Honeymoon in Tehran: Two Years of Love and Danger in Iran (13 page)

As I envisioned such interventions, we trudged among the stalls, bending down to squish grapes whose skin resembled the dark purple of the
shahani,
checking to see whether the flesh and its juice were red, as the variety is meant to be, or white, which marked a variety similar in appearance that produced a blush wine.

“You’ve come too late,” a vendor told us, as we made a second circuit with hands that were sticky but disappointingly unstained. “The
shahani
usually finish by eight. If you want
khomreh
[meaning jug, the traditional vessel in which Iranians store wine] grapes, you need to arrive early.” So we drove that same day to Qazvin, a city about 165 miles northwest of Tehran, and in the recesses of its cozy bazaar found enough crates of
shahani
to yield the equivalent of two barrels. By the time we loaded the trunk, we were covered with dirt and ravenous, and finding all the restaurants in the city already closed, bought a loaf of fresh
barbari and
some salty white cheese, and drove out to nearby Alamut, a mountain fortress on the central plain.

It was from here that the mystic-militant order of the Assassins had emerged in 1090. Little remained of the original citadel, just a jagged gray rock slung low on the landscape. We reached it after passing through a village and crossing a nearly dry stream. As we climbed the citadel’s steps, I told Arash what a shame it was that he hadn’t read
The Da Vinci Code
yet. We’d made this stop at my behest: I was immersed in the novel and enthralled with the Templars and the Crusades. This fascination now filled my evenings, and I stayed up late reading books of Templar history and watching films like
Kingdom of Heaven,
which made the religious conflict at the heart of the Crusades seem like a page out of the day’s newspapers.

The Assassins’ story runs as a fascinating subplot through the history
of those times. They were best known for striking poisoned daggers into the hearts of viziers, kings, and others they viewed as impious usurpers. Though the Assassins are notorious for targeting Crusaders, they directed most of their strikes against the Muslim elites—viziers and sultans who, in the Assassins’ eyes, had strayed from the true faith and condemned the doctrine of the Ismailis, the Islamic sect founded by Hassan-e Sabbah, to which they belonged. One reason the Assassin legend has endured throughout the ages, capturing even the modern imagination in novels like
The Da Vinci Code,
is the lore surrounding Alamut itself, their fabled castle-citadel. Marco Polo, in the thirteenth century, described breathlessly the “largest and most beautiful garden ever seen … [containing] palaces the most elegant that can be imagined and … conduits, flowing freely with wine and milk and honey and water.”

We ate our bread and cheese on the dusty steps, our conversation interspersed with contemplative silences. My eyes roamed across the distant valleys, and I thought about the Assassins. In reporting on Islamic militant groups and the Islamic Republic, inevitably I wrote and contributed to stories about the roots of violence in the Middle East. Did the Koran sanction assassination and suicide bombing? Did Shiism somehow make special allowances for the use of terror as a po liti cal weapon? Though the Assassins had disappeared in the thirteenth century, many journalists and Middle East experts drew a neat arc between the era of the Assassins and the present, arguing that modern militancy—manifested in groups like Hamas, Islamic Jihad, and Hez bol lah, and even states like the Iranian Islamic Republic—descended from the Assassins. This was lazy logic, a shortcut way of explaining complex political problems. It did not help explain why the streets of Tehran today bore the names of famous assassins (from the man who killed Anwar Sadat, to an Iranian cleric who targeted secular statesmen and historians). Nor would it help one understand the motivations of men and women today who bombed shopping malls and buses. This had never been more evident to me as that afternoon, sitting amid the ruins of Alamut.

The uneven stone ledges and crumbling dirt slopes reaching up to the citadel’s peak evoked nothing of the castle’s twelfth-century splendor.
But I could see the genius in the castle’s position: it afforded panoramic views of the snowcapped mountains in the distance and the mossy valleys below, but was neatly enclosed and made easily defensible by the rock’s steep face. As the afternoon grew cool, we began making our way down, our grapes still requiring transport to Arash’s family home in Lavasan.

Lavasan had previously been a village outside Tehran, but it was becoming a full-fledged town where middle-class and wealthy Iranians could escape the toxic pollution and traffic of the city. The house was built of red brick from Tabriz and was situated on acres of apricot, walnut, cherry, and willow orchards. The next day we would begin crushing the grapes, but that evening we sprawled out on the Persian-carpeted terrace, staring up at the stars in the summer sky and listening to the frogs croak. “Did you know eighty-six different varieties of grape grow in Iran?” Arash asked lazily, not really expecting a reply. Too worn out from the day’s journeys to play backgammon, explore the gardens, or undertake any of the other pursuits that usually filled our idle time in Lavasan, we drifted off to sleep outside, dreaming of castle strongholds, daggers at the bedsides of sultans, and other twelfth-century manifestations of what the mullah I had interviewed called “our historical compulsion to seek justice.”

N
ot long after our wine-making adventure, sometime in August, something very peculiar happened. While visiting a well-known jewelry store on Jordan Street, I decided, on a whim, to buy my mother a ring. The purchase being unplanned, I did not have enough cash on me; like most stores in Iran, the shop did not accept credit cards. I asked them to hold the ring while I phoned my aunt to see if she had enough cash in the house. She did not, but said a close family friend had an errand to run near Jordan Street and could probably pick it up for me. The friend stopped at the jewelry store and purchased my ring, for which I promptly repaid him. The next day, the jeweler called him and asked him to return to the store. When asked why, the jeweler only said elliptically, “Some gentlemen would like to speak to you.” These “gentlemen” met him in the jeweler’s private office and introduced themselves as security agents. They began interrogating him as to the nature of our association; why was he buying me jewelry? He explained. They demanded to know how I could afford such expensive gifts. The ring was not, in point of fact, particularly expensive for someone who earned an American dollar salary. But the friend felt this was not a tactful thing to say, and instead noted that I had worked for many years and likely had savings I could draw upon. Wondering whether the agents had been Mr. X and his colleague,
I asked the friend to describe them. His vague account could have applied to half the men in Iran under fifty, so there was no way to know for certain. I might have confronted Mr. X directly, but this could easily backfire. When it came to Mr. X, it was always a matter of staying one step ahead in the dance. If he had not been responsible, he would suggest trying to find out which security body had sent the agents, and perhaps he would report back that they belonged to the scary, shadowy intelligence branch of the judiciary. He might tell me that they were also monitoring me, and that I had best cooperate more fully with him, so that he could protect me against this more nefarious, independent security cell. All this might be absolutely true, or a pack of lies. I would have no way of knowing, but would be beholden to him nonetheless for acting on my behalf. By not telling him, I risked losing his protection against a sinister arm of another branch of government. But how meaningful was the protection of one questionable institution against another? Not very, I reasoned; probably I was better off saying nothing to Mr. X, and maintaining my current position in our fraught relationship. I deliberated telling Arash, and decided not to say anything to him, either. Unaccustomed to the creeping presence of state agents in his life, he would worry too much.

I called Mr. X the next day to discuss another matter.

“I thought you might like to know that I am being criticized by Iranian émigrés in Los Angeles for my latest article,” I told him.

Often my work inspired the squawks and condemnation of Iranian exiles in California, mainly those who were badly out of touch with daily life in Iran and ascribed their own beliefs to a distant people with other concerns. These armchair revolutionaries believed, for example, that Iranians should rise up immediately and overthrow the mullah regime (they would applaud from Beverly Hills), reinstall the Pahlavi monarchy, and embrace the United States. When my reporting intruded on these fantasies, when I wrote about how the United States had lost political capital in Iran after the botched invasion of Iraq, they sniped that I had become an apologist for the authorities, a traitor. They had castigated me on Persian radio call-in shows, and in person at lectures. Many of them despised Shirin khanoum, the country’s only Nobel laureate, for pursuing change within the confines of
the regime. This made her a great nuisance to them, as a symbol of peaceful change from within. Her vast popularity hindered their calls for a U.S. military ousting of the mullahs. Our association had further blackened me in their estimation. My mother had friends among these out-of-touch monarchists, and they often called her to complain about my stories. I used these grievances to boost my position with Mr. X. It was important that he and his superiors realize that while my reporting might appear insulting or unwelcome from their vantage, it registered among some as regime propaganda.

“That is very interesting. What has been said?” Tales of my persecution at the hands of the L.A. exiles always fascinated Mr. X. He liked to hear about how they reconciled their black-and-white views of the government’s repressiveness with its tolerance for my critical stories and a book that disparaged its rule. “Did they ask how you can come and go, even after the publication of your book?”

Though Mr. X appeared to enjoy these exchanges, even seemed to appreciate the fact that tolerating me enhanced the government’s image abroad, I could not measure whether I was seeing signs of his private opinion or a reflection of the government’s practicality. Despite his job as a security agent, Mr. X seemed to view Iranian society with level-headed reason. He had fought in the Iran-Iraq War, and like many veterans had experienced firsthand the government’s fickleness and the hollowness of its ideology. The regime embraced the soldiers who fought in the war, as long as it required their sacrifice, glorifying martyrdom and the “sacred defense” of nation. But as memories of the conflict faded, so too did the regime’s dedication to its veterans. The special privileges they had once enjoyed throughout the system, from loans, to government posts, to special access to university, slowly dried up. Their loyalty to the state faded, a sense of betrayal set in, and many became fiercely critical, able to see the regime’s failings with special acuity. Often I noticed such perceptiveness in Mr. X’s conversation, when he derided the bureaucratic inefficiency of government offices and the corruption that had grown rampant throughout the system.

Mr. X was the final link in a chain that included the head of domestic security and the minister of intelligence. My attempts to describe
him and the nature of our interactions to Arash had made me realize how much about Mr. X still eluded me. Though in his effect on my life it was only he who mattered, he represented more than just one agent’s opinion. Sorting through his allusions, his vague administrative language, his metaphors, to deduce what that opinion actually was, though, was often beyond me. On some days, Mr. X seemed to me a prudent, insightful functionary, trying to nudge a dictatorship toward openness. On other days, he seemed a narrow-minded bully.

P
erhaps it was a touch morbid to follow the deathbed vicissitudes of a perfect stranger with such avidity, but Akbar Ganji was a dissident on hunger strike and would have appreciated the attention—or so we told ourselves. Over two months had passed since he had launched his strike in late May, in protest against his imprisonment.

“How is Ganji?” my friend Lily asked most afternoons, as we quietly sipped tea in her book-lined living room. Often I had updates: today he refused his intravenous feeding tube; his doctors are warning his kidneys will fail within the week; the state hospital has threatened to operate on his arthritic knee. These developments cast a pall over that summer, especially because it seemed we were the only ones who cared, or, for that matter, who knew. Independent newspapers had been tacitly warned to avoid coverage of Ganji and his hunger strike. But I suspected that even had that not been the case, few Iranians would have paid much attention, so disenchanted were they with poli tics, the reform movement, and its symbols.

Shirin khanoum was serving as Ganji’s lawyer, and as we met frequently to complete her book, her anxiety about his condition infected me until I, too, began to feel that his health somehow embodied that of the nation. As the country’s most important political prisoner, Ganji had served five years and three months of the six-year sentence he received in 2000, his punishment for articles linking powerful officials to the murders of dozens of intellectuals in the mid- to late 1990s. I met him once, back in 2000, before he went to prison, and we were mobbed on the street in Haft-e Tir Square, for in those days, back
when Iranians cared about politics, Ganji was like a pop star. His book on the murders, whose title might be translated as
Dark House of Ghosts,
was a best-seller, and its success profoundly shook the Islamic Republic, in a manner not unlike the Watergate scandal.