Lipstick Jihad (22 page)

Mr. X, the lead interrogator, was beginning to behave like a jealous boyfriend. He insisted on knowing when I was leaving the country, where I would be going, what I would be doing, and when I would return. When I was in Tehran, he asked what parties I went to, whom I talked to, and who else was there. To show me he knew when I was lying, he portrayed himself as omniscient, fully aware of the fine points of my social life. “Oh, is that the Jon who Hossein introduced you to at Babak's party?” he would say casually, to show me in one swoop that he knew I was friends with Jon, better friends with Hossein, and a frequenter of Babak's home.

When he didn't hear from me for a couple of weeks, he would telephone and announce himself with a strange intimacy. “Don't you know who this is? Have you forgotten me already? You never call. If I don't call you, you forget
about me completely. What sort of friendship is this?” He tried to convince me that I needed him, by planting fears in my mind so he could then offer himself as defender (“By the way, if God forbid you happen to get arrested at the airport or held captive anywhere you can always call me”).

He cracked mean jokes (“Now, you'd never try to commit suicide, would you?”) and smiled at his own humor. He forbade me to tell anyone of our association, and when I admitted to having told the vice president (hell, you figure if it's about national security, it's okay to tell the vice president), he was furious. He held it against me for weeks (“How can I tell you're really telling the truth this time, since you lied before?”). He hinted at blackmail (“How would your editors feel if they knew you were meeting us all the time?”).

In all fairness, he did not try to make me feel like a
taghooti,
an old regime slut. In the clumsy good-cop/bad-cop routine they played, that was Mr. Sleepy's job. Mr. Sleepy looked me up and down as though I was coated with filth, and then looked away in disgust. Mr. Sleepy was the one who asked if my jewelry was real and raised his eyebrows when I mentioned male friends (in their universe, such a category did not exist) and gave me a look that said, I cannot believe this Americanized, decadent, godless whore actually has a respectable career.

Worst of all, they made references to my family, casually mentioning where a cousin or an uncle worked, to show me they knew even my distant relatives, implying that even they were vulnerable through association with me. Every session was a battle of wills. I lectured them about journalistic ethics; they lectured me about national security. In the end, I was always shaking and drenched with sweat.

I had established a routine with my driver, Ali, to call me exactly one hour into these meetings. We had a code. If everything was fine, I said, “Yes, I'll be home for dinner.” If I said, “No, actually I can't make that appointment,” he knew to go get help.

I lived with my memories of these encounters, furious with myself for picking the wrong tactic, for being pliant when I should have been firm, for allowing myself to be goaded. I didn't budge from Shahabad for days, the longest stretch of my life I have worn pajamas continuously. I was still there when, to my wan dismay, the year 2000 ended. That, unfortunately, involved New Year's Eve. In the West, staying home alone on New Year's Eve
was tantamount to admitting one was a romantic/erotic failure with no friends. Despite this implication, I could not drag myself out of bed, especially given the range of options: a diplomatic party that would inevitably lead to everyone getting very drunk, and at least one trashed European making the unoriginal confession that he thought the veil was sexy, and could I please keep it on in bed; or a chi-chi Iranian party where the women would be catty and pretend to admire my job, while secretly resenting me for having an independence they never had.

Unable to sleep, I descended to the kitchen, to find some fruit rollup to suck on while reading. As I peered into the refrigerator, Goli Khanoum accosted me, blocking the entrance with her stout frame, and let loose the lecture that had been brewing inside her. “Why are you always moping about? Are you the first person to be away from her family? . . . Are you the first person to think too much sometimes? No? Everyone praises you so highly, and says you have such a great job. . . . So what's wrong with you? You're going to really irritate your husband if you continue like this. . . . He'll want to come home, and enjoy himself, and what! . . . There you'll be on the couch, slumped over a pile of books. What about me? What should I say, if I was going to be like you? I've lost
four
children . . . and I'm making do. ... Don't you think if we all let ourselves think as much as you do, we wouldn't end up the same way? The point is, we don't let ourselves.”

I didn't know what to say. So I tried to make housewife talk, to appease her.

“Goli, don't you think it would be
so
much more convenient if the refrigerator door opened out
into
the kitchen, rather than away?”

“So everything has to be just the way
you
want it? You don't like eating dinner. Does that mean your husband doesn't get to eat dinner either?”

I couldn't believe I was standing in a dark kitchen on New Year's Eve discussing a hypothetical husband. I burst into tears and fled upstairs.

Tap, tap. It was Goli, knocking at my door. She felt bad for making me cry and knelt down next to me, pushing the ashtray aside. “It's all this pressure you put on yourself,” she said. “Maybe you can get a nicer job. Don't any of the ambassadors need secretaries? You would be an excellent secretary!” I leaned my head against her shoulder, inhaling her scent of soap and leaves. It wasn't really fixable. The act of probing deeply, I realized, was an ingrained part of my California life, a telltale sign of an American consciousness.
To not think so much—the stock local prescriptive—was simply not an option.

I remember with great clarity the day I stopped “claiming” authentic Iranianness. It was a frosty and overcast Thursday afternoon, and the streets were empty, because the official weekend—the second half of Thursday, and all of Friday—had already begun. I dressed carefully, in a simple black
abaya,
for my appointment with Mr. Abtahi, the president's chief of staff. He had chosen to meet in one of the Shah's old palaces, in the Saad Abad compound, and I arrived early, allowing me to wander around the elaborate foyer, examining the inlaid paneling.

His assistant led me up the winding staircase, into a corner room with windows on both sides, overlooking the gardens. As usual, the table was set with a gleaming bowl of fruit, and a tray of sweets. I flipped through my notes, waiting, and finally heard the rustle of his robes at the door. He settled in the chair next to me, and flashed his playful smile, eyes dancing irrepressibly. He smiled precisely the same way, whether exchanging favorite stories about Beirut, or divulging some explosive bit of news off the record, and sometimes I doubted my own hearing, so at odds was his expression with his words.

I started with women's rights, the subject of a piece I was working on, and when we paused to gossip, I asked him, half teasing, half serious, when I might hope to become Iran's first female ambassador. (I have since learned that one should not ask questions the answers to which one is not prepared to hear.) I expected him to say
“Inshallah,
one day in the future,” or any other of a hundred polite phrases that would have meant nothing, but acknowledge the validity of the question. He looked embarrassed, and his eyes said: “Why did you have to go and ask me that?” He said nothing. I waited.
Say something, anything,
I willed him silently.

It was our ritual, enshrined in our roles, for me to ask unanswerable questions, and him to dance around them, with elliptical half-answers that pointed me toward the truth. But to this question, for the first time in our long history of questions and answers, he made no reply at all. He had always been advisor and friend, as much as a source. Through the best of
times and the worst of times, inside the country and out, on weekends and evenings, he answered his mobile phone, agreed to interviews, because he believed in friendship and the importance of being accessible to journalists as a rule, not simply when he needed to spin a point or promote the president. He got me on planes, into private meetings, arranged introductions with senior officials around the region. I knew what he said, or didn't say, in answer to this question, was for my own benefit.

And the answer was: No, Azadeh Khanoum, in your lifetime, you will never be an Iranian ambassador. If there are any female ambassadors at all, they will be Islamist,
chadori
women, certainly not you, a secular, partial Iranian. I don't say this to hurt you, but because it is the truth, and you should know it. His silence cut me deeply, and I felt foolish for having opened my mouth.

His position elevated one man's opinion to an official pronouncement. I tried to detach myself from the moment by writing a headline in my head. Sympathetic Envoy of Vile Government Delivers Horrifying But Irrefutable Proof That Azadeh Is an American. The disappointment must have been written on my face, because he made some kindly remark, and held out a plate of green grapes, as though to distract a child gearing up to fling herself to the floor and wail.

—FOROUGH FARROKHZAD

As the clamor of the crowd grew louder, the toy store clerk put the pink box of Barbie beach accessories on the shelf, and stepped out of his shop to investigate. We had been discussing the ban on Barbie, his best-selling product and birthday gift of choice for Iranian girls between four and ten, when we first heard the cries outside. Thirty yards away in front of the store, about 400 people were gathered, gaping at the sight of a young man, stripped shirtless, with his arms tied above his head to a tree.

A bearded man in an untucked, long-sleeved shirt, his voice distorted by the echo of a loudspeaker, shouted: “This man is guilty of possessing and selling alcohol.” Then a second man raised a leather whip and cracked it across the young man's back as he counted, “One! Two! Three!” With each lash, the young man screamed,
“Ya Ali”
(the name of Shiism's most revered imam), then of his repentance, and his howls of pain. After the seventeenth lash, his hands were untied. With his head hung low, he quietly dressed himself and leapt aboard a passing minibus. Several other young men in line for the same punishment were tied face down to narrow wood planks for their whippings.

Every few months, a drug smuggler was hanged in public, a woman murdered for dressing immodestly. Sometimes the system staged and managed the spectacle, as it did with the public lashings, other times it bore responsibility obliquely—by fostering a culture of vigilantism that encouraged individuals to punish “offenders.” A passage in the Koran exhorted believers to be proactive in maintaining the purity of their communities. The dictum
“Amr be marouf, va nahi be monker”
(Promote virtue and contain vice) was embraced by the regime, and gave powers akin to a citizen's arrest to pious, local bullies.