The Republic of Imagination: America in Three Books (13 page)

That image of Farah banging on the door has remained firmly etched in my memory. The price one pays when choosing exile is the loss of so much that defines you as an individual. The only thing that makes this immense loss tolerable is the discovery of a self you did not know existed—of a true independence. That is the real gift of America, not its fabled wealth and prosperity. Farah’s independence, I believe, began on that day in Turkey when she started beating against the door.

On December 1, 2008, I became an American citizen. It was an extremely cold, dry and windy morning, and after I had been asked a few simple questions, mainly on U.S. history, the friendly immigration officer told me I could take the oath if I cared to wait until two o’clock that afternoon.

I spent most of my time before returning to take the oath at a diner next to the immigration office, looking out into a large expanse of land and reflecting on my old and new homes. It had not been an easy choice. Choice implies trust, a leap of faith, and it is difficult for a person who has lost her original home to make that leap regarding a new one. When I went back to Tehran in 1979, I would walk down the streets, feeling the pavement beneath my feet, and tell myself,
I am here, this is my home, I am here, here.
Soon those sentiments turned sour, poisoned by new memories of protests, tear gas, blood and public executions. Walking the streets meant averting my eyes, trying not to see, and hoping that I would not be seen or noticed. I started asking myself,
Is this my home? The home I dreamed of returning to? Where am I, and who are these people now ruling the streets?

Later, I told Farah and Mahnaz that sitting there alone in that diner, I revisited a question I had been asking myself for the past few years: What does it mean to be an American? I had concluded that to choose a new citizenship is like choosing a partner: it is a choice that binds you, for better and for worse, in sickness and in health. And it seemed to me that no time was as good as this to contemplate both America’s sickness and its health. The financial crisis crystallized much that was both good and bad about the country. For me, it never was just a financial crisis, but a crisis of vision and of imagination. You can (at least for a while) bail out the financial giants, but no one seems much concerned with propping up the Republic of Imagination. When I returned shortly before two and joined the long queue waiting to get naturalization packages, I was in a mildly elated mood, although mindful that joy is transient and should not be taken too seriously. I felt that I had the power to do a little “sivilizing” of my own, and this was for me the most exciting aspect of becoming American. We were handed our naturalization packages, which included a booklet containing the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution and a small American flag on a gold-colored plastic flagpole. We then filed into a rather shabby room and sat down. The national anthem played in the background, and a large screen projected images of the flag and of American landscapes.

Soon we were at our seats; my seat number was 30, on my left was number 29, and to my right, number 31, a man with a salmon tie and a pink shirt. It was obvious that, unlike me and the guy to my left, he had taken some trouble with his appearance. He fidgeted and looked in my direction, the movements of a man who is dying to talk. I smiled at him encouragingly and he smiled back, pointing to the small flag in my hand. He waved his, saying, “For the past ten years I have kept an American flag in my apartment. I take it out, dust it and put it back again.” He paused and then said, “And now this!”

Obviously he did not mean the small flag, but the occasion, the fact that the next time he took his flag out to dust, he would do so as an American citizen. He went on to describe what awaited us: first there would be the president’s message of welcome, some speeches about citizenship, then each of us would be called. “Remember to keep your flag in your hand,” he told me, “and smile, because someone will take our pictures.” But no one ever did.

Somehow we never properly introduced ourselves, perhaps because the occasion had made such formalities irrelevant. I knew he was Arab, because I had overheard him speaking on his cell phone, but I don’t know how I discovered that the man to my left, who was not very receptive to joining in the conversation, was from Latin America.

I listened to my new co-conspirator but did not say much. What did I have to say? Should I have told him that I was becoming an American citizen because of
Huck Finn
? Should I have mentioned Melville, Ralph Ellison, Sherwood Anderson, Kate Chopin and Elizabeth Cady Stanton? Should I have talked about the elections and added that I had some hope, but also many doubts? Should I have asked him if he watched Jon Stewart,
The Simpsons, Law & Order
or
Seinfeld
? Did he like Howard Hawks and the Marx Brothers? What about Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler? Did he listen to the Doors, the Mothers of Invention, Joni Mitchell, Jimi Hendrix, John Coltrane or Miles Davis? Did he really like Edward Hopper? Nothing I could have said, I told Farah later, would have matched his pure, unadulterated joy, his complete immersion in the moment, transforming the gaudy room, the familiar images and the anthem and the staff, all dressed up, into a magical initiation ceremony worthy of Harry Potter. He was like an ecstatic bridegroom just before his wedding, telling a perfect stranger about his good fortune, about the years he had stolen glances at a picture of his beloved, taking it out every once in a while, and now this!

I left the building and immediately called my husband to let him know that I was now the first American in the family. As I walked down the street, a car stopped and my Arab friend rolled the window down to ask me if I wanted a ride. I thanked him and declined, already a bit nostalgic as I watched the car move on and disappear. I had been too overwhelmed by his feeling of anticipation, his pride at becoming an American, to pay attention to his nationality when he was called up. We had not spoken about the homes we’d left behind. Our brief relationship, if one could call it that, was based not on our shared past but on the present, on becoming American. He had offered me his excitement, his trust, his hope, and what did I have to offer in return except a pair of attentive ears and an approving smile? Could I tell him about my doubts, my arguments with myself, my joy, my guilt? Could I tell him that it seemed to me that in this new place, the past was still very much alive, demanding a space all its own?

And yet there was another aspect to becoming American: I could be an American without casting off Iran. In fact, to be an American you do not cast off the past, but assimilate it into the present. At the time, it seemed that the person of Barack Hussein Obama confirmed my belief that you could cultivate new roots in this land with seeds from another country, that it was possible to not be paralyzed by your past. This was in part Huck’s message, or rather what Farah found so appealing about Huck. He left his family, his home—to the extent he had one—and became a stronger person once he was free of the destructive weight of conventions and expectations.

Farah arrived in the United States on August 30, 1982. “This country offered me a home,” she told Mahnaz. “I cannot remain indifferent.” The way she confronted the hurdles in this country and overcame what Saul Bellow called the “sufferings of freedom” was to my mind every bit as heroic as her struggle in the face of those other ordeals and hurdles in her country of birth. Writing about Farah, I am reminded of the fact that the United States is a country founded as much on broken dreams as it is on hope and promise; we cannot dismiss one in favor of the other. People come here bringing unbearable pain and anguish with them, and for every story of new beginnings there is one of crushed dreams.

Farah spent the first three months living with her mother in Monterey, California. She told me that those first few days and months in the United States had at times seemed like an extension of her nightmarish escape from Iran. She had tried to busy herself with the simple effort to survive but also to divert herself from the reality of Faramarz’s fate, thousands of miles away. She would write letters and place phone calls to Iran, desperate to discover his fate. At the same time, she would later tell Mahnaz, she secured all the necessary forms of identification for her new life—a Social Security card, a driver’s license, a library card. She found a child care center and began attending word-processing classes at the local high school. “I tried not to disrupt my mother’s life too much,” she said. Nema, her son, was born on September 25, less than one month later.

When the government finally announced the arrest of the Amol group, families were allowed to meet with prisoners. Faramarz’s family had told him about Farah’s escape with Neda and about Nema’s birth. The fact that they had seen him gave her hope. Perhaps it was a sign that the trial would be delayed. Perhaps he would be spared. Having heard that the jailers could be bribed, she started raising money for that purpose. Farah knew this was wishful thinking and that she was being unreasonable, but “reason,” she told Mahnaz, “had nothing to do with the state of my mind.”

I thought of Farah when I first heard on the radio that a number of her former comrades had been arrested. For days I collected the newspaper clippings with their photographs, hiding them by using them as shoe trees in my closet. I watched their show trials with Bijan in silent, inarticulate dread. Faramarz was among them. We, like so many others, had learned not to speculate about their fate. A time comes when even hope is dangerous.

Farah recalled the trials with almost clinical detachment: “Officials had packed a large hall with relatives of the guards who had fought or been killed in Amol. The walls of the hall were draped with slogans against the defendants, who were seated on a stage facing the rowdy crowd that shouted insults at them and demanded their execution. They were not allowed a lawyer.” The judge was known as the “hanging judge,” because of the number of men and women he had sent to the gallows. All of the defendants were accused of corruption of the earth, fighting against God and (of course), to crown it all, cooperating with the Great Satan. All of the defendants confessed to being communist and to mounting a plot against the regime. They said their actions were wrong. After three weeks, they were all condemned to death.

Mahnaz went to visit Farah in Monterey and finally brought her back home with her. On January 24, the anniversary of the Amol uprising, Farah and Mahnaz went to Clyde’s, in Georgetown, for lunch. Farah thought that the execution would happen then. “People were eating and watching the Super Bowl on TV,” she said. “The whole place was feverish with excitement. I felt so alien. The world with which my life was interwoven and the world in which I found myself were far apart.”

The morning of the twenty-fifth came and went with no news. The next day, Mahnaz got the call from Iran. She hurried home to tell Farah and by the time she reached the house she was crying. Mahnaz later told me that what shocked her more than anything was Farah’s reaction. She asked if something had happened to their mother, their friends—she thought of everyone, Mahnaz said, but Faramarz.

At last, she realized that her sister’s tears were for her. “The baby was taken away. I was given a tranquilizer. I had depended so much on [Faramarz’s] presence. The days became real only when I had recounted every detail of my experiences to him each evening. But part of the experience of losing him involved carrying alone the burden of raising and supporting the children, a burden that would not allow me my time of mourning.”

In her quiet and determined way, Farah refused to let Faramarz’s death destroy her. She would not give the regime that satisfaction. She moved to Berkeley a few months later and got a job working at a friend’s printing press. Then she moved to D.C. in the fall of 1984, found a nursery and a child care center and went to work. Within a year she had found a job as an editor.

“I have learned and grown and found a new identity for myself,” she told Mahnaz. “The experience has hardened me. But it has also made me self-reliant. I have grown as a person. I have searched within myself for every ounce of initiative, every resource, every strength in order to empower myself not only to survive but to become whole for my children. I am proud of what I have been able to accomplish. My children are attending good schools and are cheerful, friendly, and optimistic people. I have a successful career. I am not bitter about the past. I think of my years of political struggle not from the vantage point of the tragedy that ended them but from that of the idealism and camaraderie which marked our goals and relationships.”

Within two years of arriving in the States, Farah owned a home, had a profession and was raising two healthy, happy children as a single mother, without social stigma. The experience persuaded her that the American myth had a certain reality. “I have come to appreciate the United States in ways I never knew before,” she said. “But I have yet to feel completely at home here. . . . I have retained my ethnic identity and nowhere do I realize it more than in my children’s clear identification of themselves as Iranian Americans.” She claimed she no longer felt implicated by Iran’s troubles, and she could not care in the same way about political life in her new home.

“You feel at home when you start grumbling,” I muttered when Farah tried that one on me. And, truth be told, she did begin to participate in the political life of this country. After almost twenty years, she finally made peace with her lost love, fell in love again and married another man, who was finally able to give her the home that had eluded her for so long.

Sometimes I felt as if my conversations with Farah had a life-and-death quality to them—they had become so necessary both to Farah and to me. They led every time to surprise endings and new questions, and old questions in new contexts. We were reenacting our childhood, the secret exchanges that would fix us for hours to a corner of the living room or under the shade of a generous tree. Our conversations did have a conspiratorial aspect to them, although what we talked about was no secret. We weren’t even gossiping when, on that day that we met at Kramerbooks, we both felt kind of dizzy, I with my apple martini and she on her second cup of tea.