by Marina Nemat
The next day was Saturday. I had decided to stay in London for the weekend to explore the city and visit an old family friend, Hooshang Khan,* whom I had not seen in seventeen years. I had been exhausted the previous night, so I didn’t set my alarm. I woke with the pale orange glow of the sun spreading in my room and was shocked to find Andre lying next to me in my twin-size bed, fast asleep. I touched his hair, and he opened his eyes a little.
“What are you doing here?” I said. “You’re supposed to be at home in Canada. When did you get here? How did you get into the room? How did you fit in this bed? How—”
“Don’t ask so many questions. I just wanted to be with you,” he interrupted me, smiling.
I put my arms around him and closed my eyes. When I opened them a moment later, he wasn’t there. It had been a dream. I got out of bed and started my day. I had to rush. I was supposed to be at Hooshang Khan’s apartment at noon.
In the evening when I got back to the hotel, my cell phone rang. It was Andre.
“How was Hooshang Khan?” he asked.
“He was well. He’s older, of course, but he hasn’t changed much. He was so happy to see me. He ordered in some food, and we had chelokabab* for lunch. It felt like home. I finally apologized to him for yelling at him when he told me I shouldn’t marry you. He said he understood my reaction and had never been angry at me.”
“So … tell me, what’s happening in London?”
“Nothing remarkable. Same stuff. Interviews and events. They all went well.”
“You sure?”
“Yeah. Why?”
“They say if you want to know what your wife is up to, Google her!”
“What do you mean?”
“Some people are attacking you online.”
“I know.”
“And you didn’t bother to tell me?”
I said I didn’t want to upset him. Andre had every right to be worried for me, but regardless of the cost, I had to continue what I had started. I understood the risk I was taking.
*The complete Persian text of Dariush’s interview with me is available at www.radiozamanch.org/special/2007/05/post_230html.
*Like agha, khan means “mister” in Persian. However, agha usually (not always) comes before a name, whereas khan almost always comes after it.
*Rice with beef kebabs.
A Persian Song
Named Soltan-eh Ghalbha
(King of Hearts)
Hooshang Khan gave me a bouquet of nineteen pink roses on my nineteenth birthday, only days after my release from Evin. I put them in a vase, sat in a chair, and stared at them for a long time. I had spent my two previous birthdays in prison.
When I announced that I was going to marry Andre, Hooshang Khan tried to change my mind. He said it was suicide. I had been forced to convert to Islam in the prison, and in the eyes of the Iranian regime, I was now a Muslim woman. A Muslim woman is not allowed to marry a Christian man. If I announced that I had returned to Christianity, I could be arrested, even executed. Hooshang Khan insisted that I could have a relationship with Andre, but we should leave marriage for when we left Iran. I yelled at him, saying that I would do as I pleased, that neither he nor anyone else had the right to tell me whom I should or should not marry. Colour left his face, but he didn’t say a word and walked out of my room.
Before my time in the prison, Andre and I had both been very shy and had never even kissed. After my release, Andre didn’t seem to have changed much. He was a perfect gentleman and as shy as ever. He didn’t know it at the time, but after marrying Ali, I spent two or three nights a week with him in a solitary cell, and Ali made it clear to me that I had to satisfy his sexual appetite. Sometimes, he would even walk into my cell in the middle of the day and tell me to take off my clothes. I resisted him in the beginning, and kicked and screamed. I even managed to hurt him a few times, but he never backed off. He told me that screaming wouldn’t get me anywhere but would only scare the other prisoners. He was right. If I didn’t resist, it would be over more quickly, and I would suffer less.
The day after my arrest, my mother called Andre at seven in the morning and told him that I had been taken to Evin. Even though Andre knew there was a good chance I would not survive, he never lost hope of seeing me again. He was twenty-three years old and a university student. However, all Iranian universities had been closed. They were to be restructured and de-Westernized under the Iranian Cultural Revolution (1980–1983), which purged thousands of faculty, staff, and students, the majority of whom were followers or members of leftist groups. While the universities were shut down, Andre taught English at an Armenian school in Tehran and coached the school’s various sports teams; he had been a track-and-field champion in Iran at the national level and had won many medals. He also attended Italian-language classes at the Italian Institute of Culture in Tehran and continued playing the organ at our church and Armenian Catholic churches. While I was in prison, a few young women pursued Andre, but after my release, he told me he had never been interested in them.
Before I married Ali, I asked him to let me say goodbye to Andre. He promised he would and he kept his word. Andre was permitted to visit me in Evin only once. It was so brave of him to come—for all he knew, prison authorities could have kept him there. At the time, they only let close family members—mother, father, husband, wife, and children—visit prisoners. Allowing a friend to come was unheard of. Andre and I stood on either side of the glass barrier in the visiting room and stared at each other for a while. Phones had been installed and we could talk, but we knew we were being watched. He asked me how I was doing, and I said I was okay. I wanted to tell him about my marriage to Ali, yet I couldn’t. Instead, I told him to forget about me and move on, but he said he would wait for me.
When I returned home from Evin, Andre told me he somehow knew he had to take care of me. We spent a lot of time together in my parents’ backyard and in my room, since he was helping me with my studies. I never went back to school after Evin. I went for the necessary exams and eventually got my high-school diploma. To keep myself busy, I, too, signed up for Italian lessons at the Italian Institute of Culture in Tehran.
When all was in place for our wedding, which took place on July 18, 1985, Andre and I realized that we needed someone to pick up our wedding cake at the bakery and deliver it to the church, where we were having a small reception after the ceremony. At the time, many middle- and upper-class families rented banquet halls for weddings, but we had decided to keep ours as quiet as possible and have a simple party at the church hall, serving only fruits, soft drinks, and cake. There would be no music or dancing—we couldn’t risk being heard from the street. What if someone reported us to the Revolutionary Guard? Hooshang Khan volunteered to bring the cake. He found someone to drive him to the bakery, and he held the large cake on his lap all the way to the church. It was a very hot day, so by the time he arrived, the two-tiered pink cake had slightly melted and become lopsided. The cake would never have survived a trip in the car trunk. Hooshang Khan had saved the day.
My father walked me down the aisle. One of my mother’s sisters, Aunt Latif, had made my simple white dress. The church was full. Andre’s father had passed away while I was in prison, and his aunt who had raised him had returned to Hungary shortly before the wedding. She had become old and frail, and had wanted to be back home with her sister and the rest of her relatives. I had never met Andre’s father. Just before my arrest, Andre wanted to invite me to his house to meet his father and aunt, but we never got the chance. I was saddened that no one from Andre’s family was present at our wedding, but none of his relatives, including his sister, was in Iran. Two of my mother’s sisters and their families came to the church, but my mother’s eldest sister, Zenia, and my mother’s brother, Ismael, did not. Aunt Zenia had had a fight with my father over money. She had not been herself lately and had been behaving strangely. I was hugely disappointed not to see her and Uncle Ismael in the crowd, but I had fought hard to get t
o that day, and nothing short of being arrested could spoil it for me.
IN 1938, at the age of twenty-eight, Andre’s father, Mihaly, a Hungarian carpenter, arrived in Iran to work on a new palace named Kakh-eh Marmar. It was being built for the crown prince of Iran, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, who was soon to marry the beautiful Princess Fawzieh of Egypt. Mihaly had heard about the job from a friend who worked at the Hungarian Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Budapest. The promised pay was good and the prospect of travelling to Iran was exciting, so Mihaly applied and was hired. He left his fiancée, Juliana, in Budapest in the hope of returning home immediately after completion of the palace, but the Second World War prevented that. While the war raged in Europe and Hungary stood by Germany, the Allies entered Iran to deliver supplies to Russia from the south, and Mihaly, along with other Italian, Hungarian, and German nationals working in Iran, was expelled and sent to a special camp in India. After the war, he returned to Iran instead of his native Hungary because Hungary had become Communist. He hoped that the Communist regime would soon topple and he could go back home, but years went by and this did not happen. Hungarians weren’t allowed to leave their country at that time, and Juliana was unable to join Mihaly. She was forced to remain in Hungary until the anti-Communist revolution of 1956, which opened the Hungarian borders for a brief time and permitted her to enter Austria as a refugee. She later joined her long-lost love in Iran after eighteen years of separation. They married immediately and had two children: Andre and, fifteen months later, his sister. Juliana passed away when Andre was only four and his sister two and a half. After her death, one of Mihaly’s sisters, an unmarried woman of about sixty, travelled to Iran to help her brother raise his children. In time, she proved to be a wonderful substitute for the mother taken from them.
EVENTUALLY Prisoner of Tehran was translated into Italian, and at a dinner party in a restaurant in the city of Cosenza in southern Italy, I saw Princess India, the granddaughter of Mohammed Zahir Shah, the last king of Afghanistan. She lived in Italy and had just received an award for her aid and charity work in her country. She was a handsome woman, and appeared to be in her sixties. I had been introduced to her the morning of the dinner party. We had talked briefly in Farsi, the official language of Afghanistan. Even though the Farsi of Afghanistan (called Farsi-yeh Dari) is considered a dialect of the Persian language, Iranian Farsi and Afghan Farsi are similar. The princess had smiled as I spoke Farsi to her, eyeing me with undisguised intensity. At dinner we had more time to talk, and she told me about her family. I was surprised to hear that when she had been very young, she had married an Iranian and had lived in both Tehran and the city of Mashad in northeastern Iran. We talked about poetry and recited to each other a few lines from the works of famous Persian poets. She asked me about my family and I told her about my parents, and Andre and his parents.
The princess’s eyes widened with surprise. “What was Andre’s father’s name?” she asked.
“Mihaly Nemat,” I said, wondering why she wanted to know.
“This is so strange! How is this even possible? Mihaly Nemat made all my furniture in Iran. He was a very skilled carpenter, and he did an amazing job for me!”
I didn’t know what to say.
“He had a wife, but no children back then.”
“They had two children. Andre and his sister. Andre’s mother died when he was four.”
The coincidence astounded me. I couldn’t wait to tell Andre I had met someone who had known his father.
The princess and I also spoke of Iran and its beauty, and then she asked me if I knew any Persian songs. She wanted me to sing one to her. I cannot sing well, but my unexpected connection to her had stirred so many emotions I somehow didn’t mind. The restaurant was noisy; people had finished their food and were chatting, so I gathered my courage and sang her an old song named Soltan-eh Ghalbha (King of the Hearts) from a Persian movie that first came out in 1968. I wasn’t quite sure why I had chosen that song. I listen to a great deal of Persian music and have many favourites, but I have loved Soltan-eh Ghalbha since I was a young child. I often hummed it when I was in solitary confinement in Evin, thinking of Andre. For the princess, I sang the words to the song:
My heart sometimes tells me to leave, and it sometimes tells me to stay, but I cannot bear this. How can I live without you? When one is so deeply in love, the world seems so small. You are always in my heart, and I will never leave you. Only you are the Soltan of my heart. You are my beloved, and we are one. Now that I am far away from you, I will not give my heart to anyone else. I long for you, my beautiful lover.
As I sang, the princess’s eyes filled with tears. The song resurrected memories for her of all she had witnessed and all she had lost. We were very different; she was an Afghan princess and I was an ordinary Persian woman. But we had both suffered—and now our paths had crossed in Cosenza, where I sang a Persian love song for her. She held my hand in hers as I sang, and it was as if the words of the song brought us into one body, one existence.
Fatelessness and
The Diary of Anne Frank
After a speaking engagement of mine in a Toronto suburb, a woman in the audience asked me why I showed almost no anger in Prisoner of Tehran. This was one of the most insightful questions I had been asked. I told her that in prison I had usually blamed myself for all that had gone on and felt guilty about everything. Years later when I thought of the cruelties I had witnessed in Evin, of the torture and death of my friends, I felt a leaden sadness—thick and dark and desperate for goodness. Anger does not have the ability to carry the weight of what I feel. Maybe nothing does. Maybe a new emotion needs to be created for it. In prison, numbness overtook me. After about sixteen years, it started to diminish. I finally began to feel. I got angry at my father when, at my mother’s funeral, he told me that she had forgiven me before her death. However, my anger quickly turned into grief—a flood threatening to drown me from within. Then came a terrible sense of frustration that melted into helplessness, followed by an overwhelming need to make amends and find humanity and forgiveness. Anger cannot fix; it destroys. I have already had enough death and destruction in my life.
I clearly remember the L-shaped hallway of block 246 in Evin. The cells. The girls. My first night there. My feet were terribly swollen and I could hardly walk. I had not had much to eat or drink in days. Even though I felt safer in 246 than I had in the interrogation building, the strangeness of the environment made me think I was suffocating. The cell I was put in was about seventeen by twenty-five feet, its floor covered with a worn brown carpet. Just 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 of the cell stood a bunk bed. Jars and containers of different shapes and sizes covered the lower bunk, and plastic bags stuffed with clothes sat piled on the upper. In another corner, next to a barred window, grey military blankets lay stacked almost to the ceiling. There were teenage girls everywhere. Most of them sat talking on the floor in groups of two or three. The barred window looked out over a small, empty, paved courtyard. I was in a world I didn’t understand at all. Tears gathered in my eyes and a terrible pain exploded in my chest. Only when Sarah suddenly appeared beside me did I feel better. She had been in Evin longer than I had. I could rely on her. And time proved that she could rely on me. How do teenage girls survive hell? They do it by being who they are, by remembering that they are human beings and have families who love them. In Evin, the present was so horrible we rarely talked about it, and the future didn’t exist, so all we had was the past. We survived by talking about our homes, moms, dads, brothers, sisters, aunts, uncles, cousins, birthday parties, weddings, New Year’s celebrations, our favourite books, poems, films, and music. These long conversations somehow created a collective memory that became our beacon of hope. The more we shared, the brighter the light of hope glowed. We wanted to go
home, and we helped one another believe that we would indeed be released one day. Every minute, we risked facing torture, even execution, but amid all the horror, there was some happiness. Human beings have a miraculous ability to create hope out of nothing.
MY CELLMATES AND I were not the only ones in the world able to find light in seemingly absolute darkness. In 2007, I read a book titled Fatelessness, a novel written in 1975 by Imre Kertész, a Hungarian writer imprisoned in concentration camps as a youth. In the last two pages of the book, sixteen-year-old Georg Koves is finally going home from a concentration camp at the end of the Second World War. He is on his way to find his mother, who has also survived the Holocaust, when he pauses to rest and think:
But one shouldn’t exaggerate, as this is precisely the crux of it: I am here, and I am well aware that I shall accept any rationale as the price for being able to live. Yes, as I looked around this placid, twilit square, this street, weather-beaten yet full of a thousand promises, I was already feeling a growing readiness to continue my uncontinuable life. My mother was waiting, and would no doubt greatly rejoice over me. I recollect that she had once conceived a plan that I should become an engineer, a doctor, or something like that. No doubt that is how it will be, just as she wished; there is nothing impossible that we do not live through naturally, and keeping a watch on me on my journey, like some inescapable trap, I already know there will be happiness. For even there, next to the chimneys, in the intervals between the torments, there was something that resembled happiness. Everyone asks only about the hardships and the “atrocities,” whereas for me perhaps it is that experience which will remain the most memorable. Yes, the next time I am asked, I ought to speak about that, the happiness of the concentration camps.