Honeymoon in Tehran: Two Years of Love and Danger in Iran (36 page)

After the meeting I climbed into the waiting car. Almost immediately my phone rang, “1111111.” Mr. X had not called in a month, and it could not possibly be a coincidence that he should ring at that precise moment. I began looking out the window, wondering if I might spot him hiding behind a bush, or directing traffic, concealed behind a pair of dark glasses and an officer’s hat.

“Che khabar?”
he asked. What’s new?

My first instinct was to say nothing about whom I had just met, but I figured he must already know. “I’m doing well, thank you! … How are you? … May you not be tired. … You should know that I have just met Mr. Hashemi, but that the meeting was at his request, not mine, and that nothing of great sensitivity was discussed.”

“What right does Mr. Hashemi have to summon you for a meeting? And why did you not consult with us before agreeing to see him? What use is our consultative relationship if you only alert us to such matters after the fact, when our sentiments can no longer bear any weight on your decisions?”

Mr. X always referred to himself in the first-person plural. In Farsi, the formal “we,” usually the prerogative of kings, is also used in conversations that demand particular correctness. According to strict Islamic norms, it was deeply inappropriate for Mr. X and me—neither relatives nor husband and wife—to consort with each other so familiarly, to be in regular phone contact and meet sometimes in the absence of a third party. This impropriety called for an excessive formality in our speech, the extra distance afforded by “we,” rather than the intimacy of “I.” Of course, Mr. X also intended his plural to signify the institution of the state. “We,” as in “my ministry,” “the government,” “the totality of the Islamic state,” disapprove of little, singular “you.”

“I was made to believe the meeting was very urgent,” I said. “Had I been informed in advance, you can be certain that I would have consulted you.” This was a lie—I would never have asked Mr. X’s permission
to meet anyone—but after the fact, it seemed harmless to suggest otherwise. I regretted telling him about the meeting. Perhaps he had not known, after all; perhaps the timing of his call
had
been coincidence. Certainly he would have found out eventually, since my mobile phone was surely tapped, but I could have worked out at my leisure what to tell him.

He made some reply to the effect that I was being disingenuous and that I had better start to recall in much more vivid detail the content of my conversation with Mehdi Hashemi. I wished desperately for the line to cut out. The Tehran mobile network was barely functional. It often took several attempts to make a call, and even then the connection often died. Once I rang an Interior Ministry official back repeatedly in the course of a phone interview; picking up after the fourth interruption, he exploded, “A curse upon the fools in this government, who can’t even fix something as elementary as a mobile network!” That day, however, the reception was crystal clear and the line never wavered. Mr. X chastised me in severe tones, and I could tell from his displeasure that he would soon request a meeting to hector me in person. Once he hung up, I paid the taxi driver and decided to walk part of the way home so I could stop at Juice Javad and console myself with an extra-large pomegranate slushie and a pomegranate fruit roll. The morning’s events signaled growing tension within the political establishment; the infighting was growing more serious. I fretted over how this might affect my life, whether I might now be considered a tool or a favorite of Mr. Hashemi, and therefore a reporter whose work required more scrutiny.

In the last month, Ahmadinejad’s dwindling popularity had for the first time become the subject of people’s daily conversations. After nearly a year in office, he had failed to deliver on any of his economic promises, and the prices of basic commodities from cigarettes to tomatoes to butter had risen 20 percent. Though inflation was a longstanding problem of the Iranian economy, most experts blamed the sharp and sudden rise on Ahmadinejad’s fiscal policies. The president continued to flood the economy with cash (a tactic known to economists as increasing liquidity) in the form of loans promised on his trips to the provinces. He intended these measures to stoke his popularity
among the provincial poor, but he was ignoring the pleas of the nation’s economists, who warned he was imperiling an already debilitated economy.

In particular, fruit—as central to the Iranian diet as bread—had grown prohibitively expensive. Many of our comfortably middle-class relatives had stopped buying fruit regularly, and so had we. Our weekly fruit bill had grown to around the equivalent of $25, outrageous by local standards. We either shopped at the discount Hajji Arzouni fruit shop, which sold bruised fruit in bulk, or, when we grew tired of bananas, pilfered from the fruit bowl at Arash’s parents’.

The nuclear negotiations with the West had stalled, and the government’s defiant position was beginning to look more destructive than heroic. This created an opening for Ahmadinejad’s opponents, most importantly Rafsanjani, to begin forming an alliance against him. At such times of shifty maneuvering, the regime felt itself less stable and monitored all sorts of activity with an even more paranoid degree of vigilance than usual. This did not bode well for my hopes of leniency from Mr. X. I crossed to the other side of Niavaran Street, threading between the moving cars, confident, for no reason besides local custom, that at the last moment they would brake or swerve.

I
knew I would regret it later, but when the police skipped our street one day during a swoop to confiscate satellite dishes, I was gleeful. Of course at some point they would come for ours, too, and in the interest of karmic solidarity with those whose dishes had been taken away I should have felt more sympathy. But short-sighted, naked self-interest is an unpleasant habit of people who live under dictatorships, and I was no exception. “Lucky, lucky us!” I told my sister-in-law, Solmaz, happily that evening, settling into her couch and reaching for a slice of cheesecake. Like many women in Iran, Solmaz devoted much of her free time to cooking. The two of us had a standing date to watch
The Perfect Dinner,
a German cooking-cum-reality TV show, and without it the fall evenings would have loomed bleak indeed.

Back in 2000, as part of President Khatami’s drive to keep the state out of Iranians’ private lives, the police had stopped carting away
people’s satellite dishes regularly. Iranians had grown accustomed to this laxity and had gradually begun setting up their dishes in more conspicuous places. More and more people acquired satellite dishes, until by unofficial estimates the majority of the country owned one. The recent sweeps were a disagreeable reminder that until such rights were enshrined in law, they could be plucked away at the whim of a mid-level bureaucrat. But given how adept the regime had become at jamming signals, especially of networks airing programming by opposition groups, I had a difficult time understanding what there was to gain by such heavy-handed tactics. When I met with Mr. Tabibi, President Ahmadinejad’s relative, later that week, I put this to him.

“Don’t you think rounding up people’s dishes is so 1999?”

“No. It is a sagacious and timely move.”

“Is it sagacious to cut off people’s access to the outside world?”

“Television is trouble. Nothing but trouble. Don’t look at yourself. For someone like you, educated, who has lived abroad, you have an appropriate context through which to filter what you watch. But for people with no education, whose world before satellite was limited to state television and their local neighborhood, it’s corrupting. Suddenly, right there in your living room—women! expensive cars! vacations! appliances!—all this stuff you can’t afford. None of this bothered you when you didn’t know it existed, but suddenly Hassan Ali from Karaj is comparing himself to the people he sees on the screen. His expectations are tripled, quadrupled! …”

“Quintupled?”

“Exactly! So you understand!”

“Of course I don’t understand. The answer is not to deny Hassan Ali CNN and Persian music videos, but to improve the economy so he can buy his wife the Korean refrigerator that the channels advertise, and additionally benefit from exposure to global culture.”

“You are very idealistic,” he said soberly. “You do not speak as someone who feels responsible for the welfare of the nation.”

Mr. Tabibi, though by no means a perfectly reliable instrument, reflected the broad preoccupations of the Ahmadinejad administration. And right now, the impatience of ordinary Iranians with inflation and unmet promises of redistributed oil wealth weighed heavy. Although I
disagreed with Mr. Tabibi, he was not exactly wrong. Our doorman, Yehya, who lived in the basement with his family, embodied the plight of the hypothetical Hassan Ali. Two years prior, in hopes of better wages, he had moved his family from a small village in the province of Khorasan to Tehran. Plowing the family farm in his village, where satellite dishes were uncommon, he had been unexposed to the wicked ways of city people. But in consultations with the other doormen on the block, he discovered that most of his urban colleagues had such devices, and he asked the building if he could run an extra cable from the dishes on the roof to his television.

The cable transformed Yehya and his wife, in the short space of six months, to urbane Tehranis modern in appearance and expectations. She doffed her floral village chador and began wearing a city manteau; he bought a motorcycle and started wearing black for religious holidays. She began going to the beauty salon for threading and blow outs; he began knocking at our door late in the evenings for buckets of ice and
aragh.
Such a couple would naturally develop material aspirations that when unmet would turn into discontent. On satellite television, they would get the news in Persian on
Voice of America,
always critical of Ahmadinejad’s nuclear policy, as Iranian commentators linked the troubled economy to his defiant stance. In six months, bucolic contentment blossomed into urban resentment.

To prevent the metastasis of the urban Yehya phenomenon, the president preferred Band-Aid solutions, such as the confiscation of satellite dishes. Though it deserved much criticism for such shortsighted policies, the clerical regime had left itself no other way out. The only genuine solution to the Yehya problem would be to repair the economy and create real jobs, steps that in turn required Iran to address its political problems. It would need to fix its ties with the West and in general desist from behavior that angered the international community. For this to happen, the revolution would need to sort itself out. Would the pragmatists prevail? Would the ideological sacred cows finally be slaughtered? The history of revolutions teaches us that they take decades to mellow and settle into coherent forms of new governance. If historical precedent held, then Iran’s problems would not be solved soon.

M
y latest dilemma, a light prelude of all that was to come, involved choosing a baby name. The government, it turned out, had long ago compiled a list of names it considered unsuitable for Iranian children. I hadn’t known such a list existed until I began throwing out suggestions like Alessandro and Luc, and Arash informed me that foreign names were categorically forbidden. “Isn’t there some way around this?” I asked. I had looked forward to picking a name with such excitement, only to find an entire world of possibilities now off limits.

The names the regime forbade included those of Zoroastrian gods and goddesses, commanders of ancient Persian armies, and other such tainted figures linked to the country’s pre-Islamic past. The religious extremists who had purged that history from textbooks sought to build model Islamic citizens, preferably all with Muslim (and therefore Arabic) names. In the early years of the revolution, the authorities merged this ideological project with the need for masses of soldiers to fight in the war with Iraq. They encouraged families to have ten children and name them all after Islamic figures such as Mohammad, Ali, and Fatemeh. In time, they hoped, Iran would be cleansed of its shameful Persian history. Persian names like ours, Azadeh and Arash, were approved, but were considered inferior by the radical religious. The banning of some names, like Maneli (meaning Mermaid) or Veesta (Knowledge), seemed to have no rationale at all.

European names, Arash said, were so utterly out of the question that no one even bothered trying to bribe the clerks at the local government records office to allow them. Like me, not everyone was aware of this in advance. An unsuspecting friend of ours had tried to register his newborn daughter as Juliette Farah (a choice negotiated with his Dutch wife) and was told this was “impossible.” After a frustrating back-and-forth during which only the word “impossible” was repeated, he finally asked the clerk, “Don’t you know that Juliette was Imam Reza’s mother?” This mocking invocation of a revered Shia saint was not appreciated, and my friend was asked to leave the building. His daughter ended up simply Farah.

Along the way, other names found themselves on the forbidden list
by dint of their association with political challenges facing the regime. Wishing to quell an uprising by ethnically Kurdish Iranians in the north, for example, the government banned Kurdish names. The
ney
player at our recent dinner party, an ethnic Kurd, told us his friends typically managed to secure Kurdish names for their children by bribing the clerk at the registry office.