Prisoner of Tehran: A Memoir (No Series)

by Nemat, Marina

  I went to junior high at the age of eleven. At the time, the government funded all schools and universities in Iran, but some schools had proven themselves better than others, and Anooshiravan-eh Dadgar, which was a Zoroastrian junior high and high school for girls, was one of them. My parents didn’t choose this school for me because it was one of the best but simply because it was close to our apartment.

  Zoroastrians follow the teachings of their prophet Zarathushtra. Born in Persia almost three thousand years ago, he invited people to believe in the one and only God: Ahura Mazda. During my time at the school, the majority of students were either Zoroastrians or Muslims, but there were also Bahais, Jews, and only three or four Christians.

  The high ceilings and many windows of the school’s forty-year-old main building made it feel very spacious. The long hallways seemed endless, and two wide stairways connected the first floor to the second. Two-story pillars stood on both sides of the main entrance, above which, in large letters, it read: Good Thoughts, Good Words, Good Deeds—the main motto of the Zoroastrian faith. We had a separate gym building with basketball and volleyball courts, and tall brick walls surrounded the paved schoolyard.

  For three years, my visits to Albert’s bookstore were the highlight of my life. Albert had read all the hundreds of books that were piled up in his store, knew exactly where each one of them was located, and loved to talk about them. He had a wife and a son and told me that his son, who was married and had two boys, had moved to America two years earlier. The Christmas after we first met, Albert gave me a package wrapped in red paper. I opened it to find The Narnia Collection and a beautiful blue pencil box filled with colored pencils and erasers that smelled like bubblegum.

  The last time I saw Albert was a few days after my twelfth birthday, a beautiful spring day filled with bird songs and warm sunshine. Smiling, I opened the heavy glass door to Albert’s bookstore, holding Little Women close to my heart.

  “Hi, Al—”

  Dust particles floated in the stream of sunlight that poured onto the linoleum floor. The empty store stretched in front of me. It was as if I were standing at the edge of a desert. Feeling like a strong, fierce wind had just rushed against me, I gasped and tried to breathe. Albert sat on a large cardboard box in the middle of the terrible emptiness, looking at me with a sad smile.

  “Where are the books?” I asked him.

  He told me he had sold most of them to another bookstore but had saved all my favorites. They were in the box he was sitting on. He promised to bring them to my house later. He had wanted to tell me earlier, but he wasn’t able to. He and his wife would soon leave Iran to join their son in America. Albert didn’t want to go, but his wife was not well and wanted to spend the time she had left with their son and grandchildren. He couldn’t refuse her. They had been married for fifty-one years, and this was her last wish.

  He took a white handkerchief out of the pocket of his shirt and blew his nose. My arms and legs felt weak. He stood up, came to me, and put his hands on my shoulders.

  “I watched you grow. You brought joy and happiness to my life. I’ll miss you. You’re like a daughter to me.”

  I wrapped my arms around him and held him tight. Moving to America felt as splitting and eternal as death.

  Six

  IWOKE WITH THE TASTE of chicken soup in my mouth. I was sitting up. The world seemed to be covered with a thick fog and was spinning around me. There weren’t any solid lines or shapes, only vague colors. Someone was calling my name. Chicken soup again. I coughed.

  “Swallow it. It’s good for you.”

  The warm liquid washed down my throat. It was good. I swallowed again. There was a bright, white square in front of me. I tried to focus. It was a small, barred window. I was achy and feverish.

  “That’s better,” said the voice. It was coming from behind me. I tried to move.

  “Don’t move, swallow.”

  It hurt to move. I swallowed. Some of the soup was dripping down my chin.

  The cell slowly came into focus.

  “I’m going to let you lie down now,” the voice said. It was Ali’s.

  He sat on the floor about two or three feet away from me and said he was going to send me to a women’s dorm in Evin, named 246, where I would see a few of my friends and would feel better. He said he knew one of the guards in charge of 246 and would ask her to look after me. Her name was Sister Maryam.

  “I’m going away for a while…” he said and then kept his eyes on me in silence, as if waiting for me to say something. I had no idea what kind of a place 246 was. Had he really told me that I had a life sentence or had I dreamt it?

  “Do I really have a life sentence?” I asked.

  He nodded, the shadow of a sad smile crossing his face.

  I tried not to cry, but I couldn’t help it. I wanted to ask him why he had saved me from execution. I wanted to tell him that death was better than a life sentence. I wanted him to know that he had no right to do what he had done—but I couldn’t.

  He stood and said, “May God protect you,” and left.

  I slept.

  After a few hours, he came back and took me to the door of a small room where about twenty girls were sleeping side by side on the floor.

  “You’ll have to wait in this room until they come and take you to 246. Take care of yourself. Things will get better. Put on your blindfold after you sit down.”

  I spotted a small empty space in a far corner of the room. I was still dizzy, and my feet hurt, so it took me a great deal of effort to reach it without stepping on anyone. No one had reacted to my arrival. There wasn’t enough space to lie down, so I sat, folded my knees to my chest, leaned against the wall, and cried.

  After awhile, a man yelled out about ten names, including mine.

  “All the people I’ve called pull their blindfolds up just a little so they can see where they’re going and line up in front of the door here. Each of you has to hang on to the chador of the person ahead of you. Don’t forget; raise the blindfold just a little. If I see anyone peeping around too much, they’ll be sorry, and once you’ve found your place in the line, fix your blindfolds and make sure they’re tight.”

  I grasped the chador of the girl in front of me, and the person behind me grabbed my shawl. We went through a couple of corridors and were soon outside. It was cold. I prayed for us to arrive at our destination soon because I was close to collapsing. All I could see were the gray pavement and the chador and the feet of the girl ahead of me. Her feet were not swollen, but she had rubber slippers on, which were similar to mine and at least two sizes too big for her. I wondered what had happened to my shoes. We entered a building, followed a hallway, and climbed a couple of flights of stairs. Then the guard told us to stop, called my name, and told me to step out of the line.

  “Grab this rope and follow me,” he said.

  I took the rope and followed him through a doorway.

  “Salam aleikom, Sister. Good morning. I have a new one for you: Marina Moradi-Bakht. Here’re the papers.”

  “Good morning to you, too, Brother. Thank you,” said a woman.

  The door closed with a small click. The room was filled with the scent of freshly brewed tea. I realized I was starving.

  “Marina, take off your blindfold,” the woman said with a demanding voice, and I obeyed. She was about twenty-five years old and ten inches taller than I, with large dark eyes, a large nose, and narrow lips; features that had come together to create a very serious face. She was wearing a black chador. I wondered if she had ever smiled in her life.

  The room we were in was an office of some sort. It was about fourteen by twelve feet with a desk, four metal chairs, and a plain metal desk covered with piles of paper. Through the barred window, the morning’s yellow sunlight reached across the floor.

  “Marina, I’m Sister Maryam,” the woman said. “Brother Ali has told me about you.” She explained that the building we were in, 246, had two floors, the first floor with s
ix rooms and the second with seven. I was to stay in room 7 on the second floor. Then she called a name over the loudspeaker. Within a few minutes, a girl about my age entered the office. Sister Maryam introduced her as Soheila. She was a prisoner and the representative of room 7.

  Soheila had short brown hair and was wearing a blue sweater and black pants, and her hair wasn’t covered. I guessed that since 246 was a women’s building, we didn’t have to wear the hejab all the time. The office doors opened into an empty foyer, which was about twenty-five feet long and nine feet wide, and, as we crossed it, I noticed the stairs that led downstairs. I limped after Soheila and fell behind. She stopped, turned around, and stared at my feet.

  “I’m sorry…I didn’t realize…Here, put your arm around my shoulder. I’ll help you.”

  We came to a barred metal door, Soheila pushed it open, and we stepped into a narrow hallway. There were girls everywhere. We passed by three doors and followed the hallway as it turned at a ninety-degree angle. Three more doors, and then we entered the one at the very end: room 7. I looked around. The room was about twenty-five by seventeen feet, and the floor was covered with a worn brown carpet. A little above my eye level, a metal shelf ran across the wall; plastic bags filled with clothes sat on top of it and smaller bags hung from hooks beneath it. The beige paint covering the walls and the metal doors was thin and dirty. In one corner, there was a bunk bed. Jars and containers of different shapes and sizes covered the first bunk, and plastic bags filled with clothes rested on the second. In another corner, next to a barred window, gray military blankets were stacked almost to the ceiling. The room was surprisingly clean and tidy. In small groups of three or four, about fifty girls sat on the floor, talking. They were all about my age and looked at me with curiosity when I entered the room. Unable to carry my weight any longer, I dropped to the floor.

  “Girls, fix a spot for her so she can rest!” Soheila yelled as she knelt beside me. “I know how much your feet hurt, but you’ll be fine. Don’t worry.”

  I nodded, tears filling my eyes.

  “Marina!” a familiar voice called.

  I looked up and, for a moment, didn’t recognize the girl standing over me.

  “Sarah! Thank God! I’ve been so worried for you!”

  Sarah had withered. Her once glowing white skin had become dull, and there were dark circles around her eyes. We embraced until we were exhausted.

  “Are you okay?” Sarah asked, looking at my feet.

  “I’m fine. It could have been worse.”

  I pulled off my shawl from my head and ran my fingers through my hair, the strands of which were stuck together. I had never been so dirty in my life.

  “Why is your name written on your forehead?” asked Sarah.

  “What?”

  “Your name is written on your forehead with a black marker.”

  I touched my forehead and asked for a mirror, but Sarah said there were no mirrors here. She said since she had been in Evin, she had not seen anyone with their name written on their forehead. I couldn’t remember how it had happened. Then she asked me about the bruise on my head, and I told her about fainting in the bathroom.

  “Marina, how’re my parents? When was the last time you saw them?” Sarah’s eyes focused on me with an intensity I had never seen before, as if she had been wandering in a desert without water for days and I was a gurgling fountain.

  I told her about how worried her parents had been and about their efforts to see her and Sirus. I asked her if she knew where Sirus was and if he was all right. She didn’t know. Then I asked her if she had been lashed.

  The night they had been arrested, the guards had made Sarah watch as they lashed Sirus. They had wanted him to give them the names of his friends, but he had refused. She closed her eyes not to witness what was being done to her brother, but they hit and kicked her and made her watch. Then, they untied him and strapped her to the bed. They told Sirus that if he gave them the names, they would not lash Sarah, but he didn’t say a word, and Sarah was tortured as well. They asked her if she knew his friends, but she didn’t know any of them. Then they asked her about her own friends.

  “I gave them your name, Marina…I’m sorry…but I couldn’t take it,” she said.

  I didn’t blame her. I would have given Hamehd all the names he wanted if he had lashed me only a little while longer.

  I told her about the list. It was hard for her to believe that the guards had tortured us for what they already knew. She asked me why I had not told her anything about the list earlier, and I explained that I didn’t know who else was on it and I didn’t want to worry anyone.

  “Have you seen Gita?” I asked her.

  “Before he tortured me, Brother Hamehd said that Gita had given him my name and address. I believed him and got mad at her. I thought it was her fault that I had been arrested. Then, Hamehd lashed me and I ended up telling him everything I knew. I hated myself for hating Gita.”

  Sarah covered her mouth to silence the pain that had to find its way out of her. I put my arms around her, and she screamed in my chest.

  She finally looked up. “Just before he sent me here, Hamehd told me that Gita was executed the night before. He said if Sirus didn’t cooperate, the same thing would happen to him. So I knew Hamehd had lied to me when he had said Gita had given him my name and address. If Gita had talked, she would have lived. She didn’t talk and that was why they killed her. It wasn’t her fault.”

  “Gita is dead?”

  Sarah nodded.

  It couldn’t be true.

  A voice in my head was saying, “You’re alive, and you don’t deserve it.”

  I clearly remembered the day Gita and I became friends. It had been three and a half years earlier. Summer of 1978, up north at my family’s cottage, the summer I met Arash.

  Seven

  THE YEAR I WAS BORN, my parents bought a cottage in the small town of Ghazian—across a bridge from Bandar-eh Pahlavi—by the Caspian Sea, where life was slow and green. Although owning a cottage by the Caspian was a sign of wealth at the time, my family was not rich. My father loved the peace and beauty of northern Iran so much that instead of buying a house in Tehran, he decided to buy a cottage. However, he didn’t have enough money and bought it together with one of his friends, a loud and cheerful Russian-Armenian man named Partef who owned a stainless steel factory in Tehran. Uncle Partef, as I called him, was not married, was usually very busy, and rarely came to the cottage, so we had the place to ourselves most of the time.

  The cottage was in the middle of a large piece of wooded land behind the harbor on a quiet street that led to the beach. Its first owner had been a Russian doctor, a close friend of my parents, who had built it himself with sturdy Russian lumber. There were four bedrooms, a living-dining room, a small kitchen, and a bathroom. The outside walls were painted a light green, and twelve stone steps led to the front door.

  The trip from Tehran to the cottage took about five hours by car. Heading west from Tehran, we continued on the flatlands until we reached the city of Ghazvin. Here, the road turned north toward the Alborz Mountains, which seemed like an imposing sheer wall, separating the deserts of central Iran from the Caspian Sea. Through tunnels, steep climbs and descents, and wild bends and curves, the road stubbornly made its way across the mountain range. It followed the valley of the White River to where thick forests covered the hills and the wind carried the fragrance of rice fields.

  A see-through metal fence, which was painted sky blue and was even taller than my brother, surrounded our property. When we arrived, my father would stop our blue Oldsmobile at the gates, and I would step out and open them to let the car through. The long, unpaved driveway stretched away toward the cottage, disappearing behind maple, pine, poplar, and mulberry trees. Under my feet, multicolored pebbles poked through the dirt and sparkled in the sunlight that had managed to penetrate the thick canopy of leaves. The driveway led to an opening that seemed too bright for a moment. The white stone st
airway leading to the house suddenly appeared.

  The building always greeted us with a familiar damp scent that had saturated the stale air during the months of our absence. A dark green carpet covered the floors. Before entering the house, my mother made us take off our shoes and clean our feet, so we wouldn’t bring in any sand. My parents had furnished the small living room with a cast-iron patio set, which they had bought from a moving sale; it was painted white and had velvety purple cushions and a glass-top table. The bedrooms were very simple with plain beds and old wooden dressers, and the curtains hanging in the windows were made of bright floral fabrics. At night when I went to bed, I usually left the three windows of my room open to welcome the cry of the roosters in the morning. When it rained, ducks quacked and played in puddles, and the scent of wild lemon trees dripped from their thick leaves.

  There was a special place on the property where, as my grandmother had taught me, I said the Our Father every morning. From a distance, it resembled a big moss-covered rock, but as you approached, you could see that it was made of many small stones. It was about four feet high and six feet wide, and a thick, rusty metal bar reached out of one of its corners. It belonged to ancient times when the sea covered most of the land. Once useful as a place where fishermen tied their boats, it looked strange and out of place when I discovered it in a forgotten corner of the property. I loved to stand on it, open my arms to the gentle breeze, close my eyes, and imagine the sea surrounding me, its glassy surface moving and living, transforming the sunlight into a golden liquid that glided toward the shore where sand hills were like blisters on the hot skin of the earth. I came to call this strange monument the Prayer Rock.

  I would usually wake at sunrise and wander outside. A river of mist would float between the trees, rise over the tall grass, and cover my legs. When I reached the Prayer Rock it seemed as though the sun had breathed into the fog, making it pink with light. The top surface of the rock was an island resting on a glowing sea. I would lie down on the rock and let the sun cover my skin, making me feel weightless as if I were made of mist and light.