TEHRAN, JUNE 25, 2009
THE TAXI ROLLS along gray lines. That’s all we can make out in the darkness: gray lines, as far as the eye can see, marking out the road to the airport. Outside, beyond the window, the night devours the last forbidden words I heard. How many will still dare to shout “Allahu Akbar” (“God is great”) and “Death to the dictator” from the rooftops of Tehran?
This is no article—it is a stillborn idea, just a thought. A thought that stretches out as the taxi speeds along those never-ending gray lines. This time, though, is no false start, no trial run. I am leaving for good.
The minutes pass, seeming like hours. The drive to the airport feels so long when you’re heading toward the unknown. I move forward, I rewind. I think of the disappeared, of friends who no longer answer my calls. Of the bloodstains on the pavement. Of assassinated dreams. Of threats scratched on paper. Of stories I can no longer tell. And this fear I can’t shake. This fear is inescapable. It cannot be tamed. It’s like swimming against the current: we are pushed back, we fight to recover, again and again, until we drown.
Suddenly, the gray lines vanish within a blinding beam of light. I lift my head. We have arrived at the airport. Whatever you do, don’t look back. Get out of the taxi as if nothing has happened. Take your suitcase, the only one you were able to salvage. Pass through the X-rays. Endure the gloved prodding of the veiled policewoman. At Security, present your passport—the Iranian one, not the French one. Conceal the ball of anxiety in a fold of your headscarf. Walk carefully toward the gate. Board the plane without running. No running; be careful. Find your place and sit down. Pray for the imminent closing of the doors; pray that they close before the security agents storm in.
The plane takes off. Finally! From the sky, the mausoleum of Imam Khomeini is nothing but a dot in the night before it’s engulfed by clouds. What does a person think about once she is free? Of those pages of gray lines, ones she can newly fill in however she pleases. She tells herself that the nightmare is over. That she will learn to breathe again. In reality, the hardest part has only just begun. The hardest part is abandoning Iran to its own blank page.
LETTER TO BABAI, MY GRANDFATHER; PARIS, SUMMER 2014
I LEFT YOUR country without looking back. How could I say good-bye to a rediscovered part of myself? It was the beginning of summer 2009, Tehran was mourning its martyrs, and the prison cells were overflowing. Over the course of a sham election, we had passed from the green of hope to the red of blood. The dream of change had shattered against the wall of repression. I was reluctantly putting the finishing touches on a long report whose secret you still guarded. Back in Paris, I could not write a single line. Words waged war on my page. Emotions battled facts. A journalist by trade, I had returned to being a simple citizen. I had lost the necessary distance for telling this story. So I surrendered my pen. For a long time, a very long time—and then I remembered the lines from Hafez you had bequeathed to me.
He who binds himself to darkness fears the wave.
The whirlpool frightens him.
And if he wants to share our journey,
He has to venture well beyond the comforting sand of the shore.
You had offered these to me in Paris, one November morning in 1997. I didn’t know it yet, but this poem would become my profession of faith. You had just arrived from Iran for heart surgery that day. A routine operation, the doctors had said. I was twenty-three years old. You were at least three times older, and I believed you were immortal. No doubt because of the distance, which had always kept us apart. During your rare trips to France, you had a way of always expressing yourself through poems that you neglected to translate. You, who had represented Iran in UNESCO at the end of the ’50s, you knew Hafez like the back of your hand. You claimed that the illustrious fourteenth-century poet had an answer for everything, that his writings were more valuable than any crystal ball, that all one had to do was dip into them at random in order to glimpse the near future. There was something magical about listening to you recite what was, to my ear, gibberish. That day, in your hospital bed, you had taken the time to explain. You expressed an unexpected desire to initiate me into your native tongue. An astonishing whim. Like a fundamental need. No one at home had ever bothered to teach me about my origins. From right to left, your pen began to dance, dressing the consonants in tiny colorful accents. On each line, a short French translation followed on the heels of your calligraphy. This poem, my first lesson in Persian. One of your last breaths.
Your sudden disappearance from the world knocked me flat. I knew so little about you. And even less about your country. As a child, I would send you letters, my way of challenging the unknown. I would always embellish them with colorful drawings of unchanging characters. Papa. Maman. My sister, Nasrine, and me. A little sample of your family spread across the planet by way of miniature chronicles written in French. They were my first dispatches. They say that writing is liberating. At the time, I thought of it as a game of hide-and-seek with your shadow. Or else an intriguing puzzle, for whose missing pieces I obstinately kept searching.
* * *
So many years have passed since your death. What an unsettling feeling, to reach once again for my pen, knowing everything about you. To dedicate this long letter to you when you are no longer with us. As a little girl, when I would write to you from Paris with my chubby hands, I’d imagine you leafing through my missives, sitting on your pretty Tehran patio where I had spent the summer when I was four. The Iran of my childhood memory was that and nothing else: a patio adorned with forsythias, rosewater ice cream, an inflatable pool to wade around in, and Persian laments reverberating in the background. Papa had sent the three of us there for vacation. It was August 1978. In the middle of the garden, Maman was bronzing her fair skin, her face framed by a homemade aluminum reflector to capture the reflection of the UV rays, to the great distress of Grandmother, who said she looked like a toaster. In the East, whiteness is sacred. At the foot of a persimmon tree, cousins were playing backgammon as they sipped pomegranate juice. The crackling of the radio was accompanying their laughter when, suddenly, a terrible piece of news rattled that little corner of Paradise. I remember a crash of voices, and that indecipherable language abruptly losing its musicality. Then my panicked mother, glued to the telephone, murmuring in French to Papa, who was still in Paris, “Things are heating up in Iran … The Cinema Rex in Abadan was torched … Hundreds of people are dead … No one knows who’s behind it … The protests against the shah have multiplied.” These events, which seemed to me like fables for adults, announced the seeds of the revolution against the sitting monarchy. But, at the time, I saw them only as the unjust trigger of our hasty return to France.
Two months later, a new face invaded our little French TV screen. An old bearded man who looked like a sorcerer, a “Gargamel” in a black turban, shriveled under his apple tree at a château called “Neauphle”: Ayatollah Khomeini, whose enemy was, to my ears, not the shah but the chat (cat) of Iran, a greedy and cruel king hidden away in his golden palace. Rumor had it that the sorcerer wanted the shah’s hide and his position, and that, since his exile to France, he had dreamed of dethroning him. Nose glued to the television of our apartment in Paris, Papa said nothing. He watched, powerless, as that grand pooh-bah cast a spell over his distant country. Over there, many people, religious and secular, were drunk on his evil potion: “Revolution, liberty, Islamic Republic!” his supporters cried at the top of their lungs. You know the rest: January 6, 1979, the monarch ended up making a run for it. Three weeks later, the sorcerer was back in Tehran.
At our home in Paris, Iran became a taboo subject. There would be no more questions about your pomegranate-scented country. From then on, the description of Iran in the French newspapers could be summed up in three words: Islam, chador, and terrorism. It made Papa sick. One night when he came back from work, he collapsed on the sofa. “I was stopped by the police! They called me a ‘towelhead’!” Papa, whom you had enrolled in French boarding school from the age of eleven, until you returned to Tehran once your mission for UNESCO was finished, couldn’t stand the image of his homeland being thrown in his face. From that day on, he called himself “Henri.” Except for the H of “Homayoun,” this pseudonym had nothing in common with his given name. Powerless to change his country, he changed himself.
I concluded that I was French. One hundred percent. Nothing in our home led me to think otherwise. We spoke French. We ate French. We dreamed in French. When, during each first day back to school, the teacher asked the country of my origin, I would respond, “France!” without hesitating. Out of imitation, probably. Out of fear, also, of hurting Papa if I were to reveal what seemed to be a state secret. A giant concern, however, nagged at me. Your trips to France, which had become more and more spaced out, came to a halt entirely in 1980. In your country, a deadly conflict had just broken out with neighboring Iraq, which was backed by the majority of Western powers. At night, I had nightmares thinking of the bombs falling on Tehran. For me, war had existed in grown-ups’ movies. Suddenly, it took on a dimension much closer to home. Was your life in danger? What was the day-to-day like for you and Grandmother? Why didn’t you take refuge in Paris? I would have lent you my room. My bed, too, and my toys. In my letters, I declared my love for you. I sketched out our daily life, school, weekends in the countryside, Santa Claus and his bag of toys, naïvely praying that my stories might give you the strength to hold on. But did they make it through to you, these unanswered missives?
Once the war was over, eight years later, I learned with relief that you were in good health. A precious solace. With age, I also started to become aware of my origins. But the star of your country did not cease fading. In 1992, the international bestseller Not Without My Daughter, by Betty Mahmoody, dealt a blow to its image. Who could have imagined? This sensationalist memoir of an American woman married to a violent Iranian man, sequestered in Tehran with her daughter, also ended up poisoning my daily life. From the doctor’s waiting room to the neighborhood butcher, everyone brought it up with a little condescending phrase about the “poor Iranian women.” “And you?” they asked me. “You’re not afraid that the same thing will happen to you?” In high school, I fled the inquisitive stares. One day, the father of a friend asked me, “Is it because your father is Iranian that you don’t wear miniskirts?” What business was it of his? Short dresses had never been my cup of tea.
Comments from various people stirred up my curiosity. What, then, did this Islamic Republic that the entire planet denigrated look like? Did we have to throw all Iranians in the same basket? At journalism school, which I had begun in 1995, my professors encouraged me to go beyond the clichés. One of the golden rules of our profession. See, feel, get as close as possible, before judging. Two years later, I made the “Iranian press” the subject of my master’s thesis. An ideal pretext to return to your country. And find you again. “Khosh amadid—welcome—to the land of your ancestors!” you had flung at me upon my arrival, with that habit of navigating between words from your mother tongue and the French you learned in your youth at the Sorbonne. I had two weeks to do my research. Astonished by my fascination, you laughed at seeing me put on the obligatory veil as one dons a theater costume, at hearing me negotiate the price of a taxi without speaking a word of Persian. I innocently gushed over the tiniest things. At night, we flipped through all the new magazines that were flourishing thanks to the efforts of a certain Mohammad Khatami. This reformist mullah, minister of culture for ten years, had laboriously fought to soften censorship. A man of dialogue, he embodied a new generation of politicians, eager for political openness in an Islamic Republic that had been isolated for too long. A real roshanfekr—an “enlightened thinker,” as you would say. By May 23, 1997, when he won the presidential election to widespread surprise, I was already back in Paris, in the middle of writing my thesis. I rushed to call you. On the telephone, your voice was trembling with joy. You were celebrating. You wanted to believe this was a turning point for your country. For the first time since the revolution, Iran was reaching its hand out to the world.
Your sudden death, six months later, coincided with these changes. Your heart, too fragile, stopped beating before the French doctors could operate. The day of your funeral, at Montparnasse Cemetery, I felt injustice crashing down on my shoulders. You had left too soon. And I had come too late to meet you. The irony of history: you, who had always wanted to remain in your country, had, for reasons I was unaware of at the time, ended up dying beyond its borders. Heart on my sleeve, I placed my hand on your coffin. Under this damp ground, the dust of your secrets would be forever buried. The air was heavy that day. Above my head, the sky was moving toward a storm. I thought again of that poem by Hafez. “Venture well beyond the comforting sand of the shore.” A poem: this was the only inheritance you left me. With a message between the lines. Like a debt to be honored. On a bright morning, after a few months of hesitation, I jumped onto the Métro and headed toward Opéra. At a travel agency counter, I asked for a ticket to Tehran. “For how long?” the agent asked. “One week,” I replied. In the end, I stayed for ten years.
Copyright © 2015 by Éditions du Seuil
Translation copyright © 2019 by Emma Ramadan
