My Prison, My Home

1. THE “ROBBERY”

THE EARLY HOURS OF DECEMBER 30, 2006, began for me like any day when I would depart Tehran for the United States. I had come back to Iran, as I did two or three times a year, to visit my ninety-three-year-old mother. The doorbell rang at one a.m. It was Mr. Modarress, the taxi driver I used whenever I was in Iran, to take me to the airport. My mother held up a Quran for me to kiss and walk under for blessing and good luck; from a jug, she poured water on the hallway floor outside the apartment, as is customary in Iran to ensure a voyager a safe, prosperous journey.

Mother had stopped coming to visit us in the States after suffering a stroke two years earlier, although she could manage the shorter trip to Vienna, where my sister, Hayedeh, lived. Hayedeh came to Tehran once a year, on my mother’s birthday. I came more often, and always made it a point to spend Christmas with Mother in Tehran, returning to Washington, D.C., to be with my family for New Year’s Day. On this night, Mother and I sat up together, waiting for the driver. We talked about my childhood in Tehran; as well as my daughter, Haleh; my grandchildren, Ariana and Karenna, ages six and four; and my husband, Shaul. Mother was very fond of her grandchildren and great-grandchildren. I always saved these stories for the last few hours, to keep her mind away from my leaving.

Mother—“Mutti” as we called her in the German tradition—had come to Iran as a twenty-three-year-old bride in the late 1930s. She had met and fallen in love with my father while at the University of Vienna, where he was studying for his doctorate in botany. In more than fifty-five years of marriage, she had never fallen out of love. When my father died in 1995, she chose to remain in Iran, wishing to be buried next to him.

On this night, Mutti was on edge. “If you were only in Austria already!” she said. “I will feel better when you call me from Vienna Airport.” I tried to sound upbeat. “I will see you in three months,” I replied. I never prolonged our good-byes. They were too difficult for her. I kissed her face one last time, smoothed her gray hair, and walked down the stairs.

As I got into Mr. Modarress’s beat-up Peykan, the most common passenger car in Iran, I saw my mother looking down at me and waving from an upstairs window. She had removed her shawl, and I could see the beige cashmere sweater I had given her. Her last words to the driver had been “Call me when Khanum Doktor [Madame Doctor] is gone.” Ever since I had received my Ph.D. in 1964, my proud mother always referred to me as “Frau Doktor” when she spoke of me to Europeans, and “Khanum Doktor” when she spoke to Iranians.

It was a cold, clear Tehran night. The haze from factory smokestacks and car exhaust pipes that shrouds the city by day had dissipated. The street was quiet. No one else was out—not even at the revolutionary magistrate’s court at the end of the street, where I often saw people escorted in wearing handcuffs. My mother’s street was usually packed with parked cars and shoppers by eight a.m. Residents blocked their small driveways with huge flowerpots to stop non-residents from stealing their parking spaces. Only when evening fell did Street No. 18 revert back to its residents.

I checked again that I had my passport, plane ticket, and other documents, and settled into the backseat, only mildly apprehensive, as I always was when leaving Iran. Under President Ahmadinejad, who had been elected a little over a year before, the security services had cracked down on writers and academics. We all knew of newspaper closures and arrests. The well-known intellectual and political philosopher Ramin Jahanbegloo had been arrested at the airport on his way to Europe, and spent four months at Evin Prison, where he was coerced into saying he had unknowingly acted against the interests of state security. But Jahanbegloo was interested in politically charged ideas, such as democratic transitions. My work as the director of the Middle East Program at the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington, D.C., on the other hand, merely involved organizing talks and conferences on Middle Eastern issues, and hardly merited the attention of the Iranian authorities.

In the car, Modarress was not his usual talkative self. He drove in silence. He was also going slowly. Usually, he acted like everyone else in Tehran’s frantic, everything-goes traffic, weaving in and out of the lanes as if he were on a racetrack. Now he seemed preoccupied—with monetary or family problems, I assumed. He is getting old, I thought. He doesn’t like driving at night anymore. The day before, he had made all sorts of excuses not to drive me to the airport. His mother-in-law was sick, he said; he might have to go to the provinces, to Tabriz. But my mother insisted. “You are the only driver I trust to take Khanum Doktor to the airport,” she told him and in the end he came.

We were almost at the exit ramp to Yadegar-e Imam Highway, the road that would take us to the airport, when I first noticed the dark green Peugeot sedan that had pulled alongside us. The driver was motioning for us to stop. When we didn’t, the Peugeot began to force us off the road. I had called my mother earlier to wish her good night; we had hung up, but I was still holding the cell phone in my hand, unsure what was happening, thinking that perhaps we had a flat tire. I had barely made out the Peugeot’s four occupants before our car was pushed onto the shoulder, blocked off by the Peugeot, its doors inches away from the hood of our car.

Three men, large knives strapped to their hips, jumped out of the car. They all seemed to be wearing identical, olive drab outfits. One, a tall, burly man with a crude Persian accent, ordered Modarress to switch off the motor, open the trunk, and hand him the car keys. Even in the dark, I could make out an ugly, pockmarked, unshaven face. He took my suitcase. Another disheveled man snatched my carry-on bag from the front passenger seat. The third got into the backseat beside me. In the semidarkness he looked sinister. Slivers of light glinted on his rimless eyeglasses and bald head. Astonishingly, he was grinning as he examined the contents of my handbag. “Take everything, but leave my passport and plane ticket,” I managed to say. “I am traveling tonight.”

He paid no heed. Still grinning, he took both my American and Iranian passports, my plane ticket, and my purse. He inched his way closer to me and thrust his hand into my coat pockets. The ridiculous thought crossed my mind that, in the Islamic Republic, strange men were not allowed to sit next to or look at women they did not know, let alone search their coat pockets. I pleaded again for my passport and plane ticket but to no avail. I kept praying for a passing car to stop. None did.

I heard Modarress’s voice outside the car, followed by the trunk being slammed shut. The burly man, who clearly was in charge, reappeared at my window. “Did you find everything?” he asked the man sitting beside me. The man nodded. “Okay. Let’s move.” I heard him order Modarress to sit behind the wheel and put his head down, then change his mind and order him to lie down on the front seat. Modarress meekly complied. “If you raise your head, I will break your neck; I will beat you to death. I will kill you,” he told him. He ordered me to get on the floor. “There is no room,” I said, eyeing the narrow space between the front and the back seats. “Get down, you bitch,” he said, “or I will smash your skull; I will kill you. Do as you are told.” In minute, they were gone. As I raised my head, I noticed that the license plate on the Peugeot was splattered with mud—I couldn’t read a single number.

Modarress raised his head from the seat. “We were robbed,” he said. His voice was shaky. “We have to report this to the highway police.”

“We don’t have a phone,” I said. My cell phone had been taken, along with my purse and baggage. Modarress said they hadn’t taken his cell phone—a much-prized possession in Tehran. They hadn’t taken his wallet, either. Or my Cartier wristwatch. Or the necklace I was wearing.

The highway police told Modarress that we should stay put and wait for them. I used Modarress’s cell phone to call my mother. “How quickly you got to the airport,” she said. I told her what had happened and quickly added, “But I’m not harmed, nor is Modarress.” All her life, my mother had experienced severe coughing attacks when she was upset. As I held the phone to my ear, I could hear her hard, uneven breathing and the inevitable coughing fit that followed. I tried to reassure her. “Who cares about the lost bags?” I said. “I am alive and they didn’t harm me.”

LIKE A REFUGEE

Although I was frightened and disconcerted, my mind was also focused on practical matters. I asked my mother to phone my sister, Hayedeh, in Vienna and my husband, Shaul, in Potomac, Maryland, outside Washington, to tell them what had happened. I also asked her to call my travel agent and have him cancel my ticket.

I got out of the car and stood by the side of the road, staring down the dark, empty highway. I was buffeted by conflicting emotions. I was grateful I hadn’t been kidnapped, injured, or killed. Like every other visitor to Tehran, I had heard of people being abducted from their cars or homes and held for ransom; I had heard of the armed robberies, which had increased in recent years. I had also read of Iranians being beaten up and thrown, half-dead, into alleys—the ugly handiwork, it was thought, of the secret police. But I was still in one piece. I had not been knifed by my assailants. They had not hit me, broken my jaw. I was grateful to be alive.

But I had lost all of my belongings and money. Worse, I had lost my Iranian identification cards and my Iranian and American passports. I dreaded the many days of red tape and bureaucracy that I knew lay ahead. I felt like a refugee from some war-torn country, without papers, without proof of identity, unable to travel. Despite my wool coat with its fur collar, I was cold and numb. I was astonished that not one of the cars that drove by stopped to offer help, but prostitution is rampant in and around Tehran. They probably think I am one of them, I thought ruefully, standing on a highway in the middle of the night.

I was startled when two men emerged from behind the bushes along the island dividing the highway. They, too, seemed to be wearing olive drab outfits. They spoke quietly to Modarress. Then, as suddenly as they had appeared, they left. I asked Modarress who they were. “They are members of the highway patrol,” he said. I thought it strange that their outfits were seemingly identical to those of the men who had just robbed us. Besides, I had never heard of a highway patrol appearing on foot. I said as much to Modarress. He did not reply.

It took an hour for a police car to show up. Two officers, neat and businesslike in their uniforms, motioned for us to get into the back of the police car. I had been standing on the highway with Modarress as we waited for the police, not wishing to sit in our car after the robbery. I was now grateful to be out of the cold, but Modarress, mindful of Iranian protocol, preferred to stand outside and answer the officers’ questions through the window. As we gave a detailed account of the robbery, the policemen shook their heads, as if in disbelief. They exchanged glances when Modarress described the make and color of the car and the clothes our assailants were wearing, but they continued to take notes and said nothing. They asked for and wrote down the usual particulars: my name, address, date of birth, place of birth, ID number, contents of suitcase, carry-on bag, and purse. They had me sign the completed report, gave me a copy, and told me to take it to the police station at Shahrak-e Gharb, a seven-minute car ride from Mutti’s apartment. I didn’t know how we were going to get to the police station or home, since Modarress had surrendered his car keys during the robbery. But Modarress said he kept a spare key in the car, and we drove off.

At two-thirty in the morning, the police station had an abandoned look to it. A sleepy guard registered our names and took away Modarress’s cell phone. The sole officer on duty seemed uninterested in our story. “There is no one here,” he said, sweeping his arm across the empty room, as if we needed convincing. “Go home and report back first thing in the morning.”

All the lights were on in my mother’s apartment in the otherwise dark building. The caretaker let me in. I sent Modarress home and told him to come back at seven a.m. He said he would go back to the scene of the robbery to look for my Iranian passport and papers, since it was quite common for thieves to take the money and valuables from a purse and throw everything else on the side of the road. He thought they would keep the American passport.

In the apartment, my mother was fully dressed, waiting for me. We embraced and repeated, more than once, that the important thing was that I was safe. I called Shaul and Hayedeh. I still thought this was a simple robbery, and Shaul agreed with me.

It was nearly dawn. Mother took two pills and went to bed. I collapsed on a sofa and dozed off in a fitful sleep.

GETTING A NEW PASSPORT

Over the next three days, I went about the tedious business of getting my life back in order and replacing my stolen passport. Since I was familiar with Iranian bureaucracy, I began contacting friends, trying to find people who could intercede on my behalf to cut through the delays and red tape. My first call the morning after the robbery was to my cousin Farhad. “How’s Vienna?” he asked. I told him I was still in Tehran. “Has something happened to Mutti?” he replied. I told him about the robbery. He was suddenly quiet. “I’ll come over right away.”

Farhad is several years younger than me. We grew up in adjacent houses. He had lost his father at a young age, and my father had watched over and mentored him. He was now the man of the family, shouldering responsibility for its elderly women: his own mother, Mutti, and another widowed aunt. Farhad was soft-spoken and gentle, courteous to a fault. But there was also a firm, steely quality to him, and he knew his way around Iranian bureaucracy. I dreaded making the rounds of government offices alone. Farhad ran his own small engineering firm, and I disliked taking him away from his work, but my mother insisted. “You need a man by your side,” she said. “I know this country better than you do.” I swallowed my feminist pride and asked him to accompany me.

Farhad arrived with his son, Kami. Only twenty-five, Kami was as gentle and soft-spoken as his father, but he was tall and well built, towering over everyone else. His height alone will intimidate everyone, I thought optimistically.

Our first stop, once Modarress joined us, was the neighborhood police station. At eight in the morning, the station was crowded and noisy. Men and women were there reporting burglaries, family disputes, and thefts of cell phones. Police officers walked in with men who had been arrested in a drug bust. A mother was desperately looking for her son, who had disappeared two days earlier. We made our rounds, from desk to desk, clerk to clerk. I had to repeat over and over the details of the robbery, fill out forms, secure signatures and official stamps. Farhad, having heard my story half a dozen times, was anxious to move along. Modarress, who usually took the lead when I needed to get things done in Tehran, uncharacteristically stayed in the background, restlessly shifting from foot to foot. We needed the signature of the police chief, but he was on a hajj, or pilgrimage, to Mecca, and his deputy had not yet come in. More waiting. The deputy finally arrived, read the report, remarked nonchalantly that “such things happen,” signed the papers, and sent us to the revolutionary magistrate’s court on my mother’s street to have the police report certified.

On the way to the court, Modarress, who was following us in his own car, rang Farhad on his cell phone to say he was having a problem with his brakes and couldn’t stay with us. That proved to be the last I saw or heard from our “loyal” driver except for a brief visit to my mother’s apartment to collect his fee for our ill-fated journey to the airport. After that, he disappeared.

The two entrances to the revolutionary magistrate’s court were separated by a curtain, denoting one side for men and the other for women. Farhad and I located the presiding judge. He wore pants and an open-necked shirt and jacket. Not a cleric, I noted to myself—no robe. A neatly trimmed beard—no stubble. He was polite and well-spoken—not rude. He offered me a seat, signed the papers, advised my cousin to make copies of everything, and sent us on our way. He, too, seemed to think he was dealing with a simple robbery.

The Ministry of Foreign Affairs, where I needed to go for a letter of authorization before my new passport could be issued, was housed in the former headquarters of the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company. The era when the British had exercised considerable power and influence in Iran was long gone. The street names around the building were also long gone. In a frenzy of post-revolutionary fervor, the names of Tehran’s main avenues, great squares and parks, even nondescript side streets had been renamed to celebrate the revolution and its heroes. Shah Reza Avenue, named after the founder of the former ruling dynasty, was now Enqelab, or the Avenue of the Revolution. Kakh, or Palace Avenue, had become Palestine Avenue. And Roosevelt Avenue, named for the American president, had been changed to Mofattah, memorializing a clerical leader and martyr of the revolution.

We headed downtown to the ministry through the chaotic traffic. Hundreds of cars—some of them the expensive BMWs, Mercedes-Benzes, and Audis of Tehran’s newly rich class, but mostly older cars, belching smoke from their tailpipes—competed with buses, motorcycles, cyclists, and pedestrians for the same space. Traffic lights changed color dutifully but went largely unheeded. Cars crept into blocked intersections, bringing traffic to a standstill. People shouted at one another, and occasional fistfights broke out between exasperated drivers. Policemen stood by, refusing to get involved, not even pretending to direct the traffic.

The passport bureau at the ministry was in a large, airy room. Five male clerks, in sweaters over open-necked shirts, with stubble on their cheeks, sat behind five desks. They shuffled about in slipper-like sandals, open at the back. Stubble and slippers, I came to learn over the coming weeks and months, were the hallmarks of the Islamic Republic. The outward scruffiness mirrored an inner reality: unhurried, sloppy in dress and in the performance of their duties, these men demanded as little of themselves as the bureaucracy demanded of them.

One of the clerks was expecting us. My countless phone calls to Shaul had borne fruit. Shaul had called a friend, Hadi, a professor of politics at the University of Tehran, who was currently a visiting scholar at the Wilson Center. Hadi had good contacts at the Iranian Interests Section in Washington, D.C., the office that handled Iranian consular affairs in the absence of full diplomatic relations between the two countries.

The clerk had in hand a fax from the interests section certifying that my stolen Iranian passport had been issued in Washington and providing the relevant passport details. The Foreign Ministry could now provide the authorization letter I needed. The clerk ordered tea and got down to work. By the time we were done with the formalities and the passport bureau chief had affixed his signature to the documents, it was past one o’clock in the afternoon—too late to get to the main passport office, which was already closed. But at least we had the name of the director, and that would give us an entrée the next day. “You’ll have your new passport in two or three days,” the clerk told me. I was elated.

Back at my mother’s place, I called my travel agent and reserved a flight for Wednesday, three days away. I telephoned Shaul and told him to expect me. Many people had called my mother when they learned of the robbery, one of whom had even heard that I had been robbed, beaten, and hospitalized. A couple of close friends came by that evening. Like me, they had no reason to suspect anything other than that I had simply been the unfortunate victim of a robbery. They shook their heads in sympathy, remarked on the growing insecurity in the city, commiserated on the loss of my passports and papers, and assured me that it would all be behind me in a few days. Only my childhood friend Ferry and his wife were skeptical. “This was no ordinary robbery,” Ferry’s wife said. “It seems political to us.” “Nonsense,” I responded. “It was a robbery, pure and simple.”

THE PASSPORT OFFICE

The next day, a Sunday, we went to the passport office on Sattar Khan Avenue in west Tehran. Farhad and I entered separately through the men’s and women’s checkpoints, divided by the usual tatty curtain. The female guard on my side of the curtain conducted a superficial search of my purse and let me through. She was friendly and smiling. In the first decade after the revolution, smiles on the faces of mid-level civil servants were rare, deemed a sign of frivolousness, unseemly in an Islamic state. Thanks to President Khatami, who was elected on a reformist platform in 1997 and spent two four-year terms fighting the hard-liners, the scowls of government officials were no longer de rigueur. (Tehran’s wits referred to Khatami as Seyyed-e Khandan, the smiling cleric, a play on words in Persian that denoted both his sunny visage and his relative ineffectiveness.) During Khatami’s presidency, university students—men and women—mixed more freely; women fought for and secured more freedom in matters of dress; color returned to clothing on the streets; young girls moved about the city with hair showing beneath their headscarves, their nails polished, a touch of lipstick on their lips. I realized how miraculous it was, two years into Ahmadinejad’s far more restrictive presidency, that in a government office I was still encountering a smiling face.

Farhad and I headed straight for the director’s office, past the queues of people waiting to hand in or pick up forms. We ended up in a large room, where, we were told, the final approval for a new passport would be issued. On the wall, as in all government offices, were pictures of the founder of the Islamic Republic, Ayatollah Khomeini; the current supreme leader, Ayatollah Khamenei; and President Ahmadinejad. Three women, one in a black chador, two wearing the ample scarf known as a maghna’eh—which covers the forehead, hair, and ears; fits tightly under the chin; then drapes over the shoulders and upper back and chest—sat behind desks. The lone man in the room, obviously in charge, sat at his own desk, at some distance from the women. We carried our growing file from desk to desk. There was more signing, registering, paper shuffling, and waiting. Finally, the man in charge called my name and handed me two letters. I was to take one back to the Foreign Ministry and one to “the President’s Bureau.” Each of these two offices, in turn, had to give me letters approving my application for a new passport. “Once you get these letters, you should expect to wait at least two weeks before your passport can be issued,” he said.