Persian Mirrors: The Elusive Face of Iran (17 page)

When the revolution came, many Iranian singers were denounced as corrupt and “Westoxicated.” Some of the best fled the country. But Zangeneh’s music didn’t die and she didn’t move away. Over the years, she used her villa in north Tehran to give private singing lessons and to perform.

Then, quietly and unexpectedly, Zangeneh was granted official permission by the Ministry of Islamic Guidance to expand her space and perform in concert. Women lined up for hours to buy tickets. Scalpers sold them for ten times the official price. One night, a hundred women gathered behind the closed doors of a small theater hall in central Tehran to hear her. No men were allowed. The sound of her voice might be too arousing. (Indeed, an American male friend of mine who had heard her sing before the revolution told me, “She can lead men to dreams.”)

Zangeneh brazenly took off her head scarf and coat. Her blond hair was piled high on her head; she wore an elegant black suit. She sang old familiar songs for her fans, songs filled with love and longing, not religion. “I want to go hunting, hunting deer,” she sang. “Where is my gun? Where is my gun, my beloved Leili?” She encouraged the audience to clap, a gesture rejected by some clerics as an effete import from the West.

I heard about the concert and went calling on Zangeneh shortly after. I sat sipping coffee served by a manservant as I waited for her in a library filled with sunlight that she could not see. A Norma Desmond–like character, she made her entrance in a long black robe and gold backless sandals, led into the room by a female aide. She seemed desperate to hold on to the past, and asked me if I found her beautiful.

“Every night for eighteen years people wanted me to perform,” she said. “It happened last week. I stood on my feet and sang for four hours. The crowd was overwhelming. Everyone said I looked the same. I felt no distance from the past. And I felt the future.”

In Zangeneh’s case, the rule-breaking within the confines of the home had begun to pay off. In other cases, it has not, and never will. Probably the rule that Iranians break more than any other at home involves consumption of alcohol. It is the Koran that bans Muslims from drinking wine and gambling. “Avoid them,” one verse says, “so that you may prosper. Satan seeks to stir up enmity and hatred among you by means of wine and gambling, and to keep you from the remembrance of God and from your prayers.”

But Iran in fact is a wine-making country, perhaps the oldest in the Middle East. Some of the most beautiful paintings in the palace show long-haired maidens pouring wine from jugs. Persian poetry is infused with praise for wine. Hafiz wrote about it in the fourteenth century, and today even clerics still recite the poems, in their case insisting that Hafiz’s “wine” is not an alcoholic drink that causes intoxication but a divine experience that causes mystical rapture. A typical poem goes like this:

O cup-bearer, set my glass afire

With the light of wine! O minstrel, sing:

The world fulfilleth my heart’s desire

Reflected within the goblet’s ring

I see the glow of my love’s red cheek,

And scant of wit, ye who fail to seek

The pleasures that wine alone can bring!

Wine-making didn’t stop with the revolution; neither did drinking.There are just too many good grapes grown in Iran. Alcohol simply has gone underground. A huge industry in homemade wine, vodka, and beer has sprung up. Scotch of indeterminate origin, often with counterfeit labels, is smuggled in from Turkey and Dubai. As long as they do so quietly, non-Muslims are allowed to make alcohol for religious services and personal consumption. One of my heavy-drinking Iranian friends told me a joke as he poured me a drink that I really did not want. “Islam promised to teach us self-sufficiency,” he said. “We succeeded. We became self-sufficient in producing alcohol.”

I’ve been told by Iranians who used to live in the United States that their drinking actually increased dramatically after they moved back home. “I didn’t drink before the revolution,” a friend told me after dinner one night at his home in Hamadan, as he poured me a glass of his homemade mulberry schnapps. A retired engineer, he spent his nights watching satellite television, playing cards with friends, and getting drunk. “I was the only one of four brothers who didn’t drink.”

“So why do you drink?” I asked.

“Khomeini drove me to drink,” he said, laughing. Then he turned serious, adding, “It’s the loneliness, the depression.”

He escorted me into his front garden, to an area where no flowers grew. Under six inches of dirt were dozens of bottles of distilled alcohol that he had made. He took me to his basement; it looked like a three-room chemistry lab. One room had huge vats for making vodka, which could be flavored with berries, apricots, cherries, pears, or plums. In another room he made wine.

He didn’t sell the liquor he made. And even though he drank, he didn’t drink very much and probably would not have fit the American definition of a heavy drinker. His problem was that he had too much time on his hands. Making and bottling drinks has become his hobby. His next project, he explained, would be beer. It would be difficult to store but easy to make in his big cellar: take a big bucket, mix nonalcoholic beer with sugar and yeast, and after a week bottle it. A month later it would be ready.

For women, one of the most important private spaces available is the beauty salon. I used to wonder why Iranian women bother to get their hair done, since they have to cover it up on the street. But they have their reasons. The first is that much of Iran’s social life takes place behind closed doors and they want to look good around their family and intimate friends. The second is purely psychological. Just because women have to wear scarves doesn’t mean they don’t want to look and feel beautiful on the street. The third reason is that getting one’s hair done regularly is not a luxury; it is an act of rebellion. It tells the authorities, you can make me cover my head but you can’t stop me from becoming more beautiful. Khomeini once tried to ban all beauty parlors, labeling them “dens of corruption.” In the end, all he accomplished was to put male hairdressers (and female barbers) out of business.

I have a favorite beauty salon in Tehran. It is simple, with fake flowers and worn furniture, but welcoming, with offerings of cookies, fresh fruit, and tea. The air is usually full of cigarette smoke (women, particularly married women, like to smoke in Iran). Customers begin lining up at eight in the morning and are often still crowding in at eight at night. The clients are mostly middle-class women struggling to simultaneously make ends meet and feel good. There is a small sign on the front window, but the curtains are drawn and the door is locked. You have to be buzzed in. No men are allowed. The salon is a legal establishment licensed and regularly inspected by Iran’s Ministry of Health, but the owner, who has run the business since the mid-1970s, asked me not to write its name or exact neighborhood. Don’t give outsiders an excuse to meddle, she said.

The salon offers haircuts, coloring, blow-dries; facials and massages and makeup treatment; manicures and pedicures; and every type of hair bleaching, tweezing, and wax removal imaginable, including for underarm and pubic hair. It takes about five hours to get a bride fully coiffed, painted, depilated, manicured, creamed, and perfumed. The cost is equivalent to almost two months of an average government worker’s salary.

I never have seen so much attention paid to body hair as I have in Iran. Iranian women are known for their heavy mustaches and eyebrows, and religious women do not remove their facial hair before their wedding days. But for secular women, it is different. There is even a special system of removal of facial hair widely used throughout the Middle East in which a beautician uses a heavy sewing thread to remove the hair with friction against the face. Pain is part of the process. A Persian saying goes, “The pain of your upper lip is less than the pain of your mother-in-law’s words.” Another is, “Kill me, but make me beautiful.” There are even jokes about facial hair. Question: “Why do men grow mustaches?” Answer: “To look more like their mothers.”

I like the beauty salon because, like the aerobics studio, it is a space where women have permission to take off their head scarves and relax.

In a category all by themselves are the lingerie shops. These too are women-only refuges with drapes blocking the windows. And good lingerie is not cheap. One shop in a small shopping alley in north Tehran sells sets of silk and lace bras and bikini pants from England starting at $100. “Our best customers are the wives of the
bazaari,
” said the saleswoman, as she looked up from her reading, Mario Puzo’s
Fools Die
. “Even when they’re fat. The
bazaari
women may cover themselves in black and show only one eye. But they spend a lot of money on jewelry and clothes. They do whatever they can to look sexy for their husbands.”

The morals police once inspected a lingerie shop, hauled off the manager, and confiscated dozens of boxes of bras that showed a female model wearing one. But take away the display of a woman’s body and something as intimate as a bra can be sold openly on the street. Every weekday outside the German embassy in the middle of Tehran stands a male street vendor who hawks cheap Iranian-made bras, punching the cups with his fist to prove how durable they are.

There are still other refuges in Iran that are run, paradoxically, by the government. The Hejab (Islamic Dress) Club, a huge state-run sports facility for women in the heart of Tehran, provides athletics for the Islamic masses. It is unlike the chic aerobics studio in north Tehran, but it is still a place where ordinary women can engage in athletics—in this case basketball, karate, squash, judo, fencing, tae kwon do, marksmanship, and field hockey—far from the gaze of men. The club also offers full-service medical examinations, even access to a psychotherapist. The cost is low, but still beyond the budget of many women.

Because it is government-run, there are strict rules. “You can’t go inside dressed like that,” a young, sour-faced woman in a black chador barked at me as she blocked my entry into the cavernous building one day. “Take off your lipstick and cover your head better.”

Once inside, I found an enormous swimming pool in a suffocatingly overheated room that reeked of chlorine. In it, two hundred women ranging in age from fifteen to seventy-five and dressed in colorful bathing suits and caps took lessons and practiced their strokes. A dozen female lifeguards kept watch. No bikinis here, but a lot of body fat and seethrough Lycra. (A young friend who turned up in a bikini was told that bikinis were too revealing and could contribute to lesbianism.) Other women used the club’s sauna and whirlpool. “You see, the rumors that women wear black chadors to swim is not true,” said Zahra Mousavi, the head of the club’s swim team, dressed in a pink polo shirt and short-cropped denim shorts. It is only at public, mixed-sex beaches that women are required to swim with their heads and bodies covered. What surprised me even more, given the vigilance of the guard outside, is that some women casually walked around the locker rooms totally naked.

Men have their own swimming pools and sports clubs. Indeed, saunas are where guys go after work to unwind with their friends. Men have a much greater choice of clubs than women—from governmentrun militarylike clubs that give deep discounts to civil servants to the opulent Naranjestan Club, built of marble and travertine.

Iranians also find refuge in the great outdoors, especially in the three small mountains north of Tehran—Tochal, Darakeh, and Darband. The air is always cleaner and cooler there. Young couples, old couples, civil servants, diplomats, all use the mountains as a place of release, beyond the watchful eye of the Islamic Republic. On weekends the paths are clogged with people, but before sunrise and on weekday mornings they are nearly empty.

A young Iranian woman I know goes camping with a coed group of friends in mountains where the police do not go, deep in Mazandaran province near the Caspian Sea. For days, they sleep in tents and cook food over campfires. It is an act of both liberation and desperation. In reality, the mountains are not private at all, and if the campers were to be caught, they could be arrested, fined, and perhaps lashed. But the longing to feel free makes it worth the risk.

Although snitching is generally frowned upon in Iranian society, there is some nevertheless—haphazard and episodic. In some instances, this makes the possibility of betrayal particularly unsettling, if more remote. Iranians just don’t know what to expect, or from whom to expect it. It doesn’t happen very often, but parents can never predict when a teacher might ask their children whether their mother wears a chador, or whether their father drinks. And it can work the other way around—with teachers fearing that their young charges may inform on them. A young man who teaches religion in a public school told me that some of his preteen students worried openly that their fathers would go to hell because they didn’t fast during Ramadan, as would their mothers because they didn’t hide their hair at home in the company of men who were not close blood relatives. These boys were so open about their concerns they even questioned the teacher’s piety. “One day I was wearing my gold wedding ring and the topic of that day in class was the appearance of men in public,” he recalled. “The boys found a religious saying that told men not to wear gold and if they wear gold while they pray, their prayers are not heard. One boy asked me, ‘Sir, why didn’t you take off your gold ring for your prayers?’ I had to come up with a cover story, so I said, ‘My son, last night was my wedding anniversary and I wore my ring. But I forgot to take it off.’ You see, we are forced to lie all the time.”