After Tehran

by Marina Nemat

  That night I dreamed I was standing by a road in the middle of a desert. There was no one around. The road was a grey line on a sea of sand that covered the world. There were no trees, no plants, and no animals, and the sky was a dome of intense blue, as hostile as everything else. I was waiting for Andre to pick me up, but I didn’t know why I was in the desert or where I was supposed to go. Andre was late. After a while I began to feel frightened, thinking he had forgotten me. Then a black car appeared on the horizon, and I became even more frightened because I knew the driver was not Andre. I thought of running, but there was nowhere to go. The black car, a Mercedes, stopped right before me, and the front window on the driver’s side rolled down. Ali sat behind the wheel.

  “Waiting for someone?” he asked.

  “Andre is picking me up,” I explained.

  “Get in the car, Marina. No one is coming,” he said, smiling.

  And I awoke, covered in sweat.

  I didn’t dare remain in bed any longer. I slipped out and went downstairs to the kitchen. I had not dreamed of Ali in years. What did he want from me? I took a deep breath and tried to collect myself. He was dead. He wasn’t going to show up at our door and claim me back. I had just had a dream, a stupid dream. But what if the dream meant something? I began to sob.

  Only a few days after my arrest, Ali saved me from execution. In 1982, court in Evin prison was a Sharia judge who sat behind a desk in a hallway or in a room with a pile of files in front of him. Every day, tens of young people were being arrested and the prison was operating far beyond capacity. Evin had been built for a few hundred prisoners, not for thousands. As a result, prisoners had to be processed quickly. The Sharia judge would spend moments on each file and pass verdicts as fast as he could. If a prisoner had not cooperated and had talked back to the interrogators, he or she could easily receive a death sentence or many years in prison. I had two interrogators: Hamehd and Ali. Hamehd lashed me as Ali watched. Hamehd believed I was lying, but Ali thought I was telling the truth. Ali later told me that he had used his influence to reduce my death sentence to life in prison. Then, five months later, he forced me to marry him, threatening to arrest my parents and Andre if I refused him. I hated him for it. I was so terribly ashamed of our marriage that I kept it a secret. As long as I was a prisoner living in the world of Evin, my family didn’t need to know that I was sleeping with my interrogator.

  After I married Ali, I spent several months in solitary confinement. One has a great deal of time to think in solitary. I wondered why Ali had saved my life and married me. Was he truly in love with me, as he claimed? At the time, the only books available to prisoners were the Koran and books on Islam, so I read them to pass the time. In the Koran, I found this verse (Koran 4:3): “Marry such women [captive women taken in war] as seem good to you, two and three and four; but if you fear that you will not do justice, then only one, or what your right hands possess [captive women].”

  A war waged between the Islamic government of Iran and the “anti-revolutionaries,” and I had become a prisoner of it. As I understood it, according to the laws of Islam, I had literally become Ali’s property. I wondered if he had married any other girls. Maybe it was common practice in the prison. I asked Ali, and he said I was his only wife, but could I trust his word?

  Ali took me on short leaves of absence to see his parents and sister. His mother told me that he had been a political prisoner during the time of the shah. I saw the lash marks on his back. He had been a victim like me. I gradually realized that the man I considered evil was human after all. His parents, always kind and generous to me, knew that he was a torturer in Evin, but they were proud of him and his job. From their perspective, their son was protecting their way of life, his country, and Islam. They were blind to the cruelty of what he was doing because they were able to justify it. His family accepted me only because I had agreed to convert to Islam. In their belief, my conversion washed away all my sins.

  Fourteen months after our marriage, Ali resigned from his job. He told me that he had clashed with the prosecutor of Tehran, Assadollah-eh Ladjevardi, who was also warden of Evin prison. A month later, as we were leaving his parents’ house after dinner one night, Ali was gunned down by a man on a motorcycle and died in my arms. With his last breath, he asked his father to make sure that I was returned safely to my family. The Mojahedin-eh Khalgh, a Marxist-Islamist group that had murdered many government officials, was blamed for the assassination. But Ali’s father believed that it was an inside job and Ladjevardi had ordered it. Ladjevardi, known as the Butcher of Evin and responsible for the torture and execution of thousands of prisoners, kept me in the prison for six months after Ali’s death and wanted to marry me off to another guard, but Ali’s father used his connection to Ayatollah Khomeini to secure my release. He probably even bribed a few Evin officials to get me out. Apparently, Ladjevardi was removed from his post sometime in late 1984 or early 1985, but, to avoid assassination, he lived in Evin with his family for a while afterward. He was murdered in broad daylight in the Grand Bazaar of Tehran in 1998.

  Not dreaming of Ali would have been abnormal. How could I just forget and move on? I had betrayed Andre and my prison friends—and I had betrayed God. Was there a way I could make things right?

  My Mother’s

  Crocheted Tablecloth

  One nightmare followed another, and eventually, I didn’t want to go to bed. Except I had to, because if I didn’t, I would have to explain to Andre what was going on, and I wasn’t ready for that. So every evening I kissed him good night and tossed and turned until at last I fell asleep. Then the nightmares came. I had the road dream at least twice a week. Sometimes I was in a desert and sometimes in the middle of a snowstorm, waiting for Andre, a friend, or my mother or father to pick me up—but Ali always showed up, instead. Sometimes I dreamed of being tied to a pole and lashed, or being locked up in a cold, dark cell. After a while, I realized that I had to do something or I would lose my mind. Yet what could I do?

  One night as I lay sleepless in my bed, staring at the ceiling, I felt a presence in my bedroom. I looked toward the foot of my bed and saw a figure in the faint yellow light seeping in from the hallway night light. Someone stood there. It was my mother. She was wrapped in a shroud, which was covered with one of the delicate tablecloths she had crocheted from silk yarn. I tried to reach out and wake Andre, but I couldn’t move a finger. I tried to cry out, but it was as if my lips were sealed. I stared at my mother. She was still and didn’t say anything. I don’t know how long I lay in that frozen state, but when I could finally move, she disappeared.

  The next day, I told Andre what I had seen.

  “You have to let her go,” he said.

  “I have let her go.”

  “If you had, she wouldn’t have come to you. There are unresolved issues between you. You have to forgive her.”

  “I have!”

  “Have you?”

  “I thought I had.”

  “Why don’t you think of all the things you wanted to say to her but never did, and say them as if she were in the same room? Or write her a letter. I don’t know. But do something, or neither of you will have peace.”

  He was right. I had to face my problems.

  Eight years later, as I was researching the effects of torture on young people under the age of eighteen, I had a conversation with Dr. Jean Wittenberg, a University of Toronto professor who is also a project director in the Research Institute as well as the head of the Infant Psychiatry Program at the Hospital for Sick Children in Toronto. I was hoping that my research would make it possible for me to better understand myself and help others who had been tortured at a young age. Dr. Wittenberg told me that he didn’t have any experience with young victims of torture, but he had worked with children who had been badly abused, so we talked about the effects of trauma on young people in that context. I mentioned that for a long time after my release from Evin, I felt normal. I never thought about the prison, and for many y
ears, I had no nightmares or flashbacks. But then nightmares and flashbacks began to plague me. I wanted to know if this was common. Dr. Wittenberg noted that it was not at all unusual for children to behave normally after a traumatic experience. He explained that they sometimes enclose their trauma in a bubble, put the bubble on their shoulder, and walk through life that way. They avoid anything that threatens to burst their bubble. As a result, they avoid what may be important parts of life. They can live like this for many years, until one day, somehow, that bubble bursts and they are forced to face their trauma. This is when symptoms appear. Each individual has a different way of dealing with trauma and its aftermath. The methods depend on many factors—genetics, the environment, and upbringing. I think the reason I chose to write as a way of coping goes back to my childhood.

  As a child and then a teenager, I had always taken refuge in books. At the age of nine, I discovered a bookstore within walking distance of my house in downtown Tehran that sold only secondhand English-language books. The owner, Albert, a kind Armenian Iranian, knew I didn’t have much money, so he lent me books. I devoured them. Within three or four years, I’d developed a pattern: I would read Jane Austen whenever I was sad or stressed—which, after the success of the Islamic Revolution in 1979, was frequently. Austen’s writing transported me to a world much simpler and more predictable than my own. I became especially addicted to Pride and Prejudice and read it many times. Now I realized that I had not touched her books in years. Maybe she was what I needed. Except, what was the point of hiding in a fictional world? It would make me feel better for a few hours, but then I would have to return to reality. I was thirty-five years old. If I died tomorrow, half my life would be a lie, a desperate attempt to escape the truth. I had wanted to become a medical doctor. Instead, I became a political prisoner. After my release from prison, I spent my life trying to forget the horror I had witnessed.

  “What would Jane Austen do?” I asked myself. The answer was clear: she would write. Could I write? I used to be able to. I wouldn’t have to write for an audience; I could write for myself. As Andre had suggested, writing could help me.

  Even though I was fluent in Persian and loved Persian literature, in a way Jane Austen, Charlotte and Emily Brontë, Emily Dickinson, Charles Dickens, and Mark Twain were my best friends. I decided to write in English.

  I went to the local Business Depot and bought a notebook. Then, every day after my shift at Swiss Chalet, which now ended at 2:00 p.m., I went to a Second Cup coffee shop close to work and wrote until 3:20 p.m., when I had to go pick up my kids from school. I didn’t write at home because Andre sometimes worked from home and I didn’t want him to know about my memoir. I wasn’t ready to share secrets I had protected for seventeen years.

  My first draft was eighty pages long. Like a nightmare, the writing was raw and disjointed, and anyone reading my memoir at that stage would not have been able to understand much. It would have been like looking at a stranger’s photo album.

  I had expected to feel better once I’d put everything down on paper, but I felt worse. I could hardly sleep at night and became withdrawn and irritable. Maybe I was going crazy. Then I began to question what use my story served if my memoir remained hidden in my underwear drawer and no one ever read my words. My secrets would still be secrets; nothing would have changed, and I would still suffer. But I was terrified to go public. Yes, this was it. I was terrified. Fear had become my prison—a prison only I held the key to. I asked myself why I had survived. Was it because I was better than those who had died? I knew very well that wasn’t the case. They were the heroes, not me. Yet I was here, and they were not, and no one could change that. Did this mean that I should continue being a smiling mother, a good housewife, and a hard-working waitress living the Canadian dream? The thought made me feel sick. I couldn’t keep up the charade any longer. It was suffocating me. I had to find air. The only way was to share my story, even though the prospect scared me to death.

  I started to worry that my memory wasn’t as accurate as I had always believed it to be. Maybe I had forgotten things or didn’t remember them exactly as they had happened. Maybe I should write my memoir as fiction and tell the world it was only partly true. Except, I wasn’t a Jane Austen, much as I wished I could be. Besides, hiding behind fiction would undermine the reason I had decided to share my story: at last I had chosen to be unafraid, and concealing the truth under layers of imagination would be cowardly. More important, it would give the government of Iran an opportunity to dismiss my testimony, claiming I had made everything up.

  My memory might be flawed, but hundreds of people with imperfect recall have written memoirs. These people have told their stories because they believe that what they have to say is worthwhile. Many Holocaust survivors, for example, have written their memoirs years and years later. I believed I had the right—maybe even the duty—to do the same.

  I looked up memoir in the Oxford English Dictionary: “a historical account or biography written from personal knowledge.” I wasn’t a historian or a journalist, but this didn’t mean I was insignificant. I had been in Evin without pen and paper. Even if I had had them, in Evin I would never have been allowed to write anything down. The prison authorities never permitted documentation of any of the atrocities they committed. Yet now that I thought about it, I knew that even if they had let me, I would probably never have written a word as the horror unfolded: I wanted it obliterated from existence. Now, many years later, I had had time to understand the importance of memory and the right to bear witness.

  In early June 2002, I gathered enough courage to share my manuscript with Andre. Before I shared my story with the world, I had to put things straight at home. I had no idea how Andre would respond. He had every right to become angry. He might even hate me for having married Ali and keeping it secret. I was aware that my confession could end our marriage of seventeen years.

  When I first told Andre I was writing about Evin and promised him I would share my work with him when I was ready, he didn’t react to the news; and he never asked me about my work or how it was progressing. A part of him still didn’t want to know. But there was no way out for either of us now.

  I finally gave him the manuscript, rewritten and typed, and he took it from me without a word and put it under his side of our bed. I asked him the next day if he had read it, and he said no, that it was too difficult for him. He promised, though, that he would read it as soon as he was ready.

  On a Saturday three days later, I was at work at Swiss Chalet—instead of my regular day shift, in the summertime I worked four or five nights a week and on weekends in order to spend summer holidays with my children—when I saw Andre and our two sons walk into the restaurant. I seated them in my section, brought them their drinks, and wrote down their orders. As I was putting their quarter-chicken dinners on the table, Andre said, “I’ve read it.”

  I froze. “You have?”

  I recognized the expression on his face. It was sadness.

  “We’ll talk at home,” he said.

  The rest of my shift was unbearable. I couldn’t concentrate. My co-workers thought I was ill. I said I had a headache and left the restaurant a little earlier than usual.

  The streets floated by as I drove home. I parked the car in the driveway but couldn’t move for some time. The light in my elder son’s bedroom was on; he was probably playing video games. I gazed at my house, and it was as if I were looking at it from a distance. I considered my life. I had most of what I had dreamed of as a girl: I had wanted Andre, and I had wanted to have children with him and live in a nice house in a free country. Yet now that I had those things, I hated myself and felt like an intruder.

  The sweet scent of the phlox in the garden enveloped me as I stepped out of my car and approached the front door. I turned my key in the lock—and I knew that my world was about to change.

  I found Andre in our bedroom.

  “Why didn’t you tell me earlier?” he asked with a look in his eye
s I had never seen before, a combination of pain, sadness, disappointment, and confusion. My silence had walled him protectively, but now the sheltering walls had collapsed.

  “I couldn’t. Will you forgive me?”

  The hurt in his eyes melted away.

  “There’s nothing to forgive. Will you forgive me?” he said.

  “For what?”

  “For not asking.”

  He still loved me. I should have known that he would not turn his back on me. As he put his arms around me, I felt a huge relief, and some of the weight I had carried for so long dropped away. My good, dear Andre was so kind and faithful to me. Yet I didn’t deserve it. If he had asked me about Evin right after my release, I probably would not have told him much. What I had needed most back then was to know that when I was ready to talk, someone would listen.

  “What do you want to do with the manuscript?” Andre asked.

  “I’ve decided to publish it. Except, I don’t think it’s ready. I want to take a few writing courses. The School of Continuing Studies at the University of Toronto offers some and there are no prerequisites, but each course costs about five hundred dollars. Can we afford it?”

  “Yes, we can. Go ahead. I understand that this is something you have to do.”

  After all those years, Andre’s goodness still astonished me. He could have said no. Financially, we were doing okay, but we didn’t have much extra money. Yet this was Andre’s way. Our marriage had not been an entirely smooth ride—we had had our fights. But he always came through for me when I needed him most. He’d waited for me while I was in prison and he’d married me. In doing so, he’d put his life in danger. With his relentless support and hard work, he’d made it possible for us to leave Iran, come to Canada, and start a new life. Our arrival in Canada was a huge victory. But after we arrived here, we still had a long way to travel before either of us could feel almost at home in our new country.