My Prison, My Home: One Woman's Story of Captivity in Iran

by Haleh Esfandiari

  I left the apartment early and took a taxi to the house of a friend who would drive me to the Intelligence Ministry. I was nervous; cramps clawed at my stomach. To cheer me up, my friend tried to joke when he dropped me off: “Don’t worry,” he said. “I will visit you at Evin and bring you lots of parcels.”

  I hadn’t been in this grim neighborhood for nearly three months. The streets looked the same, except that the trees were full of fresh green leaves. Inside the building, the security belt still was not working. I passed through the metal detector with my book under my arm and was directed to a room. Ja’fari walked in. He was wearing a checkered shirt and the same parka he had worn throughout the cold winter months. I noticed that he wasn’t carrying his laptop and seemed unusually edgy. He sat on an easy chair facing me, pulled a clutch of papers from his shirt pocket, selected one, and handed it to me. He said, “This is your arrest warrant and we are taking you to Evin.”

  I was stunned. For a moment I felt nothing at all. Then fear, like a wave of nausea, washed over me. Evin Prison had a fearsome reputation. It had been built under the monarchy to house both political and ordinary prisoners. After the Islamic revolution, the thousands of officials of the old regime swept up in the first wave of arrests were incarcerated here, soon to be joined by thousands more arrested in the factional infighting that followed. Men and women had been executed here following midnight trials before hooded judges. Torture to extract information was common. The notorious warden of Evin Prison, Asadollah Lajevardi, had instituted ideological “reeducation” classes for prisoners from left-wing guerrilla organizations, demanding public recantations of their previously held beliefs. It was at Evin and a second prison that some 2,000 inmates were murdered in 1988 in an extended “night of the long knives.”

  I asked to call my mother. Ja’fari allowed me the one phone call. Mother picked up the phone. I took a deep breath and said in German: “Don’t be upset. Please listen carefully. They are taking me to Evin. Notify my family and get me a lawyer.”

  I said good-bye to Mutti and walked with Ja’fari to the front door. A dark green Peugeot was waiting for us. The bright sunlight blurred my vision, but I took in three people: the vaguely familiar face belonged to the man from the judiciary who had led the raid on my mother’s apartment and had tried, absurdly, to engage her in small talk as his men rifled through her things; beside him, a sinister-looking man with a pistol strapped to his belt who served as the driver, and, third, a chador-clad woman who sat with me in the backseat. We drove off, and Ja’fari followed in his own car.

  The two men in the front spoke into a walkie-talkie, reporting our progress, which seemed pointless since we barely crawled in the bumper-to-bumper traffic. I tried not to think of what they might do to me: would I be subjected to torture, beatings, verbal abuse, humiliation? After an hour, the high walls of Evin Prison rose before us. Two large iron doors swung open; guards peered into the car and waved us through; the car drove into the courtyard and stopped before the door of a building. “Let’s go,” the woman said to me. Here, I was handed over to a man in wrinkled gray trousers and a checkered shirt who took me inside and told me to stand facing the wall. I joined others already there, all men, each of us standing barely six inches from the wall in the narrow corridor, staring at nothing.

  After a wait that seemed like an eternity, a woman tapped me on the shoulder. She was short and chubby. Beneath her tight black hood and black chador, I saw a round face, very white skin, and glasses with gold rims. Her voice was comfortingly gentle. She gave me a blindfold. “Wear this,” she said. She took me by the hand and walked me through the building. Walking blindfolded is not only disorientating but humiliating. You hear voices, footsteps, and sounds but cannot quite place them. You worry that you will crack your head on a low beam or break your leg falling down unseen stairs. You are dependent on others to navigate the unfamiliar corridors and stairways, hanging on to the guard as if you were a helpless child.

  The process of booking me into Evin was under way.

  BLINDLY INTO EVIN

  Our first stop was a small office, where a man with a bored look took down my particulars—name, family name, age, place of birth. I was fingerprinted and photographed without the blindfold. We stopped next at the dispensary. My blindfold was removed once again, and I faced a morose doctor who instructed one of two male nurses to take my weight and blood pressure, and then asked me about my medical history and the medications I was taking. I gave him the particulars: over-the-counter eye drops for a chronic eye condition, pills for my arthritis and vitamins for my bones, and a skin condition that required regular attention. He said the prison dispensary would provide me with the necessary vitamins and pills. I said I would rather take my own medication. We left the issue unresolved.

  We stopped at what appeared to be a door—the entrance to ward 209. I could hear the guard ring a doorbell, push open the door, then pull back a curtain. We stepped inside. The guard told me to remove the blindfold. I was standing in a corridor roughly fifty feet long and barely five feet wide, with windows on my right and iron cell doors, painted white, on my left. The guard walked me to the last of the doors, which was open. This was the entrance to my cell. She motioned me to go in. She emptied my bag, made a list of the contents, and took away everything, even my watch and hand cream, leaving me only my reading glasses and my hairbrush. Two other female guards had come to the door for a look at the new arrival. One was in her twenties, the other in her mid-forties.

  They soon left. I heard the door swing shut, then heard the click of the lock as it fell into place—a quiet click that echoed in my head like thunder. I looked at my new “home.” The room was bare but clean. The walls were painted a greenish yellow, with patches of white where the paint had peeled off. Against one wall stood a dirty iron sink. Well-worn, brown, wall-to-wall carpet covered the floor. In one corner there was a single folded blanket and a copy of the Quran. There was no bed or toilet. About eight feet up one of the walls were two rectangular windows that looked out onto a flat roof. They were open to let in fresh air, screened to keep out flies, and barred to keep in prisoners. Fixed to the high ceiling were two sets of bright fluorescent lights. They remained turned on, day and night.

  A female guard with disheveled hair and a wrinkled shirt and skirt came to tell me shoes were not allowed inside the cells (which I ignored) and to admonish me not to “sit or sleep with your feet stretched toward the Quran.” Later she brought me lunch—a plastic container of rice and stew and a plastic spoon. But I could not eat. The chubby-faced guard came by with a hand towel, a bar of soap, a toothbrush, and toothpaste—the standard toilet kit for every prisoner—and later with a chador, which she asked me to please wear whenever I was summoned out of the cell. She showed me the location of the inmates’ bathroom and an outdoor terrace where prisoners were allowed for air one hour each day. Each time I wanted to use the bathroom, I had to knock on the door and be escorted to the facility and then escorted back.

  Ja’fari showed up that very afternoon and subjected me to a lengthy and angry interrogation, which lasted into the late evening. I had not cooperated, he said, and I was therefore brought to Evin. Now I was in their hands and could go nowhere.

  Back in my cell many hours later, I felt drained and exhausted. I refused dinner. I badly wanted to lie down. I undressed, wrapped myself in my chador, and, using my robe as a cover, lay down on the thin blanket on the floor and tried to sleep. But I could not. I was racked by anxiety. The floor was hard; the glare of the fluorescent lights bothered me. I had only a thin headscarf for a pillow. Every hour or so, I heard the clip-clopping of the night guard’s slippers on the concrete floor of the corridor, as she checked on me and the other inmates through the little opening in the cell doors. Through the window bars high up on the wall, I could see the stars in the Tehran sky. I thought my heart would break.

  It must have been around five in the morning when the birds started singing. For a moment I thought I
was back home in Potomac being nudged out of sleep, as I was every morning, by the birds in our garden. I sat up and took in the reality of my prison cell. Still, I thought, these birds are my guardian angels, come from Potomac to protect me.

  At six in the morning the guard with disheveled hair—I had dubbed her Sour Face—showed up with a cup of tea, a piece of bread, and a slice of cheese which she carried in her bare hands. I refused the food; disgusted and numbed, I felt no hunger. An hour later, a young guard whom I nicknamed Rashti because her accent told me she was a northerner from Rasht, came to the cell door and offered me a breakfast of milk, tea, bread, butter, honey, jam, and cheese. I was still too upset to eat; but tea, a slice of bread, and cream cheese became my standard Evin breakfast.

  I was summoned for a second interrogation session soon after breakfast, this time with both Ja’fari and Hajj Agha. It lasted all morning. In the afternoon, a middle-aged guard whom everyone referred to as Hajj Khanum told me to put on my chador and blindfold and follow her. I was to appear before a revolutionary court magistrate.

  THE REVOLUTIONARY COURT

  We went down two flights and out of the building, where I was told to remove my blindfold and step into a Nissan SUV The driver and another man, a guard, sat in the front. I sat directly behind them. One seat farther back was a male inmate in a prison uniform sitting next to a guard. The traffic, as usual, was snarled. I gazed at the familiar streets through tear-blurred eyes. Strange ideas came into my head. I hoped for an accident—an everyday occurrence in Tehran’s mad traffic—and a broken arm or leg, so that I would end up in a hospital rather than back in Evin. We went up Shariati Avenue, turned into Moallem Avenue, and stopped in front of the large building housing the revolutionary court.

  All five of us got out and we followed the driver and guard through a large courtyard and up to the eighth floor. A long wait ensued. The other inmate fetched me a chair and a cup of water. From a window, I could see the snow-capped peak of Mount Damavand—a calm and majestic view that I had loved both as a child and as an adult. I recalled that when things seemed to be taking a dramatic turn for the better under President Khatami, Shaul and I even thought of buying a small place at the foothills of the Alborz Mountains and retiring there.

  Finally a magistrate motioned for me to sit in an easy chair, facing him. He leafed through a file, asked me a few questions about my work at the Wilson Center and about people I knew, and gave me a piece of paper to sign. I read that I was accused of “endangering national security” and that the magistrate had ordered a one-week detention and set bail at 30 million tomans, or about $30,000. The whole business took no more than fifteen minutes. I felt numbed, caught in the coils of a system I could neither understand nor challenge, facing accusations that were at once outlandish and fearsome. I did not even have the presence of mind to ask why I was charged—nor would it have made the slightest difference had I done so. I asked only that I should not be handcuffed. No, the magistrate agreed, that would not be necessary. I asked whether I could call home. “You can call from prison, not from here,” he replied.

  We drove back in the SUV The driver and the guard in the backseat were idly chatting, and I wondered how they could talk so casually while my world was falling apart. “How quickly they came out,” the driver commented. “The magistrate was in a hurry to get home to his wife and children,” the other man replied, chuckling at his own observation. We stopped once again at the looming iron gates of Evin. Outside the gates, men and women waited, anxious, talking among themselves and to the gatemen, hoping for some news of a friend or relative. A similar scene had played out at the revolutionary court only an hour earlier. Inside, we were once again lined up, facing a wall, and I waited until a prison guard came and took me, groping in my blindfold, back to ward 209.

  That evening, I was able to call Mutti. I told her I had been before the magistrate. Half believing I might be able to get out on bail, I asked her to find some way of raising the 30 million tomans. Mother said she had come to Evin for the second time that morning and with some difficulty had been able to leave a package of food, clothes, and medicine at the gate. When she had come on my first day at Evin, she had been told I was not there. I asked one of the female guards for my package; she said they needed Ja’fari’s permission before they could give it to me.

  The next day, when I saw Ja’fari, I spoke angrily to him about my treatment—the appearance before a revolutionary court magistrate, the absurd accusations against me. He merely shrugged. I also complained of the way my mother had been treated at the prison gate. He reluctantly agreed to speak to the prison authorities.

  THE MAGISTRATE AS SUPERMAN

  It must have been around nine that evening when the guard I had nicknamed Sour Face announced a visitor. “Wear your chador.” Ignoring her, I wore only my robe and waited. Who would call on an inmate at night? The door opened. A tall, neatly dressed man with a trimmed beard stood there, accompanied by a short, stout assistant. He had come to inspect my room, he said, to see if I had everything I needed. You might have thought I was a guest at a five-star hotel and the manager had come to make sure I was comfortable. He saw my book lying next to the Quran and asked what I was reading. I assured him Ja’fari had okayed it. He instructed Sour Face to take me downstairs to his office. Three flights of stairs later, my blindfold off, I found myself in a large room, like the living room of a middle-class family: there were easy chairs and low tables and a glass bookcase against the wall. My visitor was now sitting behind a desk sipping tea. To Sour Face’s horror, I removed the chador I had put on before leaving my cell and sat in the chair nearest to him in only my robe and scarf. I ignored her frantic signals to cover myself.

  Matin-Rassekh introduced himself as the prosecuting magistrate in charge of my case. He was not in the day before, when I was first brought before the revolutionary court, he explained. His tone conveyed that he was taking over and that he meant business.

  After verifying my name and particulars, he abruptly said, “You are married to a Jew. Such a marriage is not acceptable in the Islamic Republic. Do you know what the punishment is?” I knew, of course. Under strict Islamic law, a Muslim woman who marries a non-Muslim is considered to have committed adultery. The punishment is death by stoning. I recalled pictures and film clips of such stonings: a village square or an open field; a woman buried to her shoulders in the ground; a crowd of would-be participants and bystanders; the mullah casting the first stone; the flurry of stones that followed in a frenzy of vengefulness.

  I tried to maintain my composure. “I have been married for over forty years, twenty-seven of them under the Islamic Republic. Both my husband and I have regularly renewed our Iranian passports and our national identity cards. Nobody has ever made this an issue. Why should it become a problem when I am sixty-seven and he seventy?” Matin-Rassekh did not answer, but he left me deeply shaken.

  He also asked why our daughter was named after me—a curious question perhaps meant to single us out as people who broke all sorts of traditions. “This is very unusual for Iran,” he said. “The Turks do it.” Unable to think of any better explanation (we had named our daughter Haleh because Shaul liked the name and because, in our mixed marriage, it was religiously neutral), I noted that the practice was not uncommon among the Qajars, the Iranian royal house in the nineteenth century. Citing royalty as a model was perhaps not the most politically astute thing for me to do in the circumstances, but Matin-Rassekh let it pass.

  Under his desk I saw that he had removed his shoes and put on slippers. He sipped tea and played with his prayer beads while I talked or wrote answers to his questions, and he leafed through one of the volumes of Nest of Spies, the collection of diplomatic dispatches and documents discovered by the students who had seized the American embassy in Tehran in November 1979. They had published over fifty volumes of documents under this title. One of the dispatches mentioned Shaul and me as prominent journalists in Iran. Another described a conversation between
Shaul and an embassy official. More trouble for me, I thought. Matin-Rassekh repeated many of the questions Ja’fari had already asked numerous times. But he seemed hardly interested in my answers.

  At one point, Hajj Khanum relieved Sour Face, who had been visibly taken aback when Matin-Rassekh spoke of my husband’s religion. I later learned Sour Face raced back to the ward and told the other guards on duty the scandalous news that “she is married to a Jew! She committed zena-ye mohseneh—adultery!”

  Matin-Rassekh, with an office in Evin Prison, worked particularly closely with the Intelligence Ministry. He had taken charge of my case for obvious reasons: the first magistrate seemed to grasp the thinness of the case against me, and consequently issued a short detention order and set “reasonable” bail by Iranian standards. Clearly, bail implied the possibility of release. From Matin-Rassekh I could expect no such fairness and objectivity. On the contrary, I could easily imagine him signing death sentences in the afternoon, saying his prayers in the early evening, and comfortably having dinner with his wife and children at night.

  I was accused, he noted, of plotting against and endangering national security. He handed me a sheet of paper and asked me to sign it. He was issuing an order for my detention in solitary confinement for three months “to prevent [my] escape from the country.” I had mentally prepared myself for such a detention order, which was common in political cases, but anticipation is never the same as the reality. I reread the single sheet of paper and its key sentences: “accused of plotting against national security…three months in solitary confinement.” They still came as a shock, like hammer blows on an anvil. I was truly afraid.