by Marina Nemat
Ali was waiting for me in the car. He was thrilled when I told him the news.
“Are you happy?” he asked me.
His question upset me. I was not happy, and this wasn’t fair. The baby inside me didn’t know anything about my life. All it needed was my love and attention. In a way, I was its angel. How could I possibly turn my back on it?
“I’m happy,” I said, “but I’m also in shock.”
“Let’s go to my parents’ house. I want them to know right away.”
I knew that my parents needed to know, too, and so did Andre. Who was going to throw the first stone?
As soon as we arrived at his parents’ house, Ali phoned Akram. His parents were overjoyed, and it pleased me to see them happy. All evening, his mother gave me advice concerning the stages of pregnancy. It already felt like I knew Ali’s mother better than I knew my own mother. I was so desperate to find some normalcy and happiness that I wished I could forget myself and love Ali. But this was impossible. I could never forgive him for what he had done, not only to me but to others.
“You should stay here with us,” Ali’s mother told me. “You need rest and good food.”
I refused the offer, but she insisted. Mr. Moosavi intervened. “She’ll stay where she wants,” he said. “She’s more than welcome to stay here. This is her home the same way it’s Ali’s, but maybe she wants to be with her husband. Pregnancy isn’t an illness. She’ll be fine.”
Akram arrived and gave me hugs and kisses. She was due in about four weeks, and considering that she was a small woman, her belly looked too big. We went to her old bedroom so we could talk in private.
“Marina, I’ve never been this happy in my life! This is wonderful! Our children will grow up together. They’ll be almost the same age.”
I turned away from her.
“What’s wrong?” she asked.
“Nothing. I’ve just been feeling nauseous all the time.”
“Are you happy to be pregnant?”
I didn’t want to hear that question, much less answer it. It broke my heart because I knew I wasn’t happy. I had tried to be, but I wasn’t. I didn’t want the baby—and it hurt.
“You don’t want the baby, do you?”
“No, I don’t, but I don’t want to feel this way. God knows I’ve tried.”
“It’s not your fault. You’re scared. Come, feel the baby moving.”
She put my hand on her belly, and I felt the baby kick.
“Your baby will grow and move inside you like this. It’s the best feeling in the world. Give it a chance. I’m sure you’ll love it more than you can imagine. I’ll be here to help you with everything. There’s no need to worry. And Marina, Ali really loves you, you’re everything to him.”
Akram had truly become my sister, and, whether I liked it or not, I had become a part of Ali’s family. With them, I felt more loved and cared for than in my old life, and their love made me feel guilty because I realized I loved them in return. But love wasn’t supposed to make one feel ashamed. Love was not a sin, and yet, for me, it had become one. Did this mean that one day I would love Ali, too? Did this mean that I had completely betrayed my parents and Andre?
In a cell that night, Ali and I both lay awake in darkness.
“Marina, I’m resigning from my job tomorrow,” he said.
I was surprised to hear this, but it wasn’t entirely unexpected. Even though Ali rarely talked to me about his job, I lived in Evin, and I had seen how frustrated he had become. I had especially noticed this after Mina’s death. I blamed Ali for what happened to her, and I believed he should have done more to save her, but I had felt his helplessness, too. He had lost the battle to Hamehd.
“Why?” I asked.
He didn’t want to talk about it, but I said I deserved to know. He told me he had gotten into a big clash with the prosecutor of Tehran, Assadollah-eh Ladjevardi, who was in charge of Evin. “Assadollah and I have been friends for years,” he said. “He was also a prisoner in Evin during the time of the shah. But he’s gone too far. I’ve tried to change things in Evin, and I haven’t been able to. He wouldn’t listen.”
I had seen Ladjevardi twice. Once he had come for a tour of the sewing factory where I worked. And once when I was stepping out of Ali’s car, Ladjevardi, who was getting into a car, had come up to us and greeted us warmly. Ali introduced me to him, and he said he had heard about me and was glad to meet me. He wished us happiness and said he was proud of me for converting to Islam.
“I promised you a good life when we got married,” Ali said, “and that’s what we’re going to have, away from this place. I’ll work with my father, and we’ll have a normal life. You’ve been strong, patient, and brave, just as I knew you would. Now it’s time to go home. I only need about three weeks to put everything in order.”
Suddenly, leaving Evin was becoming a reality, but what I felt was not happiness. I knew that as Ali’s wife, I would always be a prisoner.
“I’ll have to tell my parents,” I said. I couldn’t keep my marriage a secret forever, especially with the baby on the way.
We heard a few gunshots in the distance. Ali told me he often thought of the night I had almost been shot.
“If I had gotten there only a few seconds later, you would have been dead,” he said. “I’ve never told you this, but I sometimes have nightmares about that night. It’s always the same: I’m there, and it’s too late. I find you dead and covered in blood.”
“That’s what should have happened.”
“No, it’s not! God helped me save you.”
“How about the others? There are people out there who loved them and didn’t want them to die as much as you didn’t want me to die.”
“Most of them brought it upon themselves,” he said.
I wanted to shake him. “No, you’re wrong! You’re only a human being. Can you say that you knew everything about them? Making decisions about life and death needs a complete understanding of the world that we don’t have. Only God can make decisions like this because He’s the only one who knows everything.”
I was in tears and had to sit up to be able to breathe.
“I’m sorry,” he said, “I’m not defending violence, but sometimes there’s no other choice. If someone holds a gun to your head and you get a chance to shoot and defend yourself, will you do it, or will you die without fighting back?”
“I will not kill another human being.”
“Then bad guys will win, and you’ll lose.”
“If winning involves killing, I’d rather lose. But then, others who witness my death or hear about it will know that I died because I refused to give in to hatred and violence, and they’ll remember, and, maybe someday, they’ll find a peaceful way of defeating evil.”
“Marina, you live in your own idealistic world that has nothing to do with reality.”
I stayed awake that night after he fell asleep. It seemed to me that Ali had begun to realize that violence was pointless—torturing and executing teenagers could never lead to any good and could never please God in any way. And, maybe, this was why he had saved me from death and married me; I was his strange, desperate way of rebelling against all that went on in Evin.
On Monday, September 26, Ali and I went to his parents’ for dinner. Two weeks had gone by since his resignation, and, over dinner, he told me we would leave Evin in about a week and would move back to the house he had bought for us.
At about eleven o’clock, we said good night to everyone and stepped outside. It was a cold night, so Ali’s parents didn’t come out with us. The metal door connecting their yard to the street creaked as Ali pushed it open, and its lock clicked loudly as it closed behind us. We walked toward the car, which was parked about eighty feet away where the street was a little wider. A dog barked in the distance. Suddenly, the loud sound of a motorcycle filled the night. I looked up to see it come toward us from around the corner. Two dark figures were riding on it, and as soon as I saw them, I instinctively
knew what was about to happen. Ali also knew, and he pushed me. I lost my balance and fell to the ground. Shots were fired. For a moment that stretched between life and death, a weightless darkness wrapped its smooth, silky body around me. Then a faint light spread into my eyes and a dull pain filled my bones. Ali was lying on top of me. Barely able to move, I managed to turn to him.
“Ali, are you okay?”
He moaned, looking at me with shock and pain in his eyes. My body and legs felt strangely warm, as if wrapped in a blanket.
His parents were running toward us.
“Ambulance!” I yelled. “Call an ambulance!”
His mother ran back inside. Her white chador had fallen on her shoulders, revealing her gray hair. His father knelt beside us.
“Are you okay?” Ali asked me.
My body ached a little, but I wasn’t in pain. His blood was all over me.
“I’m okay.”
Ali grasped my hand. “Father, take her to her family,” he managed to say.
I held him close to me. His head rested against my chest. If he hadn’t pushed me, I would have been hit. He had saved my life again.
“God, please, don’t let him die!” I cried.
He smiled.
I had hated him, I had been angry with him, I had tried to forgive him, and, in vain, I had tried to give him love.
He struggled to breathe. His chest rose and fell and then was still. The world moved around us, but we had been left behind, standing on different sides of an unforgiving divide. I wanted to reach beyond the dark depths of death and bring him back.
The flashing lights of an ambulance…A sharp pain in my abdomen…And the world around me disappeared into darkness…
I stood in a lush forest with my baby in my arms. He was a beautiful boy with large, dark eyes and rosy cheeks. He reached out with his little hand, grabbed my hair, and giggled. I laughed and, looking up, saw the Angel of Death. I ran to him. He smiled his warm and familiar smile, and his sweet fragrance surrounded me. It felt as though I had seen him just the day before, as though he had never left me.
“Let’s go for a walk,” he said and started down a path that disappeared into the forest. I followed him. It was a beautiful day, and it seemed like it had just stopped raining; the leaves of the surrounding trees were shimmering under swollen droplets of water. There were bushes of pink roses everywhere, and the air was sweet and warm. I had fallen behind. He disappeared behind a tree, so I walked faster to catch up with him and found him sitting on my Prayer Rock. I sat next to him.
“You have a beautiful son,” he said.
The baby started to cry. I didn’t know what to do.
“He’s probably hungry. You should feed him,” the angel said.
As if I had done it a million times, I put the baby to my breast, and he took it with his warm, tiny mouth.
I opened my eyes. One by one, round droplets fell from a clear plastic bag into a tube. Drip. Drip. Drip. I followed the tube with my eyes; it was connected to my right hand. The room was dark except for the faint glow of a nightlight. I was lying on a clean white bed. There was a phone on a small table by my bed. I reached for it with my left hand, and a sharp pain filled my belly. I fell back and took a deep breath. The pain went away. I put the receiver to my ear. It was dead. Tears seeped from my eyes.
The door opened, and a blinding light expanded and reached me. A middle-aged woman wearing a white headscarf and a white manteau came in.
“Where am I?” I asked her.
“It’s okay, dear. You’re in a hospital. What do you remember?”
“My husband is dead.”
My husband is dead. Dear God, why does this hurt so much?
The woman left the room, and I closed my eyes. He’s dead, gone, and I feel lonely. Terribly lonely. I almost feel the same as I did when I saw soldiers throw Arash’s body onto a truck. But I loved Arash, and I never loved Ali. What’s wrong with me?
This was grief, denied, but present and strong.
Someone called my name. I opened my eyes to see a middle-aged man with a gray beard and a bald head. He said he was a doctor and asked me if I was in pain, and I said I wasn’t. Then he told me I had lost my baby. Whatever was left of me crumbled.
For about two days, I drifted back and forth between nightmares, dreams, and reality, not knowing which was which. Somewhere in between blurry images and vague voices, I found Mr. Moosavi sitting by my bed. I touched his shoulder, and he looked at me. The room was speckled with sunlight.
“This is too much for all of us,” he said, crying. “But we have to surrender to God’s will.”
I wished I could understand God’s will, but I couldn’t.
Mr. Moosavi continued to talk, but his voice became fainter and fainter until it completely faded away. I dreamed that Andre and I were walking on the beach, holding hands. Taraneh was there, and so were Sarah, Gita, and Arash. A moment later, I was standing at the door of my parents’ cottage, looking toward the driveway. Ali was walking away from me, waving good-bye. I frantically ran to catch up with him, crying out his name, but he had disappeared.
I woke with something cold on my forehead. Akram stood by my bed, and it was her cold hand I had felt. She had dark circles around her eyes and was crying quietly. I couldn’t remember where I was. She reminded me that I was in a hospital. I asked her if Ali was truly dead, and she said he was. Sobbing, she crawled in bed beside me and put her arm around my shoulder.
When I was finally lucid enough, Mr. Moosavi told me he would make the arrangements for my release, but he had been told that he had to return me to Evin for the time being. He also said Ali had made a will a few days before his death and had left me everything he had. I told Mr. Moosavi I didn’t think it would be right for me to take anything that belonged to Ali.
“You don’t want to tell your family about your marriage, do you?” he asked.
I didn’t respond.
“You made my son very happy,” he said. “You deserve to start a new life.”
He sat on a chair next to my bed, holding a string of amber-colored prayer beads in his hand. I recognized them; they were Ali’s. I asked him how Fatemeh Khanoom was coping, and he said she had been very strong.
“How is Akram?” I asked.
“She came to see you a couple of days ago and tried to talk to you, but you weren’t well.”
“Yes, she was here…” I remembered.
“She has delivered her baby, a boy,” Mr. Moosavi smiled a faint proud smile.
“When?”
“She went into labor after we told her about Ali.”
Akram was in the same hospital I was in. She had had excessive bleeding, which was now under control, and the baby had been a little jaundiced but was getting better.
Before taking me back to Evin, Mr. Moosavi took me to see Akram and her little boy, whom she had named Ali. On our way to Akram’s room, we walked by a large window, behind which about thirty babies slept or cried in small cribs. Mr. Moosavi pointed out a tiny baby with a red, wrinkled face, who was screaming angrily. It was little Ali. I asked to hold him, and the nurse brought him to me. He stopped crying as soon as I began rocking him in my arms and started sucking on my manteau; he was hungry. Unable to stop my tears, I took him to Akram, and she put him to her breast.
My baby was dead. I would have loved him if he had lived. But I was never going to feed him, change his diapers, play with him, or watch him grow.
When I walked into the 246 office and took off my blindfold, a guard I had never met before was staring at me. She was in her mid-forties, and had a mocking smile on her face.
“The famous Marina, or should I say Fatemeh Moradi-Bakht. We finally meet. Remember one thing: I’m the boss here now, and you are not going to receive any special treatment from now on. You are like everybody else. Understood?”
I nodded. “Where is Sister Maryam?”
“The Sisters of the Revolutionary Guards in Evin have been reassigned. I’m Sister Ze
inab and I’m a member of the Islamic Committees, and we’re in charge here. Any more questions?”
“No.”
“Go to your room.”
The world had its way of proving me wrong. Things could still get worse. But I was too tired to even shed another tear. In room 6, everyone gathered around me. Bahar’s voice rose above everyone else’s.
“Girls, give her some space. Marina, are you okay?”
I looked into her eyes, and all the voices faded away.
When I came to myself, I was lying on the floor in a corner with a blanket covering me, and Bahar was sitting by my side, reading the Koran.
“Bahar.”
She smiled. “I thought you were in a coma or something. Where have you been?”
I told her about Ali’s assassination. She was shocked.
“He got what he deserved,” she said.
“No, Bahar. He didn’t deserve this.”
“Didn’t you hate him for what he did to you?”
Why did everybody ask me this?
“He wasn’t all evil. There was goodness in him. He was sad and lonely, and he wanted to change, to help people, but he didn’t exactly know how, or maybe he did but couldn’t, because people like Hamehd didn’t let him.”
“You’re not making any sense. He raped you again and again.”
“I married him.”
“Did you want to marry him?”
“No.”
“He forced you into it.”
“Yes.”
“Legal rape is still rape.”
“Bahar, nothing makes sense. I feel like everything is my fault.”
“Nothing is your fault.”
I asked her about her son, Ehsan, and she told me he was taking a nap. She had not heard anything from her husband.
About two weeks later, my name was announced over the loudspeaker. Mr. Moosavi was waiting for me in the office. Sister Zeinab asked him to sign a piece of paper saying I had to be back before ten o’clock at night.
“I’m taking you to my house for dinner,” he said as soon as we stepped out of the office.