Lipstick Jihad (27 page)

Finally, riot police showed up to restore order, but they took their time. First they watched the vigilantes terrorize people for a good twenty minutes, and then they only half-heartedly intervened. Whispering into their mobile-phone headpieces, the militiamen attempted to regroup, but the riot police dispersed them down side alleys, finally clearing the way for traffic. Broken glass and trampled flowers littered the street.

I dragged my shocked, sweaty body back to the party I had left two hours ago, to find my friends sprawled on the sofa watching
Friends,
the smell of hash heavy in the air. Someone get this girl a drink, one of them said. History rumbled around them, literally right outside the door, and they were more concerned with what Rachel said to Chandler. Iranian television had recently debuted a new sitcom, a sort of
Friends in Veils,
and they were arguing over how directly the plots had been lifted.

I took my drink into the bathroom, filled the tub with water, and let my feet soak as I tried to understand why some of my friends were so indifferent to the changes unfolding around them. Years of failure and layers of stale rhetoric had emptied the revolution of meaning. The war with Iraq and a decade of bombs and privation had turned them cynical, detached
from the doings of the system. To them, upgrading from one brand of mullah to another was not a compelling enough reason to forsake this inner domain, free of pretense and false slogans. Why stand up for the revolution as it lurched to find itself? They would rather stand up for themselves, living in a way that might, after many years, indirectly force some modicum of change on the system.

—SIMIN BEHBEHANI

“The first half of the day, from nine until two o'clock, is reserved for ladies, and afternoons and evenings for the gentlemen. Fridays [the only full day off in the Islamic work week] are men only,” explained the manager of the Farmanieh Sporting Club, who clearly catered to a society of women who had nothing pressing to do before two on the average weekday. Since the monthly dues were the equivalent of a government worker's yearly salary, it was taken for granted that if you could afford to work out there, you did not work, and therefore didn't mind being relegated to the margins of the “gentlemen's hours.”

On most mornings, women in dewy, immaculate makeup marched leisurely on a long row of treadmills, arranged close together to facilitate chatting. They wore an abundance of jewelry while doing this, and the tinkle of their gold bangles created as much background noise as the Kylie Minogue CD that was always playing. The spacious gym had the only properly functioning treadmills in town, and so I went ahead and signed up, despite the peculiar atmosphere, absurdly high prices, and sexist hours.

The gym tried desperately to imitate the sort of gleaming, vast health clubs that dot urban America, but it was run by managers whose only nod to fitness was the velour track suit, and its priorities ended up all wrong. Upon entering, a sycophantish “helper” began following you around, attempting to be your valet through the complicated task of changing into gym clothes. Then there was a nonsensical fixation with hygiene, that required the wearing of four different pairs of slippers in
four
separate areas. With all this scrupulous attention to detail wholly unrelated to the act of breaking a sweat, the exercise balls were deflated, and the air conditioner malfunctioned regularly.

To me, the oppressive minutiae of rules made working out at the gym stressful in itself. Clearly, it was not a place where people emotionally strained by life in Tehran went for the relief of exercise. So whom did it serve? After a week or two, I realized the club was created by and catered to Tehran's nouveaux riches, the clerics and revolutionary elite, and their business
cronies, who made their fortunes by reserving lucrative state monopolies for their families, and controlling the Islamic charitable foundations that had absorbed the vast assets of the Shah's government. In the early years of the revolution, they shunned Western lifestyle habits as decadent, but in the last decade, thirsting for the admiration of Iranians and a closer resemblance to the status elite of other countries, they relaxed this attitude.

They began disfiguring the graceful old neighborhoods of northern Tehran with gaudy, white-columned mansions. Suddenly, a little swankiness was okay. A revolutionary cleric could buy an estate in rural England and outfit his daughter in Armani without an overtly guilty conscience. Though it was politically prudent to be discreet about such “decadent” habits, preening was half the goal. And so the Farmanieh, Tehran's first post-revolutionary, posh health club, was born and kept exclusive enough that the masses could not see how the clerics were living it up with their money.

Many of the women there were obviously the mistresses of these rich men because they were too young, breathtakingly beautiful, and middle class to afford the place otherwise. They carried themselves with a defensive, haughty brazenness that only kept women would think to affect. Others were simply high-end call girls, a trainer eventually explained to me, when I asked why they were taking photos of each other doing erotic leg lifts on the machines. They exercised with small movements—crossing and uncrossing legs, retouching their makeup, and sipping tea. If they broke a sweat, it was because they had gone up to the roof to tan, or sat in the sauna after a massage, their activity of choice. On those rare occasions they moved quickly enough to actually raise their heart rate, they rushed immediately afterwards to the club café for a reviving, dainty three-course meal.

For some reason, they hated me. Maybe it was because I spurned the cloying ladies' maid/valet, or dashed in and out without the requisite fifteen minutes of languorous small talk. Maybe because I was young, like them, but a non-mistress, unlike them. Perhaps if they knew that I worked, that my life included more pressure than leisure—deadlines and allnighters, indecent clerics, and a perpetual fearfulness of Mr. X—they would be less resentful. But they clearly believed I rushed home every day to be fed sugar-dusted grapes and fanned with a palm frond, and they tortured me with incessant, niggling assertions of their authority over the
world of the gym. It seemed the less power women had in the world outside, the more they sought to flex their influence in the small universe inside. In the non-mistress-run gyms, as I would discover, people pretty much left you alone. But here, each day it was something new: “Ms. Moaveni, can you please put your flip-flops
inside
the cubby holes, and not
next
to them? Can you please change in the dressing room [there was no one around,
ever,
and I used a towel]? Can you place your mobile on the left of the treadmill rather than to the right?”

Two impulses drove my obsession with finding the just right gym. One, which I tried to ignore, was that I had been raised in California, and therefore had an incessant tape playing in my head about the religious importance of exercise. I could sit there pretending to be as Iranian as the heavily madeup girl next to me, but the tapes would whir on, urging me to keep running, keep eating tofu, keep washing my fruit sixteen times to rinse off the pesticide. The second was the need to calm the chaos inside me with a steadying routine and the sedative effects of exercise. At the time, I couldn't, or wouldn't allow myself to, see that life in Iran strained everyone. I felt only that there must be something wrong with me, to be experiencing Iran so painfully, with a constant sense of suffocation and gloomy dread. Clearly, I must be a spoiled, self-absorbed, consumerist foreigner, to be suffering so much. Every day, I put myself on trial, and ruled myself guilty as an American, instead of a resilient, roll-with-the-punches Iranian. Restless within myself, I worked longer hours, and those longer hours—spent over somber, distressing stories—made me even more prone to melancholy.

And so I kept searching for less aggravating ways to work out, and dedicated a whole week to the task. Tehran, a city more palpably tense than any other I had ever known, a city that generously gave all of its ten million residents so many causes for distress, must surely contain places where people could cope with the physical manifestations of the strain.

The first afternoon, I resorted to an aerobics class, despite the off-putting Richard Simmons/Jane Fonda associations. The instructor had built a private studio, complete with wall-to-wall mirrors, in the back room of her house, and cavorted about in sparkly leg warmers, blaring Madonna. Aerobics appealed to Iranian women—it was indoors, so it solved the problem of sweating under a head scarf—and offered plenty of opportunity to talk while exercising. Had I been into coordinated group exercise, Tehran, with
its abundance of aerobics classes, would have been a fitness paradise. But all that energetic shouting and synchronized stomping was not for me. I was a runner at heart, and decided to try jogging in the park.

The next morning, I drove through the whitish haze of city smog to Qeytariyeh Park. Scores of exercising women filled the park, power-walking laps around the perimeters, their arms pumping vigorously, or splayed out on the lawn, stretching. Though I had put on the lightest cotton veil I owned, I began to swelter, once my body warmed up. There must be something wrong with me, I thought, all these women are doing just fine, what's my problem? Running, I concluded, must raise your body temperature higher than walking, and the head scarf prevents your neck and ears from cooling you down. I tried to stick it out, tried to get to that point where I forgot I was running, absorbed in the smell of the grass, the rhythm of my strides. But the whole time I imagined portly ministers treading water in the Farmanieh pool (the latest thing for the
aghayoon,
the gentlemen, was swimming lessons), and I overheated as much with irritation and resentment.

With outdoor exercise out of the question, I went back in search of non-mistress gyms, where one could work out unmolested, and discovered they were
everywhere
. They were more modest and worn than the cavernous, well-equipped mistress gym, but functional, and more importantly, filled with women lifting weights and sweating, rather than reclining supine, popping dates—the gym as harem. The one I ended up joining opened at seven A.M., and minutes after that, women overran the locker room, undressing quickly, talking about their jobs, their families. They were young women and older ones, new mothers and college students, housewives and university professors; some had stunning figures, others were almost spherical, but they all showed up regularly, before work, class, or after dropping their children off at school.

I relied on that non-mistress gym, that glorious, precious realm of normalcy, as an escape from not only Tehran but my personal Tehran. No one talked politics. No one knew I was a reporter for an American publication and asked me if the country would be saved, as though I was a magic eight ball. No one took me aside and recounted in wrenching detail the tale of a student relative who had been beaten/arrested/disappeared, because I was an outside witness, and a repository for such testimony. No one knew I had
an American passport and asked if I could get her daughter/cousin/cat a visa to a freer life. My mobile phone didn't get reception (the gym was in a basement), so no editor called to send me off on impossible, terrifying tasks (“Can you drive by the alleged nuclear weapons factory this afternoon, please?”). It was a sweaty paradise.

Since for so many women the sisterly atmosphere of the gym centered on stress reduction, the place was a live bulletin board for other ways to make one's life feel less constricted. One day I overheard a group of young mothers discussing a yoga class, and one of them pulled a Farsi-language yoga magazine out of her bag to show the others. She let me peek at the table of contents, which listed articles about ayurvedic medicine and vegetarianism, and, best of all, a long index of the various yoga centers and classes around Tehran.