The Ayatollah Begs to Differ (7 page)

“Can you call someone and find out for me where Mr. Javanfekr’s office is, then?” I asked, trying to sound authoritative. The guard picked up a phone and turned his back.

“Go back to the corner building,” he said after he hung up.

“But they told me to come here,” I said.

“That’s the president’s office,” he said, pointing behind me. “If you go in here, you can’t come out.” “Hotel California,” again. I walked back down the street and stepped into the corner building.

“Mr. Javanfekr,” I said to the guard. “I have an appointment, and he’s left my name at the door.”

“What’s his number?” he replied this time, forgetting that he’d sent me on a long detour from which I may not have returned had I not asked where I was going. I gave the guard the extension, and he dialed it. “It’s busy. Have a seat.”

I sat down on one of three chairs and looked at my watch. The door behind me opened and four men walked in, dressed remarkably much as I was. On closer inspection, their gray suit jackets didn’t quite match their gray trousers, their white shirts were slightly graying, and their loafers weren’t horsehide. And the buttons on their cuffs were all intact, neatly and immovably sewn into place.
“Salam,”
they said to me one by one, short nods of the head in my direction, the Persian gesture of respect, as they huddled in front of the guard. I was too busy examining their clothes to hear whom they were there to see, but when the guard asked for a telephone extension, two of the men whipped out their cell phones and began dialing. I stared enviously; they must be vastly more important than me, I thought, before realizing that I could have also easily bypassed the cell phone ban by simply coming straight to this office rather than making the unintended stop in the first building.

Whoever they had come to see wasn’t in his office either, so they took turns sitting down on the two remaining chairs, dialing their phones every few seconds. Every now and then one would look at me and nod his head again, and I would nod back. I caught the eye of one who was standing long enough for him to feel obliged to follow the nod with a word or two, and he quickly said,
“Mokhlessam,”
or “I’m your devoted friend,” a common enough pleasantry in conversational Farsi that would have in the past been a little too informal, too “street,” despite how it sounds in English, to hear in a government office.
“Chakeram,”
I replied in my best Tehrani accent, smiling and bowing my head. “I’m your obedient servant.” Even more “street,” but the correct retort in the Persian tradition of ta’arouf, a defining Persian characteristic that includes the practice, often infuriating, of small talk, or frustratingly and sometimes incomprehensible back-and-forth niceties uttered in any social encounter. Ta’arouf can be a long-winded prelude to what is actually the matter at hand, whether the matter be a serious negotiation or just ordering dinner, or it can, as in this case, be insincere but well-intentioned politesse. I wondered if he noticed my “missing” cuff button. His phone rang with an incongruous little dance number, the kind of ring tone only Finnish or Chinese designers—and, it seems, also many Iranians—would think appropriate for grown men’s telephones, and he stepped outside to take the call.

The guard dialed a number again on his phone and gestured to me with the handset. “It’s ringing,” he said, holding the receiver in the air. I stood up and took it. Mr. Javanfekr, it appeared, was in his office and ready to receive me. I handed the receiver back to the guard, who, distracted by the other men and now a television crew that had just shown up, took it and nodded his head a few times, gesturing for me to go through the metal detector. “The building on the left,” he said, noticing my inquisitive look. I left the four men and the television crew, almost all chatting away on cell phones, and made my way to the next building. Another guard, seated at a desk and infinitely more bored than the last, looked at me with raised eyebrows. “Mr. Javanfekr,” I said.

“That door over there,” he replied, pointing to an office on the ground floor. I hesitated for a moment before realizing that no one would be escorting me, and then I walked straight into Javanfekr’s office.

Ali Akbar Javanfekr has the unenviable job of being President Ahmadinejad’s top press adviser, as well as his most senior official spokesman. He doesn’t work in the presidential press office, and doesn’t sully his days with routine and tedious requests, or with the details of the president’s press schedule. But from his large office with views of the towering pine trees in the compound, he ponders the big picture—public diplomacy, if you will, for a boss who seems to have little comprehension of the concept. He is also the president’s chief propaganda adviser, which is a concept his boss
does
have a natural instinct for. A little-known figure in Iranian politics (like many of the president’s other top advisers, who wisely, it seems, prefer to stay in the shadow of a president who demands top billing everywhere he goes), he is someone who issues statements only rarely and only on very serious matters, such as his denial that the British servicemen and service-woman who endured thirteen days of captivity in the spring of 2007 were in any way tortured and, in a clever propagandist moment, his announcement that they were free to tell their stories to the Iranian press after they were barred from doing so in England by the British government.
⁵

Mr. Javanfekr is a slight man with a standard-issue Ahmadinejad government haircut—thick short black hair parted to one side and partially covering the forehead—and the obligatory, but in his case quite full and quite white, beard. He was examining some faxes when I stepped into his office, but he turned and greeted me in a soft voice. “Please,” he said, “have a seat.” In Iranian offices, one is never asked if one would like tea or coffee or any other beverage: it is assumed one will drink tea, and usually within seconds the office tea man will arrive with a fresh glass and a bowl of sugar cubes.

Javanfekr sat down beside me on an ugly leatherette couch; he was dressed in navy blue trousers, a white shirt, and a navy cardigan, and with his soft voice and quiet, gentle demeanor he appeared more as a college professor than a top aide to someone who has been likened to, at least in some of the Western media, Hitler. I couldn’t help but notice his footwear: he was wearing the ubiquitous plastic sandals that are found by the doors of Iranian homes (for the vast majority of Iranians remove their shoes before entering a house) but not often in offices, and certainly not in important government offices. But Mr. Javanfekr was clearly comfortable in them, as comfortable as the tea man was in his identical pair when he entered the room with a tray balanced on one upturned palm of an outstretched arm. The office tea man, only one rung above a janitor on the personnel ladder, was dressed just like his boss, save the cardigan, and it struck me that the more socialist aspects of the Islamic Republic, indeed Islam itself, were on full view in this quiet and shabby corner office at the heart of the republic’s power center. The Islamic Revolution had promised, in 1979, to do away with class and more particularly with any royalist,
taghouti
(which implies class structure) trappings in government and society, and in Javanfekr’s office at least, it had succeeded. It was not theater; Javanfekr did not strike me as one to affect a style, as it were, nor was I someone, say, a foreigner, whom the presidential office wished to impress with its overt dismissal of both Western and sometimes Persian pomp and airs. No, Javanfekr and his tea man were simply comfortable with who they were; a generation ago upper-class Iranians would have called them both
dahati
, “peasants,” for their appearance. Today some Iranians still do, both inside the country and in exile, and usually with an air of absolute disgust. But it just doesn’t matter anymore.

What I wanted to know most from the president’s top media adviser was who among the top echelon of government officials had thought, other than Ahmadinejad himself, that organizing a conference on the Holocaust in Tehran (held in the winter of 2006 to wide ridicule mainly outside, but also to some extent inside, Iran) had been a good idea. At least in terms of how the media would see it. Iranians, particularly those who haven’t traveled much outside the country and no matter what their level of education, have very little knowledge, if any, of the Holocaust. Contemporary European and American history is not taught much in schools, films and documentaries on the Holocaust rarely make it to Iran, and books on the Holocaust are rarely translated. It was and is still generally accepted by most Iranians that something very bad happened to European Jews under the Third Reich, but because it didn’t affect or have anything to do with Iran, not even Iranian Jews, who were mostly unaffected by World War II, the Holocaust was rarely thought about by Iranians until their president decided to make it an issue of great import.

Javanfekr was frozen by the question. He stared at me for a very long time, not angrily, but more with a bewildered look in his eyes. I was impressed that he didn’t want to repeat the standard government line, or a denial of Holocaust denial; perhaps he just didn’t have an answer that he thought would satisfy me. An Iranian who lives in New York might not, he may have reasoned, understand the subtleties and nuances in his president’s pronouncements and actions.

I thought of Fuad, my Jewish-Iranian friend from Los Angeles who had explained to me his perspective on Ahmadinejad’s Holocaust denial with no small measure of admiration for what he saw as the finest example of Persian ta’arouf one-upmanship. Ahmadinejad, Fuad reasoned, had in effect said to the Europeans (and, in a letter, to Angela Merkel, chancellor of Germany) that he couldn’t believe that Europeans had been or could be such monsters (and this at a time when Iran was being portrayed as monstrous). “You’re not monsters,” Ahmadinejad was saying. “Surely not? Surely you’re a great civilization,” a sentiment that could only compel the Europeans, and particularly the Germans, to respond in effect, “No, no, no, we were. We really were monsters. The very worst kind.” And by further asking why Israel had had to be created by them, he was essentially getting the Europeans to admit that they were entirely capable of genocide again. It didn’t matter, Fuad suggested, that Europeans by and large didn’t squirm, for Iranians and Arabs got the message, if only subconsciously. The Westernized and West-worshipping Middle Easterners whom Ahmadinejad loathes with the same passion as Khomeini did could hear the civilization they so admire shout, loud and clear, “Yes, yes, we committed the very worst genocide in history. Only a few years ago, and who knows, we could do it again.” And Ahmadinejad must have, Fuad said, derived enormous satisfaction in hearing Europeans indignantly insist that their fathers were mass murderers. But Javanfekr was unwilling or unable to explain the thought process behind a Holocaust conference in Tehran, and maybe Fuad had been too generous in his reading of Ahmadinejad’s intentions.

Javanfekr continued to stare at me with blank, almost glazed eyes behind his large, square 1970s-style glasses, unwilling or unable to tackle the subject. I felt a little sorry for him: perhaps it would have been much easier if I had been a foreigner. I changed the subject and we engaged in the kind of polite small talk and ta’arouf that lead nowhere and are one reason for the perpetual paralysis of Iran’s bloated bureaucracy: “I am at your disposal should you need anything” (he most certainly wasn’t), “Please call if you require anything” (please don’t, for if you do, I will have to lie and say I will help when in fact I’d much rather not), and, from my lips, “Thanks so much for giving up your valuable time” (he seemed to have nothing else to do, and no phone calls or messages interrupted our meeting), “You’ve been very kind and helpful” (when you essentially stared at me the whole time), and “Thank you for your hospitality” (you could at least have worn shoes).