Schritte an einem dunklen Tag: Erinnerungen eines achtundvierzigjährigen jungen Mannes

For all of the kind people who gave me their warmth from so far away 1. Birth and Childhood I was born in Tehran exactly one year before the events of 1979. My father worked as an expert at a state company; my mother kept house. There were four of us children, and I was the second in a middle-class family in a country about to change beyond recognition. My childhood was spent playing, endlessly, with the children of relatives and neighbors. I loved cycling more than almost anything. Because of my father's job, we shuttled back and forth between Tehran and Isfahan for years before finally settling in Isfahan for good. But the relationships between people there felt closed, guarded, as if we had moved from the city into a village. Even among fellow Shiites, the locals treated outsiders coldly, and I found myself in more than one fight over it. In our new neighborhood, children were sent to Quran classes at the mosque. My brother and I went to a few sessions. I remember the young cleric who taught us once announcing that Arabic was such a beautiful language. What, he asked, was wrong with speaking it and setting Persian aside? I wanted so badly to grow up quickly. I assumed, the way children do, that every adult was wise. It took me years to learn how wrong I was. 2. Revolution Even as a small child, I could feel the atmosphere of that era pressing in. Across the south and the outskirts of Tehran, I watched factories and companies stand abandoned, then be abandoned further. On television, and in the ceremonies that spilled into the streets, the revolutionaries' behavior looked to me like nothing but selfishness dressed up as righteousness: savagery with a slogan. Even now, as I write these lines, the revolution has never really ended. I know many people still imprisoned by it in one way or another, several of them close friends. Revolutionary courts, revolutionary slogans, seized property, boycotts, the swallowing or elimination of rivals: this was the machinery. At first there were fewer complainers, because most people's turn hadn't come yet. They called this quiet majority the gray layer. There's an old saying that politics has no parents. But it wasn't only politics that became orphaned. After the revolution, the parentless — the opportunists, the unaccountable — moved into everything: politics, economy, culture, the environment itself. Today, few people are left who don't understand that all that fury and all those slogans were, in the end, cover for looting. 3. War Eight years of my childhood passed inside the war, the longest conventional war of the modern era. We had to move twice because of it, after our neighborhood was bombed: first to housing provided by my father's company, then finally back to a home of our own in Tehran. As a child, I assumed the war was simply a feature of life, permanent as my father's commute or my own walk to school. Television showed soldiers and volunteers loaded onto trains and buses bound for the front. No one ever really knew how many came back. Three men were killed from our own alley in Tehran, two of them brothers. They named a street marker for one at each end of the alley. For the third, there was no room left. The news from the war was always good news, always set to a victory march, a march that, ironically, belonged to the old imperial army from before the revolution. The bad news, the true accounting, only reached people after the ceasefire, when the war was already over and there was nothing left to do but count. 4. School I was a strong student, usually ranked first or second in my class, and represented my school more than once in provincial and national science competitions. One day I finished my classwork half an hour early and asked to go play in the alley. My teacher, an older woman, patted my back gently and said, 'This is homework. Not school.' I loved history, geography, literature. I owned an atlas, and when the Soviet Union collapsed I sat down and redrew its new borders in pencil, chasing the news with a map. But I never found a way in with the religious lessons. With mosques, prayer rooms, Husseiniyas, and shrines on every corner, what more, I wondered, were all these classes meant to teach us? 5. Quotas, Coupons, and the Black Market During the war, the government introduced a coupon system for staples: dairy, meat, oil, sugar. Bread nearly went the same way, but ended up split into two tiers instead: a free-market price and a government price. Lines at the bakery were routine. In one of them, waiting for bread, I taught our neighbor's son to play chess. The following year he became the provincial school chess champion. Coupons and rationed goods used to move through paper booklets; now they move through bank cards, which the state can freeze or cut off for any reason it likes. Stores text customers when a new allotment arrives. And more than once, the government has paid shopkeepers late for coupon sales – suspiciously late – long enough, people suspect, to sit on the money and collect the interest before finally releasing only the principal to small businesses. Given how fast prices rise and how little the quotas ever grow, none of this actually solves anything for ordinary people. The list of rationed goods kept expanding: construction materials, steel, stationery, medicine, and eventually gasoline and diesel, whose price hikes were pushed through with brutal force against public protest. The very people meant to meet public need had become its gatekeepers instead. Out of all this, Iran's black market grew and grew: coupons, bootleg tapes and films, university entrance-exam study guides, foreign currency, satellite receivers, raw materials for underground workshops. The regulatory bodies charged with controlling it all couldn't even keep track of their own coupons. Whatever gets hoarded, rationed, banned, or made scarce finds its way, almost immediately, into the shadow economy. 6. Television In the early days there were only two channels, broadcasting a few hours each afternoon and evening, with a film on Friday mornings. Radio ran around the clock. I liked the old programs: the veteran actors, the dubbers, but year by year, the national broadcaster drifted from being a national broadcaster into being a revolutionary one. They said they wanted to build culture through television. Were the people really so uncultured that they needed building? The revolutionaries had found themselves a new stage, and the public was always hungry for news. What had once been a simple, concise news segment meant to inform slowly warped into a propaganda show. Censorship touched everything: sports broadcasts, nature documentaries, crafts programs, cartoons. It was clumsy at first, then, with the help of computers, increasingly precise. In the Robin Hood cartoon, they cut the dancing, cut any hint of romance between Robin Hood and his fiancée, cut the king's return and the people's celebration. I only saw the film whole, years later, on the German satellite channel ZDF. 7. Sanctions Sanctions were part of my life from the very beginning. The regime made sure that any pressure from them (sometimes even before they officially took effect) landed squarely on ordinary people, including for things we had no connection to and no knowledge of. Meanwhile, goods technically exempt from sanctions, like medicine, still turned up on the black market in abundance, at outrageous prices. I once tried to order a sample product from an American company. No bank branch I visited could transfer the payment because of the sanctions, and the company wouldn't accept currency exchange or any workaround either. At the banks, the answer was always the same: hand over your foreign currency and we'll give you rials; we can't send anything abroad. Regime officials liked to call sanctions a blessing, the same word they used for the war. It seemed that whatever hurt the people most was, by some perverse accounting, always a blessing for the regime. 8. Sports For a few years I trained seriously — wrestling, soccer, judo — mostly to stay healthy and fill the hours. Costs were low at first, then climbed year after year, alongside a rise in gang influence and corruption inside the clubs. One day at the judo club, the coach handed out a sheet for members to sign. I asked what it was. He said it was Basij membership, and in exchange they'd hand out free uniforms. I told him that after a lifetime of keeping my honor, I wasn't about to sign it away. A few days later I bought my own pair of Pakistani-made judo whites instead. Championship titles, coaching certificates, even entire martial-arts credentials were openly bought and sold. One young judoka, whose own coach didn't even approve of his stance, wanted to purchase a coaching certificate anyway — he said it would help him with courtship, or with leaving the country. Wins and losses in the competitions that mattered most for public morale were arranged in advance, like everything else in that command economy. 9. Secondary Education I started high school the very year a new secondary-education system was rolled out: a plan with none of the groundwork it needed. No textbooks were ready. Teachers didn't know what they were supposed to teach. We showed up, sat in class for three months, and went home again, with no lessons, no homework, no real instruction at all. At first we were thrilled. Then, slowly, the anxiety set in: our entire academic future was unraveling in real time. At the end of the first semester, they tested us anyway, on material we'd never been taught. Word went around that one student had hanged himself. It was devastating. My own grades collapsed, and I failed to meet the required marks in three subjects. We were all in shock. One classmate turned to me and asked, 'Why you?' Another told me I'd be forced to drop out. I said I'd settle for just getting a diploma. Instead of reforming the old education system, they had revolutionized it, and revolutions, I was learning, tend to break more than they fix. Years later, the minister who oversaw that disastrous plan became mayor of Tehran. Later still, it came out that he had murdered a woman. 10. Higher Education The university entrance exam was a nightmare for anyone hoping to go further. Around it grew a whole underground economy of prep classes, guidebooks, and private tutors. And running through everything from elementary school to graduate study, were the quotas. Those the regime approved of moved easily into the most lucrative fields, and most of them, once they left, went on to become the country's next generation of corrupt officials and white-collar criminals. With a technical-conservatory diploma, I was admitted to an entrance exam for a higher-education institute (one step below a true university) under the Ministry of Education rather than the Ministry of Higher Education, meant to round out technical and vocational training rather than confer real prestige. On opening day, instead of a welcome speech, the administration simply played us a video. When I asked the director about student services and housing, he answered with pure, cold contempt. One class, called Islamic Thought, was taught by a cleric who opened the semester by criticizing students whose names weren't sufficiently Islamic. When I objected, he responded with insults, and at the end of the term, he failed me outright. There was a female student in that same class whom he invited, separately, to a class of his own, for her comfort, he said. Not long before the 18 Tir uprising of 1999, I was expelled from the school for distributing party leaflets. A decade later, I sat the entrance exam again and was accepted into the literature department at Payam Noor University, a school with lighter prestige and no attendance requirement. I earned my bachelor's degree there. A master's, in any field, was never permitted to me. 11. Political Party In high school, a friend and I were introduced through one of our teachers to an old political party, one that had never taken part in the revolution and stood opposed to it. The teacher tried, at first, to keep our contact with the party at arm's length; he knew firsthand the dangers and restrictions the regime imposed on its members. After two visits to the party office, which doubled as the Secretary General's home, my friend broke off contact under pressure from his parents. I stayed. Unlike the regime, ideological to its core, chanting slogans from dawn to dusk, meddling endlessly in the affairs of other countries, the party was disciplined and deliberate, its whole purpose bent toward Iran's progress and toward building real relationships abroad. To me, joining a political party has always seemed like an ordinary act, a basic right of citizenship. But the response I got from the regime and from many ordinary people alike, taught me otherwise. I came to feel I belonged to some outpost of the old Eastern Bloc. Whatever I and my fellow members wrote, if we criticized the regime's Western-leaning factions, the Ministry of Intelligence came after us; if we criticized its Russia-leaning factions, it was the IRGC's intelligence arm instead. The worst of it began after I was elected to an internal party position. Threats grew severe during interrogations, along with steady pressure to inform, sometimes delivered with a smile, sometimes without one. Strangers began approaching me under all sorts of pretenses: a woman who tried to seduce me online; another who'd once attended a literary event years earlier and suddenly appeared on my WhatsApp, asking pointed historical and cultural questions, though we'd never exchanged numbers; men who claimed to be agents, or the sons of agents, from the old pre-revolutionary intelligence service; a man posing as disabled and presenting himself as both a neighbor and a metaphysics expert; others who used a professed interest in the party to run a kind of soft, patient interrogation on me; still others who arrived with imaginary blueprints for political change. Some people simply wanted a certificate of persecution: an asylum case, a résumé built on suffering they hadn't actually endured, and turned cold or hostile when it didn't materialize. One man who'd come to several party meetings once showed up in Isfahan and insisted on staying at my house, claiming he had nowhere else to sleep. Years later, he admitted the Ministry of Intelligence had leaned on him hard to get close to me. Next to our house sits a residential complex where the residents bicker endlessly over shared fees. Most are renters and reluctant to pay anything at all. Then one day a new family moved in, and the first thing they did was mount two high-end CCTV cameras by the entrance, one of them aimed squarely at our door. The same thing, I would later learn, happened to other party officials too. 12. Military Service Military service is supposedly a 'sacred' duty, until, without warning, it acquired a price tag and became something you could simply buy your way out of. I said as much at a party meeting once: what kind of sacred duty can be purchased with cash? A man attending that open meeting, who introduced himself as an economic journalist, answered my remarks by asking, pointedly, 'Are you willing to serve in Zahedan?' I told him. “Yes, Zahedan is part of Iran too.” A fellow party member later told me the man was an intelligence agent. Zahedan is the capital of Sistan and Baluchestan province, and because most of its people aren't Shiite, the regime has long subjected them to every form of deprivation, discrimination, and humiliation. After training ended, my posting came through: Zahedan. Twenty conscripts had originally been assigned there, but nearly all refused, and the list was rewritten twice until every name but mine and one other soldier's had been changed. That afternoon the two of us boarded a bus and arrived the next morning. That same summer, thirty-six police conscripts had been killed across the province, and the fear that spread through soldiers and their families, layered on top of the province's already violent recent history, was suffocating. Inside the barracks, I watched one soldier repeatedly sexually assaulted by several others. One of his attackers prayed the dawn prayer faithfully every single day. That man was simply transferred to a larger unit, where he assaulted others. The victim was eventually sent back to his own city. No one was ever held accountable. A deputy commander once exposed a colossal theft carried out by a major in charge of inspections, purely because the major had insulted him personally. The major's only punishment was a one-year delay in promotion. 13. Art Art pulled at me early. In elementary school I signed up for a photography course; the school took my registration fee and then delivered neither the class nor a refund. That summer I took calligraphy instead. In middle school, playwriting, and my teacher took us to see a live play for the first time in my life. I was drawing, too, during those same years. In a high school art competition, I submitted a portrait of a famous Iranian lexicographer. The competition director showed me another student's entry, a piece of religious fantasy art, and told me that was what a drawing should look like. He never returned mine. At university, our literature association tried to stage a play. The university official in charge told us we'd first need permission from the Islamic Guidance Department. The Guidance Department told us we'd first need to produce the play so they could review it before granting permission. We gave up. After graduating, I took a public-speaking course. For a while, I'd spend happy afternoons at the gallery and painting studio of an older party member. More recently, I've been experimenting with graphic design in Canva, though with Iran's internet in the state it's in, even that has grown tedious. 14. Recruitment After finishing military service, I sat several employment exams: shipping, which I wanted most (language and practical exams in Tehran, the theory exam down in Bandar Mahshahr); a large company where I'd once interned and where my father had spent decades; Bank Mellat; and the Iranian Broadcasting Corporation. I passed every theoretical and practical stage and failed every ideological interview. In the shipping interview, after only a few questions, the interviewer asked me, simply, whether I prayed. Two decades later, I spent a year at a large, nominally private home-appliance manufacturer. I watched firsthand as they refused to hire anyone who wasn't Shiite. It was, in practice, a machine for money laundering dressed up as a business, running Shia propaganda on the side. When the company finally reviewed my paperwork to sign a permanent contract, they uncovered my political history. I was fired. 15. Business As a boy I bought packs of effervescent vitamin C tablets from the pharmacy and resold them one at a time to other kids. I traded foreign coins and stamps. Summers, I made and sold paper pinwheels, and spent a stretch working at the neighborhood bakery, until one of the local women told my mother, pointedly, that she must not have enough money if she needed to send her child to work at a bakery. As a child I always kept a piggy bank and actually managed to save. In those years, saving still meant something. With the currency collapsing the way it has in recent years, saving money now amounts to slowly losing it instead. Since university I've cycled through job after job: a video game shop, an appliance store, a store selling protein supplements, driving for an internet taxi service, repairing household appliances. One day a cleric who ran a marriage-and-divorce office next door came into the repair shop complaining about high electricity bills, since his office shared a meter with the grocery store below us. What he actually wanted was for me to sabotage the grocery store's refrigerator motors so they'd burn out. Every job change came because I couldn't get the right license, and each move slowly drained my savings to nothing. Business privacy, like nearly every other kind of privacy, means little inside a revolution. The regime isn't just a rule-maker; it's a competitor, sometimes an outright enemy, especially if you happen to be its political opponent as well. 16. Proposal I once cared for a girl who wanted me to stay out of politics. I couldn't give her that, and she left. There were other dates after her. One woman told me she wanted a husband who would wake her for morning prayers. Another sent her cousin to my workplace to interrogate me about the fundamentals of religious practice. A third asked me to sell my father's property so she could use the money to visit her sister in America. Another, wistfully, told me about a friend's husband who'd embezzled two billion tomans from his office. They all shared one thing in common: fierce opposition to the mandatory hijab, paired with a firm belief in the dowry. Aren't both, I always wondered, equally products of the same tradition? There was one woman I truly liked, someone who liked me, too, in fact, but with empty pockets, I could never bring myself to take a real step toward her. 17. Loan I have never once taken out a loan. Either I lacked the right letter of introduction, or the right work permit, or I simply couldn't have managed the installments, or no one would agree to be my guarantor. I call loans a kind of legalized theft. Given the terms banks impose and the profits they extract, they have effectively laundered their reputation on the backs of the poor. The only reason anyone accepts such crushing installments at all is that inflation makes the alternative — saving — even worse. Low-interest and interest-free loans, of course, remain readily available to anyone affiliated with the regime. Every day I see more people crushed under the twin weight of loan payments and inflation, and just as many trying, desperately, to unload goods they bought on credit whose prices have since multiplied several times over. 18. Video, Satellite, and Internet First came video, then satellite, both strictly forbidden at first. Eventually the regime began licensing video stores to sell and rent tapes, while satellite channels sprang up hawking every imaginable product, including health and medical goods, freely advertised and sold inside the country despite the ban. Our neighbor's son once delivered our first VCR to us on a quiet summer afternoon, wrapped tightly in cloth and hidden as though he were smuggling narcotics. The internet, at first, existed only inside universities before slowly opening to the public. To learn how to use it, I enrolled in a course at a technical training center and sat the exam, but my score never appeared on the board, and the certificate I'd earned never arrived either. From the very start, the regime built internet filtering on religious grounds, then on security grounds, the same way it had already handled television, cinema, and the press. They blocked social networks, software repositories, design tools, stock-market analysis sites, even platforms built to help the blind and visually impaired. During uprisings or wartime, the internet vanished entirely, or shrank down to domestic sites alone. Two regime officials once described the internet as a rabid dog. Of course they did: it had broken their monopoly on one-way, top-down messaging and replaced it with something free and two-directional. 19. Virtual Communication I traveled abroad a handful of times, mostly to neighboring countries, but every trip grew harder than the last. The currency kept collapsing, travel costs kept climbing, and what was once a short, affordable hop to Dubai or Turkey became two times, ten times, twenty times more expensive within just a few years. So instead, to stay connected to the world, sharpen my English, and hunt for any opportunity to earn something, I turned to social networks. Scammers, I quickly learned, infest nearly every Facebook group worth joining. Whoever finally solves that problem will do the platform's stock price a real favor. I joined business groups, but for anyone actually trying to do business, Iran remained a strange, off-limits gray zone. Literature and culture groups worked better, since they demanded no financial entanglement, though even there, the regime's behavior occasionally soured the mood among members. Language-exchange groups worked best of all. Once, drawn by an interest in nature, I joined two nature-themed groups, only to discover one of them was, in fact, a nudist community whose name closely echoed the word 'nature.' Even a native English-speaking friend of mine couldn't spot the difference at first. The members were welcoming enough. I left anyway. Searching Facebook one day, I found an old friend I hadn't spoken to since our very first visit to the party office, years earlier. One night at work, I posted for the first time in a language-exchange group. Messages came in from people wanting to trade Persian for English: Fiji, Kenya, Pakistan, Iraq, Turkey, the United States, the UAE, Israel. Most drifted away quickly. A young woman from Pakistan joined a single WhatsApp call, barely spoke, and never turned her camera on. A man from Kenya, a Persian-language student, expressed interest without ever committing to real practice. An American woman whose father was Iranian traded a few short messages before losing interest too. One by one, the others faded the same way. The one person who stayed, patiently, session after session, was an English teacher in the United States. Despite the time difference between Iran and America, we found ourselves talking nearly every day. Her warmth and steady good humor gave me real confidence in speaking English, though I never managed to return the favor with her Persian. Our conversations grew closer, more frequent, more genuine. Those were hard days: freshly fired from my job over my party membership, my parents unwell, money tight, the constant low hum of pressure from the security services against me and my friends in the party. Her presence, through all of it, was a real comfort. She was more than a friend or a teacher to me by then, and I have never known her to be anything but kind. 20. Protests My first protest, if it counts as one, was against the new education system and the absence of any qualified teacher for one of our technical courses. Out of the forty students who took part, the school's directors singled me out alone, locked me inside the water tank, and released me two hours later once everyone had dispersed. We even went to the Education Department afterward and gave them the director's name. Their only response: he was redundant there anyway. My first genuinely political protest came in Laleh Park in April 1998, a demonstration against the regime's closed, undemocratic system of vetting candidates before elections. We had a permit and had given prior notice. It made no difference. Basij forces and plainclothes thugs attacked almost immediately with tear gas, batons, and chains, wounding many of us. I was reciting from the Quran at the podium when it started. Police stood nearby and did nothing. Women in the crowd egged both sides on. A tear gas canister went off right in front of my face. It felt exactly like a fistful of sand thrown straight into my eyes. The moment I got home, I called two newspapers that liked to think of themselves as critical of the regime. Neither had heard a single word about the rally. A week later I met the party formally, and six months after that, I became a member. July 8, 1999, and the days after, marked my second real experience of protest: the University Quarter uprising. My professor and several other party members were arrested and each sentenced to months in prison, along with heavy fines. That same year, in the late fall, I arrived in Zahedan for my military service and saw graffiti on a wall meant to humiliate students and young people. This was the regime's retaliation against the people of Zahedan, who had risen up alongside the students. As awareness spread and communication improved, the protests kept multiplying, and in every one that followed, I was beaten, threatened, summoned for interrogation, or arrested. 21. Scammers Fraud, in Iran, is everywhere. The older generation insists there weren't nearly so many con artists before the revolution, people determined to get rich overnight by wrecking everyone else's lives and livelihoods along the way. I fell victim to one myself and lost money in the process. He was an engineer, a relative of an old friend, and he'd built himself a careful image as a professional, high-level, upstanding man. When I finally looked into his background, I found his parents were divorced, his father a fraudster and addict who died of it, his grandfather an addict and a philanderer, and his mother (his accomplice in all of it) carrying her own deep well of need. One newspaper ran a headline that said it plainly: Iran is a paradise for scammers. Advance-fee schemes, fraudulent immigration consultants, Ponzi rings, counterfeit goods and services of every description. Fraud and grand theft run rampant through government and semi-government offices alike, though the regime prefers a gentler word for what its own people do: embezzlement, a label that, no matter how vast the sums involved, carries a far lighter legal weight than the crimes it actually describes. The courts used to overflow with plaintiffs, endlessly busy. Once judicial service offices and online filing systems arrived, the courtrooms emptied out. Now it's the judicial service offices that are jammed, and the online systems themselves that are perpetually breaking down.

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