I'm Writing You from Tehran

by Delphine Minoui

  * * *

  On the phone, Papa stopped talking. I imagined him overwhelmed by his own memories. He was only ten years old then, and that move to Paris would mark the beginning of his new French life. For you, that UN job, at first very enticing, would quickly be at odds with your desire for independence.

  Upon your arrival at UNESCO, Papa confided in me, only one order, in point of fact, was communicated from Tehran: “When a resolution is to be voted on in the General Assembly, do what the American representative does. If he raises his hand, you raise your hand!” Frustrated by this flagrant lack of autonomy, and feeling humiliated, you stopped attending the debates and putting on a show; you turned up only at the end, when they called for a vote. One day, when you hadn’t even had the time to ask about the session’s topic, you followed the example of the American. But on that occasion, a colleague signaled for you to abstain from raising your hand. “This time, the Americans asked that we vote against them,” he informed you drily, giving no reason. They forced you to lower your hand, but you threw up your arm, irritated at the increasing American influence on the shah. Listening to Papa tell that anecdote, I thought again about Sardasht, of the nuclear arms race. In its own way, your experience explained your fellow citizens’ heightened protectionism. Your personal history was merging with the larger history of your country.

  Papa carried on with the story. He told me how you grew enraged, deprived of any responsibility and left to do nothing but run around in circles. You were beside yourself. Unable to stand the idleness, you enrolled at the Sorbonne. Literature became your refuge. An outlet for forgetting your troubles. You chose to write your dissertation on the life of Kashefi, a renowned Persian poet. The defense committee honored your work, and this meant so much to you, Papa explained.

  I deduced that it was in this period that you developed a love for metaphor, which you shared with me so belatedly on your hospital bed, through Hafez. After your death, I remember poring over a bilingual collection of his poems at my neighborhood library. Opening the pages of his quatrains at random, I came upon one that said: “History repeats itself.” Was I supposed to read a message between the lines? A warning to mull over? You used to echo your Iranian proverbs, saying I was “the light of your eyes.” But without you, I felt more like “the dust beneath your feet.” The space you left behind had never been so empty.

  Lost in his memories, Papa added that, in 1961, soon after your return from France, the infamous SAVAK blackmail finalized your divorce from the state of Iran. Disgusted by their devious methods, you tossed your last hopes into the dustbin of history. You asked for an early retirement to distance yourself from everything to do with politics, directly or indirectly. But you remained in your country. Reading and writing became your comforts. Walks in the countryside, your only distractions. In 1979, from the distance of your couch, converted into an observation post, you followed the paroxysms of the revolution without participating in it.

  Given how things turned out, I’m sure you didn’t regret not getting involved. It seems that your apolitical stance and your distancing yourself from the SAVAK were in fact what saved you. For even though in the eyes of the new Islamist leaders you belonged to the taghoutis, the privileged, whose land was to be confiscated, you were not targeted as a man to be eliminated outright—even if Papa remains convinced that you were effectively killed by the cumulative effect of your property hassles with the Revolutionary Court.

  Years later, in 1997, I was able to see to what extent Khatami’s victory had restored your hope for your country. You thought he was different from the others. Perhaps because he, like you, expressed himself through poems? When you suddenly left us, a few months after his landslide victory, I regretted that you couldn’t see with your own eyes this Iran that was learning to smile again, little by little. But, with hindsight, I tell myself it’s probably better this way. Would you have been able to bear the sight, a few years later, of your country’s dreams shattering once more against the shoals of reality?

  AFTER YOUR TANGLES with the secret police, you chose to remain in your country, in internal exile. I chose to move to Iraq for a while. I thought that once I was on the other side of the border, I might manage to cure myself of this Iran Fever. No miracle remedy at hand, I had nothing to lose by trying. So, in February 2002, disheartened at not being able to get back my press pass, I headed first to the north and then made my way to Iraqi Kurdistan. The American invasion was imminent. Over there, the press was free. In a semiautonomous enclave, protected since 1991 from the claws of Saddam Hussein, many of the international media outlets had established their headquarters. Reporters for television stations, radio stations, newspapers—we were all standing by, waiting for the first signal that we could descend with all haste on Baghdad. When the regime fell in early April 2003, we all rushed to the Iraqi capital.

  The city, only just liberated, was covered in a fine beige film of pulverized dust from the explosions. From east to west, American tanks controlled the main roads. As for the official buildings, the targets of missile strikes, there remained only mountains of rubble—with the exception of the very strategic Ministry of Oil. In the residential neighborhoods, the streets were as empty as my stomach. Deserted by their inhabitants. Eaten away by the fear of more bombings. Along the Tigris, only the windows held together with adhesive tape had withstood the blasts. Residents had used rolls of Scotch Tape, to limit the damage! I had only just arrived when I was immediately struck by one detail: that city of imposing concrete buildings, vestiges of Ba’ath architecture, bore no trace of its other war, the one Saddam had waged on the Islamic Republic of Iran more than twenty years earlier. Unlike in Tehran, the martyrs’ faces were invisible. Nonexistent. Locked into a cult of personality, partial to outrageous murals of his image, the former Iraqi president must have felt that even the dead could overshadow him. But the rest of the city reminded me of Iran.

  One day, as I finished up an interview in northern Baghdad, in the Shia neighborhood of Kadhimiya, my attention was caught by some music nearby—Persian! Thrilled by that familiar melody, I hurried to see where it could be coming from. Fifteen feet away, Iranian pilgrims were flowing into the street, cameras over their shoulders and bottles of water in their arms. There were a few hundred people, men in black, veiled women. The fall of Saddam Hussein, a member of the Sunni minority known for his fear of Shiites, had opened up the route leading to the mausoleums of their beloved imams, which for a long time had been kept under strict surveillance. So, Iranians were rushing from everywhere—from Tehran, Shiraz, and even Isfahan—to bow down before the tomb of Imam Kadhim, buried here in this district of Baghdad. The most zealous crossed the border at night, by foot, and risked stepping on one of the land mines left behind from the war in the ’80s. They charged, heads lowered, as if rushing toward a rediscovered paradise. Their highly dangerous journey would lead them to Najaf, and then to Karbala, where Ali and Hussein, the most venerated of the Shiite saints, were buried.

  And then there was an unexpected encounter with Hossein Khomeini, the grandson of Imam Ruhollah Khomeini, the Father of the Islamic Republic. He, too, had made the trip from Iran to pray before these holy sites. But another reason, a more unusual one, had precipitated his trip to Iraq: an insane, curious desire to savor the rediscovered freedom hovering over Iraq after twenty-four years of a tyrannical regime. I crossed his path randomly, while visiting a young Iraqi Shiite cleric who had just returned from a long exile in Dubai. Now in their forties, the two friends shared a villa overlooking the Tigris. In that spacious home echoing with canary song, they spent their nights playing the tar and welcoming a motley array of former opponents of the Ba’ath Party: politicians, intellectuals, and human rights advocates. They all shared the same hatred for Saddam, but also an astonishing admiration for the American GIs. Seated cross-legged on his sofa, Hossein Khomeini gave me a few explanations between puffs on his Miami cigarettes.

  “As you know, Iranians are fond of freedo
m. An impossible dream, as long as religion and politics remain linked. If there is no way other than American intervention to obtain that freedom, I think that my people would be in favor of that solution. And I would be, too!”

  His speech reminded me immediately of the words of Montazeri’s son. The same outspokenness, the same dislike of the regime he had inherited. But Khomeini’s grandson was taking it a step further: in the same Iraq where, during his exile in the ’60s, his grandfather had proposed the famous velayat-e faqih, the “Guardianship of the Islamic Jurist,” which enshrined the primacy of religion over politics, Hossein Khomeini not only challenged this principle, but claimed to be ready to welcome the enemy’s tanks to Iran in order to put an end to it. Listening to him, I tried to imagine the scene: a succession of tanks overrunning Enghelab, the famous revolutionary road. It sounded like something from a spy novel and sent shivers down my spine. How would Mahmoud, the death-obsessed Basiji, react to such a scheme? Or even Niloufar, who was such a patriot that she would align herself with the clerics to save her country? Even the most dissident of my Iranian friends had always been reluctant to accept foreign intervention in their country. They maintained that the change had to come from within, not outside, Iran. My astonishment didn’t escape Hossein Khomeini.

  “Today,” he continued, “totalitarianism is eating away at Iran, as was the case in Iraq under Saddam … Since I came to Baghdad, I have noticed positive changes: the press is free, people are no longer afraid of speaking out, the Iraqis can breathe again. Their country is on the path to progress. It can’t be denied: all of that wouldn’t have been possible without the American-led intervention.”

  At these words, I felt a knot in my stomach. A burst of spasms, then another, shot through my guts. Was a Western offensive really the only recourse against a regime that oppressed its population? Could it really guarantee the establishment of a democratic system?

  “A lot of countries, France included, were opposed to the war. Even the UN was against it. Some wonder whether there isn’t a risk that American troops will turn into an occupying force,” I replied.

  “I disagree!” he shot back. “For me, they are forces of liberation, not occupation!”

  I knew exactly what he was referring to. Before him, defenders of the American invasion had relentlessly tried to sell that war by comparing it to the American landing in German-occupied France during World War II. My maternal grandfather, then a prisoner in enemy territory, owed them his life. But, in this context, Hossein Khomeini’s argument didn’t convince me at all. I completely understood his frustration with the absurd political system installed by his ancestor that was mercilessly stifling its people; at the same time, I wanted to believe, like Niloufar and so many others, in the possibility of change from within. Was it the growing influence of my Iranian identity? In my view, a foreign intervention would compromise Iran. Worse, it would open the country to American GIs, which would be opening the doors to hell. The human cost of a military operation would be colossal. I believed it would radicalize the government and destroy the rising tide still resisting the regime. After so many years of suffering, did Iranians really deserve such a fate? Was there no other solution to end this tyranny? In my head, the questions jostled around to the rhythm of my cramps. By the end of the interview, it had become clear to me: the honey and grilled chicken might finally be starting to ease the pain, but I was far from being cured of Iran Fever. In Iraq, I was more Iranian than some Iranians.

  I WASN’T TRAVELING across Mesopotamia on my own. At the beginning of February, I had reunited with my fiancé, Borzou, an American journalist of Iranian descent. We had met a year earlier, in Tehran, at the red carpet where Khatami was shaking hands with his guest of honor, Hamid Karzai. The first visit to Iran by an Afghan head of state since the fall of the Taliban regime.

  Living in the United States since the age of four, Borzou had left the comforts of a major American magazine after witnessing, in person, the attack against the Twin Towers in Manhattan, from his neighborhood in Brooklyn. While the United States shut itself away in its extreme paranoia, he headed for the Middle East to feel out the other side. His new life as an independent reporter fit into a suitcase: a satellite telephone, a flashlight, and a few wads of bills. This minimalism had charmed me immediately. Like him, I had traveled light during my first visit to Iran. Like him, I considered luggage an unnecessary burden.

  Together, we shared the same neurotic attraction to that region of the world, a predilection for complicated situations and a good dose of obstinacy. After Tehran, Kabul, and Baghdad, we rapidly became inseparable. It was also thanks to him that I had pulled myself out of my bed in Tehran and dragged my skeletal body to Iraq, in the hope of vanquishing the Iran Fever. I had called Iran every name under the sun, convinced I would be forever chained to this country that was eating away at my stomach. But he succeeded in pulling me up from the abyss.

  Like me, Borzou had a particular curiosity for Shiite mullahs. In his miniature suitcase, he had brought a reference book, The Shi’is of Iraq, which quickly became our guide to Baghdad’s twists and turns. In it, Yitzhak Nakash writes in detail of the Iran-Iraq border, an unavoidable passage along the Shiite pilgrim route that for centuries has united the two countries, spiritually and geographically, from Tehran to Baghdad. Closed under Saddam, it had just been reopened and would become our path of choice during numerous trips to and from Iraq. We followed in the footsteps of countless Shiites.

  Since the fall of Baghdad, Iraqi clerics exiled in neighboring Iran had returned to the country in droves. The Shiite awakening of Najaf, the Arab holy city, intrigued as much as it worried Qom, the Persian one. Unlike Khomeini’s grandson, who was enamored of Americanism, the conservative mullahs, eager to preserve the supremacy of Qom over the Shiite community in the region, saw in this new chapter of Iraqi history a golden opportunity to regain their influence in the neighboring country. To such an extent that, years later, the United States would bitterly observe that they had given Iraq to the Iranians.

  Back in Tehran, a few weeks after the fall of Baghdad, we set out for Qom, the capital of chadors, to meet with Ayatollah Haeri. The ultraconservative was said to be the mentor of Muqtada al-Sadr, a young anti-American Iraqi cleric who served the Iraqi city of Kufa, near Najaf. We were driven by a desire to better understand what was brewing between the two holy cities. Like me, Borzou had been stripped of his Iranian press credentials, but we thought the risk moderate, since we had not covered Iranian news in a long time.

  We had just finished our interview with Ayatollah Haeri when our cell phone rang. Trying to save money, Borzou and I were sharing a phone.

  “Hello,” I answered.

  “Put Borzou on,” said the man on the other end.

  “Who’s asking for him?” I replied.

  I knew that voice. I hadn’t been able to erase it from my memory.

  “Come on, Khanum Minoui, don’t play dumb. You know perfectly well who this is.”

  Mr. Fingers! My Iraqi escape hadn’t succeeded in making him forget about me. Except this time he wasn’t calling for me. It was Borzou he was interested in. Hesitantly, I passed him the phone. I would have liked to save Borzou from Cerberus’s claws, spare him the troubles I had suffered. Borzou took the phone. I saw him nod and heard him say yes a few times. Then he hung up, signaling to me that we had to get back to Tehran as soon as possible. The maimed man was in a hurry to see him. A routine visit, he had said. Words that rang familiar in my head.

  When he came back from that meeting, Borzou, who usually had enough energy for the both of us, collapsed onto a chair in my living room. Mr. Fingers had greeted him in person, except that he was using a different name from the one I knew him by. In an icy tone, he had accused Borzou of traveling to Qom without a press pass, reproached him for breaking the country’s laws, and then formally forbade him from writing anything. “Understand? Forbidden!” he had hammered home menacingly. Before ending his sermon, he had insisted
that Borzou promise never to reveal to anyone what was said in that conversation. Of course, Borzou did the exact opposite. Knowing that we shared the same hell gave us the strength to resist; the waves of Iran Fever seemed easier to combat. We both agreed to publish our interview with Ayatollah Haeri at the same time—his in English, mine in French. A few days later, the phone rang again, “Unknown Caller” on the display. I knew right away what it was about. Mr. Fingers was furious. He wanted to see me immediately. And in a new location, “the stone building,” in the north of Tehran.

  The building, protected by a wall of white and gray stones, looked like a prison. I had to enter through a thick steel gate, which closed right behind me. Later, I learned that the sinister-looking structure, seized during the revolution from a Bahá’í businessman who owned the Coca-Cola factory, was one of the numerous buildings that housed the intelligence service. In the reception area, an assistant was standing behind the glass. He signaled for me to slide my passport and cell phone through the opening and immediately locked them in a small safe. I pretended this was normal. My heart was beating wildly.

  They told me to sit in the waiting room. Staring down at me, portraits of Khomeini and Khamenei were my only company. Hung right in the middle of the main wall, they communicated something Orwellian that sent a shiver down my spine. An hour went by. Two hours … I was starting to wonder if I would ever get out of that hole when a door creaked open.