Honeymoon in Tehran: Two Years of Love and Danger in Iran (47 page)

We were not bound to stay in Iran by forces out of our control. It was a country that had for three decades inspired in millions a fierce, desperate urge to flee. It was said that back in the early 1980s, shortly after the revolution, one man resorted to packing his fiancée in a suitcase and putting her on a plane as checked luggage. She arrived, of course, in a freer land, asphyxiated. This story circulated for years throughout Iranian émigré communities in the West, a heartrending example of the lengths to which some people would go in seeking a better life outside Iran’s borders. I heard it often as a child, and I brooded over the horrific last moments the suffocating fiancée, the suitcase bride as I came to think of her, must have suffered. Somewhere along the way, the story was embroidered to add bananas as the only thing she had to eat along the way. Had she even been able to peel them? I wondered with my child’s imagination. Or had she lost consciousness first? I fell asleep that night haunted by thoughts of Haleh in her cell, and of the suitcase bride’s hungry, tragic end.

O
n a sunny weekend morning in the middle of spring, Arash and I headed out with Hourmazd for a walk in the Alborz foothills. Several days earlier, the familiar police vans and officers detaining women for improper dress had disappeared from the streets, and it seemed the anti-immodesty campaign had eased. We were eager to resume our weekly mountain stroll, one of the few stress-free public outings we could enjoy with Hourmazd. The tree-lined, paved path to Velenjak was navigable with a stroller, and the place drew mostly families and well-behaved young people, rather than the thuggish bands of young men who tromped around nearby Darband. From between the pine trees, billboards advertised electric kettles, panini presses, and high-tech deep fryers. People strolled along the path, chatting leisurely and snacking on crepes and barbecued corn. More adventurous young men and women donned puffy uniforms and darted around the paint-ball grounds. As usual, the “Answers to Your Religious Questions” booth stood empty and unattended.

As I pushed the stroller along, a policewoman in black chador blocked my way. She could not have been older than sixteen, an adolescent fuzz of mustache above her lip. She fingered my plain white headscarf, pronounced it too thin, and directed me toward a parked minibus with dark windows. It took a full minute before I realized
that she meant to arrest me. “I’ve been wearing this veil for over five years,” I pleaded, “surely it can’t be that unacceptable.”

“My dear woman, it is your own fault for having chosen to wear such a thin veil, when you could have opted for a nice, thick, long shawl,” she scolded.

Though I was nervous, I also had a hard time taking the teenager entirely seriously. She was underage, the thickness of my veil was debatable, and there was an infant in my stroller. Did she not notice the stroller? And why was she picking on me, when women wearing layers of makeup and more objectionable attire streamed past? Arash soon caught up with us and began berating the policewoman for harassing a young mother. Tongued-tied in my anger, I admired the perfect torrent of words. Arash used the motherhood jargon of state propaganda to admonish the girl; the language of the regime gave him full cover to attack. The girl shrank, with the deference to male authority natural in a traditional teenage female. The commotion caught the attention of a bearded superior officer, who came over to inspect me. “The problems are not few,” he said, frowning at my sleeves, which fell a few inches above my unsteady wrists. He ordered me to sign a
ta’ahod,
a promise that I would not repeat my mistake. “Now go home,” he said, “go home and don’t come back.”

We climbed back into the car, silent and furious. Hourmazd detested his car seat and had screamed and cried throughout the thirty-minute ride to Velenjak. His pale skin was still red from the exertion, and the collar of his shirt still damp with sweat. Now he took one look at the car seat and began to scream. “What do you want me to do? They won’t let us take a walk,” I told him. Why had I ever thought parenting in Iran would be challenging only once elementary school started?

At that moment, neither Hourmazd, nor I, nor Arash could bear another half hour of weeping. I held the baby in my lap as Arash recited the opening lines of “O mountain, today you heard my scream,” a poem by Houshang Ebtehaj, an eminent Iranian poet living in Germany. Ebtehaj composed the poem in the early years of the revolution, after morality squads barred him and a group of friends from climbing the very same mountain.

We drove home, stopping to buy groceries for lunch. The produce seller was flipping the channels on his television and paused on a state-produced miniseries. Something in the drama provoked Arash. “Look at them, at all the money they waste making preachy serials for their own entertainment,” he said. Noticing a middle-aged woman in black chador who was inspecting dusky purple eggplants, he added, “If my saying so doesn’t offend Hajj khanoum.”

“But we’re dissatisfied also,” she said, looking up in surprise.

The produce seller selected a few choice mangoes to cheer us up. Then he added a basket of strawberries. “They’ll boost her IQ,” he said, smiling at Hourmazd. Advanced in years and partly deaf, every second week the produce seller forgot Hourmazd was a boy. One of his own sons usually bellowed, “
He,
Hajj Agha, he’s a
he!”
We gathered our consolation fruit and headed for the car, looking forward to an afternoon spent indoors, far from the morality police and their sixteen-year-old enforcers.

A
fter this incident, harrowing in a distinctive way, a reminder of how casually our lives could be turned upside down, we began talking about leaving Iran. We had been circling the issue for weeks but never acknowledging it explicitly. Now it forced its way into the open. It was one thing having our security compromised by my work, which was deemed sensitive in the state’s paranoid view. It was another thing entirely to come so close to arrest as an ordinary citizen, because a teenage enforcer took issue with the fabric of my headscarf.

Our conversations about leaving operated on two levels. There were the practical questions to work out. We talked about real estate and whether we could sell our apartment, about where we might move and what we might do in those places. Our choices consisted of Germany and England. We considered the United States, but only fleetingly. As much as I longed to live near my friends and relatives in California, my work required frequent travel to the Middle East and that made Europe a more practical choice. Europe also better suited Arash’s academic ambitions. With his MBA now completed, he had decided to continue his undergraduate study of religions at the doctoral
level, focusing on Zoroastrianism. This meant he would need to study old Iranian languages, and only a very few universities in the world—most of them in Europe—offered instruction in those ancient tongues. Rather on a whim, he had sent off an application to the University of London earlier that year, at the height of the media furor over a U.S. attack. Since we had not actively been planning to leave, he had never taken the English language tests required for admission. When he did attempt to register for the exams (standing in line overnight with hundreds of others outside the registration center), he discovered that there would be no space in Tehran for months to come. It turned out we weren’t the only Iranians to have concluded recently that Iran was best left behind. Two and a half times as many young people were sitting the exams this year as had taken them the year before. Arash would need to go abroad in order to take the test in time for admission to the university.

In making my own practical preparations, I, too, encountered the desperation of those trying to leave. It was fascinating how, when you were staying, the country seemed full of those also coping, intending to stay. When you began getting ready to leave, preparing for English exams or applying for foreign visas, it seemed as though everyone else was desperately pushing against the borders, too. I went to renew my Iranian passport, and asked the clerk to change my official status to “resident of Iran.” This was so that I could stay however long I wished during visits and not be bothered at the passport check at the airport (Iranian citizens registered as living abroad could stay a maxi mum of six months). A complete stranger who overhead me thought I was forsaking my American citizenship, and began to shriek in protest: “Madam! What are you
doing?
You will regret this forever, please reconsider!”

I spent a long morning outside the British embassy in line for an extended visa, and watched the line growing longer and more impatient. The sun scorched overhead and the embassy guard refused to let people wait in the shade. He herded old people and those with children into a narrow line, unmoved as they wilted and cursed him. Many of those around nervously wondered whether their visas would be approved, and I felt during those hours the humiliated desperation
of those who were, in their own society, engineers and respected matrons, but were now abasing themselves before the haughty embassy staff of a European power. Inside, I filled out visa applications for women who could not read English but were eager to emigrate and join sons and daughters. At one point, a guard walked over and asked whether he had not seen me before at the embassy. “I used to attend parties here all the time. But that era seems rather over, don’t you think?” I said. I told him the last time I tried to attend a diplomatic function, hundreds of Basij and security police surrounded the embassy, calling the guests traitors,
vatan-foroush.
Arash and I decided not to go inside, which had turned out to be wise. Several of our friends who braved the harassment cordon were arrested on the way out, charged with attending the Queen of England’s birthday party or some such nonsense.

Once we finished handling our logistical concerns, we began feeling the emotional distress of leaving more acutely. Inevitably, that distress took the form of fights. Although we were in general agreement about leaving, we differed in the ranks we assigned our reasons, as well in how and whether those reasons should be shared with others. I was consumed by second thoughts that I unhelpfully aired for the first time in company. As our erstwhile therapist Dr. Majidi had discovered, friends and relatives seemed to have an oversize stake in the decision. Those who despised Iran and considered leaving themselves supported us, but those whose circumstances compelled them to stay made a sport of undermining our reasons. In the company of the latter, I felt awkward recounting our rationale. They warned that Hourmazd would grow up without close bonds to his extended family, that I would fall apart without the help and female companionship I was accustomed to. They argued that Iranian schools, the propaganda factor aside, turned out young people far more skilled in mathematics and hard sciences than graduates of western schools. I might have told myself all this, too, if I had been stuck in Iran. Arash felt blind-sided when, say, during the soup course at a dinner party, I would suddenly celebrate the science curriculum of Iranian schools. “But how can I trash the school system in front of a mother—the hostess—
who has two school-age kids and will never have the chance of leaving?” I argued to Arash. “That’s rude. It’s unkind.”

I made my case for etiquette, aware all the while that it was disingenuous. Rather than acknowledging my own doubts, I dressed them up in concern for other people’s feelings. The truth was, I was torn. I knew we needed to leave,
should
leave. But I didn’t particularly want to leave. I was also, strangely enough, nervous. I didn’t know how my career would fare in Europe, where I had no roots, connections, or expertise. My life had for so long existed between two poles, the United States and the Middle East. Europe was a place for airport transfers and holidays. “Why do you make yourself sound so helpless?” Arash asked. “If you can handle Baghdad and Kandahar, London could not possibly be intimidating. They speak English there.”

Perhaps I could conquer my irrational fear of European life. But I was most nervous about motherhood in the style of the West, because I knew from the lives of my friends precisely what it would entail. I imagined myself marooned at home with an infant who did not speak, eating my meals alone, bereft of adult company and conversation. In Iran, motherhood did not entail such isolation. Like nearly all young Iranian mothers, I lived in close proximity to relatives and in-laws, and they shared my days. The culture of proximity I had found so cloying when I was single now seemed sensible and wise.

And then there was the reluctance that lurked at the bottom of all my worries, a more abstract feeling, but as upsetting as the obvious pain of being separated from the people we cared about. “Don’t you see what it means for us to leave? It means Iran wasn’t livable enough. It means people like you and me don’t have a place here. We’re being run out, by a government that doesn’t care whether its people have a future. And don’t you see how it’s so much bigger than just us? We’re just two, but there are literally tens of thousands of people
just like us.
All of them, leaving. It means that all this talk of mending and changing and improving was a charade. That Iran is all heavy and rotten at the core. Doesn’t that make you horribly sad?”