by Rolf Potts
I cannot write where we met her; there would be terrible consequences if the guardians of Iran’s order found her. She had a lyrical name and spoke good English; she liked the language and literature of her country’s supposed enemy. She was in her early twenties and hungry for unrestricted love. But she was afraid they might come for her. There was always the fear of being arrested for the crime of having a boyfriend.
She told us about the night everything changed. She remembered it clearly, the time, the place, the sweet taste of ice cream on her lips. They had waited until night fell, thinking they would be safer under the cover of darkness. They drove to a quiet street, with her at the wheel, pretending to be sister and brother. They had just stopped when another car slowly passed by, with two men inside staring at them. After a while, the car came back and stopped behind them. The two men got out, approached their car and dangled handcuffs in front of the ice cream-eating couple.
The men weren’t wearing uniforms and didn’t identify themselves. They didn’t have to. The couple knew that if they said a wrong word, they would be dragged to a building that everyone in the city knew—the prison of forbidden love. After their arrest, the parents would have had to pick up their indecent children. They would have had to pay a fine and sign a pledge that this will never happen again. “We don’t have the right to eat ice cream,” the young woman said, tears welling up in her eyes.
The mother looked at her daughter and took her hand. She didn’t understand a word, but she seemed to know exactly what the daughter was telling us. Then she threw her thumb over her shoulder, pointing at Khomeini and Khamenei on the wall behind her, and shook her head. We went back to our hotel room and turned Khomeini’s portrait around, making him face the wall.
It was the saddest night of our honeymoon, but something changed as we lay on another tradition-defying bed. A delicate confidence was seeping into the way we looked at the country, especially the women. There was a subcutaneous seething, a quiet determination to turn their rage into change—with a baseball bat if necessary. It reminded us of something a man had told us at a teahouse. We were cautious not to discuss anything with the slightest political undertone, but we eagerly listened to whatever people wanted to share. What the man told us sounded incredible at the time, but his words kept coming back to us as the mothers and daughters of Iran came into sharper focus. He said, “The women will bring the mullahs down.”
The man with the golden microphone stood in front of a wall and sang. A small crowd of people gathered around him, looking enchanted as they listened to him. This made the man dangerous. He sang only love songs, but a policeman pushed through the crowd, bent over the loudspeaker and lowered the volume. The man smiled and kept singing. A few minutes later, two other policemen came and unplugged his microphone.
We were standing in a street in Shiraz, and the Iranian police state reminded us of its fearful nature. Shiraz is the city of poets, the heart of romantic old Persia, but we came only for Hafez. Iran’s most beloved poet had written with breathless passion about love and lies in the time of despotism, and it moved us. He called himself a “serf of love,” drank heavily, and dreamed of soaking prayer rugs with wine. Hafez lived in the fourteenth century, when mosque and state were one and the mullahs ruled with an arbitrary fist similar to the Iran of the twenty-first century. We read his poems and felt as though he was still alive.
Preachers who preen in prayer-niche and pulpit,
when in private, quite another matter do they practice
than they preach!
The Hafez mausoleum is a place of pilgrimage for lovers. Newlyweds come from all over the country to be close to Hafez, and we followed them. We placed our hands next to theirs on the cold marble of his tomb and listened to them recite the Qu’ran’s first surah. While they vowed to worship Him alone, we whispered a worldly wish, desiring a child.
There was something about Hafez that made people feel safe. At no other place did we see so many couples touch each other—holding hands, embracing each other, exchanging chaste kisses. And in the park surrounding the mausoleum we saw men that, former president Ahmadinejad once claimed, don’t exist in Iran. Following the trend of the time, they had carefully modeled their hair to look like ransacked birds’ nests. But something was different about them. Their eyebrows were a little too perfect, their t-shirts a little too tight, their nails a little too filed, and one of them sat on another’s lap. We sat with them for a while, and one of them confided to Gypsy that they were “admirers of men.” Then we saw some of them look at two policemen walking by as if they were their secret fantasy.
Young men and fire. A lot of them seemed to be playing with it, especially in matters of love. But the gay men reveling in Hafez’s shadow, despite being persecuted by a homophobic regime, seemed almost privileged when we came across another generation of young men. On the road from Shiraz to Isfahan we stopped at a white building adorned with Iranian flags; it seemed to be decorated in celebration of something. Inside were the tombs of three soldiers who had fallen in the war with Iraq. It was a shrine to their deaths, silent on their lives. On the pristine white walls surrounding the tombs were photographs that documented their transformation from soldiers to martyrs. The first images showed nervous, smiling young men up to their chests in murky water, each holding a rifle over their head like a monstrance. The last images showed bodies that were missing something. An arm. A leg. A head.
In Isfahan we wanted to let go of all this. The sadness of having ice cream. The danger of golden microphones. The decency guards wielding feather dusters at the mosque, tapping women they deemed insufficiently covered. The air was clear and the night warm, and we felt like tourists again. But the men had a way of drifting toward us. We walked across the Bridge of 33 Arches and watched a man having his portrait drawn by a street artist. When the man noticed us, he pointed at the drawing and asked, “Beautiful?” He was unhappy with the size of his nose, even though the artist had drawn it smaller than it actually was. We sat down for our own portrait, and the artist, giving us the Iranian treatment, drew our noses smaller than they actually were. When we said goodbye, he reached out and shook Gypsy’s hand. He was the first man in Iran who touched her.
Under the bridge was a teahouse with a beautiful view of the river, the glow of the city reflecting on its surface. Teahouses are the Iranian substitute for bars, a placebo for those who want to talk and mingle in a country where drinking alcohol is forbidden. The place was bustling with large groups of friends and families, and watching them engage in passionate discussions, it became obvious why the regime had shut down teahouses around the country. It was there that we met Mehdi and his brother Muhammad. They brought us saffron ice cream and told us about each of their difficulties finding a bride.
Mehdi and Muhammad were in their early thirties and their father was getting nervous that his sons still weren’t married. He was putting pressure on them. The problem was money—they had too much of it. Coming from a wealthy family, the brothers felt that what attracted most women to them was their buying power. It’s the luxury problem of privileged men in a society where brides come with a price tag. “Maybe I should marry a foreigner,” Mehdi said.
As a man with a foreign bride, I was not in a position to argue against marrying one. But I didn’t want Mehdi to give up on an Iranian bride, and I told him about the women in New York I had pursued in vain. Claiming that Gypsy was an exception to the rule, I said that, over there, I often felt that a man’s value partly depended on his net worth. Gypsy put her hand on Mehdi’s and nodded. He looked at her in disbelief.
We talked late into the night and wanted to take a photograph to remember it by. Gypsy placed herself between the brothers, but they didn’t fit into the frame. They kept their distance from the woman in the middle and stood next to her like soldiers at roll call, arms pressed against their flanks. I motioned for them to get closer to Gypsy. The brothers looked over their shoulders, as if planning a crime, and then, beaming,
moved in and put their arms around Gypsy.
The man I came to call Little Shah didn’t want to be in the picture. He had heard us speak English and hovered around our table, but now he kept his distance. Mehdi knew him; he was a regular at the teahouse. His English had a tinge of an American accent, which he seemed to cultivate, and he watched us like somebody who knew us. He was dressed in a black pinstriped suit with a shiny veneer of neglect, as though he had not taken it off in a long time. He wore it like his past.
His name was the same as that of the last Shah of Iran, Mohammed Reza. When we went for a walk along the Zayandeh River, which irrigates the fields and dreams of the people along its banks, he followed us and told us his story. He said he used to work as a journalist and, as punishment for writing the truth, was thrown into jail for several years. Now he worked at a police station. He cleaned it.
I viewed the Little Shah in the conditional. He had a black briefcase that he hugged like a pillow and said things that make a person cautious in a surveillance state. He told us that he had seen us in the morning near our hotel and overheard us speak German and Spanish, and he tried to impress us by speaking a little bit of both. He knew what had recently been on the cover of Der Spiegel, a magazine I have written for. He wanted to know if I had brought a laptop and foreign newspapers.
Maybe he was an unrefined spy; maybe he was just a ragged man cleaning the dirt of those who had broken him. I didn’t know what to make of him. We said goodbye, pretending to be exhausted from our honeymoon, but the Little Shah wasn’t done with us. He asked us to give him just a few more minutes. He sat down on a small brick wall, pulled a school notebook and a fountain pen from his briefcase, and wrote a poem for us.
People tell me that windows
have no feelings and no heart.
But when a window fogs up
and I write the words
“I love you”
on the glass,
the window begins to cry.
The following night, we went back to the teahouse. Mehdi had asked us to meet him there. He wanted to drive us to a popular spot in the mountains that he said has the most beautiful view of Isfahan. As I sat down on the passenger seat, he put a plastic bag full of money between my feet. I looked at the bag in amazement, and he laughed and said inside were the day’s earnings from his uncle’s business.
As we drove out of the city and saw it turn into a sea of lights behind us, Mehdi tried to impress us with his racing, pushing other cars out of the way. We ignored it, until everything came to a stop and we saw the woman with the baseball bat walking toward Mehdi. She was taller than him.
The road lay in front of us like a stage in a play about the future of Iran. In the spotlight stood a man at the moment when everything crashed and his hubris caught up with him. Mehdi raised his arms higher and pleaded with the woman, but she didn’t say a word. She held the bat in front of her chest like a scepter and stared at him.
Mehdi slowly retreated, came back to the car and reached into the bag with the money. He grabbed as many bills as he could, walked back to the woman and waved the bills in front of her, begging her to take them. The woman lowered her bat, turned around and got into her car. She sped off and left Mehdi standing in the street with a handful of money, a small, humiliated man.
Mario Kaiser is a writer of narrative nonfiction. A former reporter and editor for Die Zeit and Der Spiegel, his work has also appeared in The International New York Times, Guernica, and Narratively. He is a recipient of the Henri Nannen Prize, the Kurt Schork Award in International Journalism, and the Kurt Tucholsky Prize for Literary Journalism. “Love and Lies in Iran” originally appeared in Narratively. You can follow Mario at @MarioKaiserNYC.
LAURA RESAU
Playing Dress-Up in the Andes
An embarrassing fashion disaster heals old wounds and creates new bonds.
“Suck in your belly,” María commands.
I obey. Arms extended, I’m standing before her in my underwear, legs bare, torso covered in a loose white blouse, trimmed with ample lace and embroidered flowers. María wraps several yards of fabric around my lower half, followed by a long strip of woven fabric around my waist—a faja. She tugs tightly, securing the top of the skirt fabric, as though winching a tourniquet.
We’re in the bedroom of her yellow cement house nestled in the Andes mountains of Otavalo, Ecuador, preparing for a night on the town. Most tourists zip in and out of this cozy pueblo, spending only a whirlwind Saturday at the craft market—one of the biggest and oldest in South America—snapping photos of woven rugs and fuzzy ponchos and dazzling Otavaleña Indian women.
But I’m here for a whole week, staying with one of these women, and quickly learning that there’s more to the frills and glitter than meets the eye. I’ve spoken with tourists who assume these outfits are just part of a shiny exotic-Andean-market façade, unaware that all the lace and cotton and wool hold layer upon layer of meaning.
María tugs tighter, and I let out a squeak as my compromised lungs struggle for breath. The musty smell of alpaca sweaters envelops us—merchandise piled on the bed that she sells on trips to Colorado, where I first met her. We’re the same age—early thirties—but beyond that, our lives have been drastically different. She was a child slave, denied education, while I spent my coddled American girlhood devouring books. Before meeting María, I’d only read about slavery; back then, it seemed like something distant, centuries and continents away.
Now it feels much closer. Over the past three years, María has bravely revealed her deepest self to me, every scar and spark, inside and out, and entrusted me to shape this material into a book.
But standing here in my half-dressed, corseted state, I am the one exposed. She is clearly enjoying my discomfort, in an impish way.
With a ruthless giggle, she orders, “Suck in your belly some more, Laurita!”
“But Mari, I can’t breathe!”
“Ay, Laurita,” she sighs. “It has to be tight or else the skirt falls off.” She motions to her own anacos, a black layer on top, a cream one beneath, both firmly held up by a purple faja.
“But how can I fit any food in my stomach?”
“It’s just for a few hours,” she laughs, tossing waist-long hair over her shoulder. She pulls the faja tighter still, until my ribs are on the verge of cracking.
Secretly, I consider tearing off the fabric, releasing my gut, and changing into a pair of comfy sweatpants. It occurs to me, though, that dressing up in her clothes could be useful to our book-in-progress. Our project has already given me the unique experience of slipping out of my own life and into María’s—entering her mind, heart, and even body, from the beauty mark near her lip to the whip scars on her calves.
The only thing missing, I realize as I stand half-mummified in yards of fabric, has been wearing María’s clothes. Frankly, it hadn’t occurred to me before. I had a vague notion that indigenous people would frown at me, a gringa posing as an Otavaleña.
But this dress-up session was María’s idea—girls playing makeover, then going out for a night on the town. And she’s obviously taking pleasure in it. Her playfulness is infectious, transforming us into giddy teens. I have only one sibling, a brother, but I imagine this is how it would feel to have a giggly, slightly tormenting sister.
María has called me hermana—sister— a few times, mostly in greeting cards, tentatively, as if trying it out. Each time, it has felt like a gift, this word with its staggering connotations. But I’ve always felt too shy and unworthy to call her hermana back.
Throughout María’s teen years, she longed for the close bond of sisterhood. As a little girl in her remote Quichua village, she’d had a thorny relationship with her older sister, who was prettier, fairer, plumper, and more even-tempered. María used to pummel her sister in a jealous rage over who got the biggest potato in the soup or the ripest berries from the bush. But from ages seven to fifteen, after María was taken from her family to be an unpaid servant, she yea
rned for a sister—someone to whisper with about her dread of her master’s groping hands, her dreams of going to school, her major crush on MacGyver.
When María was on the verge of a dramatic escape from slavery, she contacted this older sister, whom she hadn’t seen for eight years. María had often fantasized about meeting her again, but imagined her frozen in time, forever twelve years old, the perfect age for hysterical laughter and makeovers and secrets. This time, she resolved to offer her sister the biggest potato in the soup and the juiciest berries on the bush.
At their reunion, María felt gutted to see that her sister had grown into a twenty-year-old woman, engaged to be married. The window of time for sisterly silliness had vanished, never to be reclaimed. This was when it truly dawned on María that her childhood had been stolen. And this knowledge was so devastating that she very nearly chose to return to her state of slavery, despite the physical and sexual abuse, despite being denied education and dignity.
In the next few years, though, she managed to create a new, free life for herself, working hard to pay for food, lodging, and high school. She formed friendships with classmates, but was burdened with so much responsibility that she could never live out the warm and carefree sisterly bond she’d dreamed of.
As María told me her story, there were moments we cried together—when she described being strung up to the rafters by her neck as a five-year-old and whipped by her father; being beaten with handfuls of hangers by the mistress of the household; being sexually accosted by the master as a young teen. Yet her sadness seemed to plunge deepest when she described the realization that she’d never live out her dreams of sisterhood—laughing and crying together, dressing each other up, sharing memories, confiding fears.
This bewildered me. After all she’d been through, why was this sorrow so painful? It’s hard to know why one particular loss can rip a soul’s fabric . . . and perhaps harder to guess at the surprising ways it might one day stitch itself together.