Honeymoon in Tehran: Two Years of Love and Danger in Iran (14 page)

Ganji was a repentant former revolutionary; his conversion into a modern-day democrat was an intellectual journey to which most Iranians, who once had supported the revolution but had been disappointed by its slide into authoritarianism, could relate. Despite having spent the last five years languishing in prison, Ganji had kept himself at the intellectual and tactical forefront of the drive for change. He published a taboo-shattering book calling for a full separation of mosque and state, and was the first to declare publicly that Islamic reform was yesterday’s debate, that the reign of the ayatollahs must give way to representative democracy. The establishment, of course, detested him, for he was the most legitimate voice to call the entire system into question.

The letter he released that week from his sickbed, relayed over the Internet, had shocked me with its boldness. “Mr. Khamenei must go,” it read, evoking memories of the last time an opposition figure uttered such a call, back when the Ayatollah Khomeini from his distant exile in Paris declared “The Shah must go!” That same week, the authorities transferred Ganji to a state hospital, where they proclaimed they would operate on his arthritic knee, despite the wishes of his family. Given his badly emaciated state, and the certain wish of the establishment to do away with him, it seemed plausible he might die of “complications” in surgery. Two days prior, Shirin khanoum had attempted to visit him in the hospital, and a hard-line newspaper accused her of conspiring to kill him (her own client!) to stain the reputation of the Islamic Republic.

I saw her just after the newspaper story came out, and in the nervous tension of those days I noticed again the physical toll her work was taking on her. The stress had drained her face of all its color, exacerbated her high blood pressure, and caused pinched nerves in her neck and wrists. Some afternoons, as she whispered into her cell phone and disappeared into her office with colleagues, she seemed almost to
wither under the force of her worries, as though the ugliness of what she confronted each day was somehow collapsing her diminutive frame.

“They haven’t asked you anything about me, have they?” she asked, referring to the agents of the Ministry of Intelligence. Everyone in Iran whose profession made them relevant to the security-obsessed regime—professors, writers, translators, musicians, journalists, and people in a plethora of other seemingly benign trades—was preoccupied with the question of who might be disclosing information about them to the authorities. At times, this could produce an almost Soviet atmosphere that tainted friendships and families, making people distrust one another—which was, in all likelihood, the whole point.

In fact, Mr. X had asked me about Shirin during our last meeting.

“Yes,” I replied truthfully. “They wanted to know if you were scared.”

“What did you tell them?”

“I told them you seemed to be handling things very professionally.” It occurred to me that I had also told Mr. X that she didn’t scare easily. But now, sitting before her, I wondered whether she would have appreciated that; perhaps she would have preferred that I say she did not scare at all. At such moments, I resented the trickiness of working in such a political environment, where despite the best of intentions you were forced to compromise yourself.

Shirin’s nervousness, and the urgency with which she spoke of Ganji and the importance of his strike, touched me. It struck me how fortunate Iranians were to have such people struggling on their behalf, and how regrettable it was that they could not pay more attention. I decided to write about Ganji, an opinion piece that would let me talk about all these feelings with as much un-objective emotion as I wished. An editor at the
Los Angeles Times,
my old employer, agreed enthusiastically to the proposal.

I phoned Mr. X and told him I would be writing about Iran’s most important dissident. “Was this your own idea?” he asked. Mr. X was always curious to know whether my stories, especially the provocative ones, were written on my own initiative or at an editor’s behest. I guessed the answers helped him decide what sort of journalist I was.
Did I work innocently and independently, or was I the type of reporter who functioned in coordination with powerful people—who was used to leak damaging information about Iran and encouraged to write stories that exaggerated its radical image? His paranoia in this regard had in the past made me reluctant to break news, because I knew I would be asked how I had come across my information. On occasion, I had passed scoops to colleagues in New York or Washington, preferring to save myself the hassle with Mr. X.

“Yes, it was entirely mine.” I reminded him that I had reported on Ganji back in 2000, and that it was natural for journalists to follow the same subject over time.

“I see.”

“I’ll be noting that most people aren’t following news of his hunger strike,” I said. I figured this sad truth would comfort him: I wouldn’t be writing a story about thousands of Iranians rallying to the support of a would-be martyr for democracy.

“Is that what you have found?” He was silent for a moment, as though writing something down.

After we hung up, I sat down to write what I hoped would be a moving tribute to Ganji. The image of his emaciated frame had begun to haunt me.

A
few days later, in the first week of August 2005, Ahmadinejad officially became president of Iran. His first official act was to select a cabinet. Of the twenty-one nominees he presented to parliament, several lacked any experience in government whatsoever, others were personal friends from the university where he had taught, and two had been implicated by human rights groups in political killings.

The evening the president announced his nominees, I arrived at Shirin khanoum’s office around dusk. We had dinner plans with her husband and Parastou Forouhar, the daughter of the slain dissidents Dariush and Parvaneh Forouhar. In the fall of 1998, assassins working for the Intelligence Ministry had broken into the couple’s home and stabbed them to death. Parastou’s brother had come home and found the bodies of his parents, brutally chopped into pieces. Shirin
khanoum had legally represented the family in court, though the judge, as so often happened in her trials, presided with all the indifference and political bias that characterized the Iranian judiciary That her parents’ killers would never be brought to justice was a reality that Parastou had accepted in the painful years that followed. But she knew that the very process of seeking resolution through the legal system, of needling the system into accountability, was meaningful in its own right: the trial had effectively ended the political careers of the senior officials implicated. Ever since, they had lurked in the shadows of public life, where both Shirin and Parastou had hoped they would remain. But that was not to be the case: Ahmadinejad’s nominee for minister of interior was the man suspected of ordering the killings and drawing up the list of other targets for assassination, which had included Shirin.

The evening was warm, and we smoked silently in Shirin’s office. I didn’t say anything about the day’s news. All I could think about was how tremendously composed Parastou seemed, given that her parents had been murdered, and that the man considered responsible had just been appointed to head a key government ministry.

When I look back on the early months of the Ahmadinejad era, my recollections of this evening are more vivid than any other, mostly because it was so tinged with fear. For Shirin and Parastou, but for Shirin especially, these appointments were not simply a distressing shift toward radical governance but tantamount to a renewed death sentence. When a man you believe plotted and sought your death is put forth to head a crucial government ministry, it is difficult not to consider this a license for him to return to his fatal agenda.

The government had assigned Shirin two security guards, allegedly out of fear of an attack on her life. Recently the guards had told her that the police had received credible information of an imminent threat, and had instructed her to begin wearing a bulletproof vest outside.

“What do you think,” she had asked me earlier that week, “should I wear it? Or perhaps they’re just trying to intimidate me.” She often asked my opinion on such matters with an intense, hushed air, as though hoping the scope of my contacts and work as a reporter might
endow me with special insight into her situation. I always felt my responses were inadequate.

“It seems to me,” I had replied, “that if they’re that concerned you should first be driven in a bulletproof car, no?”

Our debate went around in circles, and we concluded that one cannot properly assess the security prescriptions of a government that itself previously conspired to kill you. The presence of the two guards, with their shadow of stubble and their collared shirts buttoned to the top, lent an unnatural air to the evening. They accompanied us to dinner, sitting on a nearby raised bed at the outdoor restaurant in Darband. We spoke in low tones so as not to be overheard. Parastou reminisced about the revolution, about the high esteem in which the Ayatollah Khomeini had held her father. Shirin’s husband warned her about eating carbohydrates in the evening and teased me about avoiding the fresh onions everyone else munched along with their meal. As dinner came to an end, I realized I would have no chance that evening to speak to Shirin privately. I had wanted to tell her about the incident at the jeweler and ask her advice, but this would have to wait.

We filed out of the restaurant and into the crowd of families and young couples strolling through Darband. The warm night air was filled with the calls of vendors selling wheel-size, paper-thin rolls of dried-fruit roll-up, and children loudly begging their parents for ice cream. A couple recognized Shirin khanoum as we walked toward the car, and stopped to greet her excitedly. With her work appearing less frequently in newspapers (cautious editors were likely trying to avoid stories that would get their papers banned), and with the online news site she wrote for now censored by the authorities, Shirin khanoum’s presence in Iranian life had grown muted in recent months. Watching the shining faces of the couple who were speaking to her, I realized just how successful the state campaign had been. Even I, her coauthor, charged with noticing her role in Iranian society, was guilty of forgetting just how much she meant to people.

I
ordered a pomegranate martini, leaned back into plump velvet cushions, and surveyed the latticework of the
mashrabiya
(a wooden
shade) lining one end of the lounge. Through its ornate pattern I could see the glistening waters of the Persian Gulf. The sun was setting over a landscape of cheerful palm trees, and on all sides of the room stylishly dressed Iranians held light conversations, picking at stuffed olives and Mediterranean tapas, the ice of their cocktails tinkling. Arash and I were meeting his friends Homayoun and Gita, and of course we were not in Iran. Along with hundreds of thousands of other Iranians in search of a freer life and superior business opportunities, they had moved to Dubai, which had become a sort of Persian satellite in the United Arab Emirates. Just a hundred miles south of Iran’s southernmost point, Iranians had created out of Dubai, effectively, an Iranian city; the distance lent itself to commuting, the government permitted unrestricted travel, inexpensive airlines made the short trip occasionally affordable for even middle-class Iranians, and a sprawling Iranian embassy facilitated all this coming and going, making the emirate accessible as a hub of capital and culture. Painters we knew now regularly held gallery exhibitions in Dubai, and Homa youn, the musician son of Iran’s foremost vocalist, Mohammad-Reza Shajarian, had chosen to establish himself there.

Looking out at the gulf’s placid waters, I was struck by the peculiar twists of the region’s history. Today, all these Iranians had fled the repressive Islamic rule of their homeland for an Arab state, while in the seventh century, it was the Arab conquest of Persia that had delivered Islam to Iranians in the first place. Stripped of their ancient religion, their literature, and their history, the Persians sought to preserve vestiges of their old traditions over centuries, crafting poetry and myth around their epic kings and resisting the invaders by simultaneously adapting and Persianizing their faith and language. Fourteen centuries later, it was Dubai, an Arab outpost the size of Rhode Island, that was generously hosting Iranian painting and music, while homegrown Islamic theocrats labeled the fine arts “western garbage.”

As our drinks arrived, we briefed Homayoun and Gita (both of whom drank iced tea) on the short space of time since Ahmadinejad had taken office.

“The only truly annoying thing actually happened to me this very
morning on the way to the airport,” I said. After I’d hoisted my suitcase onto the belt of the women’s security check earlier, a female security guard in chador took me aside.

“Too short,” she barked. “Sleeves, manteau, jeans. All too short.”

That summer, the police had announced they would “deal in a serious manner” with women who flouted “proper” Islamic dress codes. They had made this pronouncement every summer for the past seven years, and not once had the rules actually been enforced in a “serious manner.” Women continued wearing short coats and pushed-back veils, treating the announcement like the toothless paternalistic griping they had been subjected to as teenagers on the way out the door. That year, the judiciary and another branch of the police had even contradicted the police department’s warnings in newspaper interviews, insisting the country’s security forces were focused on financial corruption and serious moral issues, such as prostitution.

“I’m accustomed to traveling in this manteau, and frankly, it’s not that objectionable,” I told the guard. Compared to what young women wore about the streets of Tehran, it was positively demure.

“Don’t you read the newspaper?” she said.

“Yes, don’t you? The head of the judiciary contradicted the police warning.”

“Well, you’re just going to have to take something long-sleeved out of your luggage and change.”