After Tehran

by Marina Nemat

  “May I see how you look in them to make sure they fit right?”

  I opened the door.

  “Beautiful!” she said. “Your husband will like them.”

  If only she knew.

  WALKING AWAY from the pharmacy in Athens, I thought of the baby—whom I had been sure was a boy. I miscarried when Ali was assassinated. If our son had lived, he would have been twenty-four years old now. A young man. Would he have resembled Ali or me? Would he have ended up working for the Iranian regime, or would I have been able to teach him right from wrong? If he had survived, I would have told him that even though I blamed his father for his terrible job in Evin and for forcing me into marriage, I was proud of him for quitting his job shortly before his death and for his efforts to take care of his unborn son and me.

  A year after my trip to Greece, I received an email from a young man named Nima, who told me he had been born in Evin prison in 1981. He had never known his parents. He had read my book three times and felt that his mother could well have written it. I was heartbroken. I asked him if he knew what had happened to his parents. He responded that he would tell me when he was ready. How many children had been born in Evin? How many of them had been fathered by guards and interrogators? We had a pregnant young woman at 246. She and her husband had both been condemned to death. Executing a pregnant or breastfeeding woman is against Islamic law, so Evin officials postponed her sentence. She gave birth to a beautiful son. We watched him grow. He became a toddler while I was in prison. His mother eventually sent him home to live with her parents, even though parting with him devastated her. But he had never seen a tree or a flower. His world had been made of concrete and barbed wire.

  “They tried to rob us of everything,” I wrote to Nima, “including the possibility of ever being happy again. I wish you happiness, even if it has to be incomplete.”

  He wrote back, “I wish you happiness, too, Marina, as it is our only revenge.”

  This was exactly what Shahnoosh had told me when I dreamed of her.

  AFTER MY RELEASE from Evin and before I married Andre, my secret marriage to Ali and my pregnancy came perilously close to being exposed.

  I sometimes had very heavy menstrual bleedings, and one month after I got out of Evin the bleeding was so severe I couldn’t climb out of bed and my pads became soaked after only a few minutes. My mother phoned a family friend who was a gynecologist. She stopped by our house and gave me an injection to control the bleeding, and then she ordered some blood tests. After the results came back, she said I had to see a specialist. I had not told her or anyone at home about my marriage, pregnancy, or the miscarriage, so I couldn’t tell her I knew I had thalassemia minor. I was shocked and terrified when she referred me to the same specialist the physician of Ali’s mother had sent me to.

  Andre told me he would take me to see the specialist. There was a good chance that she would recognize me and ask about Ali and the baby. I couldn’t let this happen. Two or three days before the appointment, I went to her office. I told her secretary that I needed to see the doctor for only a few minutes and I was willing to wait as long as necessary. I was quite distraught, so the secretary told me she would send me in as soon as she could. After an hour or so, the secretary showed me into the doctor’s office. I reminded the doctor who I was. She remembered Ali and me. I told her that Ali was dead and that I had miscarried. Colour left her face. I told her that I had been a prisoner when I had come to her office the previous time. Her eyes grew larger by the second.

  “My family doesn’t know anything about Ali and my relationship with him,” I said. “I beg you to keep my secret. They will disown me if they find out. I’m going to marry the man I love very soon. I just want to put the past behind me. We have an appointment with you in two days. Please pretend you don’t know me when I come with him.”

  “I’m your physician,” she said, her voice trembling. “Everything I know about you is confidential, and I assure you that it will remain that way. Dear girl … I had no idea … you looked so normal … he looked so nice …”

  I breathed a sigh of relief.

  The doctor played her role perfectly when I went to see her with Andre. Andre didn’t suspect anything. He, too, was tested for the disorder, and he didn’t have it. We could have children.

  ONE NIGHT IN ATHENS, I had dinner at the Hotel Grande Bretagne with two friends. We ate at the rooftop restaurant, with its magical view of the Acropolis. The Greek ruins made me think of those at Persepolis, which I had visited when I had been five or so. Both ruins are wondrous reminders of a time when different superpowers ruled the world. Persians call Persepolis Takht-eh Jamshid, or “Throne of Jamshid.” It was the ceremonial capital of the Achaemenid dynasty. The army of Alexander of Macedonia set fire to it around 330 BC.

  As the sun set, the lights came on and the Acropolis became a vessel of yellow light floating in darkness. I could almost see Persepolis in the desert. Each one of its molecules held a story in its nucleus. Its empty doorways were like the eye sockets of a strange skull, and its dusty skeleton seemed to stare into the sky, remembering what the rest of the world had forgotten. Above Persepolis, the full moon rested in its gauzy halo, white and pale and ghostly, watching a severe land where day and night chase each other with a vengeance and mirages are the only threads that weave hope into reality.

  Bahboo sometimes said, “I’ll go back home to Russia one day. Those Communist murderers will be gone, and I’ll go home.”

  She never went back. Eventually, the Communists were banished, but she was long gone by then, her bones decaying in the earth. Yet I have faith that her soul is at peace. I have not dreamed of her even once since she died.

  Now it is my turn to fantasize about going home. Will I live to see the end of the Islamic Republic?

  My Happy-Daisy

  Slippers and a

  Broken Umbrella

  Even though I might see the end of the Islamic Republic, my father might not live that long.

  In the winter of 2009, at the age of eighty-eight, my father developed an infection in his right toe. At first, the infection didn’t seem serious, but it spread and turned into cellulitis, and he had to be put on intravenous antibiotics. Although he slowly recovered, his health began to deteriorate in other ways—a mini stroke, high blood pressure, arthritis. He was holding up, but he had grown visibly slower and more fragile. Still, every morning, he did basic ballet moves for about an hour. He told me that without exercising, he would never have been able to remain relatively healthy for so long.

  After his mini stroke, my father became more aware of his mortality. I had been taking him for his doctor’s appointments, buying his groceries when he was unwell, and making sure that he was comfortable. One day he gave me an envelope, and when I opened it, I found one thousand dollars inside. I refused to accept the money, but he told me if I didn’t, he would get upset.

  “I’m going to die soon, Marina, so what use will money be to me?” he said.

  Since my mother’s death, my father had gradually turned into a different person. Before me was the same person who had refused to lend me the money that would get me out of Iran and probably save my life. I took the envelope and thanked him, asking myself if my father facing his mortality was the only reason he had changed. He and my mother had been married for fifty-eight years when she died. Her death was an enormous loss for him. Early in my teenage years, I became aware that friends and family seemed to like my mother more than they did my father. She was popular and had many friends; my father preferred to be alone. He had two or three friends, but altogether, he disliked socializing. His idea of fun was going to the cottage and spending hours watering trees and shrubs. Since I can remember, he and my mother had had one fight after another, and during most of them, my mother would burst into tears and threaten to leave. Her threats terrified me when I was very young, but soon after I turned twelve, I began to realize that I could take care of myself and didn’t really need my mother. This wa
s an important stage in my life when I became independent and stopped worrying about what my mother might do. By then, I had also found ways to escape my father’s critical and severe watch. I had learned to hide from him things I knew he would not approve of—for example, my friendships with boys and my religious beliefs, which were growing stronger every day. Years later in Canada after my parents moved in with me, my mother initiated most of our fights and my father just followed her. Now that I’ve been married for twenty-five years, I know that after such a long time of living together, husband and wife become almost one entity, affecting each other in a constant, profound way. As I saw in my parents, once one of the pair dies, this entity ceases to exist, and the living part has to redefine itself.

  I always feel connected to those who acknowledge death and accept it as an inescapable reality. If we manage to survive an encounter with it, death has the amazing ability to teach us how to live. We begin to put our life to good use only when every moment becomes a universe to explore and cherish.

  In May 2007 when I was in Amsterdam, a journalist named Kim Moelands, a young woman with a big warm smile and long honey-coloured hair, interviewed me about Prisoner of Tehran. Every so often she would pause in mid-sentence, overcome by a severe cough that came from deep within her chest. It sounded like pneumonia.

  “Are you okay?” I asked her. “Would you like me to order some tea?”

  “No, thank you,” she said and smiled. “I have cystic fibrosis. I’m thirty now, and doctors informed me that I’d die before the age of thirty, but I’m still here.” Then she added that her husband, who had also had cystic fibrosis, had died a year earlier.

  I was at a loss for words.

  She told me how she had related to my book, to living with death, to fighting a seemingly impossible-to-win battle.

  After the interview, we stood by one of the room’s large windows, which opened over a narrow street and a canal, and watched the world go by. It was late afternoon. The water shimmered, and the white, brown, red, blue, and grey reflections of the old townhouses across the street quivered on the water’s dark-green surface. Two cyclists, young men who were speaking and laughing loudly, rode by. A white tour boat was making a U-turn, and surprisingly, it succeeded, even though its length was only slightly less than the width of the canal. Kim and I both took in the beauty around us, very much aware of life’s fragility. We had both looked straight into death’s eyes and had accepted that it was coming for us soon. Acknowledging death doesn’t mean giving up on life; on the contrary, this understanding makes every moment in this world more meaningful and precious. Kim and I now had no time to waste. At that intimate moment, I felt a strange sense of peace, and I knew that Kim felt the same.

  Kim and I remained in touch after I returned to Canada. She told me she had decided to write a memoir, and I encouraged her, explaining that even though writing about my traumatic experiences had been very difficult, it had also given me an exhilarating sense of freedom. Kim’s book, Breathless, was published to great critical acclaim in the fall of 2008 and became a bestseller in Holland.

  The last time I saw Kim was in November 2008, on my way to speak at a conference in Milan. She had just been released from the hospital, where she had faced many complications. She had told me that she had met a man named Jan, a journalist who had interviewed her, and they had fallen in love. I was ecstatic when I heard the news. Kim said that Jan understood very well that their time together was limited. I reminded Kim that everyone’s time is limited. None of us knows how long we have. The difference in Kim’s case is that her disease is a constant reminder of life’s fragility to all who love her.

  Amsterdam was cold and damp at that time of year, and I spent most of my time indoors with Kim. We talked about books, life, and death for hours. She gave me a pair of cozy yellow Dutch-style slippers with smiling red daisies on them. She had bought two identical pairs at the hospital: one for herself and one for me. They had made her smile during painful procedures, and she was sure that they would be good for me, too. I had thought of buying Kim a gift and I had looked for one as soon as I knew I would be able to see her on my way to Italy, but the more I searched, the more I realized that buying her anything was impossible. I wanted to give her health. Except, how could I do that? I wished I could find Jesus, grab Him by the arm, and take Him to Kim. I prayed for her on a regular basis, but my prayers didn’t seem to accomplish much. So I decided to give her my rosary, the one the young Italian man had put in my hand in Milan when I was there to receive the Human Dignity Prize—the rosary from Medjugorje. It had already performed its miracle for me; it had reminded me that the Virgin was watching over me. Since I had received the rosary, I had taken it everywhere with me, but it was time to give it away. It was time for it to perform another miracle.

  I have told my father about Kim, and he asks me about her every time I visit him. Kim is constantly in and out of the hospital, and I pray for her and keep her in my heart. I beg God to cure her, but she is not getting any better. Do I understand the world well enough to know why people like Kim suffer? No, I don’t. All I know is that Kim has shown me a special kind of strength and courage. In her, I see a unique beauty that I have rarely seen before. If she had lived a comfortable and “normal” life, would she be the Kim I have come to admire and respect? Probably not. So I am going to stick with what I know for sure: I love Kim and I want her to be well. And, like a stubborn child who refuses to take no for an answer, I am going to keep on begging God.

  ON THE PLANE on my way to the conference in Milan, I thought of the Angel of Death. I had dreamed of him at the age of seven after Bahboo’s death. In my dream, he was a handsome young man with curly black hair; he was wearing a white robe, and he told me that he was my guardian angel. When I asked him why he didn’t have shoes on, he said that there was no need for shoes where he came from. He held me in his arms and made me feel loved and secure. Ever since, whenever the world became too much to bear, I thought of him. As I lost loved ones, I felt comforted to know that he waited for them in the next world.

  Milan was unseasonably cold, even colder than Amsterdam, with the temperature hovering around 0°C. Early in the morning of my second day at the conference, when I looked out the window of my room, it was snowing—a relatively rare sight in Milan. The snow was accumulating, and the flakes were the largest I had ever seen. In keeping with my morning ritual, I took a shower, got dressed, and went outside for a little walk. I didn’t want my hair to get wet and frizzy, so I opened my umbrella. The wind wasn’t too strong at that point, and I enjoyed the fresh, crisp air. I stood by a large fountain with little angels in the middle of it. Dressed in snow, they appeared even more heavenly. The wind grew stronger, so I turned back to go for breakfast, but a strong gust suddenly blew my umbrella inside out and tore it out of my hand. Years earlier, something similar had happened to me in Iran. Now it was as if a hand grabbed me and pulled me back in time. Tears fell down my face and burned my frozen skin. I couldn’t move.

  I was at a memorial service for Arash, the boy I had first met at the Caspian Sea. I didn’t know how passionately he believed in the need to fight the shah’s regime. In September 1978, only a few months before the success of the revolution, he was killed at a street demonstration. His family didn’t know where his body was. He was eighteen when we met, and had finished his first year of studying medicine at the University of Tehran. We spent a lot of time together that summer, and he was the one who first told me about the Islamic Revolution in progress in the country. I had never heard the name Ayatollah Khomeini before Arash mentioned it to me. I was only thirteen and interested in books and music, not in the news. Even though a five-year age difference stood between us, we became close friends quickly and our friendship turned into love. Arash told me that the shah was a dictator and imprisoned those who opposed him. He said that the people of Iran were revolting against the shah because they wanted democracy. I didn’t know what to make of it. From my perspective, we h
ad good lives and didn’t need a revolution. Arash disagreed with me, telling me I was too young and naïve.

  In December 1979, Arash’s parents finally gave up their search to find his place of burial and had a memorial stone made for him. Friends and relatives accompanied them to his aunt’s cottage by the Caspian Sea, a place he loved dearly. There, on a miserable, freezing, rainy day in January 1980, we held a memorial service for him. My face was numb from the cold. My eyes moved from face to face, from one black outfit to the next, from the grey landscape to the grey sky, longing for hope. The rain suddenly changed to snow. I had never seen it snow at the Caspian. As Arash’s brother, Aram, put a bouquet of red roses next to the memorial stone, a strong gust of wind turned my umbrella inside out and blew it out of my hand, away into the trees.

  Arash’s mother began to scream. Her cries seemed to rip open her chest, exposing her pain and her helplessness. Everyone was sobbing.

  After the service we returned to Tehran, and the first thing I did was find a cardboard box that I hoped was large enough to hold my memories of Arash. I had to cure myself of the agonizing pain I felt, and it seemed that the only way was to forget. Walking from room to room, dragging the cardboard box behind me, I gathered souvenirs, clothes, music tapes, books—anything that even slightly reminded me of Arash. When the box was full, I closed it, taped it securely, and kept it in our basement for a while. In March 1980, during the Iranian New Year holidays, I took the box to our cottage with me. There was a special place on the property where, as Bahboo had taught me, I said the Our Father every morning. From a distance it resembled a big moss-covered rock, but as you approached you could see that it was made of many small stones. It stood about four feet high and six feet wide, and a thick, rusty metal bar reached out of one of its corners. It belonged to ancient times when the sea covered most of the land. Once useful as a place where fishermen tied their boats, it looked strange and out of place when I discovered it in a forgotten corner of the property. I loved to stand on it, open my arms to the gentle breeze, close my eyes, and imagine the sea surrounding me, its glassy surface transforming the sunlight into a golden liquid that glided toward the shore. I had come to call this strange monument the Prayer Rock. I found a shovel, dug a large hole in the sandy earth, and buried the box next to the rock.