Honeymoon in Tehran: Two Years of Love and Danger in Iran (43 page)

In December of 2006, the U.N. Security Council had unanimously passed a resolution imposing sanctions on Iran over its nuclear program. Not long after, American troops in Iraq arrested several members of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards, and a top official in Washington accused them of being “engaged in sectarian warfare.” Most worrisome of all, though, was the January State of the Union address, in which President Bush lumped Iran together with Al Qaeda and claimed that “the Shia and Sunni extremists are different faces of the same totalitarian threat.” This statement was dangerously, and some said deliberately, misleading. European diplomats argued it was Washington’s way of seeking a more “robust” position ahead of negotiations with Iran, but to me it just sounded like more scary justification to bomb.

With the world so focused on the emerging threat of a U.S.-Iran confrontation, my editors pleaded with me to resume work. Though they had agreed to allow me three months of maternity leave, they convinced me to return after just two months, to help them consider making Ahmadinejad “Person of the Year.” In the end, they did not bestow the president that distinction, but I was caught up again in the whirl of news and somehow back on my editors’ radar. That was why, even before I’d managed to teach Hourmazd that he should sleep at night rather than during the day, I found myself riding a taxi to central Tehran to interview a university professor who was also a prominent political analyst. America wanted to know whether Tehran had the jitters, and it was my mission to find out.

It was my first full-fledged outing without three-month-old Hourmazd; I felt a rush of exhilaration, closely followed by panic. I had planned the meeting with great precision, making the appointment for an hour when traffic was at its lightest so that I could be back within three hours, the longest stretch Hourmazd, who still refused to take bottles, could go without being nursed. I prayed that there would
be no unexpected accidents clogging the freeway and no collapse in the mobile phone network: that the first outing of my career as a working mother would go smoothly.

Usually the guards at the front of the university waved my taxi through the gates. But that day, they gestured me out of the car. I impatiently collected my purse and rushed up to the guardhouse, calculating the stop would entail about five minutes of lost interview time.

I explained to one of the guards who I was, whom I was there to see, but he just stared at me glacially.

“You can’t enter looking like that,” he said. “Your manteau has too few buttons.” He used the formal pronoun for “you,” the equiva lent of the French
vous
in Farsi, but his tone radiated scorn.

I looked down at what I was wearing, confused. It was one of my more conservative overcoats, loose and olive green, and it was held together in the front by little hooks, not buttons. I wasn’t sure if he took issue with my having hooks in lieu of buttons, or with the insufficient number of those hooks. I told him I was a foreign correspondent on my way to an interview, and that I should not be held to the dress code for female students. He shook his head, and turned his back to me. In a raised voice, I said that my attire was perfectly appropriate, that I had visited this professor numerous times without any such hassle. These protestations failed to move him, so I called the professor on my cell phone. Surely the security guard would not be screening the guests of such a prominent academic.

The professor asked to speak to the guards. I passed them my mobile phone. “Sorry, Doctor,” the shorter of the two said, pronouncing the title with a sneer. “But you cannot imagine how this lady is dressed. … No, it is not possible.” He handed the phone back to me.

“I truly apologize for this, but it seems they’re not going to let you in.” The professor sounded embarrassed. “When they’re intent on picking on you, there’s nothing that can be done.” He used the Farsi verb
gir dadan,
which means to pick on or harass for no discernible reason. The term became popular after the Islamic revolution to describe a form of behavior that had not existed previously. I resented the professor for not coming out to defend me in person, as challenging
them on the phone from the warm confines of his office seemed a bit unchivalrous. But I politely said that I understood, and hung up. I tried one last time with the guards.

“Please reconsider. I’ve left my baby at home, and he still nurses. I don’t have time to go home and come all the way back.”

“Lady, I don’t care if you have a baby,” said the shorter guard. “I don’t care if you’re double-parked. I don’t care if you’ve left food on the stove. You are simply not entering the university like this. You look … you look
appalling.”

I felt as though I had been slapped. “How
dare
you speak to me that way?”

The taller guard rebuked him for addressing a “sister” so disrespectfully, but he continued to gaze at me with brazen contempt, relishing his petty power over the gate, over me.

I burst into tears, humiliated and angry over the loss of my interview and the deadline I would now miss. I despised myself for losing control before the guards, and ran back to the taxi. Once inside, I wept openly.

The taxi driver looked up from his newspaper, astonished. “What has happened, madam?”

“They said … they said … that I didn’t have enough buttons,” I cried, wiping my eyes with the sleeves. “They wouldn’t let me inside.”

“Lanat bar hameshoon, khanoum, lanat bar oon Khomeinishoon!”
“A curse upon all of them, a curse upon their Khomeini! It was now my turn to look up in shock. The taxi driver had invoked a Koranic curse against the guards, and upon the founder of the Islamic Republic.
Lanat kardan,
meaning to deprive someone of God’s mercy, is often used to curse the enemies of God and to curse the devil. Even I, from the very depths of my rage, would never have uttered such words in public. The cabbie spent the length of the ride home recounting tales of clerical malfeasance, some more outlandish than others, in an effort to cheer me up.

“You, madam, you are the proper human. They! They are trash! Thieves!”

I remained silent throughout, telling myself it had been an awful but edifying experience. It gave me a taste of what Iran must have
been like in the early days of the revolution, when Islamic ideologues took over universities, purging women and secular teachers. I told myself the professor should be excused his failure to rush to my defense, because he was lucky to still have his job. One of the first steps Ahmadinejad had taken as president was to appoint a mullah as chancellor of Tehran University. It was the first move in what many called a second cultural revolution, as administrators forced scores of secular-minded professors into early retirement. Even after the purge, which occurred in the early months of 2006, Ahmadinejad told students during a campus appearance that they should “shout at [him] and ask why liberal and secular university lecturers are present in the universities.”

I told myself that being turned away from an interview, in the hierarchy of misfortune one could suffer at the hands of Islamic radicals, scarcely mattered. I couldn’t understand why I was so terribly upset. I had been turned away from many places in my years of reporting in Iran—from universities, mosques, and seminaries, usually on some sartorial pretext that masked the institution’s hostility to females and journalists. It had become a simple nuisance, like getting a parking ticket. What had happened to me? Was this the same me who, after being beaten by police during a demonstration, stopped at a party before going home? The same person who had endured a night of Basiji detention with dry eyes?

At home I took a long shower and curled down next to Hourmazd on the bed. I set his Sleep Sheep, a fuzzy creature intended to induce drowsiness, on its “ocean wave” setting, and pulled the cool sheets over us. For a long time I stared at the shadows on the ceiling. Arash brought me a cup of orange blossom tea, and even though it was past midnight, I could not sleep. Normally I would have taken a sleeping pill, but I was still nursing. Many Iranian women stopped breastfeeding after just a couple of months. Perhaps this was because they could not imagine spending a year or two without sleep aids, anti-depressants, or whatever medication helped them cope with their overwhelming lives.

A
fter a phone interview with a politically connected family friend, I finished my story the next day. The magazine, desperate for any reporting with a Tehran dateline, posted it on the website almost immediately. Only then did I realize I had not informed Mr. X of my return to work; perhaps I should contact him before he thought to call me. I considered this an act of goodwill on my part, because I was only obliged to keep him generally briefed, not report my every movement.

He answered the phone on the second ring with a curt greeting, as though irritated. I began to explain why I was calling, and wondered why he didn’t sound more receptive.

“I just wanted to tell you that I’ve started working again, that I’ve already written a story.”

No reply. Not even perfunctory congratulations on Hourmazd’s birth, despite the fact that Mr. X and I had known each other nearly a decade. He sometimes acted, infuriatingly, as though he couldn’t fathom why I was calling. It was one of his strange tics, perhaps meant to throw me off guard so that I would splutter to fill the silence.

“I thought by telling you I would be keeping our lines of communication open, ensuring there are no mistakes.”

“You are far, far beyond the realm of simple mistakes,” he said, his voice taking on that tone of casual malice I had grown to fear.

“What do you mean?”

“There has been a review of your articles, and it has been concluded that it is no longer appropriate for you to work.”

“Oh.”

“Yes; in fact, your file has been transferred to the judiciary. Proceedings will shortly be under way against you.”

“Proceedings?” I whispered.

“It has been concluded that your articles are guilty of propaganda against the regime, undermining national security …”

He mentioned a third offense, but I was numb with terror and ceased to process what he was saying.

“But how can this be? We’ve been in regular contact. You should have said if something was wrong.”

“You know very well the risks involved in working in Iran. You have been doing so of your own free will.”

I felt betrayed by Mr. X, whose hideous presence in my life I had tolerated precisely to ward off such a day.

“Please, can you clarify? Is it a
possibility
that this will happen to me, or is there an actual process under way?”

“It is already happening,” he replied breezily. “But you can be certain you will have a chance to attend the court. You can come, defend yourself, make a case. Perhaps the judge will rule in your favor.”

The chances of the prosecutor general of Tehran ruling in my favor were comparable with those of a comet changing course. Once someone was charged with such offenses, the last thing they received was due process. They were inevitably incarcerated for long periods, often in solitary confinement, and were subject to interrogation as well as to psychological and sometimes physical abuse. Zahra Kazemi, an Iranian-Canadian photojournalist who found herself in the custody of Iranian authorities in 2003, did not have the chance to “defend herself.” She died in prison of blows to the head, inflicted during interrogation.

There was nothing left to say. I choked out a goodbye and hung up, in disbelief that I had ever given such a vile person the benefit of the doubt.

Arash was playing with the baby. I ran to him, hyperventilating through my sobs. All I could think of was Hourmazd and how he would suffer in my prolonged absence. He was only three months old. They would come for me soon, and he would cry until he was sweaty and red, waiting for me to return. He couldn’t eat or sleep without me. He still refused the bottle. He would think I had abandoned him. But surely they wouldn’t take me away if they knew I had such a small baby? But of course they would. Mr. X knew I had just had a baby. All these thoughts flitted rapidly through my head, and I couldn’t compose myself. Arash put his hands on my shoulders to calm me. He kept asking me to explain what had happened, but I couldn’t speak. In the end he put Hourmazd into my arms. He waved his little arms around as though caressing the air, swiped at my nose, and it was only
by watching these delicate movements and feeling the warmth of his body through his pajamas that I could slow my breathing and describe the nightmare that Mr. X had unleashed.

W
e stayed up that night until almost three. My first thought was that I needed to escape immediately, before I was summoned. “Do you think your dad could use his Tabriz connections to smuggle Hourmazd and me across the border in a truckload of sheep?”

“Why sheep?”

“It seems like a smart place to hide. Who’s going to check the back of a truckload of smelly, woolly sheep?” My great-uncle, according to family lore, had escaped the country in this manner after the 1953 coup, when the reinstalled Shah began persecuting the ministers of Mohammad Mossadegh, the popular prime minster he had deposed.