Stranger No More

by Annahita Parsan

  When the bag was finally removed I was expecting metal bars and concrete walls, but instead I saw a room lined with sheets of wood. It was like an oversized box, a scaled-up doll’s house with one light and one table with two chairs on either side of it. Even the door was strange; there was just a faint crack of a door-shaped outline and no handle anywhere to be seen.

  Roksana didn’t care about any of it. Ever since we had come down from the mountains she had only ever wanted to be in my arms. She would sleep soundly for hours with her head pushed up against the crook of my elbow, her legs across my waist.

  We were in the strange wooden room alone, and as the time passed—maybe one hour, maybe two—the feelings of panic and fear eased a little. But the moment I heard the door open behind me, our captors returned in full.

  The man who stood in the doorway was unlike any of the officers, guards, or soldiers I had met since arriving in Turkey. He wore no uniform, yet it was obvious he was in charge as he turned back, whispered something to a young officer behind him, and strolled into the room. He sat opposite me, spread his hands on the table between us, and looked me up and down.

  Every other officer I had spoken to so far had almost seemed bored by Roksana and me, as if we were of no consequence or threat. But the man now opposite didn’t just look at me, he studied me. I wanted to pull my chador over both Roksana and me and hide.

  He waited the longest time before speaking. His voice was low and I couldn’t place the accent, but his Farsi was perfect.

  “You’re a mystery,” he said, smiling. “But we’ll work that out eventually. All you need to know now is that my name is Beautiful Hands.” He smirked, and my eyes followed his down. I’d not looked at his hands the whole time he’d been sitting there, but as I did I saw that the name was ironic. From the edge of his shirt to the tips of his fingers, his skin was mottled brown and white, like a diseased plant.

  I looked up. He was staring at me. No smiles this time. Just a look that went deep inside me.

  “How many guns does Iran have?”

  “I’m sorry?”

  Slower this time, like he was talking to a child. “How. Many. Guns. Does. Iran. Have?”

  “I don’t know,” I said, shrugging.

  He tapped his fingers a little. “How many army bases?”

  “I don’t know.”

  More tapping. “Okay, then. Who are the key people right now?”

  “I don’t know. I’m sorry, but I don’t know anything about this.”

  He held the silence for a moment, then burst out laughing. “I don’t know, I don’t know, I don’t know!” he chanted, mocking my voice and pulling strange faces. The laughter soon snapped shut, and the silence returned. He pushed his chair back, stood up, and put his hands in his pockets. “You’ll have to do better than that.”

  I didn’t see him again that night, but Roksana and I were not alone in the room. As soon as Beautiful Hands left, an officer came in and stood by the door. He said nothing at all, but whenever I felt sleep take hold of me, he would kick my chair or prod my shoulder with the stock of his rifle.

  When I asked to go to the bathroom, I was bagged again and led out, the officer’s hand gripping tight the top of my arm. I stayed in the cubicle as long as I could, leaning against the wall, my body giving into sleep like a stone plunging to the bottom of a deep pool. When the shouting and knocking on the door woke me up, I’d never felt so nauseated and dizzy.

  There was just enough light to know that it was daytime when they bagged me again and pushed me into the car. I could not tell whether it was the same guard sitting beside me, but on the drive back to the place they called the Hotel, the hands returned. Though I was desperately tired, the fear kept me awake.

  Back in our room with the single bed and the bloody fingernails, I put a blanket on the floor and held Roksana to my chest. The floor was cold and hard, but it was better than lying on the filthy mattress or the broken bed frame. Asghar, Roksana, and I spent the rest of the day asleep.

  The door opened once to bring us each a tray of rice and beans, and again whenever we banged on it asking to be taken to the bathroom. Apart from this, we were left alone, living like nocturnal creatures. I tried to forget about the previous night, but as the faint light from the windows grew fainter still, I started to hope desperately that we would be left alone.

  Only when it was dark did the two guards return with their rifles and black sacks. They took us down to the waiting jeep. When I felt my shoulders pushed back and my hips squashed against the door, I knew that every part of the previous night’s events were about to repeat.

  Beautiful Hands was the same as the night before, only this time there were far more questions. How many military bases were there on the borders between Turkey and Iran? What was the size of the army? Where were the main training sites? How many troops were in Azerbaijan? I didn’t know the answers to any of his questions, and again he ridiculed me. Maybe he thought I would break if he humiliated me enough, but after two years of life with Asghar, I was used to it.

  What frightened me was the knowledge that there were terrible things happening behind other closed doors nearby. The bloody fingernails at the Hotel told me what that room had been used for in the past, but as I sat in the wooden room I often heard men crying out in agony, screaming in terror before being swallowed in silence.

  As the days passed and the nighttime questioning continued, I began to grow more and more worried that it would be my turn soon. If they believed I really did know something about Iran’s military, how much longer would their patience last? When would they finally decide that the only way to get the truth out of me would be through violence?

  That sense of worry turned into outright panic the day I was left alone in the bathroom at the Hotel. It was early one morning, and I had left Roksana with Asghar as I went to collect water and wash her diaper. The officer who had escorted me looked tired and bored, and as the bathroom door closed behind me I heard his footsteps drift down the hall.

  I had only ever used the one cubicle that was unlocked, and I hadn’t given the other two much thought. But as I washed my hands that morning I heard a voice calling out. “Khahar!” it said quietly in my own language. “Sister!”

  I edged over. “Who are you?”

  “A boy. I’m twelve years old and I—”

  The bathroom door crashed open behind me. “Why you talking?” the soldier yelled at me. I tried to back away, to say that it was a mistake. He blocked my way out, then seemed to think for a moment.

  “You want to look inside?” he sneered. “Okay, then.”

  He pulled out a thick bunch of keys and unlocked the cubicle door. As soon as the lock clicked the door sprung open toward us. Two bodies—one a child’s, another a man’s—spilled out and lay in a pile at our feet. I could not tell whether both were alive at first, but as the guard started to hit them with his rifle they both groaned and flinched away from the blows.

  The cubicle had been divided down the middle by a large sheet of wood. The spaces on either side were so small that no one could have lay or even sat down inside them.

  After a few more hits the guard lifted each back up to their feet and forced them back inside. They stood like broken marionettes as he swung the door shut and locked it.

  “You don’t talk again like that,” he said. “Ever.”

  Day after day we stayed in the room with the bloody fingernails on the fourth floor. Every night and every day followed the same routine of blindfolds and jeep rides, endless questions, and the torment of being made to stay awake. In the moments when I was able to sleep my dreams were dominated by the fear of Beautiful Hands tearing Roksana from my arms and locking me inside the third cubicle.

  One night, as the second week ended, Beautiful Hands told me he had a surprise in store. “You’re not going back to the Hotel this morning.”

  I knew better than to give him the satisfaction of asking where we were going, but I couldn’t resist.
r />   “Ah!” he said, a broad grin stuck on his face. “That would be telling, wouldn’t it?”

  Beneath my hood I could smell the damp air, hear the muffled shouts and cries in the distance. I heard Asghar sit next to me, and he passed me Roksana. I feared that this was the moment things would get even worse.

  When the blindfold came off we were sitting in a corridor. The walls were darker than any of the others I’d seen, and the lights lower. I couldn’t imagine anything good could happen in such a place.

  A guard arrived, escorting someone else whose face was hidden behind a blindfold. The guard forced him to sit, then pulled off the bag.

  “Firouz?” Asghar and I said in surprise.

  It was him, and once the guard left us we were able to talk in whispers for a while. I hadn’t seen him since the mountains. He looked ill and tired.

  By instinct we all fell silent when we heard the guard return. He took Roksana from me and passed her back to Asghar. Then he pulled me up by the arms and led me to a metal door. I was relieved to see that there was a standard-sized interview room beyond it—not a cupboard in which I would be forced to stand.

  I sat on a chair and waited.

  When Beautiful Hands came in and started talking he seemed almost bored. He asked the strangest questions, like what my name was, where I was from, what Asghar’s name was. Within ten minutes he knocked on the door and had me taken out to another identical room. Someone brought Roksana to me, then left and locked me in.

  It took an hour or maybe more until the door opened again. When it did the guard pulled me out and led me back to where Asghar and Firouz we sitting. Both of their faces were swollen messes of blood and bruising. Firouz refused to look at me. Asghar’s stare was full of the same menace that I remembered from back in Isfahan. In the month since we had left, he had not laid a finger on me. Not that he had been kind or loving, but the violence had disappeared. For good? That’s what I hoped. But as he now glared at me, I knew I had been naive to wish such a thing.

  “I will deal with you,” he said.

  Back at the Hotel, the violence returned. It was not the worst beating Asghar had ever given me, but the pain it inflicted stung deep inside. His fists seemed to have a new weight to them. My bones felt brittle, and my skin felt like a thin layer of ice.

  It was only when he had finished that he spoke.

  “Why did you tell him everything?”

  “To Beautiful Hands? I didn’t say anything to him at all. All he did was ask me my name and things like that.”

  Another slap sent a fresh wave of pain into my cheek. “You’re lying, you whore. He told me that you’d told him everything.”

  “I didn’t,” I begged. “He lied.”

  Asghar paused. I knew he believed me. But it didn’t stop him grabbing me by the hair and hitting me once more.

  I lay on the bunk, hiding deep in the darkness. I was listening to the sound of my husband getting drunk with the guard in the room above our cell. I took the smallest sips of breath that I could. I had to be able to hear everything that was going on.

  Roksana was asleep on my chest. There was no chance of sleep for me. I could feel my heart in my throat and the adrenaline in my guts. I needed to be alert to every sound that dropped down from above. Every clink of every bottle, every drunken shout of laughter, every set of footsteps as they slumped across the boards above me. Soon enough, Asghar would pass out. That’s when the guard would come down to the basement and try to rape me.

  It was not the first time, and I guessed it would not be the last.

  Two weeks had passed since Beautiful Hands had beaten Asghar and Firouz. I heard that Firouz had been sent back to Iran, but when Asghar and I returned to the Hotel that afternoon—and after he had given me my share of the beatings—we had been taken from the fourth floor and shown to a new cell in the basement.

  I was nervous when the guards first took us down the stone steps. It looked like a fairy-tale dungeon, with its dark walls, weak lights, and rusted bars that stood floor to ceiling across the front of each of five cells, each one full of men. By the look of them, nearly all of the inmates were from Iran, Pakistan, or Afghanistan.

  I could feel them staring as I walked. I tried not to look, but it was impossible not to notice the way some rubbed their eyes and gazed over at Roksana and me. I hated it. Anywhere would be better than this. Even a room with bloodied fingernails and broken sticks on the floor.

  I tried to calm myself, looking for something that would hold back the fear. At least there was more than one bunk. At least there were mattresses. At least the other three men in our cell looked old and weak.

  As soon as they saw me they started to complain. They told the guards it was humiliating to have to share with a woman. The guards just shrugged, pulled them out, and bundled them into one of the other cells.

  I looked closer at the mattresses. Each of them stained with blood, urine, and feces. The light was dim, but bright enough to reveal a floor so filthy that I sat quickly on a mattress and decided there and then never to let Roksana get down.

  Roksana was already crying. “Make the baby shut up,” said the guard in the cell with us. I held her close and bounced her, but I knew the problem. She was hungry, and I had nothing to feed her, not my own milk or any formula. The best I could do was try to muffle her cries in my chador.

  Our door slammed shut, the lock closed, and the guard retreated up the stairs.

  Click.

  There was darkness.

  Nothing but darkness.

  A darkness so deep and complete that I wondered for a moment if I hadn’t lost all power of sight.

  I could see nothing at all. Not the bars at the end of my bed, not the hands, head, or anything else of Roksana that I held in front of my face.

  Nothing.

  I lay there, fearing that every creak and movement I heard was a rat coming to bite Roksana or Asghar come to hit me. I wanted to curl up tight and hide beneath a blanket, but I could already feel the lice and the fleas start to bite. I wanted to shout and beg to leave, but when the light was extinguished, so was my voice. The darkness was its own kind of torture—worse than anything Beautiful Hands could dream up.

  When I finally calmed myself and gained a little courage, I removed my chador and tied it across the bars of the cell in the hope of maintaining some privacy whenever the lights were turned on again. In time, they were, and in came a guard I had never seen before. He was older than any of the others, with smeared glasses and rough skin. He pushed the chador aside and stood, staring at me for the longest time. His eyes made me long for the dark again.

  Eventually, he walked back out and opened all the cells, letting the men stretch their legs. I followed them up the stairs to the first floor and into a dining room I had never seen before. The windows were painted over like they had been up on the fourth floor, but I could tell it was light outside, barely.

  I joined a line to collect my food. There were hundreds of people, and from what I could see, every single one of them was a man. What little talking there was among them stopped as I shuffled forward. I didn’t need to look up to know that many were looking at me.

  The hush did not last long. As I followed Asghar to get my food the whole room erupted with angry shouts. I was not welcome. As a woman, my presence was an offense.

  I looked up when I felt someone standing over me. He had a full beard and a loud voice. Staring at Asghar, he began to wave his arms at me. “She cannot eat with us,” he said. “It is not acceptable for a woman to be here like this.”

  There were murmurs of agreement. Asghar glanced at me. “Let’s go,” he said, quietly.

  Back in the cell with Asghar, I examined the food we had managed to gather: ten beans, just like there had been every other meal, a corner of flat bread, and a ladle of yogurt. Nothing for Roksana.

  From that moment on, Roksana and I were confined to our cell. Asghar was allowed to go upstairs to collect our food and bring it back to th
e cell to eat with me. The only time I left the basement was when the guard allowed me to visit the bathroom. For the rest of the time, Roksana and I lay on our bunk, pinned down by the darkness.

  The guards only turned the lights on when the men were taken to the dining hall or while someone was escorted to the bathroom. Gradually I grew accustomed to living in total darkness for twenty-two hours a day.

  But I never fully lost the fear. Especially once the older guard started inviting Asghar up to the cell above ours to get drunk.

  It happened for the first time a few days after we arrived in the basement. The men had just returned from eating, and I was picking my way through the ten beans, bread, and yogurt when the guard unlocked our cell, swung the door open, and stood, arms crossed, looking at Asghar.

  “You look like you could enjoy a drink, friend,” he said. “I have some raki upstairs if you’d like some.”

  Asghar swung his feet down from the bunk, puffed his chest, and followed him out. He didn’t see the look the guard gave me as he pulled the door shut behind him and locked me back in.

  As soon as I heard Asghar laughing upstairs I knew something was wrong. The guard had left the lights on, and Roksana was asleep. I pulled hard on the legs of the third bunk and managed to swing it out into the room. After a lot more pushing, pulling, and scraping of metal on concrete, I was able to haul it across the door, barricading the entrance. I tried to ignore the lifeless stares of the other inmates. As the sound of heavy footsteps thudded down from upstairs, I tied my chador up as a screen over my bunk, pulled Roksana close, and tried to hide. I pushed myself up against the wall, trying to stay out of sight. My heart was raging, and I could feel myself trembling against Roksana. I wished for the darkness to return so that I might become invisible again.

  The key turned in the lock. I heard the sound of the bars pushing against the metal bed frame. Heard the guard breathing heavily from the effort as he pushed again and again. I buried my face in Roksana and begged silently for him to go away.