I wander around hopelessly, brushing against people, looking left and right, and wailing, wailing, until my voice disappears.
When there seems at last no longer any possibility of such a thing happening, my mother appears before my eyes. Her beautiful face is distorted by grief and fear and the sickness of panic. Her veil is pushed to one side, and her black hair falls forward. She grabs me by the shoulders, clasps my head against her body. I can hear the thud of her heart as I grasp handfuls of her clothing and pull myself closer to her, closer. I want to be her and not be a separate person, a separate thing.
She draws my face away and holds it between her hands. Tears run down her cheeks in streams, and yet she is not sobbing. She abruptly slaps me on the face, and it is a hard slap. My face is so numb with the cold that I barely feel a thing, only hear the sound. “Didn’t I tell you not to leave my side? Didn’t I say that to you, Zarah? If you are lost once more, I will die. Do you want me to die? Do you want me dead?”
This warning sets me howling again. “In the name of God, don’t die! If you die, my friends will have mothers but I won’t!”
My mother relents. She is still trembling, but there is a painful joy in her eyes. She presses my hand, knits her fingers between mine. “Promise me you will never become lost again,” she says. “Promise me, Zarah.”
I promise. I promise.
In my cell, I cover my face with my hands.
6
MY MOTHER’S COUSIN was killed in the war against Iraq when he was not much older than a boy. The death grieved my mother terribly. I would catch her sobbing as she combed her hair in front of the mirror. If she noticed me watching, she would smile and pretend that everything was okay. “I’m fine, sweetheart. It’s nothing.” Mom had a brother fighting in the war, and I felt sure that she was thinking both of him and of her cousin when tears ran down her cheeks. She kept the radio on all day long and would pace up and down anxiously while she listened to the news.
The war was everywhere. You didn’t have to listen to the radio to know that something frightful was going on. Pictures of “martyrs”—young men with unsmiling expressions, some looking scared, some full of bravado—were shown on the television. These pictures would have been taken when the young men first joined the army. Not every young man who died in battle appeared on television, of course; often, more died in a day than could possibly be displayed on the screen.
I saw widows in the street, so many. Even without being told, I knew when a woman had lost a son or a husband just by her face. Iranians feel grief very deeply, regardless of religion. Grief has its roots deep in our Persian past. The depth of our grieving has to do with the importance of love in our culture. This may sound very strange to Westerners who have been encouraged to adopt a cartoon-version of Iranians—suicide bombers, warmongers, religious zealots. But love is the more important thing to grasp when you study Iranians. And this has been true even in Persia’s Islamic period. If Westerners would look more closely at our national poets, they would develop a more accurate and just comprehension of the Persian sensibility. My mother’s grief for her young cousin was not simply dutiful or even conventional. She loved her cousin. She loved everyone in her family. And a death in the family was a catastrophe.
The war was all around us, too, when we visited my mother’s family in Kermanshah, and my father’s family; both of my parents were Kermanshahis. The city is only sixty miles from the Iran-Iraq border in the west of Iran. This is the region of Iran where the majority of Iranian Kurds live, and also the region where Zoroastrianism has its most committed adherents. In many ways, Kermanshah is more Persia than Iran. It is still easy to imagine, in Kermanshah, the ancient kingdom of perfumed gardens, nightingales, sherbet, the music of the dulcimer. Well, it is easy to conjure this Persian past in peacetime at least. During the war, it was hellish. The city of Kermanshah lay within reach of Iraqi bombers, and, with the oil fields and refineries nearby, it was an inviting target. When we visited one summer during the middle years of the war, the Iraqis bombed the refineries. I heard the thud of the bombs exploding and the screams of the people in the streets. Fires turned the horizon a vivid orange-red. The refineries burned like a furnace for a week, and it rained oil. The oil did not come down like the rain in a storm; it drizzled. Tiny droplets formed a coating on everything. The air reeked.
In the streets of Kermanshah and Tehran (and this would surely have been true for every other Iranian city, every Iranian town), I saw war widows scrounging for food for their children, desperate to keep their kids alive. In spite of the government’s incessant lauding of the “heroes” of the war, the widows of those martyrs usually struggled for life with the breadwinner gone. The welfare infrastructure that supports those in Western nations who cannot get by or who have met with misfortune did not exist in Iran, or not in any evolved way. Often the widows became beggars, or relied on the charity of relatives. Iranian families are close-knit and supportive, but the help many families could offer was limited by poverty. The plight of orphans was even worse. The Kermanshah bombing created hundreds of new orphans in a single night.
I saw fathers who came back from war to find nothing. House, wife, children all blown away. Prisoners of war sometimes found no trace of the life they had lived years before. In some ways even more heartbreaking was the experience of POWs who returned after years of captivity only to discover that they had been listed not as POWs but as having been killed. I knew of such men who had been carried off to war on a wave of patriotism, praised for their dedication to the nation and to the ideals of the Revolution. They found that their widows had remarried, often out of dire necessity, and that they were not welcome on their return; they were an embarrassment.
Everyone in Iran, my family included, became bleakly familiar with returnees from the war whose minds were so wrenched by their experiences that they could never regain their sense of belonging to anyone or anything. The experiences of these wretched men in certain ways mirrored those of Vietnam veterans in America and Australia. It was as if they had stared into an abyss and seen things so horrifying that the morality and dogma that underpinned the society they had been fighting to protect now seemed to them ridiculous, pitiable.
One of my older relatives fought for the entire nine years of the war and, over that period, became a complete stranger to the rest of us in his family. He took leave very infrequently, only six times in those nine years. Only injury or the insistence of senior officers (and he was quite senior himself, and highly decorated) would force him to leave the front; fighting the war meant more to him than anything else. He was, I suppose, a born warrior. When the war ended, he could no longer avoid facing the other part of his life: the domestic part, the part that he was unable to commit himself to, being a warrior. He returned to find his eldest son in an appalling state: addicted to heroin, half crazed, ill, his face haggard and his expression haunted. We didn’t know how to talk to the son, or to the father. My uncle attempted to gloss over the tragedy, pretend that both the father and the son were okay—it was just his way of trying to bring both of them back into the embrace of the family. He said to the father, the war hero, “Is this the son that you have raised? He does not come to visit us, and he is always spending time with his friends and having fun.” The father responded with a bitter smile: “When we were at war defending you and your dignity, we expected that all of you back here would look after the well-being of our families. We returned to you your land and honor intact. Your trust in us was fulfilled. But what of our trust in you?”
Will I sound precocious if I say that the war wearied me, left me exhausted? Will it sound egocentric to the reader if I say that the war blighted my childhood, forced me to mature too quickly? After all, the young men at the front who were compelled to clear minefields by marching over them, who experienced the horror of gas attacks, of bombardments that went on for days at a time, who fought in a half-starved state, who were sacrificed in suicidal attacks over open ground—these Ir
anians and their families surely have the most to complain about. And that is true. But war creates casualties both on and off the battlefield. Iranian children of my generation became secondary victims of war. Our smiles were guilty smiles. Our laughter was thought obscene. Our daydreams were censured as irresponsible. The unyielding severity of the regime’s dogma was further intensified by war propaganda. The little niches in which Iranian children might have expressed their natural exuberance were all shut down, filled in, closed off. What the regime’s brand of piety did not destroy, the misery of war suffocated. Children of seven and eight wore the expressions of adults.
That period of my life—my fugitive childhood—left me with a longing to create a proper childhood for my own children, when those children come along, as I hope with all my heart they will. May they never feel inclined to wear black, those children that I so crave. May they keep their faces exposed to the world all day long. May they only ever think of airplanes as friendly machines that carry people to other cities, other countries, and that never drop high explosives on neighborhoods full of terrified people. The stories I read to my children will not be stories of martyrs. The rules I lay down for them will have nothing to do with sacrifices, nothing to do with an afterlife; the rules will only insist on courtesy, tolerance. Their obligations will be to find happiness, and preserve it. When I breast-feed my baby, I hope I can do so without keeping one ear alert for the sound of the air-raid siren, signaling a catastrophe brewed up by men mad with ego. Above all, may my children never be required to comprehend things beyond their age. May they never know without being told that the woman over there with the pale, anxious face has just heard that her husband has become a martyr.
7
I CAN KEEP very imperfect track of the time by listening to the call of the muezzin over the prison’s PA system. I know, or think I know, that it is now a little past midnight. I’m being prodded and pushed down the corridor by the guard. Interrogations go on around the clock in Evin. The interrogators work in shifts, stopping only to pray.
I am blindfolded. The guard forces me down onto a chair in what I think is the same room I’ve been taken to before. I expect the blindfold to be removed, as it has been at each interrogation up until now. But the blindfold is not removed.
I try to see my surroundings in my mind’s eye. I know the bare wooden desk is just in front of me. High on the wall above the desk is a long, horizontal window, blacked out with paint and tape. The door to the right is a heavy thing, made of metal, meant to deter any idea of a sudden rush for freedom. The walls are painted a drab gray, scratched up to the height that a man’s arms might reach. I can easily imagine how those scratches came to be there.
I hear footsteps approaching, and I feel sure that the footsteps are not those of the fat man. How I can be so sure, I don’t know; I had not intentionally memorized the sound of his footsteps. I can hear with startling clarity the sounds of this new man’s movements as he stalks around the room. Without wishing to, I turn my head this way and that in an attempt to follow the movements. This is obviously a reflex, the need to seek out the enemy with one’s vision, even when one’s eyes are bound. I have the sense that the interrogator’s movements are designed to torment me. I feel certain that it amuses him to watch me groping for him in such a futile way. It’s so easy to imagine all of these torturers, everywhere in the world, getting their start in their chosen profession by teasing animals, plucking the wings off flies, drowning kittens in bathtubs. As adults, they retain all the worst features of repellent little boys, exercising power over the powerless. Even as I struggle with the fear that this new interrogator’s tactics arouse in me, I make a crazy mental note to ridicule him for his infantile sense of humor at some time in the future, when I am free.
The movements stop behind the chair in which I’m sitting. My hearing has developed such hypersensitivity that I can hear this man’s breathing as if it were amplified, even though it is not wheezy or labored.
“How did you come to know Arash Hazrati?” the interrogator asks.
This is a different voice, a softer voice. Absurdly, I find myself thinking, Oh, I hope he’s nice! Why do I entertain such a hope? Because his voice is soft? It’s idiotic, but I can’t help it! I so need this miracle, that the new man will turn out to be a nice man! I make a promise to him in my head: If you are nice, I will never ridicule you, never!
He’s waiting for my answer, as I was waiting for this question. Arash is one of the main protesters at the university, and he’s my friend. He’s now a teacher, not a student. He’s been arrested a number of times, brought here to Evin and kept for months at a time. Sometimes when I meet him and ask how he is, he grins and says, “Missing Evin.” He never spoke in detail about what he’d endured, so it is only now that I understand how brave he was to be able to make such a joke. He was studying law last year, but they wouldn’t let him finish his degree. Everybody loves Arash—everybody that I love, at least. Arash is a hero, a lion, and the regime loathes him.
I’m still entertaining my childish hope that this new man, this new interrogator will be a nice interrogator, caring and well mannered, a gentleman, a knight.
Instead of answering his question, I ask if I can remove my blindfold.
“No,” he says quietly. “Just listen to my questions and answer them very carefully. If you don’t answer my questions carefully, I will get angry. Do you want me to get angry?”
My dream of being treated nicely by a nice man dissolves in an instant, as it was bound to, as I knew it would.
“I knew him only through the university,” I answer, hoping that this is what he means by answering carefully. “We studied at the same university.”
“Is that all?” the new interrogator asks.
“Yes.”
He commences reading a list of times and dates. On these dates, at these times, Arash and I have been seen together. He wants to know what Arash and I were doing at these times, on these dates. But I can’t remember. And how does the interrogator know all this stuff? Are all the times and dates true? I make a decision that causes an alarm to go off in my head, a warning bell. I am going to deny that I have seen Arash at the times I am said to have seen him, on the dates I am said to have seen him. I am going to deny every single one. What can these people prove? They can prove nothing. I will deny, and deny, and deny.
“I know him only slightly and always see him on campus and that’s it,” I answer.
The interrogator laughs. It is not a loud, bellowing laugh. “Well, it appears that you think I’m an idiot,” he says. “Listen to me. I’m going to leave you alone here, and you are going to take a look at some photos I will leave in front of you. Study them very carefully. Write down anything that you remember about them. Anything at all. Understood?”
I hear the interrogator leave the room. I hear the door open and close. I hear his footfalls in the corridor.
Tentatively, I remove the blindfold.
It’s the same room as last time.
I am seated quite close to the wooden desk. A number of photos are laid out on it. They are color photos, each one about eight by six inches. The photos all show me and Arash together, sometimes with other friends. There are close-ups, full-length shots, and shots obviously taken from a distance with a telephoto lens. Seeing my face in close-up, my smiling face, my laughing face, I feel violated. I have been photographed by some complete stranger at a time when I was happy and carefree. Whoever took these pictures had no right to do so. The intimacy in the pictures belongs to me, to Arash and my friends. It’s as if the intimacy has been stolen from me.
I’m still thinking in this foolish way, still judging these people, these regime people, these interrogators, torturers, as if they belonged to the same moral and ethical category as normal people. I can’t seem to make it stick inside my head that they are not the same, they are above all laws, they are not required to account for things such as spying, eavesdropping, taking unauthorized pictures, blindfol
ding people, beating them, humiliating them. Why can’t I make it stick? Why am I shocked at each new violation? Is it because I actually believe what the constitution of Iran says about the rights of its citizens? That no citizen can be snatched from the street, locked up, denied legal representation, compelled to make confessions? Because that is exactly what my country’s constitution guarantees—freedom from arbitrary arrest and coercion. Even though I’ve been told of countless cases of people who oppose the government being locked up and abused, I haven’t been able to make myself accept that these people who serve the government of my country will do me whatever harm they wish.
Here’s a picture of Arash and me drinking coffee at a café. Here we are at a rally, Arash, the lion, addressing the crowd, his arm raised, and I, on the platform, gazing at him adoringly. And, dear God! Here I am going into Arash’s house! And here I am leaving the house a few hours later, according to the notation of time and date on the picture. “How dare they!” I whisper. “How dare they!” I can explain nothing. Can I tell the interrogator what I was really doing? Impossible. I struggle to make the pen work, struggle to write.
I write a couple of lines about two of the pictures. That’s all.
I hear a knock on the door of the cell.
I replace the blindfold.
The interrogator enters the room. I hear him pick up the sheet of paper on which I have written so little.
“So, you have forgotten how to write? Yes?”
He hits me hard across the face, an open-handed slap.
I am shocked. In my whole life, I have never been struck in that way. My mother once hit me, but this is a cold-blooded slap with contempt behind it, not love.
My Life as a Traitor: An Iranian Memoir Page 3