Paris Was Ours (18 page)

This level of guilt was something I had never come across in France, where I had worked since my first child was four months old. Indeed, I had never, in the many work-family conversations I had had with French friends or in interviews, even heard the word “guilt.” It wasn’t in the air. Had I expressed it, it would have sounded, once again, like sheer neurosis. Work was seen as an essential component of modern motherhood, a component of good motherhood, in fact, because it was something that helped women feel happy and whole.

Particularly odd was how readily my American peers accepted all their stress and guilt as a natural consequence of motherhood. It didn’t seem to dawn on anyone that there could be another way.

I almost felt as if I had stepped into a time warp. It was as though we were still caught in a 1970s-era discussion about women’s lib, still living in a time when women felt the need to debate whether or not they should work. Still ignoring utterly the facts that the bad, old-fashioned French so heartily embraced: that the vast majority of women do work, that work is actually a good thing for them and their families, and that it is something that need not be experienced as unduly stressful or guilt-provoking or a sacrifice.

It seems to me that the French, where mothers are concerned, have wedded their society’s belief in
différence
to a realistic and humane view of modern women’s lives. We Americans, on the
other hand, have wedded an abstract belief in equal opportunity to punitive notions of women’s “choice” and women’s “compromises.” The result is that once children come into the picture, women retain the right to compete in the marketplace but lose the right to any kind of decent quality of life. Or as Sophie L’Hélias, a French businesswoman who lived and worked in America for the better part of a decade, once put it to me: “It’s much more difficult to have a balanced life here. The equation is more complicated. There are more choices to be made.”

French labor laws help encourage “balance.” Mothers have long had the right to work a reduced week, and long vacations go a long way toward resolving the problem of what to do with children in the summer months. Yet a government-mandated restructuring of the workplace, of any sort, is unlikely to happen in America anytime soon. And at any rate, it isn’t government directives that dictate behavior, even in a dirigiste country like France. If things are better for women there, it is due to a profound and enduring social consensus that life should be made livable based on who they are and not on an abstract moralistic notion of how they ought to be. That conviction, however, rests on another fundamental belief, sorely lacking in America: that our emphasis should not be on doing as much as we can but on achieving a decent quality of life. Maybe quality of life—pure and simple—is what we as women ought to be fighting for these days. Not just for ourselves—but for the men and children in our lives as well.

Out of the Revolution

February 26, 1980

I could taste the creamy strawberry of a
lait fraise
. Hear the crunch of the fine sand underfoot on the sidewalks of the avenue Montaigne. Feel the first savory spoonful of
soupe au pistou vert
against my lips. Picture an afternoon over a
café crème
at the Deux Magots while glancing sideways to see exactly what the
parisienne
s were wearing this spring. I daydreamed of Paris as I stood waiting, surrounded by people escaping the Islamic Revolution.

The noise in Tehran’s Mehrabad Airport was deafening, the departures floor a sea of bags filled with treasure—carpets, silver, photographs, painted Persian enamels in blue and green, Korans, anything that could be transported out to create a life elsewhere.

There were no lines, for lines mean nothing in the Middle East. People bunched, surged, shouted, and, when there was space, kicked forward the bags that held their packaged lives. Everyone around me was fleeing forever. Only I was coming back.

My fiancé remained in Tehran. I had a reporter’s job lined up with
Newsweek
upon my return. I was going away only for
a vacation, to Paris—to shop for shoes, to eat steak tartare, to walk museums, and to see friends and family I hadn’t seen while living through the demonstrations and shootings and power outages of a revolution.

I eased at last through the check-in counter with my father’s trusted servant Shirghan at my side. He’d bribed someone somewhere and walked into the waiting lounge with me, wheeling my hand luggage behind him. I still had one hurdle to go—the passport desk—and he wanted to see me through. In Iran, unlike anywhere else I’ve ever been, as a native you don’t go to the airport with your passport. Instead, two weeks before you leave, you send it in to the Ministry of Interior to get an exit visa. It was one of the few things that hadn’t changed with the shift in regimes: just as you had paid fifteen hundred dollars to the official who had the Shah’s picture hanging on the wall, you paid fifteen hundred dollars when that picture was replaced by the scowling portrait of Khomeini. And as in the past, you paid the money without getting the passport back. Instead it disappeared for two weeks—to be checked at least once by Intelligence—until it surfaced at the passport desk at the airport, right next to the security boarding gate. That is, if you were lucky.

These days, many people were not. Instead of receiving their passports and immediately leaving, the passports went missing. Their names would be listed on a grimy sheet of paper as
Mamnoon Khorouj
—“forbidden exit.” Bearded police would suddenly appear, and instead of being allowed to board, the passenger would be marched off, thrown into a van, and sent to Evin Prison for trial, and sometimes for execution. The passport desk had become a place of dread. It was where people
disappeared, leaving expectant friends and family waiting eight hours later at Charles de Gaulle Airport, or Heathrow, or Frankfurt International, until the awful truth slowly dawned upon them.

Mamnoon Khorouj
. It was a phrase of Khomeini’s, typical new revolutionary lingo, and it struck fear into us all—even those like me, who, as a member of the younger “revolutionary” generation, had little reason for concern.

Nonetheless, when the Paris flight was called to board, I approached the desk hesitantly. Passengers ahead of me scrambled forward, collected their passports, and headed through security. I could see the plane and the steps leading up to it through the open doorway. I could see Paris, lying beyond.

“Farmanfarmaian, the Lady Roxane,” said Shirghan when we reached the counter. A little man in a felt domed hat and day-old whiskers shuffled between the counter and the rows of passport cubicles ranged behind him against the wall.

We could see the letters of the alphabet on the cubicles.

The little man began to scan the cubicles, as did we. At the very same moment, Shirghan and I saw the
F
cubicle. It was empty.

Shirghan’s hand clutched my elbow. A wave of heat engulfed me. I grabbed the counter for support. Everything around me seemed to stand out in sharp relief, too bright, hard edged. The man turned very slowly back toward us. I could hear passengers next to me shouting their names.

Shirghan’s face was white. He pointed to a handwritten list hanging next to me on the wall. At the top, in big black scrawl, were the words
Mamnoon Khorouj
. The man shrugged. “I’m busy,” he said. “Find your name on that.” He turned to help another passenger.

Shirghan’s eyes tore down the list. Numbly, I watched another passenger collect his passport and step toward the plane. Shirghan looked over the list again, more slowly this time. At last, he shook his head. “You’re not on the list, my lady,” he said.

The little man would not meet our eyes. We called out to him, but he wouldn’t listen. A cobra head of passengers rushed the counter, all clamoring for their passports. Panicked, heart pounding, I watched them all—the smiles of relief as the passport was placed in their hands, the angles of expectation as they passed through the security gate, the lightness in their movements as they disappeared onto the tarmac. I watched each one, until the last one passed through the exit, and the door closed. I was alone, with Paris on the other side. Even my luggage had gone.

“Khanoum?” “Madam?” The little man had shoved his domed cap toward the back of his head and was wiping his forehead with a dirty napkin. He pointed to another list, this one without a heading. “Maybe you are on there.”

The list was short, maybe ten names. Shirghan had to lean far over the counter to see it, stretching his neck.

“Yes, my lady,” he said slowly. “You are there.”

“Administrative problem,” the man stated flatly. His shoes were dusty, and though they were leather, he’d bent the back down so he could wear them like slippers. “Go back to Tehran.” He turned his back to us and sat down. “No reason to stay here any longer.”

“But what administrative problem?” I demanded. I was sure there had been a mistake. Maybe I could take the next plane. I repeated my question, my voice shrill and rising, angry, shocked, the image of Paris slipping away. The man didn’t budge.

I lingered. I didn’t want to go back to Tehran. I’d already said my good-byes. How can you go back when everyone thinks you’re gone? It was embarrassing. They have their lives, while yours has been sealed off for a while. They would laugh when they saw me, even if they also felt worried and shocked. If it hadn’t been me experiencing this nightmare, I would laugh, too.

“First let’s find out what’s going to happen to my luggage at Charles de Gaulle,” I said to Shirghan. “And then let’s pick up a glass of tea somewhere. I can’t face going back home just yet.”

March 20, 1980

Several weeks elapsed before I stepped into the tubular escalators that crisscross the center of Charles de Gaulle and felt transported, as though through giant intestines, from one world to another. Everything around me was clean, orderly, and, although it was noon, almost empty. The French sun beckoned through the spotless windows. My luggage was waiting at a kiosk, where an efficient woman handed it over. “Ben, Madame! Ça fait déjà trois semaines!” The wheels squeaked as I pulled the suitcase across the deserted floor.

Three weeks. One to discover where my passport was, another two to get the problem fixed. Two years before, I’d had the passport renewed in New York at the Iranian Consulate, and it bore the official seal of the Shah’s government. But Khomeini’s regime refused to recognize that government and had quietly annulled everything it had done, which meant that my passport was considered expired. Having it renewed again and then affixed with the exit visa had taken lots of steps, and
lots of money—in low-denomination bills, passed to officials behind counters and screens, in vast buildings filled with papers and noise.

“How do we know,” I asked Shirghan at one point, “that the official we’re bribing is someone with any real connection to my passport?”

Shirghan, whose name means Lion Man, had a face pocked with smallpox scars. Longtime family servants were turning on their old masters at the time. The Revolution was for them, after all, not for us. I didn’t know if I fully trusted Shirghan anymore. But he was all I had.

Not sure of anything, I had no choice but to wait. At last, one day he called. He said it was finally arranged. I left on the first day of spring, No Ruz, the most celebrated day of the Persian calendar. Aunts, uncles, cousins, were spread out on garden chairs, eating lunch at outdoor tables under the trees, as I left. I barely dared think of Paris this time, and they waved as though I might shortly be back again. Their expressions were like those caught by Renoir in the faces of
The Daughters of Paul Durand-Reul
, relaxed, proper, satisfied, slightly ingenue, the background filled with spring color. It was unreal, a garden party far removed from the Revolution that surged beyond the orchard walls. Here, aristocrats dined among white-gloved servants, as in a painting, while songbirds sang in the trees.

As I emerged from the doors of Charles de Gaulle, the air was cooler, clearer than Tehran’s. It would take me some time to realize that I had gotten into the habit of throwing a silk scarf over my head, even when the weather was sunny. “We’re going straight to a movie,” my cousin announced as he pulled the car onto the highway. “We’ll leave your luggage in the trunk.”

Suddenly it hit me. After two years of living through a revolution, with bearded young men in the streets, and billboards of martyrs and mullahs on every wall, I was in Paris! I watched the cars around us in fascination. They seemed to move like windup toys along a track—no honking or weaving or speeding, as was par for the course in Tehran. None of the cars were dented or missing a fender, as every car seemed to be back there. The highway signs seemed so big and newly painted—it made me feel as if I’d suddenly shrunk and slipped inside a board game. A woman driver was applying lipstick and chatting to a man sitting next to her. I couldn’t stop staring. I hadn’t seen a man and a woman together in a car for months.

When we turned into the Paris boulevards from the highway, I caught my breath. I’d forgotten the art nouveau Métro arches and lampposts in filigreed metal, and found them beautiful. The fruit trees were in blossom. “Stop!” I cried as we passed a
boulangerie
where a woman in a white crimped baker’s hat was putting profiteroles into a window case. My cousin swerved over so that I could run out to buy six in a box, the aroma filling my nostrils. We ate them all, sitting on a park bench in the dappled sun across from the movie theater, and they were even better than
lait fraise
or
soupe au pistou vert
. I contemplated the garish billboards of actors and actresses on the theater facade as my cousin went in to buy the tickets. In Iran, the billboards had once been even worse than these—the actresses with full-breasted cleavage a story high, lips lascivious and open, arched brows beckoning, but they had been torn down in the Revolution’s first frenzy, the theaters set alight and burned to the ground. The last time I’d seen anything on a big
screen had been two years before. I was so looking forward to it, I was ready to see anything. Or so I thought.