After Tehran

by Marina Nemat

  If indeed I am asked. And provided I myself don’t forget.*

  IT WAS RAINING when I was released from Evin. I had to walk to Luna Park, an amusement park located about a mile and a half south of the prison. The government had taken over a part of it to use as a base for shuttle buses for visitors to the prison. When prisoners were released, families had to wait for their loved one in the park. A gust of wind heavy with cold droplets of rain whipped against me. Adjusting my black chador, I carefully made my way down the few steps that led to the quiet, narrow street. I paused, looked up, and watched the clouds move with the strong wind. For a moment, a breathtaking small patch of blue sky appeared. Although pale, it was still lively against the shades of grey. My eyes followed the road. A white car turned the corner. The driver, a middle-aged man, slowed and stared at me but continued on his path. My socks were soaked inside my rubber slippers, and my feet were freezing. I walked quickly, with steady steps. It was 1984, and I had waited for this day for two years, two months, and twelve days. I wanted to go home and restart my life where I had left off. Unlike Georg Koves, I didn’t pause. But like him, I thought about my moments of happiness in the hell I was leaving. As I walked home, I didn’t think of the horror I had been drowning in for more than two years. There had been times when, briefly, I had been able to surface and breathe. Without those little breaths, I would have died. My cellmates were my air—or, as Kertész put it, “the intervals between the torment.” It was only when I was released and went home that I realized life would never be the same. I had changed. Everything had changed. I didn’t belong anywhere. During my first nights home, I closed my eyes and listened to the stillness of the night. I missed my friends, the girls with whom I had developed irreplaceable relationships. Without their friendship, which was the warmth that sustained me in a perpetually frozen realm of darkness, I felt a terrible gap in my life. I had wanted to come home, but it was as if my home had been wiped out of existence and the place where I now lived was only a clumsy replica. I wanted to be with Sarah. Would they ever let her go? We had been through life and death together, through madness and hope, through love and despair. We understood each other. I had returned to my family, but they were all strangers to me. Sarah knew what it meant to look straight into the eyes of death and watch it leave you behind and take the people you loved. As Kertész had said, I had to live an “uncontinuable life.”

  I have recurring images of my last month of Ramadan in Evin, when we had to fast and refrain from eating and drinking from dawn until dusk. We received larger and better rations to break our fast at the end of each day. The guards sometimes even gave each cell a watermelon. Most of us had not seen one in months or years. During the day we would put the watermelons in large buckets of cold tap water so that they would cool, and we would break them immediately after saying our Namaz at sunset. I remember running my hands over their cold, smooth skin. My friends and I sat together to break our fast, passing pieces of watermelon to one another. The sun had set, but the air was heavy with heat. First, we closed our eyes and let the scent of the fruit fill us, and then we bit into it, allowing its sweet, cold juice to tingle our chapped lips and wash away the bitter dryness of our mouths and throats. We giggled as young girls do. Yes, there was happiness in Evin, and it lived in the sisterhood that connected us to one another.

  I READ The Diary of Anne Frank after coming to Canada, so it was relatively fresh in my mind when I went to Amsterdam in May 2007. Even though our circumstances had been very different, I felt a special closeness to Anne, as if she were a friend I had lost. The first place I visited in Amsterdam was the Anne Frank House, where Anne and her parents and sister, another family, and a dentist had hidden from the Nazis. In 1960, the house became a museum open to the public. To welcome visitors, the front part of the building—the former business premises—was rebuilt as a reception and exhibition space. Only the back of the house, also known as the Secret Annex, remained in its original state. I cried my way through it. I wished Anne were here to see that a million people visited the Secret Annex every year and that her book was read and cherished by millions more. I felt her presence as I stopped at every corner and remembered parts of her diary—but her presence was not a sad one; it was full of life and energy.

  In large font, sentences from her diary are written on walls throughout the house, magnifying the suffering of not only one young girl but of a people. One sentence reads, “We’re very afraid the neighbours might hear or see us.”

  Fear, silence, and horror. I knew them well.

  Silence has a persistent presence; once it enters, it refuses to leave. After the Holocaust, victims found it difficult to talk about their experiences, and those listening found the experiences too painful to hear—so silence endured. However, Anne’s voice finally triumphed. Those who put her and millions of others in concentration camps and tried to wipe them from memory failed. Anne’s vivid presence in the house became stronger with every passing moment.

  Anne’s bedroom in the Secret Annex reminded me of mine in Tehran, but my room had only one twin-size bed, when Anne’s room had two. At first, Anne shared her room with her sister, Margot. Then a dentist named Fritz Pfeffer arrived; he, too, was hiding from the Nazis. Like me, Anne had a small wooden desk in a corner. However, my room had a glass door that opened onto a balcony, when her room was cut off from the outside world. Both Anne and I had put a few posters on our bedroom walls: hers were of film stars such as Greta Garbo, or Dutch royalty and nature; mine were of Donny and Marie Osmond. How nice it would have been to have posters to decorate my cell when I was in solitary confinement in Evin. Anne and I had a great deal in common, including our love for literature, and I am sure that had we known each other, we would have become good friends. I was astounded to learn that her cat’s name had been Mouschi—the nickname I gave Andre after my release from prison. Anne couldn’t take her cat to the Secret Annex and she missed him terribly.

  Of the eight people who had hidden in the Secret Annex for two years, seven died in concentration camps. Only Anne’s father, Otto Frank, survived. In Anne Frank House, I watched an interview with Mr. Frank, done after his release from Auschwitz and the publication of Anne’s diary.

  He said, “To build a future, you have to know the past …”

  There is much wisdom in this small sentence.

  A few weeks after visiting the house, I watched a documentary about a man who had suffered brain damage and had forgotten everything about his past. He had also lost the ability to form any new long-term memories. As a result, he was incapable of planning. He awoke every day forgetting all about yesterday, unable to understand the concept of tomorrow. Because he never remembered the past, the future had no meaning for him. If this can happen to an individual, it can also happen to a people.

  The people of Iran have to shake off their collective amnesia, face their past, and then plan for a better future. Facing the past means facing mistakes. We have to accept responsibility. We made decisions and took steps that led to a revolution. It went terribly wrong and gave birth to a dictatorship that claimed the lives of thousands of young Iranians and left thousands of others broken. Facing the past is not about pointing fingers; it’s about acknowledgment. Each one of us could probably have made different choices that could have saved lives, but we didn’t. We have to remember that it’s never too late to take a stand. In 2009, Iranians rose up and did just that: demanded justice and democracy. As a survivor of Evin, it is my duty to remind Iranians that revolutions and movements can go astray. Violence leads to violence. Torture and murder are wrong and never lead to justice. The end, no matter how sacred it is, can never justify the means. As long as there is a Supreme Leader in Iran who can veto the decisions of the people, democracy cannot root and grow.

  In Anne Frank House, I also watched an interview with Hannah Goslar, Anne’s neighbour, friend, and classmate. Like Anne, Hannah was sent to Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, and she was one of the last people to see Ann
e alive. A barbed-wire fence had separated the two girls, and Anne had cried and told Hannah that she had nobody, which wasn’t true—but Anne wasn’t aware her father had survived. Hannah believed that if Anne had known her father was alive, she would have lived. I agree with her. Hope has miraculous powers. Anne died only days before the liberation. With a great deal of sadness in her eyes, Hannah said that Anne’s death and her own survival were “cruel accidents.” Yes, maybe both our survivals are cruel accidents, or maybe they are the will of God; either way, life is precious.

  On Thursday morning, March 25, 2010, a beautiful sunny day, I stood in Auschwitz and looked down a narrow road sandwiched between two rows of red-brick, two-storey buildings. Unlike the flimsy wooden barracks I had seen in other concentration camps, these were well built and appeared sturdy. Many tour buses sat parked in the parking lot, and tourists of all ages and nationalities walked everywhere. I was on a trip organized by the Friends of Simon Wiesenthal Centre for Holocaust Studies. Birds sang in the pale sun, and the clear voice of our young tour guide, Anna, who was knowledgeable and professional, streamed through my headset. But I wasn’t listening. The bricks of Auschwitz were almost identical in colour to those at Evin. I reached out and touched them, and tears blinded me. We had just seen piles of the thousands of shoes taken from the victims of Auschwitz, and I remembered that in Evin, guards had taken my white-and-red Puma running shoes and had given me rubber slippers, instead. Where were my shoes and those of my prison friends? Had they been destroyed? We entered a barrack, and I peered into the bright, average-size room on my right. A wooden table stood in the middle of the room, with a few chairs around it. Anna explained that this room was used for arbitrary trials and that most of the prisoners tried here were sentenced to death and executed in the courtyard behind the building. In Evin prison, the Sharia judge who had condemned me to death probably sat in a similar room and drank tea as he passed on verdicts.

  I followed my group down the hall and into the basement. A friend turned around, looked at me, and asked, “You okay?” I nodded, but I could hardly breathe.

  On my left was a dark cell with a small barred window. This was where Father Maximilian Kolbe, canonized by Pope John Paul II in 1982, was killed in August 1941. During the Second World War, he had provided shelter to Polish refugees, including two thousand Jews. In February 1941, the Gestapo arrested him. He was transferred to Auschwitz about three months later. In July 1941, a man from Kolbe’s barrack vanished, and the deputy camp commander picked ten men to starve to death in order to discourage further escapes. One of the selected men begged not to be killed, saying that he had family waiting for him. Kolbe volunteered to go in his place. I wished I had been as brave as Kolbe, but I was not.

  After three weeks of dehydration and starvation, only Kolbe and three others were still alive. Each time the guards checked on him, Kolbe was standing or kneeling in the middle of the cell and looking calmly at those who entered. When his remaining cellmates had died, Kolbe was killed with an injection of carbolic acid.

  I gazed at the small barred window of Kolbe’s cell. It was as if I were back in my cell at Evin. Even though Auschwitz was now a museum and a place of remembrance, I knew that Evin was still operational: innocents were still being tortured and executed there. I searched my heart for something more I could do for them. My legs somehow carried me out of the barrack and back into the spring sun. I sat on the steps and covered my face with my hands. I couldn’t stop crying. Maximilian Kolbe is the patron saint of political prisoners. I begged him to show me the way to help bring about real change in Iran without endangering more lives.

  As in the concentration camps, life in the public cellblocks at Evin revolved around routines that, even though tedious, carried us through the days. The constant religious-education programs broadcast for hours every day on the closed-circuit television of the prison were designed to brainwash us, but after a while, even as I sat in front of the TV, I didn’t hear a word of them. I either whispered poems to a friend sitting next to me or I daydreamed about going home. I heard from one of my cellmates who had been in Evin during the time of the shah that back then, each cell in 246 held five or six prisoners. In my time, we numbered sixty to seventy. When so many people have to live in a small space, simple tasks become challenging. Finding a place to sleep, dividing food, tidying up, washing dishes, cleaning the bathrooms, and taking showers were all major issues that required a great deal of organization. We chose girls to do different jobs, and the duties usually changed hands weekly. One week, for example, I would be the “sleeping-spot authority.” This meant I had to make sure everyone had a place to sleep. This might sound simple, but it was not. There were so many of us that we had to sleep not only on the floor in the cells but also in the hallway. There was absolutely no room to spare. The lights were turned off in the cells at night, but they remained on in the hallway, so sleeping in the cells was more comfortable. In addition, your chances of getting stepped on while asleep increased dramatically in the hallway, because you would be in the way of the people who needed to use the bathroom. In the cells, some girls preferred to sleep close to the windows because we usually left them open even in winter. However, others preferred to be far from them so that they wouldn’t be cold. And we all always wanted to sleep next to our friends.

  Dividing the food, which typically consisted of bread with dates, rice, or soup, was a challenge, as well. We didn’t get much food in Evin, and making sure that everyone had an equal share was not easy.

  Cleaning was another problem. Imagine cleaning a bathroom used by three hundred and fifty to four hundred people. We had warm water once every two or three weeks for two to three hours each time. Water customarily warmed up in the middle of the night. When you were your cell’s shower worker, you had to send sixty to seventy sleepy girls to use four or five shower stalls in a matter of minutes. The shower worker had to stand at the door of the shower room and rush girls in and out. Shower nights were always loud.

  “Afsaneh, Fereshteh, Nahid! Get out! You’ve been in there forever! I told you that you had four minutes!” the shower worker would yell.

  “I’ve been here for only two minutes! I still have soap in my hair!” the girl inside would shout back.

  “Doesn’t matter! Out! People are waiting! Do you want them to have to wash up with cold water? Out!”

  And if the worker had been too hard on someone and the next day that person was called for interrogation and was tortured, the worker would feel horrible for days. The injured always received longer turns and help in the shower. My first evening in 246 was shower night. I couldn’t stand on my feet well because of the lashing, so Sarah helped me, and the girl in charge gave us extra time.

  I have faith that one day Evin, like the Secret Annex and Auschwitz, will become a museum where people will honour those who suffered and died. One day, young and old will walk its hallways, look inside its cells and torture rooms, and learn about a dark time in Iran’s history when the torture of teenagers was considered a good deed, done to please God and protect the country from evil.

  *Imre Kertész, Fatelessness, A Novel, translated from Hungarian by Tim Wilkinson. (New York: Random House, 2004), 261–262.

  My Dragonfly

  Brooch

  In August 2007, while I was in Edinburgh, I gave a short phone interview to Radio Hambastegi, a Persian-language radio station based in Stockholm. Soon after returning home to Toronto I received an email from the interviewer, Nasser Yousefi, with the link* to the program they had had on my book. Only when I clicked on the link and began listening did I realize that the program was about three hours long. The first interviews were with three of my critics, who had been prisoners in Evin and members of Communist or Marxist-Islamist groups. Two of them had written their own memoirs of Evin. They believed that my book shouldn’t have been published because my experience of Evin was different from theirs. They said that I had not properly conveyed the horrors of Evin and that I had not told
the story of the heroes of the prison who had suffered and died for their ideology and beliefs.

  Before the interviews, Nasser had given a brief introduction on memory and memoir writing, and had quoted from a Persian-language publication named Baran. He said that events happened in a place and time, and the exact retelling of them was impossible, because when events become memories they exist only in our mind, and how we view them depends on our perspective. Even immediately after we see a photo, remembering its details clearly is impossible since human memory is, simply, imperfect. He compared writing a memoir to making a movie: two directors making a film from one book might end up with two very different accounts. Some scenes we fast-forward and some we put in slow motion because of the way we feel about them. He concluded that we therefore had to respect memory and memoirs and never consider them completely accurate, because all humans look at the world through a lens, and there is nothing we can do about that.

  I had hoped that my critics would deliver a rational review of my book—which is how a literary review should be. But what I heard on the radio show was an extreme personal attack. My critics called me a liar, a tavvab, and a traitor, and claimed that I had written Prisoner of Tehran for money. One woman openly admitted that she had not read my book; she had only read about it. She said, “I first criticized Marina’s book, but then when I saw that some people had turned this [criticism] into a personal attack on her, I pulled myself aside from that … This [book] is not the truth of the pain of those who suffered in prison and were tortured. It is important for every publisher to sell books. This [book] is not the description of the pains Marina endured. It has been twisted and turned into something that would sell … This book is the result of the work of a group of people [and not only Marina] …”