I'm Writing You from Tehran

by Delphine Minoui

  One afternoon, I visited Amir Hassan Cheheltan, a writer friend. Since this deluge of assassinations, he had shut himself up at home. With a trembling hand, he showed me a document. “It’s the list of people to be killed,” he murmured, devastated, as if the walls had ears. I glanced at it. His name was right in the middle. In black and white. I didn’t dare ask him how this paper had wound up in his hands. “And to think I had recently stopped shaking each time I heard footsteps at my door,” he murmured.

  When I first met him, a few weeks earlier, he had been a different man. With a smile on his lips, he had signed one of his books for me, one that had been banned for years. The work had just been published, at last! Then he had confided in me about a new project: to relaunch, with his writer friends, the famous Writers Association, an outlawed organization that had fought against censorship. They thought that with the tentative liberalization of the regime, the future once again belonged to them. “Now I’m crippled with fear again, day and night,” Amir Hassan Cheheltan confided, accompanying me to the door. Shaking hands, neither one of us had the courage to say good-bye. We knew all too well that it might ring of a final farewell.

  Later, I learned that Amir Hassan and fifty of his colleagues had dared to break the silence by writing a letter to Khatami in which they implored him to get to the bottom of these heinous murders. In a surge of unprecedented courage, the president joined their side. At his explicit request, an investigation was opened. It revealed to the public something that in other times would have been silenced: these crimes bore the mark of powerful secret police. A finger was pointed at the minister of intelligence, Ghorbanali Dorri-Najafabadi, who resigned. A major victory for reformist politicians. But although the assassins had been stopped, they were never exposed—or punished. After a few months, the case ended with the mysterious death of the prime suspect, Saeed Emami, who had allegedly swallowed depilatory cream in his prison cell. Iranian intellectuals struggled to turn the page, to continue their course toward a more glorious future. Did they suspect that these murders were just the macabre prelude to a series of even more malicious attacks against advocates for change?

  IT WAS AROUND that same time that I began frequently waking up in the middle of the night. I was used to sleeping like a baby, lulled by the continuous murmur of the jub, the little canal that flows through Tehran, fed by the melted snow of the mountains and passing beneath the windows of your house. But then, sporadic noises started to disturb my sleep. One morning, I almost had a panic attack. When I opened my eyes, my heart was pounding furiously. It must have been five in the morning. I was soaked. I sat up in bed and listened. The noises sounded like furtive steps on the tile. They were coming from the living room, at the other end of the corridor. But before going to bed, I had padlocked the gate of the building. The windows were closed, too.

  “There’s nothing worse than sleeping in the grips of paranoia,” I had been warned by Nadia, my journalist friend, fifteen years my senior. A few days earlier, she had tried to reassure me when I confided in her that objects were mysteriously vanishing from my bedroom. Some women’s magazines, brought from Paris. One or two tops. Nothing important, but still … In the end, I blamed fatigue and stress. Sometimes lack of sleep can lead to confusion.

  One night, I had an absurd idea: What if your ghost was watching over the family home I was sharing with Grandmother, the last building on a cul-de-sac bordered by majestic trees? I was living at the top of your two-story white brick house. Tucked in the back and to the right, the house was number 12 + 1—probably to avoid the dreaded number 13—the numerals inscribed in black paint, just below the front door.

  That night, the noises were definitely real.

  “Who’s there?” I asked, cautiously approaching the door to the living room.

  The footsteps stopped. I slipped my head through the small opening.

  It wasn’t an optical illusion; there was actually someone there! A thin silhouette, hidden behind the sofa … In the chiaroscuro, I was gradually able to discern a few particular characteristics: waxen face, curly hair dyed brown with henna, a frail body enveloped in a long nightshirt. It was a feminine, strangely familiar figure.

  “Mamani!”

  Grandmother was standing there in her slippers, a duplicate of the second-floor keys hanging from her neck!

  “What are you doing here? You scared me!” I snarled at her, angry.

  “I … I couldn’t sleep … So I came up here to stretch my legs,” she murmured sheepishly.

  So it had been Mamani: the discreetly disappearing magazines, the fingerprints on the dresser, the half-closed drawers, the tubes of cream mysteriously emptied. The odor of fresh herbs left in her wake should have given her away. Clearly, your wife had a knack for surprising me.

  Ever since my move to Tehran, our acclimation to each other had turned out to be a perilous undertaking. The divide between us was twofold: generational and cultural. According to the Iranian codes of the time, I had no other choice but to move into the family home. Grandmother had taken advantage of that fact to lay the groundwork.

  “Here’s your apartment,” she had announced to me upon my arrival, pointing to the second floor, just above her living space.

  The area she had reserved for me was crumbling under a carpet of dust. Everywhere were old trinkets and boxes sealed with packing tape. But it had the merit of being separated from the first floor by a door that double-locked. As soon as I had finished cleaning, plans materialized in my head. The quiet room would become my office. The kitchen’s faded walls would be repainted yellow. The balcony would conceal the satellite dish that allowed me to access foreign channels illegally. The large living room would welcome my new acquaintances. I didn’t suspect for a second that in becoming the upstairs “neighbor,” I would lose my independence. It took only a few days for that to become clear.

  Very quickly, I became the object of all her attention, the subject of all her discussions. “Abandoned,” she used to say, by her three children corrupted by the virus of Western freedom, for years she had wound the clock of her life to your service: breakfast, lunch, dinner, time for medicine, tea, visit to the doctor … Everything was perfectly scheduled, to the minute. You squabbled all the time, but that was how it was: you were her reason for living, her backbone. I always asked myself if you two had ever been in love. In your time, love meant something different. You had given her a ring when she was only sixteen years old. An arranged marriage, according to tradition, she had told me. She was the daughter of bazaar merchants. You were the descendant of a family of intellectuals. With time, you grew accustomed to each other.

  After the 1979 revolution, Grandmother built an imaginary fortress at your side. In taking power, the clerics had robbed her of her points of reference. First, there was the veil that crushed her hairdo. All those streets that changed names, too. On the white-and-blue metal plaques, squares adopted the names of ayatollahs, of martyrs of the Iran-Iraq War … It was then that her memory, which was actually very good, became selective. For her, Pasdaran Avenue (referencing the notorious Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, Iran’s elite military force) would always remain Saltanat Abad Avenue, a long strip of pavement that leads to the posh neighborhoods in the north of Tehran and that runs perpendicular to your cul-de-sac. Not that she was nostalgic for the old regime, but from a pure instinct to contradict, a character trait whose reasons I would come to understand only much later.

  When you died, the void left behind turned her daily habits upside down. Disoriented, she closed all the curtains of the two-story building. In her vast living room, the armchairs were back in their nylon covers. Your house was her last refuge. For her, the biroon didn’t exist anymore. There was only the andaroon. While those walls thickened from day to day, her daily routine shifted to revolve around the samovar, ever ready to pour tea for passing visitors who were too few for her liking, and the daily feeding of the goldfish, the only Islamically correct inhabitants of what had been, in an
other time, the pond in the backyard. Sometimes she spent entire weeks in her pajamas, shut in her “gilded cage,” as she called it, for which she alone possessed the keys: for the padlock of the entrance gate, for the main entryway, for her living room, for her bedroom. In her home, even the refrigerator was double-locked.

  Over time, Mamani transformed into the heroine of her own tragedy. The window that separated the kitchen from the outside world served as the curtain for her Greek theater. Nose glued to the glass, she often hid herself there to spy, suspiciously, on what took place on the other side: the comings and goings of the neighbor’s son, straddling his bicycle; the clinking of the junk dealer; the beggar’s accordion. Her favorite pastime. Beneath her shutters, the regular flow of the jub drowned out the distant murmur of a city where the dream of democracy was painfully giving birth. Nothing in that house brought us together, except for a photo of you placed in the middle of her collection of plastic butterflies, which she dusted daily. Ironically, you were our only common denominator.

  One day, I dared to ask her why she didn’t go live in France, where you were buried. After all, she would feel less lonely.

  “So they can throw me in a retirement home? No, thank you!” came her reply. “And now that you live in Tehran, I’m not going to abandon you. A young woman living alone—that won’t do. Our family’s reputation is at stake.”

  Widow at seventy, without her bearings, she naturally began to organize her new daily routine around this granddaughter who had made a sudden intrusion into her life. Animated with a renewed maternal instinct, she wanted to control every single minute of my life. And wasn’t afraid to use trickery to achieve her goal.

  Immunized by her eternal complaints concerning her legs, which were “no longer good for anything,” I had believed her incapable of walking up the fifty steps that separated us. That day, at five in the morning, I discovered, stupefied, her talent for climbing stairs and her art for breaking open doors. Worse, my aggravation when faced with her nocturnal appearance only sharpened her nosy, castrating instinct. After that unfortunate episode, every single distant cousin’s unannounced visit became an excuse for making me run down to the kitchen as quickly as possible to help serve tea and cakes. Often, these summonses happened through the intercom, to the bewilderment of the neighbors. From a distance, they observed with obvious amusement as this petite woman who looked like a Scout leader, chador thrown over her pajamas for appearances’ sake, called her granddaughter by pressing the intercom button at the building entrance. To establish her parental authority even further, she started to complement my outings with a fitting ritual. When I vanished for more than a day, she would hurry to hold the Quran above my head and to make me spin around endlessly while whispering a few verses she knew by heart. She who’d practiced religion as she pleased now saw it as a way to protect me from the evil eye. A way, also, to secretly pray for me to return to the right path.

  For, in her eyes, everything about me was wrong: single at the age when she had already had two children; not very sociable, because I had refused to greet one of her visiting friends (never mind that I was in the middle of a live radio broadcast); prone to burying my head in a book as soon as she started spreading the latest neighborhood gossip. I was “too French” for her liking. Too independent, too secretive, too cold. Too, too, too. Worse: I made the mistake of revealing my boredom during family dinners. “In the West, they raise you with a stone where your heart should be,” she would say to me at every possible opportunity. And always the same refrain: “If you wait too long to get married, you’ll be too old and too wrinkly. Men won’t want you anymore.” Sometimes I asked myself how you had managed to put up with her for so many years, you who were the opposite, an expert in the art of extreme discretion.

  One day, when Khatami was speaking on TV, I tried to talk to her about politics, hoping to find potential common ground. In vain.

  “The shah, the mullahs—they’re all the same! Corrupt leaders who try to suffocate us,” she said to me.

  “Yes, but they say Khatami’s different.”

  “So they say! You know, I’ve never voted in my entire life.”

  In fact, her only relationship to politics was Radio France International’s Persian programs. She often listened to the nightly news bulletin, an old transistor radio on her knees, secretly picking up AM broadcasts. It was her way of pulling herself out of isolation and being close to her three children, scattered between France and the United States. When the radio crackled at full volume all the way up to my floor, Mamani let herself be carried away by the dream that one day, inshallah, they would all be reunited in Tehran, and she would finally take out the old oilcloth for the dining table, free the sofas from their nylon covers, slide flowers into the big white vase, and dust off the family photos sitting atop the living room chest of drawers.

  Only the ringing of the telephone was able to wrest her from her thoughts and bring an end to that racket. Barely two rings and she already had her hand glued to the phone, making sure she never missed a call—including those meant for me. In my absence, she would even take the liberty of screening my callers. If it was a man, she had to know if he was from a good family—you never know! If the call was from Paris, she found it the perfect occasion to dust off her French. When the playwright Pari Sâberi would leave a message inviting me to her latest play, Mamani always managed to get a ticket for herself, too. One morning, she almost had a heart attack when she recognized the voice of Abbas Kiarostami on the phone! The world-renowned Iranian filmmaker was calling me back about an interview. For the next week, Grandmother could talk about nothing but him. Kiarostami! She told everyone. And I was suddenly an object of admiration for the entire neighborhood.

  Exasperated by these successive intrusions, I was going stir-crazy. The Iran that Mamani wanted to impose on me didn’t resemble the Iran you had sparked my interest in. The more she tried to lock me into her daily routine, the more I wanted to emancipate myself. To avoid a palace coup in my own family, I absolutely had to leave. Rediscover my wanderlust as quickly as possible.

  BANDAR ABBAS! I circled the name of the port town in red ink on an old map I found in one of your boxes. With its toes dipping into the Persian Gulf on the southern tip of Iran, that multicultural city had always intrigued me. The large distance separating it from Tehran made it all the more enticing. In February 1999, I finally found the ideal pretext to go: the municipal elections, the first in the Islamic Republic. While the capital was hibernating beneath its blanket of snow, struggling to heal from the trauma of the “Chain Murders,” I grabbed my backpack, donned my trusty headscarf, and hailed a taxi on Pasdaran Avenue.

  The road to the Tehran airport offered me the best introduction to the electoral campaign. Banks, bus stops, gas stations—no space had escaped the rapid pasting of candidates’ posters, many of which broke with tradition. They signaled the desire to overcome obstacles, to pursue the steep road of reform at whatever cost. In black chador and crimson boots, Faezeh Hashemi, the daughter of former president Rafsanjani, multiplied as far as the eye could see. Plastered to her photo was a slogan advocating for gender equality. Struck by the extent of this political competition, unusual for the Islamic Republic, I had my taxi stop so I could buy some newspapers. On the centerfold of Salam, the customary ad inserts for “laser hair removal” and “miracle diets” had been taken over by the numerous candidates. Tempted by the benefits of Photoshop, some were posing with Khatami, the reformer; others with Khamenei, the conservative. Flipping through Iran, I happened upon a surprise: an independent candidate from the holy city of Mashhad, Jamal Sanat Negar, declared in an interview that he scoffed at the mostahabbat, those good, pious deeds prescribed to the faithful for salvation. Breaking the traditional barrier between public and private, he proudly listed his guilty pleasures: sandwiches, movies … and pop music, which gets him “all worked up!” Not to mention this controversial detail: his desire to connect with America.

  This
climate of political détente made things easier for me. At the Foreign Media Department, once again under the control of Ershad, the powerful Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance, I was granted press credentials right away. I didn’t have to justify my motivations or my movements or the fact that I was traveling alone, without a “chaperone”—that is to say, a male family member. Taking a bus from Bandar Abbas to Bushehr, a charming fishing port that would later be at the heart of a nuclear crisis, didn’t elicit objections from any officials. “Beware of the shrimp; they’re really spicy,” said a smiling Ali Reza Shiravi, one of the ministry’s civil servants, wishing me a safe journey.

  I landed in Bandar Abbas full of curiosity. Nothing in that colorful city collapsing under the heat reminded me of the capital’s cold and pollution. When I disembarked from the plane, a young man with skin leathery from the sun was waiting for me on the tarmac. It was Moussa, a young photographer who was to be my guide for the trip. Dropping me off at the hotel, he invited me to meet him a few hours later, for a gathering of friends. I accepted the impromptu offer. The driver at the hotel didn’t share my enthusiasm. Reading the address scrawled on a scrap of paper, his eyes widened with terror. As if I were going to meet an axe murderer.

  “But that’s the black ghetto!” he exclaimed, and implored me not to go.