Once Mamani had gone back downstairs, I immediately took out my black suitcase, the one I usually carried with me when I traveled, and filled it with my letters and notebooks. Now I needed to find a way to get that precious archive out of the country. I was more and more eroded by paranoia. I saw spies everywhere. On every street corner. Behind every door. Behind every wall with flaking paint. My friends didn’t know what to tell me; they were also walled up in their own daily anxieties. “I don’t even dare make love to my husband anymore,” one of them whispered to me, confiding her fear that an official might be hidden behind the curtains. There remained only the French embassy, the final resort in this impasse. A kind friend at the embassy offices offered to send my bag via diplomatic pouch. I accepted without hesitation.
I waited for Grandmother to fall asleep in front of the TV before I snuck out. I didn’t want her to see my suitcase. Then I rolled my bag along the jub, the little canal that ran the length of your street. When I crossed paths with three passersby on the way, I startled and sped up. Once on Pasdaran Avenue, I hopped in a taxi. Reaching the embassy had never seemed so perilous. The building was downtown, on Neauphle-le-Château Street, a name that was easy to remember, the same as Imam Khomeini’s residence in exile. All the way there, I felt like a fugitive, constantly watched. I trembled at the sound of motorcycles. I lowered my eyes when I saw a beard. Fear is a lead weight when it pursues you. Greeting me, my diplomat friend smiled with compassion. We exchanged only a few words. I was in a rush to leave again as soon as possible.
The next day, first thing, I took a plane back to Paris. Before I left, Mamani hugged me on the doorstep, telling me she would be awaiting my return, and adding that she wanted me to bring her back some antiwrinkle cream. That’s how she always made her good-byes. Once again, I took refuge in a lie. I agreed without batting an eye. I feared that she would be abandoned anew to the void to which you had condemned her. I lied to myself, too: the idea that I would never come back was unbearable. When one loves, one forbids oneself from letting love end. When one loves, there is no last time. So, I took off, leaving my apartment as it was: sheets on the bed, towel drying on the balcony, a few chicken skewers in the freezer. Still today, years later, Mamani chides me about those wasted skewers.
At the airport, I wasn’t hassled. Not at passport control. Not at the gate. I figured that Mr. Fingers and his shadow men were relieved at my departure. Through intimidation, they had won the battle. A journalist outside the border causes less trouble. A journalist who resigns herself to suffering in silence makes less noise. On the plane, I slept the entire way. The trip had done me in.
* * *
A few days later, I received a call from the Quai d’Orsay. My precious suitcase had arrived in Paris. The receiving area for diplomatic pouches was in a building on the street adjacent to the main entrance. I went through a large iron door. An old reflex, I jumped at hearing it close behind me. Would I ever learn to live normally again? A little rattled, I gave a number to the attendant. He disappeared into a corridor before reappearing a minute later.
“It’s a black suitcase?”
“Excuse me?”
“I said: a black wheeled suitcase. That’s the one you’re here for?”
“Uh, yes!”
The small conveyor belt started up automatically. It was cold, the same cold as at the Tehran airport. After a few seconds, my bag appeared. Stuffed like a fattened goose, pregnant with my notebooks. Ten years of reporting. Ten years of my life in a suitcase. It was all that was left for me of your country.
“Thank you!” I said clumsily.
“No problem,” replied the official, accompanying me to the door.
And I left, pulling my luggage behind me.
Walking in the street, I felt drops of water on my cheeks. It was raining. The sky was filled with clouds. And I was crying as I looked up at them. I hadn’t cried that much since your death.
BORZOU AND I ended up moving to Beirut.
After Tehran and Baghdad, it was the city that suited us best. Beirut was a wounded place. Everywhere, traces of the Lebanese Civil War, scars from shrapnel, the imprint of missiles from the last conflict in 2006 against Israel. But it was a “free” sanctuary, perfect for fugitives, suited to all the region’s pariahs, those forbidden to speak in their own countries. Beirut, a spillway for subversive ideas. Beirut, a city for escape.
Borzou had just been named Middle East correspondent for the Los Angeles Times. A reward for all his reporting in Iraq. In France, the media outlet I’d worked for hadn’t offered me anything, apart from their “regret” at my leaving Tehran. And Lebanon was so saturated with independent reporters that I had no hope of freelancing. I was angry at my profession, I was enraged at the idea of coming up against rejections as soon as I pitched an article. But I resigned myself to following Borzou. After all, Beirut gave us the chance to start a new life together. It vibrated with all those little nothings that had vanished from our daily lives: the caress of wind in my hair, laughter on the phone, the pleasure of walking without turning to look behind me. Steeped in paradoxes, Beirut had a unique gift for distracting visitors from their torments. My black suitcase followed us on our move. We no longer had to hide it. To hide ourselves. In Beirut, we finally found a hint of normalcy.
After three years of marriage, it was our first time making a real home together. It was a sight to see us eagerly walking the streets of the Mediterranean city, from house to building, from stairwell to roof deck. Karine, one of the best real estate agents in the Beirut area, convinced us to live in Ashrafieh. It was a predominantly Christian neighborhood, to the east of the former demarcation separating the Christian and Muslim parts of the city. More stable, calmer. After a dozen visits, we found the apartment of our dreams. It occupied half the third floor of an Art Deco building. A Provence-yellow facade, a light-filled living room, a large office, balconies off every room. To the left, a mosque. To the right, a church. At the foot of the building, a sushi bar and a shop selling porcelain dishes. And opposite, the seller of electric batteries who rolled his r’s and proudly sported a Mickey Mouse tie.
I felt at home immediately. During the day, we immersed ourselves in the twists and turns of local political conflicts. Come dusk, we flirted with the night, visiting the bars and discotheques of a capital that never sleeps. Good-bye long coats, passwords, the dread of an unexpected visit. We were living in the present. Like the Lebanese, immunized by years of war, we left our worries at the door. Amnesia was our party wear. Comfortable finery for anyone looking to flee her torment. Sometimes we would dance until early morning, before going to eat a manousheh while watching the sunrise over the Corniche. On New Year’s Eve, we held our housewarming party. We invited about fifty people. Four times that number showed up. The next day, most of the shoppers greeted me at the supermarket. In French. In English. In Arabic. The city was a true polyglot village. My living room, the new neighborhood dance floor.
Lebanon was so much more than that. It was Sunni Tripoli and posters of Saddam Hussein. It was Shia Nabatieh and giant photos of Khomeini. Each city we visited gave us a feeling of déjà-vu. In a country where each community exists only in relation to its religion, Beirut was a multifaceted city. And I was a chameleon. My color changed depending on the neighborhood. In Ashrafieh, I was French. In Dahieh, a Shia Hezbollah stronghold, I was Iranian. Not by choice, but as a result of a simple mirroring effect. Indeed, I was the reflection of what each person wanted to project onto the screen of my face. Depending on their faith, the Lebanese had a surprising tendency to identify with a mother country. They were more French than the French, more Iranian than the Iranians, more Saudi than the Saudis. A survival instinct in that miniature country, so coveted, a permanent theater of proxy wars. I bore witness as I went from one neighborhood to another, scarf sometimes on my neck, sometimes on my head. No matter where I went, I wore Beirut like a custom-made dress. Never had my dual nationality found such a remarkable echo. Like opposit
es who attract and complement each other, my two halves found their balance.
It was during that time, I remember, that the desire to write came to me. Not an article, but a narrative—the story of the suitcase. Of the letters, the notebooks, the fear, of life unfurling like a wave, of my quest for self. I wanted to dedicate a postmortem homage to you. Without you, there would have been neither wave nor Odyssey. But how to shape this narrative? What to start with? My body was in Lebanon, my heart in Tehran. Words lurched on the page. An excess of contradictory sentiments kept me from gathering my thoughts. I was impatient to unwind that excess of emotions on paper. And yet, I was avoiding it. Each day, I would postpone beginning the manuscript. I felt that your story, my story, wasn’t finished. Not yet.
SHIRAZ, TWO YEARS LATER
IT WAS IN SHIRAZ, March 2009, that inspiration finally came to me. For a long time, the city of your favorite poet had beckoned me to return. To explore the soul of Hafez, feed myself with his predictions. An indispensable step in this incomplete rite of passage. Two years had passed since my hasty departure from Tehran. Two years of traveling through other countries of the region, wherever my reporting took me: Syria, Yemen, Oman, Bahrain. Two years of trying to forget your country. Unsuccessfully.
Borzou and I had seriously hesitated before taking this trip. In 2009, the Islamic Republic was celebrating its thirtieth anniversary against a backdrop of reinforced repression. Roxana Saberi, an Iranian American colleague, had been arrested for “espionage.” Eaten away by fear, several of my journalist friends had stopped working. Others had chosen exile. Even Mamani had left. After running around in circles in her “gilded cage,” she had packed her bags for Paris, where she settled for good, near my parents. If Mr. Fingers decided to remind us of his existence once we were in Iran, we would have no family-related pretext to give him.
But after two years of absence and silence, this trip was far from the usual dizzying roads. It was a trip for us, a trip outside time, one that scoffed at politics and the dangers of reality. Upon landing in Tehran, we took the road south that leads to the tombs of the grand masters of Persian poetry. Together, we went to Hafez’s tomb, north of Shiraz. A lovers’ hideout, an oasis of serenity. Every month, visitors flocked there by the hundreds to place a hand on the mausoleum’s cold marble while reciting a few ghazals by the great fourteenth-century poet: little good-luck charms that they pinned to their dreams, such as the one with the “wave” that you gave me as a gift. Eyes closed, we silently scrolled through the bygone years on the screen of our memories. There was too much restrained emotion to express it in words. Then we walked along the surrounding paths framed with elegant cypresses. In the garden, springtime scents of rose and jasmine floated through the air. At the gift shop, I bought Hafez’s The Divan in its original version. My first Persian book without a translation.
* * *
Our pilgrimage complete, we went to visit Ali Jafarian, an old musician friend. He opened his door, one palm clutching the doorknob, the other searching for a cheek to kiss. Ali had been blind since fourteen, the result of a bad fall down a set of stairs. But in the kingdom of Islamic morality’s paradoxes, his blindness worked in his favor: he was the only man authorized to direct an exclusively female ensemble.
“Good timing. The girls will be arriving soon,” he said with a paternal smile.
Walking slowly, we followed him into the main living room. The couches were pushed up against the walls. Beneath a large window, the piano towered over an audience of folding chairs, thirty of them, arranged in rows. At the other end of the room, a woman in a pink top was busy adjusting the sound. I immediately recognized Pouran Dokht, the maestro’s wife. That Friday, like every Friday, was a rehearsal day.
Pouran signaled for us to sit down before she disappeared into the kitchen. She came back right away, placing two glasses of cherry juice on a shelf in the living room, next to photos yellowed with time, singing hymns to the past. In one of the pictures, Ali Jafarian shone in his elegant Italian suit, posing next to divas in the days of the shah. As a child, he first dreamed of becoming a sculptor. After his accident, his mother decided to turn him into a musician. A cello prodigy who also had perfect mastery of the piano, he quickly established himself in the microcosm of Iranian artists, jumping from classical concerts to musical accompaniment for pop stars. After the revolution, numerous Persian musical stars fled, but he chose to stay, calmly enduring the police raids in search of “satanic” instruments: pianos, guitars, saxophones … Confined to darkness and silence, he discreetly used his talent for the benefit of the young girls of his town who were hungry for cultural escape, giving them music theory classes. Their dazzling progress coincided with a timid opening in the ’90s. Under his direction, and behind the black screen of his glasses, one of the first postrevolution female orchestras came into being.
The doorbell rang. It was Bahareh, one of his oldest students. Once she had removed her headscarf, she undid her long braid, restoring life to her beautiful black hair, before tenderly embracing her music teacher.
“Salam, Ostad!” she called out to her teacher in a honeyed voice.
Thirty years old, the young woman was radiant in a silk dress cinched at the waist. An architecture student scrupulously attending to her studies in parallel with her music, she was the group’s pianist. One after another, the musicians followed. I was amazed to see how gracefully they tried to outdo one another, flirtatious in revealing low-cut tops and heels once they had crossed the threshold. Seated in a corner, I feasted my eyes on this delicious spectacle. Leaning on his blind man’s cane, Ali navigated from one to another, complimenting them on their perfume, teasing them about their absences, inquiring about their family lives. There were those who, driven by their possessive husbands, had renounced music, those who came here unbeknownst to their fathers, and those who had convinced their spouses to take classes with the maestro, too. In an Iran divided into bubbles, where everyone put on blinders to survive, Ali Jafarian’s house was more than a refuge. It was a haven of peace, a place of resistance, where excellence defied religion and power. A modern metaphor for the garden of Hafez.
I was amazed that Ali’s rehearsals had survived the tightening of the screws under Ahmadinejad. Since 2005, several of his concerts had been canceled, often without warning. After a deep breath, Ali leaned toward me:
“How many times have I thought of retiring!” He sighed.
Each time, his students had dissuaded him, threatening to sink into depression if they were deprived of their restorative Fridays. So Ali had given in, haphazardly throwing together rehearsals. After all, that was how he had functioned for years. Without any financial help, he had always paid for the orchestra out of his own pocket: instrument repairs, student meals, traveling to the capital for public or private shows.
“You have to be crazy to be in this line of work. Or else in love!” he said, shaking a tender hand in the air.
And then he burst into laughter.
His laughter was quickly lost in the cacophony of instruments. The girls had taken their seats, were tuning their sitars, adjusting their santurs. In the first row, the daf virtuosos were already making their fingers dance on the tight skin of their round instruments. Helped by Pouran, his wife, Ali took his place facing the musicians, standing behind his music stand. Head straight, chin pointed toward the congregation, he lifted his hands to announce the beginning of the first song.
First there were a few piano notes, then a storm of percussion, and then the voice of the soprano, Dorna, the orchestra’s soloist.
My spring, my girl!
Wake up!
“It’s a forbidden song,” whispered Pouran.
I leaned toward her. I wanted her to tell me more.
“It was written by Fereydoon Moshiri. Then Marzieh sang it.”
Those two names alone could have made Ali Jafarian a dissident worthy of being thrown into prison. Moshiri, the love poet. Marzieh, the Iranian diva in exile, a convert to
the Mujahedin militant group after the 1979 revolution.
“This song,” continued the maestro’s wife, “evokes the true story of a certain Bahar, a first name that means ‘spring’ in Persian. At the time, the young Iranian, daughter of the composer Farhad Fakhreddini, died of an incurable disease, in the prime of her life. To console her father and dear friend, Moshiri dedicated this song to him.”
I remember closing my eyes. Attentively pricking up my ears while letting myself be lulled by the lyrics.
Flower of my destiny
Oh sweet blossom
Spring arrives and you with it …
My spring, my girl!
Wake up!
That song of death and spring resonated with melancholy and hope. They say that Hafez’s verses ease doubts and heal torments. In the heart of that city, within that closed session of the Shiraz orchestra, I wanted to see in that song a sign of possible rebirth.
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