Paris Was Ours (19 page)

“C’mon!” my cousin said, beckoning to me from the ticket booth. “It’s already started.”

We slipped into the darkened hall. The screen was mammoth. The movie appeared to be a regular sci-fi.

“What’s the film?” I whispered as we sat down.

“It’s brand new,” he whispered back. “I’ve heard great things about it.”

“Taisez-vous!” snapped a woman in front of us. All I could think was that I admired her hair. Must get a haircut first thing, I decided.

My cousin made a face. “Typical French!” he whispered. “I’m sure you’ll love this flick,” he added. “It’s called
Alien
.” Horrible monsters jumped out of astronauts’ chests. They stalked the heroes and heroines through air-conditioning ducts and snapped them up in sudden killer movements.

I emerged into the busy sunshine from the dark theater as though lobotomized. Was this what had been amusing the West while I witnessed a revolution?

April 12, 1980

I barely noticed the weeks slip by. They were, in my mind’s eye, filled with uninterrupted sunshine and warm evenings supping outside on the Paris sidewalks. To go to the corner
boulangerie
and pick up croissants in the morning—it was heaven. To walk the avenue Foch and peer into the shop windows. Even to buy a comb or pot of nail polish from the
droguerie
near the Trocadéro—that was heaven, too.

Yet for all the gossamer feel of the city in the spring, in my small circle of family and friends, Paris was tainted by anxiety, becoming oppressive; no longer a vacation roost, it was slowly transmuting into a golden cage. All around me, Iranians were living lives that were momentarily frozen—in their Shah-era pieds-à-terre in the sixteenth arrondissement, spending mountains of cash they didn’t have, waiting. No one knew what they were waiting for. The news from Iran did not suggest further change.

I stayed with my aunt in her bijou of a flat around the corner from the Plaza Athénée. My uncle took me to lunch at the Athénée every third day, wearing not only Hermès ties but Hermès belts and Hermès cuff links. In Tehran, everyone in the family had worked—my aunts in design and fashion, my uncles running companies and banks. Now, no one worked. The days of rest had become tedious, the nights tossed with nightmares. Their friends planned holidays abroad, to the beaches of Crete or safaris in Africa. My aunts and uncles, on the other hand, caught like moths in amber, struggled to arrange for new citizenships, unable to escape Paris on their expiring, monarchist passports. They cast lines in all directions, grasping for their spouses’ citizenships, collecting on favors from old business contacts. At times it was beyond degrading, and they’d return from lunches with friends glassy eyed, having been treated poorly, as mere supplicants. The shame was unfamiliar. It smarted through long conversations over tea at home among themselves. Dignity kept them aloof: they gradually stopped calling certain friends, and the telephones grew silent. Eventually, one uncle became Spanish; another, Moroccan. My father became Venezuelan.

I, on the other hand, was unencumbered by such worries. My American passport lay safely tucked in my belongings, while my Persian passport, newly renewed, was in good order for my return to Iran. A week before my departure, I wrapped my head in a large, opaque scarf and headed to the consulate of the Islamic Republic to obtain the required entry visa stamp. I was directed to the women’s section, where a female consular officer, equally thickly scarved, looked over my papers, filled in various blanks, and told me curtly that the passport could be picked up in three days. Though she did not manage a smile, I grinned widely at her and emerged into the dappled Parisian square beyond the consulate gates with a feeling of elation. As pert French demoiselles click-clicked past me on the sidewalk in strapless heels and bright red lipstick, I knew that this time, all would be well. I even bought a pink rose at the newspaper kiosk on the corner to celebrate.

But that evening, unnerving news came over the radio. I’d been invited to dinner at the home of one of my uncles, and we were sitting around an oval table of milky white glass set with Persian jeweled rice, garlic pickle, the thick eggplant stew called
khoresht
, cucumber yogurt, and a good bottle of Beaujolais. There was a gradual hush as the regular news was interrupted for a special news bulletin: an American helicopter mission to rescue the hostages at the U.S. Embassy in Tehran had crashed in the desert south of Qom. Planes had burned, soldiers had been charred. We listened in silence as President Carter apologized to the American people, his voice dubbed by a French translator.

When it was over, my uncle spoke loudly, condemning the Americans for their incompetence.

“How can you say that?” retorted my aunt, storming from the table. “It is the Iranians that are barbarians!”

“We, too, are Iranians,” my uncle said mildly. “We are all of the same cloth.”

“We are not!” my aunt shouted. “We are nothing like them! Who are these people, that we must pay for their sins—and who lock us out of our own country?” She sat down heavily in her chair and began to cry.

Suddenly, she looked accusingly in my direction. “And you!” she snapped. “You want to go back to there!”

My uncle walked over and put both his hands on her shoulders. “None of us know who we are,” he said. “We cannot judge anything anymore.”

In the newspapers the next day there were reports of demonstrations in front of the Iranian Embassy in Paris. Police in riot gear put down the demonstrators with tear gas. I’d seen so much tear gas by now, but still it was a shock to see it billowing through the streets of Paris. Yet demonstrations by Iranians against Iranians had become so commonplace—and sadly violent—by this time that I thought nothing of it.

But when I presented myself at the consulate to collect my passport, I realized that this particular demonstration had been critical to my future. “The demonstrators tried to break into the building,” the veiled woman on the other side of the desk explained. It was not the same woman as before; this one seemed kinder. “We became worried,” she said, “and we sent all the passports in the consulate at the time back to Tehran the next morning. Yours was among them. You will need to collect it in Iran. We shall meanwhile give you traveling papers for your return.”

Traveling papers! What did she mean, traveling papers? I practically spat at her. How could I go back to Tehran on traveling papers? I might get there and they would say no! No passport, or no passport at the moment, or no passport ever!

I walked out of the consulate in a daze. It seemed clear I couldn’t go back to Iran. But how could I stay? Where would I stay? What would I do? What would I live on until I found something to do? What would I tell
Newsweek
?

I realized dimly that it was drizzling. The newspaper kiosk had umbrellas. “And a rose?” asked the vendor.

No rose.

I began to walk. I didn’t look where I was going. Great drops fell from the trees, and the puddles underfoot grew deeper and more frequent. The moisture seeped through the thin leather soles of my shoes. People on café terraces huddled behind plastic sheeting dropped against the rain. Others repaired inside. At one point, as I stood on a corner, waiting for a red light to change, an empty taxi, windshield wipers slapping, pulled up in front of me, and the driver beckoned. It seemed a miracle, for when is there ever an empty taxi in Paris in the rain?

“Where to, mademoiselle?” he asked as I folded my umbrella and pulled the door shut. I looked at him, bewildered. Where to? I didn’t know. I had just lost a citizenship. I could feel my eyes filling with tears.

“Je ne sais pas.”

He smiled. “Vous êtes américaine?”

“Oui.” And then, I knew where I was going. “L’ambassade de l’Amérique,” I said. “The side with the eagle.”

He dropped me off at the guard booth in front of the big iron grating. I waited until he pulled away, hiding under my
umbrella, and then walked into the square. The embassy was a massive structure, columned and gray. At last I could see the eagle, great wings spread wide, head down, looking out from the helm of the roof. Under my feet the fine white Paris sand of the square filled with rainwater. My shoes were soaked. My umbrella had begun to drip from inside. But I felt none of it. All I saw was that eagle, and at that moment, all I felt was gratitude that that eagle was mine.

July 18, 1980

That summer, it rained more in Paris than it had since records began to be kept. My father’s third wife had a two-room flat, it turned out, which she never used, in the Appartements George V, across from the famous hotel of the same name. Great address, horrible flat. Dark, with heavy, old furniture that emitted strange smells and poofs of dust, a galley kitchen with two electric burners, and curling linoleum in the shower. Like so many Paris apartment buildings, this one’s elevator was noisy and rickety and made of wood, and it would stay where it was stopped if the inner glass door wasn’t shut correctly. The flat was on the fourth floor, and I walked up more than I rode. But though it was horrible, it was free, and it had the great advantage of being three blocks off the Champs-Élysées. Picturesque boutiques lined the
ruelles
behind the avenue. The lady at the neighborhood patisserie became a special friend, calling, “Là voilà!” as she held out the
tarte abricot
she saved for me each afternoon, wrapped in a small square of greased paper. The charcuterie a few doors down was tiny but always had tantalizing offers: quail, rabbit, miniature wood hens.

I spent the days interviewing for jobs, the evenings cooking rabbit stew, or whatever else the charcuterie had had in the window, and talking on the phone to my fiancé in Tehran. One Friday night I told him about my interview at the
International Herald Tribune
, where I had been unceremoniously plopped down in front of William Safire. Safire had looked menacingly over his glasses and told me there was no work for Americans in Paris. “Go home,” he said. “I don’t care how talented you are, or not, as the case may be.”

Go home? But where was home? I couldn’t go back to Iran. (As it turned out, I never did go back.) The United States was not really home for me either, despite the clutching moment when I realized I was down one citizenship and it was the sole identity I had.

“Maybe we should move on,” my fiancé suggested. “I’ll ask for a transfer from Tehran and we can move somewhere new together. Meanwhile, I’ll arrange for some leave from Tehran and we can go on a prehoneymoon. Then let’s get married.”

It took several days for me to agree. My budget was getting increasingly slim; my prospects for work were uninspiring. But I didn’t want to accept the idea that I’d failed in Paris. The city was too divine, too much a dream. This was my opportunity to live in Paris—how could I give it up?

The unexpected arrival of another of my many uncles tipped the scales. He’d never had ample funds, and my father had generously offered to let him stay at the flat I was in for however long he needed. It was not a good combination. I cooked and cleaned and bought all the food. He slept late in the living room and had strong opinions, which he expected me to adopt. He claimed he’d seen all the Paris sights, and so he stayed inside all
the time. I found myself escaping whenever I could. My fiancé was right: it was time to move on.

Before I left, I had one last task: to buy shoes from Paris for my wedding. I scoured the city, up and down the Champs-Élysées, along the rue de Passy, around the Opéra. It rained every day, torrents that turned the gutters into rivers and infused the Métro with a dank, suffocating heat. I, and hundreds of other Parisians, waited for the trains and steamed. From the gay sommelier at the Hôtel Plaza Athénée to the workmen in drenched blue gabardine replacing the cobbles along the Trocadéro, everyone grumbled bitterly about the rain. I was with them. I was tired of feeling like a sodden rat.

And there seemed to be no shoes in all of Paris. Perhaps that, I thought, was emblematic of it all.

Then, coming home one evening, having splurged on sunflowers, I rounded a corner off the avenue George V and saw my shoes sitting primly in a shop window. There were only three or four pairs on display. I tripped inside, dripping from the rain, my bouquet leaving a wet spot on the carpet.

“Celles-là.” I pointed.

“
Ah, oui!
But we have only one pair left.” The saleslady herself was wearing lovely patent shoes with cutout toes. I looked at them sourly, knowing they would soon get soaked by the rain. “Your size?”

She shook her head when I told her, but disappeared behind a curtained door nonetheless. The boutique smelled like lavender, and I could see sachets from Provence in a bowl on the counter. When she reappeared, she was smiling. “I found another pair behind,” she said. “Maybe these are for you?”

She kneeled down and held one out. I felt like Cinderella,
slipping on the glass slipper. Was it surprising that they were just right? Bursting suddenly with the moment, I leaped up and began to dance around the shop, and astonishingly, she took a step or two, too. Outside, the rain had stopped, and a band of sunset was just visible at the end of the glistening street.

The saleslady folded up the shoes in a delicate paper wrapping. “Merci à vous, et bonsoir!” We smiled at each other like coconspirators. I gathered up my flowers and stepped through the door into the clear, rain-washed Paris evening.

Back in the dark little apartment, I slipped on my shoes. I was going to get married. The shoes would remind me, even as I walked down the aisle, of those tormented but happy days when, for one brief moment, my world was Paris, and Paris was home.