Captive in Iran (3 page)

“Is Christianity an offense?” I demanded.

“That’s what we’ve been charged with,” Marziyeh added.

“No,” the man in charge insisted, “you are not charged with being Christians. Most probably yours will be a political case. If the court can prove you’ve been supported by someone from the outside in promoting Christianity, the charge will be spying.”

We were led down a long flight of stairs into a basement, through a series of steel doors, and past a small room with a red carpet and an oil heater. The floor was littered with junk food. “Is this where we’re staying?” I asked Marziyeh. It was our first time inside any sort of jail. We had no idea that what we had seen was a break room for the staff, nothing like the rooms where prisoners lived.

We were escorted into a room where two sleepy, grumpy female guards waited for us. “Hand over all your belongings,” one of them ordered. We gave them our wristwatches and everything else we had. “Now take off all your clothes. Underwear, too.” We were then subjected to the humiliation of a full body search. The guards said it was to keep prisoners from smuggling in drugs. We were allowed to dress, but they kept our shoes, socks, and scarves so we couldn’t use our shoelaces or the other items to hang ourselves. We hadn’t brought heavy coats with us, and late at night the room was uncomfortably cold. The concrete floor of the hallway was like ice under our bare feet.

We went through another metal door to a hallway with rooms opening off on either side. “Take a blanket from the stack and find yourselves a spot,” the guard ordered as she clanged the door shut behind us. In the dim light, we could make out blanketed figures on the floor of the rooms. Though most of the women were asleep at this late hour, a few pairs of eyes followed us as we walked up and down the hall deciding which room to enter. We didn’t need light to tell us the place was filthy beyond imagining; our noses told us well enough. The stench of sweat, vomit, and backed-up toilets was overpowering. It took all our self-control to keep from retching—in this moment, our empty stomachs were a blessing. The floor of the toilet area was awash in muck from two overflowing commodes; the trash bin was piled high with used sanitary pads.

After finding what looked like the least crowded room, we went back to a spot near the door to get blankets. They were loathesome—stiff with dirt and smelling strongly of urine, some of them still wet. They were all in
about the same condition, but it was so cold we had to have something to cover ourselves with. We grabbed a couple that felt mostly dry and walked the few steps to our room, wrapped up as well as we could on the freezing floor, and huddled together, holding hands.

The onrush of emotions was like nothing I had ever experienced: bone-tired, confused, hungry, thirsty, repulsed by the foul air. How would our sisters and Christian friends find out what had happened? Would we be in here for a day? A year? Were our lives in danger? We were too tired to be afraid—it was all too new for us—though our future was completely unknown. It was more than we could absorb. All we could do was turn it over to the Lord.

We traded stories of our separate interrogations by Mr. Rasti, prayed to Jesus to protect us, and fell into exhausted and fitful sleep. It was to be our first of more than 250 nights behind bars.

Marziyeh

“FOR GOD’S SAKE, WON’T SOMEBODY GIVE ME A DAMN CIGARETTE!”

The voice that jarred us awake was half scream, half animal cry, mixed with the grating, rattling noise of somebody shaking the bars of the cell-block door at the end of the hallway.

“Give me a cigarette! I know you’ve got them. Have mercy!” The words dissolved into a loud moan and what sounded like two women crying.

I woke up disoriented—stiff and sore from sleeping on the cold floor, confused at being in a strange place. It took a minute to remember that Maryam and I were under arrest and had spent the night in the detention center. It wasn’t some crazy, terrible dream after all—it was reality. We buried our heads in our blankets for warmth, so that along with the sounds penetrating our consciousness there was the strong, sour aroma of stale urine mixed with the overpowering stench of the broken toilets.

“Give! Me! A! Cigarette!” The howling and begging continued, the bars shaking and clattering with each word. Maryam and I started talking
quietly to each other, going over the events of the previous day and marveling that we had been able to sleep at all in these conditions.

Just then, we felt a kick at our blankets. We peeked out from underneath to see a wild-looking woman standing in front of us. She kicked at us again. “Can I have a cigarette?” It was the unmistakable voice that had screamed us awake. Now that she had found us, she made us the object of her insistent demands.

Although she was quite a young woman, she looked positively frightening—her filthy dress half unbuttoned, exposing one of her breasts, and her long, black hair matted in clumps and falling across her face. Her teeth were rotten, some broken and others missing entirely. She looked like a witch in a horror movie. When we said we didn’t have any cigarettes, she turned abruptly and left.

The detention center was in a basement twenty steps down from street level, its walls lined with dark, damp, dirty stone blocks. Our cell was one of ten or so opening onto a narrow hallway. At the end of the hall, we saw the door in the wall of bars where we had come in. That door led to a small room with another wall of bars at the far end. In that far wall was another door, which opened to another long hallway. To the left in the hall was the entrance to the cell block with steps going up; to the right was an office or dayroom where the guards stayed. For now, the doors to individual cells were unlocked. We later learned that they were locked at night when the cells were crowded, and remained locked until morning. This solved the mystery of the terrible blankets. If a woman was forced to answer the call of nature during the night, she had no choice but to soil her bedclothes.

The door at the end of the hallway clattered open and two female guards, wearing masks to protect them from the nasty odors, came in and ordered us to fold our blankets and stack them in the corner. We could see now that there were fifteen or so women locked up in our area, ranging from teenagers to middle age. Some were well dressed, while others wore little more than rags. Over the next few days, we would see countless women come and go as they were either transferred to prison or acquitted and released.

The jail didn’t serve breakfast, and of course we were unprepared. Fortunately, another prisoner kindly shared some biscuits with us. After
we ate, we took our turn in the facilities. There were four toilets, two of which were broken and filled to overflowing with muck. There was no soap, tissue, towels, or running water in the sink. The floors were so filthy that the floor drains were clogged as well, leaving conditions we need not describe. And we were still barefoot.

With that memorable experience behind us, we set out to meet some of the other prisoners and learn more about the detention center. We saw the woman who had screamed at us and kicked us earlier, now sitting on the floor of the hallway smoking a cigarette a guard had given her. Next to her was a very beautiful young girl. Both of them were crying and shouting, occasionally calling out the names of Islamic prophets and asking them for help.

We sat down beside them without saying anything. This startled them. The Vozara Detention Center was not a place where strangers were friendly to each other, especially to crazy-sounding people who woke the cell block every morning screaming for a cigarette. We introduced ourselves and asked the two why they were there. The screaming woman told us her story, the first of many heartbreaking accounts of abuse and desperation we would hear behind bars in the days that followed.

Her name was Leila. She had been arrested two days before for buying drugs on the street. She was married and had a son. As a newlywed, she learned that her husband was addicted to opium. He pressured her into using it with him, and soon she became addicted too. Then he stopped taking drugs and threatened to divorce her unless she stopped as well. Instead, her addiction became worse and her habit grew to include cocaine and heroin. Desperate for money to buy drugs, she left her family and sold herself into prostitution, earning 4,000 tomans (about two US dollars) per time. She lived in a downtown park and slept in a cardboard box.

“I have prayed to Allah for help,” she said, “but he has not answered my prayers.” She started to cry again.

The young girl, Sephideh, was nineteen, with sparkling eyes and beautiful golden hair. After her parents divorced, her mother had disappeared and her father ignored her to spend time with his friends. She left home with her boyfriend, who introduced her to crack cocaine and opium. She had been arrested buying opium in a park; it was her second offense.

Leila and Sephideh asked us why we were in prison.

“For believing in Jesus Christ.”

They had no idea Christianity was a crime and asked us to tell them more about Jesus. After we shared our testimonies, Sephideh asked if Christ could help her. With tears brimming in her beautiful eyes, she begged, “Please pray for my freedom. If I am released this time, I will give up drugs, go back to school, and get a good job.”

Maryam and I spent the next half hour praying with Leila and Sephideh. They cried softly as we prayed for them and hugged us when we finished. “You are angels from the Lord,” Leila said gratefully. They sincerely seemed to appreciate what we’d done, and after that they acted much calmer. We asked them to pray for us, too. This experience made us think that other women in the cell block might allow us to pray for them. We said good-bye to our new friends and took a walk down the hall.

We came to a cell that was still dark, with two figures wrapped in blankets on the floor. At the sound of our footsteps, they sat up—two girls in their late teens or early twenties, one with long, black, straight hair, and the other with a short, bleached style. We said hello and introduced ourselves. They were surprised by our gesture of friendship and asked why we were in prison. Again we shared our testimony, which put the girls at ease and led them to confide in us. They had been locked up for three days and were terrified of the other inmates, many of them rough and loud like Leila.

The girl with the bleached hair, Asieh, had gone to meet her new boyfriend for a date and took her friend, Sara, along because she didn’t want to meet him alone. When the girls got to his apartment, he said he wasn’t ready yet, but invited them to come in. While they were waiting, the
basiji
appeared and arrested them. The boyfriend had been using the apartment to meet a succession of young women, and the apartment manager had found out and sent the
basiji
to investigate. Everyone in the room was taken into custody for improper contact between unrelated Muslim men and women. The girls hadn’t been allowed to call their families, so their parents didn’t know where they were. They were terrified of what the authorities might do to them and of what their families would think when they found out.

We held their hands and prayed with them. Our suggestion that they
put their trust in God seemed to calm them. Maybe they couldn’t see a way out of their predicament, but He could. We told them about how Jesus loved them unconditionally and was always there for them. They asked if they could stay with us—and before we could answer, they picked up their blankets and took them to our cell.

We went to another cell, which was the biggest one on the hall. There were six or seven middle-aged women huddled together inside, well-dressed and obviously out of place. Maryam greeted them and asked why they’d been arrested. They seemed very fearful and hesitant to talk to us. They wanted to know why we were there. Once we explained, their silence was broken by a flood of questions.

“Is Christianity really a crime?”

“How long have you been Christians?”

“How did they find out about you?”

“What will happen to you now?”

They were intensely curious about this religion that was so harshly condemned by the authorities.

As we answered them, the ladies loosened up a little, and finally one of them told us their story. They were shopping at a bakery when a flash mob appeared to protest the high price of bread. The rally had been staged by a group called We Are, whose members don’t know each other but are summoned by Internet messages to protest at a certain place. They would arrive at the location and at a predetermined time or signal, suddenly start chanting and clapping to make their point, then dissolve into the crowd. When the
basiji
came to break up the protest, they arrested anyone they could grab, including this woman and her friends. These innocent shoppers had spent the entire night locked in the back of a police car, all squeezed together, before being transported to Vozara. One of them had been beaten by a teenage
basiji
but hadn’t had any medical attention during the three days she had been in jail. The women were all afraid of losing face with their families. We prayed with them that they would be released soon and that their families would understand they were innocent.

In the middle of the day, a guard unlocked the hallway door and slid a big saucepan down the grimy hall floor. This was lunch.

Many of the women, with Leila and Sephideh in the lead, dove for the
pan, scooping the lentils and rice out with their hands or burying their faces in the dish like dogs. Maryam and I stood frozen in our tracks, gaping at the spectacle. Leila looked up at us, gobs of food caught in her hair and dripping from her face. “This is how they feed us,” she explained between gulps. “No plates, no spoons.” When we still held back, she added, “If you don’t eat like this, you don’t eat.”

I looked at Maryam and said silently with my eyes,
Then we don’t eat. At least not yet. We’re not desperate enough to be fed like animals in a zoo.
The meal was symbolic of the way the detention center staff looked at everyone under their control: subhuman, unworthy of any respect, locked in filthy cages, and treated like mongrels.

A commotion at the end of the hallway caught my attention. Two young women, who had been arrested for attending a party where men were present, were banging on the bars of the cell-block door and calling for a guard. One of them badly needed a sanitary pad—her clothes were already ruined—and she was desperately calling for one. After a long time, a guard finally appeared. When the girl explained what she needed, the guard said, “Use one of the blankets.”

“Please,” the girl begged, “I’m bleeding.”

“So go die,” the guard replied. “It’s not my problem.”

“Please help me!”

“Shut up! Shut up! Shut up! Shut up!” the guard yelled, then turned away. An hour later, the guard came back with a single pad and threw it at the girl through the bars. “There. Now quit complaining.”

Later that evening, another disturbance erupted as fifteen or so young women, all attractive and very fashionably dressed, were herded through the hallway door of our cell block. They had been arrested by the
basiji
at a weekend family party on charges of having unhealthy and un-Islamic relationships with men. Though they were Iranian, they spoke English to each other as a way to protect themselves. After a few minutes, several of the women came over to Maryam and me because they said we looked and acted differently from the rest of the prisoners. When we told them the charges against us, they asked us to pray for them, especially the one in their group who was pregnant. They couldn’t all fit into our tiny cell, so they crowded in the doorway as we prayed that they would soon be released
and that their families wouldn’t suffer any harassment or embarrassment because of what had happened.

Prisoners came and went all day. By the end of the evening, there were considerably more women in custody than there had been in the morning. We moved to a slightly bigger cell so there would be room for us and our two new friends to stretch out on the floor. The day guards left and the night shift came on duty. Though these guards slept most of the night, they had to be there when new prisoners came in late or in case of a disturbance. The lights went out, and we were left alone with our thoughts and the night sounds of the detention center.

As I waited for sleep, I heard conversations, curses, coughing, and crying fade in and out of the darkness. For a moment, one voice rose above the rumble. I recognized it as Leila’s, but this time she wasn’t screaming, she was singing—beautifully. She had a mellow, haunting voice, so tender and sweet. I could scarcely imagine it coming from that frightful face and that mouth filled with rotten teeth. Maybe it represented a part of her, deep inside, that remained pure and untouched by all the sadness and tragedy in her life.

What a day! On the surface, our situation was a complete disaster; but in another way, it was an incredible blessing. In a sense, we had been preparing for this day for a long time. First separately, and then together, we had spent years working to share the truth about Jesus in a country where evangelizing Muslims was punishable by death.