The Ayatollah Begs to Differ (29 page)

It hit hardest one day when in an embassy car with my mother in Washington, driven by a Guatemalan chauffeur who spoke no Farsi, I uttered the word “SAVAK.” My mother turned pale and brought her finger to her lips.
“Shh!”
she whispered loudly. She then made all kinds of ridiculous signs with her hands and eyes, but I understood that she was trying to indicate to me that the car was undoubtedly bugged. And this was the car that was for the sole use of my father, who was the deputy chief of mission at the Iranian Embassy at the time, and his family. I remember being shocked not only that the Shah’s government didn’t trust even its most senior diplomats but that the privacy I knew Iranians value could be so blatantly violated. When I sat with Khatami in New York years later, in a mansion that is probably bugged by both the National Security Agency
and
the Iranian Intelligence Ministry, I confess that I found myself admiring the Iranian regime: admiring it for at least allowing its officials their privacy to criticize and, yes, even make fun of the foibles of their government.

Inside Iran, I’ve witnessed many a political discussion behind walls that would have landed everyone present in prison only a generation ago, and many Iranians feel reasonably free to criticize their government beyond their walls as well, albeit without crossing the redlines of disrespect for Islam or the Supreme Leader. But regular social intercourse has retreated fully into the home and gardens, where in Iran anything goes. In the days immediately after President Ahmadinejad’s election in 2005, I was invited twice to a Thursday afternoon opium open house in North Tehran. Thursday is the last day of the week in Iran—Friday is the one holiday—and there are many such gatherings in the city. Opium “salons,” I like to call them, for the concept of the salon, a very Persian one before the introduction of café society by Westernized intellectuals, has made a strong comeback in the age of enforced Islamic public behavior. At this salon, on a quiet street in an upper-middleclass neighborhood, a stream of friends and acquaintances gathered in a large and well-appointed apartment on the second floor of a modern four-story building. It was a modern household; the women of the house not only walked around without hijab but shook hands and even kissed the men on the cheeks. They did not, however, smoke opium. Opium use is mostly the preserve of men, and men in their thirties and up. It is an establishment pastime that young people are little interested in, and the grown children of the family ventured into the “den,” complete with its own ventilation system and a video surveillance system showing the street outside, only to say hello to their father’s friends.

Talk was of politics and business, and the news on one Thursday afternoon was the continuing unrest in the Kurdish regions, an unrest little reported in the newspapers but news of which was readily available on the Internet. A nationalist Kurd, Shivan Qaderi, had been shot by state security forces, who labeled him, as usual, a “hooligan,” in the Kurdish town of Mahabad on July 9, 2005, and his body had been dragged through town behind a jeep, presumably to intimidate the population. The tactic backfired, and rather than be intimidated, Kurds had been demonstrating for days, causing a government crackdown that had so far resulted in a number of deaths and injuries. Some of the worst violence, even the state-controlled media had to admit, occurred in the town of Saqqez on August 3, the day before our gathering, and Kurdish satellite stations based in Iraqi Kurdish regions (not that I could find any Iranians who’d ever seen them; they seemed to prefer the Persian Music Channel, the BBC, and the Fashion Channel, particularly the lingerie catwalks) were broadcasting news from the front and helping to mobilize more protests. What was remarkable was not that the unrest was little reported but that even among Iranian intellectuals who hungered for news, any news, that painted the government in a bad light, there was very little sympathy for the Kurds, or for the demonstrators killed while protesting. Even a strong hatred of the ruling clergy by some in the room didn’t translate into a hatred of their tactics when it came to putting down Kurdish unrest, perhaps a sign of the latent racism so prevalent among Iranians of all stripes, but more likely because it simply could have no effect on their lives.

The other news, of course, was the nuclear standoff. It was the single biggest issue facing Iran, but these Iranians were only interested in how it might affect their wallets. The men in the room seemed to grudgingly accept that the Ayatollahs were right to hold firm on the nuclear negotiations. Perhaps there’s something about the idea of a nuclear arsenal that just appeals to a different part of the brain, but Iranians everywhere were pretty united in opposing what they viewed as the arrogance of America in demanding that Iran be denied the nuclear fuel cycle. In 2005 this group of men worried less that the United States might militarily intervene, for the Iraq quagmire was already evidence for them that America had been rendered militarily impotent, and more that the United States might push through UN sanctions that would negatively affect a rather strong economy, or at least strong for the middle class. And of course they were right, for less than two years later all the talk in Tehran was exactly that: a damaged economy, partly because of UN sanctions.

Ahmadinejad, the newly elected president at the time, was the object of much scorn for his unsophisticated manner, but as the upper-middle-class men smoked pipe after pipe, their hijab-less women darting in and out of the room to share a joke or two, it was apparent that these Iranians were against the Islamic Republic and its leaders not so much on the basis of policy as on the basis of class. Iran was supposed to have done away with class distinctions in the Islamic Revolution, but as with almost everything else class consciousness simply retired behind Persian walls. For centuries the class system in Iran, kept intact under successive Shahs, categorized clerics as one rung above the poor and the workers, and almost on par with the
bazaaris
, the men in the bazaar who are the Ayatollahs’ benefactors and who to this day, armed with only a 1930s-era Siemens phone and a desk from the same period, control hundreds of millions, if not billions, of dollars of the import-export trade. That these
shepesh’oo
, or “flea-ridden,” mullahs had managed to not only rule over them for twenty-six years but also create industry, help generate wealth for their bazaari benefactors, build a powerful military, win successive face-offs with the West, and generally elevate Iran’s importance in the world was almost too much to bear for these men.
⁴
And now, they implied, to make matters worse, an ugly, brutish, and sartorially challenged president had been elected who came from the one class they deemed below the clerics and the bazaaris: the working class. Ahmadinejad, they mused, would be better suited to being a blacksmith, the occupation of his father.

A few nights later, I found myself behind the walls of a couple’s apartment in the fancy district of Elahieh that had artfully been made to look like a New York loft. “Drink?” asked my hostess right away, and she didn’t mean soda. Johnnie Walker, it seems, has fully colonized this part of the world as the British Empire was never able to do. The artists’ loft (husband and wife, both young and both artists) could have been anywhere in the West, or at least anywhere there are lofts. As other guests arrived, it was even more so, for along with other Iranian artists who pepper their speech with as much English as possible, there were actually foreign guests.

In Iran there isn’t a particularly large expatriate community, for obvious reasons, but the ones who are there are often found at these kinds of parties. A twenty-three-year-old blond, blue-eyed girl walked through the door and said her hellos in perfect, barely accented Farsi. Where was she from, and what was she doing in Tehran? I wondered. She was British, I quickly discovered, living alone in Tehran, and working at the Iranian Foreign Ministry to further her study of international relations. Living alone? Well, not quite. She had a roommate, a male journalist, who as far as her neighbors were concerned was her husband. And did she enjoy living in Tehran? “Love it,” she said. “Absolutely
love
it,” she continued with a smile, chewing on an olive and slowly enunciating every syllable with her Oxford-tinged accent.

A couple, a French man and his Iranian wife, walked in the door and introductions were made. What, they also wondered, did the English girl do? “She’s a spy,” I blurted out jokingly, “MI6.” The girl simply smiled again, clearly aware of most Iranians’ assumptions about the British (that they’re never up to any good), and said, “Yes, I’m a spy,” and walked away.
⁵
There was a lot of curiosity about me at the party, as there can be about any Iranian who lives abroad: what I was doing in Iran, whom I had seen, and what I thought of the place. When a cannabis joint was passed around, I begged off, saying I felt that I may have indulged in a little too much opium on this particular trip. The looks of wonder, even disgust, on some of the guests’ faces were confirmation that to them opium use was the province of much older men, the bourgeois classes and lower, and not the enlightened artists and intellectuals who were busy puffing away at their very chic Western weed.

Many Iranians in the community of artists and intellectuals believe, as I did, that any Westerners at their parties are spies, or spies in the making, but I found out later that many Iranians are convinced that at any of these gatherings or parties at least one of the artist types is also a spy, but from the Iranian Ministry of Intelligence. Oddly enough, it doesn’t affect their behavior, perhaps because they feel so protected behind their walls that they cannot imagine that the state, unlike in the days of the Shah and his SAVAK, would dare to remove the one arena of privacy that allows people a freedom they might otherwise take to demanding in the streets. The spies, one is told, are usually the least obvious men—the ones who fire up the first joint, but also the ones who ask a lot of questions. Like the man, I thought later, who persisted in asking me whom I’d seen while I had been in Tehran. Based on the fact that people rarely get into trouble for attending these kinds of parties, even if they cross every political redline imaginable, as I myself have done, I have to assume that the idea that there are spies everywhere is Iranian paranoia and conspiracy-theory-mindedness, but the idea is intriguing nonetheless and quite to my Persian taste. The Iranian intelligence services certainly monitor their citizens, but if they were to arrest anyone who speaks ill of the government in private, they simply couldn’t build cells fast enough to hold their prisoners. It is far more likely that some people
are
watched and carefully monitored—people known for political activism—and any and all evidence, ridiculous or not, of their danger to the state is undoubtedly presented when and if the time comes for them to be tried and convicted.

But there couldn’t have been any spies at another party of artists and intellectuals, some of them from the same loft, in the winter of 2007, even though at times I thought there surely had to be if the Islamic Republic deserved its reputation. The party was at a house, a mansion really, of the kind that is simply no longer in private hands in Tehran: on at least an acre or so of land with a huge swimming pool set in the middle of expansive gardens shaded by towering pine trees. Once common enough during the heyday of the Shah’s reign, many large properties were confiscated by the Islamic government either in the owners’ absence or because of the assumption of ill-gotten gains, and those who managed to retrieve their properties in the courts sold off the land in parcels as Tehran grew—from a population of around four million in 1979 to the current estimate of twelve to fifteen million—both to cash in on the skyrocketing real estate prices and to project a more modest lifestyle in the new Islamic and supposedly classless society. This modernist house, the pool, the view, and the steep winding road leading to its gates, was more Hollywood Hills than Tehran, but then again, so were the occupants, who were among the few who had succeeded in retrieving their confiscated property
and
had decided to live in it, appearances be damned.