It seems more romantic in retrospect and as my reflection glances back at me from the glass wall of the tube heading to north London. How did I look wearing my head scarf? When I heard him say you are so beautiful, and even when he had approached to kiss me by the windows overlooking the city skyline from an ultra modern northern Tehran apartment.
It was as though my entire life had been programmed to lead to that kitsch—and inconsequential—moment.
The kiss itself was an objectifiable, unforgettable but not memorable one: a first in Tehran, the city of my birth and childhood; a first in hejab; and a first I did not immediately withdraw from even though I did not like the physical sensation. I was sufficiently intrigued by the situation that I could stay.
Tehran was the seductress.
We had met during a previous visit, six months before at a Christmas party. It was a a last minute invitation by a friend who had moved back to Tehran after decades in the West. At the party, French and Italian ex-pats mingled with Iranians who had become expats at home. More or less everyone associated with a western embassy.
We had spoken for hours by the fireplace, where I had taken refuge. The mingling required a certain air — a recognition of the place of the party in the social world of Tehran–which I was aware I lacked, and wasn’t in the least interested in attempting. He was the only one who continued to talk to me despite the fact that I was not only not an “interesting” person, but was also inappropriately inelegant, with jeans and a men’s shirt I had been wearing under a caftan. I was carrying mostly the trace of the air of my fathers’ residence at the Care Home.
He seemed to be an outsider to the group as well, though by temperament. I detected a mild asperger. At the end of the night he offered to drive me home, but I ordered my own taxi. It had been enough adventure for one Tehran evening. We exchanged email addresses.
I wrote him on another trip to Tehran. It was summertime, and I had decided to venture out of the safe place I had created in my father’s apartment now that he was not there, and get to know the city outside of the triumvirate institutions of hospital, nursing home, and the bank.
“Do you remember me?” I emailed.
“Of course.”
He suggested the House of Artists, in front of TehranShahr Theatre. We would meet there after his work-hours. Just reading the names of the venues conjured impossible dreams. Theatre? Artists? This is a Tehran I had had no access to. I had left the country as a young teenager 32 years before. These were the names of places of our future when we were children. The locus of subconcious fantacies of future romance, which had been forever lost.
The taxi driver, a young man who had said he knew the address, kept lamenting about the severe social and economic crisis facing his generation: “this country lacks direction, no matter how much I try, I get nowhere.” And “I am drifting” at the moment when I became worried that we were lost and nowhere near The House of Artist. I interrupted his confession/social commentary that is the prerogative taxi drivers in Tehran, to suggest perhaps we could ask someone how to get to our most immanent destination. Once we finally arrive, I felt compelled to offer an empowering and positive advice in the vain of “destinations are illusions, life is right here where you are.” And a large tip.
Walking through the impressive an populated garden of khaneye Honarmandan, I tried to understand the typology of the place. Is this a gallery? A cultural center? An exhibition space? People were young, and the average age in their 20s, and 30s. The style, global contemporary. I was a few mintues early and headed for the shop, as the objects were the most recognizable signs: modern ceramics, ethnic and tribal design in jewelry, art books. Oh, this is the place which the government closed last year, and is now back in business. I got busy shopping after sending an sms to my date, telling him that I was wearing a grey tunic, with a Kurdish style headgear. How else would he recognize me? I was not wearing headscarf by the fireplace at the Christmas party.
Dinner at the café upstairs where the menu was international but no rice is served. I realized at that moment, I had no way of reading why Pierre was there. What was this meeting about? I sensed that his years practicing embassy protocol had rendered him not easily decipherable. Or was it aspergers? We spoke about work. Mine and his which interested us both. Yet, simply being there was the event. It was the first time I had a meeting of any kind in a public place in Tehran. He told me about his work as the Scientific Attache at the French embassy, which he said was easier than being a Cultural Attache. The latter could do very little in Tehran; they could not even stage theater for example, he said, because the law forbids male and female actors from touching each other in public—this he demonstrated, by bringing his hand very near my arm, but not touching it.
We took a picture together in front of some colorful modernist painting on the wall, before getting out of the House of Artists, and into the dark of the street. I wanted take advantage of the “native” knowledge of my French company and walk the streets of Tehran at night. I noted the strangeness of the alleyway, and that I would be scared of walking there alone. Turning onto a wider street we noted an enormous apartment complex in the making; yet another high rise speculation speculating on June 30th deadline for the negotiations and the lifting of the sanctions. Western businesses will be flooding here.
“The Old American embassy is just at the corner.”
“Oh, I want to see that.”
Another mythical place of the past, where students much older than us, our future selves, had taken over. Did this place really exist? We walked over and arrived at the gates.
“What an enormous complex!”
“Oh, the Russian one is also very big.”
We continued to walk on the sidewalk along the graffiti covered wall of the old American Embassy and arrived at the main road where it was time to get taxis. I did not feel getting into a taxi on my own.
“I have wine in my apartment.” He said. A rare moment when that line actually is significant literally, and could be read something under than a ploy—pace zizek.
“Great.”
Arriving at the apartment building, passing the doorman, getting into the elevator and entering the apartment, I entered another Tehran, still forbidding, still phantasmogoric: The rents here are comparable to those in Manhattan.
“You can take off your head cover now, if you like. “
“I prefer to keep it on.”
At the window of the ultramodern apartment, I look out on the cityscape in front of me. I can stay here tonight.
January 2015.
