Lipstick Jihad (40 page)

The first year I lived in Tehran, over family lunches on Fridays, my family asked me, so, this Mr. Khatami, what is he going to do for us? Now they asked, so, this Mr. Bush, what is he going to do for us? They said this in one breath, and in another said they didn't want another revolution. They wanted everything to change, they wanted to hurl the mullahs into the mosques and double-bolt the doors, but they did not want their society to fall to pieces all over again. They did not want to be Iraq.

When I first walked the streets of Tehran, during the war in Afghanistan and, later, during the war in Iraq, people were thrilled. When will it be our turn, they would ask me eagerly, eyes gleaming at the fresh sense that entrenched
orders could collapse. And then we would go over to a shop corner and talk quietly, and it would become clear they did not, in point of fact, want the U.S. military to carpet bomb Tehran. “When will our turn come” was a cry of helplessness, an admission that change was out of their hands. The Islamic Republic appeared immune to internal change, and so it could only be fixed by being toppled. It meant: We would
immediately
like something
extremely
different from what exists now. When meaningful change was reduced to a speck of light down a very long, very dark tunnel, there was nothing left to say but “When will our turn come?” The very phrase was an affirmation, in its repetition, people reminding themselves that one day, they would have a turn.

With the United States at war in Afghanistan, my work in Tehran now centered on Afghan exiles. I found myself interviewing ex-warlords with Taliban sympathies, and their inflammatory quotes about fighting the infidel American invader surfaced in my stories. Mr. X, my interrogator, did not appreciate my associating with such types without his approval.

One day he phoned to complain. “What did you and Mr. Hekmatyar talk about?” he asked, referring to a shady tribal chief I had met with recently.

Whenever I picked up the receiver, and heard his voice, the urge to be flip overtook me. “Spring hemlines!” the urge whispered. “Oh, you know,” I said. “The war. The Taliban. That kind of stuff. Listen, I have something on the stove. I have to go.” The “axis of evil” had amplified Mr. X's suspicions about everything.

Up until that point, I had been working with a relative freedom that surprised even me. The red-lines had seemed lenient enough that I kept pushing, and finding a give, pushed even more. I wrote about torture, public lashings, show trials, attacks on demonstrations, and attempted assassinations of the regime's opponents. I wrote that young people were fed up, hated the revolution, and considered the reform movement only one degree better than the ruling clergy. I wrote that the regime staged its rallies.

Throughout it all, I listened patiently to complaints from Mr. X that I had got the story wrong, that I wasn't being sensitive enough to the red-lines,
that unbeknownst to me, my editors at
Time
were collecting cash gifts from the Iranian opposition and the CIA. The criticism was sometimes overt, often oblique, mostly friendly, occasionally intimidating. But in the course of it all, I was never, not even once, told not to write. Until the day the Bush administration declared war on terror, invaded Afghanistan, told the world it was either “with us or against us,” and declared Iran evil.

Mr. X, who had until that point harassed me in ways I could mostly bear, became intolerable. He accused me of having worked on a story that must have been either a CIA or a Mujaheddin-e Khalq (the country's main armed opposition group) plant. When I denied this, several times and at several different octaves of voice, he shrugged his shoulders.

“Fine, maybe you weren't in on it. But that means your editors are on the CIA payroll, and you're their blind servant. Not even getting a cut.” It wasn't clear which he considered worse. It was all so bizarre and seedy, I didn't know how to respond.

He insisted we talk on the phone several times a week, and turned our charged, uncomfortable meetings into full-blown interrogations. Who told you to write this? Who are these “opposition sources” you keep quoting? What do you mean you can't tell us? Doesn't national security mean
anything
to you? Khanoum Moaveni,
the country is falling apart
. And you're not doing enough for us. Perhaps it would be useful if we saw your work before publication, just in case we have any helpful ideas.

I had rejected many of Mr. X's suggestions in the past. When he asked me to email him from Damascus or Cairo, to tell him what people were saying there about Iran, I said no. When he asked me to brief him on what foreign diplomats in Tehran had to say, I talked in broad terms about the day's headlines. Most of the time, between flat-out refusals and empty blather, I managed to evade his attempts to make an informant out of me. But this request, to have my articles vetted, was too specific to slip out of.

Over the past year, I had exhausted all the resources at my disposal to extricate Mr. X from my life. The Culture Ministry was no help. I had gone to my one friend in a high place, the vice president, and asked him to help. He had a talk with the minister of intelligence, and promised things would get better. They did not. Now Mr. X was pressuring me even harder. I couldn't take it anymore.

I phoned Siamak and we convened an emergency summit over sushi at
an Asian fusion restaurant that was pioneering the trend in mood lighting. We ordered our rolls and bent our heads low over the lacquered table. What should I do, I whispered, I can't say yes, I can't say no. I'm totally screwed.

For once, he wiped the smirk off his face, muted the teasing twinkle in his eyes, and listened to me seriously. You're right, he said, there's only one thing you can do. What? Leave.

The waiter returned with steaming cups of jasmine tea. We pulled back, careful not to appear too tête-à-tête.

They're so stupid, he fumed, jabbing a chopstick into the air for emphasis. They're freaked out—which is understandable, being in the axis and all—but instead of trying to use you to their advantage, they're bullying you.

As usual, Siamak's mind was working like a consultant's, whirring to prescribe the self-interest-maximizing course of action a rational government would take (generally, the opposite of what the Islamic Republic chose to do).

I agree with the stupid part, I said, but I'm not sure about the using part.

Our summit lasted only an hour. Instinctively, we both knew there was not much to discuss. There were certain questions to which there was only one answer. Siamak was right. It was time for me to leave. The ground had become too unstable. Until it settled, working in Iran would be impossible.

The next day I sent an email to my editor in New York with a John le Carré subject line: coming in from the cold. I knew my editors well enough to be certain they would want me on the next flight, if anything jeopardized my ability to report or to work safely. I followed it up with a phone call and bought a one-way ticket to New York.

I did laps around my apartment, gazing at my belongings, at the telephone, in confusion, unsure what to pack, or who to call. I didn't know whether I would be back in three weeks, six months, or never. How many seasons of clothes would I need? Should I arrange someone to water my plants, or store my carpets with mothballs? I didn't know what sort of mood the occasion called for. Should I go out to dinner? Should I stay home, listening to old Iranian music and feeling somber? I felt an unnatural detachment, as though I was watching myself in silent, still-frames. In the end, I took a sleeping pill and went to bed.

At the buzz of the alarm just a few hours later, I got up and made what I sensed would be my very last espresso in my beloved, moonlit Tehran
kitchen. I threw some jeans and scarves into my suitcase, sent emails canceling my meetings and dinners for the week, and then set about combing through my office. I did this each time I left Tehran for work, but this time I was diligent. I went through piles of old notebooks, blacking out names and phone numbers of student organizers or activists, erasing disks with notes from sources, throwing old tapes of interviews into a bag to take with me. Should Mr. X or his associates end up going through my things, my files would be sanitized, my sources would be protected.

My uncle drove me and my one bag to the airport in the dead of night (the uncivilized hours when flights out of Tehran are routinely scheduled) and waved his medical badge so he could accompany me up to the dreaded passport control. We were both tense, uncertain whether the life we shared together in Tehran was ending or simply being interrupted. A loud, clucking woman, weighed down by several bags, and two boxes of pastry, was making the rounds of the passport lines, begging someone to carry her sweets onto the plane. Please, she said, lumbering from line to line, I have too many bags; I don't want to leave my
shirini
here in the airport.

I bet I'll be stuck sitting next to her, I whispered. Iranian mothers who carried Tupperware full of cooked, smelly food onto planes were our family joke. They were convinced that the Persian stews they cooked in Tehran to bring to their sons were wholly distinct from the exact same thing they would make for them upon arrival. If you had the misfortune of being seated next to one, you were likely to come away either smelling of stew, or getting oil stains on your bag. She waved at me with a questing look.

Don't even think about it, my uncle said, that baklava could be filled with cocaine. Caviar, I replied, is the only acceptable food item to export on one's person. We distracted ourselves with this sort of light conversation, avoiding the question neither of us could answer: When will I see you again? I waved goodbye from the other side of the line, and watched my uncle light a cigarette, take one last look at me, and turn down the stairs.

During the interminable wait for my flight, my mind flitted back to my most vivid memory of Mehrabad Airport, the day my mother and I left Tehran after that summer of 1981. When we stopped at the female security check, a woman in
chador,
with a thick caterpillar of hair above her lips, told my mother to take her pants off. I was only five, but old enough to realize that was an alarming thing to be told at the airport. In those days,
many women leaving Mehrabad were emigrating permanently, trying to take their worldly possessions, most importantly their jewelry, with them. Since the revolution had abolished private wealth, suddenly Iranian women's jewels were part of the revolution's assets, and confined to its borders. So women devised elaborate ways to hide them upon exit, a favorite method being to hide them not
on
one's person, but
in
one's person, if you know what I mean.

I stared at Maman, who stared at the mustached woman. Maman pulled her shoulders up and gazed at her with blazing eyes. Shouldn't you be going after the thieves who're robbing the country blind? Her voice was high and forceful. Caterpillar woman flinched. Okay, she said, just sit down, open your legs, and wiggle. For years, that encounter fascinated me. I devoted free minutes, in the backseat of the car being shuttled to Farsi lessons, waiting to be picked up after school, trying to invent ways to smuggle jewelry out of Mehrabad. Then I would run them past my parents. What about a secret compartment inside the heel of a shoe? Tucked inside a Cabbage Patch kid's diaper? Stop thinking about stuff like that, sweetheart, my dad would say.

I wondered if he and I would ever travel through Mehrabad together.

Finally, the loudspeaker called my flight to board. As soon as I stepped onto the plane, I tore the scarf off my head, a motion that felt no less wonderful with months of repetition. The lights of Tehran disappeared into distant flecks as the plane ascended, and I pressed my forehead against the vibrating window, until they were fully out of sight. I had called no one to say I was leaving, because in my mind, I was not prepared to leave. Uprooting with the conscious intent of transplanting myself to New York would have taken me weeks. Had I known the move would be permanent, I would have roamed the streets disconsolately, trying to memorize the bends in my neighborhood, the clean, frigid smell in the air after a night of snow. Worst of all, I would have had to call each friend, each relative and source and acquaintance, and say goodbye. I am leaving, as you always knew I would, leaving you behind
.