Sex & The Islamic City: part 5

It was not long after my separation from my lover that we first had phone sex. I had been back in Tehran staying with my aunts in the Sad Flat for a few days when everyone went out to a wedding and I volunteered to stay home and look after my grandmother for the evening. She being happily off in la-la land, my lover took the opportunity to ring. The night before, in a studiously casual tone (in case my aunts were within hearing range, which they almost always are), I had told him of their plans to go out, saying, ‘Oh and guess who is getting married…’ He immediately understood and I knew he would ring me. And so he did. And we luxuriated in an uninhibited conversation for the first time in days, relieved at least to be able to be ourselves, even if we couldn’t be together.

Our lack of inhibitions led, quite naturally, onto the thing still on our minds: our mind-blowing sex. It was a small step from discussing our amazement at our athletic and mutual pleasure to partaking of the pleasure itself. Years ago I was in love with a man who lived in the most south-westerly corner of Europe and we endured frequent long separations. So I was necessarily used to the occasional bonding moment over the phone and though this was on my mind as I chatted to my lover, I still wasn’t sure of what was considered acceptable in Iranian sexual relationships. Yet again my lover shocked me by launching first into some frankly blue talk, describing in graphic detail what he would like to do to me were we together. Things escalated from there and afterwards I felt like the naughtiest girl in school: phone sex in the Islamic Republic, imagine that.

A few days later I decamped to a friend’s house in the country and there, for the next two weeks, my lover and I enjoyed nightly intimate bedtime chats that left us both exhausted and elated. With the uncertainty of when we would next meet always threatening to overwhelm us, this particular preoccupation not only helped us feel closer but also kept uncomfortable questions about our next meeting – and indeed our future – at bay.

It wasn’t until an innocent conversation with a friend turned my mind to darker things that we paused in our nocturnal activities. My friend M has been in Iran 5 months longer than me, and one day over lunch, she told me how, a few months into her trip she had received the call we all dread: from the Intelligence Service of the Islamic Republic of Iran. They had called her mobile and said, in an elaborately polite manner guaranteed to strike terror into our Western hearts: ‘Please, Miss M, do grace us with the honour of your presence at such and such a time.’

M is a feisty girl by nature. What’s more, she has been brought up in the West and is not used to accepting things without question. After a few months of being in Iran as a lone woman, she has also acquired an aggressive manner designed to deflect the unwelcome attentions women here face daily, from suggestive comments on the streets, to being felt up by strangers on crowded savaris (shared taxis) to being stopped on mountain trails by moral police dying to know how a woman thought she could do anything alone (‘Ladies, where is your man?’ we had been asked several times on a recent hike together). So instead of simply writing down the address which she had to grace with the honour of her presence, she instead challenged the speaker: ‘How did you get this number?’

She told me she could hear the speaker smiling. ‘Well, Miss M,’ it had declared in honeyed tones, suppressing a laugh, ‘We are the intelligence service, after all.’

She told me the interview had been painless, that their intentions were quite innocent, even that she could understand why she had been hauled in, bearing in mind her family history and the work she was engaged in. She skated over what must have been the terror of leaving her companion outside as she stepped into the building to present herself, not mentioning the thumping of her heart as she walked down the corridor adjusting ever tighter her headscarf; she didn’t have to tell me. As children who lived through the Revolution and familiar with the early days of terror of the Islamic regime, we both were fully aware of how easily she could have been swallowed up by that building, her companion left outside waiting fruitlessly for her re-emergence, of how she could have that day joined the ranks of the ‘disappeared’. But no, we agreed that of course they had a right to find out what she was up to, that it was understandable, and we supported each other in the lies you tell to try and normalise your situation in this strange society that we are living in.

Lying sprawled on my bed that night, I answered the phone to my lover. ‘Salaam English,’ he purred in his bedroom voice.

I tried to head him off. ‘Salaam to you,’ I said curtly, using the formal ‘you’ to try to put him off. It had the opposite effect.

‘Janam,’ he exclaimed with relish, ‘my life, my darling heart, what are you doing?’

Me: ‘Oh no. Listen, no more of that.’

Him: ‘Of what, darling of my heart? May I die for you…’

Me: ‘Stop the Iranian stuff. I am serious.’ We had long since decided that the elaborate and flowery terms of affection that colour the Farsi language – mostly all about sacrificing yourself for the beloved in some form or other – were perfect for love and we used them liberally.

Him: ‘OK, English, what’s up?’

I recounted M’s tale and how it had awakened in me the awareness that probably I was being watched, that our conversations were recorded, that we had used all sorts of people’s phones to have sex including my mobile which in reality belonged to a friend of mine currently in the States and how she was sure to be arrested and flogged for my lewd behaviour on her return. ‘I mean, what we are doing is illegal and apart from anything else can you imagine being found out and our families having to know…’ I finished with a flourish.

He chuckled softly. ‘Listen my darling,’ he said, ‘if the regime was going to go round arresting every single person who has phone sex, they would have no time left for anything else and you can bet the streets would be empty.’

I was stunned into silence. It had never occurred to me that what we were doing was anything less than totally unique. I had been secretly proud of my own daring and liberated sexuality, imagining I had taught my lover a whole new way of enjoying sex.

Me: ‘Do you mean you have done this before?’

Him: ‘My love, my life, darling of my heart… Of course I have.’

Me: ‘Oh… often?’

Him: ‘English, do you think you people invented sex? You know, it’s not always so easy to get together with someone here. And mobiles, well, they are at least more private. Most people live with their parents but at least now you can shut yourself in your room with your mobile.’

Me: ‘Oh…’ I am crestfallen.

Him: ‘Actually, lots of girls prefer it. It gives them a way to get sexual kicks without having to lose their virginity, risk being found out or feel they have done anything too wrong. In fact, recently it has become very fashionable…’

So I lie on my bed in the Islamic Republic of Iran while my lover whispers extravagant words of love and I imagine all those words on the ether, the sighs and moans, this removed intimacy being beamed over the country, the air thick with sex, and I am grateful at least that the trained ears of Iranian Intelligence won’t find anything in my pleasure too worthy of note. So I turn over in bed and sigh into the phone:

‘Darling of my heart… May I die for you…’