“I want to go home, I can’t be here, I can’t do this,” I said, struggling against my tears. He called me a cab and went back into the party to mend his reputation. I cried all the way home. I thought, and believed, that we couldn’t possibly be in love: as a matter of fact that we hated each other. But the pain!
Behnam called me later that night. I told him I needed a break, time to think, then hung up.
9
IN THE CELL above me, I have found a friend. His name is Ali Reza. I know him from the university. I heard him calling down through the ventilation grille that encloses the fan in the ceiling without knowing whose voice it was. It took me some time after he gave me his name to comprehend. It’s good to have someone I know nearby, but this consolation has its limitations; two powerless people can do little more than sympathize with each other, and of all forms of relief a person might crave in my situation, sympathy is the least availing. What torments me more consistently than anything else is the thought of my mother bereft of information about me. Ali Reza cannot help me get a message to my parents; I can’t provide any real assistance to him. So all we can do is agree that we have come to a sorry pass, and one’s appetite for complaint is soon exhausted. It is the practical that I find myself dwelling on in this cell: the need to get a message out is only the foremost longing; after that, things such as hygiene occupy my thoughts, the yearning to be clean. Something to read would be wonderful. I have the Quran, but it doesn’t satisfy my hunger for news of the world. A chair to sit on would be a godsend. A comb. Pen and paper.
Today, Ali Reza wants to talk about my birthday party some months back. He was there with his fiancée, Atefeh. Stretched out on the floor of my cell, I listen to Ali Reza’s voice recalling the details of my party, filling my head with memories of dancing and laughter, music, wonderful food like masst-o-khiar, minza ghasomi, khaviar, kabab koobideh. The more Ali Reza recalls, the bleaker I feel. It is all so remote, that time of light and laughter. Is he trying to relieve my misery with his chatter? I should be grateful to him, but what I really want to tell him is to shut up, to please be silent about that time. If I were walking to a wall where a firing squad awaited me, then maybe I would be content to acknowledge all the carefree periods of my life; maybe I would be ready, facing certain death, to make a reckoning, agree that I had known many of the best things in life. But here in this cell, I can’t accept that my life is over; I can’t settle down to a reckoning, give good fortune its due. Reminding me of happy times merely makes the concrete walls seem that much more impenetrable, the air in my cell that much more listless, and joy that much more distant. I begin to sob, and Ali Reza can hear me.
“What’s wrong, Zarah? What’s the matter?”
“No more!”
“What do you mean? Aren’t we friends?”
“Yes, we’re friends, but no more, please!”
Now my sobbing is out of control. Misery, I realize, is a weight, and its burden can be increased to the point at which one’s legs buckle. Ali Reza, with all of his good intentions and his sweetness and concern for me, has been adding to the burden, and now my misery is complete. Oh, God, I never had the strength for heroism, for politics. It’s not in my makeup. I’m weak and cowardly. I should have left shouting in the streets to other people, stronger people. I hate politics. I hate protests. I hate it all.
ALI REZA HAS left me to myself. My tears have abated. I’m sitting on the floor, waiting for nothing at all to happen, or for another interrogation, or for nothing at all, or for another interrogation, or for nothing, or for another interrogation, or for nothing. I don’t care. I can face it now. I’m hopeless, pathetic, a child sent on an adult’s errand.
One of the female guards shouts through the hatch in my cell door, “Shower time!”
At the sound of these words, every particle of my misery evaporates. I feel almost as if I love the guard who has announced this blessing.
She drops the blindfold inside, and I leap to pick it up and slip it on. I feel ridiculously lighthearted. This will be my first shower in a week.
“You have ten minutes. Wash your underwear, too. Leave it on when you’re showering.”
“Sure,” I say. “Thank you. Thank you.”
When we reach what I take to be the showers, the guard pushes me forward. I can feel a wet surface under my feet. I remove the blindfold and find myself on a cement floor under a crude water outlet protruding from the concrete-brick wall. It’s as pitiless a place as anywhere in Evin, but to me, so sick of the stink of my own body, it is heaven.
I shut the door before removing my prison tunic, then abruptly jump as if a bare electrical wire had been jabbed into my back when the guard kicks the door open. “Who told you to close the door?” she shouts. She is glaring at me as if her disgust were almost ungovernable, as if she might at any moment lose control and beat me with her fists. For what? How on earth was I to know the ludicrous rules of the shower block?
“Sorry,” I whimper.
I turn on the tap, and a thin trickle of warm water issues from the outlet. A well-used cake of green Golnar soap (the cheapest soap you can buy in Iran) is sitting on a ledge, and I immediately begin to scrub myself. My cuts and abrasions sting furiously, but I am desperate to clean them, to forestall infection. I soak my hair and attempt to wash it, but the meager trickle of water and the coarseness of the soap make it difficult to create a lather. My hair is long and thick. At home (home!) my mother or my sister would help me dry it and brush it after a shower. Sometimes—the best times of all—my father would brush it for me and tell me stories about his mother and how my hair was like hers. The luxury of his strong, even brushing! As I struggle with my hair in this rather slimy hole of a shower stall, I recall my father’s voice singing Kurdish songs to me, wrapping me in a cocoon of enchantment and love. My favorite song was a Kurdish folk song about a pretty girl with long hair:
Dancing with shining hair, my pretty lover,
The sun is shining on her hair, my pretty lover,
It breaks my heart when she ties her hair up, my pretty lover …
I whisper this song while I’m washing, but very, very quietly. Even though my face is wet, I can feel the particular wetness of my tears brought on by the thought of never seeing my father again.
“Time is up!” the guard shouts.
As I bend to pick up the blindfold, I catch a glimpse of her face. She isn’t old, but her weathered complexion and severe expression make her seem as if she is. She must be so practiced in going the whole day without smiling. Perhaps she pities me, as I pity her. Perhaps she thinks me grotesque, ugly, a lost soul. As I tie on the blindfold, I find myself thinking about her, a series of rapid thoughts, each lasting a fraction of a second: Is she a mother? What are her kids like? Does she hate her job? Does she love her job? What is her name? It is as if my mind is trying to satisfy a hunger for normal social interaction, normal curiosity. Does she wonder why I am here? Does she think I have done something dreadful? Or maybe she knows why I am here and considers protesting against the regime a frightful crime. Or maybe she simply doesn’t care, has no opinion of me, no concern at all.
I have been given a clean prison tunic and clean prison underwear, after handing back my wet underwear. It makes me happy to have showered, to be dressed in clean clothing, even if that clothing is just the drab gray Evin uniform. My spirits soar. The guard grabs my arm more forcefully than she needs to, as if her contempt for me has been exacerbated by my having glimpsed her face. I don’t mind. I don’t fear her now. I have seen her, and that makes so much difference.
Back in my cell, my cheerful mood survives. Any person in my situation, in whatever country that person suffers, under whatever regime, surely strives to create a haven, a secure corner. I’m sure that people in far more wretched circumstances than mine do just that. They look forward to the cold corner of a fetid cell, to a niche that a rat would think too filthy to pause in, simply because for a short time, the body, the mind, and the s
oul can converse, offer one another comfort. My cell is six feet long by five feet wide. The door is iron. There are no windows. On the concrete ceiling a strip light burns constantly, maddeningly. There is no bed. It is a man-made cave, a very small one, but at times like this, I adore it. I can gather the fragments that make me up, cram them back together, and be a person again.
My mood of foolish contentment is interrupted by the sound of the slot in my door opening. The blindfold is dropped through. I get up off the floor and slip it on. Strangely, I remain happy, even when the guard swings the door open and prods me forward along the corridor. I’m frightened as I always am when being taken for interrogation, but the fear is under control. Can it be that a shower has restored enough self-respect for me to have regained my courage? Is life that simple? Maybe it is that simple, because I find myself almost smiling as I stride along the corridor—yes, stride!—entertaining with perfect equanimity the possibility that I might be killed today. How might they kill me? Shoot me through the head? Let them.
“How are you today?” I ask the guard.
“Keep walking and don’t talk!” he orders me shrilly.
His response withers my conviction. How shallow my confidence was! It had no roots. It was a fantasy. When will I stop doing this? When will I stop believing that those who are in charge of me here are actually kind people deep down, people who will respond courteously to a polite inquiry? I have to ask myself whether I’m actually mentally defective. It’s my upbringing, of course. My religion. Be nice and people will be nice to me. Think nice thoughts. The thing is, it’s not possible to accept evil at first glance. Perhaps not even at the second, the third, the fourth glance. For a person like me, evil has to insist and insist on itself, prove itself again and again. Otherwise, between episodes, I forget, woefully.
By the time I’m ordered to stop walking, I’m trembling again. All the resolve in my heart and stomach has vanished. The door is opened, I’m pushed inside. As weak and pathetic as I felt just outside the door, I’m worse once in the interrogation room. A day-old chicken would have more strength and more courage than I possess at this moment.
I hear the door closing. I hear footfalls approaching. It’s the fat interrogator this time. I can smell him. It’s not just his breath, it’s his body, too. I shuffle forward in my blindfold. The interrogator gives me a prod, urging me in the direction of the chair, so it seems. I shuffle a few more steps and strike my knee on the chair. I feel my way into a sitting position.
“Did you have a shower?” he asks. “You stank last time.”
He gives a little laugh, as satisfied as ever with his humor. It flashes through my brain to say something like “Oh, the pot calls the kettle black!” (in Farsi, “Two pots on the fire call each other blackface”) but I manage to keep my mouth shut.
The interrogator begins his slow, tormenting circuit of the room, coming closer to me, heading a little farther away, returning again. I suppose the reason that he uses these tricks, so corny, is that they work.
“Are you going to tell me what Arash did to you when you went to his place?” he says, his mouth close to my ear.
“I told you before,” I answer.
“Tell me again.”
“We’re friends, university friends. That’s all, I promise.”
He gives his little laugh again, slightly hoarse. Then he tells me that he has decided to help my memory work. He says he has prepared a list of all the things I have “forgotten.” He tells me that he is going to leave the piece of paper before me on the desk, and that I am to put my signature on it. Before he goes, he says again that he expects my name on the paper by the time he returns.
When I hear him leave the room, I remove the blindfold, blink in the white light, glance at the closed door, then lean forward and, without picking the paper up, read what is written on it. It is a confession, or a series of confessions. Using absurd clichés, it describes a sexual relationship between Arash and myself. It speaks of links between my friends at Tehran University and Communist Party cells operating in Iran. It describes the role of “foreign powers” in the student protest movement. It says that I am fully aware of the role played in the student movement by the “Communist anti-Iranian and anti-Islamic groups.” It names Arash as having “embraced Communism.”
I feel quite divorced from what is written on the paper, as if it is all about someone else. It is only as I rapidly read through it a second time that I properly comprehend that it is I to whom these stories refer, my supposed actions and beliefs. Even then, the audacity of the stories overwhelms me. The sheer brazenness of the fabrications makes me think of the fantastic lies that children sometimes tell their parents or teachers—lies so outrageous that the adults hoot with laughter. Did the fat man honestly think that anyone would believe this nonsense for one minute? The confessions make me out to be a sort of Mata Hari, part spy, part whore. But then a slow anger begins to brew in my stomach, for as disgraceful as these lies are, this piece of paper is what the fat man and the police and the mullahs intend to wave under the noses of my friends and teachers, perhaps show to my parents, maybe even publish in a newspaper. An agonizing shame is mixed in with my anger, as if somebody had submitted a sloppy, botched essay under my name to the teacher at the university whom I most respect. I want to shout out a window to everybody in Tehran, “It’s not me! It’s a trick! Please don’t anybody believe a word of it!”
And in fact, I do scream, but not from a window. I scream crazily from my chair in the direction of the door. “This is not the truth! It’s not the truth! I’m not signing this, you bastard!”
There is no response for long seconds, then comes the knock on the door that is meant to remind me to replace my blindfold. But I don’t replace the blindfold. The fat man walks into the room, glares at me, and slaps me hard across my face.
“You little fuck! Why aren’t you wearing your blindfold?”
“Because I want to see your disgusting face!” I shriek.
He slaps me again, harder than the first slap. Now he is moving rapidly in his fat way, rummaging in his desk for something. He lumbers back to me, grabs my arms from behind, and ties my wrists together with some sort of harsh twine.
“Asadi!” he yells, calling for the guard.
The guard flings the door open, looks at me, then at the fat man. He stands holding the door open while the fat man leaves. I know absolutely that I have brought about something dreadful, that I am going to pay for my shouting and my anger. But I don’t know in exactly what way. I am reduced to screaming for help, as if there is someone in the prison who will intercede for me.
The fat man is back. He is holding a pair of scissors, with the blades upright and agape.
I am mad with fear, and how I repent of my anger! I beg the fat man not to do whatever he has in mind. This is real begging, such as I have never uttered before in my life. He pays not the least attention to my pleas, but I repeat them rapidly, hysterically, because that is the only effort I can make on my own behalf, futile though it is. He pulls my scarf from my head, takes handfuls of my long hair, and chops at them with the scissors. He grunts as he cuts, and his breathing is harsher than ever—the breathing of a man harboring heart disease. I reef my head about, trying to duck the blades of the scissors, but my scope of movement is limited. I scream nonstop, like a little child in a fit, completely uninhibited. My violent attempts to avoid the blades only result in injury; the tips of the blades knick my scalp painfully. The fat man’s manner is rough and heedless, but he is not actually attempting to stab me with the scissor points; that’s all my doing. Eventually, I stop resisting, stop thrashing around; I sit mute with humiliation.
When all the length has been taken from my hair, the fat man starts in with electric shears, pushing the blades roughly over my scalp. With my head bowed, I can see through the blur of my tears the locks of my hair strewn on the concrete floor. Ages pass with the sound of the shears burring in my ears and short hairs falling to the floor a
nd gathering in a furry mass at the back of my neck. The shearing takes the humiliation I’ve experienced in this room to a deeper, more wrenching level. I’m like an animal in the hands of a man who could shear me or cut my throat with equal unconcern.
When the shearing is at last finished, the fat man steps back from me to study his work. I keep my head bowed. To lift my eyes, look this man in the face, and show that I will remain in possession of my dignity no matter what he does—no, I do not have courage of that sort.
The guard puts the blindfold on my eyes, unties my hands, and urges me to my feet. I have no strength to move my legs, and the guard has to part carry, part drag, and part push me back to my cell. I drop the blindfold out through the slot for him, then sink to the floor. My cheeks, my scalp, the flesh of my neck have all sustained cuts and nicks that sting madly. But the exhaustion and pain are not nearly as much of a concern to me as the absence of my hair. These people have changed my very look.
WHEN THE GUARD’S steps recede, I moan Ali Reza’s name and he answers. He knows that I’ve been to interrogation.
“Are you okay?”
Perhaps I had intended to tell him exactly what happened to me, but when it comes to it, I don’t want to tell him anything.
“Yes, yes, I’m okay.”
“What did they do to you?”
“Nothing, I’m fine, I’m okay.”
“Tell me, please. What happened?”
“Nothing happened, nothing. Just another interrogation.”
“Did they hit you?”
“No. Everything’s okay.”
Ali Reza gives up. It must be obvious to him that I am distressed, but he probably understands it is not something I can tell him for the time being. It’s not sympathy I crave now. I don’t want to hear the voice of a man who can do nothing to alleviate my distress other than agree with me that the fat interrogator is a vile specimen of humanity. Where’s the solace in that? What I need is my father, holding my head to his chest and stroking my face. But no, no—I would hate my father to see me like this; that would be the worst thing. I need someone who can provide something even more comforting—a key to the door of my cell, a second key to the gate of the prison, a car to carry me to some place where the police and interrogators can never find me. But miracles will not come about through wishing, or praying, or begging.
My Life as a Traitor: An Iranian Memoir Page 6