After Tehran

by Marina Nemat

  After Arash’s death, I became close friends with his brother, Aram, until he left Iran shortly before my incarceration in Evin. I lost touch with him and didn’t hear from him until April 2000, when I received a phone call.

  The winter of 2000 had felt longer than any other I had spent in Canada. It had seemed as though spring would never come, that it had frozen to death somewhere deep in the ground, buried inside an eternal shroud of glittering ice. On April 22, 2000, my thirty-fifth birthday, I checked my flower beds. The deep-green leaves of my tulips had broken the surface of the soil, but the landscape was still grey. The wind whipped against me. It started to rain, and although I hated being cold and wet, I stayed outside, breathing in the scent of the waking earth. A group of returning Canada geese filled the sky with their joyous, urgent cries; their graceful, dark wings arched, stretched, rose, and descended, bearing them back home.

  I went inside the house. I had taken the day off work because of my birthday, but the kitchen floor was a mess and the bedrooms were upside down. I decided to have a cup of tea before attending to housework. As soon as I sat down, the phone rang.

  I picked it up.

  “Hello?”

  “Marina?”

  “Yes.”

  Silence.

  “Hello?”

  “It’s me … Aram.”

  “Aram?” Speaking his name sounded unreal, like hearing a vague and scattered echo.

  “Arash’s brother.”

  “My God. Where … where are you?”

  “New York.”

  “You live there?”

  “No. I’m here for work. I live in Australia.”

  “How did you find me?”

  “Long story … It took a long time.”

  “Yeah. About … nineteen years.”

  I told him that I had married Andre in 1985, and we had two sons. Aram said he was divorced and had one son. His parents had both died a few years back, within a year of each other. He asked me about my parents, and I told him that my mother had died a few weeks earlier, but my father was well.

  “Sorry to hear about your mother,” he said. “You know, she wrote to me and told me you had been arrested …”

  “I was in Evin for two years.”

  “I lost touch with your parents in early 1984. My letters began coming back.”

  “My parents moved.”

  “It took me years to find out you had been released and left Iran.”

  “We came to Canada in 1991.”

  “Marina, I was so angry at you. Didn’t I tell you to be careful?”

  After nineteen years, had he called me to say “I told you so”?

  He said he could come to Toronto to see me. My heart sank. I wasn’t sure if I wanted to see him. Actually, I realized I didn’t. That part of my life was over and I didn’t want to step into it again.

  “Aram … let’s not go back …”

  Silence.

  “Aram?”

  “I understand.”

  “Stay in touch.”

  “I will.”

  I hung up and stared out the window. A black squirrel was sitting on the fence, staring back at me. I sat down. A part of me was telling me to call him back, to say that I had been wrong in not wanting to see him, but I knew what that would mean. For sixteen years, I had avoided the past at all costs. The bubble I carried on my shoulders, the one that held the memories of my life in Iran, had been secure for years, but now cracks were forming on its surface.

  Aram called me again about three months later, and after that, we emailed each other every so often. When I decided to publish Prisoner of Tehran, I asked for his permission to write about his brother and about him. He gave it but requested that I protect his identity. He still had friends and family in Iran and travelled there about once every two years. I had to be discreet enough that Iranian authorities wouldn’t easily recognize him from my book and cause him trouble.

  After Prisoner of Tehran appeared in print, I considered visiting Aram. Before my arrest, I had really liked him. We were simply compatible. Except, I had been his brother’s girlfriend. After Arash’s death, we couldn’t be more than friends. Then I fell in love with Andre in 1981, shortly before Aram left Iran.

  We have a word in Persian that does not have an exact translation in English. It is mehr, which could be translated as “love.” But in Persian, the word for love is eshgh. However, eshgh is the dramatic, hormonal kind of love, when mehr is even-handed, strong, and gentle. It implies friendship and trust. During all the years we had lived together, my eshgh for Andre had evolved into mehr. Seeing Aram could put what Andre and I had in jeopardy.

  In so many ways, Andre and I could not be more different. I love literature, and he reads books only about his work. I love movies, and he watches only the news, sports, or the weather channel. I love to dance, but he has never danced in his life. I love to travel, and he always wants to stay home. I am easygoing and believe in not sweating the small things, but he is a perfectionist and expects everything—for example, even making the bed—to be done flawlessly. He has been loyal to me, and I have been faithful to him. We became one in front of God. When I considered seeing Aram, Andre and I had been married for twenty-two years. We were—still are—committed to each other. I knew I had to protect our marriage. I had to take care of Andre the way he had taken care of me. Till death do us part. This is the reason I decided not to see Aram, even after I faced my past.

  AT THE END of that snowy day in Milan before I fell asleep at night, my last thoughts were of Arash and Aram. I had emailed Aram before going to bed to tell him about my umbrella and how that small incident had drawn me back in time. The next day, I found an email from him in my inbox:

  You won’t believe this, but I dreamed of Arash last night before reading your email. The two of us were standing on the beach by the Caspian, watching you swim in the distance. Arash was holding an umbrella. It was a beautiful day, so I asked him why. He said it was yours, and that he had promised to keep it for you.

  A Dream Catcher

  When I was a child, I sometimes saw angels, monks, or ghosts as I lay in my bed at night. As I grew older, the line that separated dreams from reality became more and more clear, but there were still instances when I found myself in a world I can only describe as in-between sleep and consciousness. A friend of mine who has had quite a few traumatic experiences told me that his nightmares sometimes make him get out of bed in the middle of the night and try to defend himself and the people he loves. Unlike him, though, when nightmare and reality become one, I never react. My nightmares pull me into the dark ocean of silence and paralyze me.

  Occasionally, I have recurring nightmares. In one of them, I am on a relaxing holiday or a day trip with friends or family. We are strolling along, laughing, and having a great time. I’m wearing a bright, floral summer dress. Suddenly, a hand grabs me and drags me into a semi-dark room. There I find myself tied up to a bed. I struggle to scream, but I have been gagged. A man is always in the room, but I can never clearly see his face. I wake up in a cold sweat.

  When my two boys were very young, I bought them each a dream catcher and hung it in their bedrooms. I explained how the dream catcher, which is a willow hoop with a woven web in the middle and is decorated with personal and sacred items such as feathers and beads, would catch their nightmares so that they would have only sweet dreams. Dream catchers originated with the Ojibwa nation, but during the sixties and seventies, Native Americans of a few different nations adopted them. Some consider the dream catcher a symbol of unity among those nations.

  WHEN, in the fall of 2008, I was in the city of Cosenza, Italy, to receive the Grinzane Prize for Prisoner of Tehran, I met a woman named Giuliana Sgrena. She was one of the judges for the prize and sat next to me during a dinner party. I felt at a total loss because I didn’t know anything about her, but she had read my book and, as a result, knew me very well. She was about an inch shorter than I was, probably in her late fifties, and w
eighed no more than ninety-five pounds. Her shoulder-length blond hair was carelessly combed, and she wore no makeup. Her eyes were a colour I didn’t have a name for—a shade between amber and grey. She appeared tired. Very tired.

  “Do you speak English?” I asked her, trying to make small talk.

  “Yes,” she said, “but not very well.”

  “I’m sure your English is better than my Italian,” I said, and smiled. “What do you do?”

  “I’m a journalist.”

  “Do you travel abroad a lot?”

  “Oh, yes …”

  “Have you ever been to the Middle East?”

  “Yes, to Iraq, Afghanistan …”

  “When were you in Iraq?”

  “Many times. Last time in 2005.”

  “How was your trip?”

  “I was kidnapped and held hostage.”

  I felt like an idiot. How didn’t I know this? She did look a little familiar. Maybe I had seen her on TV.

  “I’m so sorry … I didn’t know. What happened?”

  “They kidnapped me outside a mosque in Baghdad where I was interviewing refugees from Fallujah on February 4, 2005, and they let me go a month later. I don’t think they were fundamentalists. They were probably members of the Bath Party or something like that.”

  “How did they treat you?”

  “They didn’t beat me or really mistreat me. What bothered me more than anything was that I never knew if I was going to be alive in five minutes. It was a state of constant terror.”

  I knew exactly what she meant. A place between life and death.

  “What was their demand?” I asked.

  She said they wanted Italy to pull out its troops from Iraq. She told them that she was against the war, and that she was there to interview Iraqis to show the world how the war had affected the average person in Iraq. But they didn’t care. They said they didn’t want any foreigners in their country. They couldn’t see what good she could do for them. She had dedicated her life to getting people heard. Real people. Victims of violence. But they didn’t care. She believed this was what war had done to them: killed any possibility of communication.

  I asked her how they had let her go and she explained that the Italian military secret service negotiated her release. One day, her kidnappers took her out in a car. They had blindfolded her, and she couldn’t see where they were going. They told her not to move or make noise and then they left her in the car. About twenty to thirty minutes later, a friendly voice called her name. It was Nicola Calipari, an official from the Italian military secret service. He said she was free and he was taking her to the airport to go home. Another man was with him. They escorted her to a car and Nicola sat next to her in the back seat because he knew she was disoriented and scared. He was talking to her and comforting her all the time. They drove toward the airport in Baghdad. They were only a kilometre from it when an American armoured vehicle parked off the road behind a bend opened fire on them.

  “The Americans opened fire on you?” I asked, shocked.

  “Yes, the Americans,” she said.

  “Was this at a checkpoint? Did you fail to stop?”

  “No, no, it wasn’t a checkpoint. There was only an armoured vehicle. No signs. No warning. They just opened fire. As soon as we heard the guns, Nicola pushed me down and lay on top of me. He died right there. I was shot in my left shoulder. The bullet exploded in my body and my lung collapsed.”

  I could see the scene she was describing, and it was terribly familiar. Ali. I could see Ali. He pushed me down and lay on top of me, shielding me from the bullets that killed him. He drew his last breath in my arms. I shoved away the memory.

  “The driver was yelling ‘We’re Italian! We’re Italian! Don’t shoot!’ And the Americans finally stopped,” Giuliana continued.

  “This is horrible! What did the Americans say? Why did they shoot at you?”

  “They just said that this was war, and took no responsibility.”

  They had shrugged off the incident as acceptable loss. War is supposed to justify anything and everything. How many innocent Iraqis have been killed at checkpoints? What about those massacred in the violence between Sunni and Shia that erupted after the U.S. invasion? How many lost innocent lives are too many? When there is no accountability, there will be no justice.

  I asked her if she was still working as a journalist, and she said she was. She had been a war correspondent for many years. This was what she did.

  She told me that some people said she should have stayed home and never gone to Iraq, that what happened to her was her own fault.

  “It’s always easier to blame the victim,” I said, “especially if the victim is a woman. I’ve been blamed for what happened to me, too. This is just the way it is. How are you now? Do you have any health problems?”

  “Yes, I do … and I can’t sleep … I’ve become an insomniac.”

  I said that I didn’t know how her experience had affected her, but mine had made me look at my life differently. I now lived in the moment, and imagining what things could be like in a month was hard for me. Every night before I went to bed, I considered that I might not wake up the next day or that I might lose the ones I loved.

  She said that she was the same.

  The distance between Giuliana and me had disappeared as if it had never existed. She and I had been strangers only a few minutes earlier, and now I felt as though I had always known her. I felt her emotions, and I knew she felt mine.

  I told her that I might have seen her briefly on TV when she was kidnapped, but that I’d never heard about the Americans shooting at her. She said that she had published a book about her ordeal. The book had been translated into English and was available in the United States. Later, I read Friendly Fire,* in which she explains that an American military inquest into the shooting incident that killed Nicola Calipari ended with full absolution for the soldiers who had opened fire on the car. The U.S. military concluded that the car was speeding at forty to fifty miles an hour and did not stop despite repeated signals, so the soldiers were forced to shoot. This conclusion went against the testimony of Giuliana and the driver of the car, Agent Carpani, who both testified that the car hadn’t been speeding and there had been no warnings.

  Giuliana worked for a newspaper called Il Manifesto, an independent communist paper. The word communist always leaves me with a strange, uneasy feeling in the bottom of my stomach, because most—though not all—communists I have met have been dogmatic people whose idea of a dialogue is not letting others speak, pushing their ideology on others, and mocking the religious beliefs that others hold. But I liked Giuliana, and I could see that she was a highly intelligent, compassionate woman. I believe in real dialogue and sharing human experiences; clearly, Giuliana and I had connected in this way. I despise political boundaries that separate human beings as if we are from different species. “Religious” and “left” seem mutually exclusive, but are they really? I am a Catholic who doesn’t agree with all the policies of the Catholic Church and many of my views are “left.” What does this make me? I am tired of being categorized, and I believe that in general, all ideologies have proven to be dangerous political tools that usually divide people into “us” and “them.” I have never blindly followed the Catholic Church.

  Very early in the morning when it was still completely dark, a cab picked up Giuliana, two other people, and me to take us to the airport to catch our flight to Rome. Giuliana sat next to me in the back seat, and I wondered what she was thinking. We were both silent. I was sure that travelling in a car in darkness brought back terrible memories for her. Perhaps she replayed the shooting, again and again, each time trying to remember one more detail of the ordeal. This was what I did, and sometimes still do, even if not as frequently as before. I am afraid to forget, as if forgetting means dying a sudden, meaningless death.

  “Look at the moon! It’s so beautiful!” one of our companions said.

  I glanced up and was surprised
that I had not spotted the full moon. It was large and silver and perfect, and yet the darkness of the night felt heavy and absolute. I could feel the spaces between us, the occupants of the car. And then I remembered how Giuliana and I had connected. We lived distinct lives but had somehow shared a similar experience. And the spaces between those of us in the car grew smaller and smaller.

  At the airport as we sat at our gate waiting to board the plane, I noticed that a man standing nearby was staring at Giuliana. The stare wasn’t casual; it carried recognition. For Giuliana not to have noticed him would have been impossible because he stood directly in her view, yet her calm, serious expression didn’t change at all. I was sure that she was recognized frequently, but one could never get used to that kind of attention. Her story had received a great deal of publicity in Italy, and her picture had been in newspapers, on TV, and on posters all over the country. I was proud of her for putting up a fight, for doing what she believed in, and for keeping her head up. I knew that she probably wished her ordeal had never happened. Except it had, and the experience had made her who she was—and she had chosen not to run away from that reality.

  As the plane glided in the grey morning air that was slowly filling with light, I looked out my window and saw the deep blue of the Tyrrhenian Sea washing the western shores of Italy. I had flown over the Atlantic Ocean many times, but the Italian waters were the calmest I had ever seen; the surface of the sea was like blue silk. When I crossed the ocean for the first time in my life, looking forward to a new life in Canada, I could never have imagined that seventeen years later, I would go to Italy to receive an award for telling the story of my darkest days. What was Giuliana’s life like when I was in prison? I tried to compare my time in Evin with hers in captivity. In order to expand my understanding of the world and feel that my experience transcended my limited life, I needed to understand others who had suffered trauma.