The Ministry of Guidance Invites You to Not Stay: An American Family in Iran (13 page)

It even seeped into ordinary day-to-day interactions, like shopping. At one’s local fruit and vegetable stand, prices were rising—in the Tajrish bazaar, avocados ran to as much as fifteen dollars apiece,
apiece
, in the off season. But when customers complained, as they commonly did, the fruit seller—rather than apologize and blame everyone but himself for the sad state of inflation in the country, as he normally would—might retort that one shouldn’t complain about a few pennies when people are walking off with billions. “You’re from America,” one of my local fruit sellers, a man I liked very much, said to me after an agonizingly long bargaining and caviling session with a woman in an elegant manteau and Hermès head scarf, a regular customer who he said lives in California half of the year. “Do they haggle as much over there?” When I responded in the negative, he merely said, “I didn’t think so! And here they steal billions!”

Two point six
billion
dollars, I heard again and again. If a taxi ride cost more than one expected, the driver might tell you to not begrudge him a toman or two when others were making
billions
. It was
a staggering sum, those billions of dollars, to ordinary and wealthy Iranians alike. Even the young owner of the sole Bugatti Veyron in Iran, the most expensive passenger car in the world, with a list price of over one million dollars in the United States (and quadruple that in Iran, if he is ever allowed to title and register it rather than garage it in the tony neighborhood of Velenjak, taking it out for a spin once in a while), must’ve been taken aback at the sum of money extracted from Iranian banks with such apparent ease by Amir Khosravi, not much older than himself, and his associates. “A.Kh.,” as he was first referred to in the press, in keeping with the tradition of referring to suspected criminals only by their initials, had somehow, along with Amir Mansour Aria and, apparently, thirty other confederates, forged letters of credit that were accepted first by the nation’s biggest banks (the president of Bank Melli fled to Canada before he could be arrested) and then by other smaller private banks (including the one where Karri and I had set up an account), to buy companies, including state-owned ones.

They accumulated cash on a level unimaginable to any Iranian, even to the Supreme Leader, whose own wealth probably compares favorably to the queen of England’s. (Being the ultimate authority in the republic for over twenty years has meant that even without dipping into public funds, he and his family have been able to benefit from investments in any business, state-organized and private, that they have chosen to involve themselves with, and they have had access to billions of dollars in unaudited Islamic charity accounts.) The ultimate authority ultimately decided that enough was enough and that Islamic punishment was due the criminals who had made off with such a sum. Except it was unclear who in the government—and the criminals must have had government connections—was also involved, and unclear to ordinary Iranians that a scapegoat wouldn’t be found to deflect attention away from the rampant corruption. Despite Ahmadinejad’s campaign promises to root it out, corruption had actually increased in the years of his presidency: not only among
the Revolutionary Guards, whose tentacles reached into even more of the economy than before and without whose partnership virtually no large business could exist, but in Ahmadinejad’s own ministries, documented often enough but punished infrequently.

The main perpetrators of the fraud, at least those not in government, were certain to be caught and prosecuted; perhaps some would even eventually be executed by an unforgiving and highly embarrassed
nezam
whose very legitimacy rests not just on Islam but also—in keeping with the notion of justice that it promotes nationally and even internationally—on its constant and consistent defense of the
mostazafin
, the downtrodden urban poor of society, people for whom numbers in the billions are unfathomable.

In the last few years, an explosion of luxury cars on the streets of Tehran, cars that often cost far more than the homes the
mostazafin
live in, along with superluxury apartment buildings with prices matching Manhattan’s or London’s, has given the lie to that peculiar notion of justice; for it is impossible to accumulate that kind of wealth without strong regime connections or a strong proclivity to corruption. If a multibillion-dollar fraud was exposed in 2011, many reasoned, then what about all the frauds that hadn’t been exposed in the past or wouldn’t ever be in the future? They will remain a legacy of the Islamic Revolution, to be brought to light in the future either by a reformed regime or by one that replaces the current one.

The issue of
akhlagh
, the Persian character, weighed on me during our stay in Iran. If it was true, as so many people now said, that we had lost our essence—as a people who valued poetry and beauty, family and pride, charity toward the poor, and honor in business, in politics, and in social intercourse—then what emotional connection could I have any longer to the land of my birth? And why would I want my son exposed to that
akhlagh
, if it bore no relation to the
akhlagh
, perhaps one I romanticized, of his forebears?

Iranians opposed to the Islamic regime would often tell me that they were so pessimistic about the future that even if there were a
revolution tomorrow to replace the system they hated, it would be of no use, since the Persian-ness that had once defined them was now lost, if not forever, then for generations. “How do you change these monsters?” a friend said to me, after a minor shouting match on the street over a perceived discourtesy, and by
monsters
he didn’t just mean the stranger who was the target of his ire. “They’ve lived for over thirty years in a system that rewards boorishness and disciplines graciousness; there’s just no hope.” Those once-upper-middle-class Iranians, many of them cash-poor and possessing far less wealth than the monsters—or “savages,” as Khosro described them—whom they deride, should be in the vanguard of a movement to instigate change, but they have seemingly given up on their country, even as they seem reluctant to leave it for good, as many of their contemporaries have done, often with only the clothes on their backs. The Iranian penchant for hyperbole was alive and well, I understood, and although some Iranians, older ones usually, may not be active in any meaningful way to better their country, they will still be there and will contribute to changing society—a society that has little use for them now—when and if they are asked.

My
khaleh
-Poori, for example, or Aunt Poori, as my brother and I have called her since childhood even though she is not a blood relation, has lived in Iran her entire life. She baby-sat me, even on her trips abroad, and she and her politically active husband were my parents’ closest friends until, after the shah’s return to power during the 1953 coup, the regime executed her husband. I try to see her every time I’m in Tehran. I was particularly eager for her to see my son during this prolonged stay—she was surprised I had one, assuming that at my advanced age I would remain childless—and to see how she would react to the child of a child she had once taken care of and loved. I’ve always been a little perplexed as to why she persists, a single woman living alone in Iran when she could easily emigrate, for her politics do not jibe with that of the clerics or their lay supporters, and her fluency in English and her education could long ago have provided
her with opportunities and a comfortable life abroad in Europe, which she knew well and where she spent much time. I asked her, when she finally was able to come to our apartment after numerous canceled appointments and after I showed her what Skype-ing with my parents in London was like—Khash sitting on her lap and as well behaved as he could be, given that he’d starting walking recently and tore around the small apartment as if in a perpetual race—if she had ever thought of leaving Iran.

“No,” she said, almost indignantly. “Why would I ever do that?”

I suggested that perhaps now, after waiting all these years for some change and after the disappointment of the post-Khatami years—particularly the failure of the Green Movement—she might want to retire somewhere she could enjoy more social freedom and escape the difficulties of living in Tehran. Poori had in fact long ago escaped the city for a village in the mountains, but she commuted to downtown Tehran every day and continued to be gainfully employed at the National Library.

She seemed genuinely taken aback by the question. “There’s nothing like living in your own country,” she said firmly. “This is my country—nothing else matters, does it?” She didn’t say it out of some misguided nationalism, I realized, but simply out of love for what she knew, even if what she once knew, perhaps even some of that Persian
akhlagh
, had changed. Perhaps her escape from actually living in the heart of the city was a way to close her eyes to the changes, behavioral and otherwise, taking place in her country, I thought. But she didn’t talk about it further, and we didn’t have a political conversation, other than her asking me about former president Khatami, who had once been her boss at the library. She wanted to catch up on family news and spend time with Khash and Karri. It delighted me that she had met Khash, even if for the one and only time, and it saddened me that he wouldn’t remember his father’s onetime baby-sitter. But her visit confirmed to me that whatever was happening to Iran and whatever the perceived changes in the Persian
akhlagh
in Tehran,
Iran was always going to be the Iran I wanted Khash to know—frustrating, yes, but its real character wouldn’t, no,
couldn’t
, change. All is not well in Iran, not by a long shot, and few people I know would insist that it is, but provided the Pooris and other Iranians don’t abandon her, and persist in living through these troubled times, there is hope for the Iran we love. As long as they remain in their country, Iran and the Iranian essence cannot change irrevocably.

Bringing Khash to Iran was a way to show him the sights, sounds, and smells of my country but also its character. I knew he would remember none of it, but he might not have another opportunity to visit Iran as he grew up, or as he entered adulthood, and perhaps when I was no longer around, he would at least know he had
smelled
Iran, figuratively and literally, just once. To add to my happiness in seeing Poori and to my sense of country being affirmed in some way, now that I knew Khash was in the right place, Poori, to my vainglorious delight, said she thought Khash was exactly like me, both in looks and behavior, when I was his age. But we’ll see what he remembers and who he becomes,
farda
.

6
BEATING THE SYSTEM

Renting an apartment in Tehran is no more or less difficult than renting one anywhere else. If we were to arrive in London or Paris with the intention of living there for a year, without connections, we would scan the classifieds, check Internet listings, and visit a couple of real estate agents. The same is true in Tehran; the English-language papers are filled with ads for apartments, and real estate offices dot the landscape as they do in any Western capital. Real estate offerings are less present on the Internet, where a few searches brought up sites that were inexplicably censored. Perhaps the word
bathroom
is a red flag for the filtering software Iran employs, or
six rooms
might be too close to
sex rooms
, but not many Iranians seek out rentals on the Web anyway, preferring as they do with almost everything a more personal touch.

Renting an apartment in Tehran for only a year, and a furnished one at that, leaves one to choose between living in what Iranians call “apartment hotels”—overpriced and not particularly appealing—and finding, through pure luck or an acquaintance, a decent apartment that doesn’t require a huge security deposit or a longer-term commitment. One way apartments come on the market in Tehran is for the owner, who often owns the apartment purely as an investment vehicle,
to demand a large sum of money, usually more than two or three years’ worth of what would be the rent, up front. With that cash the owner can either take advantage of high interest rates at banks, or make other relatively safe investments, during the lease. At the end, when the tenant vacates the apartment, the owner is obliged to return the entire deposit, which sounds like a good deal except that in Iran just depositing your money in a bank can get you 20 percent interest or more, and if you are cash rich, other investments can bring returns of more than 100 percent.