But Faezeh wasn’t due to arrive until the following evening. I was awakened in my hotel that morning by a panicked call from Dr. Ahmadi. “Camelia?” he frantically asked. I’d developed a nasty cold overnight and had a high fever. In a weak, muffled voice, I replied, “Salaam Agha-ye Doctor. I’m very sick.” He wasn’t listening to me.
“I’m done for! Faezeh’s not coming. Zan was shut down. Tomorrow evening I have a thousand guests coming. I’m screwed! My reputation will be ruined . . .” It sounded like he was screaming underwater.
“Hang up and I’ll talk to Tehran.” I dialed Faezeh’s cell phone number.
“No, I’m not coming. My father is against it. The newspaper’s been closed, and I have a thousand people being held down at the Revolutionary Courts. We’re all out of a job.”
“Amir Ahmadi is going to give me hell,” I said.
“Fuck Amir Ahmadi and his guests!” Faezeh snapped. “You worry about yourself. Sit tight for a few days while this whole thing blows over. They’re saying that you obtained the Nouruz greeting from Farah Diba and that you faxed it to the paper and that running it was your idea. I have to take the fax down there and show it to the Revolutionary Court and say that it wasn’t you . . . You take care of yourself and stay in touch with me.” I was devastated. Zan was my last hope, and I had been waiting for Faezeh to arrive so I could tell her about all my disappointments in Prague. I wanted to cry like a frustrated little girl and hide behind her chador so she could take me home to Tehran. Now nothing was turning out as I’d expected, and I cursed Calhoun, the women at the radio station, Amir Ahmadi, the Revolutionary Court, and my terrible luck all at once.
I asked Amir Ahmadi to call off the event, but he convinced me to speak in Faezeh’s place. “I can’t tell all these guests that the evening’s been canceled. All the dinner arrangements have been made.” Quite a crowd turned out, and I stood on the stage and apologized to everyone for Faezeh’s absence and answered questions about Zan and the reformists. Sick and overwhelmed, I thought of Zan being closed down, and I wondered if I’d ever be able to return home. I couldn’t stand any longer, and they had to bring me a chair to sit in to finish the talk.
SPRING-SUMMER 1999
During the troubled days that followed, as I debated whether to return home, I studied English at Columbia University and furthered friendships within the Iranian community in New York. I met Golriz for the first time in person, though we’d corresponded before. She worked for a human rights organization, and when I was working on the series at Zan about the mysterious killings of intellectuals, I wrote a piece about her group’s plans to investigate the murders. The article caused quite a stir. Now with the typical hospitality Iranians show each other outside the country, she and I often met for lunch.
I was still interested in following the trail of those murders. My research led me to an FBI agent, Jean, and she became my most loyal friend during this difficult period. I was looking into Sa’id Emami, the former deputy advisor to the minister of intelligence and the primary suspect accused of the murders. After his arrest in Tehran, Emami had—or so it was claimed—committed suicide by drinking cleaning fluid, thus evading justice. In New York I’d found an article on the Internet that described how he’d been a student in America during the time of the Shah, attending a school in Washington, DC, where he was a member of the Muslim Student Union. The secret behind the killings had died with him, but I decided to research his tenure as a student and hopefully come up with some stories that could keep the issue alive. One of the surviving reformist papers had expressed interest in the piece. Hesam Zarafshar, a relative of a friend of my father’s who I’d met in New York, helped me track down various leads. I even called the former Iranian ambassador to the U.S., Ardashir Zahedi, in Switzerland. It was important to me to keep working, though Zan might be lost.
Eventually, a source led me to Jean and Tom, FBI agents who asked to meet me in the lobby of a hotel in Washington to discuss my article. They couldn’t find any information on Emami, though, and by our third meeting Tom stopped coming. I eventually abandoned the article on Emami after a series of dead ends, but Jean and I began to meet as friends whenever I traveled to Washington. My English wasn’t very good, and she suggested that I read books expressly for the purpose of learning the language. She told me about her family, her dogs, and her beautiful children and their singing lessons, joking that they sounded more like they were chirping than singing. We both knew our friendship had to remain a secret, that it could be incredibly dangerous for me if I returned to Tehran.
Jean urged me to stay in America. And when I called Faezeh weekly, she warned me that the Revolutionary Guard considered me a prime culprit in the charges facing the paper. I was unofficially charged for interviewing Farah Diba and sending her Nouruz greeting to the paper and encouraging Faezeh to publish it. I was completely innocent—I hadn’t even met the Queen yet, though ironically, I would meet her soon after the charge was leveled. But through all this I was burning to return, as students rioted in protests against the government’s fresh assaults on freedom of speech. My mother told me that martial law had been imposed in the neighborhoods around the University of Tehran. Students had gathered in front of their dormitories to demonstrate against the shutting down of the paper Salaam, and they were taunted and beaten by the Basij. The strikes continued in the hopes of a second revolution. People were waiting for Khatami to stand up and fight—but he remained silent, losing many supporters. I yearned to be in the city so I could report in person at this historic moment. I didn’t see myself as an exile; I felt like I was standing by, waiting for the right moment—any moment—to return.
It was a rainy day in May 1999 when I got a call from Kambiz Atabay, the head of Farah Pahlavi’s office in New York. I had met him several times in the past months as he arranged my interview with Reza Pahlavi. For monarchists outside of Iran, it seemed unbelievable that Rafsanjani’s daughter would approve of my interviewing the “young Shah,” but I’d done it all with Faezeh’s full support in the hope that when Zan reopened we’d have a unique story in our hands. I’d secreted away my recordings of Reza with a friend in America, and I left them there when I returned to Iran, but Zan was never able to publish the piece. The paper stayed closed forever.
I had told Atabay of my ambition to someday also meet Farah, who lived in Paris. But it was still an incredible surprise when he called the family friend I was staying with in New Jersey and informed me that the Queen would receive me in his New York apartment the next morning. I rummaged through my wardrobe for something suitable to wear to meet a queen and settled on a gray coat and skirt and woke up early to fix my hair and makeup.
The weather was terrible. In between getting off the bus at Port Authority and getting into a taxi, my shoes were soaked, and my hair was a mess. I bought a bunch of red roses at the bus terminal. As soon as I opened the door to get out of the taxi at the appointed block, Kambiz Atabay pushed me back in and got in the cab. He told the driver to keep going; the true location of the meeting was being kept secret from me. I was soaking wet when we arrived. I put the roses on the table in the reception room and went into the bathroom to hurriedly wipe the raindrops off my black leather shoes with a tissue.
Busts of the Shah and exquisite paintings and photos were displayed in every corner of the sitting room. Mina, Atabay’s wife, came in with a tray of tea. Lovely fragrant steam rose from the silver teacups decorated with Takht-e Jamshid engravings. She placed another tray of pastries at the edge of the table. I picked up a teacup and a crunchy roll covered in powdered sugar and walked over to the window. I’d taken a big bite of the pastry and was about to sip my tea when Atabay called me from behind. “Camelia.”
Farah was waiting, framed by the doorway. She was stunningly elegant. Fumbling, I put the teacup down. My mouth was so full I couldn’t even say salaam. I gulped it all down and stood on tiptoe to kiss her. She was tall and beautiful, a thousand times more beautiful up close than i
n any of her pictures. There’s never been a good picture, I thought to myself. I didn’t know what to call her. Khanum? Shahbanu? Your Highness?
“You are very thin and beautiful,” is what I finally came out with. “How are you?”
She asked that I convey her greetings to Faezeh, who she’d heard was modern and progressive. She seemed very interested in my views as a journalist about how Tehran had progressed under Khatami’s reform programs. She was keeping in touch, via e-mail, she told me, with many young people in Iran and that sometimes she was so homesick she’d dial a number at random just to hear a voice speaking her language from inside her country.
“The roses are for you,” I said and held them out to her.
“Thank you.” She ran her hand over the petals and patted my shoulder. “They’re beautiful, just like you. I’m pleased to see that Iran has such brave girls. I wish you success.” Then she took her leave and disappeared behind the wall, and Atabay escorted me out. I wondered, was I brave enough to return to Iran? Later, in prison, I’d think of how, in those few polite exchanges, I was risking my life.
JULY 1999
My mother had made a nazr that if I emerged from Mehrabad airport safe and sound, we’d all make a pilgrimage to the shrine of Imam Reza in Mashhad. She had implored me not to come. “You’re making a mistake. I’m not opening the door for you. You don’t understand how crazy Tehran is. It’s not enough the nonsense Kayhan printed about you? Didn’t you read that you’re a monarchist and an American spy?”
I expected to return to New York within ten days. Despite my mother’s, Jean’s, and other friends’ urgent warnings, I had been persuaded to return to Iran by the assurances of Golriz. She’d asked me to accompany and assist her in her work for the human rights organization on this short trip. I trusted her. Then she abandoned me three days after we’d arrived in Iran, when the Ministry of Intelligence agents showed up at my mother’s door to take me to prison. Much later, people told me that while I was sitting alone in my cell, Golriz did nothing to help me and claimed that I had come to America not as a reporter, but as a spy for the Ministry. It’s not really very funny, but it is ironic: at the same time the Ministry was accusing me of spying for the Americans, in America I was being accused of spying for Iran. I have never forgiven Golriz or understood her motives. But I know that while she let me believe I would be safe with her, it was also my own choice to return. I wanted to be free to visit my country any time I wished. I trusted more than anything that I could return to the home that I had always known. I trusted that I would be safe among friends.
Among the pieces I was working on, I was especially determined to finish my article about Qom, to tell the story I’d begun before I left for Prague. I could find a newspaper in New York to publish my articles. I knew now that I couldn’t continue to hope for their publication in Zan. The open atmosphere in the Iranian press had disappeared. Every day the judicial authority shut down another paper, and an increasing number of journalists were being dismissed or threatened. Newspapers no longer had the courage of those heady first few months after Khatami’s election.
I spent half of the second day after my arrival in Qom. Then my mother, my sister and my niece, and I went to Mashhad to make the offering my mother had promised. My mother bought millet and poured it onto the ground for the doves. We put on chadors and went to pray for health and for the strength to stick together. How I had missed my family! I longed to have a satisfying, heart-to-heart talk with my mother and my sister but still hadn’t found an opportunity by the time we got home the next day. We returned to Tehran at dawn, and Kati went home to her husband after she had dropped my mother and me off, exhausted from our excursion.
It was six o’clock in the morning when there was a knock at the door of our apartment. When my mother came in softly a few seconds later and stood over me, I knew what she was going to say.
“There are two men at the door. They say they have a letter for you.”
“I know. They’ve come for me. Keep calm.” I followed my mother, grabbing an overcoat from the rack and putting it on over my nightclothes. I coolly opened the front door, and the men said they had a search and arrest warrant from the Revolutionary Courts. They showed me the warrant, and I read it. I stepped aside and told my mother again to stay calm. They woke Kai Khosrou and got him out of bed and herded us into the hall, telling us to be quiet and sit still. They unplugged the phone and went into my bedroom. I could hear them keeping in touch with their headquarters by radio as they poured all my things, including books and family photo albums, into big bags. They took things from all over the house—from the kitchen, the dining room, from inside the silverware cabinets. They took my passport.
“Put on some pants,” they told me. I looked around my room. I looked at my suitcase lying open in the corner—I still hadn’t even fully unpacked. I looked at the doll that my Modar-jan had bought me. In the hallway, my mother sobbed and said, “Where are you going to take her? Take me, too!”
“Hajj Khanum, you stay at home. You will be contacted.”
I leaned my face close to my mother’s. “Khoda hafez, don’t worry . . . Khoda hafez.”
I looked at the picture of my father on the wall as I walked out the door. There were a few more guards standing along the footpath. I sat in the back of the Peykan as they emptied the bags of evidence into the trunk. I could see even more men standing in the shadows of the trees lining our street. When they were given a sign, they too got into their cars. I turned and looked behind me, at my mother’s flower boxes, at the lace curtains tied back in the windows. I knew she and my brother were watching us.
“Am I ever going to see my street, my house, or my mother again?” I asked myself.
One of the men sitting up front turned around and held out a gray canvas blindfold.
“Please put this over your eyes and lay down in the back.” I lay down, and they threw a blanket over me. Softly I said, “For God’s sake, take me wherever you’re going to take me. Just don’t kill me.”
chapter twelve
Save Yourself by Telling the Truth
One day, right after I’d returned to my cell from the interrogation room, the guards were sent again to get me. “Your interrogator is here. Get ready quick.” I put on my chador and my stockings again and followed him up the stairs. What did he want with me now? Had something happened?
When we were back in the room, he asked, “Good, so you say you’re ready to do whatever the organization needs. Do you want to become one of the nameless soldiers?” I nodded my head.
“Take these confessions by Manuchehr Mohammadi and his friend Qolamreza Mohajeri-Nezhad and read them. They are about their meetings with Reza Pahlavi. Mohammadi has not admitted to taking money from Pahlavi to start the student riots, and you must help us. He has been told that we have abducted one of Pahlavi’s employees in Turkey and brought her to Tehran. You are Shiva Batmanqelich. When you’re in front of Mohammadi, tell him that you were Reza’s accountant and that you wrote a check out to him for twenty-five thousand dollars.”
He forced me up, still blindfolded, and to walk ahead of him and into another room as he spoke to me. Then I could hear another man talking to him, and someone behind me said, “Lift up your blindfold and look at the person in front of you, but don’t look behind you.”
I lifted my blindfold. A blindfolded young man stood before me. He, like me, was wearing prison clothes. He was upset and was squeezing his fingers. I knew that this was Manuchehr Mohammadi.
A voice said, “Put your blindfold back on.” I obeyed, and that same voice, coming now from another direction, said, “Boy, now you lift up your blindfold.” Evidently, Mohammadi was looking at me now. “Put your blindfold back on.”
“Very well, Khanum, did you recognize this gentleman?”
I launched into my role as instructed by my interrogator. I said that he was Manuchehr Mohammadi and that I had seen him in Washington and that I had signed a check for him from Reza
Pahlavi. They asked Mohammadi if he recognized me. He cried and wailed that by God this was a lie—that this woman was a liar and that he had never seen me before, that he did not recognize me. He cried very hard.
His interrogator shouted at him and started punching him, and Mohammadi howled and swore at me. “Why are you lying?” I didn’t know how to answer. They pulled me out of the room. My interrogator growled at me, angry that I hadn’t acted well enough. He said Mohammadi hadn’t confessed because he saw through me and understood that it was all a trick.
“Why did you beat him?” I couldn’t stop myself from asking.
Surprised, he answered, “Beat? Who did we beat? He’s crazy. He’s always hitting himself. You have enough sense to know you’d better mind your own business.”
My senses were all there, and I was minding my own business. I was getting more positive signals from my interrogator as he listened to my confessions. I knew by rote now how to list my crimes, and I’d confessed to every one. Among my primary offenses were having relations with Reza Pahlavi and publishing Farah Diba’s Nouruz greeting in Zan; having relations with an Israeli; working for the CIA at Radio Azadi in Prague; spying for a human rights agent in Tehran (meaning Golriz); seeking action against national security through attempts at interviewing Salman Rushdie; and seeking to harm the government of the Islamic Republic by inspiring fear and dissent among the people by disseminating the black list. Among my secondary offenses were prostitution, wanton behavior, and alcohol consumption; Godlessness and spreading atheism to the blameless; making a mockery of Islam; and opposition to the velayat-e faqih.
“Any one of these crimes could mean execution. You should receive forty lashes for the crime of the consumption of alcohol alone. Now, what do you think should be done with you?”
Camelia Page 20