After Tehran (5 page)

Ed looked up. “She died six months ago.” He started eating his pie.

I gazed at his sad, clean-shaven face. A man having lunch at a Swiss Chalet restaurant with the memory of his wife. Where were my memories? What had I done with them?

Fighting my tears, I ran into the walk-in fridge and stayed there a few minutes. The silence and the cool dark air calmed me down.

By the time I returned to table five, Ed had left. On the back of the receipt, he had written “May God bless you—Ed.” I put the receipt in my pocket.

It was snowing heavily now. The world resembled a snow globe.
Up and down Yonge Street, cars and pedestrians inched along, burdened by the heavy whiteness. I felt trapped. There was a big knot in my chest.

I had to get out of the restaurant.

“I’m going home,” I said to Jimmy.

“You okay?” he asked.

“I have a headache.”

I almost raced to the old green Ford Escort I had bought a few months earlier. Once I had closed the door behind me, tears rolled down my face. Deep inside, I knew that the normalcy I had been clinging to was not real. I envied Ed. He was brave enough to face his loss. He was grieving. I had never grieved. I had fled from my pain, pretended it didn’t exist. Maybe Ed was crazy, but at least he acknowledged the ghosts that haunted him. I felt like a fraud. I thought about Mark. What if one day I was condemned to forget like him? But I had a family, a job, and a life, and I had to keep on going.

When I got home, I secured Ed’s receipt to my fridge door. I needed to see it every day so that maybe one day I might become brave.

ONE LATE-JULY EVENING
in 2000, I was making spaghetti and meat sauce while the boys were busy playing upstairs. Shortly after my mother’s death in March of that year, my father moved out of our house to a small apartment in a quiet and well-maintained seniors building, and in early July, we moved into a detached house, the picture-perfect suburban Canadian dream home, with four bedrooms and two and a half baths. Before our move, whenever I had a few minutes after work prior to picking up the kids, I would drive to the new house, park around the corner, and gaze at our future home. I’d imagine my children in their freshly painted bedrooms and Andre and me in our spacious master
bedroom. What colour would I paint the living room? No more crazy yellows. A lilac, maybe?

The meat sauce came to a boil, and the scent of onions, tomatoes, and beef filled the house. I added a little oregano to the sauce, and my mind drifted.

Evin. One of my interrogators, Ali, is reading to me from the Koran. The chapter is about the Virgin Mary. She’s blessed. Why doesn’t she help me go home?

They have tied me up to a bare wooden bed and are lashing the soles of my feet. Pain and nothing else. What have I done to deserve this? “Where’s Shahrzad?” they keep on asking me. I don’t know, or I would have told them
.

It’s dark and cold. I just want to go home and sleep in my bed, but I’m in a solitary cell, and a dirty, smelly military blanket is covering me. When I close my eyes, I can smell my mother’s scent—a mix of Chanel No. 5 and cigarettes—and feel the warmth of her body
.

Someone is kicking me. My whole body is aching. “Get up! Get up!” someone yells. It’s my interrogator Hamehd
.

I’m tied to a wooden pole. There are other prisoners like me here. Armed guards have surrounded us. My feet hurt. I’m tired. So tired
.

The small body of my friend Sarah is hanging from a noose made of head scarves. Her face is blue. “Marina! Run! Get scissors! Hurry! Now!” Sheida yells. I run
.

Ali is ripping off my clothes. He’s on top of me and is holding down my wrists with his hands. I try to push him away but can’t. I feel a terrible pain between my legs. I scream
.

I’m walking away from Evin. They have finally let me go. It’s raining, and it’s cold
.

Why did I leave my friends behind?

I jolted back to reality at the sound of the fire alarm. Smoke was everywhere. The sauce had hardened into a strange black substance. I turned off the burner and opened all the windows. How had this happened? I was standing right at the stove!

My children ran down the stairs. “Mom, what’s going on?”

“Don’t worry. I just burned the food.”

I hadn’t thought of Evin since my release—had avoided it at all costs. Why was I thinking about it now? Why were my memories as clear and fresh in my mind as if my imprisonment had occurred last week?

That night, after a hot day that ended with a thunderstorm, I opened one of our bedroom windows before going to sleep. I had already kissed Andre good night, and, as usual, he had fallen asleep immediately. He snored mildly when he lay on his back, and I listened to the peaceful sounds he made. He was very handsome, maybe even more than when I had met him a few months before my arrest. He had matured, lost his boyish, shy look. I gazed at his perfect face: the gentle curved lines of his closed eyes and his blond eyelashes, his nose narrow and straight, his lips not too thick and not too thin. I fell in love with him the moment I saw him at our church in Tehran, and I think he fell in love with me the moment he laid eyes on me. Then Evin happened. In the prison, I hung on to his memory to survive. I hung on to my recollection of his perfect face and the thought that someone beautiful was in love with me. Before Evin, Andre had never told me he loved me, but I chose to believe it, and his love became my hope, a light that would guide me back to him one day. It would have been so much easier for him to forget me while I was in prison and move on, but he didn’t. He waited for the girl he loved. Except, the girl who walked out of Evin was different from the one who’d been led in. Yes, different. But I didn’t want to be. I wanted to be the same. I wanted everything to be the same.

“I was ready for you to come home with a baby in your arms,” Andre said to me shortly after my release, “and I would have loved you just the same. Nothing would have changed for me.”

Back then, he had no way of knowing just what had happened to me in Evin, but he had heard rumours about the rape of young women. Those two sentences he uttered to me in March 1984 were the closest anyone came to acknowledging my ordeal. Andre didn’t ask me to marry him. Instead, he asked, “When should we get married?” And I would have married him on the spot had it been possible.

Perhaps I betrayed Andre by marrying him. I hadn’t told him the truth. Except, how could I have? How could I put my experiences in Evin prison into words? When I married Andre, did I truly love him, or was I just following a memory? How can you live a lie with someone you love?

I watched the curtain in front of the open window swell in the breeze, pregnant with the light of the full moon. The delicate fabric fluttered and rose. I imagined a silver angel trying to enter the room to tell me something that would lift the terrible weight I felt. Where was my angel? The angel I dreamed of when
Bahboo
died. The Angel of Death, who, to my surprise, didn’t look scary at all; the one who comforted me and held me in his gentle arms. Maybe I had disappointed him, too.

That night I dreamed I was standing by a road in the middle of a desert. There was no one around. The road was a grey line on a sea of sand that covered the world. There were no trees, no plants, and no animals, and the sky was a dome of intense blue, as hostile as everything else. I was waiting for Andre to pick me up, but I didn’t know why I was in the desert or where I was supposed to go. Andre was late. After a while I began to feel frightened, thinking he had forgotten me. Then a black car appeared on the horizon, and I became even more frightened because I knew the driver was
not Andre. I thought of running, but there was nowhere to go. The black car, a Mercedes, stopped right before me, and the front window on the driver’s side rolled down. Ali sat behind the wheel.

“Waiting for someone?” he asked.

“Andre is picking me up,” I explained.

“Get in the car, Marina. No one is coming,” he said, smiling.

And I awoke, covered in sweat.

I didn’t dare remain in bed any longer. I slipped out and went downstairs to the kitchen. I had not dreamed of Ali in years. What did he want from me? I took a deep breath and tried to collect myself. He was dead. He wasn’t going to show up at our door and claim me back. I had just had a dream, a stupid dream. But what if the dream meant something? I began to sob.

Only a few days after my arrest, Ali saved me from execution. In 1982, court in Evin prison was a Sharia judge who sat behind a desk in a hallway or in a room with a pile of files in front of him. Every day, tens of young people were being arrested and the prison was operating far beyond capacity. Evin had been built for a few hundred prisoners, not for thousands. As a result, prisoners had to be processed quickly. The Sharia judge would spend moments on each file and pass verdicts as fast as he could. If a prisoner had not cooperated and had talked back to the interrogators, he or she could easily receive a death sentence or many years in prison. I had two interrogators: Hamehd and Ali. Hamehd lashed me as Ali watched. Hamehd believed I was lying, but Ali thought I was telling the truth. Ali later told me that he had used his influence to reduce my death sentence to life in prison. Then, five months later, he forced me to marry him, threatening to arrest my parents and Andre if I refused him. I hated him for it. I was so terribly ashamed of our marriage that I kept it a secret. As long as I was a prisoner living in the world of Evin, my family didn’t need to know that I was sleeping with my interrogator.

After I married Ali, I spent several months in solitary confinement. One has a great deal of time to think in solitary. I wondered why Ali had saved my life and married me. Was he truly in love with me, as he claimed? At the time, the only books available to prisoners were the Koran and books on Islam, so I read them to pass the time. In the Koran, I found this verse (Koran 4:3): “Marry such women [captive women taken in war] as seem good to you, two and three and four; but if you fear that you will not do justice, then only one, or what your right hands possess [captive women].”

A war waged between the Islamic government of Iran and the “anti-revolutionaries,” and I had become a prisoner of it. As I understood it, according to the laws of Islam, I had literally become Ali’s property. I wondered if he had married any other girls. Maybe it was common practice in the prison. I asked Ali, and he said I was his only wife, but could I trust his word?

Ali took me on short leaves of absence to see his parents and sister. His mother told me that he had been a political prisoner during the time of the shah. I saw the lash marks on his back. He had been a victim like me. I gradually realized that the man I considered evil was human after all. His parents, always kind and generous to me, knew that he was a torturer in Evin, but they were proud of him and his job. From their perspective, their son was protecting their way of life, his country, and Islam. They were blind to the cruelty of what he was doing because they were able to justify it. His family accepted me only because I had agreed to convert to Islam. In their belief, my conversion washed away all my sins.

Fourteen months after our marriage, Ali resigned from his job. He told me that he had clashed with the prosecutor of Tehran, Assadollah-eh Ladjevardi, who was also warden of Evin prison. A month later, as we were leaving his parents’ house after dinner one
night, Ali was gunned down by a man on a motorcycle and died in my arms. With his last breath, he asked his father to make sure that I was returned safely to my family. The Mojahedin-eh Khalgh, a Marxist-Islamist group that had murdered many government officials, was blamed for the assassination. But Ali’s father believed that it was an inside job and Ladjevardi had ordered it. Ladjevardi, known as the Butcher of Evin and responsible for the torture and execution of thousands of prisoners, kept me in the prison for six months after Ali’s death and wanted to marry me off to another guard, but Ali’s father used his connection to Ayatollah Khomeini to secure my release. He probably even bribed a few Evin officials to get me out. Apparently, Ladjevardi was removed from his post sometime in late 1984 or early 1985, but, to avoid assassination, he lived in Evin with his family for a while afterward. He was murdered in broad daylight in the Grand Bazaar of Tehran in 1998.

Not
dreaming of Ali would have been abnormal. How could I just forget and move on? I had betrayed Andre and my prison friends—and I had betrayed God. Was there a way I could make things right?

My Mother’s
Crocheted Tablecloth

O
ne nightmare followed another, and eventually, I didn’t want to go to bed. Except I had to, because if I didn’t, I would have to explain to Andre what was going on, and I wasn’t ready for that. So every evening I kissed him good night and tossed and turned until at last I fell asleep. Then the nightmares came. I had the road dream at least twice a week. Sometimes I was in a desert and sometimes in the middle of a snowstorm, waiting for Andre, a friend, or my mother or father to pick me up—but Ali always showed up, instead. Sometimes I dreamed of being tied to a pole and lashed, or being locked up in a cold, dark cell. After a while, I realized that I had to do something or I would lose my mind. Yet what could I do?