Farhad arrived with his son, Kami. Only twenty-five, Kami was as gentle and soft-spoken as his father, but he was tall and well built, towering over everyone else. His height alone will intimidate everyone, I thought optimistically.
Our first stop, once Modarress joined us, was the neighborhood police station. At eight in the morning, the station was crowded and noisy. Men and women were there reporting burglaries, family disputes, and thefts of cell phones. Police officers walked in with men who had been arrested in a drug bust. A mother was desperately looking for her son, who had disappeared two days earlier. We made our rounds, from desk to desk, clerk to clerk. I had to repeat over and over the details of the robbery, fill out forms, secure signatures and official stamps. Farhad, having heard my story half a dozen times, was anxious to move along. Modarress, who usually took the lead when I needed to get things done in Tehran, uncharacteristically stayed in the background, restlessly shifting from foot to foot. We needed the signature of the police chief, but he was on a hajj, or pilgrimage, to Mecca, and his deputy had not yet come in. More waiting. The deputy finally arrived, read the report, remarked nonchalantly that “such things happen,” signed the papers, and sent us to the revolutionary magistrate’s court on my mother’s street to have the police report certified.
On the way to the court, Modarress, who was following us in his own car, rang Farhad on his cell phone to say he was having a problem with his brakes and couldn’t stay with us. That proved to be the last I saw or heard from our “loyal” driver except for a brief visit to my mother’s apartment to collect his fee for our ill-fated journey to the airport. After that, he disappeared.
The two entrances to the revolutionary magistrate’s court were separated by a curtain, denoting one side for men and the other for women. Farhad and I located the presiding judge. He wore pants and an open-necked shirt and jacket. Not a cleric, I noted to myself—no robe. A neatly trimmed beard—no stubble. He was polite and well-spoken—not rude. He offered me a seat, signed the papers, advised my cousin to make copies of everything, and sent us on our way. He, too, seemed to think he was dealing with a simple robbery.
The Ministry of Foreign Affairs, where I needed to go for a letter of authorization before my new passport could be issued, was housed in the former headquarters of the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company. The era when the British had exercised considerable power and influence in Iran was long gone. The street names around the building were also long gone. In a frenzy of post-revolutionary fervor, the names of Tehran’s main avenues, great squares and parks, even nondescript side streets had been renamed to celebrate the revolution and its heroes. Shah Reza Avenue, named after the founder of the former ruling dynasty, was now Enqelab, or the Avenue of the Revolution. Kakh, or Palace Avenue, had become Palestine Avenue. And Roosevelt Avenue, named for the American president, had been changed to Mofattah, memorializing a clerical leader and martyr of the revolution.
We headed downtown to the ministry through the chaotic traffic. Hundreds of cars—some of them the expensive BMWs, Mercedes-Benzes, and Audis of Tehran’s newly rich class, but mostly older cars, belching smoke from their tailpipes—competed with buses, motorcycles, cyclists, and pedestrians for the same space. Traffic lights changed color dutifully but went largely unheeded. Cars crept into blocked intersections, bringing traffic to a standstill. People shouted at one another, and occasional fistfights broke out between exasperated drivers. Policemen stood by, refusing to get involved, not even pretending to direct the traffic.
The passport bureau at the ministry was in a large, airy room. Five male clerks, in sweaters over open-necked shirts, with stubble on their cheeks, sat behind five desks. They shuffled about in slipper-like sandals, open at the back. Stubble and slippers, I came to learn over the coming weeks and months, were the hallmarks of the Islamic Republic. The outward scruffiness mirrored an inner reality: unhurried, sloppy in dress and in the performance of their duties, these men demanded as little of themselves as the bureaucracy demanded of them.
One of the clerks was expecting us. My countless phone calls to Shaul had borne fruit. Shaul had called a friend, Hadi, a professor of politics at the University of Tehran, who was currently a visiting scholar at the Wilson Center. Hadi had good contacts at the Iranian Interests Section in Washington, D.C., the office that handled Iranian consular affairs in the absence of full diplomatic relations between the two countries.
The clerk had in hand a fax from the interests section certifying that my stolen Iranian passport had been issued in Washington and providing the relevant passport details. The Foreign Ministry could now provide the authorization letter I needed. The clerk ordered tea and got down to work. By the time we were done with the formalities and the passport bureau chief had affixed his signature to the documents, it was past one o’clock in the afternoon—too late to get to the main passport office, which was already closed. But at least we had the name of the director, and that would give us an entrée the next day. “You’ll have your new passport in two or three days,” the clerk told me. I was elated.
Back at my mother’s place, I called my travel agent and reserved a flight for Wednesday, three days away. I telephoned Shaul and told him to expect me. Many people had called my mother when they learned of the robbery, one of whom had even heard that I had been robbed, beaten, and hospitalized. A couple of close friends came by that evening. Like me, they had no reason to suspect anything other than that I had simply been the unfortunate victim of a robbery. They shook their heads in sympathy, remarked on the growing insecurity in the city, commiserated on the loss of my passports and papers, and assured me that it would all be behind me in a few days. Only my childhood friend Ferry and his wife were skeptical. “This was no ordinary robbery,” Ferry’s wife said. “It seems political to us.” “Nonsense,” I responded. “It was a robbery, pure and simple.”
THE PASSPORT OFFICE
The next day, a Sunday, we went to the passport office on Sattar Khan Avenue in west Tehran. Farhad and I entered separately through the men’s and women’s checkpoints, divided by the usual tatty curtain. The female guard on my side of the curtain conducted a superficial search of my purse and let me through. She was friendly and smiling. In the first decade after the revolution, smiles on the faces of mid-level civil servants were rare, deemed a sign of frivolousness, unseemly in an Islamic state. Thanks to President Khatami, who was elected on a reformist platform in 1997 and spent two four-year terms fighting the hard-liners, the scowls of government officials were no longer de rigueur. (Tehran’s wits referred to Khatami as Seyyed-e Khandan, the smiling cleric, a play on words in Persian that denoted both his sunny visage and his relative ineffectiveness.) During Khatami’s presidency, university students—men and women—mixed more freely; women fought for and secured more freedom in matters of dress; color returned to clothing on the streets; young girls moved about the city with hair showing beneath their headscarves, their nails polished, a touch of lipstick on their lips. I realized how miraculous it was, two years into Ahmadinejad’s far more restrictive presidency, that in a government office I was still encountering a smiling face.
Farhad and I headed straight for the director’s office, past the queues of people waiting to hand in or pick up forms. We ended up in a large room, where, we were told, the final approval for a new passport would be issued. On the wall, as in all government offices, were pictures of the founder of the Islamic Republic, Ayatollah Khomeini; the current supreme leader, Ayatollah Khamenei; and President Ahmadinejad. Three women, one in a black chador, two wearing the ample scarf known as a maghna’eh—which covers the forehead, hair, and ears; fits tightly under the chin; then drapes over the shoulders and upper back and chest—sat behind desks. The lone man in the room, obviously in charge, sat at his own desk, at some distance from the women. We carried