| تبليغات | X |
انجمن کتابداری و اطلاع رسانی استان قم قصد دارد به همت شما دانشجویان عزیز فعالیت های دانشجویی خود را در قالب کمیته دانشجویی آغاز کند و برای این آغاز نیاز به راهنمایی و حمایت ها و حضور گرم شما عزیزان دارد. لذا از همه شما استدعا دارم با ایمیل ها پیام ها حضور و ارتباط های خود با بنده و دیگر دوستان خدمتگزار در انجمن ما را یاری نمایید تا بتوانیم در کنار هم و به یاری خداوند خدمات ارزنده ای را ارائه دهیم.
منتظریم
Leonard Kniffel finds the zippersWhy in the world would you want to go to Iran? Isn’t it dangerous? That’s what a number of my relatives and friends asked me when I told them about my “great opportunity.”
Think of it as a goodwill mission, I said. Iran is celebrating the opening of a new National Library, and they have invited me to attend. The librarians are reaching out; they want contact with their colleagues in the rest of the world. My presence at the festivities would permit them to share the good news through American Libraries.
Going someplace so foreign, so “forbidden,” also has its draw. But I didn’t mention that.
Actually, it all started just after 9/11 when the director of general information and reference services at the National Library, Gholamreza Amirkhani, and his colleagues e-mailed a sympathy message to the American Library Association (ALA), expressing their shock and sadness. Colleagues all over the world in every profession were looking for ways to show their solidarity with Americans.
Amirkhani and I began an intermittent e-mail correspondence that even resulted in his writing a short article for American Libraries about the deplorable situation in libraries in neighboring Afghanistan, after he visited the war-torn country in 2002 as part of a library delegation from Iran. He told me about the new library going up in Tehran and, proud of the achievement and eager to show it off internationally, suggested that I come to the opening in 2005. Sure, I said, never imagining that it would really happen. It seemed at the time merely a nice gesture.
On the last day of January this year, I received an e-mail from Amirkhani: “The new building of the National Library of Iran will inaugurate on March 1. Have you received an official invitation for this ceremony?”
The next day, I got a telephone call from Ahmad Sadeghi at the Iranian Mission to the United Nations in New York. He faxed me a “personal data form” and said all I needed to do was fax it back to him as soon as possible. They were serious. I wrote back to Amirkhani and told him I needed time to see if it was possible for me to go. I wasn’t sure I had the budget, I needed to talk to ALA’s Executive Director, Keith Michael Fiels, and work out other details. I was still unsure about the prospect but started to think about the story and pictures I could bring home.
“It’s a great opportunity. You got the invitation. You should go,” Fiels encouraged. I talked to Michael Dowling, director of the ALA International Relations Office, who had actually met Amirkhani at the International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions (IFLA) conference in Buenos Aires last year. He agreed that it was a rare opportunity.
I hesitated for a day or two, mostly because of the expense involved, but then Amirkhani assured me that I needn’t worry—I would be the guest of the library and my accommodations would be provided.
Then I got a call from out of the blue from Jeremy Stone of Catalytic Diplomacy, a Washington-based nonprofit devoted to providing countries with strategic advice on how to improve their security relations with the U.S. “If you’re going,” he urged with some agitation, “you need to get those forms filled out and fax them right away.” He told me that if I didn’t move quickly or I was not going to get a visa and I was going to hold up his visa as well, since he was hoping to attend the library opening too.
Following explicit instructions from Sadeghi, I sent the form to him February 3 and rushed out to Borders on Michigan Avenue to buy a guide to Iran. They had one in stock: the Lonely Planet guide. Reading it convinced me that the trip was not only possible but was perfectly reasonable and without any real risks. People go to Iran all the time.
On February 10, I contacted Mary Jane Deeb, head of Middle Eastern collections at the Library of Congress, who had traveled to Iran last year with Librarian of Congress James Billington. I explained the situation and asked for advice.
“The way you are going about getting the visa is best. There are two ways to go, through the Interests Section in Washington or through the Iranian Mission to the United Nations. Either way, it is the Foreign Affairs Ministry in Tehran that handles it.” She recommended that I make my plane reservations and have a photo taken immediately, so I would be ready when the visa was approved. She recommended Reading Lolita in Tehran by Azar Nafisi (Random House 2003) for in-flight reading.
Amirkhani told me Alitalia and Turkish Airlines were my best bets, but I still had doubts about the visa. I was careful to indicate that my profession was “librarian,” not “journalist,” as Mr. Sadeghi had advised, since I was to be traveling in that capacity and journalists had to go through an entirely different process. I read more in the Lonely Planet guide: “Israelis (along with anyone who has an Israeli stamp in their passport) are not allowed in under any circumstances.”
Well, that’s the end of that, I thought, since I was in Israel in 2000 to attend the annual IFLA conference, which all the Muslim countries had boycotted. I held off buying a ticket and didn’t even pack my luggage.
On February 15, Sadeghi called and sent me another e-mail. “Your visa clearance is issued, and you may proceed to get your visa from IR [Islamic Republic] Interests Section in Washington.” The next day, I sent the paperwork, along with my passport and a visa mug shot, by overnight mail to the Iranian Interests Section, which is located in the Pakistan embassy in Washington, since relations between the U.S. and Iran are so bad that there is no Iranian embassy.
I started looking into tickets and finally booked a flight on American Airlines to London, February 25, transferring to British Airways for arrival into Tehran the next day. I informed the Interests Section in Washington, Sadeghi in New York, Amirkhani in Tehran, and a man in Washington named Mehdi Atefat, who assured me that “your visa will be approved.”
At that point, I decided to ask about the Israeli stamp in my passport. I told Atefat what I’d read and asked him if my passport had been examined. He assured me that the Israeli stamp would not matter.
“You are the guest of the library. Everything will be taken care of in Tehran,” he said. I e-mailed my itinerary. Departure from Chicago February 25, arrival the next day, leave Tehran March 5. I forwarded the itinerary from the travel agent.
The day before I was scheduled to leave, the visa, glued neatly into my passport, arrived at my house. I started packing. I sent my last message to Amirkhani on the afternoon of my departure day and asked him where I would be staying. “Probably the Laleh Hotel,” he said. “You can get exact information when you reach Tehran. Have a good journey!”
The morning of my flight to Tehran, I wake up with a small sore in the middle of my forehead. I have no idea how it got there. Maybe I bumped my head on the bedpost. While waiting for my connecting flight to London, I read in the New Yorker (2-28-05, p. 36) that a devout Muslim bears a “prayer burn in the middle of his forehead.” Maybe it’s a sign, like stigmata.
“There ya go,” says the attendant at the check-in counter. Not exactly the send off I’d expected on my way to Iran, part of President Bush’s “axis of evil.” No lines, no security nightmare, and only two hours to wait till boarding for London. The attendants joke with me about the “M” that appeared in exit row seats on the British Airways connecting flight to Tehran. “Men,” I suggest, to their amusement. They poke around in their computers trying to decipher the code. One attendant asks another. They decide it would be best to seat me elsewhere, noting that they had not encountered the “M” designation before. “Maybe it’s reserved for her Majesty,” I suggest. They thought that was the funniest thing they’d ever heard.
A week of anticipation, a visa rushed through by Iranian government officials whose names I do not know, and I am on my way to the Islamic Republic of Iran. I review the visa: Entry: one. Acc. (whatever that means) none. Issued in Washington 23/02/2005 and overnighted by FedEx. I flip to the Israeli stamp and wonder how if “under no circumstances will you get a visa” I am carrying an Iranian visa. I am the special guest of the National Library of Iran. That’s the answer, I conclude, and I hope I can live up to being a guest so generously honored.
A British Airways attendant announces that she will be our “purser.” I haven’t a clue what that is supposed to mean, but I was to learn in a matter of hours how much I would long for a good purser. Already I am experiencing that sensation of separation one gets when traveling alone, watching the ordinary things that make up our day-to-day lives slip away. Suddenly everyone is English, or talking about their plans for theater or hotels or family and friends in London. But I am on my way to Tehran, I want to tell them. How much more exciting is that!
We land in London’s Heathrow airport, and I board a shuttle to connecting flights in another terminal. On the way I get a little of the reaction I had been hoping for. A uniformed passport checker asks where I am going. “Iran,” I tell her. She’s a well-put-together 40ish woman with reddish-brown hair who looks at me over her glasses and with perfect British understatement says, “Oh, lovely.” Motioning me toward the security checkpoint she adds, “There you go then.”
Immediately I discover that the plane has been delayed three hours. Disembodied voices on the public address system announce that flights to Alexandria and Addis Ababa are now boarding. The terminal is another transition point, from one culture to another. Women in veils and long dresses mill about chattering in other languages. Men huddle, dressed in their two piece white pajama-like outfits, some with turbans on their heads. An article in Smithsonian magazine says that Farsi is the third most-used language on the Internet, after English and Chinese. Who knew?
At the British Airways counter I ask where the showers are. When I find them, there are no towels, so I settle for a quick shave and a splash of water, hoping it well make me look more dignified on my arrival in Tehran. A woman at the counter is asking in English if they can call her home in Michigan and check with her husband.
Meanwhile, news reports indicate that Iran and Russia are about to sign a nuclear fuel deal, against strong American opposition, clearing the way for the Islamic regime’s first nuclear reactor to start operating next year.
As I settle in for the wait at the gate, the woman from the counter is seated across from me and looking at me with curiosity. She smiles. I smile back. She seems to want to talk, but I don’t want to be presumptuous. I find an e-mail kiosk and send a message to Amirkhani to let him know that I will arrive three hours later than planned.
When I return to my seat, the woman from Michigan rolls her eyes as the disembodied voice announces that we will be delayed another hour. Before long, we’re talking. She is Iranian but living in Saginaw, not so very far from where I was born. “What are you doing in Saginaw?” I ask. “I go where my husband goes. We lived in Iowa for a while too.” She seems so sophisticated, French somehow, with her accent and stylish chin-length brown hair. There is nothing veiled about her.
As we get in line to board the plane, she tells me she comes back to Iran every year. “My parents are old now. It’s not a pleasure anymore, but I could never forgive myself if I did not come to see them,” she says. Her son comes back often now, she says, “He loves Iran and may even go back there to live.”
On the plane, I read Reading Lolita in Tehran. Everyone around me seems to be Iranian now. The Michigan woman is sitting many seats ahead of me. Author Nazar Nafisi tells of “the nightmarish quality of living in an atmosphere of perpetual dread,” where good people are swallowed up by the ideology of fanatics.
I think of the role of librarians in this world-so benign, so dangerous. The fanatics always come for the intellectuals, the keepers of ideas, to set a torch to their “harmless” repositories.
Because of a personal interest in my own ethnic background, I asked Amirkhani before I left if he could show me any remains of the little-known Polish deportation carried out by the Russians in 1942, in which one-and-half-million Poles were driven from their homes and sent to camps in Siberia and Kazakhstan. Many ended up in Iran and made their way to freedom from there. “Fortunately, there is a cemetery in Tehran that have buried some of them. I hope to visit there with you,” he said.
A flight attendant asks us all if we want wine, including the couple in the seats in front of me. The woman, wrapped in black scarves, says no, and they take tea. As I’m reading, I cannot help but think about the veils. What could be more exciting to a man than the gold earrings, the scented hair hidden beneath, only for him? The couple is watching the in-flight movie, Shall We Dance; they laugh as Jennifer Lopez teaches Richard Gere how to appreciate the passion of the tango. In his western duds, the man laughs too, but is more reserved. Perhaps they are enjoying the last moments before the transition back to their home. The plane seems to be full of faces going home-Iranian face, Aryan not Arab in their racial identity. Portly men, tough men, dark-haired with massive eyebrows.
I hold up my copy of Reading Lolita in Tehran to see if anyone is curious. The well-dressed businessman wearing a large gold ring glances over and smiles. His daughter, or what appears to be his daughter, is demure, dark and sultry. She glances out the window and smiles.
One moment you are in the middle of England and the next 30 minutes from Tehran, and suddenly everyone is Iranian. And you are an American with no embassy, and you’ve no airline, and now it’s up to you. Iranians love Americans, the Lonely Planet guide tells me, and so it seems. Americans, on the other hand, myself included, know virtually nothing about Iran, to love or not love. Farsi is impossible. I try to memorize the word for thank-you: Motashakkeram.
We approach Tehran for landing. It’s past 1:30 in the morning. I glance out the window at the grid of lights. It looks the same as Chicago. Every woman on the plane dons a scarf. A British flight attendant who looks like Sarah Ferguson wraps her head in a deep purple silken wrap, tucking wisps of hair under the folds of cloth. The pilot trusts ground control to guide us to safety, and we coast to the gate. It still seems we could be in Cleveland, no signs of the axis of evil.
Inside the terminal, I join the lines at passport control. People dodge from line to line, and I find myself at the end. But soon I spot a huddle of men on the other side of the passport control gates carrying a piece of paper. I follow them with my eyes and, yes, my name is on it. I wave. They wave back and smile, almost stumbling over one another. One of them points to the far side of the room, so I leave the line and meet him, smiling. He’s wearing a navy blue suit, with a crisp blue collarless shirt buttoned to his neck.
There is no greeting, only another smile, more nervous than the first. “Your passport,” he says, holding out his hand.
I hand it to him and he runs off with it. He and his gang exchange words with the uniformed guards sitting at a desk to the right of the customs officers. I get back in line behind the British Airways flight attendants, one of whom asks if I’m okay. “Considering that I just handed my passport to someone I don’t know and he has run off with it, yes,” I joke.
“Yes, well, that’s odd,” he says. And then they all clear customs and ascend the staircase to I-don’t-know-where. The same staircase my greeters rushed to with my passport.
The passport officers in their little glass cages are all women wrapped in black, like nuns, somberly stamping and buzzing a door to let each visitor into the questioning area.
I leave the line and try to ask the uniformed guards what I should do.
“No, no,” one of them shouts, “Go.” He points to a bank of benches in the center of the room. I take a seat. Two Arabs in full garb have settled in a few seats away, smoking cigarettes. I wish I had one.
The room empties, and the last of the nun-like control officers closes shop. Another woman in black appears from an office door and floats across the room to the toilets.
It’s 2:30 now. I clutch my hand luggage and wonder what is to become of my checked bag. An Iranian man with a British Airways label on his uniform appears and says, “You have no visa?”
It’s in my passport, I try to tell him, which some people have just run off with. “I’ll tell them,” he says and disappears. I’m wondering why they have to be told.
Four guards are swaggering around the desk on the other side of passport control about 40 feet farther into Iran and muttering to one another. I have to laugh at my naiveté. I thought I was being rushed to the front. Now, I’m being detained, with no passport.
After 15 minutes, I try to approach the men again. They motion me away. One asks for my passport. That’s scary, since I have handed it over, presumably to my hosts. The British flight crew is long gone. I try to resist succumbing to how odd it all has begun to seem. Some possibilities start to occur to me. I am now in what is truly beginning to feel like a hostile country with no passport, and the people in charge have just asked me for my passport.
At the far side of a desk a young British guy appears, speaking to the guards in Farsi. He signals to me and asks me what is wrong. He talks to them and tells me there is something wrong with my visa. “Where did you get your visa, the Pakistani embassy?” he calls. “Yes, yes,” I tell him. He shakes his head and speaks to the guards again. “There is something wrong with your visa,” he says and heads to the stairs.
Now I am wondering what happened to the library people. Shouldn’t they have left someone with me? Shouldn’t they have introduced themselves? The Arab men pass through customs. A wave of alarm passes over me. The place is empty but for me and the guards.
It seems odd. The signs are all in Farsi and English, but no one speaks. Where is my checked bag? Panicking would be foolish, I conclude. What are they doing? It can’t be that they are going to send me home? Right now, perhaps, that would be the most desirable option. No library people, the people I count on for sanity and reason. Nobody telling me anything, no passport. It’s 3 a.m. Wait, I tell myself, just wait.
Another official appears and tells me, “The library did not tell them you were coming,” he says, and rushes off before I can ask more questions.
A flight arrives from Dubai. Men rush to passport control. Women follow, all wrapped in veils, but with signs of their Western-ness showing—blue jeans beneath their trench coats, make-up, wisps of hair slipping from their wrappings. Why did I hand over my passport to a man I did not know? Why? I think of how useless it would be to invoke the American Library Association. “This will pass,” I tell myself.
At last, the nervous well-dressed man who took my passport appears. “Something is wrong,” he says and tells me to sit on a bench by the gruff, uniformed men at the desk. I follow him, but just as I am about to sit, they begin to argue. Although it’s in Farsi, I can see that the guards are telling him that I am not allowed to sit there. Two men with one eyebrow each point to the waiting room bench and tell him I must go back there. They are fighting over where I can sit, with the apparent line being that technically the bench by their desk is beyond customs.
The well-dressed man motions for me to accompany another man with a two-day beard growth who gestures me toward a room labeled Ministry of Foreign Affairs. “It’s a mix-up, he says, “this office, that office, one office, two offices.” Two uniformed men escort me to a room dominated by two giant ayatollah portraits.
Inside the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, a man with a day’s growth of beard is shuffling passports and papers in front of a customer service window and two flat-screen monitors. He yammers on the telephone. The well-dressed man comes back, debating and gesturing toward me. Then he leaves, telling me nothing.
“Sorry,” says the unkempt man. “Wait.” He motions for me to sit on a brocade settee with elaborate wooden arms. Another man, plumper but with the same day’s growth, emerges from a backroom and starts showing off his English. I apologize for not speaking Farsi. “No sorry,” he smiles and boasts with difficulty, “we all speak English.” I ask him in French if he speaks French. He lightens up and assures me he does and offers me coffee to demonstrate. I thank him but decline, out of politeness on the first offer, as instructed in my guidebook. Je voudrais dormir, I tell him and make him laugh. He repeats my request for sleep in Farsi to the other man and they laugh.
Perhaps we are getting somewhere, I think, trying to be optimistic. I take comfort in being settled on a grand davenport in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs with these civil men who resume their work settling matters for a handful of errant passengers from the Dubai arrival.
It’s 4 a.m. now. The gang from the customs area is chatting on walkie-talkies. They stand me up and sit me down. “Sorry, there is more problem,” says one. But there are smiles. Another young guard assures me that “suitcase okay.”
The friendly Foreign Affairs officer brings me a demitasse of coffee, thick with cream and sugar.
Suddenly, a new face appears. It’s Gholamreza Amirkhani and a colleague from the library, all smiles and concern. He apologizes for “all of this.” And soon everyone in the room is apologizing. “Something didn’t happen in New York,” he says. When I press for more information, he makes small talk. His English is good but studied.
Now it’s 5 a.m. and without explanation, the library gang disappears again, and I’m offered more coffee by the men from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. I glance to my right at the flashing sign inside the terminal, in English and Farsi: “In the name of God, welcome.”
Everyone is gone again, except for my coffee-serving friend in the ministry and two young guys in uniforms outside the door with cell phones. My friend tells me to go ahead and lie down on the satin couch.
Now it’s going on 6 a.m. My friend is still working the window to accommodate an Italian businessman. He smiles and assures me that everything will be fine. Another uniformed man appears and demands to see my airline ticket. His English is minimal, but he uses the word “deport,” should everything not be fine. It dawns on me for the first time that they are really not going to admit me to Iran.
My friend is arguing with the Italian, about how to fill in a form. He glances over at me. I am blatantly taking notes. Perhaps I shouldn’t be. But instead of saying anything to me, he turns nasty to the Italian. “Your name, name,” he shouts in English, as if perplexed by this Italian’s inability to understand. “Sign your name!” The Italian, who clearly speaks almost no English is confused and offers his name again. The Iranian glances at me with a bored bureaucrat’s disgust.
When the Italian finally leaves, my friend turns to me and shrugs his shoulders. “I heard Italian people are stupid,” he says, grinning, “I guess they don’t know how to write.”
Now it’s almost 7 a.m. My friend dims the lights and tells me to sleep. He drops his pointy-toed slippers and puts his feet on his desk. “I can sleep anywhere,” he boasts. “When I was a soldier-you know in Iran at age 18 you must go to the military-I put my face next to my gun and sleeped while I marched.” It was during the Iran-Iraq war, he says. He tells me he was wounded. Now he has a wife and three children. He loved the Iranian film The White Balloon and explains the traditional meal that prompted the little heroine’s quest in the movie.
It’s almost 8 a.m. now. Amirkhani and his library colleagues reappear. He sits next to me and talks about our correspondence, his desire to take me to the Polish cemetery and to meet an Iranian man with a Polish wife who has made a documentary about the Polish interment. I tell him about the book When God Looked the Other Way by Wesley Adamczyk, which tells one family’s story about the kindness of Iranians. He tells me that I would not have stayed at the Laleh Hotel, but at another. He is clearly agitated and runs off again before I can get any answers to my questions about what is happening to me.
A new man appears, this time wearing a British Airways insignia. He speaks flawless English and requests my passport and tickets, which my friend produces from nowhere. “Recognize the Texas accent?” he says. “My parents are Iranian. I live here now.” He smiles. I think of the woman from Saginaw, Michigan. Her son must be about his age.
Two more uniformed guards appear, speaking no English. Still, no one has told me what is happening. One guard motions for me to follow him up a flight of stairs to who knows where. He heads up the escalator alongside the stairs. I follow him and he orders me to go back down and take the stairs. I am pulling my carry-on bag and try to comply. Halfway up the stairs, I spot Amirkhani and his library colleagues. I stop at the landing while the guards motion for me to keep going.
“No, no, Amirkhani shouts, don’t go with them!” Not knowing what to do, I listen to the librarians, who are now frantically waving and telling me to come back. I try to ask what is going on, but they are arguing with one another and waving their hands.
When I reach them, they tell me to wait again, on the same bench where I started my long night. The guards stay in their places at the stairs and then wander away.
An old man splattering soapy water on the gray marble floors motions for me to move, and Amirkhani and his friends run off again. “Wait here,” he says. I never see them again.
It’s after 8 a.m., and my friend in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs comes off duty. He stops when he sees me waiting on the bench. He shakes my hand. “They are still trying to solve your problem,” he says.
“I still don’t know what my problem is.”
“It’s not your problem,” he says, “It’s our problem.”
And what is happening?
“Fifty-fifty chance,” he says. “I hope it works out for you because I like you.” He smiles and says goodbye.
The British Airways man with the Texas accent comes back after about 15 minutes.
“Will you please tell me what is going on,” I implore him.
“They are not going to let you in,” he says frantically. “I’m afraid you’ll have to follow me. You are being deported.” He hands me my passport and tickets. “Hurry.”
He and a comrade are running around the terminal and chattering into their walkie-talkies. “Follow me,” he keeps motioning. I’m trying to keep up with him without being hysterical. I’m running behind him asking why no one will tell me what is happening.
“The plane is leaving in less than half an hour,” he says on the run, and grabs my tickets. “I’ll take care of this.”
“Leaving for where?” I beg. Siberia? Iraq? “London,” he says.
“My luggage!”
“You had luggage?”
I hand him the tag I got in Chicago.
“I’ll take care of it.”
He orders me to sit and runs to the other end of the terminal. People are looking at us, but I hardly care.
When he comes back, he yells, “Follow me!” Then he pushes us through security. They don’t even look in my bag. He pushes people aside and orders me to follow. It begins to feel like an escape instead of a departure.
“My luggage?” I holler again. “My ticket to Chicago?”
But he runs away and hands me over to another nervous agent at the departure gate who begins trying to scribble out a boarding pass while dozens of people are boarding the plane. His hands are shaking. He’s not bothering to look at their boarding passes. I try to stay calm, but ask again about my luggage, certain at this point that it doesn’t matter much at all.
“I will bring it to you,” he says in exasperation. “Customs would not release it. Just get on the plane!”
I have tried not to make high drama out of my situation up until now, but all I can think of is getting out. I don’t want to be here, and if I lose a camera and my underwear in the process, it doesn’t matter.
When I reach the plane, the Texan is there. “What is happening,” I ask again. “What did I do?”
“It’s not about what you did,” he says sympathetically, “It’s about relations between these two countries.” He pats my back and sends me into the plane.
Aboard the plane, everything is normal again. The bland messages about seats in the upright position, the vapid greetings. Even in our worse moments, it seems, whether we are ailing or dying or being deported, the lives around us go on.
Surely Ahmirkani and his library colleagues did not understand how certain it was that the authorities were not going to let me in. Up to the end he chatted about taking me to the Polish cemetery, to Isfahan and Qom. But they always ended up taking off frantically and never telling me what they were doing, to whom they were speaking. Who gave the order? Who proclaimed the visa invalid? They wouldn’t say. It’s as if they all worked for some omnipotent power without knowing what it was. I played along, just as they must.
So now it’s Sunday, going on 8:30 a.m., and I am somewhere hanging in the air over Iran with an obsequious flight attendant trying to cheer me up with tea. I stink. I haven’t shaved or slept much in three days, I’ve spent just about seven hours in detention, and the other passengers are staring at me, but I don’t really care much. The flight attendants are sympathetic. I ask them if their families think they are crazy for flying to Iran. They laugh and tell me my situation is unusual. “Who would want to fake a visa to get into Iran anyway?” joked one.
It all seemed so normal and matter-of-fact. People caught up in their jobs, complying with the rules in the Islamic Republic of Iran and trying to make the best of it. You know it happens all the time to people making their way into the United States. Still, when it happens to you, being treated like a criminal, an undesirable, it’s a shock. For my trouble, British Airways gives me a cosmetic kit so I can freshen up.
The time on the flight to London passes quickly. When I arrive, another sympathetic agent tells me there’s an American Airlines connecting flight to Chicago leaving in an hour and they can get me on it. She makes arrangements to trace my suitcase and shakes her head, telling me no one will dare to try to charge me extra for changing my ticket.
As I settle into the flight home, I’m left with the image of the nun-like women in the Tehran airport, gliding across the marble floors in their black chadors, riding up the escalators with blue jeans showing underneath.
Someone must have known that they were not going to let me in on that rush visa. They must have. Perhaps I need to see it another way, but what way? They said that the Interests Section in Washington forgot to fax a copy of my visa to Tehran and that technicality was the holdup. But they had the actual visa in their hands. Why didn’t they just refuse to issue it in the first place? I will never know, I suppose. Detained for seven hours in a room in Tehran. But it qualifies only as an irritation, certainly not torture. A display of power perhaps?
I suspect I was the only American on the British Airways flight, but I do not know that for sure. The woman from Michigan was going home to relatives. I don’t know what else I could have done. I suppose I should be grateful that fears of what might happen—when people unknown to me ran off with my passport and tickets—were not realized. It’s sobering to recognize that the airline that transports you to your destination seems so thoroughly done with you once you arrive. But on reflection, it was British Airways attendants who hustled me onto that departing flight, probably knowing little more than I about why it was happening.
The trip to Iran was supposed to have been a cultural exchange, an opportunity to understand and share a professional agenda and to bring back a story-not this one. I can see now that my hosts had no power to change the outcome of those seven hours in Tehran. It was doomed from the moment I arrived. My colleagues never argued with anyone in front of me; they all seemed to be under the control of circumstances beyond their control.
I had the same dialog over and over again. It went like this:
“What’s happening?” I would ask.
“We are trying to solve your problem.”
“Thank you. But what is the problem?”
“The problem with the visa.”
“Yes, what is the problem with the visa?”
“That is what we are trying to solve.”
Or I would ask, “Who is it that can solve the problem?”
“Yes, the problem with the visa.”
“Who can solve it?”
“That is what we are trying to find out.”
In the end, everyone tried to get “them” to approve my visa, but “they” refused. I do not know who they were and no one would tell me. The whole scene took on the surreal quality of a Soviet-style political riddle to which there is no right answer.
Perhaps, as Azar Nafisi says in Reading Lolita in Tehran, there are those in the Iranian government who look for reasons, any excuse, to keep out those it considers to be “representatives of cultural decadence and Western influence.”
I know that my library hosts were powerless to stop my deportation. My first e-mail message from Amirkhani when I returned to the United States said, “Dear Leonard, Where are you? Are you in Tehran? I am searching for you.” I called his home, but a woman who spoke almost no English managed to tell me that he was not there.
A few hours later he sent another message, saying, “I am very sorry and upset…. I cannot understand what was wrong. I talk about with President Khatami and he promised me that he considers this matter. Until final moment, I was trying to solve problem. In National Library, all things were ready and we had arranged an interesting program for you. It was arranged that you should stay at a five star hotel. In your schedule, there was a travel to Qom and Isfahan. Also, I arranged to watch that movie (about Poles in Iran) in National Film Archives. Certainly I will invite you again at a suitable time.”
On March 1, the day of the opening, I reached Amirkhani by telephone. “We are ashamed,” he said, finally admitting that from his point of view the deportation had nothing to do with botched paperwork and everything to do with being American. I asked him if other Americans showed up for the opening. “Jeremy Stone was the other American,” he says, “and he was also deported. We are so sorry, so sorry.”
I called Stone, who told me that he had arrived in Iran the day after I did. Although his library hosts, a different group, met him at the airport and got him settled into a VIP lounge, they warned him immediately that there was a problem. “Apparently they already knew what had happened to you,” he said. He knew as little else about what happened as I did.
I spoke to an editor at the Chicago Tribune. I told my story to his sympathetic ear. What’s going on in Iran, he said, is that there are two levels of government at odds with one another. One is trying to relate to the rest of the world, the other is resisting. You were caught between the two. Douglas Jehl reported in the New York Times (March 9) that a spokesperson for the Iranian Mission to the United Nations was still maintaining that we were deported because of a “technical problem.” Catalytic Diplomacy suspended its five-year effort to build bridges between the United States and Iran “until such time as the Islamic Republic of Iran provides more reliable assurances that bridges are possible.” Jeremy Stone got Iran’s ambassador to the United Nations, Zavad Jarif, to express his “deepest regrets” for the incident.
My luggage arrived at my home three days and several phone calls after I was deported. The zippers had been wired and soldered shut, and for whatever reason it arrived via Lufthansa. The books I’d wrapped in gold paper to present to the library at the opening had been torn at the corners, presumably to check and see if they were really books, but nothing else was tampered with.
Meanwhile, the library opened on schedule, with President Mohammad Khatami presiding “in the presence of cultural, scientific, political officials and foreign guests,” reported Payvand’s Iran News. I regret that I was not among them, that our colleagues were not permitted to share their achievement, and that a gesture of goodwill was turned away at the border.