I'm Writing You from Tehran Read online

  Young men suddenly took over a path bordered by trees. They were dressed in black, sporting badly trimmed beards. They were all cupping their hands to scream, “Death to America!” One of the raisons d’être of the Islamic Republic. A refrain that gave rhythm to the Friday prayer and decorated the walls of the former U.S. embassy, mobbed nineteen years earlier. That day, Khatami had purposely omitted it from his speech. A few weeks earlier, he had even granted an interview to CNN in which he expressed his regrets about the notorious hostage crisis of 1979, which resulted in the break in diplomatic relations between the two countries. An unprecedented boldness that the new intruders in black would not tolerate. The student at my side whispered to me that they were with the Basij, the regime’s voluntary militia, who pledged themselves to a radical form of Islam. Far from letting himself get flustered, the celebrity president let slip the hint of a smile: “Death is a thing of the past,” he shouted, before adding, “It’s life we must look toward!” Silence took hold of the crowd. My young neighbor was trembling. Life versus death. So that was Khatami’s credo, the secret to his success in the eyes of his supporters. His speech made me shiver. Within it, I heard a singular echo. Life versus death … My life versus your death. What message was I supposed to read between the lines?

  “Death to America!” the militiamen roared. But this time their slogans were drowned out by applause for the Iranian president. Like taunting the darkness of the past.

  It was at that instant, I think, that my gaze met that of a young girl. In her slender hand, she made a red rose dance in the azure sky as she let fly little cries of ecstasy. A maghnaeh, the hood worn by female students, framed her pale face. She was proud, it was clear. Proud to belong to an Iran that loved again. To a country that was turning its back on old demons. Tears of emotion escaped from her almond-shaped eyes and drew lines of mascara on her baby cheeks. I handed her a tissue.

  “Thank you,” she said to me.

  “Esmet chiye?” I asked her. What’s your name?

  I knew only a few words of Persian.

  “Sepideh,” she replied.

  “Why are you crying?”

  “I’m feeling so much … You know, today, I feel like the doors of a great prison have been cracked open.”

  “Really? It means that much to you?” I asked skeptically.

  “You’re not from here?” she asked.

  “No, well, not really.”

  “Well then, you can’t understand.”

  * * *

  “You can’t understand.” I felt a pang at hearing those words. It’s true that I wasn’t really from her country. From your country. At first glance, we looked alike. We were both wearing Adidas sneakers, and blue jeans beneath mantos—our obligatory long coats. Maybe we had the same taste in music, the same passion for books and chocolate? And yet, she was right. I had grown up in the comfort of democracy; how could I understand the true extent of the dreams of change that made her tremble? How could I put myself in her place? I was there precisely in order to understand. At least, to try.

  SEPIDEH MET ME a few days later, at Shouka, one of the new hip cafés in the capital that didn’t exist in your time. When I entered, I immediately recognized her round, porcelain doll face. She had swapped her usual black maghnaeh for a light blue shawl that made me, in my thick gray headscarf, look like a nun by comparison. On the glass door, a small sign accompanied by a drawing of a woman in a black veil reminded “Dear Sisters” to “Respect Islamic Traditions”—in other words, to favor an outfit like mine. Thinking I would save Sepideh some trouble, I couldn’t help but wink at her and point out the warning. She burst out laughing:

  “You’ve got to get into Tehran’s fashion!”

  Such self-confidence for a young woman who had never left Iran, who had spent the majority of her life under a heavy weight of restrictions! This was only the beginning of the surprises awaiting me. At the table next to ours, a young man with slicked-back hair was murmuring sweet nothings to his companion, a beauty who had tucked her fake Hermès scarf behind her ears to keep it from falling into her chocolate ice cream. Between spoonfuls, she played around, planting little kisses on her boyfriend’s neck. Only recently had unmarried couples started going out, discreetly, in public. They even held hands in the street. That was also part of the Khatami effect. But these young lovebirds were pushing it a bit far.

  “Iran is a time bomb! More than sixty percent of the population is under twenty-five years old. Khatami made a breach in the wall that today’s youth dream of toppling!” Sepideh insisted.

  Saying these words, she couldn’t help throwing a mischievous glance toward the counter, where a portrait of the Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Khamenei, was featured prominently. He, “God’s representative on earth,” always had the last word in Iran. But for how much longer?

  “For years, the conservatives wanted to control everything. They imposed archaic dictates on us: no hair outside your veil, no makeup, no tight jeans, no relationships between girls and boys before marriage … Today, the reformers understand our desire for change. They’re more in tune with our generation. They want to shake things up. It’ll take time, but our ideas will win out in the end.”

  Sepideh paused. I used the time to switch on my recorder. I wanted to ask about her childhood memories. Her face tensed. Had I been too intrusive?

  “You have no idea how lucky you are not to have been born here. My generation is a sacrificed generation!”

  A sacrificed generation. I didn’t really know how to respond. Sepideh was a true “child of the revolution.” The eldest of three children in a middle-class family, she had the misfortune to be born in 1980, just after the fall of the shah and three months after the beginning of the Iran-Iraq War. While I, in my Parisian comfort, was writing you letters and playing hopscotch, she was living at the whim of power outages and food rationing. At night, she woke to the sound of sirens warning of imminent bombardments. Everything she told me that day was something from which you had spared me.

  “My childhood was steeped in mourning. When Saddam Hussein attacked Iran, not long after the revolution, my father was sent to the front. He was a commander in the air force, a post he had occupied under the shah and kept under Khomeini. So we followed him to Dezful, not far from the battlefield. One day, my best friend, Leyla, was cut up by shrapnel. What a shock! Staying there had become too dangerous. My mom and I went back to Tehran. Before saying good-bye to us, my father said to me, ‘Don’t worry, soon we will be back together again. Peace is around the corner.’”

  But the war dragged on. Sepideh’s father’s furloughs were so infrequent that she had a hard time recognizing him on the rare occasions he managed to escape from the front.

  “At home, I called my grandfather ‘Papa,’” she continued.

  Eight years went by. Eight long years during which her neighborhood kept filling with little hejlehs, funerary monuments strewn with mirrors and sequins, erected in honor of soldiers killed by enemy bullets.

  “I remember faces in tears, neighbors in mourning who had to hide their sadness, because, officially, you had to be proud of having offered up a ‘martyr’ to the homeland. With the war, the Iranian religious leaders had found the perfect excuse to stifle the population beneath a patina of propaganda. At school, it felt like we were being brainwashed. Girls had to drape themselves in a black chador as a sign of mourning. Quran lessons were obligatory. Every day, the teacher would recount the ‘exploits’ of the young heroes, such as Hossein Fahmideh, a thirteen-year-old schoolboy who set off a grenade under an Iraqi tank … And Khomeini would repeatedly say to the Iranian people, ‘Make more children so they can go defend our country!’”

  * * *

  In 1988, a chorus of ululations invaded Sepideh’s street. Iran and Iraq had finally signed a cease-fire agreement. Her father had returned safe and sound! His military base had been attacked with chemical gas by Saddam Hussein’s army, but he had made it out unscathed. Or so it seemed.


  “He was tired, but everything was fine. And then, after a few months, my father started to feel his arms stiffen. He started to visibly lose weight. As soon as he spoke a bit too much, his voice would get hoarse. We went from hospital to hospital trying to figure out the cause of these astonishing symptoms. After numerous exams, the doctors concluded that he had developed Parkinson’s disease because of the negative effects the gas can cause in the long term. Can you imagine, ten years later!”

  After all these hardships, Sepideh came out stronger and more determined. They had stolen her childhood; they would not steal her youth. She confided in me that between two preparatory courses for the university entrance exams, she would devour Persian translations of Jürgen Habermas and Hannah Arendt. After being banned for nearly twenty years, these works were finally available in the libraries again. At night, to escape from the wooden, official newspeak, she would listen to the Persian programs of the BBC on an AM radio and flip through foreign TV channels thanks to a mini satellite dish hidden on the roof of their building. News reports, wildlife documentaries, Western music videos—everything interested her, as long as it didn’t have anything to do with Islam. Her hunger for knowledge impressed me. When I complimented her English, she explained that she had learned it from American TV. Her mother dreamed that she would become an engineer, mohandes. In Iran, more than a sign of success, “engineer” is a title that sticks to your skin until the end of your days. But her true passion was politics—and journalism.

  “You’ll see. One day, I’ll be a reporter, too,” she declared.

  The more I listened, the more I was struck by the paradox of contemporary Iran: by encouraging a baby boom in the ’80s and advocating for free education, hadn’t Khomeini ended up digging the Islamic Republic’s grave? Because these same young people, who were nourished with propaganda from infancy, now filled the universities and dreamed of breaking free from the straitjacket of religion. In twenty years, the number of students had doubled. With more than two million enrolled in universities and a literacy rate of 80 percent, the new generation constituted the primary threat to a regime that had given rise to it.

  I had no trouble getting Sepideh to speak about Khatami. She was a die-hard fan.

  “That man is the only hope for escaping the dead end that is the Islamic Republic!” she asserted.

  When he came onto the scene in May 1997, she had just celebrated turning sixteen, the voting age. Before going to the ballot box, she had plunged right into the electoral campaign. Each day, she walked through the capital sticking posters of the smiling mullah on all the cars. Countless undecided parents, like her own, were influenced by their children and also voted for Khatami. With characteristic spontaneity, Sepideh had hurried to send a handwritten congratulatory letter to him as soon as she learned of his victory. “And he wrote back to me!” She laughed, recalling the anecdote. She always kept his letter on her desk, like a precious treasure, and hasn’t missed any of his speeches since. Listening to her so delicately articulate the name of this Iranian Gorbachev, I felt as though I were with a teenager in the throes of her first love. Furthermore, she told me that, to seduce girls, multiple boys had started wearing a firoozeh, a ring with a blue stone like the one adorning Khatami’s hand.

  “Do you know what his nickname is?” she asked me.

  “No.”

  “The Angel.”

  The Angel. After the corrupt monarch and the cruel sorcerer, the Angel … Would he have the power to move mountains, to continue to enthrall his female admirers? Or was he merely a political mirage?

  * * *

  I glanced around. The café had emptied. The young couple had vanished. Other faces, even younger, had taken their place. Outside, the street lamps shone endlessly in that sprawling capital of more than twelve million inhabitants. Absorbed in Sepideh’s story, I hadn’t seen the moon enter through the window. But the hour had come, and her studies called. She quickly gathered up the pile of books from the table, downed her cooled coffee in one go, and stood up, readjusting her messy locks of hair beneath her headscarf. Before leaving, she pressed me against her chest, hugging me with that unfailing spontaneity. Then, in her little heels, she disappeared into the night.

  A MONTH LATER, another corner of your city’s veil would be lifted. This time, in the intimacy of a secret party.

  When the door half-opened onto the apartment whose number was on the invitation, I immediately stopped short. Had I gone to the wrong floor? Or country? Niloufar, one of my new acquaintances, had invited me to her birthday party with the warmth that comes completely naturally to Iranian women. “A small convivial party among friends,” she had said on the telephone. I didn’t expect to find myself in a nightclub. As soon as I walked in, I felt the floor pulsing beneath my feet. A deafening sound system reverberated through the apartment. The walls were shaking. Corks were flying. Heels were clacking on the floor. All around I saw bloodshot retinas, cigarette butts trailing out into the stairwell. In the entryway, the floor was strewn with scarves. Abandoned by the beauties of the night, they lay like wreckage next to empty bottles of illicit alcohol. I had to elbow my way to the living room. In the hallway, a daisy chain of veiled women was lined up in front of the bathroom. They came out transformed, hair curled, wearing striped dresses and glittery false eyelashes. And I had hesitated to wear a low-cut top.

  The living room was unrecognizable. The armchairs shoved against the walls, the rugs rolled up to the side. A bowl of pistachios forgotten on a coffee table vibrated to the techno beat.

  In a flash, a laser beam pierced the cloud of cigarette smoke that enveloped the room. There emerged a chest, then an arm, then a Marlboro held between two manicured fingers. A ghostly vision in the blur of the Iranian night.

  “How’s it going?”

  It was Niloufar. She was wearing a miniskirt and holding a glass of arak. With her crimson lipstick, she tattooed her lips onto my left cheek.

  “Happy birthday,” I said clumsily, handing her a garbage bag.

  She gave an amused, complicit smile. She could guess by the wrapping that it was a forbidden beverage. And she couldn’t wait to see if the little French girl had succeeded in finding Russian vodka or black-market gin.

  “Champagne! What a find! But where did you unearth this?” she asked.

  “A ‘suitor’ who works at the French embassy.”

  “Bravo!” she conceded, as if I had just passed an initial hazing test with flying colors.

  And she burst out laughing, revealing a dimple in her left cheek—her only wrinkle, she used to say. At forty years old, this unconventional, beautiful, shapely woman had lost none of her freshness. Perhaps thanks to her company. Nicknamed the “godmother” of the youth, she was always surrounded by an assemblage of young men and women. Day or night, they would knock on her door, eagerly seeking someone to whom they could confide their problems. Always available to help, she had a solution for everything: the high-end surgeon who restores the hymens of deflowered young women, the multi-visa consulate for express immigration, the feminist lawyer who separates couples as quickly as he marries them … Divorced herself, Niloufar lived alone. Ever since she discovered Spanish sperm banks on the Internet, she dreamed of having a baby on her own. Her neighbors were unquestionably offended by her lifestyle, but she didn’t care what other people said about her. For her, her lifestyle was a form of redemption. A former opponent of the shah, she bore the guilt of a backfired revolution. To compensate for the blunders of the Iranians of her generation, who had really believed in Khomeini, she had given herself over to the mission of helping young people. And sharing in their nocturnal escapes.

  Magnum of champagne between her legs, Niloufar let out a piercing cry before popping the cork. Amused, I watched it land in the pile of scarves that had doubled in volume since I arrived. The glasses of champagne started to fizz.

  “You know the famous Iranian joke? ‘Under the shah, we used to drink outside and pray inside. Today, in the Islamic
Republic, we drink inside and pray outside!’” she exclaimed.

  A crowd had formed around Niloufar. The magnum was a success. Above the fray, I recognized Leyla, a mutual friend. Late, as usual, she was stumbling around in stilettos. She must have gone to at least three parties before joining us.

  “I have to tell you!” Leyla roared, leaning on my shoulder. “The other day, I was driving my car, with Siamak—you know, the guy who was hitting on me at the university? We were listening to a Madonna tape—I had just bought it on the black market. A few yards farther on, we found ourselves at a police roadblock. It was the morality police! You should have seen their faces. Madonna! They weren’t pleased at all. We tried everything to sweet-talk them; we ended up at the police station. Seventy lashes of the whip for him. And for me, you can’t even imagine, the ultimate hu-mil-i-a-tion: a virginity test. Lucky for me I’m a virgin! Otherwise, I would have found myself with a ring on my finger pronto!”

  Listening to her made me shudder. Mischievous down to the bone, she always had incredible stories to share. This one was particularly traumatic. In her place, I would have shut myself up at home and drawn a clear line against going out. But no! It was incredible to see how nimbly she went from one misadventure to another, as though racking up trophies. The hesitant political overtures had only sharpened her sense of defiance and provocation. Each day, her scarves shrank more and more. Every weekend, her boozy parties ended when the sun rose. This prima donna night owl was an expert at zigzagging between the biroon and the andaroon, the “outside” and the “inside.” As if that back-and-forth between the hidden self and the public self had become her raison d’être.