City of Lies (9 page)

‘Don’t I provide for you? What more do you want? Go back to your parents’ house if you don’t like it here.’ Amir-Ali wanted a woman, not a little girl who cried because he enjoyed life.

The unravelling of their relationship was drawn out and hidden from view. It happened mostly within the confines of their apartment, but also in Somayeh’s head. Doubts and paranoia set in. Somayeh did not tell a soul. She was too ashamed to go back to her parents’ house. Her friends had placed her at the pinnacle of success, and she could not endure the humiliation of the fall.

When autumn sapped the green from the trees on Vali Asr, exposing the road below to the white November sky, their baby was born. Somayeh hoped the birth of her girl Mona would change Amir-Ali. It did not. Instead the disappearances started. The first time, he left for work and did not come back all weekend. After thirteen missed calls and twenty frantic messages, he had texted back:
I’m fine stop hassling me
. Once he texted her from the airport to tell her he was going to Dubai for a week. Otherwise, she would not hear from him for days, sometimes weeks.

Somayeh had managed to keep the first disappearance to herself. By the second, she confided in his parents, Zahra and Mohammad, unable to withstand his behaviour alone. They were not surprised. They knew everything. Amir-Ali had not turned up to work for the past six months. He had done this many times before; they had hoped Somayeh would tame him. Somayeh felt cheated. She had been lied to, as had her parents.

Zahra and Mohammad became co-conspirators in concealing the truth from Fatemeh and Haj Agha. They were complicit in her lies to them. ‘We will have no
aberoo
left if he continues like this,’ Zahra had sobbed.
Aberoo
. Honour; saving face. It was a cornerstone of their world, and Amir-Ali had robbed Zahra and Mohammad of their
aberoo
too many times.

For a while nothing changed; Amir-Ali refused to give Somayeh any answers, and she learnt to adapt to her new reality, focusing her attentions on little Mona. Soon a new cycle of disappearances began; this time they lasted longer. They were also marked by the arrival of a brown leather briefcase. Amir-Ali kept it hidden under his clothes in the back of a cupboard in Mona’s room. Some nights, he would head straight for the cupboard and she could hear the numbers of a lock clicking into place. He began to change its hiding place. Somayeh would always find it. She became as obsessed with it as Amir-Ali; she was sure the answer to her misery was in the briefcase.

For three months her small hands worked the locks, sometimes for hours, trying to figure out the combination. Until now. The moment of the miracle. His briefcase gaping wide open in front of her, her
nazr
prayer answered in an instant. Her sweaty hands shook as she lifted the compartments apart. Underneath a mound of receipts and bank statements was what she had been looking for: the truth. It was spelt out in dozens of letters written in childish handwriting. It was in words she had never heard from Amir-Ali:
I adore you, You are my life, The thought of your pussy makes me so hard
. It was in a box of Durex condoms. It was staring back at her through black eyes, round breasts and a mass of blonde, highlighted hair imprinted on a photograph. There was an ecstatic moment of liberation before the searing pain took hold; it was the serene hit of vindication before the rage. Then she started to cry. The heat was now maddening. She started grabbing the contents of the briefcase and hurling them across the room. As she was about to pick up another handful, she saw half a dozen scratched DVDs in a Bambi sleeve. She scrambled to her laptop and pushed one in. A woman was on her knees being fucked from behind. After that clip, a close-up of genitals, the camera revealing a woman having sex with her headscarf on. Another clip was a black man with two white women. Somayeh was sick to her stomach. By now she was sobbing and praying at the same time. She had never seen porn before.

Somayeh fled to Fatemeh’s house. Fatemeh had long known that her daughter’s marriage was in turmoil, but Somayeh would not admit it. The last few years had taken their toll; stress and heartbreak had left Somayeh pale and emaciated. She told her mother everything, even about the DVDs.

Life in the Meydan has changed in the years since Somayeh got married. Iran has a new President, Hassan Rouhani, a (comparatively) moderate English-speaking cleric with a Ph.D. in Constitutional Law from Glasgow Caledonian University. Rouhani is a regular Tweeter and speaks of equality and rapprochement with the West. Although many Iranians were elated at his election, not everyone in the Meydan was happy at the results.

‘Rouhani’s
bee-dean
!’ said one of Haj Agha’s
Hezbollahi
neighbours, using the word for ‘irreligious’, ‘he’s just an agent of the English, like Khatami. These types of clerics are dirty! It’ll all come out in the wash.’

They did not want to be friends with the Great Satan,
Amrika
. A few weeks after Rouhani’s historic phone call with President Obama, anti-American posters sprang up across the city (before they were taken back down as yet another internal power battle between government factions was played out). Some of the posters depicted an outstretched Iranian hand about to shake the clawed hand of the devil. On each were the words, written in both Persian and English:
THE US GOVENMENT STYLES
[
sic
]
HONESTY
.

Rouhani had been left with the mess Ahmadinejad had left behind. Discontent had sunk its teeth into the Meydan. Sanctions against Iran had ground the economy to a halt, sending the currency into free fall, slashing it to a third of its value in less than two years. Under Ahmadinejad subsidies of petrol had been scrapped and the government had doled out cash handouts instead, but these had not kept up with the soaring inflation that hovered between thirty and forty per cent. Jobs were even more scarce and badly paid. The sinking economy bred resentment and mistrust.

For the first time, even criticism of the Supreme Leader was no longer out of bounds. It had started after protesters were killed, beaten and raped after the disputed elections in
2009
.

There were other, smaller changes. Somayeh’s friends were now addicted to Turkish soap operas like
Forbidden Love
and
The Sultan’s Harem
with juicy story lines shown on GEM TV, an entertainment satellite channel based in Dubai. Halfway through the series all the characters suddenly had new voices as the actors in Iran secretly dubbing the show had been arrested. And everyone knew about a hit show that had taken the country by storm:
Googoosh Music Academy
, an Iranian X Factor on Manoto TV, a Persian-language station run from London that had bought the format of hit British programmes like
Come Dine With Me
, another Tehrani favourite. And nowadays, Fatemeh and her friends had far fewer pistachios at home since their price had almost tripled.

Fatemeh’s attitude to divorce had also changed. While the residents of the Meydan thought the moral fabric of their world was made of stronger stuff than in the rest of the city, they soon learnt they were wrong. Batool Khanoum’s divorce seemed to have opened the floodgates. Already four young couples in their area had separated. Over the last ten years, divorces have tripled in Iran, with one out of every five marriages ending – the number is even higher in Tehran.

From thinking it was a shameful act, even Fatemeh had considered divorce. She had been looking for her birth certificate to replace a lost identity card. They were usually kept in a shoebox under the bed, but they were not there. As she pushed the box back in its place, she felt it knock something. She squeezed her leg under the gap and slid it out. Another shoebox, one she had never seen. Inside were old photographs and a brown envelope. Inside that, a stash of passports. Fatemeh flicked through the pages. She sighed. Haj Agha’s journey of spiritual enlightenment was stamped across the pages in colourful visas. One of them was a recurring bright-red crest. Could this be Iraq, or Syria? She squinted at the strange blue writing on it. She held the passport closer. It was not Arabic. Definitely not Arabic. Without her realizing, her heart had started to race. She scrambled for her reading glasses. The blurred picture snapped into sharp focus; a winged demon with cock’s feet stared back at her. Beside him words in English, which she could not read. She frantically turned the pages, and on every single one the scarlet demon pounced up at her. A neighbour three streets down knew how to read English, but she had a feeling she should ask a stranger. She slumped her body next to the scattered papers and passports beside her as she considered what she should do. Somayeh walked into the room to find her mother splayed on the floor like a bear on its back.

‘I’m fine, I’m fine, just had a dizzy turn, nothing serious,’ Fatemeh panted. Now she was clambering up to get her chador. She ran out of the door and headed straight towards the bazaar, to a
daroltarjomeh
translation office. She thrust Haj Agha’s passport into the hands of a young man sitting at a computer.

‘Son, read this for me. And I want the dates.’

The young man paused.

‘KINGDOM OF THAILAND. Type of Visa:
Tourist
.’ He read out some dates, converting them from Gregorian to Persian.
They exactly matched Haj Agha’s pilgrimage trips. But he had not been in Karbala or Mecca. Or Damascus. Or Mashhad. He had been in Thailand. Wherever that was. She racked her brain to remember history lessons at school, berating herself for never paying attention. As far as she could remember, Hossein’s crusade had not ventured to Thailand. Were there Muslims in Thailand? She was not sure. Even if there was a remote Shia shrine in this strange land, one thing was clear: Haj Agha had been telling lies. She tried to pay the translator, but he would not accept her money. She hurried out into the masses swirling around the bazaar, cutting across the backstreets to Vali Asr. This was an emergency. She needed to speak to Mullah Ahmad. For more sensitive matters, Fatemeh would see him in person. She was still not sure exactly what kind of deceit she was dealing with, but it was clear this was not a subject for a four-minute reading on the telephone. She called Mullah Ahmad’s mobile and told him she was on her way.

She took the bus the length of Vali Asr. This was her favourite journey in the city, and usually she would enjoy watching the shops and restaurants pass by. But today she was too distracted to notice anything; she prayed under her breath as her mind ran through hundreds of possibilities. She got off at the very end of Vali Asr, where it opens its mouth and spews cars and taxis and buses and people into Tajrish Square. Mullah Ahmad lived in a large apartment on the second floor of a shabby building just off the square. His home was a shrine to mismatching styles and colours: reproduction French Versailles furniture stuffed next to seventies leather sofas; modern Ikea shelves and mass-produced tapestries hung on greying walls. There were the usual Iranian touches: crystal, gilding, marble and chandeliers of varying sizes and sparkle that hung in every room, including the small kitchen; Persian carpets everywhere, hanging on the walls and draped over armchairs.

Mullah Ahmad’s wife opened the door in a white flowered chador, under which she was wearing dark blue slacks and a loose knitted sleeveless cardigan over a shirt.

‘He told me it was an emergency, I’ll get you in next,’ she whispered in Fatemeh’s ear as she ushered her into the living room, past Mullah Ahmad’s teenage son who was wearing Levi’s and texting on his iPhone.

Fatemeh was not the only one with a crisis on her hands. A middle-aged socialite with a facelift and a Hermès scarf was snivelling into a tissue. A teenage girl from Shahrak-e Gharb with Chanel sunglasses propped on her head stared sullenly through the net curtains. A wrinkled woman in a black chador was wringing her hands and praying.

When Mullah Ahmad got excited, he had a tendency to shout. As Mullah Ahmad’s wife served his waiting clients with tea and assorted Cadbury’s Dairy Milk chocolates from a silvery tray, her husband’s voice boomed out of his office.

‘Why aren’t you married? At thirty-nine that is an absolute disaster! Your parents have given you a terrible name and this has obviously affected your whole life. You’re going to have to change it straight away!’

It was Fatemeh’s turn. Mullah Ahmad was sitting in a gleaming black swivel chair, surrounded by shelves lined with books. Cornices in pastel shades topped the walls of his office. A bleached-out picture of Mecca in the seventies and framed black and white photographs of his ancestors looking glum hung above him, next to a huge poster of the black-turbaned Ayatollah Boroujerdi, a dissident cleric who believed in the separation of religion and politics and who was imprisoned in
2006
for speaking out against the Supreme Leader’s absolute power.

Mullah Ahmad was wearing his fine grey robe, his white
amameh
turban and leather slippers. Three chunky silver Islamic rings – one with a large burnt-ochre carnelian, the most important gemstone in Islam, on which was inscribed a verse from the Koran – adorned his long, feminine fingers, giving him a rock-star edge.

‘My goodness Fatemeh Khanoum, you’ve got so fat!’ He prac-tically shrieked when he noticed the extra ten kilograms Fatemeh had been lugging round her midriff.

‘It’s true, I haven’t been taking care of myself Haji as I haven’t been very happy.’

‘A blind person who sees is better than a seeing person who is blind,’ said Mullah Ahmad. Mullah Ahmad was not easy to understand, not least because of his thick Azeri Turkic accent and his propensity to break into Koranic verse. His terrible short-term memory did not help matters.

Fatemeh launched into her findings. The details tumbled out in a torrent of dates, holy sites and sobbing.

‘As long as I live I will never call him Haj Agha again!’ She fished out the evidence from her bag. Mullah Ahmad flicked through Haj Agha’s passports.

‘But why does he go to Thailand? There are no Shia tombs of our beloved imams, God rest their souls, or of any of their relatives in Thailand, are there Haji?’