Honeymoon in Tehran: Two Years of Love and Danger in Iran (20 page)

Most worrisome of all was how the regime shaped news coverage of the nuclear debate, denying Iranians the information they needed to judge its benefits for themselves. State television sometimes broadcast interviews with Iranians on the street, and in response to a question
regarding nuclear power, a woman chirped: “Of course, every home should have it!”

“Most people don’t know the difference between nuclear energy and a pizza,” one of my sources told me. “If it’s a question of simply having something, of course everyone will say yes, we should have it. Everyone wants to have something if they think it’s free. But if they understood the costs, would they feel the same way? I doubt it.”

I hurriedly put the last touches on my file, sent it off, and rushed to dress. My mother was staying with one of her relatives, who had invited half the family over for a pre-Norouz lunch. (New Year’s Day itself was next week, but we were celebrating early, as many of our relatives would be leaving to spend the holiday at the Caspian Sea). It would be her first time meeting Arash, and I wanted everything to go smoothly. Truth be told, my mother is not always an easygoing person. She often fretted about me, concerned from afar about everything from my digestion to my persistent singleness. One might expect that my relationship with Arash would make her happy. He was from a good family, mature, and exceedingly bright. But my mother was prone to expressing love through worry. She would likely find some cause for anxiety. I prepared myself.

The lunch seemed to begin comfortably. My mother was thrilled to see me and was excited, as usual, about being back in Iran, which she had visited only a handful of times since immigrating to California in the 1970s. She greeted Arash warmly and ushered us to the table—we were late, and everyone had started. My male relatives asked Arash congenial questions about work, and the women fussed over him hospitably, passing him yogurt, fresh herbs, and pickles, the accompaniments to an Iranian meal. Although often reserved with new people, Arash engaged warmly with everyone, and I leaned back in relief. Shortly after lunch, having drunk tea and complimented the cook profusely, we rose to leave. We needed to visit Arash’s relatives as well, and more work awaited me at home.

“They haven’t been bothering you lately, have they?” my mother whispered, as she walked us to the door. She meant Mr. X and the authorities, whose presence in my life filled her with apprehension.

“No, everything has been okay lately. Maybe they’re pleased I’m
finally settling down.” I patted Arash’s arm. I wanted my mother to realize how much he grounded me, how his support helped me do my job in a difficult climate. We said goodbye and headed toward Arash’s uncle’s house. There we would eat the same crumbly Norouz chickpea cookies, laugh at the same political jokes about Ahmadinejad’s grooming, and endure the same questions about our matrimonial intentions. Norouz demanded relentless socializing from Iranians, and no one—not Mr. X or even President Ahmadinejad himself—would be spared.

T
he next afternoon, Arash called me into the living room to show me an ornate, leather-bound volume of Persian poetry I had never seen before. I saw that it was the
Quintet
of Nezami Ganjavi, a twelfth-century Persian poet whom we both adored. He suggested we look through it together. I was surprised, given how much we had to do that day, but was happy to procrastinate. He began to read aloud the love story of Khosrow, a seventh-century king of Persia’s Sassanid empire, and Shirin, an Armenian Christian princess. In 1000
C.E.,
Ferdowsi first told of their romance in the
Shahnameh,
the
Book of Kings,
the national epic that records in verse the history of Iran before the Islamic conquest in the seventh century. When the verses grew too intricate for my command of Farsi, Arash slowed and explained the story. He described how Khosrow, a cultured monarch with a deep appreciation for the arts, fell in love with Shirin after she appeared in one of his dreams. The story of their romance is beloved by Iranians for many reasons—the depth of the characters, the exciting intrigue that plagues them, the verses’ lyrical eroticism, and the sumptuous descriptions of the ancient court. In Iran, everyone lives with such protagonists of Persian literature and poetry as though they are neighbors. Even illiterate Iranians know of Khosrow and Shirin, their qualities and their struggles.

We talked about how fascinating this was, how richly Persian poetry infused daily life. People would often explain themselves by reciting couplets, and even schoolchildren were intimate with the master poets of centuries past.

“Don’t you think—”

“—that we should buy
Shahnameh
picture books for the baby? Definitely.” Arash had an uncanny way of finishing my thoughts. Being understood so well sometimes made me squirm, but more often it reminded me of why I loved Arash so deeply. I had never thought it possible to share everything that was essential to me with one person. Like most people who live between two cultures, I had grown accustomed to constantly translating and explaining my feelings to someone who could not relate. The ability to communicate with just a few words how I felt—about anything from a line of Persian verse, a V. S. Naipaul novel, an Iranian politician, a vexing aunt, the mist over the Golden Gate Bridge, the cut of a Hezbollahi suit—was the greatest luxury I had ever known.

In the softening light of the late afternoon, Arash turned to the book’s inleaf. I hadn’t realized the book was a gift for me, until I bent to read the inscription. Written in elegantly composed Farsi, it ended with the proposal of marriage I had long been waiting for.

We had had informal conversations about marriage, but Arash had never formally asked me to marry him, and I had been dropping miffed hints for days. It had occurred to me that I could ask him, and I once suggested as much in a teasing text message. He responded warmly to the idea, but I never managed to gather the courage. After all, in the classic Persian wedding ceremony the bride must be asked
three times
before giving her consent; while I considered that an excessive display of coquettishness, I was not quite bold enough to ask myself.

I smoothed my fingers over the book’s cool, illuminated pages, so immersed in Khosrow and Shirin’s story and in my delight at what I considered the most original proposal ever, that I forgot to respond.

He cleared his throat. “So, are you going to say something?”

“Sorry. Of course, yes!”

O
ur first outing as an officially engaged couple was neither a romantic dinner nor an afternoon of ring shopping, as I would have hoped. Instead, Arash drove me past all the Danish pastry shops in Tehran,
so I could inspect their signage. The previous month, a number of Middle Eastern governments, including Iran’s, had organized protests against caricatures of the Prophet Mohammad published in a Danish newspaper. Danish pastries were extremely popular in Iran, and rumors swirled that the government (or the pastry bakers’ union, depending on the version) had ordered them renamed “Roses of the Prophet Mohammad.”
Time
was running a story on the cartoon controversy, and was calling for reporting from its correspondents around the world. I needed to find out whether the rumors were true.

Indeed, a black banner obscured the “Danish” in the name of the pastry shop nearest our house. I loved the pastries, the subtle layer of cream buried beneath the flaky folds, and stopped inside to buy some. I wanted to keep a box with the original Danish pastry logo, a navy blue baker with a poofy hat, as a memento of less fraught times. But the clerk who was dutifully blacking out the logo with a marker refused politely to leave my box unmarked. Most of the patrons inside seemed more amused by the renaming of the pastry than anything else. It reflected, I wrote later in my story, Iranians’ remarkable reluctance to get angry about the cartoons. While many were certainly dismayed—Iranians, after all, do esteem their religion and its prophet—people were not upset enough to hold huge, violent demonstrations. The case was otherwise in many Muslim nations, where rage against the West seemed perpetually ready to combust.

Though Iranians continued to placidly eat what they continued to call Danish pastry, President Ahmadinejad seized upon the controversy to boost his image in the Arab and Islamic world. Having already called the Holocaust a “myth,” his government had recently announced a conference that would “examine” historical evidence supporting it. And that month, a state newspaper run by the president’s allies had called for a Holocaust cartoon competition. In response to criticism from within Iran and around the world, its publisher invoked the same freedom of expression the West did in defending the caricatures of the Prophet.

Most of the people around me reacted to all this with irritation. While many Iranians sympathized with the Palestinians and resented America’s support for Israel, these sentiments were not felt as intimately
as in other parts of the region. Being Persians, culturally, historically, and linguistically distinct from the Arabs of the Middle East, Iranians did not consider the Palestinian plight their own. They disapproved of their president outraging the world and sullying Iran’s reputation for the sake of needling Israel and pandering to Arab public opinion. Beyond such political calculations, most Iranians found the president’s anti-Semitic rhetoric distasteful. Jews had long enjoyed a more comfortable minority status in Iran than elsewhere in the Middle East; in fact, Iran still had the largest Jewish community in the region, outside Israel. Though it was both small and dwindling (Jewish leaders estimated around thirty thousand members), its presence kept Jewish Iranians involved in Iranian life. In Iran, I had never encountered the open, careless anti-Semitism that was rampant in Arab countries, where often people truly did conflate Jewishness with the most repressive aspects of Israeli Zionism.

That evening, I sat before my laptop wondering how to convince readers of this. Most people in the West probably believed Ahmadinejad’s vitriolic remarks about Israel and the Holocaust reflected the opinion of a majority of Iranians. It didn’t help matters that the media always mentioned Iran among the countries where people had pro tested the Danish cartoons. I had attended one of the so-called protests outside a European embassy. The demonstration had been small, and composed entirely of the Basiji and chadori types that journalists in Tehran referred to as “rent-a-crowd.” Though the protest had been in a bustling part of the city, it never grew to include the ordinary people who worked and lived in the area. I had spoken with a few of the protesters, and had been able to tell immediately that their presence was orchestrated. The men had likely been sent by their Basij unit, and the women told to attend by either a local mosque or a state employer. One woman even whispered to me that she had voted for Rafsanjani, and that she was disappointed in Ahmadinejad’s performance. Western diplomats believed the most radical factions within the regime dispatched such crowds to drive a wedge between Iran and the West, especially during critical junctures in the nuclear negotiations.

This was all far too complex to elucidate in a standard six-hundred-word news story, and I despaired of ever being able to
convince Americans that Iran was not a country full of hysterical anti-Semites. Even my own best friend in California, who had read my stories for years and had a better sense of Iran than most, had asked in an e-mail that day whether it would be safe for her to come to my wedding. I had written back, “Of course it’s safe! People love Americans here. You’ll get marriage proposals in the street, probably.” (Her problem would not be safety, but the difficulty Americans faced in securing Iranian visas. The United States granted Iranians visas so stingily, and Iran responded in kind, making the visa process for Americans enormously complicated. Most likely, my best friend would not be able to attend my wedding. I thought about this glumly as I sent off my story, reaching for what was probably my tenth Danish pastry of the day.)

L
ike most Islamic theocracies, the Iranian government preferred that women skip the life stage known in the West as single adulthood. Presumably this is why the legal marriage age was thirteen for girls (it was raised from nine under the Khatami presidency) and fifteen for boys. It explained the low-interest loans for wedding costs, and the use of compulsory marriage as one punishment for young couples caught dating on more than three occasions. These measures were designed to ensure that Iranian women conducted their lives in accordance with strict Islamic custom, by which a woman existed only as an appendage to a man—as a daughter, wife, or mother—and that any frivolous interval during which she occupied none of these roles should be hurried through with great haste. Given these attitudes and the laws that reflected them, I assumed that getting married in Iran would be about as complicated as buying a melon.

But when Arash contacted a local marriage notary—like many, this one was a cleric—to check what sort of paperwork we would need, he learned that, at least for us, a the process would be inordinately complicated. “But she’s twenty-nine!” Arash protested.

I was eavesdropping on the speaker-phone. “I don’t care if she’s twenty or a hundred,” the mullah snapped, “if she’s a
dooshizeh
[a
previously unmarried woman] then she needs either her father’s permission or his death certificate.” I had spent years reporting on women’s inferior legal status in the Islamic Republic, and could repeat by rote the most egregious examples: their testimony as witnesses counted for only a third of a man’s; their families were entitled to only half the compensation, or “blood money,” that the families of male victims received; their custody rights over children were partial at best. But somehow I had missed this particular instance of discrimination.

My father, who lived in northern California, belonged to that category of émigré who considered a trip to Iran only slightly less distasteful than a vacation in North Korea. He was born in Mashad, but had studied engineering at U.C. Berkeley in the 1960s and took part in the Iranian student movement abroad that pushed for democratic reform of the Shah’s government. Later he returned to Iran, believing his training as an industrial engineer could help modernize the country, and devoted himself to building construction equipment. Although he and my mother had already moved to California by 1979, they considered their relocation temporary. The revolution permanently canceled any hope of one day returning to Iran, and my father felt fiercely betrayed. He had dedicated years of his life to a practical discipline he did not enjoy, for the sole purpose of serving his country’s most urgent needs. Believing that Iran needed democracy as badly as it needed modern freeways and bulldozers, he had invested years in student politics. What became the mullahs’ revolution made a mockery of his life, with its return to Shia ideals, with Khomeini’s pronouncement that the western-educated should simply go. My father’s disappointment infused the rest of his personality; in the loneliness of his exile, he began despising Iran. He nurtured a keen hatred not only for its present regime, but also for its culture and its Islamic traditions. He taught me to revere the
Shahnameh
for its celebration of Persian ideals before the arrival of Islam (his car’s vanity plate was RAKSH, for the epic’s mythical steed). And he instilled in me a love for Persian gardens. But he always told me to be wary of Iran the actual existing nation, run by mullahs. At the time I considered this very
normal, since nearly all educated male Iranians of the diaspora felt this way, just as they were all addicted to their monthly poker games and political debates.