I didn’t have enough buttons,” I cried, wiping my eyes with the sleeves. “They wouldn’t let me inside.”
“Lanat bar hameshoon, khanoum, lanat bar oon Khomeinishoon!” “A curse upon all of them, a curse upon their Khomeini! It was now my turn to look up in shock. The taxi driver had invoked a Koranic curse against the guards, and upon the founder of the Islamic Republic. Lanat kardan, meaning to deprive someone of God’s mercy, is often used to curse the enemies of God and to curse the devil. Even I, from the very depths of my rage, would never have uttered such words in public. The cabbie spent the length of the ride home recounting tales of clerical malfeasance, some more outlandish than others, in an effort to cheer me up.
“You, madam, you are the proper human. They! They are trash! Thieves!”
I remained silent throughout, telling myself it had been an awful but edifying experience. It gave me a taste of what Iran must have been like in the early days of the revolution, when Islamic ideologues took over universities, purging women and secular teachers. I told myself the professor should be excused his failure to rush to my defense, because he was lucky to still have his job. One of the first steps Ahmadinejad had taken as president was to appoint a mullah as chancellor of Tehran University. It was the first move in what many called a second cultural revolution, as administrators forced scores of secular-minded professors into early retirement. Even after the purge, which occurred in the early months of 2006, Ahmadinejad told students during a campus appearance that they should “shout at [him] and ask why liberal and secular university lecturers are present in the universities.”
I told myself that being turned away from an interview, in the hierarchy of misfortune one could suffer at the hands of Islamic radicals, scarcely mattered. I couldn’t understand why I was so terribly upset. I had been turned away from many places in my years of reporting in Iran—from universities, mosques, and seminaries, usually on some sartorial pretext that masked the institution’s hostility to females and journalists. It had become a simple nuisance, like getting a parking ticket. What had happened to me? Was this the same me who, after being beaten by police during a demonstration, stopped at a party before going home? The same person who had endured a night of Basiji detention with dry eyes?
At home I took a long shower and curled down next to Hourmazd on the bed. I set his Sleep Sheep, a fuzzy creature intended to induce drowsiness, on its “ocean wave” setting, and pulled the cool sheets over us. For a long time I stared at the shadows on the ceiling. Arash brought me a cup of orange blossom tea, and even though it was past midnight, I could not sleep. Normally I would have taken a sleeping pill, but I was still nursing. Many Iranian women stopped breastfeeding after just a couple of months. Perhaps this was because they could not imagine spending a year or two without sleep aids, anti-depressants, or whatever medication helped them cope with their overwhelming lives.
After a phone interview with a politically connected family friend, I finished my story the next day. The magazine, desperate for any reporting with a Tehran dateline, posted it on the website almost immediately. Only then did I realize I had not informed Mr. X of my return to work; perhaps I should contact him before he thought to call me. I considered this an act of goodwill on my part, because I was only obliged to keep him generally briefed, not report my every movement.
He answered the phone on the second ring with a curt greeting, as though irritated. I began to explain why I was calling, and wondered why he didn’t sound more receptive.
“I just wanted to tell you that I’ve started working again, that I’ve already written a story.”
No reply. Not even perfunctory congratulations on Hourmazd’s birth, despite the fact that Mr. X and I had known each other nearly a decade. He sometimes acted, infuriatingly, as though he couldn’t fathom why I was calling. It was one of his strange tics, perhaps meant to throw me off guard so that I would splutter to fill the silence.
“I thought by telling you I would be keeping our lines of communication open, ensuring there are no mistakes.”
“You are far, far beyond the realm of simple mistakes,” he said, his voice taking on that tone of casual malice I had grown to fear.
“What do you mean?”
“There has been a review of your articles, and it has been concluded that it is no longer appropriate for you to work.”
“Oh.”
“Yes; in fact, your file has been transferred to the judiciary. Proceedings will shortly be under way against you.”
“Proceedings?” I whispered.
“It has been concluded that your articles are guilty of propaganda against the regime, undermining national security …”
He mentioned a third offense, but I was numb with terror and ceased to process what he was saying.
“But how can this be? We’ve been in regular contact. You should have said if something was wrong.”
“You know very well the risks involved in working in Iran. You have been doing so of your own free will.”
I felt betrayed by Mr. X, whose hideous presence in my life I had tolerated precisely to ward off such a day.
“Please, can you clarify? Is it a possibility that this will happen to me, or is there an actual process under way?”
“It is already happening,” he replied breezily. “But you can be certain you will have a chance to attend the court. You can come, defend yourself, make a case. Perhaps the judge will rule in your favor.”
The chances of the prosecutor general of Tehran ruling in my favor were comparable with those of a comet changing course. Once someone was charged with such offenses, the last thing they received was due process. They were inevitably incarcerated for long periods, often in solitary confinement, and were subject to interrogation as well as to psychological and sometimes physical abuse. Zahra Kazemi, an Iranian-Canadian photojournalist who found herself in the custody of Iranian authorities in 2003, did not have the chance to “defend herself.” She died in prison of blows to the head, inflicted during interrogation.
There was nothing left to say. I choked out a goodbye and hung up, in disbelief that I had ever given such a vile person the benefit of the doubt.
Arash was playing with the baby. I ran to him, hyperventilating through my sobs. All I could think of was Hourmazd and how he would suffer in my prolonged absence. He was only three months old. They would come for me soon, and he would cry until he was sweaty and red, waiting for me to return. He couldn’t eat or sleep without me. He still refused the bottle. He would think I had abandoned him. But surely they wouldn’t take me away if they knew I had such a small baby? But of course they would. Mr. X knew I had just had a baby. All these thoughts flitted rapidly through my head, and I couldn’t compose myself. Arash put his hands on my shoulders to calm me. He kept asking me to explain what had happened, but I couldn’t speak. In the end he put Hourmazd into my arms. He waved his little arms around as though caressing the air, swiped at my nose, and it was only by watching these delicate movements and feeling the warmth of his body through his pajamas that I could slow my breathing and describe the nightmare that Mr. X had unleashed.
We stayed up that night until almost three. My first thought was that I needed to escape immediately, before I was summoned. “Do you think your dad could use his Tabriz connections to smuggle Hourmazd and me across the border in a truckload of sheep?”
“Why sheep?”
“It seems like a smart place to hide. Who’s going to check the back of a truckload of smelly, woolly sheep?” My great-uncle, according to family lore, had escaped the country in this manner after the 1953 coup, when the reinstalled Shah began persecuting the m
inisters of Mohammad Mossadegh, the popular prime minster he had deposed.
In the days that followed, I grew so skittish that I would snap to attention at the sound of pigeons scuttling over the window ledges. One morning a man whose voice I did not recognize buzzed our apartment from the street, asking me to come down to receive a piece of mail. This is it, I thought, they’ve finally come to take me away. I began to cry and dashed toward the back of the house, passing Arash on the way. “He’s here, I mean they’re here. … Tell them I won’t go! … I’m not sure who it is, but I think it’s them. … Tell them we have a baby, that I can’t leave him!” I ran into the farthest corner of the bedroom and slammed the door behind me, as though somehow the distance would protect me from the mysterious man. I lapsed into thoughts of what my cell in the Evin prison would be like, filling my imagination with details I remembered from working on Shirin khanoum’s book. The vomit-encrusted carpet, the metal toilet that was never cleaned, the bacteria-infested well water piped into the women’s ward (only male prisoners enjoyed clean city tap water).
“Prisoner Azadeh, will you please come out?” Arash tapped on the door.
I opened it a crack, eyeing him suspiciously. He did not appear too upset, in the manner one would expect if a van were waiting below to cart off his wife.
He handed me a manila package. “The postmark is from California, so for now you’re still a free woman.”
I tore it open impatiently, and pulled out a jumper with little airplane designs. It was a gift for Hourmazd from one of my relatives, and I smiled weakly. “How was I supposed to know it was the postman?”
Besides skulking about the house and falling apart every time the doorbell rang, I was taking active steps to do something about my predicament—trying to, anyway. I immediately stopped working and told my editors about Mr. X’s threat. It was unwise for us to talk over the phone, as it wouldn’t make any sense to plan an escape or chart our course of action on a tapped line. The authorities likely monitored my e-mail as well, so I talked with my editors on the satellite phone, which had turned out useful after all. Each evening I climbed the stairs to the snowy rooftop, pacing until the phone connected to the satellite, gazing over the winter skyline.
My editors wanted me to fly to Dubai immediately, but if Mr. X’s threat was real, then an attempt to leave the country would invite a confrontation. I would likely be arrested at the airport and thus be detained all the sooner. Since the conversation with Mr. X, Arash and I had recalled an incident at the airport upon our return from Germany that we had given little thought to at the time. The passport officer, upon scanning my documents, had looked curiously at his screen, and turned to inspect me. “They didn’t say anything to you as you were leaving the country?” he asked.
“No, why?” Arash had replied.
“Never mind. If they didn’t say anything, then I guess it doesn’t matter.”
That exchange now seemed weighted with dark meaning. Both of us feared the screen had announced that I was barred from leaving the country, that the officer was puzzled that I had been let out at all.
Although leaving might be risky, sitting in Tehran waiting for the worst to unfold hardly seemed a better option. I decided to contact a highly influential senior official, a man of great integrity whom I had known for years and trusted implicitly, to ask for help. It was the only way to find out whether the judiciary was actually building a case against me, or whether Mr. X was bluffing—a coldhearted, sinister bluff designed to scare me away from working, perhaps forever. The official kindly agreed to investigate, promising to let me know what his inquiries turned up.
As the days turned into a week, and then two, it became apparent we needed to be patient, and that an investigation into the nature of a threat emerging from a government with multiple institutions with overlapping mandates and conflicting intentions took a measure of time. We told ourselves that until we knew more, we should not torture ourselves by assuming the worst. Actually, Arash told me this, and I tried to listen.
As though none of this were enough, precisely this time I learned that my mother in California had been diagnosed with metastatic breast cancer, a recurrence of the disease that had been in remission since I was in junior high and that we had thought had been cured forever. I did not tell her about the troubles I was facing, because she would be powerless to help and needed all her strength to cope with chemotherapy. Though she didn’t say anything, I knew she wondered why I wasn’t flying out to see her. I made vague references to “special circumstances” that required my presence in Tehran, but a gulf seemed to open between us. The geographic distance was magnified by how little I knew about her condition, and I stayed awake late into the night, trying to research her cancer on the Internet. I figured it would be easier to learn on the Web what the prognosis was for metastatic breast cancer than to ask her directly. But including the word “breast” in my search terms ran up against the wall of the government filters, and I continually met the maddening, final “Access to this site is denied” page of the service provider. As I had discovered when pregnant, the censors blocked searches of almost every body part, cutting off Iranians from a wealth of medical information. They denied each part of the body its vast array of rightful associations—medical, athletic, literary, sartorial, artistic—and reduced it to its crudest form, a sexual object.
I abandoned my Internet search and resolved to speak directly to her doctor, who only took calls after lunch, California time. For an entire week I stayed up until past two A.M., begging his nurses to put my call through. Eventually, I gave up trying to speak with him, and settled for the vague replies of his assistant. Those nights, weary from lack of sleep, from the unknown threat that might be stalking me, from the “special circumstances” that prevented me from seeing my sick mother, I began to feel that the life I had so lovingly created in Iran had turned into a nightmare. For the time being, at least, I no longer had a career, or even the assurance of personal safety. Nor could I take solace in the idea that I alone stood to suffer. Arash and Hourmazd were vulnerable as well, and I could do nothing to protect them.
With my toe, I gently traced the pattern of the rug, following the vines that formed its border. Those who make it their life’s work to understand Persian rugs can immediately spot a carpet of poor quality. Though the designs are meant to be symmetrical, the fingers of tribal weavers tire after laborious months of knotting from sunrise to dusk. As they reach the rug’s bottom, their concentration wavers, the knots loosen, the design grows less precise. That was how I felt, as though the strands of my carefully woven Iran life were unraveling.
CHAPTER 18
The Suitcase Bride
Compulsory retirement was not without advantages. Before the fateful phone call to Mr. X, I perpetually lacked time. Now I had long, luxurious days full of nothing to do. Though the warning still preyed on my mind, I found myself unable to keep up the intensity of my loathing for Mr. X and the cruelty of the Islamic government, my dread that what he told me was true. Slowly I became preoccupied again with mundane matters, like whether Persian Gulf shrimp were back in season, or whether I had dry cleaning to pick up. I walked along Shariati Avenue, Hourmazd snuggled in a sling carrier, and sipped pistachio milk shakes topped with mulberries. I haunted the Golestan Gallery, around the corner from our house, which that month was exhibiting the work of a young woman on death row. I lingered around the bookstalls near Tehran University, whose dusty stacks contained relics of a past Iran, back when there were enough Americans in the country to merit multiple copies of books by Helen Gurley Brown. Along with Arash and his friend Houshang, I spent days in south Tehran, exploring the shrine of Shabdolazim, and the pilgrimage site of Bibi Shahrbanou, one of the daughters of the last Iranian king, Yazdgerd III, before the Islamic conquest. Attracted to a myth that fuses Zoroastrian Iran with Shia Islam, many Iranians believe that Princess Shahrbanou became the wife of Imam Hossein. Scholars have long disproved this legend, but the ordinary, often
illiterate women in chador who climb the tan-colored hill to the shrine do not know this, and make their reverent pilgrimage anyway.
At other times, Hourmazd and I spent the day at my parents-in-law’s home in Lavasan, curled up under the korsi, an electric brazier tucked beneath a table covered with quilts. We watched the birds alight on the snow-laden branches, and when it was sunny we ventured out onto the terrace, watching Geneva cavort in the banks of snow. We had moved the dogs to Lavasan, partly because Geneva had grown too large for the apartment, and partly because it was safer for them. As part of their “anti-immorality” drive, the authorities had stepped up their harassment of Iranians with pet dogs; by some reports, they had even established a dog prison to detain pooches caught walking illegally (for a dog, this seemed to mean walking in the capacity of a pet, rather than as an independent, nameless four-legged creature).
Were we to be lost in a blizzard, Geneva would have been capable of saving us, in the long tradition of the St. Bernards who rescued stranded travelers in the Alps. I told the Lavasan gardener this, hoping it might mitigate his dislike for her. Like most devout Muslims, he considered dogs ritually impure, and disapproved of us keeping them as pets. As a result, he also skimped on her meals and denied her sufficient time outside her corral. When she lost weight, her coat hanging too loosely on her frame, we reprimanded him and asked that he feed her as we instructed. But as was his maddening way, he offered her more food only when we were in residence, reasserting his pious neglect when we returned to Tehran. The knowledge of her noble lineage as a rescuer of lost travelers made no difference to the gardener, who continued to glower in resentment as she trotted after him with a goofy, drooling smile.
When Hourmazd slept, I listened to the relaxation CDs my mother had sent from California. She had just started a course of radiation therapy, and over the phone at least, she sounded as though she had already given up. I focused each day on not taking my situation, the temporary annulment of my career, personally. The instinct that rose up each day from deep inside was to somehow punish those responsible, to blast them with my generalized contempt, to write caustic essays in which I derided them (they had, of course, taken on the abstract, monolithic object status of “them”) as backward, smelly, evil. There was a genre dedicated to this sort of reaction, revenge lit you might call it, comprising books like Not Without My Daughter and other volumes that took one person’s misfortune and fashioned out of it an assault on a nation, a culture, its people, and, often, their religion. It took all my concentration to beat down this angry impulse, to view what was happening to me dispassionately as a political process. The fact that I was currently a victim did not mean all women in Iran were suddenly victims.
Honeymoon in Tehran: Two Years of Love and Danger in Iran Page 33