Nine Parts of Desire (15 page)

I was intrigued by Janet’s decision. Early one morning in the winter of 1984, I had made a similar choice. I’d gone to a dank room in a Cleveland suburb, submerged my body in a tiled pool of rainwater, and come up pronouncing the words: “Hear, O Israel: the Lord Our God, the Lord Is One.” Later, I celebrated with my rabbi and my fiance over matzo-ball soup and potato latkes at a nearby Jewish deli.

My conversion had more to do with history than faith. If I were going to marry a Jew, it seemed important to throw in my lot with his often threatened people. I didn’t know then that I would spend the best part of the next decade in the Middle East, where being on my husband’s side made me an automatic enemy to many of those we lived among.

Janet, too, wanted to be on her husband’s side. But in Iran in the late 1970s, her nationality was an obstacle that her new faith couldn’t entirely overcome. “It wasn’t a great time for a bride from Kansas City to be setting up house in Tehran,” she recalled with a wry grin. Within a couple of months of her arrival the city was paralyzed by demonstrations, fires, gun battles. When Khomeini returned from
exile in 1979, Mohamed was exultant. Like many young, well-educated Iranians, he despised the corruption of the old order and admired the way Khomeini thumbed his nose at the great powers who had vied with each other to exploit the wealth of his homeland.

Janet had to sit through family gatherings listening to Mohamed’s relatives pillory her country. As her Farsi improved, she began to challenge them. “They would say, ‘Oh, Janet, you know we like American people, it’s just the government we hate.’ I would say, ‘Yeah? Well, in my country, buddy, the government
is
the people.’ ”

When Iranian students occupied the U. S. Embassy in Tehran in 1979, the State Department told all United States citizens to leave. Janet watched as an exodus emptied the city of the thousands of American expatriates who had once made fortunes there. Soon only a handful of Americans remained, most of them wives of Iranians too financially or ideologically committed to their country to leave. “The State Department said we’d be on our own if we stayed here. And we have been. But if you love your husband, you stay.”

Janet also gradually found herself coming to love many aspects of her life in Iran. She found that Iranians lavished affection on the few Americans who stayed. Some Iranians had warm memories of American teachers or technicians who had helped the country, while even those who saw Americans only as rapacious exploiters felt that Janet, by staying, had aligned herself with Iran. Instead of being greeted with hostility, she found herself welcomed everywhere—pushed to the front of food lines, given the best meat, and helped in every possible way. “They treat me like a queen here,” she said.

But convincing her parents back in Kansas City took some doing, especially after Betty Mahmoody published her memoir,
Not Without My Daughter.
The book is a nightmare tale of an American wife who agrees to visit her husband’s family in Tehran only to find herself trapped there by Iranian laws that forbid women to leave the country without their husbands’ permission. It gives an unremittingly bleak picture of life in Iran, describing wife beatings, filthy houses and vermin-infested food.

“My father would get on the phone and say, I know Mohamed is beating you,’ and I’d say, ‘Dad, he’d no more beat me than you would.’ I even took pictures of my freezer to show how much food we
have.” She tried to describe the split-level luxuries of her spacious villa, the leisure provided by her regular cleaner and her easy access to good child care for her three children. It was a life that many Americans would have found enviable. But her parents weren’t reassured. So she agreed to see me in the hope that her parents might believe a report by an outsider. She invited a friend, a Californian also married to an Iranian, to meet me as well.

Janet gaped as she opened the door to her friend. It was the week of Khomeini’s funeral, and the whole of Tehran was shrouded in black. Black crepe decked public buildings, men wore black shirts, women packed away their colorful scarves for the forty days of official mourning and donned their black chadors. Amid all this gloom, Janet’s friend stood out like a clown in a convent. Six feet tall and seven months pregnant, she wore a huge cotton caftan splashed with pink and red roses, and a pink silk scarf that barely covered her sun-bleached hair.

“Good grief, I hope Hajji Yousefi didn’t see you!” gasped Janet, referring to her next-door neighbor, a member of the local Komiteh responsible for enforcing Islamic discipline. The woman, whom I will call Margaret, just shrugged and flopped into an armchair. “Who cares?” she said. “I got abuse on the way over here, with some old bag in a chador coming up to me and saying, ‘How can you dress like that? Don’t you know the imam is dead?’ I said, ‘What’s it to me? I’m an American.’ I told her I knew better than she did what the Koran says women should wear, and it doesn’t say anywhere that it has to be a big old black rag.”

Margaret knew what the Koran said because she spent every morning sitting cross-legged on the floor beside her mother-in-law, studying the holy book line by line. Margaret had wed a scion of the Islamic Republic’s aristocracy: the son of a long line of eminent ayatollahs. The family tolerated a lot from their son’s odd choice of bride because she had done two things to earn their approval: converted to Islam and quickly become pregnant. Her mother-in-law fervently believed that winning a convert was a passport to paradise and, as none of her children had yet given her a grandson, she had high hopes for Margaret’s pregnancy.

Margaret also spoke frankly about the sexual power she believed
she wielded over her husband. Growing up in California’s hedonistic beach culture, she had acquired a sexual repertoire undreamed of by an Iranian boy closeted among clerics. “He runs after me like a puppy,” she giggled. All this, she believed, protected her from conforming to the iron disciplines of Iranian society that Janet barely questioned. In Tehran, all government buildings have female guards who strictly enforce Islamic dress codes, and Margaret had recently been turned back at the door of a post office for wearing lipstick. “I asked for a Kleenex, and she said, ‘Here’s your Kleenex,’ and slapped me across the face.” Margaret complained to her family and they had the guard sacked.

A few days after our meeting at Janet’s house, I invited both women to join me for lunch in town. Margaret chose her favorite place, a once grand French restaurant with linen tablecloths and red banquettes. The restaurant waiters greeted her like a long-lost sister. Complimenting her on her colorful dress, one of them asked why her two friends were wearing such dowdy black hijab. Margaret replied with a quick Farsi crack. The waiter looked startled, then laughed. “I told him you were ass kissers,” she grinned.

But even Margaret had learned that there were limits. Once, her irreverence had almost gone too far. She had been annoyed for days by some anti-American graffiti scrawled on a wall at the end of her street. One night she’d taken a can of paint and altered the lettering to turn the insult back against the Iranian government. At daybreak the new message caused a furor and a witch hunt. Margaret, delighted by the frenzy she’d created, confided to her husband, thinking he’d enjoy the joke. “I never knew he could be so angry,” she said. Furious, he screamed at her, calling her a madwoman: “Do you want to be killed? There are some things even I can’t save you from.” In the end, no one managed to identify her as the culprit.

For me, Janet’s friendship offered a window into women’s lives in Iran. Mohamed’s huge extended family included the poor and the affluent, the religiously convinced and the skeptical. Whenever I was in town it became understood that I was included in all family events.

For me, being Jewish had remained an abstraction: something
that had defined the kind of wedding I’d had, and afterward meant a once-a-year family feast at Passover, a fast at Yom Kippur, a certain awkwardness at Christmastime and a label, often an inconvenient one, that I had to write on visa forms when I visited Middle Eastern countries. But, for Janet, religion shaped every day’s routine.

No one in the Mamoudzadeh family lived a secular life. Mohamed’s mother rose every morning before dawn to ready herself for the first of the five prayers she would offer each day. Mohamed and Janet were less meticulous, but even Janet said she enjoyed the moments when she joined her mother-in-law at prayer. “It’s just such a peaceful few minutes in your day,” she said. “If the kids call for you, or someone comes to the door, you just raise your voice and intone ‘Allah’ to signal that you’re praying, and no one can interrupt you.”

To prepare for prayers, Janet and her mother-in-law would wash carefully, scrubbing the face, feet and hands, rinsing the mouth, and rubbing damp hands over the hair. Women can’t wear nail polish in Iran because of the law that hands have to be clean for prayer, and a coating of polish is considered polluting. At the airport, even foreign women are handed petrol-soaked rags to wipe varnished nails. But perfume is encouraged at prayer time, so Janet and her mother-in-law would sprinkle themselves with scent, enfold themselves in their prettiest floral chadors, roll out a special prayer rug, and begin the series of bows, kneeling and prostration that accompany the Muslims’ melodious poem of devotion: “Praise be to God, lord of the creation, the compassionate, the merciful, king of the last judgment… You alone we worship, and to you alone we pray for help…. Guide us to the straight path, the path of those whom you have favored, not of those who have incurred your wrath….” Men must recite the prayers audibly enough for someone nearby to distinguish the words. Women whose voices are considered sexually arousing, are supposed to whisper.

Every year Mohamed put his name down for the lottery which selected the pilgrims who would make the annual Hajj. The month of Hajj follows immediately after the purifying month of Ramadan. These days, about two million Muslims from all over the world descend on Mecca annually, ritually dressed in simple white garments.

Because the Iranians’ politicized view of religion doesn’t sit well with the Saudis, Saudi Arabia imposes a tight quota on the number of Iranian pilgrims it admits each year. Finally, in 1993, Mohamed’s name was drawn. He planned to take his mother and Janet on the month-long journey. But Janet, after studying the obligations of the pilgrimage, decided not to go. “There is so much more to it than circling the Kaaba and praying for forgiveness on the Plain of Arafat,” she said. Pilgrims not only had to refrain from having sex, she learned. “Even thinking about sex can destroy the value of your Hajj.” As well, there could be no irritable words or malicious thoughts. “I don’t think I’m spiritual enough to do it properly.” Instead, she offered her place to Mohamed’s sister, who delightedly embarked on a special Hajj course of study to prepare herself.

Almost every week of the Mamoudzadehs’ life contained some religious observance bound up in the rituals surrounding births, betrothals, marriages and funerals. During one week-long visit to the family, I learned a lot about Iranian life from two very different deaths.

Mohamed had lost a great-aunt—a ninety-year-old matriarch. Together, we set off for her Shabba Haft—Seventh Night—an evening of ritual grieving that takes place one week after a death. The woman’s children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren were so numerous that the gathering spilled from her own large house into a neighbor’s. Both homes were decked with black crepe, their courtyards filled with carpets and cushions and strung with fluorescent lights. Mohamed parked the car and we split up, he heading with the other men to the neighbor’s house—neighbors generally lend their homes for the men’s gathering, since women often come encumbered with toddlers who might make a mess. Janet and I joined the women and children crowding into the reception room of the dead woman’s home.

Next door, among the men, a mullah read from the Koran, his voice piped through to the women’s gathering via loudspeakers. Mullahs who do such readings are chosen for their fine voices, and after the Koran chant he began to sing a low, mournful song extolling thei
rtues of mothers. Around the crowded room, women sobbed gently. Then, with the end of his song, the mood changed abruptly. Servants spread huge sheets of plastic over the carpets and laid out mountainous trays of lamb, chicken, rice and vegetables.

Such gatherings bring families together, but this Shabba Haft also revealed how ten years of war and revolution had torn this Iranian family apart. A picture of the dead woman’s grandson, a “martyr” in the war with Iraq, hung in the center of the living-room wall. Underneath the portrait sat the young man’s sister, who had recently been released from prison after serving a seven-year sentence for shouting “Death to Khomeini.” Her brother, the martyr, had denounced her to the Revolutionary Guards.

“You will find something like this in almost every middle-class Iranian family, if you can get them to talk about it,” Janet said. “The revolution really divided people here—passionate believers and passionate disbelievers all under the same roof.” We were sitting next to the young woman’s aunt. The aunt had lost all three of her own children—two fighting for the regime, the third struggling against it. A daughter died in training for the volunteer women’s militia. At her first practice on the rifle range, she was so startled by the burst of automatic weapons fire that she stood up in her trench and was shot in the head. One son went to the Iran-Iraq front and was listed missing in action. I didn’t tell his mother that I had been to the battle lines where her son had fought. I’d gone from the Iraqi side, since Iran didn’t take women reporters to the front. I arrived the afternoon of a major Iraqi victory, and the Iranian dead lay sprawled and flyblown in their trenches like ragged sacks of rotting meat. The Iraqis had already set to work reinforcing the few meters of desert they’d captured. Giant earth-moving equipment rumbled right over the corpses, leaving the sand smeared with a paste of mashed flesh. There would be no identification for such bodies. Hundreds, maybe thousands of young men will always be “missing” in those sands.