Prisoner of Tehran: A Memoir (No Series)

by Nemat, Marina

“They were showing a documentary about the September 8 demonstration. Soldiers were throwing bodies onto a truck. I think one of them was Arash.” There, I had said it.

  Silence, awful silence.

  “Are you sure?”

  “No, how can I be sure? It was a split second, but how can we find out?”

  Aram suggested that we should go to the television station the next day after school. I wanted to go in the morning, but he said if we skipped school, our parents would get worried, and he didn’t want to say anything to his parents until we were sure I was right.

  The next day, we took the bus to the television station, and neither one of us said a word on the way. We first went to a receptionist, a middle-aged woman, and explained our situation. She was very sympathetic and told us she had lost a cousin at the September 8 demonstration. After making a few phone calls, she led us to a bearded young man in a small office. He wore thick glasses and never looked straight at me as we talked but nodded constantly. He took us to a large room filled with different kinds of equipment where we told our story to a man in his late forties named Agha-yeh Rezaii, who promised us to find the tape. And he did.

  Aram and I both stared at the screen, and there it was. We asked Agha-yeh Rezaii to freeze the frame. There was no doubt that it was Arash. His eyes were closed and his mouth was slightly open. His white T-shirt was covered in blood.

  I felt like a rock had crushed my chest. I wished I could have been with him when he had died, when he was lonely and scared.

  We couldn’t take our eyes off the screen for a long time. I finally looked at Aram. His eyes were blank and absent, as he, like me, tried to understand the devastating, lonely gap that death had left behind, the terrible falling from the known into the unknown and the terrifying wait to hit the solid ground and shatter into small, insignificant pieces. I touched his hand. He turned his head and looked at me. I embraced him. Agha-yeh Rezaii was crying with us.

  “I have to call my parents. They have to know right away,” Aram said.

  They were both there within the hour, devastated and broken. After eight months of suffering, we had to face the reality of his death. They thanked me for finding him. Yes, they thanked me. My brain had shut down. I couldn’t think. They wanted to drive me home, but I refused. I wanted to be alone.

  I got on the bus, found a quiet seat in a corner, and prayed. Was there anything else to do? I was going to say the Hail Mary over and over again. I was going to say it until it was enough, until I could make up for the way he had died, for not being with him at that moment. But was it ever going to be enough? The sorrow that had invaded my soul was growing rapidly without any sense of forgiveness. I had to accept it and let it swell, overflow, and go wherever it needed to go or it was going to destroy my soul and turn it into nothingness.

  At our front door, with my shaking hands, I struggled to put my key in the keyhole, but it wouldn’t go in. I rang the doorbell. No answer. The thick, hot air mixed with the sound of traffic and weighed down on me. I took a deep breath and tried my key again. The door opened. I closed it behind me and leaned against it. The air in the hallway was dark, cool, and silent. Feeling exhausted, I took heavy steps toward the stairs and began climbing but collapsed after the first flight. For some time, the coolness of the stone against my skin was all I was aware of. Then, I heard a voice calling my name. Something warm touched my face. I looked up. My mother’s eyes were staring at me, and she began to shake me.

  “Marina, get up!”

  She pulled on my arms, and I finally managed to stand on my feet, leaning against her. She led me to my room. She was talking to me, but I couldn’t understand her. Her words were like fog, like smoke rising in the air, disappearing in the sunlight that crept into my room through the window. She helped me sit down on my bed. I needed to understand what had happened. I needed to understand why Arash had died. I stared out the window into the blue sky.

  When I finally became aware of my surroundings, my mother was standing with a plate of my favorite dish—beef and celery stew and rice—in her hands. It had turned dark outside, and the light in my bedroom had been turned on. I glanced at my watch. It was past nine o’clock. Two hours had passed, and I was still sitting on my bed. I had somehow slipped through time as if my sorrow had cut me out of the world, like scissors snipping a simple shape out of a piece of paper.

  “He’s dead,” I said out loud, hoping that saying it would help me understand why it had happened.

  “Who?”

  My mother sat on the edge of my bed.

  “Arash.”

  She looked away from me.

  “He was killed during the September 8 demonstration. He was shot. He’s dead.”

  “This is terrible.” She sighed, shaking her head. “I know you liked him. It’s hard, very hard, but you’ll get over it. You’ll feel better tomorrow. I’ll make you a cup of tea.”

  She left the room. Every once in a while, my mother gave me brief moments of affection. But they never lingered, flashing brightly like shooting stars and disappearing into darkness.

  I fell asleep after a cup of chamomile tea but woke in the middle of the night with my chest burning. I had been dreaming of Arash. I ran to my dresser, grabbed my angel figurine, and crawled under my bed. Deep cries tore from my throat, and the harder I tried to silence myself, the worse they became. I pulled down my pillow from my bed and covered my face with it. I wanted the angel to come and tell me why people died. I needed him to come and tell me why God was taking the ones I loved. But, although I called him, he didn’t come.

  On September 6, 1979, Irena passed away from a heart attack. I had lost two loved ones before her, but I had never been to a funeral. Irena’s was my first. On September 9, I put on a black skirt and a black blouse and looked at my reflection in the mirror. I hated how I looked in black: thin, pale, and overwhelmed. I tried to stand strong and tall. I took off the black and put on my favorite brown skirt and a cream-colored blouse. Irena would have liked this outfit better.

  On my way to the bus stop, I went into the flower shop and bought a bouquet of pink roses. On the bus, I sat by the window and watched the streets go by. All color and happiness had been drained from the city. People only wore dark-colored clothes and looked down as they walked, as if to avoid each other as well as the scenery. Almost every wall was covered with harsh slogans that promoted hatred.

  The Russian Orthodox Church in Tehran had no priests, so the funeral mass was held at the Greek Church with the burial in the Russian Cemetery. I was grateful to be able to be there for Irena’s funeral. I had come to appreciate the gift of having a chance to say good-bye.

  After the funeral, I asked Aram to help me look for my grandma’s grave. I didn’t know exactly where it was. My parents had not taken me to her funeral, and they had never taken me to visit her grave. I wanted to find it and say a little prayer. The cemetery wasn’t too big and was encircled by clay brick walls. Graves were very close to one another, and weeds grew everywhere. There were many tombstones; finding my grandma’s was going to be difficult. We tiptoed between tombstones, and the fifth or sixth one we looked at was hers. It seemed as if she had found me. I had saved a pink rose for her.

  I looked around. Each tombstone was like the cover of a book that had been sealed forever. I went from one to the other and tried to read the names and the dates of birth and death. Some people had been old and some had been young when they died. I wanted to know them all. There were many stories never to be told. Did the angel know all these people? Had he been able to help them and listen to their hearts when they were dying? What were their last thoughts before they left their bodies? What were their greatest regrets? Was it possible not to have any regrets at the moment of death? What would I regret the most if I died at that very moment?

  Aram’s friends and family were beginning to leave the cemetery, and I noticed his parents looking in our direction and knew they were thinking of Arash. They deserved to know where he was buried�
�and he deserved to have a proper grave. I wanted to plant roses for him around the small piece of earth that held his body. Roses of every color. And I would never let weeds take over his tombstone. A year had passed since his death. Four seasons of loss and grief.

  On November 1, 1979, Ayatollah Khomeini asked the people of Iran to demonstrate against the United States, which he called the “Great Satan.” He said that the United States was to blame for all corruption on earth and that it was Islam’s greatest enemy together with Israel. Thousands of people took to the streets and surrounded the American embassy. I watched the news coverage of the demonstrations on television and wondered where this angry mob had come from. No one I knew had participated. A sea of people had engulfed the streets around the embassy grounds, which were surrounded by brick walls.

  On November 4, 1979, we heard that a group of university students who called themselves the Muslim Students Following the Line of the Imam had seized the embassy’s main building and had taken fifty-two Americans hostage. They wanted the United States to return the shah, who was in the States for cancer treatment, to stand trial in Iran. This sounded like absolute madness to me and to everyone I talked to. People knew that the shah was very ill. The hostage-taking didn’t make any sense. But nothing had really made sense since the revolution.

  Ten

  ON VISITATION DAY, everyone was excited, and for the first time since I was arrested, I heard the girls laugh out loud. The sisters called prisoners’ names alphabetically, usually fifteen names at a time, over the loudspeaker. The ones called put on their chadors and went to the office. Not knowing whether our parents were allowed to see us or not, Taraneh and I paced up and down the hallway. Taraneh had been arrested more than two months earlier but had not had any visitations yet. Her last name began with B, so her turn was to come before mine.

  “…Taraneh Behzadi…”

  We both jumped and screamed. She was so excited that I had to run and grab her chador and blindfold. She disappeared behind the barred doors, and I continued pacing. Most of the girls returning from their visitations were crying. Taraneh came back in about half an hour, composed and calm.

  “You saw your parents?” I asked her.

  “Yes.”

  “How were they?”

  “Okay, I guess. There’s a thick glass barrier in the visitation room, and there are no phones. You can’t talk. But we used some kind of a sign language.”

  I was finally called. In the office, we were told to put on our blindfolds. I followed the line of girls downstairs and outside. We walked to the visitation building and, before entering it, were told to take off our blindfolds. Armed guards stood in every corner. A thick glass barrier divided the room in half. There were men and women standing on the other side of it, a few of them crying, their hands on the glass, searching every face, trying to find their loved one. I soon saw my parents. They ran toward me and began to cry. My mother wore a black manteau, which came down to her ankles, and a very large black scarf covered her hair and shoulders. She must have bought the outfit for the sole purpose of coming to Evin. All the manteaus she had owned before I was arrested were shorter—about an inch below her knees—and her scarves were smaller.

  “Are you okay?” I managed to read my mother’s lips.

  I nodded, holding back my tears.

  She clenched her hands together, as if in prayer, and said something.

  “What?” I frowned, desperate to understand her every word.

  “Everyone is praying for you,” she said more slowly, exaggerating the movement of her lips.

  “Thank you.” I bowed slightly.

  “When will they let you come home?” she asked, but I pretended not to understand. I could never tell my parents I had a life sentence. This would kill them. They were terrified and devastated, but at least they had some hope that I might go home one day. I didn’t know what to tell them. I wanted to embrace my mother and never let go.

  “Sarah is okay,” I finally said after staring at them for a minute.

  “What?”

  I wrote “Sarah” on the glass with my finger, and my mother followed my finger with hers.

  “Sarah?” she asked.

  “Yes.”

  “She’s okay?”

  “Yes.”

  “Time is up!” a guard yelled.

  “Be brave, Marina!” my mother said.

  The prison was always very quiet after visitation days. Sitting in our lonely corners, we tried not to think of how our lives used to be before Evin, but it was hopeless, because memories were all we had. We missed our families and our lives, the way we once were. We had no future, only the past.

  The day after visitations, we received small packages of clothing from home. I opened mine. Shirts, pants, brand-new underwear, and a sweater. Everything in the package smelled like home, like hope. Taraneh was running her fingers over a faded red wool sweater and told me that it was her lucky sweater. “This will bring me luck,” she said and explained that her mother had made that sweater years earlier when she had just learned to knit. Taraneh and her sisters all wanted it. When her mother decided to give it to Taraneh, her sisters were upset, but her mother explained to them that she had to give it to one of them and that it was fair to give it to the youngest. She had promised to make each of Taraneh’s three sisters a sweater exactly like it, but she had not kept her promise. Taraneh believed that whenever she wore that sweater, good things happened to her, and she wondered if it still had its magic.

  “Taraneh, we’ll go home one day,” I said.

  “I know.”

  “We’ll do all the things we love to do.”

  “We’ll go for long walks, right?”

  “Yeah, and we’ll go to my cottage.”

  “We’ll go shopping.”

  “We’ll cook, bake, and eat everything!”

  We laughed.

  That night I couldn’t sleep. I thought about how Ali had managed to reduce my sentence, and maybe, he could do the same thing for Taraneh; maybe he could help Sarah as well. But he had told me that he was going away, and the truth was that I didn’t want to face him ever again. He terrified me. In a way, it was easier for me to deal with Hamehd, because with Hamehd, I knew what to expect. With Ali, things were different. He had never hurt me—but yet, I felt a raw, deep fear when he was close to me. I thought of the night of the executions. I had avoided thinking about it. My brain refused to recall the terrifying images. But I knew they were there, untouched and clear. And when Ali took me to the cell, I remembered the look in his eyes. The longing. It made me feel as if I were trapped in the bottom of a frozen ocean. But for Taraneh’s sake, I had to talk to him.

  I went to the office in the morning and knocked on the door. Sister Maryam sat behind her desk, reading something. She looked at me with questioning eyes.

  “Is there any way for me to see Brother Ali?” I asked.

  Her eyes dug into mine. “Why do you want to see him?”

  I explained how he had saved my life and that now I wanted to ask him to save a friend of mine.

  “Who?” Sister Maryam asked.

  I hesitated.

  “Taraneh?”

  “Yes.”

  “Brother Ali isn’t here. He’s at the front, fighting the Iraqis.” Iran had been in war with Iraq since September 1980.

  “When is he coming back?”

  “Only God knows. But even if he was here, he couldn’t do anything. You got very lucky. When an Islamic court condemns someone to death, the only thing that can save that person is Imam’s pardon. But the imam doesn’t usually interfere with these things. He trusts the courts and their decisions. The only person who might be able to do something for her is her own interrogator.”

  “Is there anything we can do for her?”

  “Pray.”

  I tried not to think of happiness, of the way things used to be before the revolution, before terrible things happened, as if recalling the bright memories would make them fade l
ike old pictures that are handled too many times. But sometimes, in the middle of the night, I would breathe in the fragrance of wild lemon trees and hear the rustling of their thick leaves in the clean, salty sea breeze. I would feel the warm waves of the Caspian swirling around my feet and the sticky, wet sand covering my toes. In my dreams, I would lie down on my bed at the cottage, watching the full moon rise. Then, I would step on the floor, but it wouldn’t creak, I would walk around, but there would be nobody there, and I would try to call Arash, but no sound would come from my throat.

  I thought of Andre all the time. Before my arrest, my love for him had been young and fragile. I was afraid to give in to my love for him because I was afraid of losing him—and I didn’t want to betray Arash. Now, in the face of my own mortality, I knew I was in love with Andre. There was nothing I wished for more in the world than to be with him. But did he love me? I believed he did. He was my hope. I had to survive for him. He was the one I wanted to go back to.

  One night in mid-March, Sheida went into labor and was taken to the prison hospital. The next day, she returned with a beautiful, healthy baby boy, whom she had named Kaveh, her husband’s name. We all gathered around her and the baby. We were proud to have a mother in our room and called her Mother Sheida from then on. The baby was spoiled very soon; he had many eager aunts to look after him. And although it never completely went away, the dark shadow of worry on Sheida’s face lightened a little; the baby gave hope not only to his mother, but to everyone around him.

  When Kaveh was two or three weeks old, about seventy prisoners from 246 were transferred to Ghezel Hessar, a prison in the city of Karaj, about fifteen miles from Tehran. Most of the girls said the living conditions in Ghezel Hessar were slightly better than Evin, so the ones leaving were rather happy. I was glad that none of my close friends had been called. After the transfer, the rooms were a little less crowded, but this didn’t last long. Every day, a few new girls joined us, and before long, sleeping spots were tighter than ever before.