Captive in Iran

by Maryam Rostampour

  “If you’re offered bail, you should praise the Lord,” a voice in the crowded room declared. “If you think this government will ever apologize to you, you’re crazy.”

  “We believe in our God,” I said. “We’re sure God can show His victory. We can’t do it, but God can show His power.”

  They were astonished at our story of how the judge had served us tea and given us perfume. Nothing remotely like this had ever happened before.

  “I know they’ll apologize now!” someone said, and everyone laughed.

  Our comments in court made big news, though we never knew how word of our statements before Judge Pirabbasi could spread so fast.

  MARYAM

  A few days later, Marziyeh and I were called to the prison office, where a grumpy guard named Izadi was on duty. She had glasses, a wrinkled face, always wore a black chador, and looked like a witch. She often swore at prisoners, especially when she was talking on the loudspeaker. She said Mr. Ramezani was waiting to see us again. “Are you girls blind?” Izadi growled as she walked with us to the office door. “Can’t you see there is a strange man in this office? Put your chadors on properly!” Maybe we had a few stray hairs showing, but mostly she was trying to show off her authority over us.

  Mr. Ramezani didn’t seem to mind about our chadors. In fact, he snickered at Izadi’s sharp comments. He handed us vitamins and medicine he’d received from our sisters.

  “These items are for these two prisoners,” he said calmly but with authority to Izadi. “They have been authorized by the judge. Please be sure they receive all of them.”

  Izadi had a sudden and dramatic change of attitude. Once she realized that our visitor was someone very important, she became a different person. Mr. Ramezani said he wanted to speak to us in private.

  “Of course,” Izadi said in a calm and polite tone that we’d never heard from her before. “There’s an office right here you can use. I will bring you tea.” We accepted the offer of the room but declined the tea. Izadi left us with Mr. Ramezani and a guard, closing the door behind her.

  As we sat down, our visitor asked, “Did you read the verse in the Koran that I asked you to read?”

  “Yes, but we didn’t understand it,” Marziyeh said. “There was nothing in it about Jesus. We think that most of the verses in the Koran that refer to Jesus are in the part known as the Nessa. Is that what you meant?”

  “No, I gave you the right verse. Did you pay attention to it?”

  “We could only read the Farsi translation,” I said. “The verse is written in Arabic and we don’t understand Arabic.” It is said that the miracle of the Koran is in its original Arabic. True Muslims are supposed to read it only in the original language.

  “I see,” Mr. Ramezani said. “You should have concentrated on the Arabic text, which indicates that this is the verse in the Koran that refers to Jesus not only as the Son of God but also as the Savior of mankind. Furthermore, the Muslims have changed its meaning in Persian so that you don’t get an accurate reading in Farsi.”

  I had never heard this before. “How do you know this?” I asked.

  “The man who has asked me to visit you is the one who told me all about this.”

  “Who is this man? Is he a Muslim? Why does he want to help us?” The mention of this anonymous figure was a surprising and very mysterious turn of events.

  “He is not a Muslim,” Mr. Ramezani explained. “In fact, he does not believe in any religion at all. He can connect to all the prophets, and in one of his dreams, Jesus asked him to come and visit you. He and I have been ordered to help you out of your situation.

  “This person says you will soon be freed and then he will personally tell you about his message. We are certain you will be set free soon.” He shifted gears suddenly, leaving us to ponder the identity of this amazing mystery man. “When do you think Jesus will return?”

  “No one has a definite date for it,” Marziyeh answered. “The Bible makes that clear. I’m not a fortune-teller, so I can’t know the day.”

  “The return of Jesus is very near,” Mr. Ramezani said confidently, then added some confusing statements about dates and the calendar. When we asked him to explain more clearly, he said, “I cannot tell you everything right now.”

  His cell phone rang. He listened for a moment. “Can you guess who I’m with right now? Miss Rostampour and Miss Amirizadeh.” He spoke for another minute before finishing the call, then said to us, “This is very interesting. That was the man who sent me here to bring you this message. He didn’t know we were meeting now, but just called to ask how you were. When I said I was with you, he was very pleased and asked me to give you his best regards. He also wanted me to tell you that you will soon be released from prison. The eight months you’ve been in here have been a blessing from God. He wanted to protect you from problems you would have faced if you’d been outside during this time.”

  Could he have meant the riots after the presidential election? Would we have been convicted on different charges? Killed? Something else? We had no idea.

  “Now your prison term is over, and you must be freed,” he went on. “This man lives in a provincial city and is traveling to Tehran to see you.”

  “Is he that confident about our freedom?” I asked.

  “He surely is!”

  Mr. Ramezani told the guard in the room that he must not say anything about our conversation because it would cause trouble. “Rest assured that I will not tell anyone,” the guard answered.

  Our visitor stepped out of the room for a few minutes to see another prisoner who knew him and had heard he was in the office. While our guard was alone with us, he asked, “Are you the two Christian prisoners who get all the mail?”

  “Yes, we are. How many letters are there?” Marziyeh asked.

  “There’s a whole roomful of letters and postcards, with dozens more arriving every day. Several soldiers open and read them, and then report the contents to the authorities.”

  “What do the letters say?”

  “Many of them are in English, and most of them say the same thing. They talk about the sheep and the shepherd, they say they are praying for you, they encourage you to keep resisting, they send you Bible verses, things like that. Some people send drawings.”

  “Since they don’t give them to us, maybe at least you should read them and benefit from their contents,” Marziyeh suggested.

  When Mr. Ramezani came back, I reminded him that he had said earlier we could have our letters if the judge agreed. I told him that Judge Pirabbasi had ruled we could have them.

  “If so, he should have sent a written order to the prison office. The judge knows perfectly well that words don’t mean anything in prison; everything has to be done through official written orders. I think, in any case, he will order that you get the letters after you’ve been released, because there are so many of them, and prisoners aren’t allowed to receive letters anyway.”

  By the time we returned to Ward 2, our meeting with Mr. Ramezani had already made headlines. Some of the inmates remained jealous of the attention we received, yet they all wanted to know about our discussion and what would happen next. We hid our vitamins and medicine in our bedcovers. We heard later that our visitor had stayed to talk with several other women prisoners after we left so as not to raise suspicions that he had come again only to see us.

  This visit left our heads spinning. Who was this Ramezani character, really? Who was his mysterious friend? How could they be so sure we would be released?

  It was all the more shocking and disappointing, then, when the next time we were summoned to the office by the raucous loudspeaker, it was to go back to the place we dreaded most and had hoped never to see again.

  CHAPTER 24

  WAITING ON THE LORD

  MARYAM

  “Maryam Rostampour! Marziyeh Amirizadeh!” Our names rang out over the loudspeaker. When we reported to the office, a guard from Ward 209 was waiting to blindfold us and take us to that mise
rable place. It was very unusual for prisoners to return to 209 after their cases had been heard by the Revolutionary Court. Fereshteh told us that it usually meant a prisoner’s sentence was either going to be extended or applied.

  Marziyeh and I walked to the other building, peeking out from under the bottom of our blindfolds to watch our escort’s feet as usual, and waited in the hallway facing the wall. We heard a woman’s frantic voice cry out, “I swear to God I’m innocent! There must be some mistake!”

  I was taken alone into a room, with Marziyeh left facing the wall in the hallway.

  After the guard had left the room and shut the door behind him, a voice told me to remove my blindfold. In front of me were two men sitting at a large desk. One of the men wore a gray suit and had only one hand. The other man was much older, with white hair. The older man invited me to sit. He asked how long I had been in prison.

  “More than eight months,” I answered.

  “Why did you convert to Christianity? Didn’t you know that those who renounce Islam are considered apostates and their sentence is death?”

  “I met with Jesus Christ. My story is a long one, and I’ve told it many times since I’ve been here. Would you like to hear it again?”

  “You are very decent girls,” the white-haired man said. “You were also our guests here in Ward 209 for a while.” Something familiar about him registered in my mind—I knew his voice! He had been one of the interrogators in 209 before, but this was the first time I had spoken to him without wearing a blindfold.

  Now the younger man spoke. “Miss Rostampour, we have no problem with you and your friend being Christians.”

  Really! Then how to explain the past eight months?

  “Everyone is entitled to his or her own beliefs. You chose to be Christians.”

  He made it sound as if becoming a Christian in Iran was as simple as buying a loaf of bread. So they arrested and imprisoned us just for fun, and Christian converts don’t really face the death penalty? Obviously, he was trying very hard to offset the mess others had made of our case with some syrupy language. Someone is really worried about what the regime has done to us and how it makes them look!

  “What can I do for you?” the man asked.

  What can you do for us? Anything either of us requested would make us beholden to him, which no doubt he would desperately like to happen.

  “I don’t need anything from you, thank you.”

  “Do you know who this is?” the older man asked.

  “No, I don’t.”

  “This gentleman is Mr. Jafari Dolatabadi, Tehran’s chief prosecutor. He is here to help you.”

  The chief prosecutor, here to help us? Most interesting!

  “If you need anything, all you have to do is ask.”

  Mr. Dolatabadi smiled and said, “I have the power to let you go free or not. Are you sure you don’t want me to help you with anything? I can set you free.”

  “I sincerely thank you for your kindness,” I replied, “but my trust and reliance are with God. I believe it is the Lord’s will that Marziyeh and I should be in prison, and that our freedom lies in His hands alone. If the Lord wishes to release us, no one can stand in His way. Of course, we don’t like staying in prison and we would rather be free, but we prefer to wait for the Lord’s decision on the matter.”

  I was irritated at Mr. Dolatabadi’s attitude and his remark that he had the power to release us. It reminded me of Pontius Pilate’s claim that he had the power to save Jesus.

  The two men looked at each other and smiled. “Very well,” the prosecutor said. “So you don’t request anything from me. By the way, have you ever been to Rome?”

  “No, never.”

  “Then why is the Vatican involved in your case? What’s going on?”

  “I have no idea. We’ve been in prison and have had no news of what’s going on in the outside world. However, it’s only natural for the Vatican to get involved with our case because we have been imprisoned on charges of being Christians and believing in Jesus.” (We never learned any more about the Vatican’s reported involvement.)

  “In any case,” Mr. Dolatabadi said, “you must have known that to convert to Christianity and then promote it the way you have in this country is quite dangerous and subjects you to execution. You must be very careful.”

  The door opened and Marziyeh came in. After being told to remove her blindfold, she took a seat. The men offered us sweets and treated us like honored guests rather than prisoners threatened with death. Clearly, the Vatican’s involvement had brought the publicity in our case, and the need to resolve it, to a new level on an international scale.

  Mr. Dolatabadi asked lots of questions about conditions inside Evin—food, medical care, our general health—as if he, the city’s chief prosecutor, had no idea what went on in the city’s prisons. Marziyeh gave him an earful about her sickness and the lack of decent medical care for herself and everyone else. I talked about my recent food poisoning and the careless treatment for that.

  “How could they do this to you?” Mr. Dolatabadi exclaimed.

  I started telling him about the ridiculous rule requiring every prisoner to go outside for the morning roll call, regardless of her condition. He picked up the phone and entered a number.

  “Mrs. Rezaei, Miss Amirizadeh and Miss Rostampour are in my office and have complained about some prison problems.” There was anger in his voice. “I ask you to sort these out as soon as possible.”

  Mr. Dolatabadi then launched into a long monologue, starting with his belief that everyone should be free to practice whatever religion they like, but that our problem was in generating so much publicity about Christianity and talking about it with too many other people. He advised us not to endanger our young lives by defending these beliefs so inflexibly. Beneath his words, we saw a completely different story.

  Like everyone else we had talked to lately, he was scrambling for a way to avoid an international crisis by persuading us to change our story about what had happened to us—forget the mistreatment and relentless interrogations; overlook the inhumane treatment and injustice; believe that our mistreatment at the hands of Mr. Sobhani, Mr. Haddad, our anonymous interrogators, and everyone else was because of their personal actions and opinions, not because they were acting in the name of the kindly, compassionate, and accommodating Iranian regime. That’s what they wanted the world to believe.

  After Mr. Dolatabadi finished his speech, Marziyeh and I were blindfolded and taken back to our ward. As always, our friends crowded around to hear what had happened. When they found out we had met with Mr. Dolatabadi, they were convinced it was a prelude to our release and the final settlement of our case. We began to think they might be right, that we actually were going to be freed soon. As happy as the thought made us, it was sad to imagine leaving Shirin, Marjan, and our other wonderful friends behind. That night, we talked to them about our hopes for the future, feeling somehow that these might be our last hours together with them. We promised one another we would meet again as free people. We didn’t concentrate on the sad feelings, but on all the happy times we’d shared together.

  Within days, we found ourselves blindfolded once again, escorted to Ward 209, and seated before Mr. Dolatabadi and his white-haired companion.

  “I have agreed to release you on bail until your trial begins,” the chief prosecutor said.

  We had heard this story before from Judge Sobhani, and it turned out to be a lie. Even so, the words made us hopeful.

  “You will be released after posting bail of 200 million tomans [about $100,000] each.”

  “We don’t have anyone who can help us raise that much money,” Marziyeh said. “Besides, after nearly nine months in prison under these charges, we want to see our case resolved. We think the case should be settled instead of releasing us on bail while still under charges.”

  “You wouldn’t actually have to pay the bail,” the older man said. “Your sisters could stand as your guarantors. I can ca
ll them now and they can go straight to the courthouse to register their names on your behalf, and their guarantee will serve as your bail.”

  “I have agreed to your freedom,” Mr. Dolatabadi added. “But please don’t give any interviews to the press.”

  We said we would contact our sisters and talk it over. We were blindfolded and left in the corridor, waiting for our escort to take us back to the public ward. As we stood there, someone handed us each a takeout container of barbecued chicken and rice. We heard the old man’s voice say, “Eat. These are for you.”

  I couldn’t suppress a laugh. “We can’t eat with blindfolds on.” Instead, they allowed us to take the delicious-smelling food with us.

  The sight of the food amazed the guards in the Ward 2 office, who were used to seeing prisoners return from 209 exhausted and worried, and sometimes bruised and bleeding. They didn’t want us to go into the ward with our food, so they sent us into the kitchen to eat it. It tasted heavenly! But it was so rich and we hadn’t had real food in so long that we couldn’t eat it all. Marziyeh and I split one container of food and gave the other to some other prisoners who were in the room. After we’d eaten and were walking to our cell, Amiri, the guard who had been so mean to me the night I got food poisoning, called out to me. She apologized profusely for her rude behavior that night and also for forcing me and the others to attend the morning roll call outside. Right behind her came Mrs. Rezaei, who also apologized. Mr. Dolatabadi’s brief phone call had ushered in a new world inside Evin Prison, at least for the moment.

  Marziyeh

  The very next day, our names were called again to go to Ward 209. Instead of fearing for our safety, our friends were now convinced this summons was moving us yet another step closer to freedom. Parvaneh, the prisoner who made a little money as the cleaner of our room, asked for our autographs to prove she had shared a cell with two such famous people. We said we would gladly write in her book, but that we weren’t famous and our words were for her alone. Others teased us good-naturedly by shouting, “What’s on the take-out menu today?” and, “Who’s coming to apologize to you today?”