Drinking Arak Off an Ayatollah's Beard

by Nicholas Jubber

  “You know what this boy is doing?” whispered Moonlight, leaning toward me.

  “Oh yes!”

  I’d spent enough nights on the town with Sina to know why boys had a tendency to drop pieces of paper whenever they were in the vicinity of attractive young ladies. No doubt, later this evening, there would be a phone call exchange.

  The performance that stuck most in my mind was Tahmineh’s. Directing everyone’s attention to whatever she considered amusing, she had taken the role of the table’s emcee.

  “Look at those chadoris!”56 she exclaimed with a sneer, pointing through the window at the conservative women outside in their black nylon robes. “It’s a good idea! If they get lost they can sleep in the park—they already have a tent!”

  She didn’t let present company off the hook either. Moonlight was upbraided for her makeup (“When she goes to bed at night, she covers herself in cheese,” said Tahmineh with a laugh. “Well, at least I don’t look like a chocolate,” Moonlight retorted—a reference to Tahmineh’s unusually dark skin—according to her friends, she was the only girl they knew who had ever used a tanning bed), while I was the inevitable subject of ridicule when Tahmineh noticed I was wearing an odd pair of socks.

  “All his other socks have holes in them,” she said, laughing. “I don’t know how it happens—I think there are special mice who come from all over the city just so they can eat through Nicholas’s socks.”

  As the milkshakes and snacks were handed around, I was grateful for the distraction. The conversation took a new turn, and to the slurps of their drinks the girls shared stories about their encounters with the Morality Police.

  “Oh, don’t speak about those basijis!” said Moonlight, laying down her fork on a plate of sliced melon. “They are always telling me not to wear a colored headscarf or heeled shoes.”

  Tahmineh talked about a recent experience, when she had been walking past a grocer’s just down the road from the house, with her hair under a baker-boy hat. A basiji had stopped her and told her to put on “the correct headscarf,” but she didn’t have one with her.

  “I thought he is going to hit me,” she said. “But the grocer came out and said, ‘Go to your grave! This girl is my niece and she is a good Muslim.’ And the basiji went away.”

  Here was an example of Iranian “role-playing”—the importance of acting on the street (with the grocer “acting” as Tahmineh’s guardian, easing her passage between Iran’s public and private worlds). It also cast a spotlight on the public pressure for women to play the role of the silent virgin.

  The situation hasn’t always been like this. “The Persian women since 1907,” claimed the American lawyer Morgan Shuster, “had become almost at a bound the most progressive, not to say radical, in the world.” Shuster was brought to Iran to reform the treasury in 1911, in the wake of the Constitutional Revolution, when many women took part in demonstrations against the excesses of the Qajar shahs—such as Mrs. Jahangir, who threw herself in the way of the shah’s carriage. But it wasn’t until 1962 that women were granted suffrage, and although this survived the revolution, many of their other rights didn’t. Ayatollah Khomeini pressed his finger on the rewind button and kept it there. Forced to cover up, denied rights to divorce or retain custody of their children, allowed to inherit only half as much property as their brothers, forbidden from riding a bicycle, and afraid of their faces being slashed by chador-clad women in government SUVs, women aren’t all that much better off than in Ferdowsi’s day, when they were “prisoners in the hands of men.”57

  “My heart’s wish,” announced Tahmineh, lifting a paper napkin to wipe the milkshake off her mouth, “is to play in F.A.N.Z.”

  I’d watched this play in a box at Vahdat Hall—one of Tehran’s biggest theaters. It starred the country’s most famous actor, Parvez Parastoui (who also took the lead in the film The Lizard), as an English soccer fan who dedicates his life to Manchester United but won’t allow his daughter (the part Tahmineh was after) to play soccer herself. No one in the audience was under any illusions: It wasn’t about England.

  “But here,” said Moonlight, “we can’t even go to the soccer stadium.”

  “Yes we can!” Tahmineh threw back her head with a chuckle, before adding, “Only, you have to disguise yourself as a man.”

  Acting once again.

  Watching Tahmineh in the coffee shop, I was struck by how normal she was. She wanted to go to parties and concerts, she exchanged tips with her friends about makeup, debated with Moonlight about which colors were in fashion this year, argued with Sina about the likely plot twists in the popular soap opera Narges, and had a poster of Madonna on her bedroom wall. It was only because she was in Iran that she was marked as a rebel—if she’d been born almost anywhere else in the world, doing the things most women take for granted, she would have been as conventional as they come.

  Circumstances might be easier for men in general—but not when it came to Valli, Tahmineh’s fellow actor and operator of the “blackplayer” marionette. In a country where body language can be as confusing as the verbal sort (hence Sina would innocently take my hand when he was leading me over the road, and kisses of men’s cheeks were a common ritual on the threshold of a house), it wasn’t easy to identify Valli as gay. Had the girls not pointed it out, I might not even have been aware of it.

  “You should talk to Valli,” said Tahmineh, that afternoon at the café.

  Valli had been chatting to someone at another table—“maybe that’s his new boyfriend,” whispered Moonlight, giggling into her milkshake—but eventually he came over and sat down with us. The girls weren’t especially warm with him, which drew Valli naturally toward me, as the other outsider in our group.

  “I went on a date with him once,” he said, nodding to the guy at the other table. “It was one of my better dates.”

  He smiled—the broad smile of someone who was acting up—and, to avoid the girls’ ridicule, he continued in English, which he’d learned to make life easier in “the community.”

  “If you understand English,” he said, “you can talk and the sons of bitches won’t hear. It’s not just English—we have a special code we use on the chat sites so the basijis won’t catch us.” He let off another of his actor’s smiles. “When you’ve been hit for the hundredth time with the wires, you make sure you know the code.”

  On a visit to New York in 2007, President Ahmedinejad insisted, “In Iran, we don’t have homosexuals like in your country.” So perhaps I was mistaken about Valli. Perhaps, when a middle-aged man who was giving me a lift up Valiasr Street one evening reached his arm over the gearstick, I was mistaken about his intention too. “I know a special place,” he said, “maybe we can go there and have some pleasure.” Perhaps he was just talking about sharing a water pipe. Perhaps the pair of old queens Sina and I encountered a few times at the local sauna were nothing of the kind. Sina told me he knew someone who’d agreed to share a changing cubicle with one of them, “because he needed to buy some books for his studies.”

  I met Valli a couple of other times. Once, I stumbled into him as I was coming out of the language institute and he gave me a lift on his motorbike. Another time we met outside the City Theatre and went to a teahouse together.

  “Sometimes I think I should get a sex change,” he said.

  He was wearing a loose lumberjack and a leather cap, and there were blotches under his eyes. I wondered if he’d spent the night in a cell—it would explain his strange clothes and the bitterness in his voice—but I didn’t know him well enough to ask.

  “That’s what other guys did,” he said. “A friend of mine, he wanted to be with his boyfriend so much he went to Mirjalali.”

  “Who’s he?” I asked.

  “The surgeon.”

  Valli picked up his tea—he drank it with firm, fast gulps, throwing it down his throat. “Anyone can do it—all they need to do is sell one of their kidneys. Then Mirjalali will take out your intestine and turn it into a
cunt!”

  “Is it legal?” I asked.

  “Of course. Ayatollah Khomeini said sex changes are allowed.58 You see? They want you to be one thing or the other. People like me, they encourage us to have sex changes—anything but same-sex playing. They even help you to pay if you can’t afford it.”

  There was another man in the teahouse, sitting in a corner, under a painting of Imam Hossain at Kerbala. He was reading a book—the Diwan of Hafez, written in the fourteenth century, of which there was a pile on a dusty shelf in the corner.

  “We used to know each other,” whispered Valli, as the man came over to greet us.

  He had small gray eyes, which darted around the teahouse furtively, settling for a few moments on me.

  “He is asking,” said Valli, “if you need a lift anywhere.”

  I looked at the man, who had cast his eyes to the floor, as if he were following the path of an invisible mouse, and then at Valli’s lifted brow.

  “I think it’s a good day for walking,” I replied, “but . . . thank you.”

  The man shrugged, treading back to his table, but occasionally exchanging comments with Valli, which were too idiomatic for me to understand.

  “If we get caught,” Valli explained, turning to me again, “they can kill us. It’s not like the Taliban, but it’s not good, is it? This is why we have to be secretive. You heard about Mahmud and Ayaz?”

  “Sultan Mahmud?”

  The sultan had many slaves at his court in Ghazni, but one was favored above all the others—a Turk called Ayaz. Mystic medieval poets wrote about their relationship as the archetype of “innocent” love, although many scholars have suggested that it went a lot further.59

  “No, no, no!” exclaimed Valli, laughing. “But that is appropriate. I’m talking about Mahmud Asgari and Ayaz Marhani. They were arrested for having sex with another boy—they are all teenagers; now they are going to be hanged. But it is interesting you think of Sultan Mahmud. How many men do you think he slept with?”

  “Well, I don’t know. It’s not something the history books are specific about.”

  “But it was a lot, huh? This is the Persian culture. Same-sex playing has always happened here, so when the president says it doesn’t exist, I think he must be blind. The mullahs say it’s against the Quran—well, maybe they are right, but it’s not so strange in our history, is it?60 If a great sultan was allowed to sleep with boys, then why can’t I?”

  Later, when I was saying goodbye, the other man came over and whispered to Valli. I walked away toward Ferdowsi Square, but as I reached the corner I turned back to see the two men strolling in the other direction, hands clasped together—one gesture that wouldn’t give them away.

  Moonlight often visited the house. She had her own car, a shiny silver Peugeot 206, in which she would drive Tahmineh to the cinema or to see their friends. It was on one of these visits, when Tahmineh was taking an eternity to get ready, that I found myself being asked about her secret.

  “Nicholas,” said Moonlight, beckoning me to the kitchen table with her index finger. A copy of French Vogue, brought over from Dubai by Khanom’s sister, was covering half her face like a veil, with the pages held between her nail extensions.

  “In your country,” she said, “boys and girls, they go out all the time?”

  “Yes.”

  The magazine lowered and she leaned across the table.

  “But you know,” she said, “that in our country it is difficult?”

  “Slightly!” I said.

  She moved closer. “So many of us, we behave in secret ways. But you know, it is not always necessary. Between friends, for example . . . ”

  She was leaning so far across the table that I could see her collarbone.

  “And you know,” she continued, “I think Tahmineh, she behaves in secret ways.”

  As she drew back into her chair, it dawned on me what she was up to: I was being sourced.

  “So do you know anything about her . . . ” She paused, whispering the next word as if it were a top-secret code and I’d better not repeat it: “boyfriend?”

  One evening at supper: While the Professor was raging against the closure of another reformist magazine, Tahmineh turned away from the talk and the only noises she made were the beeps on the buttons of her mobile phone.

  “His identity is still a secret?” whispered her mother, to which Tahmineh replied with a click of her tongue.

  Before, I wouldn’t have known what they were talking about. But people were starting to speak more slowly and a lot more clearly. . . . At least, that’s what it felt like: My Persian classes were starting to work!

  Tahmineh was aware of the mystery, although she wasn’t giving an inch. I imagined she was enjoying all the fuss. But one morning after breakfast, I realized something more uncomfortable was going on.

  “What are you reading?” asked Tahmineh.

  She had brought a plate of sliced melon and a glass of tea into Sina’s room, where I was seated at the desk, trying to read a passage from the Professor’s green-jacketed copy of the Shahnameh. The language was a toil and even with the help of my dictionary, I could make sense of only one couplet in every three or four—but the thrill of working out even half a line made it worthwhile.

  “It’s very hard!” I said. “Maybe I should try something easier—like Harry Potter!”

  “What is the story?” asked Tahmineh.

  It was about a warrior called Bizhan, who falls in love with a princess after hunting down wild boar in a meadow.

  “Do you know it?” I asked. “I’m at the bit when Bizhan’s cutting the heads off the boars. I’ve got this line—it says he wants to carry their tusks before the shah.”

  “Ehhh, baba loves this story. Give it!”

  Sitting down on the bed, she let out a short laugh as the book rested on her lap.

  “How heavy is this!”

  She licked a finger to turn the page and read so fast her pupils barely appeared to be moving.

  THE TALE OF BIZHAN AND MANIZEH (PART ONE)

  It is the princess, Manizeh, who sets the story in motion. Inflamed with desire for Bizhan, who cuts a dashing figure in his brocade gown and jeweled belt, she invites him to join her for a picnic. Loosening the girdle from his waist, she washes his feet in rose water, fills him up with wine and meat, and in case he is thinking of deserting her, she gives him a honey-flavored drug and has him carried back to her chambers, hidden under a curtain. But this is where the trouble begins: Manizeh is the daughter of Afrasiyab, the evil king of Turan, and when he finds out she’s been at it with an Iranian knight, there is serious dudgeon.

  “A man may be crowned but is truly ill-starred,” read Tahmineh, “Who has in his household a daughter to guard.”

  These words are spoken by Afrasiyab, who flings his daughter out of his palace, bareheaded in a single wrap, while Bizhan is chained from head to foot and thrown into a pit blocked by a boulder so heavy it has to be transported by elephants. . . .

  This was as far as Tahmineh read. She closed the book slowly, a palm on the top cover, her face stiff. Her bottom lip disappeared under her top teeth and she looked down at the picture of Ferdowsi on the cover as if she were seeing something else under all the swirling black and green lines. This was the Shahnameh at its most immediate, cutting away the centuries of distance and speaking to personal experience. I wanted to ask what she was thinking, what she was seeing as she stared through the cover. But it was enough just to catch her eye, alight like a flame at its fullest. As she pulled herself away from the book, I sensed the lid had lifted just a little over her secret. She presented the book like a gift, with her politest expression and both palms outstretched. Before I could think of anything to say, the door had closed behind her.

  For the next couple of weeks, Tahmineh’s relatives made no progress in the hunt to uncover her secret. Several times, I heard Sina’s cousins asking if he knew anything, but he would always give them a short reply. Occasionally we we
nt on a runaround to the bazaar district. The CD player would spin and Reza would fill up our tumblers with gin, while the elderly man from downstairs would knock on the door when the noise was too loud and gently ask us to keep it down.

  “No, no, no,” he would say to Reza’s apology. “It is not a problem for me. But you must be careful of the basijis.”

  I remember Sina and Reza having a play-fight one night as we were leaving. Sina pulled at Reza’s earlobes and Reza thrust his arm around Sina’s waist, then threw him to the floor. But before he could step away, Sina had grabbed his foot and soon they were rolling over each other on the carpet, engulfed in laughter. They hugged each other with such affection that I’m sure Sina couldn’t have had any suspicion. It was the last time I would see them together: Within a week the secret was out.

  “Reza,” announced Sina, “is a koos-ghol!”—a “cunt-ogre.”

  Over the next few days, I understood the revelation of Tahmineh’s “misalliance” less in terms of words than in the atmosphere, since the tense whispers or full-throttle slanging matches were delivered too fast or idiomatically for me to translate. It was as if the wind had come billowing through the mosquito-net door and although it hadn’t knocked anything over, havoc had been unleashed. The Professor would sit at the kitchen table, building a pyramid out of the ash from his Bahmans, while Khanom knocked on Tahmineh’s door and tried to coax her out.

  “This is big trouble,” said Sina. “Baba doesn’t like Reza’s family, he is really angry. By the way, I don’t want you to say anything to anyone.”