Persian Mirrors: The Elusive Face of Iran (3 page)

There was a time when going in and out of the country was enough to make me want to stay home. The baggage handlers and customs officials did not speak English; the passport control officers spoke barely enough to get by. It could take three hours to get through the checkpoints. I once counted three checkpoints for people entering the country—each representing different centers of power—and nine for people leaving. But it was the invasion of my privacy that got me most angry. Customs officers have dumped the contents of my suitcases on the floor, run their fingers through jars of face cream and leafed through books and manila folders of news clippings. Body searches—always by female guards in black chadors—could be rough and much too intrusive.

Iranians sometimes still suffer some of these indignities. Western magazines used to be what customs officials were after. Even a copy of
Newsweek
could cause problems. Then it was contraband CDs, cassettes, and videotapes. Bertrand Vannier, a French journalist for Radio France, and I once flew in on the same plane from Rome, and the customs officers confiscated his radio (which might pick up Revolutionary Guards communications) and his deck of playing cards (gambling is forbidden in Islam). Bertrand was given a receipt for both and told to retrieve them on his way out of the country. He was stunned that upon his departure, two weeks later, he was given back his goods.

Today customs checks for foreigners are rare. The last thing potential foreign investors want to deal with at 3:00
A
.
M
. is a search of their suitcases. Even huge anti-American banners and looming portraits of Ayatollah Khomeini that once dominated the airport have been taken down, replaced by modest-sized photographs of Khomeini and his pale successor as Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. The only sign I continue to find offensive is one in yellow neon in the domestic terminal that reads, in English, “In future Islam will destroy Satanic sovereignty of the West.”

Hadi Salimi, my friend and my regular driver, is always at the airport to meet me. Iranians can be rather formal, and it has never occurred to me to address him as anything other than “Mr.” By day he has a full-time job maintaining a chemistry lab. After twenty years’ service, his monthly salary is the equivalent of $50. But he can earn $50 a day, sometimes $75—in dollars—by driving foreign visitors. It is only when I see Mr. Salimi, smiling, in his jacket and knitted cap, that I feel that I have safely arrived.

Then, as we speed down the highway toward downtown, Tehran hardly seems like a worthy destination. It is a perfectly dreadful city that grew out of a barren brown plain, without even the saving grace of a storied past. “In the Middle Ages it was a savage place where people lived in holes,” wrote Roger Stevens in his classic book on Iran,
The Land of the
Great Sophy.
Tehran, he added, was “an obscure, ill-favored provincial town.” It became the capital quite by accident. As dynasties changed over the centuries, Susa, Ctesiphon, Isfahan, Hamadan, Shiraz, Qazvin, Rey, Tabriz, Persepolis, and Mashad all served as capitals. In the latter part of the eighteenth century, Agha Mohammad, a Persian king of the Qajar dynasty, moved his court to Tehran because it was close to his native province of Mazandaran on the Caspian Sea, and to his tribal allies there. Only then did Tehran flourish, and were lavish palaces built.

Unlike the great ancient capitals of Baghdad or Cairo, Tehran has no river to bathe and cool it, to bring trade and commerce. Initially, it was built around a bazaar and a main mosque. Reza Shah, an army colonel who took over the government in 1921 and was crowned king four years later, expanded it with broad thoroughfares and a railroad as part of his single-minded campaign to modernize the country. During his twenty years in power, he also razed some of the most beautiful old residences, replacing them with structures every bit as monstrous as Stalinist designs. The oil boom of the late 1960s and 1970s then triggered a more ambitious building spree under Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, who assumed power after his father was dethroned by the British and the Russians because he was thought to have pro-Nazi tendencies. The new Shah seemed determined to spend money as wildly and quickly as possible on high-rise buildings of no architectural importance. At the time of Iran’s 1979 revolution, the population of greater Tehran was only about four million. Then came massive confiscations of property and the revolutionary dictum, “Land belongs only to God!” An order by Khomeini to bear more children, massive migration from the countryside, and disregard for building codes increased the population to nearly 12 million—almost one fifth of the country’s population—creating a need for cheap housing and contributing to the city’s dysfunction. It would be comparable to 50 million people living in New York City. A coffee table book of photographs of Tehran attests to its ugliness. The aerial shots show miles of squat, square, featureless buildings, mottled and gray with pollution.

The traffic requires a survival-of-the-boldest attitude. Nobody is timid and nobody yields the right of way and nobody stays in his own lane. Drivers routinely back down one-way ramps and drive the wrong way on one-way streets whose direction can change without notice. But everyone knows the rules, so when it seems as if an accident is all but certain, drivers move just enough to avert calamity. I often think that Tehran traffic is a useful metaphor for the country: individualistic, fluid, and yielding at the last possible moment. Even so, Tehran has one of the highest automobile fatality rates in the world.

After the revolution, the clerics renamed the streets after religious symbols, martyrs, and ayatollahs. (Ayatollah, which means “sign of God,” is the title given to the most learned religious leaders in the Shiite Muslim world.) But in the minds of motorists, the names did not change. My favorite street in Tehran has always been Vali Asr Avenue, named for the revered hidden Imam (spiritual leader) of Shiite Islam, who, Shiites believe, went into hiding in the ninth century. A wide thoroughfare shaded with stately chenar trees, it cuts through the city from north to south. But for many Iranians, it will always be called Pahlavi Avenue. After all, it was Reza Shah Pahlavi who planted the trees.

I once asked Mr. Salimi what it was like to drive for a living. “The line in the middle of the road has no meaning,” he said. “When you see the yellow light that tells you to slow down, people speed up. The women think the only purpose of the rearview mirror is to look at themselves. There is a written driving test, but if you say you’re illiterate you only have to identify a few signs to get your license.

“Traffic,” he concluded, “is worse than life.”

“So you hate your job?” I asked him.

“I love my job!” he exclaimed, to my surprise. “It energizes me. On the road, I can get away with things.”

The streets of Tehran are so clogged with cars—most of which are more than fifteen years old and lack exhaust filters—that Tehran has become one of the most polluted cities in the world, alongside Mexico City, Bangkok, and Jakarta. Tehran’s location at the foot of the Alborz mountain range limits the free circulation of air. Radio and television announcements warn children and old people to stay home, schools can shut down for days, and it is not at all unusual to see people walking down the streets wearing face masks to keep out the bad air. I have often thought that one of the few benefits of the obligatory head covering is that at least it keeps women’s hair cleaner.

Yet sometimes, in the early morning, after a windy night or a heavy snowfall, Tehran dazzles. The air is fresh and clean. The yellow-gray fog that has lain thick over the city lifts to reveal Damavand, one of the most beautiful mountains in the world. Sometimes I have come upon half-hidden treasures: an ornate nineteenth-century villa hidden behind a grimy brick wall adorned with exposed electrical wiring; or, near the bazaar, a winding street too narrow for my car; or an Art Deco house in gray stone that I longed to see painted South Miami pink; or a decades-old wishing well decorated with candles and framed portraits of Ali, the son-in-law of the Prophet, where people leave their dreams along with their 1,000 rial bills.

When I come to Tehran, I often stay at the Laleh International Hotel. The fourteen-story, 386-room concrete structure had been the Inter-Continental in the Old Regime, one of the top-of-the-line hotels built by Americans. Those were the days when Western businessmen crowded into Tehran seeking lucrative business deals. A Sheraton, a Hilton, and a Hyatt, with American decor and hamburgers on the menu, also had been built to make them feel at home. They all were confiscated, renamed, and Islamicized by the revolutionaries. Today the Laleh (which means “tulip,” the symbol of martyrdom) is owned by the Ministry of Islamic Guidance and Culture, which also finds the hospitality business a good way to monitor the comings and going of Western journalists. But like the renamed streets, the big hotels are still widely known by their prerevolutionary names. I picked up my copy of the English-language
Tehran
Times
one day to find a large front-page ad for a carpet merchant’s annual sale at “Tehran’s Esteqlal (ex-Hilton) Hotel.”

I can plot the course of Iran’s revolution by the changes I have seen at the Laleh. After the Shah left the country, his portrait and that of his wife that hung in the lobby were turned toward the wall; with the success of the revolution, they were taken down. The ayatollahs’ plainclothes security guards replaced the Shah’s plainclothes security guards. Milton Meyer, an American travel agent married to an Iranian, kept his business open in the shop off the lobby after the revolution and even after the American embassy was seized. Later, he moved his business across the street, and eventually he was arrested. In April 1994, he was sentenced to twenty-four months in prison and fined more than $200,000 after confessing, Iranian authorities said, to corruption and espionage charges.

The Mozaffarian brothers have kept one of their swank jewelry shops at the Laleh, a tribute to the staying power of capitalism in the Islamic Republic. Their prices are exorbitant—much higher than the bazaar—but that is the cost of shopping in the hotel. Whenever I enter the shop, they make me tea and sit me down and show me their museum-quality treasures. They are particularly proud of a necklace of matching diamonds and emeralds made decades before by their father. In a country where university professors earn only a few thousand dollars a year, the necklace is priced at half a million dollars.

I met many of the Laleh’s receptionists and waiters during the revolution. We lived through those heady and scary days when rival factions shot up the hotel looking for would-be enemies. For the most part, the staff stayed on, thankful to have jobs in a country whose revolution did not deliver prosperity. The men behind the reception desk are no longer allowed to wear ties, which are considered a symbol of the corrupt West. Some of them wear silk ascots instead, a modest rebellion.

In the early days of the revolution, it was still possible to get a drink in the hotel and the minibars were fully stocked as the hotel management tried to keep the Islamic Republic at bay. But armed Islamic zealots finally arrived at the hotel one evening and politely demanded access to the storage area in the basement. They had orders, they said, to destroy all the liquor in the wine cellar. In a fit of Islamic frenzy, they poured bottles of wine and champagne into the outdoor swimming pool. They opened thousands of cans of imported beer and pitched them into a service driveway. The manager of the hotel estimated the value of the lost stock at $325,000. That ended the battle.

Soon afterward, the Air France stewardesses were banned from sun-bathing in the chaises longues near the five-sided pool. The pool was emptied of its water and closed. Later, masons came and installed a mosaic of tiles on the lobby wall. It welcomed all visitors with the words, “Down with U.S.A.” The doormat was imprinted with a large American flag that visitors stepped on going in and out of the hotel.

Over the years, the Laleh became downright seedy. The carpets wore out, the bedspreads grew faded and torn. In the rooms, the air-conditioning system made so much noise that I opted for open windows and the sound of Tehran traffic. But that invited hungry, plump mosquitoes. The cockroaches became so comfortable that they didn’t bother to flee when the bathroom light was switched on.

A few years ago, the Ministry of Islamic Guidance and Culture poured enormous sums into renovations. The occasion was the 1997 summit of the fifty-five-country Organization of the Islamic Conference, which attracted Muslim heads of state from all over the world. Iran was the host and wanted to show off. So the gray facade of the Laleh was painted white. The lobby was redecorated with gray and black marble, mirror-mosaics, polished brass, and crystal chandeliers. Gulf gauche, I call it. New bedspreads, drapes, carpets, lamps, and air-conditioners were bought. The American flag doormat was replaced with ornate white stones decorated with stars. The tiles that spelled “Down with U.S.A.” were removed and two red carpets were rolled out the front entrance. Framed posters were hung, not of mosques and mullahs (the generic term for members of the clergy) but of Iran’s pre-Islamic sites. Pre-revolutionary Muzak tapes were taken out of storage—even an orchestral medley that included “Strangers in the Night” and “On the Street Where You Live.” Ataollah Mohajerani, the Minister of Islamic Guidance and Culture, said at one point that three hotels could have been built for the cost of renovating this one.

Room service at the Laleh is a refuge from the restrictions of the Islamic Republic. I hate eating while wearing a head scarf; the ends of the scarf usually wind up in my plate. But I can eat all the caviar I want bare-headed in the privacy of my room—even for breakfast over scrambled eggs. And in Iran it’s economical. Depending on the source, it can cost as little as $
10
for one hundred grams of an excellent Sevruga. I keep it in my minibar.

When I do eat out, I can always get a table at the French Rotisserie, the culinary gem of the Laleh. With its caviar and blinis, its world-class wine cellar, and its view of the city and the mountains, it was once one of Tehran’s finest places to dine. It stayed open throughout the revolution (though no longer serving alcohol), even when armed leftist militias used its windows for target practice and hotel employees had to douse the leftists with fire hoses. The restaurant moved to the first floor during the long war with Iraq and then closed for renovation. The Polynesian restaurant down the hall took its customers. Maybe it was for the best. My most vivid memory of the Rotisserie was the six-foot-long tapeworm I once got from eating rare beef tenderloin there.