Members of Congress also got involved in my case. The two Democratic presidential candidates, Senators Barack Obama and Hillary Rodham Clinton, issued statements calling for my freedom. Senators Barbara Mikulski and Benjamin L. Cardin and Representative Chris Van Hollen of our home state of Maryland sponsored resolutions in the Senate and House that were unanimously approved. All sixteen women members of the Senate, led by Hillary Clinton, wrote a letter to UN secretary general Ban Ki-moon urging him to intervene with the Iranians to secure my freedom.
There were dissenting opinions as well. The Iranian community in the United States was highly supportive, but as always in the tangled politics of an exile community, there are those who oppose any effort to build bridges. Shaul received phone calls—but only two—from Iranians who actually seemed to relish my arrest. “I am happy your wife is in jail,” one anonymous caller told him. Particularly hurtful was a New York Times op-ed by an older, former student of mine published while I was still in Evin Prison. Under the title of “Prisoner of Her Desires,” the author, an advocate of punitive sanctions and military threats against Iran, used my arrest as a prop to argue his own case, suggesting that I had received my just deserts for having naively advocated dialogue with the Iranians. But these were the exceptions.
It is impossible to judge with certainty the effect of this international effort on my behalf, but it is difficult to believe that it did not have an impact. The public outcry surely strengthened the hand of moderates in the regime, who saw no profit in holding me, against the hard-liners who wished to make an example of me. The Intelligence Ministry sought to persuade a mass audience that it had a strong case in claiming American schemes for a “velvet revolution” in Iran. But even its allies in the press judged its propaganda efforts a flop.
At the very least, the international effort on my behalf hastened my release. But perhaps far more important, if the Intelligence Ministry was toying with the idea of a show trial, international attention and condemnation of Iran’s behavior made sure such a trial—and its possibly fatal outcome—never took place.
10.
FREEDOM
IN THE DAYS AFTER MY release, I gloried in my freedom and took pleasure in small things: sleeping in a clean bed with ironed sheets, being able to turn off a bedside lamp and sleep in soothing darkness, looking into a mirror again, wearing my own slippers instead of plastic prison slippers. I did not have to see, first thing in the morning, a toilet that was a filthy hole in the ground. I took immense joy in wearing ironed clothes, sipping coffee while chatting with my mother at the breakfast table, putting on perfume. I no longer had to wait with pleading eyes for Ja’fari to hand me his cell phone to make a thirty-second call to my mother. I could talk to Shaul, Hayedeh, Haleh, and anyone else I wished with no one standing by to monitor my conversation. If I wanted fresh air, all I had to do was step out on the balcony of the apartment. I did not have to negotiate for an extra five or ten minutes outdoors. I felt I was giving in to wild abandon.
Three days after my release I joined an extended family gathering for a lunch organized by a cousin. I had gone to the hairdresser, and although my clothes were two sizes too large due to my weight loss, I felt coiffed and neat as I basked in the affection and concern of my close-knit family. Was I physically mistreated? Did I need a doctor? Was I sleeping well? Was I eating enough? All the cousins remarked on my weight loss, and everyone wanted to feed me. My eyes ran over a buffet laden with food: a huge tray of chicken and meat kabob; an assortment of stews; salads; and trays of rice with cherries and saffron, with lima beans and dill, with almonds, pistachios, and red slivers of orange peel. Only four days ago, I was forcing myself to eat bread and cheese, sitting alone at a child’s desk in a prison cell.
MEETING WITH MY LAWYERS
The next logical step was to meet with my lawyer, Shirin Ebadi, who had officially been representing me since my arrest in May, although the Intelligence Ministry had successfully prevented any contact between us. Early one morning I took a cab to her apartment on a street off Yusefabad Shomali Avenue in northwest Tehran. From the cab window, I saw her familiar figure at the apartment door. Barely five feet tall, compactly built, she stood with her feet planted firmly on the ground, as if to say, “Here I stand; you’re going to have to deal with me.” She had used her Nobel Prize money to set up the Center for the Defense of Human Rights, and along with two other lawyers who also worked pro bono, she represented political prisoners like me. Practical and pragmatic, she insisted only that the Iranian government adhere to its own laws, constitution, and international undertakings.
I ran to meet her and we embraced. I wanted to shower her with gratitude. But she was all business. As we paced on the sidewalk, since we both knew her office was bugged, she queried me about the conditions of my incarceration, my prison cell, methods of interrogation, questions I had been asked, papers I had signed, how Matin-Rassekh had dealt with me—all the details important for a human-rights lawyer. Later, at her center, I signed powers of attorney for Shirin and her two partners. She would continue to represent me. The Intelligence Ministry, which had not yet closed my case, could still summon me to trial, and the lien on my mother’s apartment remained in their hands.
That evening Ja’fari called. He had been telephoning me regularly since my release five days earlier, ostensibly to chat but in fact to keep tabs on me. He asked whether I had met with Shirin or signed any papers. He was obviously spying on me. I had met with Shirin, I told him, and signed papers appointing her my attorney. It was an act of defiance on my part, and I meant for Ja’fari to know that.
ON THE STREETS
I was out of Evin but I was still in limbo. I worried lest hard-liners in the Intelligence Ministry succeed in reversing the decision to release me or in preventing me from leaving the country. The danger was real. Kayhan spoke for the faction in the security services that was unhappy that I was free and that the opportunity to make an example of me was slipping away. I tried to maintain a low profile and stay indoors as much as possible. I gave no interviews. I avoided being too much on the streets because I feared being run down in a fatal traffic “accident” or being kidnapped, or disappearing in some other unexpected way.
But I still needed to get a new national identity card, and I decided to resume my habit of daily walks, either with cousins or friends. It was summer, and I thought I could hide behind a pair of large sunglasses. But I was surprised to find, whenever I took a cab from the taxi stand at the corner of our street, that the owner knew me, as did several of his drivers. They had seen me on Iranian TV or heard of me on the BBC, Radio Israel, the Voice of America, or the American-run Radio Farda, broadcasts that Iranians listened to for the accurate news they could not get from Iranian radio and television. While I sat in the backseat, the drivers would talk: how much weight I had lost, they would say; and how concerned they had been for my mother; and why doesn’t she leave Iran? What brought me back to this “cursed land”? The antipathy to the government they displayed surprised me. Had those “beasts” tortured me? One asked me matter-of-factly whether the allegations that I was a spy and a Zionist agent were true. “If there was a shred of truth in these allegations, they would have barbecued me,” I told him. None of the drivers wanted to accept my money. “You are our guest,” they insisted, and we would have a long back-and-forth before they allowed me to pay the fare.
The cobbler on my mother’s street leaped to his feet the first time I walked by his shoe stand. “Hajj Khanum,” he said, addressing me with an honorific. “We were so worried for you. I can’t afford to give you flowers, but I prayed for you.”
When I entered a fruit shop in my mother’s neighborhood, the greengrocer was so astonished to see me he dropped the tomatoes he was weighing and sent them rolling across the floor. Recovering, he cried out to his shop assistant, “See what Khanum Esfandiari needs. Give her the good fruit from the back.” (Iranian grocers traditionally hide their choicest fruit in the back of the store, r
eserving it for their best customers.) A woman in a black chador gave me a big smile and said, “We are so happy you are out. May God burn them in hell.”
“Inshallah,” added the greengrocer. God willing.
At a government registry office where I had some business, the woman clerk behind the desk took one look at me and said in a whisper, “Haleh Esfandiari! Welcome. We are so proud of you.” A man came over with his cell phone and asked permission to take a picture with me.
Four girls headed for the student dormitory on the corner of Mother’s street recognized me one afternoon as I was going to the supermarket. One of them stopped to hug me. “You are a role model for us,” she said, and added, “You are so thin; I could feel all your bones.” It was a moving moment for me. All the propaganda of the Islamic Republic had not convinced these young women that I was a villain; instead, they were on my side. They understood what I had gone through; they realized that under interrogation, I had not chosen the easy way out. I felt vindicated, able to walk with my head held high.
Many of these people had seen me on In the Name of Democracy. My numerous encounters with strangers on the street suggested that the footage of the Ukrainian and Georgian “velvet revolutions” had exactly the opposite effect than the one the government had intended. More than one person came up to me to say that the protests, demonstrations, and fair elections they observed, and the “velvet revolutions” themselves, hadn’t seemed such a bad thing after all. One man approached me and said, “Hajj Khanum, if you ran as a candidate for president you would be elected.” As I later told Ja’fari, “You only succeeded in making me the cow with a white forehead,” a Persian expression meaning, You made me stand out, turned me into a celebrity.
JA’FARI’S FRANTIC PHONE CALL
Ja’fari called again on the evening of Thursday, August 30, almost a week after my release from Evin. My heart fell when I heard his elongated salaaaam, but this turned out to be the call I was praying for. “The aghayun [the gentlemen] have decided you can leave the country,” he said. He wanted to know if my paperwork at the passport office was complete. I had filed all the necessary application forms and supporting documents with the passport office in January, I told him. “The only thing that stands between me and my passport is a clearance from the Intelligence Ministry.” He didn’t appreciate my sarcasm. “Meet me first thing Saturday morning at the passport office,” he said. He sounded like a man in a hurry.
Hajj Agha also called. “You will get your passport Saturday morning. You should leave Saturday night,” he said. Having kept me in the country for eight months, these men were suddenly forcing me out. I could only guess why: now that the decision to send me home had been made, they feared attacks from a hard-line newspaper like Kayhan for letting me go. President Ahmadinejad was going to New York at the end of September for the opening of the United Nations General Assembly, and the government didn’t want him to be hounded by questions about me and Tajbakhsh.
Mother and I spent an anxious weekend at home. I was still on pins and needles lest something go wrong. I slept fitfully Thursday and Friday night. On Saturday morning, I woke up very early to make it for my eight o’clock appointment at the passport office. At seven, the telephone rang. It was Ja’fari. He sounded frantic. “Kojayin?” he said. Where are you? “Parvandeh nist!” There is no file! My file had probably “disappeared” because agents of the Intelligence Ministry had themselves removed it to stop me from securing a passport and leaving the country clandestinely. The ministry’s left hand did not know what its right hand was doing.
I grabbed my folder of important papers and rushed to the passport office. Ja’fari and passport chief Torabi were waiting for me. I gave Torabi my papers and two hours later he handed me my passport, setting some kind of a record for rapid passport delivery. Both he and Ja’fari suggested I leave that evening. But I needed an Austrian visa and the embassy was closed, since it was Saturday; the next Austrian Airlines flight was not until Monday, anyway.
The next morning, Mutti went herself to the Austrian embassy in my stead to pick up my visa. We were worried that something untoward would happen to me in the last thirty-six hours; Ja’fari’s and Hajj Agha’s own haste to see me go was hardly reassuring. Both Mutti and I were straddling two emotional worlds at the same time: elation that my ordeal was over, and gnawing anxiety that it was not.
I had decided to spend a few days in Vienna before returning to America. I needed time alone with Shaul, away from the media spotlight. Shaul and I had married in Vienna and I had close friends there from my university days. I wanted to sit in a Viennese café with Hayedeh and stroll the city’s streets. My dearest Viennese friend, Ute Sassadek, had already moved to her country house, leaving her apartment to Shaul and me.
ONE LAST INTERVIEW
On the Tuesday afternoon that Hajj Agha showed up at Evin Prison to tell me I was free to go, he “requested” that I do one more interview that they could film. He assured me that it would take the form of a friendly chat, with me appearing as a karshenas, an expert. He praised the interviewer, Morteza Haydari, as knowledgeable and “the Larry King of Iran.” I did not think it wise to refuse, and I knew I could stick to banalities and refuse to answer anything that smacked of propaganda, à la In the Name of Democracy.
On the night of my departure, at seven in the evening, Ja’fari picked me up at my mother’s apartment for the drive to the TV studio. I purposely decked myself out in my best “Islamic” dress. I wore a white robe and a light beige scarf; I put on makeup. “You look chic,” Ja’fari said. I sat next to him on the front seat, only barely able to disguise my feeling of revulsion. We made small talk as we made our way to Seda va Sima, the studios of the Voice and Vision of the Islamic Republic of Iran.
Inside, Iran’s Larry King, lacking suspenders or tie, was waiting for me. The bearded, disheveled man present at the In the Name of Democracy interview was also there. Haydari tried to impress me. He told me he had interviewed many famous people, including the Nicaraguan president and Sandinista leader Daniel Ortega.
The cameras started rolling and Haydari began to discuss United States policy in Iraq and Afghanistan, Palestine and Lebanon and the Middle East. I realized he liked to talk and to impress his interviewees and audience. I gave brief answers to his paragraph-long questions and encouraged him to comment at length on the issues he was raising. The disheveled minder appeared displeased again. He had wanted talk of soft revolutions, the conspiracies of the American government and U.S. think tanks, and the villainies of George Soros. But Iran’s Larry King was focused on other issues. In half an hour or less, the interview was over. I said good-bye to Haydari, thankful he had done most of the talking, and flashed a smile at the bearded man. He glared back; I thought he could have strangled both me and my interviewer.
As far as I know, the interview was never broadcast. The Intelligence Ministry had made a last stab at getting me to endorse their conspiratorial worldview, and it hadn’t succeeded.
A PRESENT FROM “THE BOYS”
Ja’fari drove me home. Before saying good-bye he reached into the trunk of his car. He had a farewell present for me from the bacheh-ha, “the boys,” meaning his Intelligence Ministry colleagues. He handed me a large, beautiful inlaid box. There was something heavy in it. “What is it?” I asked. “You will see,” he replied, and drove off.
Back in the apartment Mutti and I opened the box. Inside was a handsome, leather-bound volume of the poetry of Hafez, Iran’s great fourteenth-century poet. Iranians memorize his verses, and they open his book at random at important turning points in life to receive guidance on critical decisions. Hafez happened to be my favorite poet. In Evin I would recite to myself those of his poems my grandmother had taught me or that I had memorized in my youth.
I examined this curious gift, turning over and over in my mind its intended meaning. It was truly bizarre. The Intelligence Ministry was sending a message: “No hard feelings. Let’s be friends.
“Never mind that we kept you away from your family, your work, your friends, and your home for eight months. Never mind that you nearly died of fright the night of the robbery and your mother nearly died of fright the night we raided her apartment. Never mind that we violated your privacy and filmed you in bed in your nightgown. Forget the months of senseless, grueling interrogations. We kept you in solitary confinement for 105 days in Evin Prison, but don’t give that another thought. No hard feelings. So what if we took your mother’s home as bail before we let you go? It’s the way we play the game. We will never close your case; we will leave the threat of indictment and trial hanging over you forever. We won’t lift the bail on your mother’s apartment. But we are sending you home, and giving you Hafez as a good-bye present to show you how much we care for you, and to say, once again, ‘No hard feelings.’”
FAREWELL TO MUTTI
It was already ten at night, just hours before my departure for the airport and my flight. Mutti sat with me in my room as I threw my few pieces of clothing into a suitcase. I took a last look around my room. I wanted to imprint every detail on my mind: the pink-striped easy chairs, the inlaid wood-carved table Father had brought back with him from one of his trips to Pakistan, the sofa and cushions covered with Persian kilims, the paintings and family pictures on the wall.
I knew there would be no return in the foreseeable future for me—not as long as these people were in power. I knew I could never visit Mother in Iran again. She would not hear of it; she would rather stay alone and suffer the separation than have me or Hayedeh risk a visit. Nor would Mutti leave Iran to live with one of us. My father exercised the greater pull on her. She wanted to be buried at his side. I apologized, needlessly, for having put her through this crisis. She wiped away my tears. We both had to be strong, she said.
My Prison, My Home: One Woman's Story of Captivity in Iran Page 23