The Ministry of Guidance Invites You to Not Stay: An American Family in Iran (5 page)

“And you want to go with them?”

“Yes, I do, but if it’s not possible, then I won’t. I’ll just see friends and family.”

“No, it’s okay,” he said. “You can go with them.” The worse cop, the younger man, was turning into a veritable good cop now.

“Really?”

“Yes, why not?” He squinted at me as if he were sizing me up before a boxing match.

“Okay.” I stood up as they did and shook their reluctant hands. “One other thing,” I said. “I won’t have any trouble at the airport—leaving, I mean—will I?”

“No,” they both said, shaking their heads. “It’ll be taken care of,” added the now-good cop.

“I’m coming back in a few weeks, with my American wife and child, for an extended stay,” I said. “I won’t have trouble at the airport then, or will I?”

“Why should you have trouble?” asked the worse cop, with a sneer. “What are you coming for? To cause trouble? Or maybe to gather information?”

“To spend time here with my family,” I said. “Not as a reporter.”

“Then you won’t have any trouble,” he said. “Now, you won’t write about our little meeting here, will you? As a journalist?” he added. It wasn’t a question. “You won’t, because you want to come back with your wife and child.” He stared straight into my eyes.

“No, I won’t write about it,” I lied.

They left the room and closed the door, and for a moment I wasn’t sure what to do. My session had been remarkably mild, I thought, compared to what others had gone through, especially the political prisoners who had been interrogated at Evin, the notorious prison, in the aftermath of the 2009 elections. But the meeting still spoke to the extreme paranoia the regime felt since those elections. That paranoia brought it a big step closer from being an authoritarian state that made a good pretense of allowing some political discourse to being a complete dictatorship that brooked no dissent whatsoever. I walked out the door, said goodbye to Shiravi—who looked extremely uncomfortable standing outside his door, glass of tea still in his hand—and left the building.

I walked for a while, still wondering if coming back to Iran—with my family—would be a good idea. I believed the intelligence officers when they said it wouldn’t be a problem, but they were warning me, too: if I overstepped my bounds—and who knew exactly what those bounds were?—I would be in trouble. Yet this was Iran, thirty-two
years after a successful revolution and two years after an arguably unsuccessful one, and not much was new in terms of the ambiguities, the unknowns, and the maddeningly contradictory behavior of government officials. It was still an Iran I could recognize. I believed, as I had for many years, that despite the brutality, the arrests, and the crackdown on civil liberties as well as the press, powerful figures within Iran were working to advance a more democratic future. Perhaps naïvely, I wanted to be hopeful, rather than—like many of my compatriots who had become apathetic after the Green Movement, even toward the Arab Spring evolving in their own backyard—resigned to the fact that Iran’s destiny was to forever be in the grip of tyranny. I was coming back, even if it could end up being my last trip.

The NBC crew was interviewing Jalili, so I was in no hurry to get back to the hotel. But since I had been given permission to visit the Tehran reactor, I did need to contact them and find out if and when they were going. No sooner had I gotten into a taxi than my phone rang. It was NBC’s Tehran bureau chief, telling me they had finished their interview and were to go to the reactor the next morning. That meant we’d have to change flights. I said I had been told I could go with them and would see them later at the hotel.

Fifteen minutes later I received a call from an “unknown” caller, who had to be a government official, as no one else is allowed to block his or her number from caller ID recognition in Iran. “Mr. Majd?”

“Yes?” The caller did not introduce himself.

“You are not permitted to visit the Tehran nuclear reactor.”

“But I was just told I could,” I protested.

“No, you may not.”

“If you say so,” I said, “but the gentlemen I spoke to this morning specifically said it would be all right—”

“I just told you no,” said the man, sounding a little angry. “Just go and visit friends and family, and then go home. Why not just have a good time in Tehran?”

I shook my head as I hung up. What kind of country was this, where you couldn’t even trust the intelligence officers interrogating you to say what is permitted and what is not? Had they intentionally been fucking with my mind, or had they been overruled afterward? Did someone really suspect that I might be a spy, and that the nuclear reactor—built in the 1970s by Americans, actually—was just too sensitive a location to allow me a peek?
Gee
, I thought,
when did I become so damn important?

There was no question of my staying an extra day now, nor even of spending much time with NBC, so I had the afternoon and early evening to visit a friend or two and then head to the airport for the long trip back to New York. If I couldn’t trust the intelligence officers on the subject of the reactor visit, I wondered, could I trust that I’d be allowed to board my flight in the wee hours of the morning? But they had admonished me to not miss my flight, so after saying my goodbyes at the hotel later that day, I went to visit a friend before heading to the airport.

Snow began falling as dusk arrived, and by the time I was driven to the airport, it had turned into a veritable blizzard. Cars and buses made no allowance for slippery surfaces or poor visibility and sped along, defying traffic regulations and on occasion ending up in a ditch by the side of the unforgiving road or stranded after a pile-up. Just my luck, I thought—the Intelligence Ministry will blame me, and not the storm, if my flight is canceled and I have to return to the hotel. Almost all the international flights that night were indeed canceled, except for two: mine to Frankfurt and one to Amsterdam. When the plane took off, two hours late and after a thorough
de-icing of the wings, I felt genuine relief: not only had I made it through passport control, but during the three hours that I had waited in the airport before boarding, no one had changed his mind about letting me out of the country. Furthermore, once I was seated, no one had come to drag me off the flight, as had happened to other Iranians on hit lists maintained by the competing security services. As soon as the plane leveled off, still in Iranian airspace, I ordered a scotch. A double.

What is it about Iran and authoritarianism? Why, after so many attempts in the last hundred years or so to advance democratic rule, has Iran always reneged on the promises of people’s revolutions and reverted to dictatorship? Perhaps my optimism about the future, my belief that the country is on a circuitous path to an inevitable true democracy, was unfounded after all; perhaps we Iranians will forever simply replace one dictatorship with another; perhaps our very DNA condemns us to living in a society in which the absolute power of the state is accepted as a fact. I thought about it on the long flight from Tehran to New York via Frankfurt. Maybe I was more concerned now because I was about to subject my wife and child to living in an authoritarian state. Given my profession, it would be impossible for me not to be subjected to government scrutiny and perhaps constant observation.

How utterly selfish of me! I had been privileged to live in liberal democracies all my life, first far away from the shah’s secret police, who had interrogated some of my student friends, and then far from the Islamic Revolution’s “guidance”—which was much more about dictate than about suggestion. In my reporting and research trips to Iran prior to the elections of 2009, I had been aware that since I didn’t have to live there, whatever discomfort I might feel would always be temporary. I had my escape, my foreign passport and my
foreign home, and my stays in Iran were excursions, not a way of life. Although my family and I would still have that escape hatch after moving to Tehran, we would also be living as Iranians in a country whose appeal was, admittedly, more romantic than anything else. I knew people who had been caught up in the security apparatus of the state; I had friends and family members who had been arrested and had even endured long stretches of solitary confinement at Evin prison. Iran, I knew, was not quite the dystopia that Westerners sometimes imagine it to be—it could never be compared to Saddam Hussein’s Iraq or the Kims’ North Korea—but it was also unpredictable in terms of its politics and civil rights. My interrogators in Tehran, Mr. Bad and Mr. Worse, merely represented the long Persian tradition of absolute monarchy, of state or aristocratic control over its citizens; if the shah were still in power, they would have been SAVAK, or
his
secret policemen. And despite the mildness, the near placidity, of my experience compared to the horrors others had gone through, I again wondered if there was something innate in our culture that consistently produced men and women who happily worked to subdue free thought and opposition to their sociopolitical system, or in feudal times, opposition to what was essentially serfdom.

During those hundred years of the nation trying to free itself from despots and despotism, each time, from 1906 onward, Iran’s citizens’ efforts were foiled by the machinations of either foreign powers or native despots, often disguised as liberators of the Persian people. Ingeniously, the Islamic Republic’s peculiar form of democracy has not only subverted traditional notions of dictatorship (there are still, even after the 2009 elections, few absolutes in Iran, as my own experience showed), it has also endowed its supporters with a sort of moral righteousness that makes them truly believe they are not just doing God’s work but serving the cause of justice and doing
right,
much as other ideologues, such as communists, have believed elsewhere. Perhaps that is the reason for the republic’s longevity, despite its vulnerability to an educated and intellectual class’s demands for change. That same class, arguably smaller then than it is today, supported the revolution against the shah, and while it is generally not looking to overthrow the current Iranian system by force, at least not yet, it continues to struggle against the authoritarian state it helped to usher in. (The irony of the Persian Islamic system—rule by clerics with unquestioned authority—is that Shia Islam, the sect to which 90 percent of Iranians adhere but a minority sect worldwide, was founded in
response
to the tyranny of Sunni caliphs.) I wondered as I left Tehran—my mind swimming, trying to reconcile my run-in with the Intelligence Ministry with my decision to move to Tehran—whether, given my fear of a flaw in our national character, if today’s Iranians ever succeed in bringing true change to their country and making Iran a democracy with freedoms unheard of, Mr. Bad and Mr. Worse will simply find themselves with a new master to serve.

2
TOUCHDOWN

Flying from the United States to Iran is taxing under the best of circumstances, but when flying with an eight-month-old baby, it is an altogether different experience. Especially if one is traveling with enough suitcases for an extended stay, a Cadillac-size stroller, and a Barcalounger-size baby car seat; and especially if that baby is accustomed to organic and natural foods that must be transported in bulk to one’s destination, for god forbid that he consume what other babies do; and especially if his mother insists on bringing the water filter, weighing some pounds, along with its multiple cartridges, from our home in New York, where the quality of the tap water, just like Tehran’s, is boasted about by its residents (but not this mother, who believes that fluoride is a poison, even if only applied to the skin). I was, in the past, accustomed to the mild culture shock of boarding a KLM or Lufthansa flight to Tehran in Amsterdam or Frankfurt—it’s as if one were already in Tehran, okay, a
nice
part of Tehran—but my wife, Karri, wasn’t. She was nervous as we waited in line at Schiphol airport to board our flight to my hometown, surrounded by Iranians, the Farsi language, and women in various states of Islamic-friendly dress, from head scarves already firmly in place to shawls draped over the shoulder, ready to be summoned for duty sometime
before landing. Besides the suitcases we’d checked, we had the stroller, a baby in arms, and as much hand luggage as would ordinarily serve my baggage purposes for a four-week solo trip. Karri asked me if breast-feeding in public was taboo in Iran or among Iranians abroad, for she would be feeding our son on the flight, and I had to confess that I didn’t know.