I, Who Did Not Die

by Zahed Haftlang

  My movie debut was so successful that the men asked me to make a sequel. I was overjoyed to have a new artistic project, and used the occasion to say that I had to stay in my room to write, but really I was exhausted. It’s draining to be performing for seven days straight, and I needed a break. A vacation from nothing, if you will. I was brewing tea in my electric pot when I heard a soft rapping on the door. The new guard, the one I hadn’t met yet, popped his head in. He was young, twenty maybe, with skin so fair he looked Caucasian. I noticed immediately that he was extremely tidy. Not a speck of lint on his uniform, and his hair was parted like a laser beam had just burned a line there. It was like he had just been taken out of the box.

  “You tell a good story,” he said, walking into my room. He sat down in my only chair and extended a cigarette. His jade eyes had an excited shine.

  “Do you mind?” he asked.

  I offered him a cup of tea, which was my way of saying I didn’t.

  “I’m Afshin.”

  “Najah.”

  “I know.”

  He was sitting there like he just wanted to talk, but you can never trust a guard, so I let him steer the conversation. You can learn so much if you nod instead of speak. Afshin was looking for a friend. After getting on someone’s bad side at a prison in Tehran, he’d been reassigned to our little remote oven of the world as punishment. He didn’t elaborate, and I didn’t ask, but now he was forced to stand in one spot by the prison fence all day long, and he was colossally bored. He was looking for someone, anyone, to talk to, and figured I had the gift of gab after watching me perform in the yard. To be polite, I inquired about his family. His mother was a general manager in some type of manufacturing company, and his father was an intellectual, before the Revolution. I knew what that meant. “Intellectual” was often code for “disappeared” by the Islamic regime.

  “The Iranian government killed my father,” he blurted, crushing his cigarette butt with his heel. “I hate this revolutionary government.”

  My skin prickled. We were veering into dangerous territory, and he was either opening up to me or trying to trick me into thinking he was my friend so I would then say something that could get me in trouble. I wasn’t going to take the bait. Guards griped all the time, but they didn’t say treasonous things in front of the prisoners.

  “Do you have any siblings?” I asked.

  His dark look receded, and he reached for something in his pocket. His happy-puppy expression returned.

  “Wanna see some pictures?”

  He unfolded his wallet and wrestled out a photo of two teenage girls, posing with their arms around each other’s shoulders, hair swept up in ponytails. I had not seen a female in so long that I had the same curious sensation as if I were looking at a photo of an exotic animal, like a zebra or a shark. It was strange and beautiful and frightening all at once. My brain overloaded with curiosity. What were their names, what did they like to eat, what music did they listen to, what did their voices sound like, what did they think about the war? I asked question after question, and he was only too happy to answer, and we stayed up all night talking about his beloved sisters.

  Afshin returned the next night, and the next, and the next. Slowly, I started to trust him a little because he kept visiting without asking anything of me in return. He visited so often that he enlisted a second guard to keep an eye on his abandoned post and alert him if the bosses noticed he was missing. The other prisoners noticed our friendship forming and were pleased. The inmates felt, and rightly so, that Afshin’s favoritism was like a bank account, and if we ever needed help in an emergency—a news report from the outside or help getting a message out to a family member—I could call in a favor. It was good to keep the enemy close.

  That day came sooner than I expected. Afshin set his teacup down one night and told me he would soon be transferred back to Tehran. My heart fell an inch. I would miss him; our talks had made me come alive a little bit. I could tell he looked a little sad, too.

  Then he lowered his voice. “If you need anything from me, tell me what it is, and I can bring it to you before I have to go.”

  I was prepared with my answer; I had thought of it the minute he set foot in my room and said hello.

  “Bring me the smallest radio you can find,” I said.

  Three weeks passed, and then Afshin woke me up one night and pressed a battery-powered Aiwa transistor radio, about the size of half a deck of cards, into my palm. He took my other hand and wrapped my fingers around an earpiece. He might as well have placed the key to the prison in my hand.

  “This is more precious to me than my own heart,” I whispered.

  “Good luck to you.”

  “Wait,” I said, stashing the radio in the pocket of my jumpsuit. I gave him two date-pit necklaces and a bracelet carved by the prison artists. “These are for your sisters and your mother.”

  He hugged me and then walked away into the night.

  My fingers trembled as I plugged in the earpiece and turned the dial. The static crackled, then I heard warbled sounds, and then I picked up a Saudi news broadcast. I plugged my other ear with my finger and heard the announcer say something about the United Nations Security Council and a ceasefire resolution. Our war had gone global! I squeezed my eyes shut to concentrate on the words. Saddam was willing to sign it, the reporter said, but Khomeini was balking. Tears of relief flowed down my cheeks. It wasn’t just the prisoners of war who were praying for the war to end; the international community was with us—more than a hundred countries demanding peace! It was only a matter of time before Khomeini gave in. I felt a flutter—so small, barely a wisp of hope—tingle inside me.

  My son must have been six years old now. I hoped he had her olive skin and inquisitiveness, and my athleticism and business smarts. But most of all, I hoped he would accept me back, his sudden dad.

  I clicked the radio off to save the battery. I couldn’t go back to sleep. Instead I scooted under my desk and started scraping the wood from underneath with my spoon. The shavings fell in sweet-scented curls in my lap as I patiently carved a cubbyhole to stash the radio. Then I removed a screw from one of the legs and positioned it to keep the radio from falling out of the slot.

  The next morning, I walked the yard alone, slowly dribbling the wood shavings out of my pocket. I didn’t tell anyone about my radio. When I had good, solid confirmation that the war was indeed over, I’d share the news, but until then it was too much of a secret to ask the others to keep. Something as priceless as a radio was a lightning rod in prison, something men would fight to have access to, and then it would only be a matter of time before the guards caught wind of it and punished all of us for my indiscretion.

  It was July 1988, and while the loudspeakers at our prison kept telling us the war was still on and the Iranians were close to removing Saddam from power, I was hearing quite a different story. On an Iraqi radio station, during a speech marking the twentieth anniversary of the Baath Party, Saddam declared that Iraq stood on the edge of victory, after inflicting “material and moral damage” on Iran. Which didn’t make a whole lot of sense because in the next breath he announced Iraq would give up all the land it had captured inside of Iran. He pledged to cooperate in peace talks, as long as he got what he wanted, mainly both countries to withdraw to their original borders, respect each other’s political systems, Iran to guarantee Iraq’s use of the Shatt al-Arab to export its oil, and an immediate prisoner exchange.

  My heart leaped at the last item on the list. Saddam ended his address to the Iraqi people in typical fashion, with a threat: “If Iran refuses to start direct negotiations with us, it will be held once again responsible for spilling more blood and rejecting the honorable peace path.”

  A response came three days later from the old buzzard Khomeini, now eighty-eight, reluctantly accepting the ceasefire, after his advisers convinced him that it was his only remaining option.

  He issued a statement with characteristic melodrama: “Happy are tho
se who have departed through martyrdom. Happy are those who have lost their lives in this convoy of light. Unhappy am I that I still survive and have drunk the poisoned chalice.”

  And then, on August 20, I heard the news I’d been waiting for since I left Alyaa with our baby boy in her arms. Khomeini and Saddam had signed the ceasefire document. There were 350 UN peacekeepers spread out along the 740-mile border between the two belligerents.

  This goddamn war was over.

  I fell to the floor and held my hand over my heart, feeling it thrum with joy. I couldn’t cry out or jump up and down; I had to find a silent way to explode. I put the earpiece back in, and to hell with the batteries, it was time for some music. I moved the dial until I heard the strains of an Egyptian harp, a Kaman violin, and an oud. Then the Arab diva Umm Kulthum’s unmistakable voice danced between the strings. She was with me in my cell, with her diamond-studded cat-eye sunglasses, beehive hairdo, and flowing floor-length dress, calling to me. The lyrics floated into my ears, lifted me up over the concertina wire, and like a slingshot rocketed me back to my homeland:

  My heart, don’t ask where the love has gone,

  It was a citadel of my imagination that has collapsed.

  I mouthed the words in my mother tongue, imaging myself drowning my sorrows over a drink with Umm Kulthum until the song became fainter and fainter and then petered out. The batteries, after four months, had finally died.

  Let’s just say story time was especially captivating in the yard that day. When I told the men, we couldn’t reveal what we knew, because it was business as usual inside Arak. I don’t know if this was because the guards were too stupid and illiterate to know that the war was over, or if they were purposely keeping us in the dark. The command staff surely must have known about ceasefire Resolution 598, but they sure didn’t let on. Some of the inmates wanted to riot and break down the walls, but I was able to advocate for calm. How would we explain how we knew? Officially, yes, the war had ended. But we were still captives, and we were not the ones with the weapons. Until the prisoner exchanges happened, we were basically still fighting our own hidden war. So we celebrated with winks and nods and grins as we went about our days. We laughed more and cared less when the guards were rude to us. And then little signs began appearing that told us we were about to be released. The guards started being nicer to us, telling jokes and asking about our families. All of a sudden a third meal appeared, and now we were getting lunch daily. Medical teams arrived to give us physicals and examine our ailments. Our crusty jumpsuits we’d been wearing for the last three years were taken away and replaced with new ones.

  The euphoria didn’t last. A whole year went by, and our new jumpsuits lost their brightness, same as our expectations. I’d tried asking the guards about the war ending, but they insisted they had not heard anything about it, and there were no orders to exchange us for Iranian prisoners. I still held out hope that they were lying and that it was taking a long time because Arak was at the bottom of the list for prisoner exchanges, and I was one of the few who kept a positive attitude. But even Sharshab had given up.

  “Maybe it was wrong what you heard on the radio,” he said, taking a seat next to me in the yard.

  “It sounded real,” I offered.

  “Maybe it was true at the moment, but then Saddam or Khomeini changed their mind.”

  I sighed. All these maybes were giving me a headache. It was entirely believable that either country had gone back on its promises. Both were infamous for saying one thing and then doing another.

  “It just doesn’t add up, Najah,” Sharshab said. “The Falklands War happened the same year ours did. It only lasted a few months, and within three days England and Argentina exchanged all their POWs.”

  “You’re making me depressed,” I said.

  When a second year went by and one of the inmates in the prison for high-ranking officers next door started a rumor that Saddam had invaded Kuwait, I gave up hoping to be released. We were fighting two wars now? Or did this mean he’d moved on to a different war? Nothing made sense anymore, like we were human experiments in some twisted game of psychological warfare. I asked a different guard if he’d heard any news about Khomeini signing a peace accord, and he looked at me with a knot of confusion between his brows and asked me, in all apparent seriousness, if the Shah was no longer in power.

  I was in Arak for five more years. I had long since stopped looking for answers when one night the guards shook us awake, told us to gather our things, covered our eyes with blindfolds, and relocated us again, to what I prayed would be a clearinghouse where we would finally be exchanged with Iranian POWs. When I could see again, I was in an outdoor pen enclosed on all four sides by a chain-link fence. There were concrete freeway lane dividers forming another fence around the fence, and behind those, armored tanks. We were in Tehran now, at a military base for the Revolutionary Guards called Heshmatiyeh. A paved walkway separated our pen from an identical one filled with other Iraqi prisoners who were waving their arms and hurling bloodthirsty insults at us. I looked closer and recognized some faces. These were the traitors from my first prison, Torbat-e Jam, the suck-ups who had denounced their country in order to save their own asses. These rats were the reason why we had been singled out and sent to the caves in Sang Bast for extra-special treatment. Every scar on our bodies had one of their names on it.

  We responded in kind, telling them exactly where they could stick it, and soon the air above us was boiling with venom. Guards came and tried to placate us, telling us that we were about to have our long-awaited second chance at life, if we would just stay quiet and not cause any trouble. Their plan was to mix all the prisoners together and then send us back to Iraq when all the paperwork was done. I interpreted what he said, and my men blew up. They swore on the souls of their dead grandmothers that they would kill those treasonous Iraqi POWs the minute they had the chance. The turncoats curled their lips at us and spat, and the guards dragged everyone out of the pens, kicking and screaming, and separated the warring factions into large rooms of 200 men each, with four-tiered wooden bunk beds.

  The prison command’s quick fix to the unrest was to bring in a high-ranking military guy, who swept into the central courtyard with an entourage in a hurried fashion, as if he was irritated by this errand and had more important places to be. All the prisoners had to assemble before him, in our divided camps, with rows of guards with Tasers and batons forming a safety barrier between us. There were so many more prisoners than I had first realized, more than a thousand. The speaker scowled as he gave the assemblage the once-over.

  “Iran won the war,” he boomed. “All you Baathis; your lives are effectively over. You cannot go back to Iraq, and Iran doesn’t want you. So that means you’re mine, and you will do what I tell you. And I will tell you this: the first one who gives me trouble will be executed on the spot!”

  The prisoners who had just arrived with me from Arak were having none of it. We knew that nobody had won the damn war, which had ended in a stalemate eight years before. We said as much, first raising our hands to speak, and when that didn’t work, shouting over him. We demanded the truth, demanded to go home, demanded to know why the Red Cross hadn’t saved us yet. And then he had to go and tell us to shut our big mouths.

  The first shoe sailed through the air and clunked the speaker on the head. Then a second one hit the mullah standing next to him. The prison guards saw where this was going and started to back away. Someone threw a punch and then a full-fledged riot erupted between the brainwashed POWs and our guys as the speaker and his interpreter ran for safety. Guards in the towers fired into the air and prison commanders squawked threats over the loudspeakers in both Arabic and Farsi that they would open fire if we didn’t cease and desist, but there was no stopping a thousand men from avenging one seriously long vendetta. I tried to reason with my friends, pleading with them that there were frail and elderly among us who could get harmed. But my shouts were useless, as I watched them knocking
out the traitors with the very Bruce Lee fighting moves I’d taught them. The brawling lasted for five hours as so many years of pent-up rage roared out of everybody, and it probably would have continued until every last one of us was unconscious or dead had it not been for the Iranian TV news cameras that came bursting through the prison doors. As soon as the fight became a potential public-relations liability, Iranian police in riot gear showed up and started shooting from behind shields, aiming haphazardly into the crowd. Twenty-two men were killed.

  As a punishment, we were locked in our rooms for three days without food or water. When the door finally swung open, a bigwig Persian military guy with three stars on his collar came in and greeted us with a warm smile.

  “Salaam Alaikum.”

  When we didn’t answer, he asked who could speak Farsi, and I approached cautiously and shook his hand.

  “Son, we are very sorry about what happened. That speaker was insulting, and he was wrong and is being court-martialed now. You are Iraqis, you will stay Iraqis, and you will be returned to Iraq. We don’t need new citizens.” He chuckled. “We have enough people in our own country.”

  He said we would not be punished, but I smelled bullshit. The melee had made the news, and the United Nations had ordered envoys to come to the prison to check on our living conditions. This guy wanted to butter us up so that when the inspectors came, we would say nice things about our captors. So this is what I translated to my men, while the dumb guy stood there smiling. And then I used the opportunity to pump him for information. I did a little buttering up of my own.