I'm Writing You from Tehran

by Delphine Minoui

  As I amassed my collection, I noticed that the prices at Elyas’s were almost double those at Moses Baba’s. The day I mentioned this to him, Elyas jumped out of his seat and spared me the usual haggling, offering me the tray I’d had my eye on at half the price. A week later, I recounted the anecdote to Moses Baba, who burst out laughing: “That’s my brother! He’s refused to talk to me for years. I’ve tried everything to reconcile with him, but he hates me.” Since then, we’d laughed about this brother who was so bitter that he was ready to sacrifice profits to compete with the only family he had left in the country. “When faced with someone who’s trying to do you harm, laughter is an unbeatable weapon!” Moses Baba philosophized; he hoped that, with time, the brotherly tensions would diminish, a motto he preached among his small community, and which he further emphasized when he tirelessly brandished his jerry cans, thumbing his nose at the regime’s extremists.

  But the Iran of Ahmadinejad was not the Iran of Khatami. Seeing the two vessels dancing above his head, my heart skipped a beat.

  “Moses Baba, is that really smart?” I whispered, discreetly signaling for him to conceal his illicit potion under the counter.

  Once Ahmadinejad took power, not one day went by without the local press reporting the umpteenth outcry against the “Zionist entity.” The new president had made Israel his obsession. Paying tribute to the late Ayatollah Khomeini’s way of speaking, he strove to compare this small, controversial piece of land to a “cancer” that had to be “eradicated” at any cost. Once more, Iran’s Jewish community felt vulnerable. And the worried eyes of the planet turned again toward Iran. That day, it was an article on this very topic that had brought me to Moses Baba’s shop.

  “One more threat won’t change the face of the world!” sneered the old antiquarian, clinging to his jerry cans.

  Then he signaled to Ahmad, his young Afghan refugee assistant, to give me a glass.

  “We Jews, we’re like fish swimming in a net. When everything is going well, the Iranians leave the net in the water. When things are going badly, they take it out.”

  I recognized his talent for metaphor, symbolizing the way in which the Islamic Republic used the country’s Jews as scapegoats as soon as tensions with Israel mounted. Head in his memories, he continued:

  “You remember the thirteen Jews who were arrested for ‘spying for Israel.’ Some of them were barely sixteen years old! Months of imprisonment, only to finally be freed in exchange for forced televised confessions … And that was in 1999, under Khatami, friend to all Iranians.”

  But Ahmadinejad was going even further. On top of his impassioned diatribes against Israel, he was a Holocaust denier, believing it was a “myth,” one he contested in no uncertain terms. An Iranian journalist in exile had even spread the rumor that Jews in Iran would soon have to wear a star. When I brought up that rumor to Moses Baba, he finally resigned himself to putting down his jerry cans. But it wasn’t a gesture of fear; it was, conversely, the expression of a man in a hurry to “reestablish” the truth, as he said.

  “Let’s be clear: all you have to do is watch Iranian TV to see that the Jews always play the role of the bad guy. Thieves, crooks, spies, to name a few. At school, when I was young, children would refuse to drink water from my glass. For them, I was najes, ‘impure.’ Even today, some customers avoid shaking my hand! Obviously, this social discrimination has strengthened since the revolution. But for them to want us to wear distinguishing symbols … The regime isn’t that crazy! Those are myths spread by government opponents living abroad.”

  Though he was quick to ridicule the regime, he refused overly hasty categorizations. In Iran, the paradox was that the small Jewish community, though stigmatized, benefited from certain inalienable “rights”: they had a representative in Parliament; they had schools, synagogues, a hospital. They could even produce wine, forbidden by Islam, for religious use, on the condition that they be discreet.

  “I’ll tell you a secret. If they catch me with my jugs of alcohol, the worst they’ll do is call me a dirty Jew. But for Ahmad, it’s guaranteed prison! Isn’t that right, Ahmad?”

  Seated on the stairs leading to the stockroom, the young Afghan nodded.

  “Imagine: the Afghan refugees don’t even have the right to buy a car, or send their kids to school! And we’re not even talking about the Bahá’í, hounded by the regime; or the Sunnite minority, denied even mosques.”

  Eyes riveted to the portrait of Khamenei hanging on the wall, a “decoration” imposed on all shopkeepers, Moses Baba murmured:

  “My wife begs me every year to join her in Israel. The truth is that even under surveillance, I feel at home here. Period!”

  I was amazed that he didn’t practice the “loose-leaf” technique, as those of his religion called it. It was a well-known strategy: a plane ride to the airport in Istanbul; a visa affixed to a piece of paper separate from the passport, to circumvent the ban on traveling to the “occupied territories”; and an incognito trip to Israel during summer vacation! He told me he had no interest, that he didn’t see the point in all that secrecy. For nothing in the world would he give up, even for a few days, the taste of pomegranate juice or the scent of saffron. He celebrated Nowruz, the Persian New Year, with the same enthusiasm as Passover. Slowly, he took a jerry can and filled his glass with his bootleg drink. Then he raised it to the sky, saying he wanted to salute Shushtar, the site of the Tomb of Daniel; Hamadan, the site of the Tomb of Esther. And Cyrus the Great, who, according to the Torah, freed the Jews from captivity when he conquered Babylon in 539 B.C. He wanted to celebrate Iranian history and Jewish history. His was a bond that neither Ahmadinejad nor any other president would ever manage to break. And in a fit of hysterical laughter, he exclaimed:

  “Going to Israel, to do what? I don’t speak Hebrew. It’s more expensive. For me, Iran is more tender even than a mother. It’s my country!”

  IN FACT, IN the Iran of Ahmadinejad, the stars didn’t land on the Jews. They targeted students. On campuses, medieval sanctions rapidly put in place began stifling the slightest critical thought. A disruptive student, a star. A disagreeable slogan, two stars. A sign of dissent, three stars. Once you had four stars printed in black and white in your file, which was updated regularly by the disciplinary committee, it was automatic expulsion, for “violation of national security.” Professors weren’t spared in the hunting down of critical thought. If you were even a little too talkative, you could be fired on the spot, forced into early retirement. In the coming months, the scene grew even darker. Young people were arrested, their newspapers censored, and their friends threatened with the same fate if they, too, dared rebel against the new regulations. In the name of Islamicizing the curriculum, some courses were revised, others eliminated. In this attempt to castrate Iran, thought control was paired with a reconquest of the public sphere. One summer night, the new director of the Amirkabir University of Technology bulldozed the student association headquarters in order to replace it with a prayer room. With the disappearance of that symbol of intellectual ferment, an entire facet of student memory was erased.

  At the same time, the Basijis were earning their stripes little by little, once again granting themselves the right to hunt down “poorly veiled” girls. And to mark their territory, they reburied the bodies of some of the martyrs of the Iran-Iraq War on university campuses. The full-scale reforms rapidly overflowed into other spaces. In Tehran, a Quran reading competition was added to rich music programming that dated back to Iran’s most open period. In Qom, a Sufi lodge was razed to make way for a parking lot. For those who had witnessed the “cultural revolution” of 1979, this new era reawakened terrifying memories. A veritable machine to crush modern Iran had been set in motion. In the name of an outside threat, sometimes American, sometimes Israeli, Ahmadinejad knowingly declared war on his own people. Each day, he painted the country blacker, a permanent national mourning that stifled absolutely everything, even laughter. After throwing the last buds of the
Iranian Spring into prison, he was stealing, from every single Iranian, the desire to breathe. To live.

  AMID THIS NEW climate of terror, death came knocking at my door. Over the years, I had resigned myself to being in close contact with it. I no longer kept track of the number of dissident students I’d written about who had disappeared. But those stories were remote enough for me to maintain a certain separation from the daily tragedies. Until that gloomy night when I received a desperate call from an actor friend. On the line, he mumbled that he wanted to tell me a secret, the kind of secret you can’t say over the phone. I told him to come over right away. I was at home. When he arrived, his face was so pale, I immediately understood the gravity of the situation.

  In a trembling voice, he murmured:

  “Do you remember Ardeshir?”

  Ardeshir, the young actor who swore only by the theater of the absurd. The mischievous tightrope walker, hero of the Book of Kings. A name you don’t forget! Right away, I imagined he’d been arrested. Ever since our crazy night at Niloufar’s, interrupted by the morality police, I had followed his courageous progression through the twists and turns of Iranian censorship. After The Blacks, by Jean Genet, and then a few failed attempts to put on even more risqué plays, he had abandoned the stage for the film set. The seventh art was better paid. It also lent itself to greater flexibility. In theater, as a matter of course, you submitted the script to a screening committee, which then had to approve the final rehearsal before the first show. Once up and running, the play remained at the mercy of a raid by the Islamic morality police, who could cancel it without warning. In one minute, months of rehearsals and years of personal investment could go up in smoke. With cinema, it was different. All you had to do was present a phony screenplay, then shoot the “real” film, while saving a few politically correct sketches to shoot during impromptu visits from the censor. And that was it! Since the revolution, Iranian cinema had even benefited from this subterfuge, to the point of gaining real international renown.

  “Cinema, that’s just it,” muttered our friend.

  Cinema. A few months earlier, Ardeshir, at the age of twenty-eight, had finally finished his first feature-length drama. The end of filming coincided with Ashura, the annual period of national “mourning,” commemorating the martyr Imam Hossein. Despite the restraint imposed during that Shiite celebration, Ardeshir’s friends had convinced him to organize a small party at his apartment in the Tajrish neighborhood. The party was well under way. There were sandwiches, music, a few refreshments, and a password to enter. Very late in the night, plainclothesmen knocked on the door. They said they were the police and demanded that someone open the door. At first, Ardeshir and his partners in crime resisted. They simply turned off the music. But the knocks resumed with greater intensity. The night visitors started to break down the door. The guests panicked. The most acrobatic among them rushed to the balcony and straddled the railing, in order to jump onto a tree and run to the end of the garden. Ardeshir followed suit. He knew that gymnastic maneuver by heart, having practiced it during other parties. But his apartment was on the fourth floor, and when he jumped, the branch gave way under his feet. The fall was fatal.

  “His friends immediately brought him to the hospital. The doctors did everything to try to stop the bleeding. Twelve hours later, he died of his injuries,” added his actor friend.

  I was speechless. My tears had swallowed up my words. For days, the incident invaded my thoughts. Even today, I still think about it often. And I try to reconstruct in my head exactly what happened that night, that fatal instant when someone passes seamlessly from life into death. Music blasting, bursts of laughter, undulating dance moves, the scent of stolen freedom. Then the militia showing up, the knocks on the door, the police entering, the guests’ pleas, the officers who won’t hear any of it, who won’t accept any concession, not even a few bills slid into a palm. Finally, the panic, the young people hiding under beds, others who lock themselves in the bathroom or take shelter on the balcony. And Ardeshir, who jumps onto a branch. How many other times had he managed that leap? Often enough that he thought he was invincible. Through practice, it had become a game, a game of heads or tails. And that last time, the branch hadn’t held. Ardeshir the acrobat had fallen. Into the void. Death. The end of a dream. Murdered innocence.

  DEATH, LIFE. Life versus death. As darkness gradually bled into our daily lives, punctuated by the new president’s ominous warnings, a man of rare daring waged a relentless battle against the growing pile of funeral shrouds. That man was Emadeddin Baghi, the former Islamist revolutionary and a longtime journalist friend, an Iranian who never ceased to amaze me with his courage and clairvoyance. After three years in prison, he had regained his freedom in 2003. Banned from politics, he threw himself into social activism by launching a small association that defended the rights of prisoners. He was one of the few people to fight against capital punishment, another growing scourge plaguing Ahmadinejad’s Iran.

  I absolutely wanted to see him again. His daring was so precious in these particularly somber hours. His office on Haft-e Tir Square had closed a long time ago. He had been forced to put it up for bail and then ended up relocating to the top of a tower on Jordan Street, one of numerous high-rises obstructing Tehran’s sky. The window of his new office looked out onto an improbable view: the courtyard of the “stone building,” the stronghold of Mr. Fingers and other surveillance officials. I don’t know by what coincidence, or coercion, he’d found himself in such close proximity to the intelligence service. Iran was a mountain of indecipherable paradoxes and surprises. I held myself back from asking him, focused as I was on understanding what force enabled him to keep fighting for those condemned to the gallows when he was condemned to his own troubles.

  “Life is like the roots of a tree. Everything else is branches. If you take care to water the roots, only good will grow out of them. In other words, if we find a solution for capital punishment, there will be other opportunities for change.”

  Here was his usual wisdom. For him, there weren’t only problems; there were also solutions. On his desk, the files accumulated, each more dreadful than the last: a dissident in solitary confinement, a man sentenced to life for ill-gotten wealth, an inmate cut off from his children. And all those condemned to death by hanging or public stoning for terrorism, homicide, even adultery. Several hundred every year in Iran, known for being among the five countries on the planet administering capital punishment most frequently, including to minors—with the numbers noticeably increasing since Ahmadinejad’s arrival. As soon as he heard about a new case, Baghi would go to work finding the person a lawyer, helping the family, alerting the media when necessary. It was such meticulous work. Inch by inch. As a careful observer of his country, he acted from the belief that capital punishment was an act of violence against society as a whole. Abolishing it would ease tensions across the board.

  I was curious why he had chosen advocacy as his means of combat, over politics or journalism.

  “I don’t have a choice. It’s the only space left to me.” Launched in autumn 2004, his new paper, Jomhouriyat (Republican), had been banned after only two weeks. The tightening of censorship had also kept him from publishing his latest work, The Right to Life, in which he, a sincere believer and theologian, strove to show that Sharia, Islamic law, was not incompatible with an equitable system of justice—one without capital punishment. For writing articles denouncing that barbaric practice, among other reasons, he had spent three years in prison. But far from breaking him, his prison experience had taught him lessons about his country, its idiosyncrasies and its faults.

  “In jail, I spent a lot of time with common criminals. I lived with thieves, drug addicts, petty criminals. We intellectuals have the unfortunate tendency to believe that the rights of man are restored when one of us is freed. But we represent only a minuscule number of prisoners.”

  Spending three years in a completely different environment had, he said, opened his e
yes to the breadth of the gap between the Iranian intelligentsia and the rest of society. In his view, it was this same gap that had brought about the recent victory of Ahmadinejad, with his populist slogans and promises to the poor.

  “The reformers have been too focused on abstract notions like democracy, or even freedom. They should have been doing social work. That’s what I’m trying to rectify today. In my own way.”

  His cell phone, atop a pile of documents, started to ring. Baghi picked up. The call was from an inmate at Karaj Prison, on the outskirts of Tehran. Accused of embezzling funds and condemned to ten years in prison, he had heard of Baghi’s organization and was calling for help. Baghi scribbled a few lines in his notebook. In his soft, calm voice, he promised to find the man a lawyer. Hanging up, he fixed his gaze on the photo of a bird with folded wings nestled at the bottom of a series of rungs. The poster for his organization.

  “There are a lot of prisoners who have no legal defense,” he explained. “The majority of them don’t even know that they have a right to one. The fact that they call us at all is already a victory. I am convinced that slogans are not what will help us achieve democracy. Sometimes, a simple action is worth much more than countless words chanted at the top of our lungs.”

  Baghi was a true freedom fighter. While doors were closing one after another, he had turned his organization into the ultimate escape from the censor. Accompanying me to the door, he told me he had a small favor to ask. He had heard about a book by Albert Camus, on capital punishment. He wanted me to help him get a copy, which he hoped to have translated into Persian. I didn’t hesitate. I agreed on the spot. You don’t refuse that kind of favor. Unwittingly, without thinking it through, I was shifting subtly from journalism to activism.