Lipstick Jihad (31 page)

And so I thought out the worst. Veiled, I would dislike myself. I would brush my teeth in the dark, embarrassed to look at myself in the mirror. But going bareheaded, I would display disrespect for the faith of men I esteemed. Men who had, on their territory, encouraged me, treated me with respect, and always helped me, even when it didn't serve their purposes. On what they perceived as my territory, I would be flinging it all in their faces. This I would carry around like a brick of guilt in my stomach. This I could not live with.

With just a block to go, I unfolded the veil and draped it over my hair, tossing the ends over my shoulders. For a second I felt transported back to Villa Street, that day when Khaleh Zahra dropped her veil and attracted eyes like a lighthouse. On this Manhattan street, wearing a veil was the equivalent of going bare-headed in Tehran. Suddenly, I wasn't invisible anymore. People's eyes actually skimmed over me, instead of sliding past blindly, as they're supposed to do on a crowded urban sidewalk. I had been so busy contemplating “to veil or not to veil” that it hadn't occurred to me anyone else would notice. It was like wearing a neon sign, blinking “Muslim! Muslim!”

I reached the U.N. Plaza Hotel and joined the other journalists, television anchors with brand-name voices, in the lobby. As though the self-immolation
I had subjected myself to en route was not enough, a prominent television reporter took one look at my covered head and informed me imperiously that I was not required to veil (as though I had forgotten that the laws of the Islamic Republic did not apply in New York City) and that in fact, I was doing the other women there a disservice by doing so. So now, not only was I wearing the veil, but I was forced to defend the decision publicly with all these people listening. I live and work in Iran, I explained. My situation is different. I deal with these officials all the time, not once a year at election time.

After the day's round of meetings, I slunk back to my hotel room, peeled off the outfit of shame, and poured myself a glass of wine from the mini-bar. Lying naked on the fluffy white comforter, I contemplated, in between sips, where my cousins and I should go for dinner that evening. Somewhere very unIslamic Republic. Tapas? Nobu? Just as the hundreds of small kinks in my shoulders had begun to ease, the phone rang.

“Salaam Azadeh Khanoum.”
It was Parsa, the president's translator, and apparently, he was downstairs in the lobby.
My
lobby. No, no, no, I groaned face down into the pillow. He had asked me that afternoon where I was staying, and since
international law
prohibited the delegation from leaving U.N. grounds, it hadn't occurred to me not to tell him. “For just one second, come down. I have to speak to you about something,” he said.

Parsa was arrogant, boyish, and spoke four languages fluently. He had sneaked me into a bunch of bilateral talks that day, and had given me play-by-play updates of the president's movements by cell phone, since their arrival.
Now we're on the Brooklyn Bridge, getting pelted by eggs
[anti-regime activists].
Now we're at the hotel, and he's taking a nap. Now we're skipping the photo session, because Madeleine Albright is supposed to be there.

“Basheh,”
I sighed, all right. “Give me a minute.” I pulled on a pair of jeans, but refused to brush my teeth. He and his friends were probably drinking back at their hotel, and I didn't care if he smelled wine on my breath. There was nothing sadder than official Iranian delegations—journalists, officials, their assistants—abroad. Half of any group usually couldn't wait to crack open a beer, but there were always one or two devout spoilers. They argued
among themselves, like those sour couples who are always bickering in the breakfast rooms of hotels. I wouldn't wear the veil, either. He'd showed up on my turf and he'd just have to deal.

When the elevator doors opened, I saw Parsa perched awkwardly on a red velvet chaise longue shaped like a kidney. The Royalton is one of these overly clever hotels that is deliberately invisible from the street. Its lobby is a stark, white, sunken lounge filled with lithe, beautiful people holding flashy conversations over drinks. Parsa had likely never seen so much exposed skin all at once, but he held his head high, trying to appear unfazed. He undid the top button of his collarless shirt as the waitress, an angular blond giraffe in all black, handed us the cocktail menu. Parsa ignored her, for which I gave him credit. It was a rare servant indeed of the Islamic Republic who could avoid checking out a half-naked blonde. Instead, his eyes scanned the rest of the room like strobe lights. I ordered mineral water, and prayed that he would leave quickly.

In a small, nervous voice, he asked me if anyone at
Time
needed a Farsi-speaking assistant in New York, and seeing the incredulous look on my face, revised his request slightly. Or in Tehran. Or Dubai. Or anywhere really, as long he was working for an American company.

“Are you kidding?” I asked him gently. “You have an amazing job. You speak all these languages and get to travel the world. You translated for our
president
in front of the entire General Assembly. Why would you want to give that up to be someone's assistant?”

His face sank in disappointment. In the end, he said, each glamorous assignment landed him back in Tehran, on an Iranian passport. He didn't care about the status; he wanted a life with a future. Besides, there were handfuls of qualified translators who deserved his job, and he owed his to some combination of chance and connections to insiders within the system. If those connections dried up or he fell out of favor, well, he would be just another talented, Iranian twenty-something working long hours for a paltry salary and little chance of upward mobility.

This type of conversation, of which I'd had too many, was akin to treating a splinter. Any tug or pull, whether getting the splinter out or pushing it in further, hurt. And in the end, no one would listen to what I said, because I was not considered an impartial judge. If I argued that life in Iran, for all its oppressiveness, had a sweet, singular appeal, I would be scoffed
at.
Nafasat az jayeh garm darmiyad,
as the Persian expression went, loosely meaning: You're judging the coldness of a place from a warm spot. As long as I bore an American passport, any Iranian who didn't would reject my opinions on the livability of Iran. They would interpret my reaction to mean that I didn't think Iranians deserve better, that they shouldn't strive for what I had. But if I agreed, commiserating about how life in Iran could grind you down to a fine powder, like a few strands of saffron crushed under the weight of a pestle, I would be confirming the future's bleakness. And then my judgment would be fresh cause for despair.

Parsa fidgeted, trailing his finger through the condensation on the green glass of the water bottle. I asked if he could find his way back to the hotel. He said he could. Phew. Operation Abort Translator Defection appeared to be a success.

Presidents Khatami and Bill Clinton had come within yards of a handshake. For weeks before the Assembly, an informal group of senior semi-official intermediaries had convinced both Iranian and U.S. officials to proceed with the gesture, on the sidelines of the summit, in the first public display of rapprochement between the two countries in decades. The Americans had said yes, provided the Iranians promised not to make any stentorian rhetorical accusations. The Iranians had the same requirement. Both were reassured the other would behave discreetly. Everything was set. It was meant to happen as the world leaders gathered for the annual picture.

But at the eleventh hour, the Iranian side backed out. For reasons I didn't quite understand, I took this failure of diplomatic vision personally. I felt like the Islamic Republic had let me down. Or maybe it was the first time I had front row seats to the Islamic Republic messing up a good opportunity, the first time I had seen its foreign policy so starkly reactive, so absent of long-range strategy or ambition. The leaders weren't taking Iran forward, they were doing damage control and trying to keeping a failed revolution afloat.

At such times, when the puppet-show character of Iranian leadership was put in stark relief against the panorama of the possible that was both
the U.N. and New York, I felt crushed by the magnitude of Iran's national decline. How had we been reduced to this? We who had once brimmed with potential, we who had an embarrassing wealth of riches—oil, an ancient civilization, gorgeous cities that would forever draw tourists, mountains and sea, an educated and talented population.

It was impossible for me to form any thoughts beyond what my role was, or what it should be, in relation to this national disaster. One part of me felt involved. I felt like I should make a firm decision, as Siamak had done—roll up my sleeves and take up permanent residence in Iran and in some small, modest way, chip away at the edifice of this rotten regime. At this tendency, my father would have rolled his eyes and said (pointedly and in English), “We raised you in California. We sent you to an American university. Get over it.”

Another part of me wanted to listen to my dad and pretend it was okay to do that. I could leave Tehran to study Persian literature at Stanford and buy French cheese at the gourmet groceries in Palo Alto and serve wine to my well-groomed Iranian yuppie friends. I could be Iranian without the Islamic Republic, without the Mr. X interrogations, the nightmares, the veil, and the lascivious mullahs with their temporary marriage proposals.

Being in these political situations, when Iran and the U.S. encountered one another, made me nervous. No one came right out and said anything, but everyone acted uncomfortable if you didn't make your loyalties and politics clear from the outset. If you weren't obvious about this kind of question and suggested things were complicated (that Iran was a rogue state with democratic tendencies; that the United States made lots of mistakes in the Middle East), the possibility lingered that you were some sort of apologist for authoritarian regimes.

I didn't know what I thought. About politics. About patriotic duty. About what or whom I should even have patriotic duty toward. Thinking of myself as a hyphenated entity, an Iranian-American, didn't help in the slightest. It was a sense of self that helped in the banal, day-to-day course of things, but it didn't erase the question of loyalty at all. It didn't help you when two things you loved, countries or people, existed at odds with one another.

When I was a girl, when I tugged on my mother's skirt and made her repeat my favorite story—of her
maman bozorg
(grandmother), the one who
chopped down the mulberry orchard in revenge for being demoted to second wife—I remember feeling outrage at the injustice. In the only picture of my great-grandmother we have, she sits on a terrace, next to a line of hanging laundry, hands folded across her lap, a squinting, uncomfortable expression on her face, as though the chair she sat on was missing a leg. How could this great-grandfather be so horrible, I asked my mother, as to cruelly
make maman bozorg
a co-wife? Why was it allowed at all?

Maman explained that in the Koran, it says that a man can take more than one wife
on the condition
that he treats all of them exactly equally. Their quarters must be furnished with equal elegance or simplicity; he must spend an equal number of nights with each. But what about love? I asked. How can he love them equally in his heart? He can't, she said. The heart doesn't work that way. And that's why men should never, ever, have more than one wife. Because the heart is not docile, can't follow literal instructions, can't be cordoned off like a garden—this grove for the first wife, this for the second. Sooner or later, emotions blossom or wither in places they shouldn't, and the pretense of heart boundaries collapses.