Love and Death in Iran

A modern Dostoevskyian love story set in Iran.

• Drama

								
Love is a cycle of contractions, rich with lance-split heart, flushed with boom and bust. My blind love had required of me a description of light and darkness. But then I felt the impulse to commit a crime, a crime of heart.


The phone call came at around 1 PM when I was teaching - a graduate course on global diplomacy at Tehran University as a visiting professor. Mrs. Javadi the department secretary hesitantly knocked on the door to alert me about a "very urgent call" for me. Some of my students seemed delighted by the interruption, perhaps finding me boring or too Westernized, i.e., the hermenutics of suspicion. I told them to review a book chapter and that I would be right back, never fathoming it was the last time I saw them, rushed to my office and picked up the phone the moment it rang. A male voice in a thick serious tone first asked for my name and then inquired if I knew Hannah Hoffman? I said I did and asked why? He told me he was a deputy chief police officer in Isfahan and they had arrested Hannah, who had left me three days before for a photo shoot in Isfahan, for attempted murder.

"Attempted murder?! Are you serious?! Murdering who?"

His answer was even more shocking, "An elderly lady here. Did you know that your friend carried a hand gun with her?" Of course, I didn't and couldn't believe my ears. I asked if I could talk to her and he firmly said no. The only option was to hurry to Isfahan a half day away. After hanging up the phone, I dialed the secretary and asked her to cancel my afternoon classes. Then I took a taxi to the bus station and boarded the first one for Isfahan, with my head jammed with so many questions begging for an answer.

During the bus ride on that hot autumn day, I had to put up with a constant baby crying behind me, wishing at one point to just grab and throw it out the window, and, worse, a repulsive onion-breath worker sitting right next to me and lamenting the drought in Isfahan devastating its riverbed and its harvests, pretending to be listening while my mind revisited all that I knew about Hannah, i.e., she was a perfectly enchanting woman in every respect, an award-winning photo journalist visiting Iran on a German magazine's assignment and we had met three weeks earlier at a mutual friend's house party, hitting it off instantly, partly because of our shared experiences in international travel, particularly in East Africa, where I was involved once in some UN peace efforts, and speaking German, French, and English with each other. She had shown me photos of her tiny house (in the community village Margarethenhohe) in Essen, with a little garden behind, and a lawn as big as a pocket-handkerchief in front. We had spent time touring the Niavaran Palace and the rug museum, among other places, and then I took her for a few days excursion to the Kish island in Persian Gulf, pretending to be married so that we could share the same hotel room, putting on a couple of fake rings to convey a married couple's impression, and laughing about it. "What happens if we get caught?" She asked. “I've heard about the Evin Prison.” I casually answered, "Nothing, probably stoned to death for adultery -- just kidding don't worry." We spent romantic evenings, making love passionately and rapidly falling for each other, to the point that I confessed my love for her that last evening strolling by the beach side and enjoying a bonfire before the clouds piled up in the sky moving with lightning flashes and thunder peals, running back to the hotel and taking shelter under a massive tree kissing each other like mad lovers; I loved kissing her full lips, told her once "your lips silently promise to keep me happy" to which she quickly reacted, "and what about when my lips are not silent?"
"They speak in coded words: We always keep our promise," I laughingly responded. "Oh, you're a flesh reader Professor," she teased.

The bus made a half-way stop at a roadside traditional restaurant and I treated myself with some rice and kebab yet with a head somewhere else, tapping into my memory bank, now recalling that she had an ugly scar on her right thigh from an accident a long time ago, but didn't want to talk about it. We watched a couple of episodes of popular TV show, Game of Thrones, on her laptop and she educated me all there was to know about the cast of characters, particularly the anti-hero, Cresei, her rogue sexuality, viciousness and constantly scheming. I played my favorite Persian song, the melancholic yet inspirational Gole Yakh (the ice flower) by Koorsh Yaghmai, for her and she instantly loved it and asked me to play it again and again and translate every word of it. Through a waiter we managed our hands on an old bottle of red wine and finished it at the beach, drinking from the bottle only when there was no one around while listening to Cold Play on her cell, basking in the glory of being transgressors of local restrictions. There is always something liberating about being a rebel. A la Les Bacchantes (Roman God of wine and intoxication), she sounded after finishing the last sip, then stood and showed me how she can turn into a derviche tourneur (whirling dervish), forcing me to join her, inevitably attracting some attention until a life guard showed up and warned us to leave before we got into real trouble. She found the island, a western oasis built primarily for Iran's budding bourgeoisie with its fancy malls and plush hotels, "extraordinarily interesting" and her only lament was losing her summer hat to blowing wind on a pleasure boat; on the boat, we met a group of young musicians who had fled Tehran over their underground music and were in hiding at the island; partly because of their subversive lyrics and partly due to their embrace of Buddhism -- they referred to the boat in Buddhist term, kari no yadori (temporary dwelling). "Buddha is cool, doesn't guilt trip you over your sins," one of them explained to Hannah, who had been to Tibet monasteries and certainly knew more about that eastern religion than me and most if not all of those young souls; one of them, his first name Amir, was a talented singer whose uncle was the captain, a grubby old man mildly reminding me of Zorba the Greek, who worked them hard as the crew and, yet when we were sufficiently out in the sea, softened up and let those kids play live music for us, much to the chagrin of some conservative tourists who disapproved of their "decadent" behavior, but not Hannah who simply couldn't take enough picture of them, wondering aloud if those kids had any bright future in the country? I gave them a nice tip at the end, appreciative of the odds they faced in Iran's restrictive post-revolutionary system at odds with its modern civil society. On the way back at the airport, I purchased a small silk rug and a miniature painting for Hannah, and she was hesitant to accept them but I finally convinced her. On the plane, she told me for the first time that she was seriously thinking of taking up my suggestion of a much longer stay. Hannah had a minor degree in philosophy, from the prestigious Heidelberg University, and bragged about her honor thesis on the subject of David Hume's aesthetics and modern photography. To my delight, she was quite well-read, carried a copy of Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment in her purse, and was also a movie buff like me, rather amazed by my knowledge of new wave German cinema, although we disagreed on the merits of Werner Fassbinder's films, not to mention my personal friendship with the great German philosopher, Jurgen Habermas, who was once my professor at Boston College and who had also made a visit to Iran several years ago with some help from me. Walter Benjamin was Hannah's favorite author and I impressed her by my deep knowledge of Benjamin and the rest of the Frankfurt School (of social theory), above all Horkheimer and Adorno.

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