by Marina Nemat
When I was released after two years, two months, and twelve days, my parents behaved as if I had been away on an extended holiday. The first night I was home, we all sat around the dinner table, and I listened with astonishment as my parents talked about the weather. I almost felt locked out on the balcony again. It took me a few days to understand their behaviour. I finally decided that their silence was their way of protecting themselves as well as me; they didn’t want to know about the pain and horror of my time in prison, so they pretended it never happened, hoping we would all forget it. But I did not forget anything. I pushed my memories into a dark corner of my mind, where they would remain dormant for many years. I became a prisoner of silence.
After my release in 1984, for about six years the government of Iran refused to give me a passport. Finally, they agreed to let me leave the country, but only if I guaranteed my return and put down five hundred thousand tomans—about thirty-five hundred U.S. dollars—as a deposit. If I returned within a year, the money would be refunded. If not, it would go to the government. At the time, Andre’s salary was seven thousand tomans a month—about sixty U.S. dollars. We didn’t have enough money, and it took us a while to gather it. Once we did, the government let us go. However, since I did not return to Iran after the year was up, there was the chance the Revolutionary Guard would decide to arrest my parents to punish me. After all that had happened in Iran, I couldn’t rest until my mother and father were safely in Canada. So, shortly after our arrival in Toronto in August 1991, I asked my brother, Alik, to sponsor my parents. He had immigrated to Canada in 1979. Andre and I would have sponsored my parents ourselves, but legally, we couldn’t until we were Canadian citizens—a process we knew would take more than three years.
My mother passed away from cancer in March 2000, before I was able to tell her my secrets. But the past had come back to life and there was no escaping it. It had built up like a volcano for sixteen years and an eruption was imminent. When members of the Revolutionary Guard had come to my house to arrest me and pointed guns at my face, I had felt nothing. It was as if I had left my body and was watching a movie. At that terrible moment, I entered a never-ending state of shock. Without realizing it, I’d lost the ability to feel anything deeply. Fear, love, anger, and hatred brushed my skin but never penetrated my flesh. This mechanism became my key to survival in a prison where ninety per cent of the thousands of prisoners were teenagers who had been dragged out of their warm beds and lashed on the soles of their feet until they were so badly swollen that they could not walk. The crimes of these children ranged from having read Western novels or works of Marx and Lenin or publications of illegal political groups, to having dressed the wrong way or having spoken against the values of the Islamic Revolution. Some had participated in protest rallies against the regime and some had distributed pamphlets of “anti-revolutionary” political groups. Evin was like high school in hell.
I HAD MY FIRST psychotic episode right after my mother’s funeral in mid-March 2000.
Bundled up in our parkas, hats, and gloves, Andre, my father, my seven- and twelve-year-old sons, Thomas and Michael, and I got into our gold Toyota Camry. Even the children were silent, somehow aware that all had to remain unsaid. Silence had become a member of my family; like a weed, it had crawled into all the spaces between us, its sap a thick, stubborn emulsion of secrets, pain, and anger. The car moved along grey streets under a grey sky. Spring still felt a world away, and people walked briskly with their backs hunched against the wind. I wondered if my mother was watching us, if God had told her about what happened to me in Evin and if she finally understood how lonely I had been. Would she embrace me now and murmur soothing words to take away some of my sadness?
A wave of guilt washed over me. How terribly selfish of me to think of myself on the day of her funeral.
Except, she was gone, and I still had to deal with this world. Should I ask God to forgive her? Had I forgiven her? Forgiven her for what? For a lonely and often terrifying childhood, for one thing. She sometimes threatened to leave me forever if I misbehaved. A few times she even pretended to go, grabbing her purse and rushing angrily down the stairs as I hung on to her skirt or her legs and begged her to stay. She never truly left, but every time she went to the grocery store or to run an errand, I sat by the window and cried until she returned, worried that I would never see her again. But I had forgiven her for that many years ago, I guess when I turned thirteen. By then, I had grown into an independent child who had come to understand that she had to rely on herself for survival. I had finally lost my fear of losing my mother. Did I blame her for not asking me about what had happened in Evin? No, I didn’t exactly blame her, but the sadness and loneliness of carrying the burden of the past made me feel, in a way, that I was still in prison. All I wanted was for her to understand how I felt and know the truth. I didn’t want her to feel sorry for me. I didn’t feel sorry for myself. It would simply have comforted me to know that she knew.
We stopped at the Loblaws at Yonge Street and Steeles Avenue to buy flowers. Pink and white gladiola. My mother’s favourite colour was blue, but the store didn’t have any blue flowers. A few days before she died, during one of her rare moments of lucidity, she asked me to make sure that she would be buried in the purple dress she had worn to my wedding.
“I ask you because your father is too emotional right now, but you’re sensible and I know I can count on you,” she said to me.
Sensible?
I had always believed that if she had to find one adjective to describe me, it would be stupid. Cancer had changed my mother, as if, like her body, her soul had been affected. But the cancer wasn’t the only thing devastating her; it was also the morphine.
One day she awoke from her medicated sleep and looked around like a terrified, wounded animal.
“What is it, Maman?” I asked, jumping out of my chair, which was next to her bed.
“They’re coming to get me … they’re here … look, over there!” she said, pointing into the empty space in front of the door and then the window. But nobody was there.
She grabbed my hand with her cold bony fingers. Her skin was dry like desert sand. I remembered when she was young and healthy and beautiful, when her hands, warm and soft, always smelled of roses.
“Marina, tell me you can see them! Look! There!”
“Who do you see, Maman? If you tell me what they look like, I might be able to make them go away.”
When I was six, Bahboo had said the same thing to me to get me to talk about my nightmares, which used to make me shiver and cry without saying a word—and, very quietly, I whispered everything in Bahboo’s ear. If I spoke any louder, they might hear and punish me. I told Bahboo about the shadows walking around my room. I believed that I saw them when I awoke in the middle of the night. With their bodies covered in long black cloaks, they were tall and darker than the darkness surrounding us. They walked in a circle in a slow, steady pace. I couldn’t see their faces because they always bowed their heads. I knew that they were chanting, but it was as if their voices were made of darkness. I could almost see their song but couldn’t hear it; clearly, it was a well-protected secret that wasn’t made for my ears. After I told Bahboo about them, she looked at me thoughtfully, and then her amber eyes inspected my room. It was daytime and there were no dark shadows.
“Monks,” she said reassuringly, and smiled.
“Monks? Who are they? Are they bad? Will they hurt me? They’re scary!”
“Have you ever heard what they say?”
“No.”
“Have they ever hurt you?”
“No. They just walk around.”
“They will never hurt you.”
“You sure?”
“Yes.”
“But how do you know? Do they walk around your room, too?”
“No, but I’ve had my own nightmares.”
“But I see them, Bahboo. They’re not a nightmare! They’re real!”
“I know. I know. I
’ve had real nightmares, too. Trust me. Bahboo knows. What you have told me sounds exactly like monks. They’re good. They walk around and pray. Maybe they pray for you.”
“Really?”
“Who else can they be? If the Devil wanted to hurt you, do you think he would send such a useless bunch to walk around your room and do nothing? What’s the point of that?”
She was right. The Devil probably had very scary monsters. Much scarier than my monks. It felt good to know their name; “monk” was much better than “dark shadow.”
“So … what should I do?” I asked.
“You should acknowledge them.”
“How?”
“Talk to them.”
“No way!”
“Why not?”
“They’re scary!”
“Scary? You told me they never hurt you.”
“Well … I don’t know … What should I say?”
“How about a Hail Mary?”
“Okay … I’ll try.”
“You can’t run away from shadows and nightmares, Marina. You have to face them.”
I swallowed.
It took me a few nights, but I did whisper a Hail Mary to the shadows. My every word was a little more than a breath that crawled reluctantly out of my mouth through my trembling lips and helplessly floated into the night, disappearing in the black nightmare that lived in my room. The shadows stopped moving for a moment but soon resumed at the same pace as before. However, I heard something. Surprisingly strong, my own voice echoed back to me: “‘Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee. Blessed are thou amongst women and blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus. Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our death.’” As the prayer touched my face, my fear began to melt away. “Good night,” I said to the monks, then turned around and soon fell asleep. I was not afraid anymore. At least, not as much as before. Bahboo was right. They were just silly monks who had nothing better to do than walk around my room.
Now my mother was seeing shadows. We had switched positions: I was the adult and she was the child.
“Maman, if you tell me what you see, I’ll be able to help you,” I said.
“They’re coming for me. They want to take me away and lock me up. They will suck my blood.”
“Who?”
“Pasdarah.”
“Maman, there are no Revolutionary Guard here. What you see is from the past. We’re in Canada. It’s safe here.”
“But they’re here, Marina, and they want to take me this time!”
“I won’t let them take you, Maman.”
“But they’re here for me. I know it!”
“No, Maman. They’re here for me, and I will tell them that they have already had me, and they will go away.”
“Yes, you do that,” my mother said exhaustedly.
“Go away!” I said sharply. “You’ve already had me. Leave us alone!”
My mother was suddenly still. Was she breathing? I put my hand on her chest. Her rib cage rose slightly under my fingers. She was alive.
This was the closest my mother and I ever came to talking about Evin.
Soon after this hallucination, she didn’t recognize any of us. She was awake but dead. Her eyes were not the ones I had known all my life. They had turned into glass. Cold, fragile, and without nightmares or dreams. Her soul had left her body.
At the funeral home my children and I warmed ourselves by the fireplace, but at that moment, all the fires of hell could not have stopped me from shivering. I reluctantly took off my coat. I wasn’t wearing black garments but rather a beige sweater and a brown skirt, the nicest clothes I owned. When dressing to come to the funeral home, I realized that I didn’t own any black outfits. “What kind of a woman never wears black?” I asked myself. After the success of the revolution in Iran, they made women wear only dark colours. Was this why I hated black and avoided it, and was this why I had painted my living room an “interesting” shade of yellow, as Andre put it politely? Why was I thinking these stupid thoughts at my mother’s funeral?
We had to climb a flight of stairs to get to the visiting room. My feet were already hurting in my high heels. Wearing pants and boots would have been so much more sensible. My father walked ahead of me. He was seventy-nine years old, but his posture was still perfect; he still had a dancer’s elegance. His every movement was light, as if gravity didn’t apply to him. As he extended his hand for people to shake, I could almost hear the waltzes and tangos of his dance studio in the background. How had he felt when the Islamic Republic of Iran took music away from him? What does a nation become without colour, music, poetry, and literature? What do we become when beauty turns into a crime?
People were nodding, smiling, and looking sad. I knew a few of them, but most of them were Alik’s friends I had never met. I felt guilty standing there, greeting strangers and accepting their condolences. They didn’t know I was a terrible daughter who went to prison for two years at the age of sixteen and made her parents suffer. Were they wondering why I had not worn black? I saw a few of my own friends and sighed with relief. Even if they didn’t know the details, they knew I had been in prison, and still they had chosen to come to the funeral.
My mother’s flower-covered casket sat on the other side of the room. I knew that she was wearing her purple dress. She had looked great in it at my wedding. She never cried that day at the church the way some mothers do when their daughters get married. She had been angry with me for marrying Andre; she couldn’t understand why I was doing something so illogical. However, she tearlessly played the role of the proud, happy mother, and I was grateful for that. I myself hadn’t known why I was marrying Andre, but I was quite sure that I had to do it. It was as if I were starving and had to eat. Even though I returned to my church immediately after my release, the government of Iran still considered me a Muslim woman. Since a Muslim woman is not allowed to marry a Christian man, by returning to the church and marrying Andre, I would be automatically condemned to death. Did I want to die? Was this why I married Andre? Or was marrying him an act of defiance, showing the world that even though the Islamic Republic had tried to destroy me and almost succeeded, I was still me?
From the cemetery, with family and friends, we went to Alik’s house for lunch. Given the fourteen-year age gap between us, Alik and I had never been close. And we don’t look alike: he is six-foot-seven and thin, with clear white skin, deep amber eyes, and a large nose; I’m five feet, with dark hair and dark eyes. The caterers had prepared a Persian meal of basmati rice and chicken and beef kebabs, but I wasn’t hungry. People were eating and chatting. For dessert, there were cups of sholeh zard, a Persian rice pudding made with rosewater, saffron, and cinnamon. I took a pudding—I needed some sugar in my system—and sat next to my father.
The scent of cinnamon made me close my eyes and think of happiness. Was I happy with my life? I had survived Evin, married the man I loved—even if under strange circumstances—had two beautiful children, a nice house, and, altogether, a wonderful Canadian life. Was happiness supposed to be an intense emotion? When I thought of happiness, my memories carried me back to my childhood days by the Caspian Sea when I munched on cinnamon cookies on the beach, watching the sunset.
“Marina, your mother forgave you before she died,” my father suddenly announced.
“What?” I heard myself say.
“Yes, she forgave you.”
I stared at him and a strange feeling rushed from my stomach to my chest. It saturated my heart and lungs in what felt like a thick, chalky liquid, and for a moment I thought I would vomit. But I didn’t. Instead, to my own astonishment, I began to scream. I wasn’t saying anything; I was just screaming. I had not screamed while being tortured. Not because I was resisting, but because every lash that landed on the bare soles of my feet somehow drained every ounce of my energy. Under torture, I couldn’t breathe properly, as if I had forgotten how. The man who was beating me, Hamehd, thought my silence was a sign of
resistance and flogged me even harder. Why was I screaming now? I didn’t know, but I couldn’t stop. I expected to bleed from my eyes and nose and ears and my skin to rupture. Anger. An emotion I had not felt since I could remember.
My screams became so urgent I couldn’t catch my breath. I ran to find air.
Faces around me were a blur of colours and lines that blended and moved, but sometimes a face came into focus and all I could absorb from it was a sense of shock and fear. I landed in the front yard, still screaming. I needed someone to help me stop, but everyone was staring at me. I collapsed. A friend of mine who is a medical doctor bent over me. “You’re okay,” she said. “Everything is okay. Look at me and breathe.” I gazed into her familiar brown eyes. I trusted her, had always trusted her. Her husband had been Andre’s colleague in Iran, and she had been our family physician there. I concentrated on her voice.
I can’t remember how I got home, but in the days that followed no one phoned to see how I was doing. No one asked why I had behaved the way I had. I guessed they assumed that I was upset because of my mother’s death. Except, that kind of an outburst wasn’t like me at all. What I had done was not normal in any way. That was not grief. Why didn’t people ask me anything? Maybe they were doing the right thing. Maybe I had to continue doing what I had done for all those years and look ahead. I had a job, a family, a life, and I had to attend to them. So I tried to do just that. I kept on serving quarter-chicken dinners at the local Swiss Chalet where I worked, and I smiled at my customers and inquired if they wanted fries or salad with their meal. Then, every weekday after my lunch shift, I picked up my kids from school, went home, did laundry, and made dinner.
* Chador is a cloaklike garment worn by some Iranian women in public and is only one way in which a Muslim woman can follow the Islamic dress code known as hejab. A chador covers all of a woman’s body so that only her face remains visible.