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

Shiraz, May 1988
Shahla is laughing as she dances to Boney M’s ‘Ma Baker’, her red dress flapping round her legs as her husband Manuchehr spins her around.

Ma Ma Ma Ma, Ma Baker – she never could cry Ma Ma Ma Ma, Ma Baker – but she knew how to die

Shahla dances with uninhibited abandon, as though no one is watching. And she moves so beautifully, so joyfully, that everyone is always watching. Even at six years old Amir knows his mother is captivating, and whenever she dances he feels intensely proud.

Before the dancing is the business of dissent, and the evening started as these gatherings always start. The guests arrive separately, using the back door. It has been like this ever since Peyvand, another leftist comrade, was arrested at a similar meeting. A suspicious neighbour noted a group arriving at the house opposite and called local vigilantes. That was five years ago and Peyvand is still in prison. Since then, the situation has only got worse. Nearly ten years after the revolution, fear and suspicion are the daily currency of life.
A black shroud has fallen over the country. The war with Iraq rages; lives are lost. The revolution fights its enemies within; lives are lost. The lifeblood of the people is sucked dry, they are left limp and afraid. Even the landscape has changed. Antiquities are ripped out, paintings and murals vandalized as remnants of the non-Islamic empire are raped and shredded.
The southern city of Shiraz also looks different: the hillsides, once bright green with undulating vineyards, are a dusty brown, the earth beneath them still recoiling at being torched by the hands of the devout, who swear they will never again allow alcohol to drench this soil.
Like most of the group, Shahla and Manuchehr are not card-carrying members of a political party but they are proud to call themselves chapis – leftists. In simple terms, they describe themselves as ‘pro-poor and anti-imperialist’. They have, in turn, sympathized with Iran’s communist Tudeh Party and the Marxist Fedayin Party. In the last nine years, since the revolution, thousands of political opponents and ‘counter-revolutionaries’ have been killed. Now, only the brave or foolish continue. Manuchehr and Shahla do not see themselves as either brave
or foolish – rather as unimportant in the grander scheme. They never admit this out loud, for to admit this is to acknowledge that they have no real stake in their future, that they are simply powerless armchair activists – although they do allow themselves to take solace in their insignificance when it is remarked on in terms of their protection, for they believe that as long as they are eclipsed by more prominent political players, they are safe. So they continue to fight the system as a matter of principle, as a matter of attempting to right something that, in their minds, has gone terribly wrong.
The group’s secret parties happen at least once a month, and are nearly always held at Shahla and Manuchehr’s house, as it is the biggest in their small neighbourhood in the north of Shiraz. It is an unlikely group of dissidents, a quixotic mix bred out of revolution and war. Shiraz’s intellectual class, which consists mostly of rich, educated Shirazis and a few Marxist-Leninist academics, is now shoulder to shoulder with a handful of fearless middle-class housewives, a group of students, some working-class farmers, two Jews, an Armenian, a few shopkeepers and a devout Muslim. The meetings are an opportunity to be subversive and to kick the machine while it is not looking, from the safety of the living room.
And here they are, Shahla and Manuchehr, huddled with a small group of friends in the kitchen. This is what their lives have become: a brotherhood of secrets, of back entrances and kitchens. They relay messages and share the latest arrests and executions. Somebody unfurls a squashed bundle of dog-eared typed pages, pulled out of underwear. It is the latest communiqué from a chapi leader. Somebody else has a photocopy from an illegal political publication.
Finally they discuss what is on everybody’s mind – the one issue that Shahla and Manuchehr try to evade. The threats. For the past year they have been receiving anonymous scraps of paper slipped under the door in the dead of night, messages scrawled in childlike, spidery handwriting. The missives are at first vague, but menacing:
WE KNOW WHAT YOU ARE DOING.
But the sender is getting brave. There is a bolder voice:
DISBELIEVERS DESERVE TO DIE.
Manuchehr and Shahla refuse to stop the parties and the secret meetings. Over the past year a few friends have been arrested and imprisoned, yet still the group continues. They tell the group they have not received any notes recently. But they are lying. The truth is that they are scared by the latest message:
WHO WILL LOOK AFTER AMIR WHEN YOU’RE GONE?
This arrived a week ago and Manuchehr immediately stopped his writing. Since he was dismissed from his job as a university history professor he has been working as a journalist for underground left-wing publications; rather, for any publications that dare publish his work.
Amir is shooed out of the room. He is too little to understand the complicated conversations and he flits in and out unnoticed. Amir is told these are illicit meetings and that he must never, ever tell anyone. Manuchehr and Shahla test him; their exaggerated mock questioning, imitating a nosey neighbour, makes him laugh. Aged six, Amir is well versed in the art of lying. He has a ready stockpile of lies perched on the tip of his still-developing tongue, waiting for the cue for them to fall out of his baby mouth and into the ears of adults: grandmother’s birthday; a pilgrimage party; a family reunion. The lies are simple and pure and white enough for Amir to happily repeat them with utter conviction.
Food plays an important role and with every new agenda is a new course. Tonight it starts with dolmeh, stuffed vine leaves, and slowly moves on to the grand dishes: rich pomegranate, walnut and duck stew; lamb with saffron rice. And then the drinking, bootleg whisky and home-brewed vodka to warm up spirits so dampened by oppression. The need to dance and drink is as great as the need to dissent. The drinking always leads to dancing; eyes closed, trying to find a light in the dark.
Children are never banished in Iranian households when grown-ups play, and Amir wanders around the party being fed and petted. He falls asleep on Manuchehr’s lap, cocooned by the safe sounds of music and drinking and talking. Shahla carries him in her arms to his bed and kisses his face as she tucks him under the blanket. But tonight Amir gets bored with the adults, and wanders to the front of the house. He plays with his toy cars in the hallway, in the dark, for the lights here are always off at night so as not to attract attention. He hears rustling by the door. He is curious and walks up to it. There, on the ground, lit up luminous white by the moonrays streaming through the porch windows, is a note. He picks it up and runs into the living room. Everyone freezes at the sight of little Amir holding a note.
‘Mummy, look what I found. It was under the door.’ They run around, frantically fumbling to turn the music off, collecting the bottles of alcohol. Manuchehr has already crept to the door and back. ‘There’s nobody there, I checked,’ he is whispering. Shahla’s best friend takes Amir upstairs. Shahla holds the note. She has still not opened it.
‘What does it say, what does it say?’ Their voices are urgent. She reads out loud, in a sober, matter-of-fact voice: WE’RE COMING TO GET YOU.