Honeymoon in Tehran: Two Years of Love and Danger in Iran (19 page)

Compared to such times, the authorities today were handling Iranians’ piety deficit altogether more moderately. A glossy ad campaign to promote Fatemeh seemed just the thing for a society in which people mourned Hossein by day and had cocktails by night.

I
continued reporting and working on Shirin’s book, Arash continued working, and we both waited for life to darken in our respective and shared spheres, but it did not. The hook-nosed stalker who had followed Arash never reappeared, and neither did Mr. X intrude more into my life. The harsher social restrictions everyone had feared simply never materialized. See, people murmured among themselves, the time for such repression has passed. They know they can no longer control these young people. They have learned, become wiser.

Even Shirin khanoum seemed more relaxed. Her bodyguards had disappeared, and on the clear, frosty night we finally went to dinner with her husband, her mood was almost effervescent. After dinner we took a walk along the road leading to Velenjak, in the foothills of the Alborz Mountains, discussing Iranian classical music in the moonlight and collectively agreeing that a holiday at the world’s first hotel built entirely of ice should become an immediate priority. She intended the evening to help nudge my relationship with Arash toward permanence, because even for independent-minded Iranian women, marriage was viewed as fundamental to a successful life. With all the time one would eventually lose while having children, the only answer was to hurry hurry hurry (waiting only meant that your mother and mother-in-law would grow too old to help raise your kids, so that you would waste precious time dealing with babies during the prime of your career rather than at its outset).

Looking back, I view that evening with fondness but also a touch of amusement, for though none of us knew it, the question had already been sealed by a reality more immediate than career calculations
or matrimonial ambitions. As I discovered later that week, I was pregnant. Had we lived in New York or Berlin or any of a number of other places, this would not have been cause for alarm. But in the Islamic Republic of Iran, one could not be unmarried and pregnant. That social category of individual simply did not exist. The crushing moral condemnation of a traditional culture aside, there were also practical considerations: if any matter arose requiring a hospital visit, my
shenasname,
or identification papers, would reflect my single status, at which point, depending on the whim of the hospital in question, this could either not be an issue, or it could be grounds for execution (or so I imagined at the time).

“I could be stoned!” I wailed, waving the test stick in the air, aware that I was being dramatic, but unable to collect myself. I told myself that the worst could not happen to me, that such cases were restricted to a handful a year, that they befell helpless girls in the provinces who found themselves at the mercy of vengeful fundamentalist judges. I reminded myself that life in Iran was premised on the culture of “as if,” where everyone behaved as if the laws did not proscribe the behavior most Iranians considered natural. But all of this interior dialogue failed to soothe me, because wearing a short manteau “as if” the dress codes permitted individual choice was an entirely different matter from being pregnant, “as if” that reality did not qualify one for execution. And perhaps the crucial difference was that in matters of everyday concern, such as going to parties, dating, or dress, you still retained some measure of control, minimizing your vulnerability by carrying an extra scarf, skipping a party on an inauspicious evening, planning your dates for the middle of the week.

But as a pregnant woman, you had no such room for maneuver. You could not ensure that you would not experience spotting, as so many women do, and require a trip to the emergency room. You could not with certainty avoid a car accident, a slip on a sidewalk, or the myriad of other circumstances that might necessitate an encounter with the doctors and police, who might or might not choose to shield you from harm. As if the potential mishaps common to daily life were not enough to consider, there was also the distant worry of falling into the hands of the morality police, who had the mandate to punish men
and women with lashings for drinking alcohol or attending mixed parties. While such invasions of private life had lessened dramatically during the Khatami years, there were always exceptions. One still heard of parties being raided, and the implications of this happening to a pregnant woman were altogether more grave.

My uncle worked as a doctor at one of Tehran’s more prominent hospitals, and I had heard too many tales of the emergency room to take the potential for trouble lightly. In particular I recalled him telling us of a woman who had been admitted one night after being whipped by the morality police. She had told them she was pregnant, but “we’ll beat the filth out of you,” one of them had said. She proceeded to miscarry. I remember hearing the story vividly, for it was one of the darker episodes in my uncle’s medical career. The night he returned from treating the young woman who had miscarried, he described her bloodied back, her anguished husband, in numb tones.

If the authorities were capable of such cruelty toward a pregnant woman who was married, how might they treat a pregnant woman who was not? The harsh Islamic criminal codes that governed the Iranian judiciary, the lawless, random cruelty of the morality police, ceased being abstract material that I described in news stories or spun into dramatic episodes highlighting Shirin’s cases. And I ceased being an observer, a single, privileged, peripatetic social anthropologist who was protected from Iranian reality by her American passport and career. I suddenly glimpsed reality from the vantage of a nameless, faceless Iranian woman susceptible to the vagaries of her society, and my skin turned cold with anxiety. These were not the most romantic preludes to thoughts of marriage, but there were limits to living in Tehran as if it were Manhattan.

Circumstance had intervened, so I tore up the cards of the Leb anese florists and caterers, made myself a cup of Turkish coffee, and stared out in the dark night, trying to absorb how in just a matter of hours nearly everything in my life had changed. I turned the cup over and examined the grainy streaks and suggestive outlines that had appeared in the grounds, unable to decide whether they resembled foreboding clouds, or tulips.

T
he next day, I was sitting on the floor, surrounded by books on Islam, researching the provisions of the Iranian penal code that governed premarital sex. I assumed the law unambiguously prescribed stoning, but wanted to know for sure. Arash walked into the room and surveyed the books curiously. I explained my mission.

“Of course you’re not going to be stoned. Why on earth would you think that? Everyone knows only adulterers are stoned.”

I wasn’t so sure. But after I’d leafed through several more books, it seemed to me he was right. Only adultery was punishable by stoning, which fell under the category of punishment known as
hudud,
or mandated by God. Adultery was the only hudud punishment that didn’t appear in the Koran, I discovered; it appears only in the hadith, the record of the Prophet Mohammad’s life which supplies the source for much of Islamic practice as well as jurisprudence. Because the sources of hadith vary in reliability, and have been debated for centuries by Islamic scholars, this meant that the classification of stoning as hudud was an entirely open question. I also related to Arash a rather ghastly piece of information I had come across: the Iranian penal code laid out guidelines for such executions, including the types of stones that should be used. Article 104 states, “The stones should not be so large that the person dies upon being hit by one or two of
them; neither should they be so small that they could not be defined as stones.”

“You shouldn’t spend your time on such morbid stuff,” Arash said. “Why don’t you look through a baby name book instead?” He began putting the books back on the shelf and told me his mother had just dropped off some rice pudding. The thick grape syrup drizzled across the top,
doshab,
tasted of molasses and wine. Together we ate it out of the bowl, leaning against the kitchen counter.

Arash’s first reaction to my pregnancy had been a frustratingly detached confusion. I was thrilled and wanted him to share my excitement. But he seemed to feel responsible for my welfare, and the uncertainty of the situation made him anxious. He worried that a hospital might refuse to admit me should some complication arise. But that nervousness soon gave way to anticipation, and he began looking forward to all the fun baby decisions we had to make. Did we want to know whether it was a boy or a girl? Should we paint its room with fairies or dinosaurs? What name would we choose?

But now I was the one preoccupied with serious thoughts. No matter how much I tried, I couldn’t stop thinking about the more dramatic legal dimensions of being pregnant. Although I would be in no danger of death by stoning—no stone too big, none too small—the punishment for unadulterous premarital sex still proclaimed its origins in the tribal customs of seventh-century Arabia: a hundred lashes, and possibly a year of banishment. That was the legal reality, though in practice millions of Iranian young people engaged in premarital sex with no worry more serious than whether it would be enjoyable. Although, every year or two, some judge ordered a lashing, under ordinary circumstances the law was not enforced in any meaningful way. This was just one of the many respects in which the Iranian government had grown pragmatic. It also distributed clean syringes to heroin addicts, and condoms to prostitutes and prison inmates. This was rather astonishing, given that it also punished drug use and homosexuality with anything from flogging to death.

I was not sure how concerned I needed to be for myself. Even if I ended up miscarrying or needing medical attention for some other reason, it was unlikely that the hospital staff would turn me over to the
authorities. Most Iranians were not fundamentalist in that particular way; it was the government and the ayatollahs who claimed to be puritans. I had single girlfriends who had checked into the city’s hospitals for abortions, which were of course legally forbidden. For the equivalent of a few hundred dollars, the doctors and nurses simply filled out paperwork for another procedure. I knew women who had undergone hymen repair on the eve of their marriage to men who thought them virgins. Gynecologists might treat you for years without asking whether you were married or single; even if they did, they would never mention that your anatomy did not match your marital status.

Of much more immediate concern than the mullahs’ wrath was the disapproval of our families. Arash and I agreed that no one should know for the time being. Both our families were educated and well-traveled, the sort of people who should not be especially upset at such news. But in all likelihood, it
would
upset them. Westernized Iranians might have evolved to accommodate dating and don’t-ask-don’t-tell premarital sex, but pregnancy out of wedlock would almost always test the limits of their liberality. I even began to wonder whether I was not more bourgeois at heart than I had imagined. Something about my situation—well, it embarrassed me. I kept reminding myself that it was utterly normal. That if I still lived in New York it would never occur to me to feel shamefaced, and that I should not let myself be influenced by the censorious environment. Arash found my occasional bouts of mortification amusing, and reminded me of his German friends who had been nudged into marriage by unexpected pregnancies. This did not help much, though, because he was the man. If the news leaked, no one would spread hurtful rumors about him entrapping me.

T
here’s never a good time to find yourself unmarried and pregnant in Tehran. But for me, the timing that spring was particularly rotten. The standoff between Iran and the West over the country’s nuclear program dominated the world’s attention, and the magazine constantly asked for reporting that explained Iran’s position. Above all,
the top editors wanted me to get an interview with President Ahmadinejad. They urged me to exploit my best connections, pester his press aides, and generally do everything possible to secure a meeting. Meanwhile, my mother was due to arrive from California for a month-long visit. She had timed her trip to coincide with Norouz, the Persian new year, which meant frequent lunches and dinners with relatives, just the sort of leisurely Iranian socializing that I wouldn’t have time for.

The morning of her arrival, I was struggling to finish a briefing file about the nuclear issue for my
Time
colleagues, as well as a list of questions for the Ahmadinejad interview (it had not been granted yet, but often journalists were notified just hours in advance and we needed to be ready). Though I had done extensive reporting, I found it hard to explain the many contradictory and confusing aspects of Iran’s quest for nuclear energy. If the Islamic system did not vest the president with real power, then how was Ahmadinejad managing to set the country’s nuclear policy? What was he trying to achieve with threats of withdrawing Iran from the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty? Didn’t more sensible elements within the regime worry about the threat of sanctions, and if so, why weren’t they intervening? Iranians seemed to support the country’s right to nuclear power, but did they realize its costs? The answers lay in the convoluted reality of Iranian society and politics. While the constitution granted the president little actual power, Ahmadinejad had bypassed it by appealing to the street, fueling popular support for a crisis that the clerical establishment wished to avoid. As for his goals, my best sources told me the president was a fundamentalist on a mission, aiming to provoke a confrontation with the “enemy” that would re-instill in Iranian society the lost idealism of 1979. That was certainly plausible, but I had a hard time believing the man could harbor such dramatic ambitions. And such a project would pit him against the ruling establishment, which no longer held such revolutionary aspirations.