Honeymoon in Tehran: Two Years of Love and Danger in Iran (22 page)

“If both you and your partner have tested negative for STDs, then no. But if you haven’t been tested, you should use a condom.”

Two other women asked similar questions about sexual health. I found it striking how comfortable everyone seemed with the frank discussion, as though at a Planned Parenthood session in San Francisco. At the class’s end, the instructor passed out bags filled with starter packs of several types of contraceptive pills. She then directed us to the nurse’s office next door for the final check on our forms, a tetanus shot administered by a woman in a white coat. The other women pulled up their sleeves, but I fiddled with mine, stalling until they had all gotten their shots. When they had gone, I explained that I was pregnant and would prefer to skip the live vaccine. I was afraid any other objection would be waved aside, and something in the nurse’s kindly manner as she administered the shots gave me confidence.
“That’s fine,” she said, smiling broadly. “Congratulations.” She initialed the box, and sent me on my way.

Once reunited with Arash, I discovered that his class had learned about contraception by watching an instructional cartoon. After the film, the instructor counseled the class to regard sex more holistically “He told us that for women, sex is an emotional experience. That we shouldn’t just roll over and go to sleep when it’s over.”

“Really!”

“There’s more. He said that if we were more attentive afterward, our marriage would improve outside the bedroom.”

We drove through the overcast morning to the notary’s office, to announce that our paperwork was complete and to set a time for the proceedings. The office was situated on the south side of Zardosht Street, a thoroughfare in central Tehran dotted with medical clinics and florists. We climbed up a narrow staircase, and Arash opened the frosted glass door, only to have the handle inauspiciously come off in his hand. We bent over trying to fix it, whispering, and I couldn’t escape the feeling that we’d been cast in an absurdist comedy. The handle hastily affixed, we entered a long hallway lined with shoes and slippers. That shoes were not permitted inside signaled a mosque atmosphere, natural enough given this was a mullah-notary, but a minor crisis for me: I had not imagined needing to remove my boots, and had paired a pink argyle sock with a plain black one. Hoping no one would look below my knees, I stepped onto the machine-woven Persian rugs, which smelled like two decades’ worth of unwashed feet. Inside, hanging fluorescent lights cast a sickly corporate glow on white stucco walls covered with mirror mosaics of palm trees. The place had the air of a kabob palace in Fallujah.

The notary, whom we would call Hajj Agha as is customary, greeted us warmly and introduced us to his son Mohammad. A series of photographs—prison mug shots of Hajj Agha—formed a column beside the palm tree mosaic. In these, Hajj Agha’s head was shaved, his expression was scowling, and he looked about forty pounds thinner than the avuncular and portly man before us. Wondering why our marriage officiant had a prison record and especially why he used that
fact in his décor, I nudged Arash to look up at the photos. He nodded and turned his attention back to Mohammad, a young, wily mullah-notary in training who acted as his father’s assistant.

“He was a political prisoner under the Shah,” Arash said, under his breath. “Look at the books.” The bookshelf behind the desk was lined with numerous copies of three books, all authored by Hajj Agha. “Thirty Years of Resistance, Imprisoned and Tortured on 25 Occasions” read a line of sticker-tape underneath the mug shot on one cover. I leafed through the index, learning that in his years as a young, radical mullah organizing against the Shah’s unpopular reg ime, Hajj Agha had kept company with Iran’s foremost revolutionaries, holding court at the legendary Hosseiniyeh Ershad, a religious center that was a platform for the famous ayatollahs of the day. “See, he’s practically a celebrity,” Arash said.

Hajj Agha riffled through our papers, scanning the faded power of attorney through a pair of thick-rimmed black glasses. “This power of attorney bestows the right of signature over matters of finance and property only,” he said, the folds of his turban precise and creamy white, as if pressed from an icing tube. “There is a separate power of attorney for marriage, and that is what you need to bring me.”

My hands began to flutter, tucking imaginary strands of hair under my headscarf. I wondered whether I would have been able to talk my way through this were I able to speak more refined, native Farsi, or whether the situation required a man-to-man resolution. I suspected the latter, as somehow Hajj Agha did not strike me as the sort of man accustomed to bargaining with women over their futures. Arash settled back into the loudly patterned sofa, arranging his limbs in the relaxed pose that I knew meant he was preparing to negotiate; he would unfurl long, ornate sentences of Farsi that bore little relevance to the matter at hand yet that indirectly conveyed both the urgency of our position, and how far we were prepared to go to remedy it. He excelled at handling these moments, which so frequently occurred in Tehran—situations that seemed intractable owing to a rigid regulation or someone’s fixed position, but that he managed to maneuver around with flattery and creative problem solving. It was a matter of
speaking their language, he always said, though he was German enough at heart that the hours involved, the tea drinking, and the sycophantism incensed him.

Hajj Agha listened patiently, but in the end it fell to his son, Mohammad, so thoroughly a child of the Islamic Republic, a shifty composite of piety and cunning, to suggest a solution. We would produce a faxed, handwritten letter from my father (they would provide the text) authorizing our marriage, and my uncle would be permitted to sign in his stead, on condition that within sixty days my father would present himself in Tehran and sign the official certificate himself. I inserted myself into the conversation, explaining that my mother was in Tehran and would be happy to attend and vouch for my father’s permission. Given the irregularity of our situation, I felt it couldn’t hurt to bring along physical proof of parental blessing, to ward off any sense that ours was an illicit love match made without their approval. I didn’t imagine Hajj Agha needed to know that my parents were divorced. “That’s a very good idea, my daughter, it would be helpful to have her here,” he said.

The only problem was that for the next two days we couldn’t find my father. I dimly recalled some mention of a backpacking trip, but couldn’t be sure, and in my irritation imagined him reclining in a meadow high in the Sierra Nevada, smoking and reading a John le Carré novel. I phoned my mother to tell her we would be signing the
aghd
contract any day now.

“But it’s Moharram!” she said. It is in the month of Moharram that Shias commemorate the martyrdom of Imam Hossein. My mother had rediscovered her devotion to Islam in recent years, a shift for which I credited geography. She lived in Carmel, far from any sizable Muslim population and from the reality of life in a theocracy. Thus removed, she could freely enjoy the faith’s finer spiritual qualities without the unpleasant dogmatism of its mullahs and other stern adherents. The decades she had spent straying from the faith had distanced her from the fine points of observance, so now she tended to overdo her fidelity. Islam, its Shia and Sunni sects alike, permitted marriage on any day of the year. It could perhaps be considered
inauspicious
to marry during a period of mourning, but given that we were compelled by circumstances, and given that the idea didn’t offend Hajj Agha, I felt she should relax her position.

“The mullah doesn’t have a problem with it, why should you?” I demanded. “Do I need to start calling you Mesbah-Yazdi again?” In recent years, when my mother’s piety bordered on the reactionary, I had begun teasingly calling her by the name of a famously fundamentalist ayatollah, Ahmadinejad’s main clerical champion.

Unmoved, she wailed about how our timing disrespected her values, how no one who was
adam-hesabi,
good people, got married at the notary anyway, how there should be at least some pretense made of
khaste-gari.
This custom, by which the groom’s parents formally visit the bride’s family to ask for her hand in marriage, was no longer as widespread as in her youth. Many couples knew each other too well before marriage for such formalities, and our ages and independence made the idea quite preposterous.

I reminded her that it was also Norouz, a celebration of joy and rebirth, and that she could focus on this instead. I told her that a great deal had changed since the Iran of her era, and that her expectations were now passé. I recounted the case of my cousin Ghazal, who was married to the nephew of Jalal Al-e Ahmad, a famous social critic of the 1950s and 1960s who had devised the term “westoxification” to describe how Iranians had abandoned their traditions in their pursuit of modernity. You couldn’t find a family more traditionally religious than the Al-e Ahmads, but Ghazal and Ahmad had not involved their parents in any
khaste-gari.

It frustrated me that, in many ways, my mother remained more conservative than the parents of my friends and relatives in Tehran. The Iranian diaspora community in the West had remained frozen in the mind-set of the 1960s and 1970s, the era of its emigration. My mother, for example, and the mothers of many of my Iranian-American friends, had frowned on our having boyfriends in high school; they thought their daughters would be corrupted by such forward American ways. But most middle-class moms in Tehran, nudged by the country’s changing social mores into revising their expectations of young people’s behavior,
accepted boyfriends as a fact of life. How ironic, I thought, that the Iranian women who immigrated to the West and bene fited from its education and its freedoms clung to their paternalistic traditions, while those who’d stayed in Iran, under the thumb of the Islamic Republic, accommodated to the ways of the younger generation.

In today’s Iran, the signing and reading of the
aghd,
the marriage contract, was a procedural matter and it often took place weeks or months ahead of the actual ceremony and celebration. Many couples needed the extra time to find and furnish an apartment; others were waiting for the groom to finish his military service.

Characteristically skeptical of all my pronouncements, claiming I reflected only the views of an alien, westernized fringe of Iranian society, my mother remained perturbed, opposing. In her politics, she was an American liberal, reflexively skeptical of what the U.S. media reported about Iran. Like many Iranian-Americans, she believed that reporters like me should not write openly about Iranian young people’s liberal lifestyles, their openness to the West, and in particular, how their despair over the slow pace of change sometimes led them to hope for a U.S. intervention that would unseat the mullahs. Such coverage, they believed, would be used by hawks in the Bush administration who, in seeking a military confrontation with Iran, argued that in the event of a U.S. attack Iranians would rise up against the regime (this was a delusion of course, Iranians were staunch nationalists and would always side with their own rulers, however abhorrent). I understood this view, but disagreed with it entirely. You could not ignore the legitimate frustration of millions of young people for the sake of thwarting hawks in Washington who might seek to exploit it.

But beneath the leftist contours of my mother’s personality, there also lurked an Iranian matron’s bourgeois regard for propriety, and a Shia Muslim’s enthusiasm for sacrificing sheep on religious occasions. Often it seemed to me that I couldn’t locate my mother amid the swirl of her values; they were unworkable, too disparate to be contained in one person. The enmity between Iran and America saddened her; poverty in Africa saddened her; the class stratification wrought by first-world capitalism saddened her. The Germans have a term for
the condition of perpetual sorrow over the state of the world: Weltschmerz. My mother was the queen of Weltschmerz. And, once fixed in a particular position, she refused to budge.

I told her about all my middle-class friends who had married without
khaste-gari.
In exasperation I finally said that if Jalal Al-e Ahmad’s nephew didn’t represent Iranian society sufficiently for her tastes, I didn’t know who would. In the end, I abandoned my case, because it occurred to me we weren’t really fighting about contemporary marital mores or the etiquette of the religious calendar. My mother often resorted to battles over abstract values when she wished to avoid thinking about matters that upset her. Once I phoned her from the roof of my hotel in Baghdad, just weeks after the U.S. invasion, because the cracking sound of sniper fire scared me. It likely scared her, too, but rather than console me she rebuked me for covering the war for
Time
instead of for
The Progressive.
What really concerned her now was my marriage itself, the marriage of her only child to a man who lived in Iran and thus posed a threat to any hope of my eventual return to northern California. I presumed that, like her opposition to my reporting and living in dangerous places, this, too, would pass.