“Here you are!”
Mr. Fingers was standing in the doorway. Icy gaze, tight lips—still the same. He signaled for me to follow him into a small room with curtains turned yellow with age. I recognized my file on his wooden desk. It had grown much larger since my first summons. My interrogator didn’t waste time on useless formalities. He got right to the point.
“How dare you write that Muqtada al-Sadr is Iranian!”
With his good hand, he brandished a page from the file. I recognized my most recent article, annotated in Persian.
“I never wrote that he was Iranian, just that he had an Iranian mentor.”
“That’s not what the translation says.”
“I met him in Kufa. He didn’t speak a word of Farsi. I can confirm for you that he is Iraqi.”
“So why did you write the opposite?”
“I promise you, that’s not what I wrote.”
“And yet that’s what I read, right here, in the margin.”
“There must be a problem with the translation.”
“You’ve become rather insolent since you started spending time with Mr. Borzou!”
What did my private life have to do with an erroneous interpretation of my article? What was he insinuating with that inappropriate remark? That he knew everything about our relationship, which was automatically illicit in his eyes because we weren’t married?
“Your accusations are unfair!” I threw back.
He slammed his fist on the table.
“You write lies, and you do it without even having a press pass!”
He launched into a rapid monologue of accusations. In the torrent of words, I recognized traitor, liar, illegal—not much more. In fact, I understood only one out of every two or three words. I wanted to avoid giving in; I clung to my journalistic training. I took out my notebook, the only shield I had left. I wanted to copy down his sentences, to have them translated later in order to understand exactly what he was accusing me of. The more he spoke, the more I wrote.
“This isn’t France!” he barked.
Like a robot, I continued to take notes.
“You really are obsessed with writing everything down! Didn’t your friend Borzou inform you of my order? He is forbidden to write.”
He said the name “Borzou” in a particularly disdainful tone. I was beside myself.
“He told me only that he had promised not to reveal any details of your conversation,” I replied in an exasperated tone that came dangerously close to sarcasm.
Mr. Fingers did not appreciate this. He yelled:
“Do you know that I can charge you with lying and breaking the law?”
I swallowed. Getting ahold of myself, I repeated with resolve that I had never written that Muqtada was Iranian. I refused to cave. He was tearing into me, this man who had already destroyed my stomach. Pen in hand, I continued to fill the pages of my notebook.
He hit the table again:
“That’s enough!”
I raised my head. His face was scarlet. I said nothing. I was stunned. His voice echoed off the walls. I didn’t know what had compelled me to provoke him in this way.
“Next time, I’ll see you in court!” he yelled.
And with his maimed hand, he showed me the door.
* * *
I met Borzou in a café right afterward. He was waiting for me, worried.
“What do we do now?” I asked, after telling him everything.
Neither of us had the answer. But could there be one, in a country with so many uncrossable, ever-changing lines? We went to knock on the door of Mohammad Seifzadeh, one of the few lawyers still walking free. In Iran, even the lawyers end up in prison. Seated around cups of tea accompanied by nougat from Isfahan, Seifzadeh repeated a paradox that we already knew: there is no law, despite the imposed restrictions, forbidding anyone from writing without a press pass.
“Write! Write!” he insisted. “It’s the only way of saving what little remains of our besieged freedom of expression.”
His audacity impressed us. He had defended Shirin Ebadi, the recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize, during her arrest; he had seen far worse cases than ours. It was clear that he was trying to reassure us. He told us we had no reason to panic. That, after all, we had alternate passports—an “escape route,” he called it. That he would protect us in case of an emergency. But we felt vulnerable. The next day, we went to see Mashallah Shamsolvaezin, a pillar of the reformist press and the head of the Association of Iranian Journalists. A pipe in his mouth, he received us with open arms, laughing at our fears.
“What are you afraid of? You make me smile. If you stop writing, who will do it in your place? Who will tell people what’s happening in Iran?”
He knew what he was talking about. Since the Tehran Spring, he’d lost count of the number of shuttered newspapers, jailed writer friends, exiled colleagues. He, too, had known the coldness of Iranian prisons, but without ever renouncing the struggle, despite having endured the worst humiliations. He told us how, during his last stint in jail, the judge had even fabricated charges of illicit relations between him and his secretary.
“When they can’t manage to break you professionally, they break you personally.”
Borzou and I looked at each other. There was no need to say more. In a country of forbidden love, if we didn’t want to stop writing, we had to keep our private life hidden.
“Freedom comes at a price. Each of us must find his own way of negotiating the lowest cost,” Shamsolvaezin murmured by way of both advice and a good-bye.
Back at my place, we sank into the sofa, nestled against each other. By merely spending a night under the same roof, we were committing a “crime” that Mr. Fingers could use against us however he liked. And you, my absent grandfather, what would you have done in our place? Among the dusty cassette tapes salvaged from one of your old cardboard boxes that Mamani had kept, I picked out an album by Shahyar Ghanbari, one of the numerous exiled pop stars living in Los Angeles since the revolution. He sang, “The blue of the sea, forbidden! / The desire to see, forbidden! / Love between two fish, forbidden!”
Lulled by the melody, we were nodding off when the telephone rang. It was Borzou’s mother. Where she was—Chicago—the sun had only just risen. With the time difference, she always called us around dinner. When she asked for news, at first we kept quiet about our troubles, but since the walls had ears anyway, we ended up telling her everything. She listened carefully, then exclaimed without the slightest hesitation: “Get a sigheh,” she said. “A temporary marriage.” I shrugged. But she was right. To protect oneself from the scorching strikes of the regime, it was better to stop playing with fire. I had denigrated the sigheh so much, but this “secret pact” would turn out to be the key to my survival.
* * *
The next day, I wore neither a crown of flowers nor a white scarf. Hastily, I called Laya, an Iranian friend. She came over right away while Borzou went to the pastry shop. She would serve as our witness, and the sweets as our festive decoration. We went to a matchmaker mullah discreetly recommended by an Iranian female colleague. He was located near Towhid Square, not far from the city center. “Don’t worry, he knows his trade by heart,” she had assured me. A few days earlier, he had married one of her Muslim acquaintances to a Zoroastrian from California for two weeks. The sigheh, a made-to-order marriage.
“What can I do for you?” the mullah mumbled upon our arrival.
It hadn’t been hard to find his address. “Marriages/Divorces,” a sign written in Persian letters, announced his well-established business. Recently, an epidemic of divorces had struck Tehran. For a lot of rebellious Iranian women, who moved directly from the parental home to the conjugal home, it had become the final step in obtaining the freedom they dreamed of. And so this was what the cleric imagined had brought us to him.
“We’re here for a temporary marriage,” whispered Borzou, avoiding the taboo word sigheh.
The mullah sat up in his armchair
, intrigued by our request.
“For how long?” he asked.
We remained quiet. We had thought of everything except the length of time.
“One week? Three months? A year? Four years?” he continued.
“Uh, let’s say two years,” Borzou replied.
His Persian, which he had spoken growing up, even in the United States, was much better than mine. But a strong American accent betrayed him.
The cleric turned toward Laya:
“Where are they from?” he asked.
“From here, and elsewhere,” she replied.
“All right, sit down!”
Our case seemed to amuse as much as intrigue him.
He solemnly put on his glasses and then turned toward me.
“May God preserve you, are you a widow?” he asked me.
At my side, Laya translated his questions for me.
“No,” I replied.
“Divorced?” he continued.
“Not that, either!”
In response to my astonishment at his questions, he added:
“You mean to say that you’ve never been married?”
“No,” I replied.
“Never?”
“No.”
He leaned toward Laya, murmured a few incomprehensible words, started flipping through the pages of a book as if searching for a miracle solution, then crossed his arms, pensive. Embarrassed, Laya whispered in my ear:
“I think there’s a problem.”
“What?”
“A woman can’t enter into a sigheh unless she’s a widow or divorced. Normally, the condition is that she has already consummated a marriage, if you know what I mean.”
I saw perfectly what she was trying to say. Since my discussion with Mehdi, the leather jacket–wearing mullah, the temporary marriage held no secrets for me. I also knew, thanks to the reappearance of your secret wife, Marie, that there were a thousand and one possible arrangements to seal this pseudoreligious pact.
“So tell him I was married before, if that will reassure him.”
But it would take more than that to convince the matchmaker mullah: he wanted written proof of my “divorce” and the presence of my father, or at least his written authorization.
“No document, no sigheh,” stated the mullah.
I turned toward Borzou. In this maze of rules, I felt I had exhausted every resource.
“Certainly there must be a solution,” said Borzou.
The mullah was unmoved. He chewed on the frames of his glasses, watching us out of the corner of his eye. After a pause, he put his glasses back on and said, an eyebrow raised:
“What are you ready to give in exchange for a sigheh?”
Borzou and I glanced at each other again. I let him respond.
“Fifty dollars,” he said.
Fifty dollars was a fifth of the average monthly salary.
The mullah’s face suddenly relaxed.
“Okay, we’ll find a way to marry your friends,” he said to Laya.
We breathed a long sigh. So, it was a simple matter of money!
Looking very serious, he took out a sheet of paper from the bottom of a drawer. He stapled our two photos to it and meticulously copied a few phrases from the Quran, having us repeat them after him. Then he took out adhesive tape. After covering up the Quranic verses, he turned toward me:
“It’s so as not to tarnish the words of God … during times of impurity.”
I watched him append his final seal below our signatures. I didn’t recognize his name in it. This man clearly marched to the beat of his own drum. My astonishment didn’t escape him:
“I’m not the real mullah. I’m just an intermediary, working behind the scenes!”
We opened the box of sweets. Mullah or not, we had to celebrate our love visa before its expiration date. With the gleaming eyes of a glutton, the Quranic charlatan took a cream puff. Then he raised his head toward Laya. This time, she was the one being gobbled up by his eyes. When we got up to leave, he signaled for her to stay. He said that he had a secret to tell her. For her ears only. We waited for her at the entrance. A few minutes later, Laya joined us, looking pale.
“Everything okay?” I asked her.
“He offered me … a sigheh!”
ONE YEAR LATER, on the day of our “real” marriage, July 31, 2004, you were the only one missing. Faithful to our convictions, Borzou and I had opted for a civil marriage, in the middle of Normandy. At dinner, the guests’ tables bore the names of the cities we had traveled through together: Tehran, Qom, Kabul, Herat, Baghdad, Fallujah, Kirkuk, Najaf, Samarra. The moon was our host, full and luminous. And Iran, our guest of honor. Before the meal, we kissed beneath two candy canes, according to the Persian custom, so that sweetness would guide our path. Laya surprised us by coming. In her red velvet dress, she enchanted us with a Sufi dance during the aperitif. For dinner, there were dishes from the East and the West, champagne, and bursts of laughter. A musician friend from Bandar Abbas crooned the melodies of Persian Gulf fishermen. Even Mamani had taken off her Medea mask. In the middle of the meal, she suddenly stood up. She put one foot in front of the other, snapping her fingers enthusiastically. Then, with her whole body, despite the burden of her years, she started to dance. Her face, normally so somber, glowed with the effect of half a glass of red wine. She laughed as she lit up the dance floor. My French friends couldn’t believe it—I had poisoned them with stories of my killjoy grandmother. And I imagined you, somewhere up above, or else behind the waves, smiling at it all.
But a civil ceremony was worth nothing in the eyes of Iran. Before taking the plane back to Tehran, we still had to clear one last hurdle, this time at the Iranian embassy. Hassan Ferechtian, a doctor of theology accredited by the regime, greeted us at the first floor of the Centre Culturel Iranien, behind the Jardin du Luxembourg. I was wearing a white headscarf; Borzou, a cream-colored suit. According to the existing custom, Hassan Ferechtian recited a few verses of the Quran and issued us a marriage certificate in a burgundy folder. Once the formalities were over with, he handed us a gift: 400 Questions and Answers to Better Understand Islam, a book of his that had recently been published in France. But he wanted to seal our union on a more romantic note. He turned toward Borzou and asked:
“Do you know Florent Pagny?”
“Floran who?” Borzou replied, staring at me inquisitively.
“Florent Pagny, the French singer?” I repeated.
I wasn’t sure that I had heard correctly.
“Yes, Florent Pagny,” Ferechtian insisted.
Hands on the table, he smiled at us:
“The marriage contract is a formality. Administrative paperwork. The important thing is to love each other. To love is to take and to give. To nurture the flame … In one of his songs, the French singer Florent Pagny says it much better than I can. So, here is a bit of advice: hurry and buy his CD.”
Another Iranian paradox! He and the impostor mullah represented the clashing of two worlds. Touched by his ode to love, we took his advice. With Allah’s blessing and Florent Pagny’s album in our luggage, we had been immunized; we were ready to take on Iran once again.
IN TEHRAN, OUR Iranian honeymoon was abruptly cut short. At the Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance, our requests for press credentials were once again met with refusal. I was enraged to be subjected to such a sanction. I felt Iran Fever digging into my stomach again. Through much insistence, I managed to secure a meeting at the Foreign Media Department. “Other journalists before you agreed to do us a few favors. Take it or leave it,” murmured the head officer, adding, “Sorry. There’s nothing I can do for you.” His response was clear, at least. Ours, too. To escape Iran’s diktats, our only recourse was to go back to the other side of the border and settle in Iraq for good. It wasn’t the best moment. Two weeks after our Normandy nuptials, our French colleagues Christian Chesnot and Georges Malbrunot had been kidnapped on their way to Najaf, in the middle of the “Sunni Triangle,” a
Sunni-Arab insurgency stronghold. Kidnappings for ransom were becoming common, and booby-trapped cars exploded without warning. At that time, Shiites and Sunnis were fighting for power against a backdrop of death squads and targeted assassinations. A post-Saddam conflict of unprecedented violence. In Iraq, there was no need for an alarm clock. The first bomb of the day always went off at around seven in the morning. In Iraq, you could die on any street corner, at any moment; it was like a game of Russian roulette. But this war wasn’t mine. I lived in it, but with a certain detachment. The fear that gnawed away at me didn’t have the same texture as my Iranian anxieties. At night, I found something like comfort in letting myself be lulled by the purring of the generator providing our electricity. It was a change from the staccato that punctuated my Tehran nights, when passing strangers seeking to intimidate me sent stones ricocheting off my shutters.
In the winter of 2004, I was set on going back to Tehran for a few weeks. A personal visit, so I could give Mamani a hug and see my friends again. Love for a country can’t be controlled. On the other hand, the Iranian intelligence service excelled at control. To perfection. I was waiting for my luggage in front of the baggage carousel in the large arrivals area when the loudspeakers spat out my name. A metallic voice ordered me to go to a vestibule. Behind a desk, a man in a black suit was there, waiting for me. Last name? First name? Age? Address? Again the same questions. Like a robot, I responded to the interrogation without batting an eye. Over time, I had gained confidence. My interlocutor then handed me an “invitation.” The letter included a telephone number and instructed me to contact the “president’s office” to arrange a meeting. I deduced that this was the intelligence service’s latest tactic. Back home, I called my editor in chief. I wanted the secret police to hear that I was purposely informing Paris. That I was no longer as vulnerable as before. My composure caught them off guard. Later, when I contacted the number I’d been given, I was told that the interview had been canceled.
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