Prisoner of Tehran: A Memoir (No Series) (26 page)

The door opened, and a blinding light expanded and reached me. A middle-aged woman wearing a white headscarf and a white manteau came in.

“Where am I?” I asked her.

“It’s okay, dear. You’re in a hospital. What do you remember?”

“My husband is dead.”

My husband is dead. Dear God, why does this hurt so much?

The woman left the room, and I closed my eyes.
He’s dead, gone, and I feel lonely. Terribly lonely. I almost feel the same as I did when I saw soldiers throw Arash’s body onto a truck. But I loved Arash, and I never loved Ali. What’s wrong with me?

This was grief, denied, but present and strong.

Someone called my name. I opened my eyes to see a middle-aged man with a gray beard and a bald head. He said he was a doctor and asked me if I was in pain, and I said I wasn’t. Then he told me I had lost my baby. Whatever was left of me crumbled.

For about two days, I drifted back and forth between nightmares, dreams, and reality, not knowing which was which. Somewhere in between blurry images and vague voices, I found Mr. Moosavi sitting by my bed. I touched his shoulder, and he looked at me. The room was speckled with sunlight.

“This is too much for all of us,” he said, crying. “But we have to surrender to God’s will.”

I wished I could understand God’s will, but I couldn’t.

Mr. Moosavi continued to talk, but his voice became fainter and fainter until it completely faded away. I dreamed that Andre and I were walking on the beach, holding hands. Taraneh was there, and so were Sarah, Gita, and Arash. A moment later, I was standing at the door of my parents’ cottage, looking toward the driveway. Ali was walking away from me, waving good-bye. I frantically ran to catch up with him, crying out his name, but he had disappeared.

I woke with something cold on my forehead. Akram stood by my bed, and it was her cold hand I had felt. She had dark circles around her eyes and was crying quietly. I couldn’t remember where I was. She reminded me that I was in a hospital. I asked her if Ali was truly dead, and she said he was. Sobbing, she crawled in bed beside me and put her arm around my shoulder.

When I was finally lucid enough, Mr. Moosavi told me he would make the arrangements for my release, but he had been told that he had to return me to Evin for the time being. He also said Ali had made a will a few days before his death and had left me everything he had. I told Mr. Moosavi I didn’t think it would be right for me to take anything that belonged to Ali.

“You don’t want to tell your family about your marriage, do you?” he asked.

I didn’t respond.

“You made my son very happy,” he said. “You deserve to start a new life.”

He sat on a chair next to my bed, holding a string of amber-colored prayer beads in his hand. I recognized them; they were Ali’s. I asked him how Fatemeh Khanoom was coping, and he said she had been very strong.

“How is Akram?” I asked.

“She came to see you a couple of days ago and tried to talk to you, but you weren’t well.”

“Yes, she was here…” I remembered.

“She has delivered her baby, a boy,” Mr. Moosavi smiled a faint proud smile.

“When?”

“She went into labor after we told her about Ali.”

Akram was in the same hospital I was in. She had had excessive bleeding, which was now under control, and the baby had been a little jaundiced but was getting better.

Before taking me back to Evin, Mr. Moosavi took me to see Akram and her little boy, whom she had named Ali. On our way to Akram’s room, we walked by a large window, behind which about thirty babies slept or cried in small cribs. Mr. Moosavi pointed out a tiny baby with a red, wrinkled face, who was screaming angrily. It was little Ali. I asked to hold him, and the nurse brought him to me. He stopped crying as soon as I began rocking him in my arms and started sucking on my manteau; he was hungry. Unable to stop my tears, I took him to Akram, and she put him to her breast.

My baby was dead. I would have loved him if he had lived. But I was never going to feed him, change his diapers, play with him, or watch him grow.

When I walked into the 246 office and took off my blindfold, a guard I had never met before was staring at me. She was in her mid-forties, and had a mocking smile on her face.

“The famous Marina, or should I say Fatemeh Moradi-Bakht. We finally meet. Remember one thing: I’m the boss here now, and you are not going to receive any special treatment from now on. You are like everybody else. Understood?”

I nodded. “Where is Sister Maryam?”

“The Sisters of the Revolutionary Guards in Evin have been reassigned. I’m Sister Zeinab and I’m a member of the Islamic Committees, and we’re in charge here. Any more questions?”

“No.”

“Go to your room.”

The world had its way of proving me wrong. Things could still get worse. But I was too tired to even shed another tear. In room 6, everyone gathered around me. Bahar’s voice rose above everyone else’s.

“Girls, give her some space. Marina, are you okay?”

I looked into her eyes, and all the voices faded away.

When I came to myself, I was lying on the floor in a corner with a blanket covering me, and Bahar was sitting by my side, reading the Koran.

“Bahar.”

She smiled. “I thought you were in a coma or something. Where have you been?”

I told her about Ali’s assassination. She was shocked.

“He got what he deserved,” she said.

“No, Bahar. He didn’t deserve this.”

“Didn’t you hate him for what he did to you?”

Why did everybody ask me this?

“He wasn’t all evil. There was goodness in him. He was sad and lonely, and he wanted to change, to help people, but he didn’t exactly know how, or maybe he did but couldn’t, because people like Hamehd didn’t let him.”

“You’re not making any sense. He raped you again and again.”

“I married him.”

“Did you want to marry him?”

“No.”

“He forced you into it.”

“Yes.”

“Legal rape is still rape.”

“Bahar, nothing makes sense. I feel like everything is my fault.”

“Nothing is your fault.”

I asked her about her son, Ehsan, and she told me he was taking a nap. She had not heard anything from her husband.

About two weeks later, my name was announced over the loudspeaker. Mr. Moosavi was waiting for me in the office. Sister Zeinab asked him to sign a piece of paper saying I had to be back before ten o’clock at night.

“I’m taking you to my house for dinner,” he said as soon as we stepped out of the office.

“These new sisters aren’t very nice.”

“No, not at all.”

Mr. Moosavi was distracted as we walked to his car.

When we cleared the gates, he asked me if I was feeling better, and I said I was. He said he and his family were doing better as well; God had given them strength, and Akram’s baby had been keeping them busy. Then, he took a deep breath and said he’d received information that Ali’s assassination had been an inside job. I couldn’t believe it.

“Hamehd?” I asked.

“Yes. He’s one of them, but it can’t be proven.”

I said Ali had told me that he had been having difficulties with Assadollah-eh Ladjevardi, and Mr. Moosavi said he believed Ladjevardi had ordered the assassination.

“Is there anything you can do to bring the ones responsible to justice?” I asked.

“No, as I said, nothing can be proven. Witnesses will never step forward.”

Mr. Moosavi had lost his only son, and the killers, who were his son’s colleagues, were going to walk away. This was terribly painful for him. I found it sadly ironic that Ali had died almost in the same way as the young men and women executed in Evin; members of the same firing squads who had killed Gita, Taraneh, and Sirus had pulled the trigger that had ended his life.

“There’s something else you need to know, Marina,” said Mr. Moosavi. “I’ve been trying to get you released and I haven’t been able to.”

“Why?”

“Because hard-liners, like Ladjevardi, who have a lot of influence in Evin, say you shouldn’t be allowed to return to your old way of life. They say such a move will jeopardize your faith in Islam. They say that you’re a martyr’s wife, that your husband was murdered by the Mojahedin and that you should be protected against the infidel and marry a good Muslim man as soon as possible.”

I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. “I’d rather die,” I said.

He shook his head. “There’s no need to go that far, Marina. I promised my son I would get you home and I will. I’ll have to go and see the imam. I’m sure I can convince him to give the order for your release. Some people will be upset, and they’ll do their best to cause complications, so it could take longer than I had expected, but we’ll be fine. You have to be strong. I might not be able to bring Ali’s killers to justice, but I will protect you, because this is what he wanted me to do.”

“Will you take me to Ali’s grave?” I asked.

He promised he would.

“Marina, did you love him at all?” he suddenly asked.

I was surprised to hear this question. I had never expected him to be so open with me.

“He asked me not too long before he died if I hated him, and I told him I didn’t. I can’t say I loved him, no, but I cared about him,” I said.

I had never been to Ali’s parents’ house without him. Every few minutes, I had a very strong feeling that he would walk into the room.

After dinner, Ali’s mother told me she wanted to talk to me in private. We went to Akram’s old bedroom. She closed the door behind us, sat on the bed, and motioned me to sit next to her. She told me Mr. Moosavi was doing his best to get me home to my parents, and I told her I knew this.

“I know he’s told you, but I wanted to tell you myself,” she said. “It was Ali’s last wish for you to go home, and this means a great deal to us.”

She said she had never expected Ali to survive when he was arrested by SAVAK and taken to Evin before the revolution. She knew it was an honor to be the mother of a martyr, but she had been terrified. She had not wanted to lose her only son. When he went to the front, she had been afraid again, and she had been relieved when he had returned, believing he’d be safe in Tehran.

“But look what happened,” she sobbed. “The people he worked with stabbed him in the back. The people who were supposed to protect him. The ones he trusted. And nothing can be done. He survived the shah and the war to be killed like this. All we can do now is to honor his last wish. And we will, I promise you. And we know very well that Akram owes her baby to you. Little Ali is our miracle. He’s our hope.”

There was a knock on the door, and Akram came in with little Ali in her arms. He had grown since I had seen him at the hospital. He had big rosy cheeks and large dark eyes; he was beautiful. I held him and thought of my own baby. I was grateful that I had had a chance to hold my son, even if only in a dream.

A few days later, Mr. Moosavi took me to Behesht-eh Zahra cemetery, where Ali had been buried. Behesht-eh Zahra is located just south of Tehran, off the highway to Quom, a city famous for its religious Islamic schools. Akram had come with us. She sat in the backseat with me, and for the two hours of the journey, we held each other’s hands in silence. The road was a dark, clean line cutting the desert in half. It had rained the night before, but now the sky was clearing. I rested my head against the back of the seat and let the waves of shadow and light wash over me. I had lost friends and loved ones before, but Ali didn’t fit with them. He was unlike anyone else I had ever known. I couldn’t change what he had done to me or what had happened between us. He died when he had begun to pull away from the person he had been. So many innocents had lost their lives behind the walls of Evin and were buried in unmarked graves, and Ali was accountable for the terrible things that had happened there. But the truth was that he had died unjustly. The hard-liners who were responsible for his death had murdered him because he had become a threat to them, because he had tried to make things better, because he had tried to break free.

In the cemetery, my mind refused to focus. The world had become a jumble of unrelated images. I came to myself when Akram told me we had entered Golzar-eh Shohadah, the part of Behesht-eh Zahra dedicated to martyrs. It was almost noon, and although a cool, gentle breeze had begun to blow, the sun was hot, and I was sweating. There were small trees here and there, but as far as the eye could see, the earth was carpeted with marble and cement tombstones placed horizontally on top of graves. Tin stands with glass windows, small shrines to the dead, stood all around us. Most of the dead buried here had been killed in the war, and most of them had been very young when they died.

Mr. Moosavi and Akram finally stopped. We had arrived at Ali’s grave. His father dropped to his knees and put his hands on the white marble stone. His shoulders began to shake, and his tears fell onto the stone’s sparkling surface, seeping into the engraved letters that read:

Seyed Ali-eh Moosavi
Islam’s Brave Soldier
April 21, 1954, to September 26, 1983