After Tehran

by Marina Nemat

  Unlike my experience, Giuliana’s had been public from the start. Moments after her kidnapping, news agencies around the world reported the event, and most people in her country were openly concerned and wanted her to return home safely. For Iranian political prisoners incarcerated in the 1980s before YouTube and Facebook, things were vastly different. In a way, we were kidnapped, too, but by our own government; as a result, our disappearance remained a secret that our families and the local media could not discuss openly, or they would share our fate.

  Just like Giuliana’s abductors, ours had complete power over our lives. In her case, luckily, they chose not to physically harm her, even though the possibility of execution at any moment was excruciatingly real. What would have happened had Italian officials decided not to negotiate with the hostage takers? Giuliana could very well have been killed—maybe beheaded gruesomely, as other hostages had been. We, on the other hand, thousands of Iranian teenagers, were brutally tortured while we lived under the constant threat of execution by firing squad or hanging.

  Giuliana told me that what gave her hope during her incarceration was knowing that the people of Italy were aware of her ordeal and were asking for her release. A few days after her kidnapping, her captors let her watch a report on the EuroNews Network. It showed a giant photo of her displayed at city hall in Rome. Later, the kidnappers were surprised when, at a soccer game, members of Rome’s top soccer team wore jerseys that read Free Giuliana. Italians demonstrated for her release and made their voices heard, giving her strength. In our case the world, it seemed, had decided to forget about us. No one cared what happened to us, as if we had never existed. Our families cried silently and knew very well that they might never see us again, but their fears had to remain secret; in other words, we had to remain a secret. The terrible secret of the Islamic Republic of Iran. Our photos did not appear at city halls and were never published on the front pages of newspapers. We found hope in each other instead of in the outside world. The only way for us to survive was to remember that we were human, that we had families—brothers, sisters, mothers, and fathers—and that we used to go to school, celebrate birthday parties, read books, watch movies, and go on holidays. And by sharing these memories with one another, we created a collective hope that helped us believe that our nightmare would end one day and that we would somehow go home.

  Once Giuliana was released, she fell straight into a media frenzy. Some regarded her as a hero, some a victim, and some severely criticized her, but her experience was known, and this mattered, even though she never received the attention she deserved in North America and the government of the United States did not take responsibility for the events that led to the death of Nicola Calipari. On the other hand, those who survived Iran’s political prisons in the 1980s and were eventually released—in most cases after years—entered a world that was dominated by silence. We were forced to push aside our memories and deal with them alone. Giuliana dealt with her trauma immediately after her release, when we had to create new realities for ourselves from which the prison experience had to be erased. Only after twenty years did I begin the journey that Giuliana travelled right after her ordeal. I have a twenty-year hole in my life that is impossible to fill, but at least I have found my way to myself. I fear there are thousands of others like me who are still living false lives.

  In June 2009, after the disputed presidential election in Iran, Maziar Bahari, an Iranian-Canadian journalist who worked for Newsweek magazine, was arrested in Tehran and accused of espionage. He was tortured, psychologically and physically, and forced to make false confessions. He spent four months in Evin. After he was released and returned to Canada, I listened to his interview on The Current, a CBC Radio One show. He said that his interrogator repeatedly asked him why no one in the outside world was mentioning his name. Didn’t he have friends? Didn’t he have anyone who cared about him and wanted him released? Bahari had been cut off from the world, so he had no way of knowing that in the West a great deal of publicity surrounded his case. Only when one of the nicer guards called him “Mr. Hillary Clinton” did he realize that a serious campaign to end his imprisonment existed. Bahari asked the guard what he meant, and said the guard replied that Hillary Clinton had mentioned his name in a speech that day. This gave Bahari a huge morale boost.

  Bahari said that while in solitary confinement, he regularly thought of the Leonard Cohen song “Sisters of Mercy,” and this helped him survive. He found it ironic that a song written by a Jewish Canadian gave him hope in the most notorious prison in the Islamic Republic of Iran. I had never heard “Sisters of Mercy,” so I listened to it, and wished I had known it in Evin. Now I have it on my iPod and have memorized its words. The only song I sometimes hummed in solitary was Soltan-eh Ghalbha. It helped me remember Andre’s face, the colour of his hair, and the love in his eyes. I had been in Evin so long that his image had started to fade in my mind.

  One night, I dreamed that Giuliana and I built a huge dream catcher together, while Bahari and Leonard Cohen watched us, singing “Sisters of Mercy.” The dream catcher was so big that we easily fit in its circle. Maybe it was big enough to save us all from nightmares.

  *Published in 2006 by Haymarket Books, Chicago; translated from Italian by Lesley Freeman Riva.

  Jasmine’s Poem

  about the Night Sky

  During my incarceration in Evin prison in Tehran from January 1982 to March 1984, the guards regularly took my fellow prisoners and me to the Hosseinieh—the gym-size room on the prison grounds where hundreds of people could gather—to listen to propaganda speeches, attend group prayers, and hear the “confessions” of other prisoners. I hated the Hosseinieh, but I sometimes found myself willingly going there to escape the boredom of Evin’s routines, if only in a minor way. Many of my friends got quite excited about going to the Hosseinieh because we were not blindfolded there, and they hoped to catch a glimpse of family members or friends who were prisoners in other cellblocks. Inmates from different cellblocks were not allowed to speak to one another, but just seeing loved ones was a treat. I had a friend named Jasmine whose only reason to go was to see the night sky. Jasmine was a Muslim and had grown up in the city of Yazd, in central Iran. Many times, the guards walked us to the Hosseinieh when it was dark. As we neared the building, they would tell us to remove our blindfolds. Jasmine would ask me to hold her hand to make sure she didn’t fall, because she didn’t want to take her eyes off the night sky. She was a poet and told me that stars were candles lit by angels. Stars made me think of my nights at the Caspian. I used to lie down on the beach in absolute darkness, count shooting stars, and listen to the whisper of the sea. Before the revolution, I knew next to nothing about real darkness, about the cruel acts that mark too many parts of the world.

  One day, Jasmine recited one of her poems to me. We didn’t have pen and paper, so she couldn’t write it down. I cannot remember it word for word, but it went something like this:

  Stars are candles lit by angels in the windows of heaven

  I see my friends run across the night sky, leaving trails of

  light behind

  Why can’t I be with them—please tell me why?

  Darkness holds me in its dakhmeh

  But I will escape. I promise

  I will dance across the night sky and sing and laugh and play

  I will bathe in the light of the moon and drink from the

  Milky Way

  And I will never be alone or forgotten.

  Jasmine asked me if I knew the meaning of the word dakhmeh. I said that as far as I knew, it signified a dark, terrifying place, something like a dungeon. She said that even though many Iranians were unaware of the word’s history, dakhmeh was what Zoroastrians had called cemeteries in the old times. Although I had gone to a Zoroastrian school, I didn’t know anything about their burial customs, so she explained that Zoroastrians believed that death was not the work of God but the work of the Devil, a temporary triumph of evil over good, and th
is was why they considered the dead to be unclean. According to Zoroastrian belief, demons entered the body after death, so corpses could not be buried or cremated, for fear they would contaminate the world of the living. In the deserts of Iran, special raised structures named dakhmehs, which Westerners called Towers of Silence, stood outside the walls of cities. On top of these towers, the dead lay exposed to the elements. Vultures ate the flesh from the bones and left them to the hot sun of the desert. The towers, which were fairly uniform in their construction, had an almost flat roof, with the perimeter slightly higher than the centre. The roof was divided into three concentric rings: the bodies of men were arranged around the outer ring, those of women in the second circle, and those of children in the innermost ring. Once sun and wind had bleached the bones—which could sometimes take months—they were collected in an ossuary pit at the centre of the tower. There, assisted by lime, they gradually disintegrated. Rainwater washed the remaining material through multiple coal and sand filters before eventually carrying it to the sea. In the early twentieth century, Iranian Zoroastrians gradually abandoned this tradition and began to bury or cremate their dead.

  Jasmine told me that the moment she stepped into Evin, she felt that it was a dakhmeh for the living. The thought made me shudder.

  ONE OF MY REASONS for writing Prisoner of Tehran was to reclaim my past. Now I wanted to reach out to my prison friends with whom I had lost contact. I asked people who I thought might know something and searched various publications and the Internet. I eventually created a website, where people could easily get in touch with me. The time my school friend Shaadi found me through my American publisher, she gave me the good news that when she had travelled to Iran a couple of years earlier, she had seen a few of our classmates who had been arrested around the same time as I; they had survived and were living their lives. However, I was unable to find my best friends in Evin, and I consoled myself by believing that ultimately they had been released. But in late 2008, I found information on a website that Jasmine had been executed. The information came from a report—published by a reputable international organization—that listed her and tens of others as persons executed in the Islamic Republic of Iran in 1984–85. Jasmine’s real name is quite unusual, so I doubted that this could be a case of mistaken identity.

  I read each line of information on the website many times, and my computer screen blurred before my eyes. This couldn’t be true. But her name was in the report, so it had to be true. Executed in 1984. I was released in 1984. The execution must have happened after my release or I would have heard about it. Or would I have? Officials had moved us to different parts of the prison. I don’t even know where Jasmine ended up. In 1983, we had spent a few weeks together in the same cell.

  I could see Jasmine: she was about an inch shorter than I, a petite girl with a serious face. Her sad eyes seemed so large, but I think this was only because she was extremely thin and pale.

  I read the information again. Why was it so incomplete? Was this all that was left of her—only a name and a date? I tried to remember all I knew about her, but twenty-five years had gone by and my memory had gaps. She was about my age and had been a high-school student at the time of her arrest.

  I contacted Amnesty International, and they confirmed that the website I had visited was reliable. I contacted the people who had set up the website, and they said that all they knew was that Jasmine’s name was on a list of the executed, but there was no way to find out how accurate the list was. The person I spoke to told me it was a good sign that Jasmine’s name was on only one list. Only one list? I felt terribly frustrated.

  What if she really was dead? Had they hanged her or shot her? Some guards and interrogators in Evin believed virgins went to heaven when they died, and I had heard that they raped young girls before killing them. Had they raped her before her death? I should have somehow protected her. I should have died instead of her. But everything and anything I said after all these years wouldn’t change the fact that she had died and I had lived. Now all I could do was to tell the world what a beautiful person she was. She did not deserve to go to prison. She did not deserve to die. I wished I could reach back in time and bring her back. I loved her, but my love wasn’t enough. I wished I could do something significant, but all I could do was to write and make sure that people remembered her.

  Every day, Jasmine read the Koran and prayed for hours. Her tears soaked her prayer mat as she said her Namaz. We used to talk and talk. We daydreamed about all the wonderful things we would do once we went home. We wanted to go for walks on the beach and read the books we loved. We wanted to cook elaborate meals and eat until our stomachs hurt. We wanted to go to the movies, dance, laugh, and sing.

  The Internet was always the last resource I used to try to find my friends, as it is usually a source of bad news; it won’t tell you that your friend was released, went back to school, got married, and had kids, but it might tell you that her name is on a list of the executed. I had Googled other friends before Jasmine, leaving her out—and I’m not exactly sure why. I think it was because she was the quietest, kindest, and most loving person I had known in Evin. Why would they have killed her? I had made the same mistake with Shahnoosh, but I had not learned from it; a person’s goodness and innocence do not protect her in Evin.

  Jasmine was one of only two of my cellmates with whom I ever talked about death. For Evin prisoners, death was the elephant in the room; we lived with it, but we never mentioned it. Jasmine and I also spent a lot of time reciting poetry to each other, especially the works of Forugh Farrokhzad and Rumi.

  I had begun reading Forugh a few months before the 1979 revolution. I owned and treasured three collections of her poems. She was one of the greatest Iranian poets of the twentieth century and had a very strong feminine voice that was quite controversial for her time. She was born in 1935, married at sixteen or seventeen, was divorced two years later, and died in a car accident in 1967. After Arash was killed I buried myself in books, including hers. In Evin—in solitary confinement and in 246—I tried to recall Forugh’s words. I had not entirely memorized any of her poems, and I could remember only parts of each of them, including one about death, which I one day recited for Jasmine:

  My death will come one day

  In a spring bright with waves of light,

  A winter dusty and distant,

  Or a fall void of sound and joy …

  … They will come to put me in the earth,

  Oh, perhaps my lovers

  Will lay flowers on my sorrowful grave …

  That was all I could remember.

  “Come on!” Jasmine protested. “That is it?”

  “I’ve never been good at memorizing things. I’m surprised I remember this much.”

  “Maybe you’ll remember more later.”

  “You know … years ago I almost took a full jar of my mother’s sleeping pills,” I confessed.

  “You say ‘years ago’ like you’re thirty!” she said, smiling.

  I laughed. “I wonder if I’ll ever be thirty. It sounds so strange.”

  “You didn’t take your mother’s pills.”

  “No.”

  “Why?”

  “I didn’t want to be a coward.”

  “If you had taken them, you wouldn’t be sitting here with me, reciting poetry.”

  “No.”

  “I would have missed you, but you wouldn’t have missed Evin.”

  “I would have missed you, too,” I said.

  “Are you afraid of death?” she asked.

  “I guess … but I don’t know what death really is …”

  “No one does.”

  “I trust God, though,” I said.

  “Me, too.”

  “Are you afraid of death?”

  “Not really. Even if God decides to turn us into nothing, it’s not so bad.”

  “No, it’s not.”

  Jasmine’s death came much sooner than mine, and I would never even know if
she left this world in spring, summer, fall, or winter. Her friends and family would not have put flowers on her grave—they had probably not been allowed to. Had the guards even told her parents where she was buried? Many of the executed are buried in a cemetery the government calls “The Land of the Cursed,”* which the families of the victims have renamed “The Flower Garden of Khavaran.”** A barren piece of land located on Khorasan Highway on the outskirts of Tehran, it has mass and individual graves, many of which are unmarked. Families of the executed sometimes go there to celebrate the Iranian New Year or other occasions. Many of them can only guess that their loved ones have been buried there. The Revolutionary Guard have attacked several of the peaceful gatherings of the families. Some of the executed have also been buried in marked and unmarked graves in Tehran’s main cemetery, Behesht-eh Zahra.

  I couldn’t stop thinking about Jasmine. Even though she was most probably dead, a part of me refused to believe it—and this angered me. I was mad at myself for being in denial. It frustrated me to the point of madness that my friend might have died twenty- five years ago, and yet she might be alive—I just had no way to know for sure. And if I wasn’t sure about her death, I couldn’t write about it, because if she was alive and still lived in Iran, writing about her would cause her a great deal of trouble and could draw the attention of the authorities to her.

  I talked to a friend of mine, Steve, about my dilemma. Because of his job, he knew a great deal about human rights and victims of torture. He, too, had had a difficult past, and he understood my state of mind. He asked me if I was familiar with los desaparecidos—“the disappeared”—of Argentina and Chile. I had seen photos of Argentine and Chilean mothers holding the pictures of their lost sons and daughters, pleading for information about their fates. Steve said he could only imagine how terrible it was to know a loved one had been arrested and never to hear any news, never to learn if the person was dead or alive. He reminded me that thousands of people around the world have suffered like that. He believed that I should write about Jasmine. Not knowing what happened to her was an important part of my suffering and the suffering of many others like me. He believed I should honour her with my words; in so doing, I would be making my readers aware of los desaparecidos. He said he had no doubt I knew what was best.