Prisoner of Tehran: A Memoir (No Series) (13 page)

My heart was beating so fast I felt like my head was going to explode. “I didn’t take off. Ali took me away, and I know exactly what happened to the others. You killed them.”

There were bloodstains on the torture bed, and I couldn’t take my eyes off them.

“I have to tell you that although I don’t like you, you do amuse me. Have you ever wished you had died with them that night?”

“I have.”

He was still smiling.

“You know that your sentence is life in prison, don’t you?”

“Yes, I do.”

If he lashes me, he won’t stop until I’m dead.

“Doesn’t this bother you? I mean, you haven’t exactly had fun for the last couple of months, have you? Imagine it going on forever.”

“God will help me through,” I said.

He stood up and walked around the room for a minute and then came toward me and slapped my right cheek with the back of his hand so hard I felt my neck had cracked. My right ear was ringing.

“Ali isn’t here to protect you anymore.”

I covered my face with my hands.

“Don’t ever say ‘God’ again! You’re unclean and unworthy of His name. I have to go and wash my hands because I’ve touched you. I’m starting to believe that a life sentence might be better for you after all. You’ll suffer for a long time without any hope.”

There was a knock on the door. Hamehd opened it and stepped out. I was unable to think clearly. What could he possibly want from me?

A man whom I had never met before came into the room.

“Hello, Marina. My name is Mohammad. I’m taking you back to 246.”

I looked at him, puzzled. I couldn’t believe that Hamehd was letting me go so easily.

“Are you okay?” Mohammad asked me.

“I’m fine.”

“Put on your blindfold and let’s go.”

He left me at the office of 246, where Sister Maryam told me to take off my blindfold as soon as I arrived. Sister Masoomeh sat behind the desk, reading something.

“Why is your face so red?” Sister Maryam asked.

Sister Masoomeh looked up.

I told them what had happened.

“Thank God I was able to find Brother Mohammad! He and Brother Ali are very close friends. They worked in the same building. I called and told him Hamehd had taken you. He promised he’d find you and bring you back,” said Sister Maryam.

“You were lucky, Marina. Hamehd doesn’t need a good reason to seriously hurt people if he feels like it,” Sister Masoomeh whispered.

“As you can see,” Sister Maryam turned to me, “Sister Masoomeh is not Hamehd’s best friend, but she has learned to bite her tongue. Even though she was one of the Muslim Students Following the Line of the Imam, one of the hostage-takers at the American embassy, and she personally knows the imam, she’s had problems with Hamehd. The only people I know around here who can really stand up to Hamehd are Brother Ali and Brother Mohammad.”

“Don’t worry, Marina. Now that Hamehd knows Brother Mohammad is watching your back, he won’t bother you again,” said Sister Masoomeh.

Everyone at room 7 was happy to see me and wanted to know where I had been. But once they saw the swollen red mark on my cheek, they knew I only had bad news. I had no hope of parole, but I was not going to give up. This was what Hamehd wanted me to do. He had tried to crush my spirits and had almost succeeded. Almost.

I thought about what Sister Maryam had told me about Sister Masoomeh. It was hard to believe that she was one of the hostage-takers at the U.S. embassy in Tehran. I remembered watching the news about the hostage-taking on television when it happened. I had been worried for the hostages. They had families back home; people who loved them, needed them, and wanted them back. Their captivity lasted 444 days, and they were released on January 20, 1981. Now, my situation was much worse than theirs had been. They were U.S. citizens, and this meant that they were somebody. At least their government had tried to save them, and the world knew about the horrible thing that had happened to them. Did the world know about us? Was anyone trying to save us? Deep in my heart I knew that the answer to both these questions was no.

I thought of the church constantly. I could smell the candles burning in front of the image of the Virgin, their lights flickering with the hope of being heard. Had she forgotten me? I remembered that Jesus had said that with the tiniest amount of faith we could throw a mountain into the sea. I didn’t want to move anything as big as a mountain; I just wanted to go home.

On my birthday, I woke up very early. It wasn’t even time for the morning
namaz
yet. I was seventeen years old. When I was younger, maybe ten or eleven, I had dreamt of being this age. Back then, I believed that a seventeen-year-old could do anything. Instead, I was a political prisoner with a life sentence. Taraneh touched my shoulder, and I turned around. Her sleeping spot was next to mine.

“Happy birthday,” she whispered.

“Thanks. How did you know I was awake?”

“By the way you were breathing. After all this time sleeping next to someone, you can tell if they’re really asleep or just pretending.”

She asked me if my family celebrated birthdays, and I said my parents usually bought me a cake and a little gift. She said birthdays were very important in her family. They had big parties and showered each other with gifts. She and her sisters had a competition between them: they sewed garments for each other, and every year, the garments got fancier.

“Marina, I miss them,” she said.

I put my arms around her. “You’ll go home, and everything will be the same.”

After lunch, Taraneh, Sarah, and a few of my other friends surrounded me. Sarah handed me a folded piece of fabric. I opened it. It was a quilted pillowcase. I gasped. It was beautiful. Each of my friends had donated a small piece of their clothes or scarves to make it. I recognized every single square. It was a prison custom to make small, sewn bags, which we hung from a hook under the shelf in our room to store our little personal items. I was the first one to receive a pillowcase.

After dinner, we had a prison-style birthday cake made of bread and dates. I pretended to blow out imaginary candles.

“You forgot to make a wish!” Taraneh said.

“I’ll make it now: I wish for all of us to spend our next birthdays at home.”

Everyone clapped and cheered.

Two or three days later, it was announced over the loudspeaker that all the prisoners of the second floor of 246 were to put on their
hejab
and gather in the yard. Although we could go outside at specific times of day, this had never been mandatory. Everyone was worried. Once in the yard, we were told to stay clear of a marked area in the middle. Four armed, male revolutionary guards walked out of the building, escorting two girls. One of them was a friend of mine from our room, who was nineteen years old, and the other was from room 5. They had their chadors on and were told to lie down on the ground in the middle of the yard. One of the guards tied their wrists and ankles with rope. It was announced that they had had a homosexual relationship and therefore were going to be punished according to the laws of Islam. Everybody was horrified. We watched as two of the guards lashed the girls’ backs. Many didn’t look, covering their faces and praying, but I couldn’t close my eyes. I watched the lashes rising in the air, turning into a blur, slicing the air with their sharp, piercing cries. Then, a second of silence when one’s heart seems to stop, when lungs refuse to breathe. The two girls weren’t screaming, but I wished they were. Their small bodies shook with every blow. I remembered the terrifying pain I had experienced when I had been lashed myself. After thirty lashes, they were untied, managed to stand up, and were taken away. We were left behind to think about what had happened to our friends. Suffering is supposed to make us stronger, but we first have to pay the price.

One day, it was my turn to help Sheida with her laundry. Washing cloth diapers in cold water was not an easy task. We had washed the diapers in the morning and had hung them to dry in the yard. Although everyone had to wait until the next day to collect their laundry from the clotheslines, Sheida was allowed to go outside in the evening. She walked a few steps ahead of me. It was spring and birds were chirping in the distance. The sun had just set, and the sky was a glowing pink. The five clotheslines were at the end of the yard, each tied to the bars of the first-floor windows, stretching all the way from one side of the yard to the other, covered with colorful clothes. Sheida disappeared behind the walls of fabric, and I followed her, using my arms to push dresses, pants, skirts, shirts, and chadors out of my way. Then I heard her scream.

“Marina! Run! Get scissors! Hurry! Now!”

I caught a glimpse of Sheida holding someone who was hanging from the bars of one of the windows. I ran to the office and banged on the door. Sister Maryam opened it.

“Scissors! Now! In the yard!”

She grabbed a pair of scissors from her desk, and we ran to where I had left Sheida. She was still holding someone. I realized it was Sarah. She had hanged herself with a short rope made of scarves. The rope was tied above the top horizontal bar of a first-floor window. If Sarah, who was short and small, had been even a little taller, she wouldn’t have been able to do this. Her body was shaking. Sister Maryam cut the rope. Sarah was breathing, but her face had turned blue. We stayed with her while Sister Maryam went to get the nurse. Sarah was unconscious. We talked to her and touched her face, but she didn’t react.

Sarah was taken away again.

I lost a little bit of hope with every passing moment. It was spring, and the air was light and carried the fragrance of blossoms. Life was going on outside the walls of Evin. Was I only a distant memory for Andre? Maybe he had forgotten me. Phones had been installed at the visitation area, and I had asked my parents about him. My mother had told me that he visited them all the time and was always thinking about me, but maybe they had said this not to upset me.

Every day was almost the same as the one before, which made our loneliness and desperation even more difficult to bear. Each day started with the morning prayer before sunrise. Breakfast came in at about eight o’clock, and after that we had to watch the religious education programs on the television. We were allowed to read the available books, which were all about Islam, or walk up and down the narrow hallways. We hardly ever spoke about politics or our political involvements and activities before Evin. Some girls were known as informants. There weren’t many of them, maybe one or two in each room, so we didn’t risk saying things we didn’t want our interrogators to know.

For about an hour a day, we could use the small courtyard that was surrounded by the building. We had to wear our
hejab
while out there, because male guards walked on the roof all the time and watched us closely, but it wasn’t mandatory to wear chadors in the yard; we could wear manteaus and head scarves. While outside, all we could do was to walk around in circles or sit by the walls and watch the slice of sky above us. That small patch of blue was the only part of the outside world we could see. It reminded us of the other place where we once used to live, where our homes were, and where we belonged. I usually sat by the wall with Taraneh. We leaned against its rough surface and watched the clouds as they disappeared out of our view and traveled to that other land. Imagining that we sat on a cloud and could steer it in any direction, we told each other about all the familiar places we could see from up there: the streets of our neighborhoods, our schools, and our homes, where our mothers looked out the windows and wondered about their daughters who had been taken away.

“How did you get in trouble and end up here?” Taraneh asked me one day as we soaked in the warmth of the spring sun, daydreaming about home. We had never talked about the events that had led to our arrests. The yard was filled with girls. Most of them walked around rather fast and in a purposeful manner, as if they had a destination. Black, navy, brown, and gray manteaus brushed against each other, and rubber slippers moved swiftly against the paved ground. I realized that what I saw sitting there was similar to the view of a beggar sitting on the side of a busy street, but my view was much more limited and more modest than a beggar’s view. At that moment, my world was like a roofless square building with two levels of barred windows that looked inside dark rooms, a world of young women walking in circles. It was like a very strange science fiction story: “The Planet of Imprisoned Girls.” I laughed.

“What?” asked Taraneh.

“It almost feels like we’re beggars sitting on a sidewalk on another planet.”

Taraneh smiled.

“Compared to us, a beggar is a king,” she said.

“My trouble started the day I walked out of calculus class…”

I
N EARLY
1980, Abolhassan Banisadr became the first elected president of Iran. Before the success of the revolution, he had participated in the anti-shah movement for many years, had been imprisoned twice, and had then managed to flee to France and join Ayatollah Khomeini. There were hopes that he would lead Iran to democracy. However, as the school year of 1979–80 inched forward, I felt like I was sinking into darkness. Everything gradually changed for the worse. One by one, inexperienced, fanatic young women replaced most of our teachers. The
hejab
became mandatory, and women had to wear either long, dark-colored robes and cover their hair with large scarves, or they had to wear chadors. Political groups that had opposed or even criticized the Islamic government became illegal. Wearing ties, cologne, perfume, makeup, or nail polish was declared “satanic” and therefore subject to severe punishment. Every day before going to class, students were forced to line up and yell hateful slogans like “Death to America” and “Death to Israel.”

Every morning, our principal Khanoom Mahmoodi, and our vice principal, Khanoom Kheirkhah, stood at the school entrance with a bucket of water and a washcloth and inspected every student entering the school. If they saw one of the girls wearing makeup, they scrubbed her face until it hurt. One morning, during her inspection, Khanoom Mahmoodi pulled aside a good friend of mine, Nasim, and claimed that her eyebrows were too perfect—she must have trimmed them. Nasim cried and said she had never done anything to them, and the principal called her a whore. Nasim was naturally beautiful, and many of us defended her and testified that her eyebrows had always been like that. She never received an apology.

Day by day, anger and frustration built up within me. I suffered during most of my classes, especially during calculus. The new calculus teacher was a young woman from the revolutionary guards who wasn’t qualified to teach the subject. She spent most of the class time spreading the Islamic government’s propaganda, talking about Islam and the perfect Islamic society that resisted the influence of the West and moral corruption. One day as she was going on and on about the great things Khomeini had done for the country, I raised my hand.

“Yes?” she said.

“I don’t mean to be rude, miss, but can we please get back to our main subject?”

She raised an eyebrow and said in a challenging tone, “If you don’t like what I’m teaching, you can leave the classroom.”

Everyone was looking at me. I collected my books and left the room. As I walked down the hallway, I heard the sound of many footsteps coming from behind me. Turning around, I saw that most of my classmates had followed me out. There were about thirty of us standing in the hallway.

By lunch recess, the school was in chaos. Everyone was saying that I had started a strike. Most afternoon classes were canceled because about 90 percent of the students were in the yard, refusing to go back to class. Khanoom Mahmoodi came outside with a loudspeaker and told us to go back, but no one listened. She said she would call our parents, but no one moved. Then she threatened to have us all expelled, but we said she could go right ahead and do that. Finally, the students chose me and two others as representatives to speak to the principal. We informed her that we were only going back to class if our teachers promised to stick to their subjects and put politics aside.

That day when I got home, my mother called my name. This was unusual. She hardly ever talked to me before dinnertime. She was in the kitchen, chopping parsley.

I stood in the doorway. “Yes, Maman?”

“Your principal called.” She didn’t look at me but kept her eyes on the cutting board. Her knife moved smoothly and precisely. Diced parsley covered her hands, making them green.

“What do you think you’re doing?” she asked, throwing me a quick glance as sharp as her knife.

I told her what had happened.

“You’d better fix this problem,” she said. “I don’t want her to call me again. Just get along with them. This government isn’t going to last long. Now go do your homework.”

I went to my room and closed the door behind me, surprised to have escaped her anger so easily. Probably my mother disliked the new government as much as I did, and this was why her reaction had not been as severe as I had anticipated.

The strike continued for two days. We still went to school, but not to class. We passed the hours by walking around the yard or sitting in small groups, talking. Our conversations were mostly about all we had witnessed during the recent months. It was hard for us to believe that life had changed so dramatically. Just a year earlier, we would never have believed that our clothes would put our lives in danger, or that we would go on strike in order to learn calculus. On the third day of the strike, Khanoom Mahmoodi called the student representatives to her office.

Her face red with anger, she said she was giving us a final warning. She told us if we didn’t go back to class, she’d have no other choice but to ask the revolutionary guards to come to our school and take the matter into their hands. She said she had no doubt we knew that the guards wouldn’t be very patient with us, that this was a serious matter and people could get hurt. She warned us that we were acting against the Islamic government and that the penalty for this could be death. We had an hour to go back to class.

She had made her point. The revolutionary guards had a bad reputation. During the previous months they had arrested hundreds of people, many of whom were never heard from again. Their crime had been being anti-revolution, anti-Islam, or anti-Khomeini.

The strike ended.

The guards were not the only ones to worry about; there was also the Hezbollah, groups of fanatical civilians armed with knives and clubs, who attacked any kind of public protest. They were everywhere and could become organized in a matter of minutes. They were especially violent toward women who didn’t wear the
hejab
properly. Many women had been attacked and beaten for wearing lipstick or because a few strands of their hair had been showing from under their scarves.

It was about a month or two after the strike that my chemistry teacher, Khanoom Bahman, asked me to stay behind after class and told me about the list of names she had spotted on Khanoom Mahmoodi’s desk. Khanoom Bahman was one of only a few teachers who had been teaching at our school since before the revolution, and she knew me very well. As she spoke her eyes remained on the door to make sure no one walked in on us. Her voice was almost a whisper, and I had to bend down to hear her properly.

Somehow, I expected something like this could happen. I knew I would be in trouble after all I had said and done. The fact that I didn’t like the new Islamic rules was not a secret, and during these times one couldn’t exactly speak freely without repercussions. But even though I knew all this, the dangers I could face seemed vague and distant. Somehow, I thought bad things only happened to other people.

I thanked Khanoom Bahman for telling me about the list. She told me I had to leave the country. She asked me if I had any relatives abroad, and I explained to her that my family was not rich and could not afford to send me anywhere. She interrupted me, raising her voice.

“Marina, I don’t think you understand. This is a matter of life and death. If I were your mother, I’d get you out of here, even if I had to go hungry,” she said with tears in her eyes.

I liked her, and I didn’t want to upset her, so I told her I would talk to my parents, but I had no intention of doing so. What would I tell them? That I was going to be arrested soon?

My brother and his wife had left the country shortly after the revolution and had migrated to Canada. They had realized that there was no future for them in the Islamic Republic. Not too long after their departure, the government of Iran denied Iranians the right to migrate to other countries. I liked the name “Canada”; it sounded far away and very cold but peaceful. My brother and his wife were lucky to be there. They could live a normal life and worry about normal things. My parents had thought of sending me to stay with my brother, but it couldn’t be worked out. I had to stay and take my chances.

At home that afternoon, I watched the street from my balcony. The new regime had brought nothing but destruction and violence. School, which used to be the best part of my life, had turned into a kind of hell, and I had heard that the government was planning to close down all universities for restructuring, calling it the Islamic Cultural Revolution. And Arash was dead. There was nothing left.

Most of the summer of 1980 was quiet, and I was relieved to be out of school and to be going to our cottage. In July, Aram and his parents spent about two weeks at his aunt’s cottage. I had been very lonely and had looked forward to their arrival, but when they came, I found myself thinking of Arash and missing him even more. Aram and I spent most of our time inside, playing cards or his favorite game, Mastermind. We sometimes went for walks on the beach but couldn’t go swimming together because now women were not allowed to wear bathing suits in public. Most of our friends, including Neda, whose families had owned cottages in the area had left the country. We met a few old friends, but all of us were afraid of the revolutionary guards and the members of Islamic committees, who were everywhere and disliked it when boys and girls were seen together; according to the new laws governing the country, this was immoral.

The Iran-Iraq war began in September 1980. I was back in the city. I had gone to a friend’s house, and we were sitting in her kitchen, having tea and rice cookies. She was showing me her new pair of Puma running shoes, which were white with red stripes on either side. Suddenly two deep booms interrupted our talk. They sounded like explosions. We were home alone.

More booms.

We looked out the window but saw nothing. My friend lived on the fifth floor of a five-story apartment building close to Jaleh Square. We decided to run up to the roof. In the hallway, we bumped into a few neighbors who were also on their way up. Once on the roof, we had a good view of the city. It was a cloudless, sunny day, and Tehran was wrapped in a thin haze. We heard planes.

“Over there!” someone yelled.

A few miles to the south, two fighter jets zoomed eastward. On the western horizon, columns of smoke rose into the sky. One of the neighbors had brought a radio with him and turned it on. Soon, an excited reporter announced that Iraqi MIGs had bombed Tehran’s airport. Different divisions of Iraq’s army had crossed the border and entered Iran. We were at war.

I had read about the First and Second World Wars and the American Civil War. I had read about bombs that demolished cities and left nothing but rubble and dead bodies. But those wars were in books. Even if the stories were true, they had all happened years earlier. The world was now a different place. No one would be allowed to destroy cities and kill thousands of people.

“We’ll show them!” the man with the radio waved his fist in the air. “We’ll conquer Baghdad and stone Saddam! Those bastards!”

Everyone nodded.

Once I got home, I found my mother taping large Xs on windows with masking tape to prevent glass from shattering in case of bombings. She explained to me that the radio was urging people to take precautions while promising that this war was not going to last more than a few days or weeks at the most and that our army was going to defeat the Iraqis in no time. My mother had also bought pieces of black cardboard to cover the windows at night so the MIGs wouldn’t spot our lights and use them to target us. I wasn’t too worried. It couldn’t be that bad.

Days went by. Air raid sirens screamed a couple of times a day, but we rarely heard explosions. Radio and television channels played military marches all day and announced that the air force had attacked Baghdad and other Iraqi cities and that we had pushed back the Iraqis. All men, young and old and even teenagers, were encouraged to join the army and to become martyrs; after all, the government announced, becoming a martyr was the fast, guaranteed way to go to heaven. This was the war of good against evil. The city of Khorramshahr, which was close to Iran’s border with Iraq, had been almost entirely destroyed and then invaded.

All borders were soon closed, and no one was allowed to leave the country without a special permit. However, every day, people who had paid great sums of money to human smugglers left Iran to avoid military service or to escape arrest by the revolutionary guards. They risked their lives to cross into Pakistan or Turkey.

Sometime in late fall, I heard from friends at school about a protest rally and decided to go. Although I knew it was dangerous, it seemed the right thing to do. The rally was to start at four o’clock at Ferdosi Square, a ten-minute walk from school.

On the day of the rally, after the final bell rang, Gita, Sarah, and I stepped outside and saw hundreds of people, mostly young men and women, filling the street. We joined the throng walking toward Ferdosi Square. Everyone was alert, looking around, knowing that eventually the revolutionary guards or the Hezbollah or both were going to attack us. My heart began to race. The street was a seething, breathing river. I noticed shopkeepers closing down their stores and leaving. At Ferdosi Square, holding a loudspeaker in front of her mouth, a young woman told the crowd about the violent attacks of the Hezbollah on women: “How long are we going to allow criminals and murderers hiding behind the name of God to attack our mothers, sisters, and friends and get away with it?” she asked. An old woman stood next to us, holding a sheet of white bristol board in front of her. She had tied her white chador around her waist, exposing her thinning gray hair to the sun. In the middle of the bristol board, there was a picture of a young girl with a big smile on her face and under the picture it said: “Executed in Evin.”