Stephen Orth - Couchsurfing in Iran - Revealing a Hidden World

“I think half of all Iranians are not strictly religious, but the government is so strong that they have to conceal it. And the young people are frightened of fighting for their rights because they know how brutal the mullahs are, how many people they have killed for opposing their views.”

The conversation has turned. A few moments before, we were having a pleasant musical afternoon, and now we are talking about death, fear, and religion, with Ahmad saying one forbidden sentence after the other.

I have often experienced such shifts in mood in Iran. Moments of lightness are more fragile and more precious than elsewhere. A downpour can at any moment drench cheerful small talk at a garden party, even if there were no signs of clouds before.

In the evening Ahmad says his goodbyes. He plans to stay with his parents and leave us his apartment. He doesn’t want to disturb our honeymoon in Bushehr.

At night a relay of red lights illuminate the dome and chimney of the power plant. On. Off. On. Off. I feel like I hear a constant humming coming from that direction, but it might be just my imagination. “I’ve never seen you so radiant,” says Laila. Well, I guess there had to be at least one nuclear power joke. We sit on the couch, drinking tap water. She then draws a spot on my forearm with a pen. “My dad always does it to my mum, just to annoy her. I think it’s really cute.”

“I think Ahmad thought we were pretty cute, too.”

“It’s my best marriage so far, but it’s also my first.” Then she grabs the guitar and starts playing “Nobody’s Wife.”

Laila gets Ahmad’s bed, and I get the mattress on the carpet. We turn out the light. My bus leaves at six in the morning. “It’d be gloriously forbidden to have sex in Iran when not married, wouldn’t it?” says one of us.

“Yes, forbidden,” is the answer, but she stresses the word in such a way as to make clear she doesn’t intend to replace it with “exciting” or “an excellent idea.” In a romantic Hollywood comedy this would be the moment when something unexpected happens. In Iran, too. Someone knocks at the door—pretty hard. Not our door but outside near the garage. Always four or five knocks and then silence. We don’t dare move. Tourists staying the night so near to a nuclear power plant are automatically thought of as spies, if noticed. And the knocking continues. Laila sits up in bed and slowly puts on her veil as quietly as possible. Our door isn’t locked; we have no key. Is it possible that our host has lured us into a trap? Ahmad seems nice enough, but we’ve only known him a few hours. Paranoia is a mean power that can destroy trust in seconds. We hear steps in the courtyard. A male voice shouts something. More steps. More shouts. But nobody enters. The footsteps fade, and a metal door opens and closes. Then it is so silent that I can hear my own breath.

THE BUS CALLSitself VIP and has red upholstered reclining seats and legroom comparable to a first-class seat on an airplane. The onboard menu consists of orange waffles called khootka wafer and date cookies that answer to the name of kutlu . And a paper cup with an Angry Birds motif and a 10 per cent fruit nectar whose contents include the interesting words pineapple constantrate . It comes in a laminated foil pouch with a couple ISO certificates printed on it and a halal stamp but with no instructions about how to open it. A sharpened straw was glued to the outside, which proves unable to pierce the foil. The contents don’t seem to be intended for consumption.

After a divorce, a temporary phase of disorientation is nothing unusual. I’m alone again, the wedding ring stowed away deep inside my backpack. After a six-hour journey, the bus spits me out at a roundabout on the outskirts of Ahvaz. Roundabouts are perfectly suited for making you feel lonely. Every driver behind every steering wheel seems to have an objective; I am the only one who has none. I stand here, with my thirty-three-pound backpack, on the fringe of a city. I have no street plan, and I only know that it’s hot, it’s ugly, and there’s no worse place to breathe. In the World Health Organization’s list of the world’s most-polluted cities, Ahvaz has the first place. In comparison, Beijing, New Delhi, or Tehran are oases of fresh air. Nowhere in Iran is the average life expectancy so low. The city is famous for the orange clouds of smog from heavy industry that cloak the houses in the evenings. To put it another way: people who don’t smoke only have themselves to blame, as health-wise there is hardly any difference.

All the traffic signs are in Persian, Ayatollah Khamenei stares down from a number of gigantic posters, and everyone else is staring, too, as tourists here are scarce. My host is working until late afternoon, and I have five hours to kill. The traffic is a wild spectacle of sheet metal and wheels. If you meet people who are too perfect, too nice, and friendly, you automatically look for skeletons in the closet, for some sort of twisted hobby, for something that compensates for this nicer than niceness, something that shows that the person has weaknesses and flaws. With Iranians you don’t have to look far. In fact, you just have to go to the nearest main road in any city—their most warped hobby is driving. The second that any Iranian turns the ignition key, he or she forgets ever to have heard the term taarof, politeness, and morphs into a fishtailing, honking, fuming Saipa monster in hot pursuit of pedestrians.

I would have loved to have sought safety in a café, even a Starbucks would have been okay, but there are none, only fast-food joints with plastic tablecloths full of crumbs. I know laundromats in Berlin or Hamburg with more charm than the average Iranian hamburger joint. I buy a grilled lump of grouund meat in a bun that has seen better days and just stay there for an hour. What shall I do? I don’t even known the direction of the city center. I decide to try an experiment. I go out and wave down a cab. “Imam Khomeini Street,” I tell the driver. Every city in this country has a Khomeini Street, usually in the middle.

“Hotel?” asks the driver.

“No,” I reply. “City center.”

He doesn’t understand. With gestures he tries to tell me that Khomeini Street is quite long. I nod and try it with telepathy: just get going and when I like the look of somewhere, I’ll tell you to stop. The telepathy doesn’t seem to work. Instead, he asks passersby if they can speak English. He asks a bus stop line full of veiled women and a driver in the next lane. Nobody can.

I repeat “Khomeini Street,” together with a reassuring gesture intending to convey that it’s okay, that I know what I’m doing. Actually, I have no idea what I’m doing. Due to the lack of earthly assistance, the cab driver turns to Allah and starts muttering a prayer. In doing so, every now and then he rests his head on the steering wheel, which, considering the present traffic situation, is clear evidence of his trust in God.

After crossing an arched bridge over the River Karun, a medium-sized river with a color that doesn’t inspire much confidence, we seem to be approaching something like a center— inshallah . On the horizon I see the methane gas flares of a number of oil rigs.

The driver brakes and says, “Imam Khomeini” and points to a street on the left that is completely canopied. I would have liked to have given him the thumbs-up sign to say that everything is fine, but I am worried that it could be mistaken for an obscene gesture, so I just pay up and set off.