Honeymoon in Tehran: Two Years of Love and Danger in Iran (45 page)

T
hat spring, news spread that a new director had been appointed to the government office of the foreign press. The official who had promised to investigate my case had still not contacted me, and the uncertainty was growing unbearable. I decided to seek a meeting with this new director. If what Mr. X said was true, I reasoned, the new director would surely have been apprised of the proceedings, and that would be evident in how he received me. Though the precise nature of the link between Mr. X and the press office was ambiguous at best, it was evident that they cooperated to some extent. At previous tense junctures in my relationship with Mr. X, when he was displeased and withheld security approval of my work, the director of the press office had refused to see me, communicating through his unavailability that my credentials were not in order. He seemed to resent having to obey a security agent’s dictates, and he chose, in situations when he had an unpleasant message to convey, to convey no message at all.

In what I took to be a promising sign, the new director granted me his very first meeting with a foreign journalist. With no information about the man’s political background, I had no idea what to expect. Out of caution, I dressed conservatively in head-to-toe black, in a Gulf-style abaya. Unlike an Iranian chador, which is basically a large square of cloth that you clutch together with your hands or teeth, an abaya includes arm holes, so it is much more wearable.

I took a taxi to the Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance on a weekday morning for the meeting. The form of his greetings suggested that the new director was a traditional official, unlike his suave, westernized predecessor. “I would like to felicitate you on your marriage,” he began, speaking softly, as though not yet at home in the new position. “We consider the family of your husband noble and respectable in the extreme, and are very pleased at your union.”

How excellent: the Islamic state approved of my marriage.

“My father-in-law’s example is truly inspiring,” I said. (Mahmoud Agha, Arash’s father, was renowned for his business ethics—he refused to buy property that had been appropriated by the government after the revolution, or to boost his profits with black-market trade; officials who were above neither of these practices nonetheless respected him for his principles.)

We proceeded to discuss the noble duties of motherhood and the wildly exaggerated images of Iranian women in the western media. Once tea was served, our conversation warmed up, and we moved to matters of Shiism. I tended to shine in such meetings, as my experience reporting in the Arab world provided endless material. Iranian officials enjoyed debating gossipy points of Shia religiosity, even Shia intrigue (Who
really
killed the Lebanese-Iranian cleric Musa Sadr in 1978?), and Shia clerical gossip (the feud between Iran’s Supreme Leader and the top ayatollah of Lebanon, Sheikh Muhammad Hussein Fadlallah).

The director glanced at his watch, noting with embarrassed surprise that we had been chatting for nearly an hour although he had allotted only half an hour for our meeting. He then turned the conversation deftly to the matter of my press credentials. While the press office generally approved of my work, he said, he would be “best able to advocate” on my behalf if I spent some time working on stories that were “easy to defend.” This meant that for the time being I should avoid subjects the government deemed provocative and instead focus on more neutral topics, such as film and women’s high rates of university attendance.

Although this fell short of an explicit denial of Mr. X’s threats, it was encouraging. It was unlikely that the ministry would push me to
work while at the same time the judiciary prepared proceedings against me. That evening, I wrote to the official who had been looking into the matter, to inform him of the meeting. He wrote back to say that he was pleased and that his own investigation had turned up nothing. Taking this together with the result of my meeting, it seemed plausible that Mr. X had been making an empty threat, intended to discourage my work or to cow me into freezing all my connections with non-Iranian institutions and people.

This was, of course, speculation, but it was informed speculation, the best anyone could hope for in such matters. When dealing with an opaque, secretive system, there is no such thing as “inside information” or real political analysis. This holds as true for journalistic analysis as it did for my dilemma. Every year or so, some American publication runs a political analysis that can be broadly described as the “Who
Really
Runs Iran?” story, the answer being the Supreme Leader, the president, the Revolutionary Guards, or unelected clerical bodies. But the reality is that no one knows, ever. The closest approximation of the truth is that many people run Iran, but that at no given moment is it entirely clear who has the upper hand and why. We can guess at this clique’s broad motivations and at the internal dynamics that shape their behavior. But to go beyond that was just speculation. I knew this because I had spent years writing such pieces, and, that experience aside, I was a Farsi-speaker with better connections and sources inside the regime than most. Along the way, I had honed my detective skills, culling information from as broad a range of sources as possible, trying to devise an interpretation that would, I hoped, hint at the regime’s reality. I never imagined I would be applying these skills to my own life, and in doing so I was forced to confront what a hack job it was, this fumbling effort to determine the contours of what lurked behind the curtain.

Arash and I talked at length about how to proceed. I could remain in retirement, thus suggesting to Mr. X that I was intimidated and obedient, that his scare tactics had worked. I could start working again as before, and risk whatever repercussions this might entail in the new, more hostile climate. I could work gingerly, on tame features that would not cause offense, or dry news stories that recast what the
wire services reported. In the end, we agreed the last option was the most responsible. It would give me a chance to better appraise the situation—to see whether the new press director would be an ally and what befell other reporters.

After years of reporting aggressive, boundary-pushing stories, the kind of coverage to which family and friends responded with e-mails saying “This is the one that’s going to finally get you in trouble,” I felt somewhat squeamish about my new resolution. But caution was the only wise course.

In my new incarnation as a soft journalist, I no longer tried to brainstorm stories that fired up my investigative instincts. Instead, I just reacted to what was happening around me. I wrote about people’s indignation over the blockbuster American film
300,
which they felt insulted their proud, ancient history. Using as a springboard the weddings I attended, I wrote about how modern marriage offered rich material for understanding contemporary Iran. Fortunately, the news that spring was livelier than the usual back-and-forth over the nuclear program. In March, Iran took captive fifteen British sailors in the Persian Gulf, and a mini hostage crisis ensued, taking over international headlines for nearly two weeks. I filed dispatches recounting what the foreign minister and president said at press conferences. I became, in effect, a human tape recorder.

Once that crisis passed, I went searching for more stories, and discovered that when I made a point of trying to produce “neutral” or even positive coverage, many legitimately fascinating subjects occurred to me that might not have captured my attention otherwise. In a way, the combative, investigative journalism that I felt was the only real kind tended to lead me only to stories that highlighted everything that was wrong in Iran. When dealing with a government as obviously nasty as that of the Islamic Republic, it is very easy to consider this impulse noble, in the tradition of the great muckraking of people like I. F. Stone. Various forces also combined to focus me exclusively on the Next Horrible Thing story—the appetite of editors; the “pickup” factor of certain stories. Once I had put this mentality aside, my consciousness found room for other topics. Everyone knew that Iran forced women to cover, but who knew that it also ran the most
progressive HIV program in the Middle East, ahead of other Muslim countries with less puritanical images? Who knew that many of its undergraduate university programs numbered among the best in the world?

The next thing I learned was that there were no “neutral stories.” In covering even the most benign subject, there was no avoiding mention of the regime’s flaws. I wrote a story about the renaissance of Persian classical music, but then had to detail how for years musical instruments had been illegal. When I reported an essay on people’s taste in reading, censorship asserted itself as a theme throughout the story. It reminded me of the days when I toiled over the ending of
Lipstick Jihad.
I confessed to Lily, my publisher friend, that despite all my efforts it ended sorrowfully. “I want so badly not to write a grim Iran book,” I told her. “Why is it turning out this way?”

“It’s not your fault,” she said with a knowing smile. “You can’t write the sadness out of Iran’s story.”

And so I could not will away the paragraphs that detailed what was still unacceptable, unfair, extraordinarily awful. With each story, it grew more apparent to me that at least for now, remaining in Iran as a journalist meant risking my safety. Though I trudged through each week, guiltily corresponding with my editors and plotting the next article, I knew the situation was unsustainable. Sooner or later I would need to decide what mattered more, being a mother or being a reporter. This wasn’t a real choice, of course, but Arash and I had not properly contemplated other options. We would need to soon enough, and meanwhile I sought to console myself by reading about the history of journalism in Iran.

Censorship predated the mullahs; in a book written before they took power, I learned that the media “intended to conceal facts that might hurt those in power.” In 1961, many newspapers refrained from covering the country’s election riots, and authorities jailed the resident
New York Times
reporter for five days. That same year, Abdol Rahman Faramarzi, the founder of one of the country’s most influential newspapers, described the Iranian media as “often monotonous, useless propaganda.”

Though it did nothing to alleviate my current plight, it helped to know that even Iran’s secular rulers had bullied the media. Unlike their successors, they did not murder journalists and nearly annihilate written culture with censorship. But every now and then it is instructive to remember that Iran has a long tradition of autocracy, and that while the present Islamic tyranny feels terribly foreign, it is undeniably
Iranian.
Even though Iranians resent their government, there is almost always a degree of complicity between rulers and the ruled. Something in our culture nurtures tyranny, and has for centuries. I felt I finally understood the poet Simin Behbehani, when she writes: “If the snake is domestic / I will give it shelter / I will be fond of it still / even if it does cruel things.”

T
he sound of loud crashes on the roof carried all the way down to our third-floor apartment. They startled Hourmazd, who had been reluctant to sleep and now rolled over to attention with a look of satisfaction. At barely over five months, he spent much of his time reclined on a doughnut pillow observing our living room, one arm propped in a Caesar-like pose. I scooped him up from the bed and headed toward the elevator. It was family custom to gather at Arash’s parents’ apartment during thunderstorms, power outages, and other troubling, extraordinary circumstances.

Arash’s mother, Eshrat khanoum, opened the door, and I entered to find Arash’s nephew Aryo perched on a chair, knees clutched to his chest, sobbing. “They’re knocking down the satellite dishes on the roof,” Eshrat khanoum explained.

I climbed up the stairs and peered onto the roof through the tiny window in the stairwell. A dozen soldiers were bent over kicking at the dishes’ cement bases, while two officers stood aside chatting. Back downstairs, Aryo remained inconsolable. His life revolved around the hour on Wednesday afternoon when the German cartoon channel broadcast
Power Rangers, and
the thought that he might miss it had reduced him to panic. “I want to complain, I want to call the police!” he kept howling.

“The police are the ones who are taking them away,” Eshrat khanoum told him. “That’s the law. Do I cry because the law says I have to wear a headscarf and a manteau?” She looked to me for assistance.

“Yes, it is the law,” I said solemnly. “We live here and we must respect the laws.”

“Let’s buy a ticket
right now and
go to Germany,” he said. “I want to go to Germany.”

We tried to explain that we could not leave the country, that he could watch a DVD instead, that it was not the end of the world. But these assurances only frustrated him more, and soon he crunched up again in the chair, and began wailing
“Dish! Dish! Dish!”
without pausing for air.

I felt sorry for Aryo, for his wounded sense of justice and his inability to comprehend what was happening. “Poor kid, what a world he has to grow up in,” I said, pressing my hands around a cup of tea, and surveying naked rooftops in the the rest of the neighborhood.

Eshrat khanoum was less moved. “Azadeh, what have you seen? Things are so much better now. Before, they would show up, insult you, treat the doorman horribly, and charge you a huge fine for having the dish in the first place. Now they arrive respectfully, kick over your dishes, and cart them off.”

It was the perennial matter of perspective, emerging as it always did, revealing the difference in expectations I found so painful. I had grown up in a world where policemen did not kick down people’s satellite dishes, either respectfully or brutishly, and I expected it not to happen at all. The same gulf separated me from other young mothers in Tehran. Once, when the wait at Hourmazd’s pediatrician was exceptionally long, several mothers began talking about the difficulties of raising children in Iran. I listened to their conversation stupefied. They complained about the poor quality of Iranian diapers and about how challenging it was to find well-made baby products in general. Of course I, too, found Iranian diapers plastic heat traps and had to hunt to find all-cotton pajamas, but these things hardly occurred to me as grievances, compared with the fact that I couldn’t take my baby
out for a walk, because of the pollution, the uneven sidewalks, or the hooligans overrunning the parks. Women who had grown up in revolutionary Iran were accustomed to public space being hostile. They had no particular expectations of a park and they did not imagine the city should provide them with play centers or playgrounds or well-stocked children’s libraries. What disappointed me, in short, often did not even occur to them, and vice versa.