Читать книгу My Prison, My Home - Haleh Esfandiari - Страница 17

I returned to Tehran in the summer of 1964 and was hired by the publisher of Kayhan, the largest daily newspaper in the country. Since I knew French, English, and German as well as Persian, I was assigned to the foreign news desk. When the publisher, Dr. Mostafa Mesbahzadeh, known to everyone as “Doktor,” introduced me to my colleagues on the foreign news desk, I was met with skeptical stares. The foreign news veterans were all men in their early fifties, educated, but from modest backgrounds. Most of them, I later learned, were former Communists or had dabbled in left-wing ideologies popular among students and the new educated middle class in the postwar period. They had spent time in prison after the overthrow of Mossadegh, and some of them had been tortured. Times had changed, but they remained attached to their radical political beliefs.

I was twenty-four, the only woman on the foreign news desk, one of the very few in the entire newsroom. I was also from the wrong social class in their eyes, with a well-known family name and family members in senior positions in the civil service. These “enlightened radicals” clearly did not think a woman capable of doing their weighty work, and they were not comfortable having a woman in their midst. “Does this zaifeh—this weak one—understand anything?” an older reporter once sneered, using a traditional and derogatory term for women. With me around, the men had to watch their language and stop exchanging crude jokes and accounts of their escapades. The toilet in the building was for men only, meaning I simply could not go to the bathroom all day. At five-thirty in the morning, my colleagues would breakfast on a dish of sheep’s brains and sheep’s feet—a delicacy in Iran, but one whose sight and smell nauseated me. One or two of the men even topped off their breakfast with a glass of vodka. But my foreign language and translating skills were good, I was speedy, and gradually the men came to accept me. For a brief period, I even became the foreign news editor, and by the end of my decade at the paper, the environment had changed so dramatically that women were even given their own bathroom.

Kayhan was an afternoon paper, and except for major stories, the foreign news pages were put to bed relatively early. I arrived at work at five-thirty in the morning and worked until two-thirty in the afternoon. Depending on the volume of news, I sometimes stayed through the afternoons and evenings, as well.

The newspaper had no foreign correspondents of its own and relied on the wire agencies Reuters, the Associated Press, United Press International, and Agence France-Presse. We were still in the age of teleprinters, and dispatches came rattling through on long perforated sheets of paper. Every half hour someone would walk in with rolls of dispatches and give them to the translators. At noon, the mail boy would bring in newspapers flown in from Europe—the Herald Tribune, The Times of London, the Financial Times, Le Monde, Figaro. In August 1968, when Russian tanks invaded Czechoslovakia, I remember huddling around the teleprinters as the dispatches rolled off the machines. Earlier that year, the new Czech leader, Alexander Dubček, had sought to loosen the hold of Soviet-style communism over the country. He had freed up the press, allowed non-Communist political parties to operate, and decentralized the economy. The “Prague Spring” seemed, for a moment, to herald a wave of change across the Soviet bloc. But what the Czechs welcomed the Russians feared, and that morning the news coming across the teleprinters was grim. More than 200,000 Soviet and Warsaw Pact troops had fanned across the country. Dubček and his colleagues as well as Czech activists and intellectuals had been arrested. The Prague Spring was being snuffed out. Even my leftist colleagues were hard put to justify the invasion.

The staff of the foreign news desk served principally as translators. The editor selected the stories he wanted to run, and we translated them in longhand. They were then typed and edited, headlines were written, and the type was set.

Just before the presses rolled at noon, the censor from the government’s information office would show up with a list of stories that we were not allowed to run. The censor, Mahram Ali Khan, had held the job since the 1930s, and each day he went from newspaper office to newspaper office with the censor’s list. He checked all the pages and read all the major stories. Sometimes he ordered the removal of a name or a paragraph, sometimes a whole story. We were not allowed, for example, to report student demonstrations in other countries, lest our own university students get ideas. We were not allowed to repeat criticism of the shah from abroad. Fortunately, Mahram Ali Khan had a sense of humor. One day, before I joined Kayhan, the journalists took advantage of Mahram Ali Khan’s visit to the men’s room, locked him in, and pretended they could not open the door. They quietly reinserted the stories he had removed and went to press before they let him out.

Within six months, the publisher, Dr. Mesbahzadeh, decided I would be more useful as a reporter than as a translator. I began to cover visits to Iran by ministers, officials, and foreign heads of state. I also reported on trips abroad by the shah and other high officials. Shaul, who would become my husband a year later, worked for the English-language newspaper of the Kayhan publishing house.

We ran across each other in the newsroom but really “met” when both of us were covering the visit to Iran of Ethiopia’s emperor, Haile Selassie, who granted us an exclusive interview. At the end of the interview, after thanks and good-byes, I simply turned around and walked out, realizing only too late from the startled looks of Haile Selassie’s courtiers that I had committed a faux pas. You were not supposed to turn your back on the emperor. I met Haile Selassie once more in the late 1960s, when I covered the shah’s trip to Addis Ababa. The emperor recognized me. “I am indebted to you,” I said. “I met my future husband when interviewing you.”

“Well, and are you happy with your husband?” he asked with a twinkle in his eye.

I had taken to Shaul immediately. He was already a prominent journalist, covering all the major stories for his newspaper and writing for the Financial Times and the Economist. He had a sharp intellect, fierce integrity as a journalist, and was infectiously enthusiastic about newspaper work. Covering stories with him was always an adventure. We were both interested in Iranian politics; we both loved literature. When we first met, he was deeply into the German playwright Bertolt Brecht, and he soon presented me with several of Brecht’s plays in the original German, which would not have been easy to locate in Tehran’s bookstores. He had studied in America and opened up to me a whole new world of American history, literature, and politics.

The decision to marry was not an easy one. We came from two different communities, and marriages between Jews and Muslims were extremely rare, virtually unheard of, in our two societies. Both Shaul’s family and mine were deeply unhappy. We were breaking all sorts of taboos, and, looking back, I am amazed at our audacity. But we were young and determined, and once we were married, I was warmly accepted into Shaul’s family and Shaul into mine. Shaul and Mutti grew especially close to each other.

Two years into our marriage, in 1966, Shaul decided he would like to return to Harvard, where he had gone to college, to study for an MA in Middle Eastern studies. He was covering the Middle East and wanted to study the region more seriously. Besides, he was unhappy with the creeping censorship of the press. We spent two years in Cambridge, Massachusetts, basically exchanging our comfortable life as professional journalists for the more cramped circumstances of graduate students. Shaul’s scholarship hardly covered our expenses, especially once our daughter, Haleh, arrived.

Shaul received his MA in 1968, but student life continued for the next three years as Shaul pursued his PhD, in Iranian history, at Oxford University. I taught Persian while he completed his doctorate.

We returned to Iran and to our newspaper jobs in 1972. The Kayhan organization was enjoying a period of considerable success and expansion. Kayhan continued to be more “liberal” than Tehran’s other large-circulation daily, Ettela’at, but it was no longer the bold and risk-taking newspaper I had joined nearly a decade earlier. The weight of censorship had grown heavier, and the freedom to write and publish more restricted. Mesbahzadeh’s own liberal preferences remained in place, and as the publisher, he was always admirably protective of his editors and reporters. Pressured to fire journalists who had stepped on the censors’ toes, he continued to pay their salaries and brought them back to the newsroom at the first opportunity. He kept jobs open for colleagues who went to jail, took care of their families, and reemployed them once they were released. He allowed reporters who were banned by the shah’s secret police, SAVAK (the Persian acronym for Organization for State Security and Intelligence), to write for Kayhan under assumed names.

But the organization’s very success was a kind of vulnerability, since the financial stakes were now huge. The staff and employees numbered in the hundreds. “If we are closed down, who is going to pay all these people?” Mesbahzadeh once asked Shaul, who was insisting he stand up more aggressively to the censors. The government was a source of advertising revenue, and it set policies that could affect everything from Kayhan’s ability to purchase newsprint abroad to Mesbahzadeh’s considerable land holdings. Increasingly the shah and the government showed less tolerance for even the mildest criticism, and the grip on the media of the emboldened Information Ministry grew tighter. Dr. Mesbahzadeh continued to allow his editors considerable autonomy, but the editors were being hounded daily by the censors.

In 1973, rumors circulated at Kayhan that Mesbahzadeh was under pressure from Prime Minister Amir Abbas Hoveyda to name his protégé, Amir Taheri, a Kayhan reporter, as editor of the newspaper. Taheri, who seemed all too willing in his reporting to do the prime minister’s bidding, was to replace the highly respected, independent-minded Mehdi Semsar. The rumor proved true. One morning Taheri’s appointment was announced to the staff. When he walked into the newsroom a few minutes later and took his seat behind the editor’s desk, one colleague and I gathered up our belongings and walked out of the newsroom and the building. We quit. I subsequently had a long meeting with Mesbahzadeh, who tried to convince me not to leave. Editors come and go, he said, but Kayhan will endure. I was not persuaded; and I have never regretted my decision. Leaving Kayhan was difficult for me. It was the country’s leading newspaper; I took pleasure in the work and in being part of the Kayhan family. Shaul and I needed both our salaries to make ends meet. But I am proud of having refused to work under a government-imposed editor who represented everything I disdained in a profession I loved.