Honeymoon in Tehran: Two Years of Love and Danger in Iran (17 page)

Though Laico was competitive and managed to control the home textile market, the costs of domestic manufacturing ran high, and the company’s profit margin was slim. Its potential suffered from the unregulated imports flooding the country, and the situation grew disastrous in 2003, when Mahmoud Agha acquired a government-run textile factory through the regime’s much vaunted privatization scheme. After transferring ownership, the government disclosed the factory was millions of dollars in debt. Even apart from this, the firm was virtually inoperative. Its five hundred salaried employees spent their days playing soccer and volleyball around the factory yard, while million-dollar machinery languished in unopened containers. When Mahmoud Agha took over and asked the employees to actually work, many went on strike in Islamic shrouds, lying down before entrance doors with pious “Ya Hossein” bandannas tied about their heads. Their leaders, it turned out, were all related to the provincial bureaucracy, which did nothing to stop the protest, despite the fact that strikes are illegal under Iranian law. I was accustomed to reading about such travails in dense, business-oriented analyses of the Iranian economy, but for Arash’s family they were vivid, living nightmares.

Ahmadinejad had promised to address all of this. His predecessor, Mohammad Khatami, for all his civilizing rhetoric about open and civil society, chose to overlook the economy altogether. The other major heavyweight in Iranian politics, Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, had made commercial trade his priority, enriching thousands of businessmen close to the regime through lucrative import and export deals that undermined local industry. For all his exaggerations and irresponsible fulminations, Ahmadinejad’s focus on domestic industry seized the attention of manufacturers like Mahmoud Agha.

I hoped for his sake, for Arash’s as well, that matters would improve. The factory was growing increasingly unmanageable, and each day they both came home gray and exhausted, tired of pouring their
energies into an enterprise that, on its merits, should have been a success. The story of their company mirrored that of most Iranian private enterprise—a long, slogging struggle to stay competitive in an inhospitable, corrupt economy that sent foreign investors fleeing and that catered mainly to firms run by regime officials or linked to its military’s engineering arms. An uncle of mine had helped found one of Iran’s largest petrochemical firms back in the 1970s, and while it fared better than Laico (in technical fields, government firms needed to outsource their lucrative contracts to outfits with real professional expertise, while the decline of domestic manufacturing was mainly felt by ordinary Iranians forced to buy more expensive imported goods), it, too, suffered from the unfriendly economic climate.

When I first began reporting in Iran in 1999, I found stories about the economy, about the fate of such businesses, deadly boring, and preferred to report on flashier subjects, like reform-minded Islam and student politics. I thought the fate of the country would be determined in lofty struggles dominated by colorful clerics and rebellious students, rather than in gray realities of business competition. But in the intervening years, I discovered how utterly wrong I had been. The real story of modern Iran, what would drive the country’s politics and future, was its failing economy and how it was sinking the prospects of millions of young people, who cared far more about finding jobs and raising their living standards than about whether Islam would become compatible with western-style democracy during their lifetime. In the years and months I spent in the offices of my uncle’s firm, I watched teenage secretaries grow into young women on the verge of marriage, graphic designers struggle to manage their monthly rent, junior programmers drive taxis at night, burn out and then seek to emigrate.

That evening, after our day of skiing, we settled in to watch
Shabhaye Barareh
(“Barareh Nights”), a new comic soap opera that according to state television was being watched by 90 percent of the country. We adored it, as did all our friends and relatives, as did the whole neighborhood. Between eight and nine
P.M.,
when it was broadcast, traffic actually dwindled and shopkeepers frowned when you distracted them from their televisions. The village of Barareh offered
a microcosm of modern-day Iran, complete with rigged elections, a corrupt city council, a grouchy gendarme who censored the town newspaper, and a strident women’s rights group. The village, like Tehran, was divided into “Upper” and “Lower” districts that reflected the social status of their residents. In Barareh, reporters were jailed for criti cizing the government, the local poet was openly gay, and everyone supported the village’s right to enrich nuclear peas, a thinly veiled subplot that took on the country’s fracas with the West over nuclear power. Not only did the show offer clever writing and quality production; it also reflected Iranians’ cynicism over the state of their country and its place in the world.

When I first watched
Barareh,
I found it refreshing and important that a government program so candidly voiced the country’s ills. I thought it meant the state was growing aware of its weaknesses, admitting them before the public, and implying through the story line that it, too, might change. It hadn’t occurred to me that
Barareh
might function as a pressure relief valve, until a family friend, an adviser to a very senior ayatollah, made the point. He believed the show encouraged Iranians’ worst tendencies—an empty cynicism that pushed critique aside, a worldly sort of passivity. “This show, it’s one of the savviest things this regime has ever done,” he said. “It teaches people to think the worst, but not do anything about it. Daily life should be full of resistance, where people defend their rights. But people sit home at night laughing, and release all their frustration. The next day they’re laughing in the street, not angry.”

I
called Mr. X one morning to inform him that I had begun reporting a new story, a chronicle of Ahmadinejad’s transformation from marginal ideologue to national hero. I anticipated little resistance: Mr. X would surely appreciate such a narrative. But his reaction, to my mind, was a touch cool, and he quickly changed the subject.

“It is my responsibility to tell you that times are changing. The atmosphere no longer tolerates articles such as what you wrote last summer,” he said, speaking in the vague, bureaucratic terms he reserved for uncomfortable matters.

Though he most likely had a reason for saying this, I saw no immediate cause for concern. That Ahmadinejad’s new minister of culture had not replaced the director of the foreign press department signaled a willingness to treat journalists as Khatami’s administration had. It was the first time Mr. X had mentioned my pre-election essay, and if all he meant was that I should desist from writing about the public consumption of cocktails, well, that was hardly worrisome. I filed away his warning, and proceeded with my story.

To better understand Ahmadinejad, Arash and I both turned for guidance to our acquaintance Mr. Tabibi, the president’s close relative. He spent most evenings in Ahmadinejad’s company, privy to closed-door conversations that when repeated sounded deceptively simple. “You shouldn’t worry so much, he’ll take care of all this,” Mr. Tabibi assured us regularly, in reference to whatever catastrophe the president had recently unleashed. Whenever we were puzzled by the news, unable to make sense of Ahmadinejad or the direction in which he was taking the country, we relied on Mr. Tabibi as some sort of oracle.

He worked in the marketing department of a major rug exporter, and I had met him while reporting a story long ago, before his kinsman became president. He usually wore the oddly fitting green suits associated with bureaucratic Hezbollahis, religious Iranians who advertise their piety through lax grooming and purposefully unfashionable attire. But he seemed to spend most of the working day in pious flirtation with secretaries.

When Mr. Tabibi recounted to us the aims of the Ahmadinejad administration, he spoke of what “we” were trying to accomplish, and “our” challenges. Though he knew I was a journalist, he had never asked for which publication, and I never told him. This was perhaps unfair, because I knew he assumed I worked for an Iranian newspaper. But I worried that mention of
Time
would make him think I was a spy or an agent of imperialist powers, which inevitably would inhibit our discussions. I wasn’t sure whether he conveyed Ahmadinejad’s thoughts precisely, but his convictions mirrored the rhetoric of the president and his closest aides, and his mood rose and fell with the administration’s successes and failures. He was a consummate insider, even if prone to adding his own interpretation.

The morning that the United States agreed to participate in European negotiations over Iran’s nuclear program (it had refused for years, and Iranians considered the reversal a concession), his excitement was uncontainable. “This man is touched by God,” he had said, thumping the newspapers on his desk. “He has brought the world to its knees!”

What I remember most about Mr. Tabibi’s confidences was that they seemed at the same time sincere and lunatic. “Come on,” I whispered to Arash one morning, when Mr. Tabibi had left his office to order tea. “Does he really think anyone besides college students is going to buy into this talk of ending corruption and helping the little person battle the bogeyman of globalization?”

“Of course he believes it,” Arash said. “He thinks corruption is eroding the Islamic Republic’s legitimacy. And he’s right.” The problem was that corruption, like a creeping vine, was intertwined in the innermost workings of the system, in its very structure.

When Mr. Tabibi returned with the office tea server, he looked dejected and uncharacteristically failed to look up as a young secretary in a peach headscarf lingered near his door.

“It’s floundering,” he said, shaking his head mournfully. Ahmadinejad’s anticorruption drive, he continued, seemed doomed. The president had asked his aides to identify the most corrupt officials in key positions of urban management and had replaced them with inexperienced but in his view incorruptible individuals whose only credentials were war records and religious devotion.

“We placed a senior Basiji in the Saveh municipality. How long do you think it took for him to be bought out? In a month he was driving a Mercedes, as were his wife and sister.”

As he spoke, Mr. Tabibi’s face grew long and ashen, as though the story of the bribable Basiji wounded him personally. In his sensitive display of distress, I caught sight, just for a moment, of the appeal Ahmadinejad must have had in his pre-election television address. Corruption had indeed gutted Iran’s economy, and it was indeed inhumane for a tiny clique of regime cronies to grow more conspicuously wealthy each day, while the tension and resentment of coping with runaway inflation stamped themselves on the faces of ordinary
Iranians. Ahmadinejad had offered curatives for these woes, and Mr. Tabibi, like so many millions, believed they would work. He believed God would help the president help the people, a sentiment that sounded naïve in the modern world of 2005 but that somehow still resonated with a minority of Iranians.

T
hat winter, I flew to Beirut to pack up my apartment and have my things shipped to Tehran. It had been clear to both Arash and me when we moved in together that I would be relocating to Iran permanently. But my lease ran through the beginning of 2006, and I had lazily put off the physical act of rearranging myself. I spent scarcely a week in Beirut, just long enough to have movers put all my belongings into boxes, see my friends, and pick up leaflets for wedding caterers. Ever since visiting Lebanon together at the beginning of our relationship, Arash and I had lovingly nurtured plans for a Beirut wedding.

We had already picked out a faded, exquisite old palace in the cobblestoned Christian quarter, decided on the Lebanese wine that our guests would drink, and figured out how to make the garden overlooking the Mediterranean glow with the light of candles. Arash and I had explored the grounds together and found them perfectly suited to an Iranian ceremony. I was intent on Beirut because it was the only city in the world where the disparate strands of my life came together. The Mediterranean evoked the beaches of California where I had grown up; the Shia slums, adorned with pictures of Khomeini and loyal to Hezbollah, were like a pocket of the modern Iran that had become my home; and in the memories of my elderly Lebanese neighbors, with whom I would sit discussing the fashion sense of Farah Diba, the former empress of Iran, even Iran’s past was alive.

My Lebanese friends loved the idea, and we spent my final dinner in the city immersed in girlish talk of wedding details. This warded off the pall of impending separation that usually hangs over farewell evenings, and supplied us with a pretext for drinking too much champagne (we needed to choose a variety for the as yet unscheduled reception). I returned to Iran in high spirits, eager to redecorate our apartment around all my soon-to-arrive belongings, and to subtly remind
Arash that our Beirut wedding could not proceed unless he first proposed.

I
t was eight
A.M.,
and we were already at nine thousand feet, eating date omelets at the small canteen of Shirpala, the first station in the ascent to Tochal peak. We had met Arash’s mountaineering friends at Darband, the mountain’s base, before dawn to begin our ascent. It would take most of the day to reach the summit—perhaps even longer, for the winter winds and waist-high snow would slow our climb. I uncomfortably twisted my veil to cover the North Face logo on my parka. Iranian mountaineers are familiar with such international brands of trekking gear, but most cannot afford them. Our group that day numbered only six, because the snow levels required hiking boots, and at least three of those present shared their boots with others, who would take their turn the following weekend. Arash and I were the only ones wearing crampons, because the machismo of the rest of the group did not permit them to use such a sissy accessory. Most of them lived in south Tehran, and subscribed to the virile conceptions of manhood that still held sway in that traditional, working-class quarter of the city. On the way up, a ten-year-old boy selling snacks in a village along the way had even taunted Arash for wearing them, “A mountaineer who’s afraid of snow better stay off the mountain!”