A TIME TO BETRAY

by REZA KAHLILI

  We took a cab to her house. Aunt Giti sat close to me with her arm around my shoulders, watching me intently. While we talked, I occasionally looked outside the window to explore the new city that I would come to call home. We didn’t have anything like the LA highway system in Tehran, but in many other ways the landscape seemed familiar. Even the sunny weather was similar to what I knew. I found this comforting, as I was still wary about traveling all this distance to go to school.

  Despite her busy work schedule, Aunt Giti had taken care of all my paperwork for USC and had prepared the guest room in her Tarzana house especially for me. In order to allow me to learn the language as quickly as possible, she suggested we speak only English to each other. She also signed me up for intensive English courses at the local Berlitz school. Though I had taken the language in high school, I was hardly fluent, and I knew Americans would have a difficult time understanding me if I didn’t improve quickly. I therefore spent long hours in classrooms with exchange students from Japan and Mexico just as inarticulate and homesick as I was.

  I missed everything about home. I missed Naser and Kazem. I missed the Friday gatherings. I missed my grandfather’s political debates with Davood. To substitute for some of this, I followed Iranian politics on TV, imagining what Agha Joon would say about the day’s events.

  When my first semester at USC began, I found myself surrounded by young people very rapidly speaking words I was still learning. Sometimes my head would hurt from concentrating so hard to understand people, but I loved this total immersion. I met a student named Johnny in one of my math classes and we became fast friends. He invited me to his place and I asked Aunt Giti if it was okay for me to spend the night.

  “You don’t need my permission, Reza jon,” she said. “You are a big boy and just letting me know is enough. I trust you to do the right thing.” This was my first experience of a significant difference I would discover between Iran and America—here, people weren’t always looking over your shoulder. Here, they believed that if you were old enough to go to college, you were old enough to make your own decisions.

  Johnny lived in a small three-bedroom town house in West LA with two roommates. One was his best friend, Alex. The other was a guy who was about to move out to live with his girlfriend. There was a party going on when I got there, and it was unlike any party I’d ever known—a long way from Davood’s singing and Mina and Haleh dancing in their minidresses with parents watching every move we made.

  In no time, college girls and boys filled Johnny’s place. With them were bottles of vodka, tequila, and beer, along with a thick cloud of cigarette smoke. Some people were smoking marijuana in the small balcony off the living area. It was the closest I’d ever been to this kind of drug. In Iran some young people smoked hash, but Naser and I were never around anybody who did so.

  Before I knew it, I was making out with a couple of girls whose name I didn’t even know. Soon one of them called another girl to join us.

  “Hey, Molly, come meet Reza. He is so cute. He has this cute accent. Reza, say something.”

  Molly was a tall blond girl, wearing the shortest cutoff jeans I’d ever seen. Her red tank top was way above her belly button. She looked me in the eye, held my hand, and asked me to go to the balcony with her. The other girls were annoyed that Molly was taking me away from them, but they found the lap of another partygoer quickly enough.

  I walked outside with the blond beauty. When we got there, she filled her cigarette paper with greenish leaves and lit it. She took a puff, and then passed it to me. My heart started pounding. I did not want her to know it was my first time, but I also didn’t know what to expect. “Mari-joo-ana?” I said, grabbing the joint with my thumb and forefinger.

  She burst out laughing. “They were right—you are cute.” She ran her fingers through my hair. “We call it pot, sweetie,” she said as she kissed my lips.

  I don’t remember much of what happened after that. I woke up on the floor next to the kitchen at four o’clock the next afternoon with a horrible headache, an upset stomach—and the desire to go to another party as soon as possible. I liked this new life very much.

  After that, Johnny and Alex made me part of their group, which accelerated my learning of the culture and the language far beyond what any Berlitz class could. We hung out after our classes, talking for hours about the meaning of life while we blasted Pink Floyd and Jethro Tull. Before I knew it, I was contributing to conversations without having to think. I started getting, and then making, jokes in English.

  To make my college life in LA complete, I needed a car. People without cars in this town were second-class citizens and I wanted no part of that. I pressured my father for one, explaining that because the city was so big and sprawling, cabs were useless. How else could I attend classes, living so far from campus? Aunt Giti seconded this and Dad agreed to send the money. Johnny suggested a red Mustang with mag wheels and he helped me get a driver’s license. As soon as I bought my “study mobile,” I started dating LA girls and experiencing everything this town had to offer.

  At first I wrote regularly to Naser and Kazem about life in the U.S. I told them about college life, my red Mustang, my new friends, LA girls (this last part only to Naser), and how different America was politically. I told them how student protesters could burn the American flag and deface photos of President Nixon right in front of the police, who just watched. In Iran, if you insulted the shah or the royal family in public, the notorious SAVAK police would arrest you and throw you into Evin Prison. There they’d beat you and demand to know the names of your friends.

  In one of my letters to Naser I included a picture of myself leaning on the hood of the Mustang with my arms wrapped around Molly’s waist. “Check out these two babes!” I wrote on the back of the picture.

  Although I included a picture for Kazem in the letter I sent him at the same time, it was Johnny and Alex who stood next to me in that picture. “I now have the real Clint and John next to me,” I wrote on the back of that picture. “We are hiding our shotguns in the trunk! Ha ha!” I signed it, “Your friend, Steve McQueen.”

  Both Naser and Kazem found life in America fascinating. Their letters were full of questions, particularly about politics. I was surprised that they wanted to know so much about this. The Vietnam War and Watergate dominated the news at this point, so these became the main topics of my letters. I also wrote about how student rallies protesting the war were more like social gatherings and about the stratification of the student body into stoners, jocks, Greeks (frat boys and sorority girls), and the rest of us.

  Naser and Kazem were keenly interested in how Americans openly protested their leaders’ policies. Naser found the American resistance particularly interesting while Kazem wondered if religious principle motivated Americans. I did my best to explain the subtle differences, knowing they both ultimately wanted proof that a society of free speech and protest could work.

  Meanwhile, Johnny and Alex’s roommate moved out and they were looking for someone to take his place. I started lobbying my parents to allow me to move in with them, explaining how it was important for me to be around college buddies to improve my language and study skills. How was I supposed to pursue my degree without a study sanctum close to campus shared with my fellow scholars?

  My parents were suspicious at first. Alex and Johnny? Who are these people? What kind of families did they come from? After explaining that everyone who attended USC came from a good family and convincing Mom and Dad they were just the American version of Naser and Kazem, they approved.

  I was part of a trio again, only this time all three of us partied and dated girls. I filled my new room with the posters of my favorite rock bands and half-naked women. I didn’t have Grandma’s maid coming into my room early in the morning to make my bed or clean up after me, and it showed. We had no rules whatsoever.

  For the next three years, it was volleyball at the beach, football in the park, barbecues, road trips to Vegas, watching
football games, and only occasionally cracking a book before going to the next party. Iran and my friends back home became a dimming memory. My letters to friends and family slowed to a trickle. I believed I was exactly where I wanted to be in the world.

  Then, one evening in my senior year, I was watching TV when the phone rang.

  Alex answered. “It’s your mom. She sounds upset.”

  I put the phone to my ear and heard my mother crying. “Mom, what’s wrong?”

  “Your father …” she said, and my heart sank through the floor. Between sobs she explained that doctors had diagnosed my dad, a lifelong smoker, with lung cancer. He was in critical condition. He was only fifty.

  “Reza, he is everything to me,” she said, her voice trembling. “If something happens, I don’t know what I am going to do.”

  I booked the first flight home.

  I arrived in Tehran for the first time in four years, planning to take a cab home, but Naser and Kazem surprised me at the airport. When I saw that they were both dressed in black, I got very nervous, but I dared not ask why they were wearing this color, trying to convince myself that they had a reason for this that had nothing to do with my father.

  Naser’s hair was now short and combed back. Kazem’s hair was slightly longer than his old buzz cut, but he was neat and clean, as always. Their dress was a huge contrast to my sandals, tight T-shirt, loose jeans, and long, uncombed hair. At that moment I realized how time had separated us and this pierced my heart. I grabbed both of them in my arms and started crying like a little child.

  “How did you know?” Naser said. “Who told you?” He thought I was crying over the loss of my dad, not realizing that he’d just confirmed it for me.

  “How is my mom doing?” I said, trying not to cry harder.

  Kazem patted my shoulder. “She is devastated. But that’s the way it is, Reza. Hopefully, she’ll cope. It is so good you are here. It will mean a lot to her.”

  “I am so sorry, Reza,” Naser said. “May God bless your father’s soul.”

  Naser bent his head. I’m sure that when he did so, he noticed my bare toes.

  I felt embarrassed by the way I looked. “I think I should get some proper clothes from my suitcase and change in the car.”

  On the ride home, we reminisced briefly about my father. I had a million thoughts about him running through my head. He’d encouraged me to live a full life. He taught me how to play soccer and how to swim. He helped me with school, telling fables about the tragic lives of boys who did not do their homework and the triumphant glories of boys who did. He made me promise never to waste my life or my time.

  I looked out the window wondering if I was living up to that promise, considering how I’d spent most of my USC days. But I was immediately distracted by how much Tehran had changed since I’d been gone. Building cranes monopolized the skyline. Apartment buildings were thirty stories high. Pahlavi Boulevard, a cosmopolitan center with upscale shops and restaurants lining it, looked like a street in any big city in Europe or America. In four years, it seemed, Tehran had moved forward fifteen.

  Naser started telling me how things had been while I was gone. Student protests in the universities had heated up with the number of SAVAK arrests climbing proportionately. Kazem said that the SAVAK arrested members of the clergy in the religious schools of Qom because they spoke against the shah.

  The SAVAK was a security and intelligence organization the shah created in 1957 with the help of the U.S. military after the CIA helped overthrow democratically elected Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddeq because he nationalized Iran’s oil. Iranians were still angry about it. Nixon’s support of the shah helped keep this wound open. The shah and Nixon were buddies. U.S. products filled Iranian store shelves. Our military was fully Americanized and trained. Iranian pilots helped fight the Vietnam War. The shah supported the royalists in the Yemen civil war that ended in 1970. Then, in 1971, he helped the sultan of Oman put down a rebellion at the bidding of the U.S. In exchange, Nixon visited Iran in 1972, and he allowed the shah to buy any American weapons he wanted. The U.S. saw advantages in having an autocratic monarch as an ally who would do the U.S.’s dirty work in the Middle East. Saddam was the Soviets’ man. The shah was America’s man.

  While Naser was going to school for engineering (receiving excellent grades with little effort), he talked about politics and injustice constantly. Kazem, still struggling with his studies, was a full-fledged devotee of Islam. He mostly agreed with Naser’s critique of the shah’s policies, but he objected to the encroaching Westernization of the country because he saw it as a key contributor to growing decadence among Iranian youth—girls wearing miniskirts, drunks in the streets, and the preponderance of nightclubs and bars. Kazem and the other members of his poorer religious class were hurting financially, and the fabulous profits from oil had not filtered down to them. The shah’s modernization had left Kazem’s people behind while at the same time assaulting their moral principles.

  As Naser pulled into our driveway, I grew anxious. My heart felt heavy because my father was not going to be there and I would never greet him again. When I saw my mother, we hugged each other tight and she cried hysterically. I tried to console her, but nothing could stop her sobbing. My grandfather and grandmother were there and they seemed to be suffering horribly from the loss of their son, but as my mother and I huddled close together, Agha Joon whispered, “Your son is here, be happy.”

  Kazem and Naser stayed up late with me that night. We talked about my dad and some of the more memorable events of our childhood. Before long, though, our conversation turned back to politics. Little time ever passed before one of these two veered back toward that topic.

  “This tyranny has to fall,” Naser said. “People are suffering. This is the twentieth century and we still live under a dictatorship. There is no freedom of speech. No freedom of the press.”

  Kazem nodded in agreement. “Many people still live in poverty while the shah’s family and those around them are obscenely wealthy and stealing what belongs to the people. We have to bring justice to our society. We are becoming a nation of corruption and decay. We need to turn to our faith. Only Islam can rescue us and our country.”

  “But it’s only through Dr. Shariati’s view of religion and society that we can find our true selves in all human dimensions and fight tyranny and its moral decay,” Naser added. I knew virtually nothing about Ali Shariati. Naser explained that he was an Islamic scholar, sociologist, and critic of the shah and the mullahs. Shariati was so popular that citizens who weren’t even students overflowed his lecture halls to hear him speak.

  At the time, I did not share Naser’s keen interest in politics or Kazem’s devotion to Islam. Their well-informed dialogues aroused my interest, but I did not have much to contribute. I had not until this moment understood the intensity of moral outrage against the monarchy. It made the American outrage at Nixon seem like a minor irritation. And maybe that was appropriate. After all, while Nixon had an enemies list, the shah had an execution list.

  That night, I also learned about the most famous case of arrest and execution, that of Khosrow Golesorkhi, the Iranian Che Guevara. He was a Marxist-Leninist poet and journalist arrested for a plot to kidnap the shah’s son. “In truth, he and other leftists had only speculated about it as a means to trade for the freedom of political prisoners,” Naser told me. He also said that since the shah was courting the West and conscious about the declarations by the UN human rights committee on various issues, including the treatment of political prisoners, he allowed what he thought would be an open-and-shut case to be aired on television. The court permitted Golesorkhi to speak, ostensibly to recant his crimes. Instead, he spoke with stirring eloquence on behalf of the peasants laboring under the shah’s land reform, comparing their struggles to those of the great martyr Imam Hussein himself and detailing the shah’s crimes against humanity. Golesorkhi refused to defend himself; he would defend only the people. When asked if he would contin
ue his terrorist activities against the shah, he brazenly said that he would.

  “You know what Golesorkhi did when they took him to be executed? He refused the blindfold and stared his executioners in the face when they fired at him. He was a hero, Reza.” Naser shook his head. “No man should live under oppression. You have to stand up for your rights.”

  Naser then recited a poem by Golesorkhi:

  “On your breast lay

  the deep scar of your enemy

  but, you standing cypress did not fall

  it is your way to die.”

  Both Naser and Kazem sat up with me until I fell asleep. They were by my side when I woke up. I was very thankful that they were there because sleep had caused me to forget temporarily that my father was gone. When I awoke and remembered, the grief overwhelmed me anew. I don’t know what I would have done if I didn’t have my dearest friends by my side.

  Naser and Kazem remained with me during my father’s funeral, when every vulnerability in me was exposed and raw. I was my mother’s only son and I felt a great deal of responsibility for her, but I knew she would not allow me to quit my studies to care for her—especially since my father had so strongly wished for me to get a degree in America. She was secure financially, but I was not convinced that she could cope emotionally without my father. Kazem and Naser assured me that they and their families would look after her and check in frequently. They did this because they loved her and they loved me. They knew I had an enormous opportunity in America—an opportunity they couldn’t have—and they wanted to make sure I made the most of it. This outpouring of support brought me light in these dark days. I could hardly believe that I had allowed myself to neglect my two best forever friends as much as I had the past few years.

  I returned to California determined to devote myself to my studies and to do my father proud. Home would not leave my mind this time and letters from home took on new meaning. Naser wrote about the mounting opposition to the shah. In sending me letters, he risked arrest by the SAVAK, as they monitored communications in and out of the country. I admired Naser’s bravery and the passion of his commitment to the Iranian people. One of Naser’s letters came with copies of some of Shariati’s books. Reading these changed my life forever.