Honeymoon in Tehran: Two Years of Love and Danger in Iran (31 page)

The reception later that evening was exquisite for many reasons—for the abundant, fragrant roses that crowded each corner of the garden, the glowing candles that lit the landscape pathways, the jewel-like pastries circulating on trays; but most of all for how it evoked, on a rather grand scale, an Iran that no longer existed. Men and women danced together inside the house, and in the lower garden, the alcohol flowed freely from a bar in the dining room, where a DJ tended to the young people, while the
motrebs
played classics outside. Receptions of this sort were usually only held in the rented gardens of Karaj, so couples were forced to choose between the coziness of home, and the security requirements of a proper party. In the Lavasan garden we could have such a party, and be at home at the same time. We were exceptionally fortunate in having such a special place to hold our wedding.

As we walked with our final guests down the petal-strewn path to the gates, passing the remnants of the lamb on a spit, I gazed around with a tender sense of satisfaction. Though I was not certain that our future in Iran would be blessed with the magic and security of this one evening, I was glad we had reminded people that you didn’t need skywriting and fireworks to have a good time, and that the city’s own rites and its
motrebs
offered the best entertainment anyone could hope for. That six main courses were just as good as twenty, and that there was something to be said for inviting only a hundred guests,
even if your family’s social obligations might have merited a thousand. Though it had scarcely been our intention, the very next morning the phone began to ring with requests for information. Who had written our vows? Would we share the text with others? Who had produced the invitation? In the months that followed, it became popular to use Zoroastrian ceremonial texts and invitations, to have
motrebs
play alongside DJs. Even friends of ours from observant Muslim families asked to use our text, so delighted were they with its Iranian sensibility and the idea of using Farsi rather than Arabic. Iranian young people, lost between the domineering Islamic culture of the government and the mindless embrace of western traditions that were equally foreign, lacked an authentic identity to call their own. Before long, Arash and I became known in our social circle as the couple with the Zoro astrian wedding, the originators of what appeared more meaningful than just another trend.

For our honeymoon, we spent a weekend in Shiraz, a city in southwestern Iran known for its orange blossom-scented gardens and the shrines of great Persian poets. We spent a day exploring Persepolis, the 2,500-year-old ruins of ancient Persia’s capital. Thousands of Iranians strolled through the magnificent complex of temples, drawing rooms, and palaces, gazing reverently at the towering columns. In 330
B.C.E.,
Alexander burned the imperial city to the ground, but what remained of the pre-Islamic kings’ throne drew Iranians in vast numbers, more than any other attraction across the country. Families laid out picnics in the shade; children played hide-and-seek around the columns; and loudspeakers intoned warnings that demonstrated the authorities’ nonchalance about preservation. Instead of installing guards every few meters to protect what remained of one of the most sophisticated civilizations on earth, the government simply reminded Iranians: “Please do not stub out your cigarette on Persepolis. … Please do not write or carve on the ruins. …” We posed with the winged creatures carved out of stone, and headed back to central Shiraz to eat rose sorbet laced with fragile rice noodles in the shade of an eighteenth-century citadel. We walked backed to our hotel, and I pressed Arash’s hand in mine, enchanted with the city, with my new husband, and the prospect of everything our future held in store.

A
s odd as this might sound, most women in Iran consider marriage greatly liberating. The adjectives they use to describe their married lives—“independent,” “unbound,” “carefree”—are similar to those western women would apply to being single. Perhaps this is because the phenomena of single life—dating, premarital sex, parties—are still not openly acknowledged by many, however commonplace they have become. The single woman has to concoct excuses to spend long hours with a boyfriend, must connive with friends to secure places to be alone. Her parents call her cell phone constantly, demanding to know where she is and when she will return home. A single woman, in short, requires considerable subterfuge if she is to maintain the delicate pretense of being a respectable daughter living at home with her parents. Marriage ends the tiresome years of charade and releases the fetters of parental and societal oversight. The married woman is mistress of her time and space, accountable to no one but her husband. Provided, of course, the husband is not some jealous, controlling disaster of a spouse, as is sometimes the case, but often not. She can take bonsai classes, meet friends for coffee, disappear for an afternoon at the cinema, and dress as she pleases.

It had never occurred to me to view marriage in this way. Raised in
the West, I conceived of the institution as unnecessary and potentially stultifying. I had viewed marriage as a distant, somewhat distressing fleck on the horizon, anxious that it would render my life banal. I became aware of the radically different Iranian view one fall afternoon some years ago, while I was waiting for my tape recorder to be checked by security at the presidential palace. A young member of the security staff, a woman in black chador, kept me company, and as we chatted she asked my age. She looked horrified upon discovering that at twenty-five I was not yet married. “Twenty-five! What on earth are you waiting for? Don’t you want to be
free?”

“Free?” I had repeated, confused. I didn’t see any connection between marriage and freedom.

“Yes, free. You can finally leave your parents’ house, no one telling you what to do.” Adding in a mimic of a maternal whine, “‘Wake up, eat, sleep, come, go!’”

When the only escape from suffocating parental love was marriage, it was entirely reasonable, even if unrealistic, to imbue that institution with the charm of long-awaited autonomy. The eternal compromises of marriage, the need to continually adapt oneself to the demands of life with another human being, occupied no corner of this idealized picture.

Though I never expected marriage to bestow on me a new independence, I did believe that it would, in one important respect, secure my freedom: it would be my rescue from Mr. X. This conviction dated back to my earliest conversations with Shirin khanoum, when I inquired about how she managed the invasive presence of the state’s security agents in her life. If they pestered me, an ordinary journalist, with such dogged zeal, then surely they must have terrorized the country’s outspoken Nobel laureate. I had been deeply surprised to learn this had not been the case.

“I explained to them that as a proper, married woman, I could obviously not be seen having coffee with strange men in the lobbies of hotels,” she told me. Since it was Islamically improper to meet them alone, on one occasion Shirin khanoum had even brought her husband along to the meeting. The agents had been mortified—something to
do with one Iranian man respecting another man’s territory—and afterward they had ceased to demand she meet with them.

Arash resented the presence of Mr. X in my life, though not out of any sense of encroachment on his
namoos,
the Islamic term for the honor and sanctity of a man’s family. Arash simply considered my minder scum and wished I were not obliged to maintain contact with someone who bullied and intimidated people on behalf of a despotic state. When I told him that I could, in the manner of Shirin khanoum, use Islamic propriety and his purported displeasure as a pretext to end, or at least modify, the relationship, Arash readily agreed. Thus prepared to finally disrupt the years of menace and intrusion, I awaited Mr. X’s inevitable phone call with much excitement.

The morning the numbers “1111111” appeared on my phone’s caller ID—Mr. X phoned from the Ministry of Intelligence, I assume, with a blocked number—I picked up eagerly.

“May you not be tired. Are you well?” I said. We exchanged robotic pleasantries for a minute, before Mr. X asked when I might be free.

“There is something I must tell you,” I said. “My husband does not consider it appropriate for me to meet men alone in an empty hotel room.” I would wait to bring out the real ammunition, the word
namahram,
the term for someone who is not an immediate family member. Strict Muslims believe that men and women who are
namah ram
should not be alone in each other’s company. Any pedestrian mullah could tell you this; it was an edict as direct as the one about pork being
haram.
“He would be more comfortable if we met in an official government office, or at the very least in a public place, such as a hotel lobby. Alternatively, he would be happy to accompany me, if you preferred to continue to meet in seclusion.”

“What right does your husband have to interfere in our work?” he asked. “Our work is
amneeat,
security.” He emphasized this as if talking to a small child. “Do you think we can conduct sensitive intelligence work related to the nation’s security in the lobbies of hotels?”

I felt like asking him whether the sorts of things he liked to know and that I refused to tell him—what the Irish third secretary had said at the Maldivian ambassador’s tea party—truly protected Iran from
grave and insidious threats. Instead, I remained civil. “That is for you to determine. But my husband’s sensitivities must be respected.”

“Has your husband not been in the West? How can it be that he has such a closed mind?”

I wished I were recording this. A henchman of the Islamic Republic was lecturing me on liberality. “My husband, regardless of his time abroad, is an Iranian man. And that means he has firm beliefs regarding the propriety of his wife’s meetings with other men. As an Iranian man yourself, working for an Islamic government, I would presume you could appreciate that.”

“I regret to hear that you’re just not serious about work anymore.” Mr. X sighed. “Maybe now that you’re married you would just like to retire?”

Mr. X held veto power over my press credentials, as he often reminded me. I was on the verge of tears. Nothing was going as I had expected. Why had it worked for Shirin khanoum?

“You know that I’m very serious about work,” I said, softening my tone. “Haven’t I shown that by staying in regular contact? And the last time I was at the foreign press office, everyone was very pleased with my stories.”

“Forget the foreign press office. They do not have security responsibilities.” Apparently my file was on a par with negotiating rights over nuclear enrichment at the United Nations. Mr. X was very sensitive about the ministry’s reputation, and puffed up regularly when discussing its myriad “responsibilities.”

“What I’m asking is not so unreasonable,” I pleaded. “Surely we can come to an agreement. There must be a room somewhere at the ministry, anywhere official, that we can use? Or perhaps you would like to meet my husband, and get to know him? He is very discreet.”

But Mr. X was not interested in meeting Arash. “You should think again about these silly excuses you are making. I will make discussions on my end,” he said, hanging up.

Perhaps it had been too much to hope that I could extricate myself from dealing with Mr. X altogether, but I had imagined I could at least negotiate a more balanced relationship. Meeting in public, or
at least in a government building, would deny Mr. X the psychological weapon of creepy seclusion. Reducing my vulnerability in these meetings had been my central aim, and it had failed.

I wanted to call Shirin khanoum and tell her that her approach had not worked, but obviously I couldn’t say such things over the phone. Mr. X had said in stark terms that security concerns, whatever that meant, took precedence over Islamic correctness. That pretty well summarized the ethos of the regime: security over everything—over development, over the ethical values of Islam, over the rights of its people. Although the state ruled in the name of Islam, had taken power through a revolution that was termed “Islamic,” in its behavior it had everything in common with a dictatorship. When a government derived its authority from Islam, one had no other language with which to defend oneself. Mr. X defended his right to interrogate me in seclusion like the agent of a secular state, but I could not call upon any universal, secular values to challenge him. Neither, apparently, could I call upon Islamic ones.

“You won’t need to meet Mr. X after all,” I told Arash that evening, as we walked London and Geneva to the neighborhood vet to be dewormed. They stopped every two minutes, sniffing the leaves and candy wrappers floating down the sidewalk canal, best friends despite their ill-matched sizes—an elephant and a teacup, as the Farsi expression went.

I resolved to speak to someone, perhaps at the foreign press office Mr. X had dismissed, about my minder’s wanton disregard for Islamic morality. There had to be someone in this Islamic state who would care.