CHAPTER 10

 

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IRAN

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NOT EVERY TIME YOU CAN EAT ICE CREAM

 

 

 

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WORK EXPECTED SO LITTLE of me that I often forgot I had any other job but to seek and dive down rabbit holes. I was getting closer, I thought, to what I wanted. If I had spoken with more of the region and felt no calmer, I figured I must be homing in on the places where answers were kept.

Just as my first weeks studying Arabic planted the nerve to leave for Abu Dhabi, and the possibility of Pakistan planted the nerve to fly to Afghanistan, the experience of Iraq gave me the nerve to wangle into Iran. And nerves are so many things as they flit back and forth between brain and gut, affected by and affecting our energy, our confidence, our perception of what makes sense and what does not.

“Iranian visas for Americans are not a thing,” Danny wrote me from Syria. I knew that, but I felt I’d ask, in case the response revealed cracks in that certitude.

I called the Iranian Embassy in Abu Dhabi.

“Sure we have visas!” he said.

“For . . . Americans?”

“Of course!”

I was buzzing.

“Tourist visas,” I clarified. “For Americans.”

“Of course.”

“What are the chances that I’ll be able to get one?”

“Maybe . . . one percent!”

He was laughing.

I digested that rejection, and scouted for next steps. I brainstormed with Neal, a new Iowan import to Abu Dhabi, who was similarly antsy. (I always seemed to gravitate toward the unsettled, the disaffected, the angry.) We met at a gathering high in the skyscraper for Purim, aka Jewish Halloween, and together we tried to face our fears of sitting too still. Even though it was expected, it was hard to be told “no” so firmly (as I had been only at the Saudi and Sudanese embassies) with no place to push back.

Except—there was a bizarre travel agency across from Foodlands shawarma that I had always passed too hungry for more than a cockeyed glance. I had always thought that if a travel agent could help me, then I was asking for the wrong kind of help, but this building looked like a mess—plastered in flight routes and airlines and names of places I hadn’t heard of. That was what I needed: to throw myself off the map.

Kish Travel could arrange that in half an hour.

There are two Iranian islands in the Persian Gulf: Kish and Qeshm. They are “free trade zones”: each island operates like its own duty-free shop, watching people come and go and buy things. No visa from any country is required to enter, except for Israelis and those with Israeli passport stamps—they’re barred from every part of Iran. Kish is a vacation spot for Gulf shoppers and scuba divers and day-trippers from Dubai; Qeshm is the opposite. Flights are infrequent and irregular. There was no mention of Qeshm on the U.S. State Department website. No news, Neal and I thought, was interesting news.

Whatever school of going-with-the-flow Danny had gone to, Neal was the valedictorian. There was a combination I couldn’t quite understand: My urge to travel was so fueled by restlessness that I knew only how to hit new ground and run—but the world’s Neals had some way of wanting to move without needing to. Neal was calm like a picture of an Iowa cornfield.

In the months we would spend together, I never knew if he was capable of raising his voice.

Our journey to Dubai’s Terminal 2 for Forsaken Airlines began early in the morning on an empty bus that would get a flat tire somewhere on the emptier stretches of desert highway from Abu Dhabi. The driver, who had been in an accident a week earlier, attempted to wind the car jack without using a protracted index finger the size and shape and color of a large carrot. At the airport, the flight was unlisted, but we hadn’t missed it yet. The airline had no counter. We waved our irreplaceable paper tickets; representatives at the Miscellaneous Desk directed us to a back office where we paid a fifteen-dollar “airport fee” and tried to confirm that the island still existed.

“You fly in here,” said the agent, as if everyone were in on the farce: he pointed to the one of Qeshm’s two airports that was abandoned years ago. Even the airline had a name to match: Fars Air.

I converted dollars to rials at a window in the terminal, and we became instant millionaires. The fifty thousand rial bill, a new issue from 2007, bore a picture of the late Ayatollah Khomeini, as required by law, and the atomic symbol, as a deliberate Eat shit! to international opponents of Iran’s nuclear program.

We waited by the gate, though it never appeared on the Departures screen. After hours without announcement, other passengers assembled as if secretly in tune, and we filed in behind them onto the bus to the plane, underneath the sign that read BASRA.

It was a thirty-four-minute hop from Dubai in a Yakolev Yak-42, a Soviet-era plane discontinued in 1981. In case of emergency, above us where oxygen masks might have been, there was a small plaque in Russian and English: ESCAPE ROPE.

QESHM ISLAND LIES seventy-five miles along Iran’s southern coast at the mouth of the Strait of Hormuz. Every day, more than fifteen million barrels of oil are squeezed through the tightly regulated waters. We landed over a shocking desert moonscape: sharp-sided mesas snapped like LEGO pieces onto completely flat ground, fire burning over the oil refineries.

In Dayrestan Airport, Americans are fingerprinted with office supply stamp pads and offered sugar cubes to help scrub the ink off while other foreigners file immediately to the one van to the one hotel we were allowed to stay in. We passed our luggage through the outbound X-ray, where the checker kept a bottle of Pimm’s, that ginny summertime English liqueur, hidden poorly on his desk. Perhaps it had been confiscated (alcohol is forbidden in all of Iran); the bottle was still in its protective duty-free leggings.

Many Iranians stop over from Dubai on a more economical route to major cities, but the rest are neither tourists nor businessfolk—aside from us two Jewish sightseers, the rest of the van carried disappointed-looking men and women from Central and South Asia to the limbo of the Hotel Diplomat. This was where the noncontract workers of the Emirates came when they switched jobs and their old visas expired, to wait until new paperwork came through so they could return to Dubai. We had come on vacation to purgatory.

Most guests of Qeshm couldn’t care less about the scenery. Even the name—sometimes Geshm or Qushm—is pronounced with an m that nearly disappears, as if everyone always realized midthought that it was a mistake even to mention it.

After pausing for indifferent, free-ranging camels to cross the road, we were there. The Hotel Diplomat is part hostel, part minimum security prison, with comfortable enough dorm-style or single rooms and televisions and a sprinkling of channels all from the Emirates. Our roommates were from Tashkent and spoke little to one another. One said that he had learned all the English he knew, conversational and easy to understand, in the last fifteen days. The other snored louder than the Persian army.

The hotel seemed to wake up between noon and 4 P.M. In the evenings, national delegations stuck mostly together either around the hotel’s two shishas—the African table, the Arab couples perched on benches—or mingled by the pool table with tattered felt. A woman from Tajikistan in a bright blue headscarf was shooting pool as she did most nights, waiting for her work visa, against our roommate, who had just gotten his. No one dared challenge the quiet, skinny man from northern Iraq. He had been there for six months.

Next to Neal, I looked far less American. He is the kind of ethnic Jew who is a marvelous likeness of “white people.” But as we bounced our thoughts off of each other out loud, our English made meaning even for those who didn’t speak a word.

Traveling not alone again, I was less blank, less able to hide behind a huge nose and the vagueness of tan skin. I also felt less like I needed to, and I relaxed away from the constant strain of choosing how to define myself at every turn.

But—so much of the way I understood a place was based on the way I saw it seeing me. Sure, with a scene partner now, I didn’t have to perform as hard. But I was worried that I’d be less sensitive to all the lasers of other people’s perceptions zipping around the room.

Neal was challenged to chess by a burly Russian who performed the same, predictable opening three games in a row, and then demolished him. He asked Neal what he thought of George Bush. Neal was relieved to have a geopolitically sensible answer for the man who could nutcrack his head with a bicep curl.

“I hate Bush, of course. What do you think of Putin?” This was supposed to be a moment for hate-your-president solidarity.

The Russian locked eyes. “Putin good. Putin I commander in police before.”

Neal swallowed. Then, the ex-KGB patrolman displayed a picture on his phone—Was it proof?—taken in front of a bathroom mirror, of himself without a shirt on. Later he showed a picture of his daughter. We wondered if there was anything on this island we would understand.

There was hardly any food, too. A little shop by the pool table sold chips and ice cream and the restaurant on site offered something at select hours of the day (breakfast of a hard-boiled egg, honey, and a tea bag). But still, almost no one wanted to go into town. “Yeah, it’s bad here,” our roommate said. “Outside is worse.”

In Arabic, Qeshm is called Jazirat at-Tawila, “Long Island.” Downtown Qeshm centers around two large malls selling clothes and bags and smuggled IKEA for cheaper than anywhere else in Iran. For the same reason we as Americans were allowed in, because the island is classified as a Free Trade Zone, there are no taxes and domestic tourists pop in to shop, either in the town of Qeshm or in nearby Dargahan. Shawarma stands deal in long hoagie rolls and little kids peddle chewing gum and locals gather in the town’s park by the sea to smoke nargile or, because it was nice out, to prepare camping tents for the night. Benches in front of a television were set up like a kind of outdoor movie theater.

Resplendent with spiky hairstyles and too-shiny pants, the Long Island of the Persian Gulf even has signs for the “North Shore.” Winter is the busy season, when mainlanders show up for sun and more shopping.

We flirted with the idea of a trip to the mainland, one short illegal boat ride to the port of Bandar Abbas, about ten miles away across the strait. Farther down the island, Qeshm came within two miles of the Iranian coast. Let’s do it, Neal said.

Between the bright lights of the fruit and ice cream stands and the twinkling of boats out in the oil-rich strait, the park at the edge of town had the air of a small carnival. Families and twosomes were strolling along the water’s edge. Dark waves rolled in softly and lapped at their feet.

AFTER DARK, we found teams of young people at Nemat’s Ice Cream, offering fifty-some flavors from hazelnut to melon to something that tasted like spray paint (beware the four-scoop minimum). Our hands oily from plates of tomshi, like crispy Persian crepes—that was where Maral took us second.

Maral was from Shiraz, one of the island’s four Couchsurfers, and an immensely eager and delighted tour guide. She’d seen my post on the Qeshm message board and come to rescue us strangers. She was studying physical therapy here at Shahid Beheshti University of Medical Sciences.

There wasn’t a whole lot, but what there was in Qeshm was relaxed and (sometimes) lively. And it did beat the Hotel Diplomat. Maral’s friends and the other young women around Nemat’s were unveiled, wearing bright, patterned scarves that left much of their hair showing—but Qeshm was less free than Shiraz, Maral said; in Shiraz, she would hardly readjust her headscarf if it fell. If I had expected Saudi Arabia in Iran, I was mistaken. Foreign is welcome: Maral was an avid downloader of Grey’s Anatomy. On Facebook, she lists Woody Allen as a favorite artist.

She took us by taxi (twenty thousand rial, less than a buck, for anywhere in town) to the Portuguese Fort on the northern tip of the island built in 1507 and destroyed a century later by Persian “liberators.” The fort is surrounded by one of the poorer neighborhoods of Qeshm locals (as opposed to mainland workers or students); Maral classified them as ethnically Arab. “I ask if they celebrate Eid-al Fitr or Nowruz,” the Persian New Year on March 21. “They say, ‘We celebrate Eid al-Fitr . . . that’s what we’ve always done.’ ”

As we navigated around the stumpy castle to a Zagat’s-worthy restaurant on the sea, the driver shut off the headlights. “So they wouldn’t see the garbage,” he said to Maral. He was visibly embarrassed. “The government doesn’t want it to be beautiful.”

This part of town does look forsaken, garbage piles collecting in corners of the medieval ruins. It is hard to know how much this can be attributed to the federal government. Religious freedoms, though, may come with a price—one that is levied not only externally, but from within. Those backed into corners at risk of losing their traditions put up walls, becoming conservative out of necessity. A woman in a full black robe and a niqab that covered her face shouted at me from a distance, waving a finger and warning me not to even think about lifting my camera.

I wasn’t going to, I didn’t know how to say—and I was suddenly ashamed by that truth: Was I so biased that I cherry-picked the memories I wanted to have? So committed to contesting the darkness that all I saw was light?

AT THE RESTAURANT on the sea by the Portuguese Fort, the waiter brought a mixed selection: fresh shrimp, squid in a light, sweet tomato sauce, and shark meat, minced and spiced, dry and pungent and delicious. We talked about Iran and religion and ethnicity over the waves. “I hate Arabs!” Maral said, beaming. She loved the West, longed to emigrate, and hoped for lasting peace and stability in Iran, but she hated her neighbors—or rather, she hated her neighborhood. But still, the brazenness of this—Was it racism?—hit me like ice cream on a sensitive tooth. Maybe what she hated was not a people, but the influences of the strict cultural and religious rules of this Arab-identified island on her personal life. Or, I had read her all wrong.

Beyond that, the girls seemed to enjoy ranking foreign countries like American Idol judges. USA? Great. Europe? Wonderful. Pakistan? Good. Maral’s friend’s sister Azade, visiting from a town closer to Tehran, said she loved Israelis (but would never go to Israel because “it wasn’t allowed”). Over the course of our visit we began to teach them some vernacular English words . . . that all happened to be Yiddish. (“I am sorry for being schlep,” Maral tried out on us.)

And then, we bought embargoed goods in this embargoed country and outed ourselves as allegedly embargoed people. Toking on Cuban cigars, we came out to Maral as Jews. She was delighted. Her parents in Shiraz had Jewish friends who traveled discretely to Israel via Turkey, and now she did, too. When you hate your neighborhood, it’s easier to love the world beyond. And Maral did hate Qeshm. Like the hotel’s clientele, she had come to the island for one reason, and dreamed constantly of leaving.

We wiled away the evening in a gazebo on the beach, playing card games and abandoning card games and laughing, joking about little nothings and trading the worst words in our home languages. Motherfucker, she taught us in Persian. Asshole. Ahmadinejad was a schmuck, while the man who brought us seaside snacks was a mensch. Police were less likely to patrol this beach, a “private” one with a tiny entry fee, to scan for improprieties; otherwise young men and women giggling might have earned a small inquiry. The girls asked how I got my hair so curly.

Maral said goodnight to hurry home before her school’s 9:30 curfew. It was easier than dealing with the reprimands and dirty looks if she didn’t, and in return for her degree from the prestigious medical university, she would sometimes have to play by the town’s rules.

I whispered again to Neal about Bandar Abbas or Bandar-e Pol or anywhere on the mainland, stones’ throws away. Boats left under the cover of night, and we might be able to bribe our way across and then scuttle up to Shiraz. Maral made it sound so wonderful. It was right there.

I would have done anything to keep the adrenaline charging, to create novelty where there was none. Boredom—I smelled it but didn’t taste it yet—would prove that this was a place like any other, interesting and stupid and comfortable and terrible, not a prize witness in my case against bad reputations.

But I remembered what I learned about the Taliban tollbooths on the roads south and west out of Kabul, situations that had no margin of error. And I remembered the hikers in Tehran’s famous Evin Prison. With one misstep, we’d be cellmates.

EVERYONE WAS EXACTLY where we had left them, frozen in visa limbo at the pool table. I rotated into the Uzbekistan-Tajikistan doubles game and miffed a few shots. The woman from Tashkent laughed, and translated a phrase from Uzbek she thought germane to my frustrations: “Not every time you can eat ice cream,” she said.

I nodded. I’d have to think about that.

I FIDGETED in the morning soundscape of Uzbek snores.

The girls came to attempt a rescue; outside of town, colorful wooden boats with outboard motors and captains for hire lined the beach, and Maral haggled for one to take us to nearby Hengam Island. The boatman pushed his ship into the surf. Dolphins chased us as we got close.

A couple of miles over the water from Qeshm, some of the area’s first inhabitants live in thatched huts and sell handicrafts to passersby. They looked African and wore brightly colored and patterned clothes that would have befit a Pakistani wedding. Elsewhere, the dark sand on sheltered Silver Beach glittered with mica. Except for the dolphins that circle playfully around the island, tiny Hengam also seemed like a place the rest of the world had just let be; aside from the septic tanks and we tourists with our cameras and the concept of tchotchkes, almost nothing spoke of modern times. One moment, Maral remembered that Hengam might be outside the area authorized by the stamps in our passports, and cautioned us to keep our voices down. If there were any overzealous police, we might have been accused of encroachment into other Iranian territory.

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Qeshm is one of the poorest parts of Iran, and Hengam is one of the poorest parts of Qeshm. It seemed as if the country’s indigenous had been ignored by every larger social order they are technically a part of. For us, if we were illicit in our presence on the island, it was lucky—it was a place we could be ignored, too.

Maral’s sister’s friend Azade was the most vocal opponent of the hijab women are obliged to wear in Iran, and when she saw the beautiful beaches surrounding the island, she cursed both the Iranian government and Islam for preventing her from sunbathing.

The effortless beauty of the island made it easy to ignore everything we weren’t seeing. “Azade said Hengam has the highest female suicide rate in Iran,” Neal told me as we got back in the boat to leave. “Rampant poverty and polygamy.”

We parted ways with the Persians on the beach, and hired a fifteen-dollar taxi to take us the length of Long Island and back, about an hour and a half between the farthest points. We blasted Jennifer Lopez music videos front and center on a screen above the air conditioner. The car shook in sync with JLo’s hips.

We drove past the mangrove forests like Venetian neighborhoods, canals of hara trees sprouting their yellow blooms from the sapphire bay. We felt the paved road turn to dirt, on the rocky red hillside along the dusty road from Dustku to Salk. We coaxed the driver on, despite the machine gun he charaded with his hands and worried eyebrows. We found the Ghar Namak, the Salt Caves most locals know but have never visited. Cavernous walls marbled in red and brown swaths, dripping with pure white salt stalactites like an old freezer, and heaping piles of salt crystals on the ground. Across the flats, water pooled into a tiny Dead Sea, seeping back into a cave. The driver was mystified as we shucked our shirts and shoes and ducked inside to float.

The bottom half of Qeshm was quiet, gorgeous, and we roared through it. At sunset, we found ourselves at the dry dock of a dhow yard, long wooden beams resting on the dirt. No power tools in eyeshot, we climbed the fifty-foot ladder up and over the bulwark onto the deck of a gorgeous ship. I was sure of it: these were the guys who made Noah’s ark.

The expanse looked back over the empty island. A dark man pulled up below on a motorcycle and sputtered away, and we were alone at the stern of an incomplete boat drinking in the sherbet skies.

At the Hotel Diplomat, we gave the cabbie nearly all of our remaining rials. The hotel staff on behalf of the police asked the driver where exactly we had gone and what we had done. Our Uzbek roommates welcomed us as if we had been gone for days, and as if we had known each other for years. Our day trips were incomprehensible to them. And when they greeted us with their only two salutations, we never had answers: “No problem, no problem,” they would say, in the space hello might have gone. At other moments, they were more existential: “Where are you?” they said, standing face to face. Some moments, I felt that was a decent question.

IN THE MORNING, the biweekly plane wasn’t there. With a flash, the fabricated stresses became real ones, and we were trapped, too. We didn’t know if the delay would mean another week on the island, or more, and the truth of the place began to trickle out and into us.

With no money, we had lost the major advantage of being American in a place where nationality is meaningless.

All it took was a moment of being stuck, and in a flash, I was aware how much I had forced greatness on the place: As if my life purpose depended on it, all strangeness I labeled unique, and uniqueness meant discovery, which was good. The mundane was proof of normalcy, which was good. The flight delay was a welcome beat of adventure, which was great. I multiplied local kindness into sainthood. And if I was frustrated, I would frame it as my fault, a lack of forbearance; or I might blame a deviant individual who I plucked from representing the place.

In Damascus, I had celebrated street-stand juices as if they negated the war. Facing the muzzle of a Kalashnikov in Karzai’s driveway, I made sure there was good where danger could have been. Was my maddening day with Marwan in mosquito-haunted Lebanon all my doing, or ours together? As if only positive prejudice could counter the negative, I moved fast, flitting across The Middle East in a blur of novel inputs. But when the rush slowed . . . when boredom hit . . . there was no stimulation to keep my gaze from the messy, the stupid, the bad. The shuttle to the airport continued not to arrive. It was nerve-racking—and if my nerve had fractured, I might have seen the place the way everyone else saw it.

Masha was coming soon, for a winter break visit from law school, and she could bring me home with her. That felt like exactly the wrong direction. I needed some other way in . . . some way of seeing and being where I didn’t need everything to be great.

And then, only twelve hours behind schedule, the shuttle came and took us to the plane. And the Yak-42 dropped us in Dubai after thirty-four minutes, and I lacquered “Iran” in the bright polish of memory.

FROM: MASHA <MASHA.•••••••@•••••.COM>

RE: (NO SUBJECT)

SAT AT 5:48 AM