Captive in Iran

by Maryam Rostampour

  How savage the culture whose survival depends on abusing and killing helpless girls! Cruel, heartless, indefensible—and all in the name of Allah.

  The leaders of Iran are right to fear Jesus, because He is infinitely more powerful than they are—and they know it! Still, for now, they rule by force and terror, holding back the truth at all costs, imposing on their people a religion that the leaders can control.

  God bless the precious memory of Zeynab Nazarzadeh. And may God deliver the people of Iran.

  CHAPTER 13

  BLINDFOLDED AND BLESSED IN WARD 209

  Marziyeh

  After living on separate floors in Ward 2 for a week, we were taken again to Ward 209. Our first trip over there had lasted only half a day, and all they did was interrogate us. We didn’t know whether to expect more of the same treatment as full-time inmates, or if this was when our torture would begin. We said a tearful good-bye to our friends—especially those who had been to 209 and knew what could happen—and placed our few personal possessions into bags. Again we were led across the prison yard to a brick building with a small door. We put on blindfolds and went inside.

  After shuffling down a hallway, peering out as best we could through the bottom of the blindfolds, we were ordered into a tiny cell about six feet square—the size of a closet. A guard told us to take off our blindfolds and all our clothes, and then gave us men’s prison uniforms that hung on us like sacks. We couldn’t keep from laughing at each other.

  “Silence!” the guard ordered. She was a hefty woman of about forty who wore glasses. “Keep quiet. That’s the rule here. If you talk, talk softly. Don’t yell for us and don’t knock on the door. When you have to go to the toilet, press this button on the wall and someone will come for you.”

  She left us to look around our new home, but there wasn’t much to see. Grimy carpet covered the floor. A few dirty blankets were tossed in a corner. The only furniture was a small metal sink. There were no windows in the tall steel walls, which were painted white. The only natural light and ventilation came from a skylight covered with a heavy metal screen that blocked most of the light and air. A bare lightbulb in the ceiling, we soon would learn, burned day and night. We sat talking quietly for several hours. There wasn’t another sound anywhere—quite a change from the constant noise and commotion of Ward 2. We had no knitting, nothing to read. Shirin and Silva had told us to pound on the walls to see if any other prisoners heard and answered back. At first there was no reply, but then we heard an answering knock.

  In response to our pounding, the cell door opened and a young, heavyset guard stood glaring at us without a word. We stared back for a moment before collapsing on the floor in laughter. We were not going to allow prison to rob us of our sense of humor. We needed it to survive.

  “So this is what you do!” the guard said. “Don’t do it again!” She slammed the door and disappeared.

  Sometime later, a tall, young guard, scarcely more than a girl, came in with plastic plates of food. There were decent meatballs in the dish, and it was hot! It was the first time since our arrest we’d had a good, hot meal served to us on plates. Silva had told us that the guards in Ward 209 feed the inmates better because they are political prisoners and news of their treatment is more likely to get out. This made about as much sense as anything else in the Iranian justice system. If we were going to be tortured, at least we’d be well nourished.

  The combination of a hot meal and the quiet surroundings made us very drowsy, and we soon drifted off into a deep sleep. When we awoke, we needed to use the toilet. Though we pressed repeatedly on the buzzer, no one came. Finally we banged on the door. After a minute the older guard with glasses threw open our door.

  “Do you know what time it is?” she huffed angrily.

  “No, we have no idea,” I said. “How could we possibly know what time it is?”

  “It’s three in the morning.”

  “I’m sorry. I didn’t know. But the buzzer doesn’t work.”

  “It’s not a buzzer,” said the guard, exasperated. “It blinks a light to let us know you want to go. Here, put on these blindfolds.” We covered our eyes and followed her down the hall.

  Except for breakfast at 7:00 a.m., our other meals, and trips to the toilet or the shower, our only activities were talking or sleeping. We slept a lot just to pass the time. Every two or three days, we had the chance to go on a break to a larger room with a clear skylight, but we turned it down in protest over our tiny, windowless cell and lack of books or other diversions. We made up nicknames for the guards based on our impressions of them: Mommy, a kind, older woman who was the head guard and usually brought us our food; Auntie, a short, fat, comical-looking woman; Cousin, another chubby guard; Iron Woman, who had braces on her teeth; Grumpy, who was always in a bad mood; and the Ghost, who never spoke or made an unnecessary move.

  After a few days, we were transferred to another small cell, the same size as our old one, where we scarcely had room to lie down, but which we would now share with a third woman, Munis, who had been in Ward 209 for three months. She and her former cellmate, Roxana Saberi, were the ones who had answered our knocks the day we arrived. Roxana was an Iranian-American journalist falsely accused of espionage and sentenced to eight years in prison. Our friend Silva had met her in 209 and had told us to look for her. Because of pressure from the international community, including the American president, Barack Obama, Roxana had recently been released. (She later wrote a book about her experience, Between Two Worlds: My Life and Captivity in Iran.)

  Munis was a publisher and a leader of Al-e Yassin, an ideological group based on Islam, but which respects all religions. Later that day, a fourth prisoner was added to our cell, a girl of about sixteen with long black hair. When she and Munis saw each other, they embraced with shouts of joy. They had met earlier, but then had both been placed in solitary confinement. The new girl’s name was Mahtab, and she had been imprisoned for belonging to the mujahideen organization. She was arrested while walking in a park with her fiancé. She believed it was a way for the regime to harass her father, who had already spent a year at Evin, leaving her mother and ten-year-old brother to fend for themselves. Her father was in the public ward of the prison, and Mahtab had been allowed to see him only once.

  Munis and Mahtab had both endured intense interrogation during their time in solitary, living in cells half the size of the one we were in, which had scarcely left them room to sit. Mahtab’s interrogator had sat close in front of her, opening his legs and moving his body in suggestive ways. She’d had the good sense to tell him to stay away. She might be young, but she knew how to stand up for herself.

  “We’ve heard about the dangerous, high-profile political prisoners in 209,” I said. “Who would have believed this teenage girl has put the national security of our country in jeopardy!” When we laughed this time, no guard came to shut us up.

  “Before I transferred to this cell,” Mahtab said, “the interrogators told me I would be with two girls who had run away from home and converted to Christianity. They said I might be able to convince you to recant and return to Islam.”

  We couldn’t help laughing. “We’re not runaways, and we didn’t leave our families,” Maryam explained. “Your interrogators have tried to shape your perception of us with lies before you even met us.” For a minute, we suspected that she had been sent to spy on us; but we soon realized she was a brave and very honest and naive young girl. Her interrogators had sent her in to change us. What eventually happened was that our testimony changed her. In time, she would become a Christian.

  With four women in the cell, there was scarcely room to lie down. The air became thick and stifling as we did our best to get comfortable. We arranged our pallets on the floor, wedged ourselves next to each other, and fell into an exhausted sleep.

  MARYAM

  The next day, I was blindfolded and taken away to another cell, separating Marziyeh and me once again. My new cellmate was Fereshteh, a middle
-aged woman with short, scruffy hair, who looked like a walking skeleton. She had large, sunken eyes that contrasted sharply with her starkly white skin, and her dark, bleeding gums were a testament to long periods of malnutrition in prison. Her whole body shuddered and wheezed with every breath, and she was so weak that her voice was almost inaudible.

  “Don’t sit here,” Fereshteh said in a worried tone when I took a step toward her in the tiny cell. “Sit on your blanket in your corner. They’re watching us on the security camera, and they can also hear us.”

  “Don’t worry,” I said, trying to calm her. “I don’t think it’s that important to them.”

  “You don’t know these scumbags! You’re so naive.”

  To avoid upsetting Fereshteh, I sat in my own corner and we began to talk quietly. As I related my story of being arrested for being a Christian, Fereshteh constantly warned me to be quiet and to be careful what I said, or else the guards would take me away and she would be alone again. By the time I finished my story, Fereshteh had calmed down enough to tell me her own.

  “I have been here in solitary confinement for about three months,” she began in a thin, soft voice. “Until yesterday, I was interrogated every day. I’ve been on a hunger strike for a month, taking only dates and tea, to protest against my treatment. I’ve been charged with belonging to the mujahideen, but I’m not a member of that or any other movement or political party. My real crime is being a mother who loves her children and wants to stay in touch with them.

  “My two daughters live at the Ashraf camp for mujahideen in Iraq. After I visited them last year, I stayed in contact by telephone and e-mail. One day, coming home from an Internet café, I saw several men lounging outside our apartment. I could tell they were from the ministry of intelligence. I called my husband and told him what was happening. We hid in the street, watching the men around our door, and knew we had to decide right then whether to leave our entire lives behind and escape from the country that day, or face the agents and try to sort everything out. We decided to face them. They ransacked our apartment, arrested us, and separated my husband and me.

  “I have been interrogated seven or eight hours every day until yesterday. I haven’t been tortured, only hit in the head and slapped, but I still have terrible headaches. I have multiple sclerosis. I’m too weak to be a political activist, too weak to endure torture beyond what they’re already doing. That’s why I shake all the time. If my MS isn’t treated, my doctor has told them I will soon be paralyzed and blind. But these vile, inhumane people have no conscience whatsoever.

  “There have been times when I thought I couldn’t endure another day. I’ve tried to kill myself, but have been too weak even to do that. The guards have promised me I will either die of MS in prison or commit suicide. They say I’ll never walk out of 209 alive.”

  “Dear Fereshteh,” I said, “why are the authorities punishing you so harshly for sending e-mails to your children?”

  “As a student, I was politically active and wrote political articles,” Fereshteh said. “I wanted to do something good for my culture and my people. When I was twenty-two, three weeks after my wedding, I was arrested and sentenced to five years in prison. I went to Ghezel Hesar Prison, in Karaj, with some other women from various groups, including the Daftar Tahkim Vahdat student association. For a month, my husband didn’t know where I was, and he thought I’d been killed.

  “In Karaj, we were stripped naked, blindfolded, and put in a cold, empty hall. One by one, we were taken for interrogation and torture. Some women, especially the young, pretty ones, were raped; others whipped with cables; others, including me, beaten in the head until we had concussions and blood streaming from our noses. My MS dates back to this time. I was whipped on the soles of my feet so that I couldn’t walk or stand for days at a time. I had buckets of scalding water poured over my head. Some of us were led blindfolded into the execution chamber, where corpses still hung in their nooses. They made us walk around inside the room for hours. When we bumped into a body, a guard would announce that person’s name.

  “My husband finally found out where I was and came to see me. ‘Forget about me,’ I told him. ‘Go find a new life for yourself.’ After a year, I was transferred to Evin and spent four more years here. By then, most of my friends had been tortured to death or executed. When I was released, I went back to my husband.

  “You must excuse me for talking so much,” she said. “I haven’t had anyone to talk to in so long and I have all these feelings inside me. I feel like I’m going to explode! From the first moment I saw you, I prayed to God that you would come in here with me because I could see you smiling below your blindfold.”

  “Dear Fereshteh, could I pray for you?” I asked.

  Fereshteh laughed, a strange sound coming from such a cadaverous form. “Of course. Why not? I love Christians.”

  I sat beside my new friend and prayed for her and her family. When I finished, Fereshteh put her head on my chest, and we sat together silently for a while.

  “I guess you’re unlucky to have been sent in here with me,” Fereshteh said. “But I am very lucky that God sent you to me.”

  “Please don’t say that,” I replied. “If I had been through what you have, I’d be in much worse shape than you are.”

  With some gentle urging, Fereshteh ate a little of her lunch and, later, all of her dinner. After dinner, a guard brought her a handful of sleeping pills.

  “I have to take these for my condition,” she explained. “I must apologize, but once I take them I can’t stay awake very long.” True to her word, she fell asleep within half an hour.

  Too keyed up to sleep and now with a pounding headache, I tried to relax by walking around the cell. But it was only two steps across, and walking soon made me dizzy. I sat staring at the white walls for hours, thinking of all the heartache, injustice, and agony those walls had seen visited upon the lives of women like Fereshteh, the ocean of innocent blood spilled, tender lives like Zeynab’s snuffed out by evil forces. At last, exhaustion mercifully overcame me and I settled into a fitful sleep.

  After breakfast the next morning, I pressed the button to summon the guard to escort me to the toilet. She came to the door, blindfolded me, and led me down the hall. Once inside the washroom, I was allowed to remove the blindfold. A reflection behind the sink caught my eye. Between the basin and the wall, balanced on a water pipe, was a cross made from the foil top of a yogurt container.

  Marziyeh is trying to communicate!

  I knew if she was using the same facilities, it meant she was on the same floor. My heart was filled with joy as I hid the token in my pocket and put my blindfold back on. I could hardly wait to tell Fereshteh.

  Later that afternoon, I made a similar cross and left it in the same spot in the washroom. When I heard someone in the next cell leave for the toilet, coughing and dragging her slippers in a distinctive way, I knew it had to be Marziyeh, letting me know she’d received the message. I tried a few exploratory knocks on the wall, and the rapid response confirmed that Marziyeh was just next door.

  On my next trip to the toilet, I couldn’t wait to check the hiding place behind the sink for another message. This time, I found a note made from torn-out letters from a newspaper stuck to a piece of tissue with toothpaste. It said, “how are you who are you with.”

  Elated, I now had to figure out a way to answer. The only paper in my cell was Fereshteh’s copy of the Koran, which I didn’t dare damage. As I scanned the spare, small room, my eyes were drawn to a tube of toothpaste, still in its carton, resting on the edge of the sink in the corner. I removed the tube, tore open the carton and flattened it out, and then smeared a light coating of toothpaste on the blank inside surface of the cardboard. Once it was dry, I used my fingernail to scratch my response: “Fine. With Fereshteh.” On my next visit to the toilet, I left the note behind the sink.

  Our “underground spy” communication system survived for as long as we were separated. We wrote notes in t
oothpaste and sent each other crosses, stars, and flowers made from yogurt lids or orange peels. Once, when the guards discovered one of our notes, they were angry and threatened us, but we kept up our correspondence without a pause. God was protecting us every minute.

  Marziyeh

  After Maryam and I were separated, I thought hard about how I could find out whether she was still close by. I had no paper and nothing to write with, so a note was out of the question. I talked with Munis and Mahtab about it, and they suggested some kind of symbol that Maryam would recognize. Munis warned me that if the guards found it before Maryam did, we would both be punished. But I decided it was worth the risk. The next morning, as we were eating our breakfast, I made a small cross from the foil top of a yogurt cup, which I then concealed in the washroom. My heart was overjoyed when Maryam found the cross I had made and left me one of her own. When I found out that Maryam’s new cellmate was Fereshteh, Mahtab told me that she knew her and that she was a kind, gentle woman who would be a great companion.

  During the long days, Munis, Mahtab, and I had lively discussions about faith and religion. They observed the Islamic traditions of prayer and fasting, which they tried to explain to me.

  “The regime gives people a distorted version of Islam,” Munis insisted, “and its actions have nothing to do with the real principles of the faith.”