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

by Haleh Esfandiari

  Three cats—one black, one gray, and one golden brown—perennially prowled the top of the wall. I could see them through the glass roof. I dubbed them the “killer cats” because they looked so ferocious. There were two faucets and a clothesline on the terrace and detergent was available from the prison guards. There was a small washing machine too, but it dated back to the 1960s, and was reserved for the guards. I washed my clothes by hand every day, sometimes twice a day. The clothes dried quickly in the sun. A fresh change of clothes was important to me as yet another small way to stave off the indignities and dehumanizing effects of prison and remain the same Haleh.

  The larger of the two terraces was accessible through a hallway. It was about the size of a volleyball court and a far superior place for walking. It too was surrounded by high walls topped by barbed wire, but open to the sky. The killer cats prowled the top of the walls here as well. The smaller terrace was reserved for the women inmates, but the larger terrace was used by both the men and the women in ward 209. A member of the prison staff would telephone and specify, by name, whose turn it was to be out. Inmates were allowed one hour a day for what was called hava-khori, or taking the air. But since none of the other women inmates wanted to be outside, the guards allowed me more time on the terraces.

  Because I liked to be outside without my headscarf and in short sleeves, the guards arranged for the security camera to be turned off when I was there, or so I was told. I continued to walk outside even when it rained, much to the surprise of the guards. I sometimes was able to stay on the small terrace until darkness fell.

  After my first night at Evin, when I slept uncomfortably on the floor on a single blanket, I was offered a cot. I knew the thin mattress would not be good for my back, and I worried about lice and disease. Plus, a cot would take up too much space in my small cell and I wouldn’t be able to keep up with my exercises. I asked for eight blankets instead. Six blankets folded in half became my bed. I used one blanket, folded into a rectangle, as a makeshift stand for my books and another for my clothes so that I wouldn’t have to leave them on the dirty floor. In the morning, I gathered up my “bed” to give myself room to move around.

  The two fluorescent lights in my room were left on all night and made it difficult to sleep. When Hajj Agha was unable to have them turned off for me, he offered me a pair of aeronautic goggles. I smiled to myself, thinking I would look like Snoopy, in his imaginary role as a World War I flying ace, and I declined. I began sleeping in my blindfold.

  THE GUARDS

  The women’s section of ward 209 was the kingdom of six female guards. Three of them were women in their forties, and three were in their twenties. I never learned any of the guards’ names, but adopted a nickname for each: Hajj Khanum, Sour Face, and Sunny Face were the three older women and Athlete, Rashti, and Twiggy were the three younger guards. The six women worked in modified twenty-four-hour shifts, so that there were always three guards on duty at any one time.

  Hajj Khanum, the most senior of the guards, was a neatly dressed woman, professional in her behavior, with a manner that demanded and was accorded respect. She had studied at a howzeh, or religious seminary, was well versed in the religious sciences, and often walked around the ward quietly reciting verses of the Quran to herself. When the ward was quiet and the other inmates and guards were resting, she stood outside my cell door and discussed with me various Quranic verses. On one occasion I asked her why so few women appeared in the Quran. She said all the women in the Quran were shirzan, lionesses; no lesser women deserved mention.

  I had been shocked to discover in my prison reading how harsh the Quran is toward the Jews who were living in Arabia at the time of the Prophet and who did not accept Mohammad’s new dispensation. Hajj Khanum wanted to reassure me that as a believer she didn’t differentiate between Christians, Jews, and Muslims. All of them are God’s creatures and we have to respect and love them all, she said. Islam, she stressed, was a magnanimous, loving, and forgiving religion. According to her, the problem was that the Jews had first betrayed the trust of Moses (in Egypt) and then of Mohammad (in Arabia) and had sided with the Prophet’s enemies.

  Hajj Khanum was genuinely concerned about my well-being. Because I did not eat meat, she carefully removed the meat from the stews and rice dishes that we were served. When the inmates were given sweets for dessert she would bring me an extra slice. One morning, she came into my cell, quietly took out a white rose from under her chador, handed it to me, and left. It was a tiny rose, the size of my middle finger. She had picked it in the prison garden. I treasured it. The gesture, in the unkind world of Evin, moved me. The rose summoned a flood of memories—of the climbing roses in my grandmother’s garden and the roses I had planted in our garden at home in Potomac. Now, in a rush, I recalled everything I was missing. I wanted to be embraced and kissed by Shaul. I wanted to hold Mother’s hand, hug Haleh; I wanted to sit on the floor of our house and hold Ariana and Karenna on my knees. I put the rose in a paper cup, and when it faded, I kept it pressed between the pages of my one book.

  Hajj Khanum was almost always paired on duty with Sour Face, the most disagreeable of the female guards. While the others tried to make prison conditions more bearable for the inmates, Sour Face seemed intent on making them more onerous. She groused when I or another inmate asked for tea, even if it was teatime. She was reluctant to let an inmate out, even if it was her turn to spend an hour on the terrace.

  One night after having to ask her to let me go to the bathroom, she lectured me. “Everyone who comes here, including you, thinks they are innocent,” she said. “None of you are innocent. Islamic justice doesn’t make mistakes. All of you are here because you are guilty and you don’t want to repent.” She got so worked up that foam formed at the corners of her lips, and her voice turned into a hiss. I walked past her into my cell and closed the door behind me. That night I had a good cry; it was one of the few times I allowed myself the luxury.

  Sunny Face was the kindest of all the guards. She was chubby, light-skinned, and brown-eyed, with an ample bosom and an ample behind. She wore her dyed blond hair in a bun. She schooled me in Evin’s shopping opportunities. Every Tuesday, inmates could list the items they needed and a prison employee would make the purchases in the local market. I always ordered a week’s supply of vegetables and fruit. I paid cash, as Mutti regularly sent me money.

  On the three days of each week that she was on duty, Sunny Face bought fresh bread from a bakery near home and shared it with me and the other guards. Without her bread, I might have shed another five pounds on top of the twenty pounds I had lost during my incarceration.

  I discovered that Sunny Face loved cooking and that her family didn’t eat much meat at home, either. I was happy to talk about food or anything else with someone; it was preferable to the monosyllabic exchanges I had with the guards. Sunny Face gave me a recipe for an omelet with potato and spring onions, which I promised to try when I was home again. (But once back home, and to this day, I could not bring myself to try the dish and stir up memories of Evin.) I taught Sunny Face how to cook stuffed pepper and stuffed quince, with a filling of rice, split peas, and herbs. I also taught her to make a quiche, a vegetable lasagna, and a stew based on dried fruits.

  One day she brought me a small plastic container of the rice dish with green beans and dill that I had taught her to make. I had to fight back tears at the sight and taste of food I used to cook at home.

  She was the most talkative of the guards and chatted with me about social practices in Iran—marriage traditions, mixing between girls and boys, and the like. She had entered into an arranged marriage with a decent man who treated her well, she said. She had gone with him on a pilgrimage to Mecca.

  Sunny Face believed in arranged marriages, but young people these days, she noted, insisted on choosing their own partners. She expected her son and daughter, both in their early twenties, would do the same. She was proud that both her children were in college.

  A
thlete, one of the younger guards, was six feet tall and heavily built. She had given up weight lifting after injuring her knee. Battling a perennial weight problem and a stubborn skin and scalp problem, she spent all her salary on dietitians and dermatologists. She walked around all day with a vibrating belt about her waist, hoping to lose weight and develop a flat tummy. Conscious of her looks, she chose her non-prison clothes with care and consulted me on the color of clothes she should buy.

  She told me she lived with a group of friends. I assumed she was from the provinces and had no family in the capital, but it was unusual for a group of women from her social background to be living without parents, husbands, or other relatives. Social norms were changing rapidly in the Islamic Republic. Like the other guards, Athlete was religious and performed her daily prayers punctiliously.

  At night, when I was enjoying my last bit of fresh air on the rooftop terrace, Athlete would come and talk to me. By an odd coincidence, she was reading Dostoyevsky’s The Idiot in a Persian translation at the same time that I was reading it in an English translation. “See what happened to the Russian royals and upper classes?” she said, referring contemptuously to the somewhat feebleminded main character, Prince Myshkin. “They all became retarded and deranged.” Her tone implied that all aristocracies, upper classes, and the wealthy are doomed to universal idiocy.

  Athlete ardently believed in the Iranian revolution and the Islamic Republic. But a visit to a museum dedicated to the atrocities of SAVAK clearly shook her. The museum featured pictures of SAVAK’s jailers, interrogators, and torturers. When she saw the pictures, she told me, she remarked to a friend who was with her, “Someday, they will put our pictures in this museum.”

  Rashti was a plump young girl from a religious family who wore long sleeves even in the heat of summer, holding them tightly in place with rubber bands to make sure no man glimpsed a millimeter of her bare wrists. She told me she hoped to move to America with her future husband. “I’ll come and visit you,” she said. I suggested she should put aside her chador and make do with a maghna’eh and robe if she comes to the United States. The suggestion seemed to upset her; she staunchly defended the chador, and I did not argue with her.

  My constant exercising caused Rashti to shake her head—whether in wonder or disapproval, I never knew. “Other inmates sit in a corner or nap in the afternoons,” she said. “You never sit still.” Yet one day she asked me to show her a few exercises to tone up her stomach muscles and her triceps in preparation for her marriage. Rashti also had a stubborn skin problem and was constantly trying new creams and ointments, asking me to translate the literature that came with her medications.

  Finally, there was Twiggy, the youngest of all the guards. Twiggy was very tall and thin. Under her black chador she wore T-shirts and tight trousers that showed off her figure. She took her showers and washed her underclothes in prison. I would see her skimpy string bikini pants and bra drying on the clothesline on the terrace, incongruously out of place alongside the size-fourteen bras and ample underpants of the other guards.

  Twiggy had a university degree and knew English, although I never saw her read a book or newspaper. Sweet but uncommunicative, she simply seemed bored most of the time, almost visibly wishing to be elsewhere.

  I learned a little, but not a great deal, of their personal lives. They hardly ever talked about their families. They seemed all to come from the same working-class or lower-middle-class background. They were all religious, prayed regularly, and observed a strict form of the hijab. They were raised in traditional homes, but their lives were in flux. All had finished secondary school; one had been to university; one had trained at a seminary and another aspired to do so. They had learned to care about their looks, their clothes, their weight, and their health. At least one aspired to go to America. Their children were striking out in new directions.

  For them, their jobs represented a step up in life. As prison guards, they were government employees. They had job security, a reliable monthly income, and the prospect of a pension at retirement. The government, I gathered, took good care of them. Three of the guards had been on pilgrimages to the shrine city Karbala in Iraq, and two had been on pilgrimages to Mecca—all on government expense. Except for Athlete’s one moment of self-reflection during her visit to the SAVAK museum, I never sensed they had second thoughts about working for the intelligence services or the repressive apparatus of the state. They were just doing their job. “We don’t set the rules. We follow our orders,” Hajj Khanum would always say. I did not sense any discontent with the Islamic Republic from these women; they were its beneficiaries and, to my face at least, never criticized it.

  PRISON CUISINE

  Unlike the rest of Evin Prison, where, according to Twiggy, the food was disgusting, the inmates of ward 209 ate relatively well, since they were served the same food as the Intelligence Ministry’s staff.

  For breakfast, each prisoner was given tea and a loaf of bread with cream cheese. Lunch always consisted of rice and a meat, chicken, or vegetable dish and, occasionally, a cucumber and tomato salad or a mixed salad, which for some inscrutable reason they called Chinese salad. For dinner the food was still substantial, but lighter.

  I found I couldn’t face the food. I had never had the most robust appetite, but meals at the prison made me especially uncomfortable. I didn’t want to get sick; I even feared they might try and drug me. I had geared my whole being to remaining alert and on top of things for Hajj Agha’s interrogations and for anything else they might throw at me. It took several weeks before I was ready to accept a bit of rice or a piece of chicken. I never ate meat.

  Once I learned I could have food purchased for me outside prison, I was in control of what I was eating. Every Tuesday I would prepare a list of fruits and vegetables and also order seven small containers of yogurt to last me the whole week.

  I developed a routine, especially when Rashti was on duty. She noticed I did not like to eat fruit unpeeled or uncut, but knives were not allowed in the cells. Rashti would bring a knife and stand by the door while I sliced my fruit and my vegetables to prepare a salad. Then, on the rooftop terrace, I squatted down on my haunches, opened the faucet, and washed the salad, invariably splashing water over myself and everything around me. In my heart, I cursed the people who had reduced me to such devices.

  THE DOCTORS

  Every two weeks, inmates in ward 209 paid a visit to the prison doctor. The dispensary, off the men’s block, was a large, windowless room with a bed at one end and shelves stacked with medicines against the walls. I was taken to the prison doctor on my first morning at Evin. After the routine measurements and questions, he told me to come and see him if I needed medical attention. Two weeks into my incarceration, around ten o’clock on a Friday night, Athlete suddenly showed up: “Let’s go. The doctor wants to see you,” she said. I was startled. It was late, and I had heard of the use of “truth serum” at Evin. Athlete led the way in her black chador; I followed in my robe, scarf, and blindfold.

  A different doctor was sitting behind the desk. He was in his forties. He had a huge hairpiece on his head and a thick Groucho Marx moustache. His ridiculous appearance was a welcome bit of comic relief. “Why am I here?” I asked. For some reason, he wanted to check my blood pressure. I rolled up my sleeve. It was one of the oddities of life at Evin that the strictures regarding female modesty ended where inconvenience began. Male doctors could touch a woman’s bare arms. Interrogators could be alone with a woman in a room, behind closed doors. No one seemed to notice the incongruity.

  Until the third month of my incarceration, I was taken to the dispensary every two weeks to have my weight and blood pressure checked. My medications remained a problem, however. I used Refresh over-the-counter eye drops and took vitamins for my bone and eye conditions, but Mutti was not allowed to bring me my medication from home, and I refused the substitutes offered at Evin. My refusal grated on the prison doctor and he repeatedly brought up the issue. “You do
n’t trust us,” he said. “What is wrong with our medicine and our doctors?” I tried to avoid a discussion of the relative merits of Iranian and American medicine. “I have a one hundred percent trust in Iranian medicine,” I said. “I have my bone-density tests done here. But I prefer to have my medication brought from home. Why waste it?”

  The doctor said he had no objection, but that Hajj Agha had banned medicine from home. Hajj Agha alleged that Refresh eye drops came from Israel. This was the kind of official cant that is common in the Islamic Republic. My eyedrops came from America. Besides, everyone knew there were plenty of Israeli goods in the markets, imported through Cyprus with the markings disguised. One day, at the large Behjatabad fruit market in Tehran, a fruit seller had asked me in a whisper if I wanted Israeli avocados.

  Late in the second month of my incarceration, the physician on duty—he happened to be the doctor who examined me on my first day—brought up the subject of my trust in Iranian medicine again. Never a big eater, and with the crushing anxieties of prison taking their toll, I had been losing weight at an alarming rate and had managed to convey this to my mother, who passed the information on to Hayedeh and Shaul. I had also managed to tell Mutti that my skin condition had visibly worsened; I genuinely feared a form of skin cancer. Shaul must have reported some of this to the press, since the doctor surprised me on this visit with the news that Web sites had begun to report my weight loss, raising concerns abroad about my health. The doctor then suggested they send me to “a four-star hospital, with the best possible doctors” for a full checkup. They could even keep me for a few days, he said, as if offering me a vacation at a luxury spa. A previous inmate was so happy in the hospital, he didn’t want to leave, even to go home, he added.