Honeymoon in Tehran: Two Years of Love and Danger in Iran (40 page)

O
ur baby boy, Hourmazd, was born on a November day so extraordinarily clear that the great peak of Mount Damavand, usually obscured by brown haze, loomed with ethereal dignity. You could actually see how it sloped into the Alborz range, which merges into the mountains of Anatolia and the Caucasus. It was on such a morning centuries ago, according to ancient Persian myth, that Arash the archer shot an arrow all the way across the plains of central Asia, establishing the boundary of Iran to the east. Iran had lost in battle to its archenemy Turan, and the Turanians, instead of imposing a boun dary on the defeated nation, proposed to limit its territory to the radius of an arrow’s flight from Damavand. The mountain was considered the very heart of the Persian empire, and is endowed in Persian mythology with almost sacred status. It is for the heroic archer that my husband is named.

The hospital did not permit men to enter the regular maternity ward, and though Dr. Laleh and the nurses smuggled Arash in for my delivery, it would not have been possible for him to linger. He was allowed, though, in the wing reserved for foreign diplomats, so I stayed there overnight. The room cost twice as much as one in the regular maternity ward, and there was nothing fair about our ability to buy our way around the rules. By lunchtime the next day, flowers crowded
the floor and every surface. A couple of my relatives called to congratulate us, but whispered that they would wait a few weeks to share the news with others, so that an appropriate amount of time would elapse between our wedding and the baby’s arrival. I privately considered them cowards, but said nothing.

My friends in America sent urgent e-mails asking about the experience, still in disbelief that I was having a baby in Tehran. I told them that once I was within the antiseptic confines of the maternity ward, my delivery followed the routine procedures standard across the modern world. I can only recall two exceptions. One, I was forced to wear a long, thick, billowing hospital gown with puffed sleeves, meant to preserve the modesty of a woman being delivered by a male doctor. My one irrational moment during labor was to refuse this gown, and it took Arash ten minutes to convince me to put it on. Besides being hot, uncomfortable, and ugly (in photos I resemble a Soviet nuclear scientist), it, unbelievably, did not open in the front. For the next twenty-four hours I repeated to every nurse, in a daze, “But why not? How am I supposed to breast-feed?”

The second exception involved the nurse’s chatter as she guided me through the extremely intimate procedures that are performed on a woman’s body ahead of delivery. I expected she would maintain a respectful silence, but instead she chided me in a thick Rashti accent for being in Iran. “But I cannot understand why you have chosen to live here. In America, is there not freedom? Here we have none. Why didn’t you just stay there?” According to my American pregnancy guides, the nurse should have turned on a relaxation CD or suggested I soak in a bath, not probe my choice of theocracy over freedom. I had not bothered to read any Iranian pregnancy books, and I wondered whether they catalogued all the small details of comfort that should be provided to a woman in labor. People in Iran, like all people living under authoritarian regimes, were usually preoccupied with big ideas. Whether waiting at the bus stop or preparing a woman for labor, they contemplated hypocrisy, ethics, and personal responsibility with the focus people in America devoted to the minutiae of eating, exercise, and
The Sopranos.
In the past, I’d found Iranians’ political engagement exhilarating, had seen it as a richer, more thoughtful way of
being. But it was starting to feel too intense, the burden of people who, given the option, would have preferred the luxury of conversations spent vilifying gluten.

Hourmazd is the Middle Persian form of Ahuramazda, the Zoroastrian god Iranians worshipped before they were forced to convert to Islam. My father was greatly irritated by this choice of name; believing that it would be unpronounceable outside Iran, he felt that we should have chosen something easier on the western tongue. I considered Hourmazd easy enough to say (Hūr, like “tour,” mazd with a short
a,
like “jazz”), but for his generation, such compromises of identity were a natural part of acculturating in the West. But that trend would soon make endangered species of any Iranian names considered too long or challenging for non-Farsi speakers, I told him. Indian immigrants in America seemed to have no qualms about bestowing complex, long names upon their children. Why were Iranians so quick to shape their culture to the West, rather than push the West to adapt?

Arash and I faced no problems registering our son’s name, though we took a giant box of pastry to the registry office just in case. Everyone smiled and cooed at Hourmazd and wished him a long, healthy life. He acknowledged their attentions with a tranquil yawn, and I privately felt thankful that the first bureaucratic encounter of his life, the registration of his name, had not required bribery. On the way home, I gazed at the murals and billboards of turbaned ayatollahs as though seeing them for the first time, and almost felt the urge to cover Hourmazd’s eyes. I asked Arash how we would explain them, when the question arose years down the line. “We will say they are eastern Santa Claus,” he said.

LJecember 2006, the month after Hourmazd’s birth, was a deeply satisfying time for those Iranians disappointed in Ahmadinejad’s performance, a sizable and ever-growing percentage of society. In the eighteen months since he took office, the president had managed to weaken Iran’s frail economy, provoke U.N. Security Council sanctions, elicit the threat of American military attack, alienate members
of his own party (who broke off and started a front against him), offend the ayatollahs of Qom, and trigger the first serious student protest since 1999. Fifty activists burned an effigy of the president during his visit to Amir Kabir University; they set off firecrackers and interrupted his speech with chants of “Death to the dictator!” Their outburst reflected the widespread frustration also displayed during that month’s city council elections. Millions turned out across the nation to vote against Ahmadinejad’s allies in what amounted to a major, unequivocal setback for the president and his policies. Reformists, having absorbed the lessons of their presidential defeat, fared well throughout the country, capturing twice as many seats on Tehran’s influential council as Ahmadinejad’s supporters.

I did not vote in the election; I was so crushingly exhausted from the sleepless nights of nursing Hourmazd that I couldn’t even make a cup of coffee without burning something. I delighted in the election results from the confines of our apartment, where we were preparing Hourmazd for his first visit to the pediatrician.

It was an overcast morning, and we left early to reach Qaem Magham Street on time. The pediatrician, Dr. Abtahi, one of the most respected in the city, practiced at Tehran Clinic, a hospital that claimed to be modeled after the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota. Though she had trained in Iran, Dr. Abtahi was half German, and her fluency in German and English made her as popular with foreigners as Iranians. In her waiting room, Iranian grandmothers in floral print chador sat alongside the impeccably dressed wives of European ambassadors, pointing to the same fuzzy lobster mobile to distract their screaming children.

In the examining room, I gingerly peeled off Hourmazd’s bodysuit as Dr. Abtahi began lining up glass vials of vaccine. I mentioned that we were flying to Germany the following week and asked for advice on how to protect the baby’s ears from the fluctuating cabin pressure. “You’re flying
next week?”
she asked, putting down the needle and turning toward me. “If so, why are you getting him vaccinated here?” She proceeded to explain that Iranian vaccines were of an outmoded type liable to cause fever. And whereas in advanced nations several vaccines are combined in a one-shot cocktail, Iran’s were one vaccine
per shot, so Hourmazd would have to be stuck with needle after needle. I
had
wondered why there were several vials, but it hadn’t occurred to me that all of them were going to be serially injected into my tiny, nine-pound baby.

Dr. Abtahi suggested we have Hourmazd immunized in Germany and bring back the remaining doses for her to administer in Tehran over the course of the year. He would be spared fever and the unpleasant impression that doctors were needle-bearing tormentors in white coats.

Dr. Abtahi had not overtly criticized the government on that score, only remarking that “Iran, along with Bangladesh and Afghanistan, is the only country left in the world to still be using such vaccines.” Af ghan istan is a destitute country ravaged by war, with a GDP of $22 billion; Iran is an oil-rich nation with a GDP of $600 billion. It was simply staggering that despite its vast resources, the Iranian authorities could do no better for their children than the precarious government of a virtually failed state. The regime’s inadequacy at this most basic level was what made the majority of Iranians despise it so. They saw, in each toman spent on groups like Hezbollah, a toman not spent on modern vaccines.

We swiftly agreed to her suggestion, determined as most parents would be to spare our baby bouts of fever when it was within our means to do so. I dressed Hourmazd and watched with relief as the vials disappeared back into the refrigerator. It was only the next week in Cologne that we confronted the monumental complexity of our decision. Arash spent two days shuttling between doctors and pharmacies, explaining our rather irregular need to buy and transport vaccines. We learned that, to retain their potency, vaccines must be kept within a precise temperature range at all times from the place of manu facture to the point of administration. They are vulnerable to damage from light as well. Tranportation requires what is called a “cold-chain system,” involving special monitors, insulated containers, and dedicated trucks and refrigerators. To secure Hourmazd’s vaccines, Arash and I would need to devise and execute our own improvised cold-chain system.

As though this were not difficult enough, after our second day in
Germany Arash needed to attend to work, the ostensible purpose of our trip, so the remainder of the search fell to me. I do not speak German, and Cologne numbers among the German cities with a militant Islamist problem. It was the seat from where a radical onetime associate of Osama bin Laden, a Turk known as the Caliph of Cologne, had organized followers to wage holy war. It was, in short, one of the last places where you could comfortably stride into a pharmacy and say, “Hi, I’m from Iran and I’d like a year’s worth of live vaccines to take on a plane!” In the end, by deploying much charm and many introductions from local friends, we succeeded. A foam ice chest and some ice packs constituted our picnic version of a cold chain.

The next challenge lay in getting our ice chest home. We needed to take a train to Frankfurt, and from there a direct flight back to Tehran. Before departing, we calculated the total length of our journey and worked out precisely at what times the cooler would need to be placed in the on-board refrigerators of both the train and the plane. Although we both held non-Iranian citizenship, we were Iranians flying to Tehran on our Islamic Republic passports, demanding to carry live germs aboard crowded means of mass transport. With every additional minute it took to explain our situation to security officers and transportation staff, our anxiety mounted. The ice packs melted, Hourmazd screamed out of boredom, and the people behind us in line inched back as though we had confessed to carrying Ebola virus. We finally managed to board the plane, handed the vaccines over to the flight crew to refrigerate, and collapsed in our seats, elated at having carried out a seemingly impossible mission. But as the plane began its slow descent to Tehran, a flight attendant thrust the cooler into my lap, half an hour early. She flounced up the aisle before I could tell her the vaccines needed to remain cold until landing, and each time I attempted to stand an irate flight attendant barked at me to take my seat. We stared miserably at the glowing “Fasten Seatbelt” sign as the plane descended, coping with the situation as most couples would, by arguing.

“I told you this was a bad idea. You just can’t live in a country like Iran and perpetually conduct your life with the standards of the West,” Arash said. “This was a mistake. We should learn from it.”

“How can you call it a mistake? We’re providing the best for our son, protecting him from
fever.”
I looked at Hourmazd asleep in my lap, tranquil and innocent, and imagined him wailing from a fever, his little body burning. “You’re horrid to suggest we should let him suffer.”

“You’re wrong. Right now, as far as we know, these vaccines are spoiling. Unless there’s some way of checking their potency, we’re going to use them at our own risk, hoping that Hourmazd is protected from various awful diseases. If we had just used the Iranian vaccines, he would’ve had a night of discomfort. But at least we’d know for sure he wasn’t at risk of contracting polio.”

“But that’s only because we had bad luck and because this stewardess is a rude German who can’t be bothered to listen to an Iranian passenger.”

“Azizam, listen to me. My sister is just like you. For years I’ve watched her try to live in Iran with German sensibilities. It has taken over her life. When she travels, all she thinks about is filling her suitcase with the right shampoo, cereal, child medicine. She sends her son to the German school because the Iranian ones are terrible. Don’t you see how dangerous it is, getting used to things whose availability is precarious? When she runs out of the German muesli, he refuses to eat Iranian cereal. If one day the political situation turns ugly, the diplomats will send their families home and the German school will close. If you want to live a German life, you need to live in Germany. If you’re going to live in Iran, you need to live as everyone else does. The same cereal, the same schools, the same vaccines. You can’t live like an alien in your own society.”

What Arash said made sense, though I was too stubborn to admit it at the time, and reluctant to acknowledge the wider implication of his reasoning. It meant, of course, that we would eventually need to decide whether to raise Hourmazd in Iran or move abroad. I had imagined the question would arise years down the line, once we had his schooling to contend with, but it suddenly loomed closer.