The Ministry of Guidance Invites You to Not Stay: An American Family in Iran (16 page)

“I’m sure he’ll be happy to,” he replied. “I’ll let you know as soon as I hear back from him.” Weeks went by, and when I pressed him, the editor said he had spoken to Larijani, who had asked him if I was related to Maryam Majd. Maryam, a well-known photographer, had just been arrested on charges of “endangering national security,” the
catchall phrase applied to all political prisoners. I’m not related to her, even though one of my cousins is named Maryam Majd and is the wife of former president Khatami’s brother; but Larijani, according to the editor of
KhabarOnline
, was “afraid to meet with [me].” I thought he should be more afraid of all the Maryam Majds who languish in prison but will one day look to exact revenge—much as Larijani and his ilk took revenge on former shah functionaries in 1979—on the powerful men who have decided that any form of dissent, even a propensity to dissent, must be snuffed out. But that a Larijani would be afraid of me, or of what I might write, was also tremendously gratifying to me. After all, I now lived in Tehran rather anonymously, was not allowed to use my pen, and felt as insignificant to the Iranian power equation as every other Iranian I crossed paths with in my daily, often mundane routine—which included little apart from note taking and staying abreast of the news, daily grocery shopping, visiting friends, and taking care of a demanding infant on the cusp of toddlerhood.

Like their American or European counterparts, Iranian youth, flocking to Facebook and other social media, sometimes forget that it’s not only their friends and “friends” who can see their lives unfold on their computer screens, it’s everybody. Very soon after we moved into our apartment, finding a baby-sitter for Khash became a priority. Baby-sitting is not, as in the West, a quick way for teenagers and young women to make a buck while studying or waiting for acting auditions. In Iran, nannies come from a somewhat professional class; the many middle-class families who employ them expect them to work every day and nurture a child or children all the way through their high school years. A baby-sitter, someone who occasionally watches a child while its parents are out for the evening, is a rarity.

But by asking around we were able to find a young woman, a social worker in her early twenties, who also spoke good English. She was wonderful with Khash, who seemed to like her and listened carefully
when she spoke to him in Farsi (which we encouraged). But she often canceled on us at the last minute, usually when we most wanted to attend an event or were invited to a party we particularly looked forward to. On the days when she would show up, I would leave my computer on for her with the VPN connected, and based on the browsing history that, I’m sorry, I just had to check later, Facebook was the site she visited most often when Khash was asleep. Or maybe when he was awake, too. And she friended us both.

Usually her last-minute no-shows happened on weekends, when she, like so many other Tehranis, would escape to the mountains or the Caspian shore; she would text me or Karri to say she was stuck in horrendous traffic, which was believable enough—Iran’s traffic patterns can make a one-hour trip to a mountain resort take three to four hours depending on when you leave.

One time, on a night when we were to attend a friend’s fortieth birthday party—it promised to be a bacchanal unrivaled in Tehran’s infamous party scene—she texted me at the last minute to say she had been in a car accident on the way back from
shomal
, the shore, and couldn’t make it. That was also believable, given that the accident rate on Iran’s roads is among the highest in the world. “R u ok?” I texted back. She was fine, she said, but had to work out how to get back to Tehran. Karri, who by now cried foul every time the sitter canceled, was furious. No way, she argued, had the girl been in an accident. She’d just found something better to do, like all spoiled Iranian kids.

I wanted to believe our sitter, but I thought I’d check her Facebook page to see what she had been up to over the weekend. And yes, Karri was right: less than an hour before, she had changed her status from “single” to “in a relationship.” Talk about beating the Islamic system. The change in her relationship status couldn’t be due to her falling into the arms of an eligible man as her car smashed into another, or an accidental brush of the lips as their faces collided
when two cars did. Iran’s cellular network makes updating Facebook or even accessing the Internet while in a car practically impossible, so she couldn’t be stuck on the road somewhere. No, it was just a case of a Tehran
duffi
finding her
puffi
, if only temporarily, with no time for watching a baby.

While setting up an Internet connection that allows free access to information is easier than one might suspect, and easier than the U.S. administration seems to believe given that President Obama and Secretary Clinton often mentioned the “cyber curtain” that exists in Iran, obtaining a good source of liquor is easy, too. A visitor may be forgiven for thinking that everyone drinks in the Islamic Republic, since there seems to be no shortage of alcohol or of entrepreneurial suppliers, but of course it is only in the big cities, and among the more secular classes, that drinking is a regular pastime. Liquor comes into Iran via a number of sources: across the borders from Turkey, Iraqi Kurdistan, Azerbaijan, Armenia, or in small boats from the Persian Gulf countries. Iran’s Christian (mostly Armenian), Zoroastrian, and Jewish minorities can legally manufacture liquor for their own use, but they are technically prohibited from selling it to their Muslim compatriots or even serving it to them. Naturally, that doesn’t stop some in the community, mostly Armenians, from entering the rather lucrative and easy business of selling
aragh
, the traditional Persian vodka distilled from raisins and affectionately known as “dog sweat,” and occasionally homemade red wine to customers they know, either through a personal recommendation or a genuine friendship. I needed a good supply of both foreign spirits and the Iranian one, which is far cheaper than imported bootleg whiskey or vodka and which I rather like. A year or so in Tehran, a city with no bars, meant evenings at home mostly, drink in hand.

As with almost everything illegal anywhere, one has to ask friends and acquaintances for a connection to a supplier. One friend had told me to stay away from foreign liquor—even though it looked,
smelled, and sometimes tasted like the real thing, it was inevitably fake, produced in the mountains of Iraqi Kurdistan or in Turkey using “essences” of the spirit mixed with alcohol and water. “How can there be more Dewar’s here than in Scotland?” he asked. “Or more Johnnie Walker? You’ll get a bad hangover if you drink that shit.” He himself stuck to good old Iranian dog sweat, which he happily decanted out of five-gallon drums into plastic one-liter Sprite bottles for me, and which I transported home, a little uncomfortably, in the front seat of a taxi, sweating as much as the dog in the bottle whenever we drove past leering Basij patrols under the overpasses.

But I wanted some whiskey, too, and I thought Karri would like the occasional vodka, seeing as she was unlikely to get much drinkable wine. (Beer, although available almost as widely as spirits, is not as popular in Iran, for it doesn’t offer the same bang for the buck, or thwack for the toman, as spirits do, even though it is just as difficult to transport across borders. And since nonalcoholic beer is sold in every deli and supermarket in Iran, adding an ounce or two of
aragh
to the brew makes for an easy, cheap, and passable beer.)

So another friend introduced me to his dealer, a youngish man who drove up to an apartment building where we were having lunch one day and called us. We went into the busy street, where he double-parked his old Peugeot and opened the trunk. A few cases of whiskey and vodka, some open, were in view, and I asked for a couple of bottles, Dewar’s and Absolut, handing over the equivalent of about fifty dollars. He removed them from the cases and put them in a black plastic bag.

That was his only nod to discretion in an otherwise blatantly illegal act that could get him years in prison and me a good lashing with a whip if a policeman, or worse, the Gasht-e Ershad, the infamous morality patrol, drove by at that moment. I had always had a drink or two, or more, when visiting Tehran over the years, courtesy of friends whose home bars seemed much better stocked than mine
in New York, but the act of buying liquor myself, and the thought of making it a regular habit, was a little disconcerting. A bit thrilling, too, I’ll admit—not unlike how I felt buying pot in my college days.

Karri, perhaps influenced by our friend who insisted all bootleg liquor in Iran is fake, declared my bottles to also be so after taking her first sips. And she’s not even a whiskey or vodka drinker. (To be fair, however, she was, during her acting and modeling days, a bartender at a couple of New York bars, one of which is where we actually met, and she is more familiar with spirits and cocktails than I’ll ever be.) Fake or not, the Scotch tasted fine to me, and the vodka no different from what I’ve had before, but I decided that Karri and my friend were probably right, and that drinking something that could be even more poisonous than the real stuff was probably unwise. We determined that I would only buy the real deal, if I could find it, or else we’d stick to Iranian martinis—dog sweat and whatever fresh juice was available in season. Vermouth, absent in Iran and probably considered pointless anyway, was out of the question.

A friend of mine who drinks, chain-smokes cigarettes, and uses opium with abandon told me he had a contact who could deliver genuine spirits, specializing in high-end European vodkas. (Oddly, it’s almost impossible to get Russian vodka in Iran, even fake, when Iran shares a border with a number of former Soviet republics and is on friendly terms with Russia.) “They’re expensive,” he said, “but I promise it’s the real stuff. It’s the only thing I drink.” I asked if I could share his contact, and he said, matter-of-factly, no. “He doesn’t trust anyone and prefers to deal with as few people as possible.” To me, that meant the customer had to be connected to government, but my friend said he’d be happy to order whatever I wanted. I said I’d buy whatever was genuine.

The next time I saw him, he took me into his den, opened a closet and then a huge safe inside, and said I should take whatever I wanted. He had a price list in his hand. From among the thirty or so different
bottles, I chose a Scandinavian vodka—not the unexceptional Absolut that is readily available from any dealer—and paid double what it would cost outside Iran, also double what I could have paid if I had been less concerned about its provenance. Back home, Karri declared it genuine the minute she observed me unscrew the cap. “It doesn’t have the shot measure pourer built in, like all the other liquor in Iran,” she said. “It must be real.”

As easy as buying liquor is in any big Iranian city, it’s even easier to buy bootleg movies on DVD. Along with watching satellite television, watching DVDs is a favorite (illegal) pastime for many Iranians. What is legal and sold at every newsstand tends to be Iranian films that have satisfied the censors or popular television series, so for foreign films one is obliged to turn to the black market. Small shops in almost every mall carry foreign films, below or above the counter, and every day street vendors lay out their wares—the latest Hollywood hits—openly on pavements to entice passersby; if one lingers for longer than a few seconds, they’ll produce stacks of DVDs from a bag or backpack.

In our neighborhood, one young man could be found outside a shoe store and near a famous ice-cream parlor and an
ash
joint (a soup restaurant not unlike the
Seinfeld
Soup Nazi’s in both look and the attitudes of the servers) on the northern end of Vali Asr every day at around six in the evening. At that moment strollers out for air on the tree-lined boulevard, evening shoppers, and ice-cream or soup aficionados, depending on the season, would be out in force. Conveniently, this young man was also across the street from a small park where we would take Khash for his afternoon constitutional, and on our return home we would stop to check if he had any new films we hadn’t yet seen.

The DVDs were not, naturally, originals—they were always copies made from one original smuggled into Iran, or sometimes they were downloaded from the Internet. I didn’t want to buy
pardeh-ee
films, literally “curtain-like,” which were films shot in a theater with a video camera; so the dealer, who like all Iranians was fascinated by and taken with Khash and my American wife, would warn me off certain titles. “These are
nines
,” he’d say, taking out a stack from his backpack, meaning they were direct digital copies of originals and therefore watchable. I wondered why he didn’t say they were tens, but I suppose he was trying for honesty with a customer he hoped to keep—I’d told him we’d be living in Iran for a while. He wouldn’t claim his products to be quite perfect copies, even though technically they were.

But our man often seemed to go AWOL, not answering his cell phone for a few days, leading us to wonder if he’d been busted. Then I would venture farther south on Vali Asr to Vanak Square, where another DVD seller would assure me that although his prices were higher than others, a little over a dollar rather than a little less, he could guarantee that all his films were nines. Not tens? No:
nines
.

I would buy as many films as possible at one time, never quite sure if our dealers would disappear or be arrested, but they remained a relatively regular presence—we’d usually see them on the late afternoon walk from the park to our apartment. We’d also stop for fresh hot bread at the bakery, which Khash would get a start on nibbling, and whatever groceries we’d missed buying earlier in the day. We returned to the United States having seen every single film of interest that was released in 2010 and even 2011, even a few
pardeh-ee
ones, new releases that we just couldn’t resist.

Films were an accompaniment to our satellite viewing, limited as that was to the BBC for news, or the Fashion Channel for amusement, since our satellite guy, who expertly connected the receiver and set up the channels, didn’t have the codes for the pay movie stations, or so he said, and we’d have to get someone else in to unlock them. For another hefty fee, presumably. Satellite installers are very much like the cable guy in the United States, if not the actual character played by Jim Carrey in
The Cable Guy
. Highly professional and technical
wizards, they can install a dish, set up a box, and show you how it all works in minutes, but of course they prefer to take hours, both to validate the amount they charge (for no Iranian would pay their rates if the job seemed a simple matter) and to pontificate on and carp about everything from the government to the state of the world.