I'm Writing You from Tehran

by Delphine Minoui

  “I cried a lot … I was alone, faced with my sadness … And then your father arrived. Then your uncle and your aunt … At that moment, I switched roles, from spouse to mother. Hossein and I had started sleeping in separate bedrooms, and I turned a blind eye to his secret life.”

  * * *

  So that was the reason for her constant bitterness. Deprived of happiness, she couldn’t help herself from systematically destroying it in others. Maybe because she thought that, in any case, it didn’t exist. Listening to her, I understood her wounds, her flaws, which reminded me of those of other Iranian women. Islamic law, in effect since 1979, was a convenient scapegoat. People blamed it for all the evils of the earth. But the suffering of women didn’t begin with the revolution; it had long before been sealed with the mortar of patriarchal traditions.

  A high-pitched barking tore me from my thoughts. The furry pooch had just made a new interruption into Mamani’s room, preceding Marie, who had a large lollipop in her mouth and a colorful cake in the shape of a hamburger in her arms. She was cheery, as if nothing were wrong.

  “Dessert!” she cooed.

  Still riled up about Marie’s insensitive wisecrack, Mamani’s eyebrows were on alert. I had never seen her with such incandescent eyes. She pushed back the covers, sat on the edge of the bed, scornfully stared down her adversary from head to toe. Then said, with a mischievous grimace:

  “Look at you, with your fat belly! You eat so much you’d think you were pregnant with triplets.”

  * * *

  What a comeback! Your secret wife spat out her lollipop—to the immense joy of her dog, who immediately seized the sugary gem. Bewildered, I observed this little game of Ping-Pong, worried it might end badly. But, the game at a tie, the opposite happened. After a brief pause, Marie swallowed, and broke into an enormous fit of laughter. I turned toward Mamani. Her body had been taken over by convulsions that transformed rapidly into little high-pitched cries: she couldn’t stop laughing!

  “That was a good one!” Marie guffawed.

  * * *

  Outside, the moon was round. Their chuckling petered out in a singular nocturnal melody. There was something cathartic about their way of laughing until they were in tears.

  Also, in the following weeks, I started getting used to Marie. With each visit, the same merry-go-round. Arms full of sweets, she perfumed the air with her asphyxiating eau de cologne, her dog trailing behind her. In Grandmother’s apartment, there was always a bed and a place setting waiting for her. With time, their complicity grew even stronger. As if in having shared the same man, they were linked to each other, despite the odds.

  * * *

  I observed your two wives, the visible and the invisible, squabbling like sisters and then reconciling right away through the magic of a good joke. They also mocked your quirks: your mood swings or your naps in the middle of meals, when you would pretend to be “thinking.” A greater absurdity, Mamani soon became an adviser to Marie. When your “second wife” was on the lookout for a contractor or mason for the construction of her villa on the land she had inherited, Grandmother always found a way to unearth a telephone number or a name. For the duration of the work, Marie would always visit, making sure we didn’t forget about her.

  While the villa was taking shape, her visits started to spread out. Three years later, once her house was finished, she disappeared for good—along with her pooch, her hamburger-shaped cakes, and her lollipops. No doubt about it, that woman was exceptionally brazen. But I had a hard time being mad at her. She had deserted our life as suddenly as she had invaded it, but I almost missed her, so much had she spiced up Mamani’s morose daily life. In fact, I was grateful to her. In revealing a part of the shadow of your past, she had achieved the impossible: she brought me closer to Grandmother.

  “SOKOUT … HAREKAT … SILENCE … Action!” Pitched on the rocks, our camera zoomed in on the face of a Persian Castafiore. “Daughter of the sea, it’s morning! Wake up! Open your eyes!” crooned the young actress, impersonating Googoosh, the timeless pop diva from before the revolution. Her words ricocheted through the gully. Her doe eyes lit up the jagged ridges. Thumbing her nose at the prohibition against women singing in public! Gathered around her, boys and girls repeated the refrain in unison. “Wake up! Open your eyes!”

  At the end of September 2001, I was working as an assistant on a Belgian documentary, Iran Behind the Veil, about your country’s ongoing changes. We walked for hours in the hills, filming some novice actors along the hiking trails. Lungs swollen with oxygen, they darted about like mountain goats, sending imaginary monologues down through the clouds. Far below, Tehran had disappeared under a blanket of pollution as thick as a theater curtain. That day, the Darakeh Mountain, accomplice to defiant teenagers, revealed its secrets to us: unmanageable headscarves, unleashed words, backpacks pouring out their hidden treasures (cassette players, guitars, tambourines).

  At the first whistle, the mini-Googoosh froze on the spot. Index finger on her lips, she signaled to her partners in crime to be quiet. The whistling was intermittent. It disrupted the gurgling of a neighboring spring. Intrusive, piercing.

  “Who’s there?” she asked.

  Thinking it was an ad-libbed sketch, we continued filming.

  “Shut off the camera!” shouted an unknown voice. “Right now!”

  We turned around. Eyes bulging, a stocky bearded man came charging out of the bushes. Fists clenched, he plowed straight into our small group. He must have been twenty, the same age as the young actors. A walkie-talkie was affixed to his belt, a black shirt stuck out of his khaki pants—there was no doubt about it: he was a Basij militiaman! Since the summer of 1999, I had been able to spot them easily, but this was the first time I had been confronted by one of them directly.

  “Hijab! Hijab!” he screamed, glaring at the girls.

  As in synchronized choreography, we all put our headscarves back on. The budding singer had swallowed her voice. She was petrified. Her friends looked mummified. In their pale faces, I read the same question: What was this militiaman doing on “their” territory? The morality police almost never ventured up so high. Normally they limited their patrols to the teahouses nestled at the foot of the hiking trails. Furthermore, summer—“hunting” season for uncovered heads, when the heat prompted women to lift their veils—had already passed.

  “Your documents!” the bearded man continued, furious.

  We were stupefied. We let a few seconds go by in utter silence. These young people weren’t related to one another. If the militiaman checked their IDs, he would have reason enough to arrest them. With a slow, prudent step, one of the actors approached the intruder and handed him his backpack, empty.

  “What did we do wrong? Go through my things. There isn’t even any alcohol!” he said with a nervous laugh.

  “As if this weren’t already enough! Half-naked girls in front of a camera—you’ve already crossed the line! This isn’t America!” the Basiji ranted.

  “Hey, watch what you say!” The young man was beside himself.

  “Listen, sousoul, daddy’s boy, hand over your papers and shut your mouth if you want to stay out of trouble!”

  “You think you’re better than us? If you don’t like us, just go back to your barracks. It’s because of people like you that Iran has regressed a thousand years since the revolution.”

  The bearded man’s face hardened. Cut to the quick, he puffed out his chest, straightened his chin. With his right hand, he pointed to a nearby hill and continued:

  “Have some respect! ‘Brothers’ of the war rest beneath the soil of this mountain.”

  I wasn’t sure what he was implying. One of the girls whispered in my ear that he must have been referring to the bodies of soldiers who fought in the Iran-Iraq War. The Basij militia had recently made the controversial decision to bury them here, out in nature. As if to mark their territory.

  “Right, right, the war again … It’s a great scapegoat! As if there weren’t a
more appropriate place to bury the dead. Haven’t you heard of cemeteries! An ideal pretext for spying on us and stealing one of the rare spots where we have freedom,” the young actor said, angry.

  “‘Freedom’? What do you mean ‘freedom’? Smoking and drinking … like in the United States? How decadent!” the militiaman shot back, snatching the actor’s bag from him.

  The pitch had been dialed up a notch. Up till this point, the camera crew had remained in the background, but with that, the Basij had gone too far. I slid my hand in my bag to retrieve my press pass. After all, we had the proper authorization from the Ministry of Culture to film on the mountain. I handed the pass to the militiaman.

  “Foreigner?” he asked me, suspicious, examining my credentials.

  The press pass didn’t impress him at all. It was as if, on this mountain overlooking Tehran, he had outsize power, was above the law.

  “Foreigner?” he insisted.

  “Half,” I replied.

  “Another Iranian woman who was all warm and cozy in Europe while our soldiers were getting their brains blown out defending our country against Saddam!” he growled.

  While he spoke, he nervously fingered the beads of a rosary wound around his wrist. His arrogance baffled me. It was obvious that we were not cut from the same cloth. But I had to find a way to appease him at all costs.

  “Uh, no. Not at all,” I replied. “Actually, I recently did a report from a mosque.”

  “To better humiliate us afterward?” he snarled.

  I didn’t see what he was getting at with his dirty look.

  “All you have to do is watch CNN or BBC to see how Muslims are demonized! Ever since the kamikazes crashed their planes into the towers in New York, we’re all Islamist terrorists in your eyes. You Westerners have such short memories. Not only has Iran never attacked any country, but on top of that, when Saddam Hussein invaded us in the eighties, he was backed by the West!”

  So that was the source of his anger. I was starting to better understand … A few weeks earlier, the attacks of September 11, which bore the mark of Al-Qaeda, had devastated the international community. Mohammad Khatami, reelected in June 2001, had been one of the first heads of state to condemn the attack on the Twin Towers in New York City, lamenting the fact that the horrible crime had been committed in the name of Islam. The people of Tehran had also expressed compassion and their solidarity with the families of the victims. The following Thursday, hundreds of people lit candles on Mohseni Square, exclaiming loudly, “Down with terrorism!” and “Death to the Taliban!” But in the West, anything the least bit associated with Islam was reviled like the plague.

  “The reformists are fools if they think that by smiling at the West, they’ll be accepted as equals by your leaders. You’ll see, the West will use us in order to better take advantage of us afterward. This will end badly.”

  I was still perplexed. I thought he was giving in too easily to conspiracy theories. That’s often the case in this part of the world. Ironically, what came next would prove him right, in light of the paroxysms that would shake Iran and the region. In October 2001, when the United States decided to attack Afghanistan to drive out bin Laden, a common enemy, Tehran would immediately demonstrate unprecedented cooperation with Washington, D.C., offering humanitarian and logistical aid. With the fall of the Taliban regime in Kabul, Tehran would reiterate its support, helping the West form a transitional government in Afghanistan.

  But on January 29, 2002, the American president, George W. Bush, chose to include Iran in his “axis of evil.” Later, the Islamic Republic would even be accused of plotting with Al-Qaeda. In Tehran, this would be a hard pill to swallow. Many Iranians felt betrayed, stigmatized—which only helped the conservatives, who were quick to accuse the reformists of letting themselves be hoodwinked by the White House. It also served to feed the bitterness of the Basijis, like this young militiaman. Looking back, you had to ask if the United States’ so-called war on terror hadn’t contributed to heightening Islamist extremism at the expense of more moderate voices. Was the dialogue Khatami so dreamed of sparking at risk of turning into a clash of civilizations?

  That afternoon, trapped on our rock, our concerns were more practical. How to save our film and keep our videotapes from ending up in a police dumpster? How, most importantly, to stop this young self-proclaimed leader of Darakeh Mountain from calling in his “troops” to put us behind bars pronto? Seeing his resentment, I was imagining the worst.

  The Basiji stopped talking. Once he had spat out his litany on “international arrogance” and the Western media, it seemed like a burden had been lifted. Then, pen in hand, he wanted to write down the names of the girls and boys. He said it was for his own records, that he didn’t want to cause us any harm; he simply wanted to ensure that we respected “Islamic virtue” and the “values of Imam Khomeini.” With these words, the young actor started to sputter. He determinedly snatched up his backpack, which was sitting on a large rock. He had heard too much; he wanted to leave. The militiaman grabbed him by the sleeve.

  “You’re not getting out of this so easily. Did you know that I could keep you out of university? And that I can get you sent directly into the military?”

  The young singer hurried to stand between the two men, trying to create a barrier. The militiaman abruptly retreated. According to his backward beliefs, he was not allowed to touch a woman. He was stuck.

  “Go on, get out of here before I call my superiors,” he retorted. “You got lucky this time. But rest assured, it’s the last time!”

  We gathered our things at once, before the Basiji could change his mind, and started our descent, hightailing it down the path that ran along the gully. Jumping from stone to stone, we felt his gaze following our shadows. He disappeared behind a bush. At the foot of the mountain, Tehran was lit up with a thousand lights. From that angle, the capital seemed deceptively peaceful. A little farther down, in front of the traditional teahouses, we crossed paths with other young people who were climbing upward, to camp under the stars. With a complicit wink, we signaled to them that the hills were compromised. In Iran, solidarity is a mode of survival.

  I COULDN’T LOOK away from the frozen expressions, on faces barely old enough for a shave. Their smiles were fixed, stoic, timeless. They stared solemnly into space, “Allah” stitched into their headbands and guns on their shoulders. Not a single wrinkle, not a hair on their chins, not the least trace of fear. Looking at these hundreds of black-and-white snapshots on the walls at a neighborhood exhibit on the Iran-Iraq War, one could have imagined that this army of beardless adolescents might rise again at any moment. They were thirteen or fourteen, maybe younger. Too young to go to the front. Too young to die.

  “Is that really you?”

  I jumped. Was I on edge because the photos of these young martyrs had heightened my emotions? Or because the voice that tore me from my contemplation was strangely familiar?

  “What a surprise to see you again!” continued the mysterious person standing behind me.

  I turned around, squinting. I couldn’t make out the silhouette in the darkness of the temporary exhibition hall. Squared shoulders, prominent facial features … I let a few seconds go by, at first thinking I must be mistaken. Meanwhile, my eyes acclimated to the lack of light. The militiaman from Darakeh Mountain was standing there, next to me! He seemed as surprised as I was by this unexpected reunion only a few weeks after the incident on the mountain.

  “And what brings you to our neck of the woods?” he asked with a hint of irony. I could have asked him the same question. The exhibition was in my neighborhood, far from his mountain. On my way home from running an errand in town, I had stopped in by chance, intrigued by the gigantic camel-colored tent set up temporarily on a small soccer field. At the entrance, hanging from an old rusty tank that stood guard, a sign, black letters on a blood-red background, read “Sacred Defense Week,” commemorating the eight-year war. Out of curiosity, I had lifted the thick covering that
acted as a door, and entered.

  “They’re beautiful, aren’t they?” the militiaman continued, even more absorbed than I was by these photos decorating the walls.

  “They’re … so young,” I answered.

  “Only the best die on the battlefield. God chose them!” he said.

  I detected an astonishing mix of respect and envy in his voice.

  What a unique way to evoke the memory of these child soldiers, these colonies of “mobilized volunteers”—the literal and original meaning of the word basiji—who had served as cannon fodder for the regime. In 1980, at the beginning of the hostilities with Baghdad, they had rushed, heads down, over Iraqi minefields thinking they would go to Paradise … I remained silent.