City of Lies: Love, Sex, Death, and the Search for Truth in Tehran

Tehran Nights eventually made its way to the offices of the cyberpolice. It had been picked up during a house raid and lain hidden under a pile of written statements on a police officer’s desk for a few weeks. The DVD was unmarked and the officer was about to throw it in the bin when he thought it might be his
copy of The Bling Ring that he had lent a colleague. He pushed it into his laptop and Leyla’s jiggling breasts appeared. The officer thought it looked quite tame compared to the porn he liked to watch. He gave the DVD to his sergeant, who handed it to the cyberpolice.
The fight against porn was a losing battle. The clerics were worried. The government was worried. Porn had even been discussed in parliament. A new bill was introduced that updated the law, enforcing stricter punishments, which included being found a corrupter of the earth, an executionable offence. Sex tapes were leaking out, and the cyberpolice needed to act. When the private sex tape of a soap star, Zahra Amir Ebrahimi, had exploded across the whole country, more than 100,000 DVD copies were sold on the black market. The regime was caught in a tricky situation; the actress was adored and it would not look good to come down too hard. She had also made her name by playing the pious lead character in a soap opera called Narges; she was the face of virtue and purity on state television. A celebrity sex tape was not the image the Islamic Republic of Iran Broadcasting (IRIB) had hoped for. Ebrahimi left the country and never returned.
Even the threat of execution had done little to deter the fornicators. The courts had sentenced two people to death for running porn sites; one of them, an Iranian-born Canadian computer programmer called Saeed Malekpour, had his death sentence reduced to life imprisonment for ‘designing and moderating adult-content websites’ which went hand in hand with insulting the sanctity of Islam.
The cyberpolice pored over hours and hours of porn films. They needed a conviction, but finding the culprits was almost impossible. The officers watched Tehran Nights several times; it looked like another amateur porn video but classier.

*

A girl in a catsuit with blonde pixie-cropped hair was gyrating with an Amazonian beauty wearing a sheaf of a dress slashed to her navel. Around them a group were popping ecstasy pills in each other’s mouths as they danced in front of a DJ spinning house tunes from his booth. Two famous actors were on the sofa with a group who were chopping out lines of cocaine on a glass table. The house belonged to a returned exile, notorious for her wild parties. She was an interior designer and her home was a homage to gothic style: pointed arches,
black and red walls, heavy velvet curtains and six-foot wrought-iron candelabra. Leyla was about to take off her manteau when the hostess sprang on Kayvan. ‘Get that fucking jendeh out of my house. How many times have I told you
before about bringing those girls here?’ She dragged Kayvan to the kitchen. Leyla stood on her own, her headscarf round her shoulders. She was unmoved by the attack, but was surprised that the hostess could tell she was a jendeh. Leyla had thought she was now assimilated well into the north Tehran set, but the hostess had trained eyes. Kayvan returned.
‘Sorry babe, I’ll get you a cab home.’
This was the first time he had abandoned her.
‘You said we were going to a party tonight – together?’
‘I know, but you heard her. House rules, what can I say. I’ll call you next week.’
‘You fucking arsehole.’

That night Leyla decided to leave Iran, to start a life where no one knew her.

Leyla had always thought that marrying above her station was the only way that she could better herself, just as her sister had done. The sex films had given her an independence she never thought she would have, but it was not enough. She wanted a husband; she wanted love and a family like everyone else. Partying with Kayvan had been fun, but she had been wrong about him and her own naivety surprised her. It was obvious really: they were all happy to fuck her and even to be seen with her, but no rich kid with high-society friends would marry a whore. Even the most outwardly urbane guys who seemed so sophisticated and, well, Western, wanted to marry virgins – or at least upper-class girls who knew how to play virtuous.
Parisa had reached the same conclusion and was now working as a prostitute in Dubai, where Iranian flesh was some of the most expensive on the market (Chinese and then African the cheapest). Parisa was now earning nearly 1,000 US dollars a night, and she was not half as striking as Leyla.
Recently Leyla had been listening obsessively to Dr Farhang Holakouee, a Los Angeles-based celebrity agony uncle with a daily radio call-in show; his popularity had peaked a few years ago, but Leyla still tuned in. His callers were mostly Iranians living in the United States. No subject was off-limits and he tackled them all with a no-nonsense manner, doling out sensible counsel with stern impatience. Housewives and professionals from all parts of the city downloaded his show and bought his DVDs on the black market. He was anti-
regime, secular and modern, and he understood the damaged Iranian psyche. He spoke of cycles of behaviour, of taking control, of cause and effect, of responsibility for your actions. A caller had phoned in to ask if changing your life was really possible: of course it is possible, first you have to face reality and then you must know that your future is in your own hands.
Leyla knew what to do. She would save up in Dubai and then start anew in the USA. She lay awake all night, overwhelmed with this sudden urge to leave Tehran.

*

They came for her at six o’clock in the morning, her head still full of the plans she was making to join Parisa. She shook with fear when they put her in the back of the police car. This time she knew it was more serious.
The officers in the cyberpolice unit had whooped with excitement when they noticed a box in the corner of the screen with a serial number on it. It was Leyla’s electricity meter. It had taken a matter of hours for them to track her down.
She was taken straight to Evin. There was no police station, no courtroom, no lawyer. On the way, she had frantically called the judge’s number. No answer. The line was dead. She managed to send two texts before they confiscated her phone, one to Kayvan and one to the judge. I NEED HELP. POLICE HAVE GOT ME.
Neither of them replied. Kayvan had got scared and deleted all signs of her existence from his life. The judge had died.
Most of her cellmates were either working girls or women who had been found guilty of other moral crimes, such as adultery. The sex workers were from the streets, and at first Leyla found it hard to identify with them. She had worked hard to eliminate the memories of her Takht-e Tavous streetwalking days from her mind. Many of the girls took drugs and often fights broke out between them. Leyla won them over with gossip about her film star clients and details of lavish parties. She sold herself as the glamorous porn star headed for Dubai – what they could all be. She even comforted the women by teaching them the beautiful passages from the Koran that the cleric had taught her. The women shared with her their own stories of bouncing in and out of prison and reassured her she would be freed in no more than a few months.
Leyla was told she would be assigned a lawyer, and that she could call her
family. Her mother sobbed down the phone and said she could not bear to visit her in prison through shame. She told Leyla to call her when she was released.
But she was not in prison long.
It was a beautiful spring dawn when Leyla was hanged.
six

MORTEZA