“Listen to me,” says the interrogator, quietly and deliberately. “I’m going to leave the room again and I want this paper to be full when I come back. Are your ears open?”
I hear him leaving. I remove the blindfold again, my face still stinging.
I must write something. I must write something. I must. What can I say? What does this man want to hear?
Picture 2. I had gone to Arash’s place to see his library.
Picture 3. Me and Arash going to the magazine office to see a friend.
That’s it. I can’t write anything else. I don’t know what to say. I know that what I’ve provided will not satisfy the interrogator, but I simply can’t think of anything more. I wish I could. I realize that I could write down the names of all my friends who appear in the pictures, but I am very reluctant to do that. My friends could end up in here with me.
I place the pen on the desk next to the pictures and the sheet of paper on which I’ve written. The paper is not full. It’s not half full, not a quarter full. I replace the blindfold, as I’m compelled to do.
The interrogator hasn’t returned. What is he doing? Listening outside the door? Or is he interrogating someone else at the same time as he interrogates me? Is he like one of those chess players who can conduct two or three or four games at once, skipping from board to board, moving a knight, a pawn, a king, always keeping control of the game?
So I wait with my eyes blindfolded.
He’s coming. I can hear his footfalls in the corridor. He’s opening the door. I can hear his breathing. I imagine him deliberating over what I’ve written. What he thinks of it I have no idea. He’s laughing, once again not loudly, a short, private laugh. I can hear him doing something, but I have no idea what it is.
Without warning, he hits me, not with his hand this time but with something else, a belt of some sort. The pain runs up the length of my bare right arm, a frightening pain like an explosion in my skin. The belt is barbed; I am conscious even in the midst of the pain of my flesh being penetrated.
“Why did you do that?” I scream.
I can feel blood flowing.
He hits me again, this time on my right shoulder. The pain is worse than the first time. I fall to the floor, squirming, thrashing.
“Please don’t do this! Please! I wrote about the photos! What else do you want?”
He wrenches me to my feet by my injured arm. The pain is made worse by his grasp, and I scream louder than at any time in my life.
He forces me down onto the chair.
“Have I helped you to remember more details?” he says. “I’m leaving the room. This will be your last chance. When I come back, that paper will be full. If it’s not, if you still can’t remember, you know exactly what will happen.”
He slaps me on the shoulder where the belt has ripped my skin, then leaves the room.
I lift my arm to remove the blindfold, wincing and bleating. The flesh is torn on my right arm. The bleeding puncture marks are small, but they feel deep, as if I’d been stabbed repeatedly with a steel pin. I take up the ballpoint pen in my right hand. The pain in my arm and shoulder is the worst I have ever had to cope with, but even stronger than the pain is the devout wish to avoid it being readministered. It frightens me to think what I would do to avoid being hit again.
What can I write? I can’t say what I did at Arash’s house. Can I? No, I can’t. I don’t know what the interrogator’s response would be. He already considers me depraved for having gone alone to the house of a man who is not my husband. If I tell him what happened, he may use it against Arash. Or he may use it against me.
I sit squeezing the pen, struggling to find a solution to the dilemma. Each second of delay in writing something down carries me closer to punishment. I think I know what I am going to do, but I can’t accept that I really will do such a thing. I touch my shoulder where the belt struck me and flinch. I wait a few seconds, then touch my shoulder again. I whisper to myself, “Coward! Coward!”
This is what I do, finally: I name my friends. I say who each friend is in the pictures.
The guilt makes me wretched, but my moral misery is immediately attacked by self-serving rationalizations: My friends would do the same if they were sitting here. I’m not a hero. They can’t expect me to die for them. They wouldn’t die for me.
And this, above all:
I cannot endure any more. I cannot.
I’m crying. My face is wet. But at the same time, I’m writing. I’m filling the page.
“This is better, isn’t it?” the interrogator says when he returns, having given me time to replace the blindfold.
I don’t answer. These are the tears you weep when you discover that your fear of pain is stronger than your convictions. These are the tears you cry when you hate yourself. Dear God, I’d always believed that I’d be so much stronger, that I’d resist and resist until death if need be. But it’s not true. It’s not true. I am not the person I hoped I would be.
“Did you have a sexual relationship with Arash Hazrati while you were at his place?” the interrogator asks, in his falsely reasonable manner. An answer of yes to this question, as I fully understood when I refused to give any details of my visit to Arash’s house, would likely be followed by a death sentence, and not just my death sentence. The prey they are really stalking is Arash. I am nothing.
“No, never, we were only friends.”
“Why did you go to his house?”
“I wanted to see his library. He has books that I have been looking for but I couldn’t find anywhere.”
“And only he has those books?”
I see the mistake I’ve made. I’ve implicated Arash in the crime of possessing illegal books. I try to extricate myself, and Arash.
“No, I mean he has these really old books …”
“Very good books? Very good books that are illegal, yes? Is that why you went there? Or maybe you wanted to have some fun with your superhero, lying on his bed and reading one of his books? Yes?”
He has his face close to mine. He is holding my chin between his fingers. He is trying to prevent me from turning my face away from him.
“Get off me!” I shriek.
“Sorry that my hands are not as soft as his.” He laughs quietly at his wonderful wit.
“Did you know you are showing contempt for Islam by entering a house with a male who is not related to you?” he says, sounding very like a clerical magistrate all of a sudden. “That would be very, very serious.”
What I want to say is that it is also illegal for him to touch me. I want to hiss at him that these rules seem to apply only when it suits him. But I don’t say that at all. What I say is this:
“Yes, but I said I only went there to see his library and it’s obvious even from the pictures that I’m holding books when I’m leaving his house. I didn’t even take my scarf off.” Then, surprising myself, I add: “And according to the rules, you shouldn’t be touching me, either.”
He slaps me across the face.
“Little girl,” he growls, losing his composure for the first time, “you don’t tell me the rules. I make the rules for this place we are in, and, if I like, I break them. I can do anything I wish. Do you at last understand?”
I feel strangely happy to have made this disgusting man angry. But immediately I begin to fear that he will wish to make a point, wish to demonstrate his complete power over me, over everyone who is dragged into this cell. I can hear him panting like a dog. He is exaggerating the sound, to alarm me or to amuse himself.
He walks around my chair, stops, waits, then begins to caress my neck with his fingers. He attempts to go further and I struggle to prevent him. I’m screaming, with no regard at all to what further trouble this might land me in. I don’t care. Somewhere in the hideousness of this struggle I realize that this pitiable man is actually trying to make me feel his appeal. It’s inconceivable, but I truly believe that, for him, this is some insane form of violent courtship. He’s kissing my neck, sl
obbering over my throat, squeezing my hand. Now I’m begging him to stop, the most earnest begging I can convey. It doesn’t stop him. And then I vomit. It heaves up from my stomach with great force and spills down my prison garment.
He steps away from me. “Bitch!” he says.
I am spluttering and crying at the same time now. The interrogator leaves the room rapidly. Someone else hurries in and grabs my arm and drags me out and down the corridor. I’m shoved into my cell. The door is pulled shut behind me.
I tear off the blindfold and force it through the slot; then, with my eyes unclothed, I howl and howl, collapsed on the floor. At intervals, I smell the stench of my vomit and the different, sweeter smell of my blood.
8
IRANIANS FALL IN love in exactly the same way as everyone else in the world. Muslims fall in love in the same way as everyone else in the world. Young women in vestments that reach from the crowns of their heads to their toes fall in love in the same way, by the same process, roused by the same emotions as young women everywhere.
The liberty to explore a dozen relationships before making a commitment to one man, to one woman, is not available to most Iranians, but this particular liberty, unlike certain others, is perhaps no great loss. In the end, a reasonable compatibility of soul and soul is all that is needed. After that, or so I imagine, it is all a matter of what one has inside: a capacity for loyalty, a desire for affection, spiritual ambition.
I was nearing the end of my first year at Tehran University when I fell in love with one of the very few students who wore a suit on campus. I had noticed him a few times while my girlfriends and I were strolling around the campus on our lunch break, paying close attention to boys in the way that young women do in Iran: minute observation but no robust public expression of the interest or delight we might be feeling. The way we talked about boys and sex and good looks and male charisma and desire and longing can be summed up in the Farsi term maskhare bazi. A rough equivalent in English would be “teasing,” but the term suggests something more specific; “teasing about something that at another time would be taken seriously” perhaps conveys the fuller meaning of maskhare bazi.
The man I had noticed was, as the cliché goes, tall, dark, and handsome, but more important, he had an air of quiet self-possession and he projected a maturity beyond his years. (I took him to be in his mid-twenties.) I asked my friends if they knew who he was. Their response was thirty seconds of complete silence. Then came the lecture: I was not to think about him any further; I was to look for someone my own age; I was to come to my senses. The problem was that the handsome man in the business suit with the gentle manner and kind eyes was the eldest son of a very wealthy family. And he and his family were very close to the regime. So his age, his wealth, and his politics should definitely rule him out. But I allowed myself to fantasize. I still worshipped Arash, but I could never think of him as my boyfriend; he lived a life aloof from mere boy-girl relationships.
Both my friends and I had started at the university with the same casual and unfocused complaints about the regime. Irritation at and occasional exasperation with the rigid dress code, with the hidebound ideology of the mullahs, with all the dos and don’ts that we were expected to internalize—this made up the substance of our “opposition” to the regime. Not one of us had developed a sophisticated way of looking at the regime’s foundational philosophy; not one of us could have mounted a coherent argument to back up our complaints. The young women in my group of friends could have summed up their politics by saying aloud, “Hey, girls just want to have fun, okay?”
At the same time, we’d known for years who the enemy was, and during that first year of university, our disdain for the regime and its supporters—people like this beautiful man I’d just noticed—had developed more specificity. Hypocrisy became a special hatred of ours—the hypocrisy of a government that awarded all sorts of treats to the people who endorsed its ideology, whether or not the endorsement was sincere, and withheld favors from those who voiced even the mildest criticism of those in power. Even those who, having nothing good to say about the government, said nothing were denied advancement in their careers, better-quality housing, visas to travel abroad, government contracts. My friends and I came to see that it was necessary to perjure your soul to earn your share of the favors the government dispensed. Anyone with real money to spend in Iran—I mean big money, what would amount to millions in U.S. dollars—was a friend of the government, by definition. Not in most cases a companion in philosophical outlook but a means-to-an-end friend. And the man in the smart suit I was eyeing was, so it was said by those who knew, Arash most important, right up there among the country’s most accomplished brown-nosing hypocrites.
My infatuation with Behnam found its initial expression in diary confessions. Not long after learning his name and a certain amount about his family and circumstances, I composed a version of a women’s magazine “Is He the Right Guy for You?” checklist:
Me:
1. Cute, maybe pretty
2. Down-to-earth
3. Nineteen years old
4. Well-to-do family but not rich
5. Mom: easygoing about religion
6. Dad: strong, dependable, a real father, religious up to a point
7. Five siblings
8. Love sports
9. Live in a beautiful suburb, the oldest in Tehran, lots of culture
10. Maybe clever, if going to uni means being clever
11. Know nothing about business
12. Don’t have my own car
Him:
1. Handsome!
2. Arrogant or shy, not sure which
3. Twenty-three years old
4. Admired
5. Mother: very religious
6. Father: businessman living in America
7. Only one brother
8. Not really into sports
9. Lives in the richest suburb
10. Clever, according to the same standard as me
11. Businessman, sort of
12. Has been seen driving at least ten different cars!
The outcome of this highly scientific analysis was 100 percent negative: we were not exactly born for each other. But in the way that all girls respond when an analysis like this (or an astrological reading, or even plain common sense) contradicts their hopes, I dismissed the outcome. The next day I felt a bit self-conscious telling my friends that I was crazy about Behnam, since they had already explained to me, so kindly, that I was chalk while he was cheese, and well, face it, kid, you don’t even own a car. (How could I? The sort of ultrasafe car that my father would have allowed me to drive—a brand-new Volvo, maybe—would’ve cost an absolute fortune in Iran.) In short, they had told me that I was insane. They also said, as a way of compensating me, that he wasn’t worth the effort, being so stuck-up.
Behnam walked past me in the corridors of the university without responding in the slightest to my tentative smiles. It was rare for me to see him without a cell phone at his ear, so my opportunities for letting him know of my existence were extremely limited. Seizing the initiative, I asked a friend, Miriam, who was seeing a friend of Behnam’s, to introduce me. Behnam responded to the introduction as if he were a diplomat of illustrious standing greeting a minor official from some unimportant foreign state. He was formal, correct, politely dismissive. Instead of feeling put out, I found myself admiring his manners. How courteously he had demonstrated his complete lack of interest in me! Only a true gentleman knows how to do that. And so my infatuation deepened.
Courtships in Iran follow a format that predates the Islamic Revolution, although the mullahs certainly added more tension and more inanity to an already tense and inane ritual. A young woman is permitted to go out with a young man, but only when suitably chaperoned. One chaperone is rarely adequate; a small crowd of the young woman’s friends will meet up with a small crowd of the young man’s friends, and the mingled group will watch a movie together, or drink fruit juice, or simpl
y sit down somewhere and smile vacuously. In the midst of all this elaborately choreographed silliness, the relationship of the young man and the young woman is somehow advanced. As unlikely as it sounds, the impediments to intimacy actually enhance one’s receptivity, something like the way, maybe, that the blind often develop extraordinary sensitivity of hearing. One very brief glance from the young man might provide the eloquence of a hundred love poems. Agreement over the choice of a fruit juice might stand for agreement on everything, stretching years into the future. In an odd way, the essence of romance is often better preserved by constraints than by license.
I became part of my friend Miriam’s courtship retinue; Behnam, at the same time, was dutifully helping to make up the numbers in his friend’s group. The females and males of each retinue took the opportunity (as was expected, and sanctioned) to chat with one another; it was a form of mass wooing, everybody keeping an eye on everybody else. I tried to chat with Behnam but was usually too tongue-tied to say anything more engaging than “Wow! Hot weather we’re having lately, don’t you agree?” or “Thank you for asking, I am perfectly well.” After a number of these awkward exchanges, Behnam wondered aloud why I was so unforthcoming when I spoke with him. We were sitting side by side at the movies. What we were watching I can’t recall, but it would have been something bland and silly that had pleased the government’s censors; the wonderful movies made by Iran’s small crop of world-class filmmakers were only ever shown in secret sessions in garages.
“Why are you so quiet and remote when it comes to me?” he asked in a whisper and without looking at me.
Such a question is loaded with a disguised intimacy and way outside the rules of the wooing ritual, which do not endorse any question whose answer would require the employment of a compound sentence. I thought I was about to have a heart attack.
“Maybe because I don’t have anything to talk about with you,” I said.
As soon as I spoke, I felt like slapping myself across the face. It sounded so pointedly rude! What on earth was in my head? Because what I really wanted to say was “I would love to talk with you freely and naturally. I am besotted with you. I worship the ground you walk on.” Instead of that, I constructed a wall of ice between us. I had to ask myself, Zarah, are you the most stupid girl in Tehran, in Iran, in the world? I despair of you!
My Life as a Traitor: An Iranian Memoir Page 4