City of Lies (19 page)

‘Now we are not sinning.’ The cleric patted Leyla’s leg and smiled. He took off his glasses and his rings and turned off the side light before undressing in the dark. They sank into the memory-foam mattress. Afterwards, for the first time, Leyla did not fear a reprisal from God.

The cleric became a regular and they would meet every week. He was polite and attentive. He bought her gifts, nearly always cheap, ugly underwear – bright red crotchless knickers, scratchy lace teddies, hold-ups and see-through baby-doll nighties. Leyla would give them to Parisa, who would sell them at the beauty salon. After sex, they would drink tea on the balcony with the entire city splayed out in front of them, thousands of concrete tower blocks receding into the smog, to the west the tall spire of Milad Tower, Tehran’s tallest building, which from a distance looked like a seventies alien spaceship atop a gigantic spike. On days when the pollution was not so dense, they could see all the way to the mountains that cradled the south of the city.

As he grew to trust Leyla, the cleric would confide in her about his troubles: ungrateful children and a bitter wife who refused to have sex. He serenaded Leyla with his favourite verses from the Koran, about paradise and beautiful gardens that await the righteous:

Leyla would learn them off by heart, which pleased the cleric; she showed far more diligence than any of the spotty teenagers that he taught. She became fond of him, this sage father figure. He had awakened her spiritual senses in a way her
erfan
classes had not, and taught her how to keep her work on the right side of the Lord. There were no endless discussions on morals, no philosophical questions where there were no real answers. Instead there were ethereal words of righteousness and divinity straight from the Prophet’s mouth. And Leyla never again had sex without whispering the
sigheh
prayer under her breath.

*

The first time the judge heard her say it, he had laughed out loud.

‘Oh I’m so glad you said the
sigheh
dear girl, because I had been worried what we were doing was wrong. Now I can rest in peace!’

‘But if clerics say it makes it OK in the eyes of God, how can you argue with that?’

‘Quite right, who are we to argue with the justice of the clerics?’

Over thirty years as a vassal of the Islamic Republic had rewarded the judge with a droll sense of humour, as well as disillusionment at how the revolution had turned out. He had seen many men he trusted and loved, who had fought shoulder to shoulder with him on the streets of Tehran and then in its courts, chewed up and spat out by the system. Good men, some of them the very architects of the Islamic Republic, were now either imprisoned or under house arrest for daring to criticize the regime and the Supreme Leader. The judge had made a decision early on: the regime was like a child he had created and it was almost impossible to turn your back on your own blood. He also knew that being an enemy of the state would be his ruin.

The judge did not pay Leyla to begin with, according to their arrangement. He liked it the way nearly all her clients did: doggy-style. After that, Leyla became the judge’s concubine; he had never had sex with such an exquisite woman. He paid her rent and had her on twenty-four-hour standby. Whenever he could make excuses to his wife, he hurried to her apartment. He bought her gifts, including an expensive carpet she picked out herself from Solomon Carpet on Vali Asr. She feared he was falling in love with her.

*

Leyla was beginning to feel a sense of accomplishment. She had a roster of respectable clients and the money was rolling in. She was no longer just surviving; she was living. She figured that within a few years she could open her own beauty salon, a good earner in a city where, no matter how severe the economic downturn, women always found the money to beautify themselves.

She soon revised her calculation down to a year. When Taymour first saw Leyla, he wanted to film sex with her. Leyla refused. She had a strict policy: she would allow anonymous photographs for extra money, but she would never be filmed. Taymour would not give up. He was a thirty-year-old software designer who lived in a small apartment with his parents in the east of the city and he was addicted to porn. Taymour was desperate to make his own; he wanted it to look good and Leyla was the prettiest girl he had ever met. He offered her so much money that Leyla finally agreed, on condition that he would not show her face and that she would approve the final result.

Taymour liked the look of amateur porn. It turned him on. The seedier, the more real, the better. The Internet had sucked most of the money out of the under-the-counter porn market in Tehran in recent years. But uploading and downloading videos that could be traced was a risky business. Taymour preferred DVDs. In any case, during elections or protests the authorities would grind Internet connections down to an excruciatingly slow speed to dissuade use altogether. In these times, it was back to the good old days of underground porn bought and sold on the streets. Taymour had been told that there were a handful of kiosks and computer shops near downtown Toopkhaneh Square that sold porn. Hawkers stood on the square and whispered
super
,
the Persian word for a porn film,
out of the side of their mouths at potential customers. It was pot luck; as many people got ripped off buying blank DVDs as those who got the real grainy, blurred thing. Through trial and error, Taymour had found a reliable dealer. He was an old hand, a suave, middle-aged man with a mountain of jet-black hair in dark jeans, loafers and a smart jumper.

‘Listen mate, don’t fuck around, it’s like being caught with a truckload of heroin. Death sentence,’ he had said to Taymour as he sucked hard on a cigarette and made a hanging noose gesture with his left hand.

‘Home-grown stuff is hard to find. I got a shitload of foreign, but home-grown is going to cost you more.’ Every time the Internet was slowed down, the dealer was inundated with requests for local porn. Not the blonde, foreign girls, but beautiful, dusky Iranians. Some wanted to see them in their headscarves and chadors, others wanted to see the young and beautiful having fun. Taymour bought everything the dealer had; clips that had been sent to international porn sites and had been filed under the ‘amateur’ section; girls who had been filmed without their knowledge, girls who were seen shouting instructions not to film their faces. But there were also girls who did show their faces, who smiled at the camera. A few even waved. There were girls flashing their breasts in the backs of taxis driving through packed traffic. One couple was having sex in a park. Another was in the back of a car. These were young people taking deadly risks.

Sex is an act of rebellion in Tehran. A form of protest. Only in sex do many of the younger generation feel truly free. They have ultimate control over their bodies, if nothing else in their lives, and they have made them weapons of revolt. It is a backlash against years of sexual repression; in the process of having to continually lie and hide natural desires, the sense of ordinary sexual behaviour and its values is being lost.

Taymour played his porn collection for Leyla. She had watched foreign porn with clients before, and it looked much slicker than the fumbling on the screen in front of her. She knew she could do it better. They filmed it in Leyla’s apartment, because Taymour lived with his parents. Leyla charged double for home visits; she would make men wait outside until she sent a text, then they would come in through the basement car park to ensure they would not be spotted by neighbours; she paid the Afghan caretaker to act as lookout.

Leyla made Taymour listen to her
sigheh
prayer before they started filming. Taymour was thrilled with the results: every glistening crevice and prickle of shaving rash was sharp and clear, even Leyla thought it looked good. He called it
Tehran Nights
and made a load of copies. He handed them out to his friends and even sold one to his DVD seller. A week later, Leyla’s porn film was everywhere. The touts standing in downtown Tehran and on Vali Asr Square, outside Ghods Cinema, were flogging unmarked CD copies of it for six US dollars a pop – twice the amount as for a classic series of
Benny Hill
and even more than
Desperate Housewives
and
Lost
. It was also the underground bestseller at the various electrical shops scattered through the city that ran lucrative side businesses in stolen mobiles and black-market goods. Even the marble-floored, air-conditioned stationery boutique on the northern reaches of Vali Asr, renowned for its under-the-counter Hollywood blockbusters, had already sold fifty copies of
Tehran Nights
. The DVD would be fished out from behind a drawer that was concealed, not in a back room but under a glass cabinet where a handful of top-of-the-range fake Mont Blanc pens were carefully displayed.

Taymour’s friends wanted their own sex tapes. Leyla was in business. She was charging
1
,
000
US dollars and upwards. The guys liked to outdo each other. She filmed on a high-rise balcony, in the back of a car, in a park and in the mountains. Most connoisseurs of local porn soon recognized the round bottom, the soft girlie voice and the big full lips as the same girl who had spread her legs so adroitly in
Tehran Nights
and, by now,
Housewife from Shiraz
. But only a handful of people knew her real identity, for the camera never went past Leyla’s mouth, which was either smiling, parted in an elongated moan, or, more usually, stretched over an erect penis.

Kayvan was one of Tehran’s
bacheh pooldars
, rich kids. He wore Rolex watches that he bought on Vali Asr. He lived in a mansion with Roman pillars at the entrance and peacocks strutting in the garden. In the summer he had pool parties. In the winter he skied in Shemshak, forty-five minutes north of Tehran, where he would drink under-the-counter vodka and tonics and eat wild boar at a hip café. After the skiing season he would retreat to Dubai, the Mecca for holidaying Iranians. There he would hire breathtakingly beautiful Russian hookers.

His father imported a famous brand of American printer with a regime-approved licence. Despite sanctions, most government offices were still buying the latest models. A deal brokered with a member of the Revolutionary Guards, the most powerful force in the country and directly answerable to the Supreme Leader, meant the printers surged into the country with the same velocity as before, through a port that also welcomed shipments of alcohol and drugs.

Kayvan’s best friend was Behfar, whose father had made a fortune in food manufacturing. International sanctions had been excellent for business; even though prices of basic produce had shot up, demand was higher than ever; the whole family prayed for an eternal stalemate. Behfar’s father was a canny operator and had made some powerful allies in the regime, donating extravagant gifts and money for election campaigns. He had also built a spectacular mosque on Vali Asr. There was a rumour that the Supreme Leader had told him he never had to pay another penny in tax again for his services to the nation.

Kayvan and his friends were bored and idle trust-fund kids, all in their early twenties. Their fathers’ bank accounts injected their congenital arrogance with an uninhibited confidence. The money gave them a degree of immunity, for they had learnt they could buy their way through most red tape and sticky situations. The women were as abundant as the allowances from their fathers. Cruising in his Porsche, or in Behfar’s Bugatti in the tangle of roads in his stomping ground, Fereshteh, it would take less than ten minutes to pick up a giggling teenager. He had timed it. Some would be in it for a flirt, some for sex. Nearly all, he suspected, were after a husband. But he had a particular liking for whores. The girls he used were the uptown variety, pretty girls who only wore branded goods and who cost top whack,
500
US dollars a night and upwards. He had slept with every single high-class ‘escort’ signed to an agency with an impressive client list that ran out of a small office in Gheytarieh. Not all the girls he picked up were working girls, like the ones he met in the upmarket coffee shops; but there was a tacit agreement that they expected a shopping trip to the Valentino Red boutique in the Modern Elahiyeh Shopping Center if they were to open their legs. They were so Barbie-doll perfect, it was a fair deal.

After Kayvan watched one of Leyla’s films, he tracked her down through friends of friends. He wanted a piece of the action. He captured their first film together on his iPad for his own personal collection. He decided she was the best whore he had ever met. Unlike most of the girls he hung out with, Leyla was straight-talking and direct. There was no game-playing, none of the baby-voiced faux coyness favoured by so many Tehrani girls. Kayvan started parading her everywhere with him – parties in north Tehran, luxurious chalets in the mountains. At a rave in the ski resort of Shemshak, Leyla danced as a sea of luminous white eyeballs bobbed around her, the revellers’ coloured contact lenses picked out by the UV disco lights. The super-rich kids were a mixed-up lot; it was hard to tell who was the son of a
bazaari
, who was the son of a
dolati
,
government worker, and who was old money. Sophistication could be bought for the price of a Western education and a passing knowledge of art.

Leyla had never imagined she would experience life at the top of Tehrani society. Her need to better herself combined with her beauty had catapulted her northwards, reaching the pinnacle for every Tehrani working girl, which was as an escort to the uptown playboy circle. She dropped her regular clients like the cleric and the judge. And Kayvan no longer paid her in cash; instead he bought her whatever she wanted. It was easy to pretend she was his girlfriend.

Tehran Nights
eventually made its way to the offices of the cyberpolice. It had been picked up during a house raid and lain hidden under a pile of written statements on a police officer’s desk for a few weeks. The DVD was unmarked and the officer was about to throw it in the bin when he thought it might be his copy of
The Bling Ring
that he had lent a colleague. He pushed it into his laptop and Leyla’s jiggling breasts appeared. The officer thought it looked quite tame compared to the porn he liked to watch. He gave the DVD to his sergeant, who handed it to the cyberpolice.