Honeymoon in Tehran: Two Years of Love and Danger in Iran (35 page)

The doorbell interrupted these musings, and I ran to greet Neda. She kissed me hello, whisked off her veil, and handed me a tin full of her famous spicy yogurt dip. Neda’s parents came from the same town in Tabriz province as Arash’s father, and the two families’ friendship spanned most of their lives. Neda was very beautiful, with milky skin and moss-colored eyes. Her exuberant spirits and playful humor made her delightful company, and she had many suitors, all of whom she refused. She remained stubbornly unmarried at the age of thirty-five, a fact that caused her mother great sorrow.

I fixed her a drink and asked her what was new at work. Neda’s days were nearly always extraordinary. She worked as a medical assistant to one of Tehran’s premier plastic surgeons, and in the decade
she had spent taking a small hatchet to the noses of thousands, she had acquired more insight into Tehrani society than most trained observers. It was only Neda who could describe the intersection of Islamic piety and modern vanity, in the tales of the faithful who sought more slender, western noses. Over and over again I asked her to repeat my two favorite stories. One concerned a young religious man who consulted his
marja’ taghlid
(literally, “source of emulation,” referring to an ayatollah vested with the authority to make legal decisions) over the proper disposal of the leftover bits of his formerly bulbous nose. The
marja’
held that they required proper burial, and so Neda gathered the shards of bone in a zip-lock bag and carried them out to his mother in the waiting room, who gathered them into the folds of her black chador. Neda’s second best tale concerned the mullah’s daughter who was so grateful for her pertly chiseled nose that she asked her father to pray each week for the health of Neda and the surgeon. When the family went to Mecca for pilgrimage, the mullah called the surgeon to say, “Doctor, we have prayed here for your health, as well as that of Miss Neda.”

Neda and I sat around the table, the air perfumed by a vase of white tuberoses, and began shelling pistachios. “Thank God I don’t have a mother-in-law,” she began. In Iran, even prospective mothers-in-law, not yet the real thing, could blacken one’s days. The St. Bernard, Geneva, trotted over, and placed a paw on Neda’s leg, gazing up adoringly. He was all cuddles, a fluffy bonbon of selfless affection. London the beagle was sequestered under a couch, gnawing on a chicken bone in greedy privacy. Neda went on to describe a young woman who had come in that day for a consultation, explaining that her current nose had been rejected by her boyfriend’s mother, and that her suitability for marriage depended on her correcting it. “Doctor said he wouldn’t operate for such a reason,” she said. “He told her, ‘Why would you want to marry into such a family anyway? My prescription: keep the nose, get a new boyfriend.’ But she wouldn’t listen. ‘Make it pretty,’ she kept begging.”

“How bad was the nose?”

“It had the Persian bump, but I liked it. It had character, and it matched her face.”

I retreated to the stove, attempting to de-salt the curry. Neda followed me. “Forget the nose. The nose is not interesting. You will never believe what is happening to my English class,” she said, hands propped behind her against the cabinet.

For the past two years, Neda had spent two afternoons each week learning the basics of English grammar at a government-run language institute in central Tehran. The fifteen men and women in her class had befriended one another over time, trading tips about language entrance exams that would enable them to study in the West. The previous week, the institute announced it would divide men and women into separate classes, held on separate days of the week. “As if that weren’t awful enough,” Neda continued, “the female staff began arriving at work dressed in chador.” Plans were under way to move the women’s classes to a separate building altogether, to eliminate the possibility of illicit mingling in the hallways.

“A third of the class dropped out,” she said. “I suppose they were partly just there to meet people. But that’s not criminal, to socialize alongside learning. It’s so disrespectful. As though we’re all just depraved, and need to be regulated at all times. Just in case. In case of what? You should see our class. We are mind-numbingly normal. Ali just sharpens his pencils and fixates on prepositions, Niloufar shows off her weird BBC accent—what do they think we are going to do?”

“I guess what’s really irritating is that you’re not used to this kind of thing anymore, right?” I was flinging spices into the steaming pot indiscriminately, no longer deriving much satisfaction from cooking for my guests. I wondered whether we could just order pizza, so I could fix myself a drink and enjoy its coolness on the other side of the house. The only reason we had invited people over in the first place was because as a pregnant hostess I would be spared the guests smoking indoors. At most parties, everyone smoked regardless, lamely pretending to wave the smoke in the direction of a window cracked open a centimeter. Even Iranians educated in the West, who knew better, were guilty of this.

“I mean, you’re studying English to improve your future, which makes you feel productive and sort of linked to the rest of the world.
And then you’re suddenly resegregated, which just makes you feel like some laboratory mouse in an experiment on the state and Islam.”

“Something like that,” Neda said, running to answer the door. By around eleven, most of the other guests had arrived. I served the over-spiced curry at eleven-thirty, early by Tehran dinner-party standards. The conversation, led by Neda, centered around the creeping restrictions everyone had noticed in their respective corners of city life.

Arash had invited Majid Derakhshani, his
tar
teacher, and Majid had brought his orchestra’s
ney
player, and the
ney
player’s wife, who played the
kamancheh.
They had all just returned from a concert in the town of Sari, in northern Iran.

“So the official comes up to me, and asks, ‘Can your female musicians play behind a black curtain?’” Majid said. “I told him, ‘Why would they fly here all the way from Tehran, to play behind a
curtain?’
“

The
ney
player said, “It’s better than the concert in Tabriz. Remember? They asked if the females could just not play. Not behind a curtain. Just not at all.”

“I myself am horrified,” announced the wife of one of Arash’s MBA classmates. She wore a silk scarf patterned with a designer logo around her neck in a sort of ascot, and I shifted nervously, wishing I had not tried to pay off my dinner party debt all at once by inviting people who would not ordinarily find themselves in one another’s company. I hoped the musicians, who were all straining to meet their rent, would not be offended. “I met friends this morning for coffee, and we were told women could not smoke anymore in cafés. And, afterward, I went to the beauty salon and I asked my manicurist, ‘What happened to all the photos on the wall?’ She said the police had come and demanded that they be taken down, because images of unveiled women are illegal.”

My first impulse was to tell the woman that there were far graver examples of the growing campaign of repression to worry about. Did anyone really care if the coiffed women of Tehran could smoke their European airport duty-free cigarettes with their cappuccino? I felt mortified, until I looked around and realized the other guests were listening
to her respectfully. I detected no censure in their understanding expressions. They seemed to absorb her anecdotes as just another instance of the new and worrisome restrictions. There was no regime that would limit its violations to the affluent; a Taliban outlook would target musicians and schoolteachers, not only the well-heeled. Iranians, accustomed for three decades to the vagaries of the Islamic regime, understood that very well.

“The problem,” concluded the only western guest, a diplomat trained in summing up our daily travails under the mullahs in clever, brief formulations, “is that your old regime viewed religion as an obstacle to modernity, and this regime views modernity as an obstacle to religion.”

We all chewed on this for a while in silence. He continued a moment later, explaining that layered identities were richer, and that Iran’s government should try to harmonize society’s westernized and religious elements, rather than excising the parts deemed destructive or threatening. This was wise, measured thinking, but I wondered when, if ever, it might become Iranian reality. The revolution, as is the nature of such upheavals, took bloody revenge for the years in which Islam was marginalized by the secular Pahlavi monarchy. The revolutionaries murdered secularists, and even religious Iranians it considered opponents. Part of the reason the regime today brooked no opposition was, I imagined, fear. The authorities worried that if they loosened their grip even just a tiny bit, all those whom they had wronged—secular intellectuals, Muslim modernists, technocrats—would rise up together and seek their own revenge, as well as their right to participate in government.

These were heavy musings for two in the morning. Unable to think of any insight to add, I poured another round of tea in slim-waisted cups. The
ney
player blew into his flute, the notes dispelling the conversation with their own melancholy beauty.

M
r. Hashemi would like to meet you today at one o’clock.” The tone was polite, but it was quite evident that I was being summoned rather than invited. I had never met Mehdi Hashemi, the son of former president Rafsanjani and could not fathom why he would want to see me, let alone with such urgency. I canceled my lunch date with a girlfriend, and redirected my taxi toward Hashemi’s office at a private university complex in north Tehran, opposite Niavaran Palace. I was wearing a longish button-down shirt, ankle-length linen trousers, and sandals, an outfit that wasn’t suited for such a meeting, but I figured that wasn’t my problem. I had not, after all, been given ample notice to prepare myself. At the door, a security guard scanned my attire and told me curtly that I wasn’t “going anywhere at all, dressed like
that.”

I adjusted my scarf, trying to decide what to do. Clearly, the guard believed I was a college student dressed inappropriately for an institution un-ironically called the Islamic Free University. If I imperiously announced myself as a correspondent for
Time
magazine going to see the former president’s son, I would likely be treated with a bit of respect. I was spared that when a moment later, the man who had set up the meeting appeared, assessed the situation, and brushed off the security guard. “She’s a foreigner! Of course she’s not dressed properly
… but she’s a visitor in our country—we must be hospitable! You know how they are.”

He ushered me into Hashemi’s private office immediately. Usually Iranian officials make you wait for at least half an hour as a way of underscoring their influence, but Hashemi’s influence was so vast that it required no such airs. Over the years, he had held positions in various state bodies active in the oil and energy sectors, but his real power came from being Rafsanjani’s son.

He wanted to chat about my profile of Ayatollah Khamenei, which had just recently been published. Although he did not say so directly, I presumed he was displeased by the scantness of the space devoted to his father, whom many people considered the preeminent power player in Iranian politics. My article had alluded to the lavish life styles of certain corrupt clerics, and it seemed Mr. Hashemi had taken the reference personally.

“People say the silliest things about us,” he said, smiling defensively. He smoothed a hand over thick black hair, and leaned his softly sloped shoulders back in his chair. His appearance surprised me. Unlike his sister, who was notorious for wearing Chanel suits under her chador, and unlike the daughter of that sister, known for parading through Tehran’s jet-set parties in designer clothes, Mehdi Hashemi did not look like Islamic Republic royalty. His white shirt was neatly pressed, but apart from his tidy grooming, he resembled an ordinary, mid-ranking official. “They say we have ranches overflowing with Thoroughbreds. The Supreme Leader rides; how come no one mentions that?” A popular joke that captured the extent of the Rafsanjani wealth had the former president discussing how he had amassed his fortune: “We had this bit of land in the family. A country called Iran happened to fall within its borders.”

We talked seriously for the next half hour about President Ahmadinejad and the implications of his foreign policy. It remained unclear, to the outside world as well as to many Iranians, whether Ahmadinejad devised policy and had any real influence, or whether he was a marionette executive controlled by powerful ayatollahs who ruled from the shadows. Mr. Hashemi’s real opinion of the president was impossible to deduce; he seemed to consider him both contemptible
and effective, a phenomenon that simply needed to be waited out. He said the president’s defiant stand had paid off, and that Iran was now ahead in its nuclear confrontation with the West. He predicted that Tehran would not accept the most recent European proposal.