Lipstick Jihad (21 page)

But my bitter sense of displacement followed me everywhere, to the bazaar, in the expression of the merchant who sold me pillows to decorate my new apartment, to my new neighbors, who watched me move in, with looks of pity and curiosity on their faces, eyeing this girl from America who had chosen to live alone. I gave up searching for myself, and for what constituted the real Iran, whatever that meant. Instead, I dedicated my days to one task alone: decorating my apartment.

My relatives came to visit, and admired the traditional architecture, built around a central garden courtyard. But they all said I was paying too much. I countered that I would probably expire in Tehran without a nice apartment, and given that I didn't have medical insurance, it was probably worth it.

My American friends got suspicious when I told them. They sent emails demanding to know how a young, single woman could live alone in Tehran. They didn't believe half the things I told them about Iran, which they assumed was a slightly more cultured version of Saudia Arabia, and began to suspect that I was holed up in Rome spinning elaborate fantasies with a Tehran dateline.

The apartment soon became my world—a substitute for the world outside, to which I seemed not to belong, unfit to understand—and so I figured, it might as well look sublime. I bought plants, chose fabric for bedspreads, hunted for antique tiles in the bazaar, commissioned a table, and mounted track lighting on the ceilings. I put a bronze statue of Antigone on the mantle, and stared at it from every angle for an hour, then moved it across the room, and stared at it there. The objective was to create an interior space where East and West fused with elegance, and the apartment became a canvas on which I could endlessly practice different combinations.

When friends called, I refused to go out. The heat of high summer made the dangerously high pollution especially toxic, and I hated coming home caked with sweat and dust, my veil scented with car exhaust. Come visit
me, I suggested to the dwindling number of friends who continued to phone me, long after I had ceased returning calls. Reza was one of those friends, though our friendship perpetually surprised me. We never acknowledged being on close terms publicly. At events where we encountered one another, we nodded stiffly and walked in separate directions.

It took him a long time to trust me. His advice, especially in those early months, guided me through a system of mysterious, potentially dangerous, unknowns. It was from him that I learned most Iranian journalists were routinely interrogated by intelligence agents (Mr. X was not just my cross to bear), and that they were all constantly forced to rat on one another. That I should never let down my guard even with my closest journalist friends, because they would lose their jobs if they didn't inform, and because they had families to support they had no choice. Certain things I already knew, like watching what I said on the phone. But Reza suggested I get a second mobile number and keep it on reserve, so I would have a clean, untapped line in case of emergencies. The sort of thing that wouldn't occur to me until I needed it, when it was too late.

He taught me how to recognize a “plant”—a person who casually inserts himself into your life, discreetly offers you tantalizing scoops or sources, or who seeks private information, all with the purpose of entrapping you, or securing material to fatten the file with your name on it, in the event that one day it would be used against you. Evading such people, knowing in what public situations I would be assessed, and how, were not instincts that came naturally to me. But they were required for reporting in Iran without triggering suspicion.

Speaking over our mobile phones, which were certainly bugged, we used a code. “I've printed out an article for you” meant I need to see you immediately. “I'm not that busy today” meant I'll be home in the evening, come by. In person, after exchanging a few pleasantries, we both turned off our phones, and removed the batteries—supposedly the phones could be used as listening devices. I thought he was paranoid and treated all his cautionary measures lightly, until his friends—reformist editors and intellectuals—began getting rounded up.

The hard-line judiciary started arresting activists, and intellectuals whose opinions were considered criminal, on a regular basis in early 2000. The process was methodical. Among the first to be arrested were the influential
thinkers whose work inspired and propelled the reform movement. Once they were behind bars, the judiciary moved against the prominent editors and journalists in the pro-reform press, who discredited the conservative clergy each day in their newspapers.

The campaign was designed to make the personal cost of political opposition untenable, and it worked. The prison sentences varied between one year and ten. And then there was the blackmail. The hard-liners collected intelligence about their targets' private lives—extramarital affairs, old scandals—and threatened public humiliation unless the activists in question agreed to sign documents confessing to and apologizing for their “crimes.” This systematic abuse eventually crushed the reform movement. Many activists simply gave up their political work, in return for promises that they and their families would be left alone. Others went to the West for year-long fellowships that became permanent.

Reza watched this all happen to his friends with a coolness I could not fathom. Sometimes he would drop by, and only an hour into the conversation would he mention that he had just come from dropping a friend off at prison, or visiting one in hospital. For the most part the regime had dispensed with brutal physical torture, but the emotional harassment, solitary confinement, sleep deprivation, and strange drugs administered in prison wrought a physical toll.

When I saw exactly how these reformists suffered in the process of a movement so many of us mocked as ineffective, I felt terrible. Iranians of all walks of life called them so many names—collaborators (for working with the mullahs), cowards, incompetents. But they were doing what no one else was willing to do. They were exposing themselves, making their families vulnerable, for the sake of making Iran a tiny bit more open. Yes, many of them were Islamists. Yes, many of them had supported, or still supported, the revolution. But were they not asking for the right things? For the right to free expression, fair trials, and free elections? It was so easy to sit at home and be pristinely secular over cocktails in the garden in north Tehran, or Switzerland, or Washington.

As the months passed, Reza and I became easier in each other's company and stopped being so formal and Iranian about everything. It wasn't easy. He was from a more traditional social background than my family and was unlike all the Iranian men I had ever known. Because he was not suave and
Westernized, I was initially suspicious when he talked freely about everything, even sexuality. I worried it was a clever, drawn-out, intellectual ploy to seduce me.

Sometimes he made me squirm, because he saw right through me and I wasn't used to that. Typically, Iranian men were too self-absorbed (forever princes of their mother's domain) to pay close attention to the emotional makeup of a woman they were not related to or sleeping with.

“You're Iranian in a superficial way,” he said one day, after I rescheduled one of our meetings for the eighth time. “You come across warm, but your affective nature is really Western. Eastern affection involves generosity with time. You drench people with warmth and charm, to distract them from how miserly you are with your time. You handle minutes like an accountant.”

Reza was my favorite audience for monologues of alienation. He said I was too intelligent to waste my time rotting at home, wallowing (his word) in my sense of exclusion. “Stop asking if you count as an Iranian. By asking you just make it seem like a question that other people have the right to answer. If you were confident about yourself, instead of tip-toeing around, no one would challenge you.”

This made lots of sense. Probably my accented Farsi would be less noticeable if I didn't make such a point of apologizing for it. For hours after a talk with Reza, I'd stop tormenting myself and walk around feeling quite okay about things. But sooner or later, something would distress me (a call from Mr. X, a failed attempt to execute a bank transaction on my own) and I felt shattered and tentative all over again.

I thought of my family in California and superimposed the question onto them. What if they woke up one day, and decided they were really American? Even if they felt it with all the force of their being, did that mean Americans would suddenly stop considering them foreigners? Maybe identity, to an extent, was an interior condition. But wasn't it also in the eye of the beholder? It seemed delusional to go about convinced you were a peacock, when everyone treated you like a bear. The contradiction bounced around my head. What percentage of identity was exterior, what percentage self-defined? Was it sixty-forty, like a game of backgammon, sixty percent luck, forty percent skill?

That winter, when the holidays rolled around, I looked forward to a complete break from all existence, including work.
Time
scheduled its Man of the Year double-issue for the last month of the year, which meant a long dead stretch for far-flung reporters. For two blessed weeks I could ignore my ringing mobile phone, and retire the tight, fake smile I wore in public, when forced out for an interview. I considered staying somewhere besides my apartment, mainly to escape my maid, who thought it decadent and inappropriate that a young woman should live alone, not work (she thought the laptop was a cousin of the espresso machine), and stay in bed most days. She had started casting me baleful glances and making oblique jibes: “Azadeh Khanoum, what a sweet and kind girl you are. Really, how much I adore you. May God grant you everything you want. May he provide for you, so that you can keep on relaxing at home forever.” Then she would massage her lower back, and ask if I had any
khareji,
foreign, creams that would heal the ache in her old bones.

I retreated to Shahabad, the old family home high, high up in the north of the city, almost out of Tehran. My uncle and aunt lived there, but it had a special place in my heart, as the house where my parents once lived together, in the early days of their brief marriage. The house was tucked in the back of a narrow, winding alley off the main road, and its wraparound terrace looked out on the orchards in the back, the line of willows, and the glittering, dark surface of the pool in the front.

The distance from the cruel, draining hustle and bustle of Tehran was quieting, and the day I arrived, with a small suitcase, I found my aunt, Khaleh Mimi, making jam. Goli Khanoum, the clever and kind woman who had been their servant for decades, walked around purposefully with vats of this, and canning jars of that. The scent of sweet quince wafted through the house, and a great copper pot simmered on the oven, full of the sticky, burgundy brew. The transformation of raw quince into jam was fascinating. The heat turned the yellow, fibrous meat of the fruit into soft red slices that melted in your mouth.

Khaleh Mimi's long, light brown hair was pulled back into a ponytail, and she wore a white button-down cardigan over a long, caramel pleated skirt, like a silvery cheerleader. They were driving up to the villa at the Caspian, and after much reassurance that I did, yes, truly, prefer to stay in Tehran all alone, by myself, agreed to leave me behind. My relatives could
not fathom a thirst for solitude, and they continually tried to tempt me away to dinner parties, the hair salon, any little outing so I could “just get some air,” as though wanting to be alone made me brittle and sick, like a nineteenth-century hysteric.

Khaleh Mimi showed me upstairs to my little room, with arched windows that overlook the garden, and the adjoining bathroom with the yellow cupboards my father installed years ago. There was a round tin of Nivea creme by the sink, and I smoothed some over my hands, inhaling the familiar scent, rapping my nails against the blue tin lid. It smelled like my grandmother and every other Iranian woman over sixty.

Iran was beginning to exhaust me. And like Reza, I was becoming paranoid, wondering whether my emails were being monitored, or if my apartment was bugged. It didn't help that Mr. X and Mr. Sleepy, the intelligence agents/interrogators assigned to monitor/recruit me, were making me meet them every few weeks. I couldn't tell anyone, because they had made it clear I should
not breathe a word.

They would phone my mobile an hour before we were supposed to meet and give me directions to some secluded spot, sometimes an empty apartment in a quiet back street. The sort of place where no one could hear you scream. They didn't like some of my stories, especially the ones with anonymous sources, and demanded I tell them about everyone I had seen, everything they had said. They insisted on knowing who the unnamed sources were, even though I explained again and again that I couldn't betray their confidence.