Borzou sat next to the driver. I sat in the back of the car. Outside, Tehran was colored with grief, wearing its veil of mourning. Forehead against the glass, I took a mental photograph of this city I had learned to love, that was slipping away from me yet again. The streets were deserted, the streetlights dimmed. The driver slowed while passing a makeshift Basiji checkpoint. In the twilight, just before turning onto the highway that led to the airport, he carefully slalomed between charred trash cans and burned cars. Last snapshots of a city on the brink of death. With a shudder, I told myself that soon there would be no more witnesses to tell the story. Beneath my headscarf, I was trembling. Everything in me rebelled against the turn taken by Iranian history, my history.
* * *
The taxi drives along gray lines. I’m scared. I know the road to the airport by heart. I’ve taken it many times. But I know that people who cause trouble disappear here. Glued to the glass, I stare at those gray lines while torturing the ends of my headscarf. Time seems so long when you are no longer capable of controlling your emotions.
A half hour later, perhaps a little less, a blinding light floods the taxi. We have arrived. The gigantic glass terminal is swarming with passengers; carts filled with luggage, cakes, and knick-knacks of every kind. We weave through the crowd. Mouths sewn shut, we check the departure time on the bright screen and then go through the body search checkpoint. At passport control, a light relief: our small group of reporter friends is here, too. Like sheep, we fall into the line together. On high alert, I keep an ear out for the loudspeaker. I wait for the bearded man to come looking for me. I try to imagine what will come next: Will he escort me to a small room to interrogate me? Or take me directly to Evin Prison? I haven’t, however, committed any crime. No arrest warrant looms over me. My papers are in order. But I know that in this moment, anything could happen.
We end up passing through without any problem, one right after the other. Except for the last of us. Behind the glass, a security officer signals for our friend to follow him. We watch him disappear into a small room as we hold our collective breath. We hardly dare whisper. Five minutes later, our friend reappears. False alarm. Marching robotically in single file, we reach the gate. It’s terribly hot and stuffy beneath the lights. My heart bangs in my chest. A mixture of anxiety and exhaustion. Only a few minutes to go. Behind the counter, a flight attendant in a midnight-blue veil informs the passengers that the plane is finally ready for boarding. When the doors open, we rush onto the plane like fugitives.
When we finally take off, my headscarf slides furtively to my shoulders. I don’t put it back on. A feeling of relief, of freedom, comes from shaking my hair loose. I lean against the window. Seen from above, Khomeini’s gigantic mausoleum lights up the night. Like antennas pointed toward the sky, the minarets gleam as if nothing has happened and eventually disappear behind the clouds. In his tomb, the all-powerful imam is, no doubt, laughing at our distress.
I sink into my seat, a pillow behind my neck. I rifle in my pocket. I take out Sara’s poem, the one she gave me before I left.
There’s one upside to a tear-gas bomb
Like the starting gun to a race
You run
Your eyes burn
The first time, you’re afraid
—Just like with the baton, just like with the cables used for torture—
The next times, you learn to take out
Your cigarette
You smoke
The neighbors scream at the window: “They’re coming!”
You run again
It’s so good to run
Along the plane trees of Valiasr Street
—no trace of self-righteous patrols—
From the bookstores on Enghelab Street
—So many banned books we found there!—
We run
If only you could run at our sides
You, our exiled friends
Our older brothers who lost your lives
For a simple manifesto
Or at the front
Or behind the walls of Evin
They tore us apart
We run
We miss you
The torch has now changed hands
May this race live on
We run
Eyes filled with tears
Toward freedom
I feel a pang in my heart. In 1997, I arrived in Iran with a poem. Twelve years later, a poem accompanies my voyage once again. It sings with a passion for life. The hope of a country that refuses darkness. A small firefly in the uncertain night.
POSTSCRIPT: PARIS, SEPTEMBER 2, 2014
MONTPARNASSE CEMETERY VIBRATES with birdsong.
This is the first time since your death, Babai, seventeen years ago, that I’ve come to your tomb alone. To think that it took all this time, all these miles, and a necessary distance from your country, to write this letter. And to place it on the cold marble that protects your last secrets.
I crouch down, hand on your headstone. I remembered it being smoother. Over the years, the rain has eroded the surface. I scan it with my eyes. An end-of-summer sun tickles the small mosaic of Ispahan, a subtle touch of color in the middle of a cemetery. Someone has placed flowers at the base. An old colleague from UNESCO? One of your former conquests? Another of your mysteries that will remain forever buried.
I close my eyes. In the disorder of my memories, I see your face again, your unforgettable smile. It floats among other faces of the deceased, imprinted forever in my mind. Ardeshir, the free-spirited acrobat who “died while escaping the police.” Neda, the young Madonna with broken dreams. And all those others striving for democracy who left us too early during the 2009 crackdowns. How many had to pay the ultimate price for their dreams of freedom? How many were robbed of funerals, sometimes even of a grave, because those in power feared they might prove as dangerous, as provocative in death as they were in life? All those injustices would have outraged you as much as they have me.
Once more, I remember my hasty departure from Iran, at the end of that long journey you initiated. On June 25, 2009, I reluctantly closed the door to a country condemned to the blank page. It is the fear that all these memories might vanish that pushed me to take up my pen and dedicate this story to you. I recall, when I was little, writing to you from Paris, worried sick that you would disappear from my memory because you lived in Iran, so far away. In those letters, I recounted everything I could find—certain stories, anecdotes, details, sometimes trivial—to keep them alive on paper. I was convinced that this method would help keep you alive, too. Years later, when Iran pushed me once and for all toward the exit, the same obsession took over: write so as not to forget.
But I was affected by the censorship that had touched my friends. Sepideh was arrested at the end of August 2009. A few days before her arrest, she had written on her blog: “My pen is my totem.” Isolated in her cell in Evin Prison, she was forbidden from having visitors, forbidden natural light, forbidden paper or even a pen. Freed after four months, she recounted her nightmare to me through a mutual friend: the cries for help that slam up against the iron door, the extended interrogations, standing blindfolded against a wall, the wandering hands of the guard … And then that ultimate affront by the judge on the day of the verdict: “Don’t waste your time writing. You’re starting to get old. You need to think about having children. Swear to me that you will make it your priority!”
Sara also had been consigned to the blank page. The poem she gave to me would never be published in Persian. At the Ministry of Islamic Culture and Guidance, the censorship committee settled for turning it into one more cadaver, buried at the bottom of a drawer. One night in 2010, she told me about it over Skype, her last window to the outside world. Taking refuge in her little apartment in Tehran, she repainted the walls of her living room a pistachio green. During sleepless nights, she made up quatrains that she wrote in green calligraphy on the white tiles of her bathroom. Rebellious and ephemeral words that were
immediately erased with a stream of water. After a few months, even the most brazen protesters ended up going quiet under the weight of merciless repression, along with mass trials and forced confessions on television. A French researcher, Clotilde Reiss, even ended up on the defendants’ bench. Arrested at the airport a few days after our departure, she became the hostage that I could have been.
* * *
How would you have reacted to that fierce repression? Would you have drawn sufficient comfort from Hafez’s The Divan? Me, I was on the run. At the start of the “Arab Spring,” in January 2011, I headed back out on the reporting trail, toward other revolts: Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, Syria … Afraid of reopening my Iranian suitcase and facing the dark memory of disappeared friends, I wrote about other martyrs whose deaths were just as violent, sometimes even more so. In reality, so many deaths made me forget the true meaning of life. It was time to pause in the middle of that insane race. At the beginning of summer 2011, I put down my reporter’s bag in our apartment in Lebanon. For the first time in my career, far from the clamor of the news and without my computer, I took a real vacation in the country of cedar. A month later, I discovered I was pregnant—the most beautiful gift.
If you had still been among us, you would have succumbed immediately to Samarra’s charm. She was born in Beirut in March 2012, arms open to the world, just as one announces the arrival of a new spring. Her name means “Happy is the person who sees her” (Soura Man Raa) in Old Arabic. A nod to the ancient Mesopotamian city, where Borzou and I spent time during our stays in Iraq. And so, life goes on, interspersed with symbols that you taught me to appreciate through a poem you gave me just before your last breath.
In April, a month after Samarra’s birth, we moved to Cairo, where we still live. After a few days, I finally unpacked my trunk of souvenirs and, taking advantage of my daughter’s naps, started to fill in the first gray lines of the blank page. To my surprise, the words came together easily. The barriers were no longer so insurmountable. Samarra had given me back the strength to write. It was as if I needed to give birth to this small being before I could allow myself to bring my paper child into the world.
What came next, unpredictably, would have filled you with joy: in the spring of 2014, realizing a dream we had long ago renounced, we brought her to Tehran. A few days of vacation to celebrate Nowruz, the Persian New Year. Many things had changed since we left. In June 2013, after four gloomy years, Hassan Rouhani won the presidential election. In Iran, land of the unexpected, this moderate cleric advocated for openness and dialogue from that moment on. It was as if the fall of the region’s dictators and the reinforcement of international sanctions on the country had prompted the Supreme Leader to endorse change.
Two years old, Samarra was amazed at everything: the goldfish, the dried pomegranates, the flaming twigs you step over to ward off the evil eye. The streets were in full flower, dotted with men dressed as Hajji Firuz, little minstrels in red hats singing of rebirth from their cars as they drove with their windows down. I felt such emotion at seeing the capital again through the eyes of a child. To see Sara again and read her poems, which she was finally going to publish. To hug Sepideh, who had regained her work permit and the pounds she’d lost in prison. Even the walls of the city were discreetly singing of the new spring. “It’s the Spring of Freedom. Neda, You Are with Us,” read graffiti on a wall.
On that trip, I also had a chance to see Fatemeh again. We met her in a “family” gathering in the gardens of the former palace of the shah, in the foothills of Niavaran. I saw her arrive hand in hand with a child, Mahsa, her four-year-old daughter, with Mahmoud at their side. Just like the country’s political players, the Basiji couple had reconciled. At least in appearance.
I immediately recognized Fatemeh’s spirit in Mahsa. The girl wasn’t afraid of anything, climbing over off-limits lion cub statues, intruding into a teenagers’ soccer match. Two years her junior, Samarra watched her with candid admiration. Would our daughters be friends one day? Would they be curious to rifle through their family history, as I had brought yours back to the surface of my memory?
On each trip to Paris, Mamani, along with my French grandmother, is one of the first people we visit. I like to listen to Samarra respond to her in Persian when Mamani sings Iranian nursery rhymes. They entertain themselves by gathering the jasmine flowers that Mamani grows on her balcony in remembrance of Tehran.
The echo of a bell tears me from my thoughts. I open my eyes. It’s already 5:45 p.m., a quarter of an hour before the cemetery closes. Seated on your headstone, I gather my thoughts as I watch the summer drift away. Around me, the trees are already beginning to turn brown. The sun is low, drawing pink streaks across the sky. In its wake, a cloud has taken the form of a wave. I take a moment for a few final memories: Ali Jafarian, the marvelous conductor in Shiraz, who died suddenly due to a fragile heart; Moses Baba, the Jewish antiques dealer with the magic jerry cans, who also left this earth too soon. And then Ali Montazeri: his death, at the end of December 2009, came close to shaking up the powers that be. Never had Qom seen so many people pour out onto its streets as for the funeral of the enlightened ayatollah. A sign of a silent revolution that had not yet spoken its last word.
From time to time, acquaintances reappear through the magic of Facebook. Such as the mullah with the leather jacket, exiled in Europe, where he is currently working toward peace among religions. And Niloufar, the “godmother” of the youth. A few years ago, we met up on the terrace of a Parisian café. She made a comment that I have never forgotten: “Iran is like a broken glass whose pieces have been glued back together. For now, it’s holding. But it could crack at any moment.”
Mr. Fingers never reappeared. And it’s much better that way. As for my computer, stolen in Paris, I never heard about it again, apart from a letter from the judicial police announcing that the case had been closed.
* * *
The bell rings again, even louder. In the distance, the Montparnasse groundskeeper signals that he’s waiting for me to leave so he can close the gate. It’s 6:00 p.m. Next time, I’ll come earlier. I’ll bring Samarra. Together, we’ll read poems by Hafez and I’ll tell her about you, the person who helped me reconnect with this invisible part of myself.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This book almost never saw the light of day. “I don’t think you’ll write that book on Iran after all. Too much distance. Too much time. Too much delay,” one of my former editors wrote to me, exasperated by my slowness, when I was still two years from finishing.
Nearly seven years passed between the earliest pages of this project, in 2007, and putting in the last period, in 2014. Seven years of intermittent writing, of introspection, of scribbling and rewriting, that resulted in a narrative thread much more personal than the simple journalistic account I had planned.
Obsessed with objectivity, reporter that I am, I had developed the reflex of boxing up my fears, preferring to hide behind facts rather than express my feelings. I was also anxious to write down everything, not to leave out a single detail, to relay all the voices inside, without exception. And then came a night when I was sharing my memories and a novelist friend, Hyam Yared, urged me to come out of my shell. “What if you focused your Iranian narrative on your personal history, and your grandfather?” Thanks to her, I found the courage to express this version of myself hidden behind a veil of reserve.
Other dear friends accompanied me on this long journey.
The filmmaker Katia Jarjoura was the only person with whom I shared this text from start to finish. More than a proofreader, she turned out to be an incredible adviser, from the selection of the people described in the book to the construction of the narrative framework—the arc to which we devoted so many nights. Rigorous, generous, she was of exceptional help to me.
I am also extremely thankful for my Colombian colleague Catalina Gómez, who is also passionate about Iran, for her moral support along the entire evolution of this project. Thanks are also due to
my reporter “sister” Manon Loizeau for her enthusiasm and continuous cheering.
I would also like to express my gratitude to the incredible Hala Moughanie, who was kind enough to read and comment on the entire work in its final phase. Her suggestions proved to be infinitely valuable. Danielle Serpollet has also been of enormous help as we refined the English-language edition.
A special thank-you to my talented colleague from Paris Match, Alfred de Montesquiou, who, while my manuscript was at the halfway point, had the graciousness to speak to Éditions du Seuil about it.
I especially want to thank my Iranian friends, so many of whom opened their doors to me and shared their laughter, tears, and daily lives. Some of them appear in the book under their real names; others are protected under a pseudonym, as is the case for Fatemeh, Mahmoud, Niloufar, Sepideh, Leyla, and Kourosh. (They will recognize themselves, undoubtedly.) There are also those, whose shadows hover over these pages, who played a large role in my increasing passion for Iran over the years. I would need entire pages to name them. But I must express my faithful gratitude to my indispensable Iranian friends: the sociologist Masserat Amir-Ebrahimi, and the photographers Newsha Tavakolian and Zohreh Soleimani. Their energy and the beauty of their souls will forever remain a model of courage, a source of inspiration.
At Ershad, the Iranian Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance, I was fortunate to be able to count on the efficient and polite aid of many benevolent people, especially during my administrative troubles. I’m thinking in particular of Ali Reza Shiravi and Efat Eqbali.
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