Honeymoon in Tehran: Two Years of Love and Danger in Iran (44 page)

In the days that followed, I grew so skittish that I would snap to attention at the sound of pigeons scuttling over the window ledges. One morning a man whose voice I did not recognize buzzed our apartment from the street, asking me to come down to receive a piece of mail. This is it, I thought, they’ve finally come to take me away. I began to cry and dashed toward the back of the house, passing Arash on the way. “He’s here, I mean they’re here. … Tell them I won’t go! … I’m not sure who it is, but I think it’s
them. …
Tell them we have a baby, that I can’t leave him!” I ran into the farthest corner of the bedroom and slammed the door behind me, as though somehow the distance would protect me from the mysterious man. I lapsed into thoughts of what my cell in the Evin prison would be like, filling my imagination with details I remembered from working on Shirin khanoum’s book. The vomit-encrusted carpet, the metal toilet that was never cleaned, the bacteria-infested well water piped into the women’s ward (only male prisoners enjoyed clean city tap water).

“Prisoner Azadeh, will you please come out?” Arash tapped on the door.

I opened it a crack, eyeing him suspiciously. He did not appear too upset, in the manner one would expect if a van were waiting below to cart off his wife.

He handed me a manila package. “The postmark is from California, so for now you’re still a free woman.”

I tore it open impatiently, and pulled out a jumper with little airplane designs. It was a gift for Hourmazd from one of my relatives, and I smiled weakly. “How was I supposed to know it was the postman?”

Besides skulking about the house and falling apart every time the doorbell rang, I
was
taking active steps to do something about my predicament—trying to, anyway. I immediately stopped working and told my editors about Mr. X’s threat. It was unwise for us to talk over the phone, as it wouldn’t make any sense to plan an escape or chart our course of action on a tapped line. The authorities likely monitored my e-mail as well, so I talked with my editors on the satellite phone, which had turned out useful after all. Each evening I climbed the stairs to the snowy rooftop, pacing until the phone connected to the satellite, gazing over the winter skyline.

My editors wanted me to fly to Dubai immediately, but if Mr. X’s threat was real, then an attempt to leave the country would invite a confrontation. I would likely be arrested at the airport and thus be detained all the sooner. Since the conversation with Mr. X, Arash and I had recalled an incident at the airport upon our return from Germany that we had given little thought to at the time. The passport officer, upon scanning my documents, had looked curiously at his screen, and turned to inspect me. “They didn’t say anything to you as you were leaving the country?” he asked.

“No, why?” Arash had replied.

“Never mind. If they didn’t say anything, then I guess it doesn’t matter.”

That exchange now seemed weighted with dark meaning. Both of us feared the screen had announced that I was barred from leaving the country, that the officer was puzzled that I had been let out at all.

Although leaving might be risky, sitting in Tehran waiting for the worst to unfold hardly seemed a better option. I decided to contact a highly influential senior official, a man of great integrity whom I had known for years and trusted implicitly, to ask for help. It was the only way to find out whether the judiciary was actually building a case
against me, or whether Mr. X was bluffing—a coldhearted, sinister bluff designed to scare me away from working, perhaps forever. The official kindly agreed to investigate, promising to let me know what his inquiries turned up.

As the days turned into a week, and then two, it became apparent we needed to be patient, and that an investigation into the nature of a threat emerging from a government with multiple institutions with overlapping mandates and conflicting intentions took a measure of time. We told ourselves that until we knew more, we should not torture ourselves by assuming the worst. Actually, Arash told me this, and I tried to listen.

As though none of this were enough, precisely this time I learned that my mother in California had been diagnosed with metastatic breast cancer, a recurrence of the disease that had been in remission since I was in junior high and that we had thought had been cured forever. I did not tell her about the troubles I was facing, because she would be powerless to help and needed all her strength to cope with chemotherapy. Though she didn’t say anything, I knew she wondered why I wasn’t flying out to see her. I made vague references to “special circumstances” that required my presence in Tehran, but a gulf seemed to open between us. The geographic distance was magnified by how little I knew about her condition, and I stayed awake late into the night, trying to research her cancer on the Internet. I figured it would be easier to learn on the Web what the prognosis was for metastatic breast cancer than to ask her directly. But including the word “breast” in my search terms ran up against the wall of the government filters, and I continually met the maddening, final “Access to this site is denied” page of the service provider. As I had discovered when pregnant, the censors blocked searches of almost every body part, cutting off Iranians from a wealth of medical information. They denied each part of the body its vast array of rightful associations—medical, athletic, literary, sartorial, artistic—and reduced it to its crudest form, a sexual object.

I abandoned my Internet search and resolved to speak directly to her doctor, who only took calls after lunch, California time. For an entire week I stayed up until past two
A.M.,
begging his nurses to put
my call through. Eventually, I gave up trying to speak with him, and settled for the vague replies of his assistant. Those nights, weary from lack of sleep, from the unknown threat that might be stalking me, from the “special circumstances” that prevented me from seeing my sick mother, I began to feel that the life I had so lovingly created in Iran had turned into a nightmare. For the time being, at least, I no longer had a career, or even the assurance of personal safety. Nor could I take solace in the idea that I alone stood to suffer. Arash and Hourmazd were vulnerable as well, and I could do nothing to protect them.

With my toe, I gently traced the pattern of the rug, following the vines that formed its border. Those who make it their life’s work to understand Persian rugs can immediately spot a carpet of poor quality. Though the designs are meant to be symmetrical, the fingers of tribal weavers tire after laborious months of knotting from sunrise to dusk. As they reach the rug’s bottom, their concentration wavers, the knots loosen, the design grows less precise. That was how I felt, as though the strands of my carefully woven Iran life were unraveling.

C
ompulsory retirement was not without advantages. Before the fateful phone call to Mr. X, I perpetually lacked time. Now I had long, luxurious days full of nothing to do. Though the warning still preyed on my mind, I found myself unable to keep up the intensity of my loathing for Mr. X and the cruelty of the Islamic government, my dread that what he told me was true. Slowly I became preoccupied again with mundane matters, like whether Persian Gulf shrimp were back in season, or whether I had dry cleaning to pick up. I walked along Shariati Avenue, Hourmazd snuggled in a sling carrier, and sipped pistachio milk shakes topped with mulberries. I haunted the Golestan Gallery, around the corner from our house, which that month was exhibiting the work of a young woman on death row. I lingered around the bookstalls near Tehran University, whose dusty stacks contained relics of a past Iran, back when there were enough Americans in the country to merit multiple copies of books by Helen Gurley Brown. Along with Arash and his friend Houshang, I spent days in south Tehran, exploring the shrine of Shabdolazim, and the pilgrimage site of Bibi Shahrbanou, one of the daughters of the last Iranian king, Yazdgerd III, before the Islamic conquest. Attracted to a myth that fuses Zoroastrian Iran with Shia Islam, many Iranians believe that Princess Shahrbanou became the wife of Imam Hossein.
Scholars have long disproved this legend, but the ordinary, often illiterate women in chador who climb the tan-colored hill to the shrine do not know this, and make their reverent pilgrimage anyway.

At other times, Hourmazd and I spent the day at my parents-in-law’s home in Lavasan, curled up under the
korsi,
an electric brazier tucked beneath a table covered with quilts. We watched the birds alight on the snow-laden branches, and when it was sunny we ventured out onto the terrace, watching Geneva cavort in the banks of snow. We had moved the dogs to Lavasan, partly because Geneva had grown too large for the apartment, and partly because it was safer for them. As part of their “anti-immorality” drive, the authorities had stepped up their harassment of Iranians with pet dogs; by some reports, they had even established a dog prison to detain pooches caught walking illegally (for a dog, this seemed to mean walking in the capacity of a pet, rather than as an independent, nameless four-legged creature).

Were we to be lost in a blizzard, Geneva would have been capable of saving us, in the long tradition of the St. Bernards who rescued stranded travelers in the Alps. I told the Lavasan gardener this, hoping it might mitigate his dislike for her. Like most devout Muslims, he considered dogs ritually impure, and disapproved of us keeping them as pets. As a result, he also skimped on her meals and denied her sufficient time outside her corral. When she lost weight, her coat hanging too loosely on her frame, we reprimanded him and asked that he feed her as we instructed. But as was his maddening way, he offered her more food only when we were in residence, reasserting his pious neglect when we returned to Tehran. The knowledge of her noble lineage as a rescuer of lost travelers made no difference to the gardener, who continued to glower in resentment as she trotted after him with a goofy, drooling smile.

When Hourmazd slept, I listened to the relaxation CDs my mother had sent from California. She had just started a course of radiation therapy, and over the phone at least, she sounded as though she had already given up. I focused each day on not taking my situation, the temporary annulment of my career, personally. The instinct that rose up each day from deep inside was to somehow punish those responsible,
to blast them with my generalized contempt, to write caustic essays in which I derided them (they had, of course, taken on the abstract, monolithic object status of “them”) as backward, smelly, evil. There was a genre dedicated to this sort of reaction, revenge lit you might call it, comprising books like
Not Without My Daughter
and other volumes that took one person’s misfortune and fashioned out of it an assault on a nation, a culture, its people, and, often, their religion. It took all my concentration to beat down this angry impulse, to view what was happening to me dispassionately as a political process. The fact that I was currently a victim did not mean all women in Iran were suddenly victims.

The most profound change inside me, one that I could not control or reverse, was the final evaporation of my spiritual regard for Islam. I did not begin to resent or disrespect the faith. I was already well acquainted with the dangerous, puritanical ways in which it could be interpreted, the premodern complexity of its jurisprudence. But my passion for its qualities subsided. Before, I had been quick to defend Islam whenever I felt it was attacked or portrayed unjustly. I remembered how determined I used to be to ensure that
Time
cover Islam fairly, even once waking up a respected Islamic scholar in the middle of the night to help me correct what I knew was a distorted reference parsing the Koran.

I would always cover Islam diligently, but I could no longer imagine myself throwing all my energy and soul into the task. Why should I, when the grand ayatollahs of Qom could not be bothered to defend the rights of Iranians against Mr. X and the regime he represented? Once, I would have argued that the ayatollahs were moderates at heart, but that a long tradition of political quietism prevented them from stepping into the fray. Now that reasoning did not satisfy me. If they were indeed moderates, let them come out and defend moderation. Islam could not be constituted only of the liberal reverence and interpretations of a handful of reformist Muslims who accepted western humanism and universal values. Islam was the sum total of its many million believers, their behavior and outlook. And at this point in time, that majority had not come out in favor of change; they did not accept the liberal reformists, or even know of them. These were
intellectual conclusions that I could easily have arrived at before, had my spirit been willing. Though it is the most commonplace thing in the world for faith to cloud reason, I had always applied that truth to extremists, such as the Israeli settlers and Muslim suicide bombers in their perpetual standoff. It had not occurred to me that
my
attitude toward Islam might also be vulnerable to such emotional distortion. I wasn’t at all pious; I had attended university; I had grown up in California. Was it Mr. X who had taught me otherwise, or simply living in Iran, years of living right up against Muslim hypocrisy? Though I could not be sure, and though I missed the easy pride and sense of belonging my previous views had afforded, I considered myself cured—and free.