My Life as a Traitor: An Iranian Memoir

by Zarah Ghahramani

  “Ten years?” I ask him, just to make sure I heard right.

  “Ten, maybe. But maybe not ten. Maybe seven, eight. I don’t know.”

  This is weird! As the madman becomes quieter, more reasonable, I become crazier. Because I cannot imagine what will be left of me if I have to stay here for ten years. I will have no teeth, because I will tear them from my face in desperation. I will have no hair, because when it grows back I will rip it out again.

  “Oh, God! Ten years!” I wail. “Ten years!”

  “Shush!” says the madman. “Don’t yell. If you yell, they will come and rape you. They raped Miriam, she was in your cell before you. I could hear them. Don’t yell, silly girl!”

  But I can’t stop. The two words, “ten years,” have taken over my brain, my lungs, my throat, my mouth. I wail them out and wail and wail. Even as I wail I know that I am hysterical, that I am sick. But the words won’t stop.

  “Shush! Stop! Stop!” says Sohrab, more urgently. “Stop it now!”

  And I do. The words grow duller on my tongue. The wail becomes a whisper.

  “Ten years, please no, please no …”

  “That’s better,” says Sohrab the madman, and both of us fall silent.

  THE GUARD DROPS the blindfold in through the slot, and it falls almost soundlessly to the floor. I immediately stop worrying about the more distant future and start thinking about what is waiting for me in the interrogation room today.

  I’m like a trained rat. I have become completely conditioned by the experiments being conducted on me. A piece of fabric appears through the door, and the expected reaction commences. I’m trained. And I’m tame. Trained and tame. There is not a vestige of spirit left in me. The experiment is successful, bastards. Leave me be. They know more about me than I know about myself. Give me a piece of paper to sign, I will sign it. Whatever you like. I won’t even read it, I’ll just sign. What more can they possibly have to ask me?

  I walk haltingly into the interrogation room, blind as usual. Every time I enter this room, I picture myself looking so timid and miserable, and I picture my interrogator smiling in satisfaction. He likes the way I look. He likes what I have become. It’s an endorsement of his craft, of his skill. Probably his satisfaction is more that of the proud professional than that of the sadist.

  He nudges me to the chair. I sit and take a deep breath. The feel of the chair forming its shape around me makes me break out in a fit of shivering. More trained-rat response. If I ever get out of here, it will be ages before I am able to sit upright in a chair of this sort without the association making me ill.

  This is the stinky guy, the fat, unwashed one. His smell is as distinctive as his voice.

  “Where were we?” he asks himself in a businesslike way. I hear him moving papers around. Now he clears his throat.

  “Were you being supported by any antigovernment organizations overseas?”

  Hasn’t he asked this question before? If so, what was my answer then? Yes? No? So far as the truth goes, I would have had to have answered no. The idea is ludicrous. We had no money, no support, no assistance at all. If one of us was beaten up by the Basiji, was there ever any money to pay the hospital bills? Not a single rial. We were like a club of hobbyists. Our hobby was politics. We were passionate about it, but so are the people who make model airplanes or play chess. Who would give us money? Who would bother?

  “No, nobody supported us.”

  “You don’t say. And did Arash Hazrati have any friends or connections with Iranian TV channels in L.A. or radio stations in London?”

  People’s sense of humor is so fugitive, so prepared to hide itself until the chance comes to smile. He didn’t say “Los Angeles”; he said “L.A.” It strikes me as very funny. But I don’t smile. I will save this smile for later. And in any case, as if any of us would watch the channels he’s talking about. Those channels are shit. Iranians overseas encouraging us still in Iran to run out into the street and smash the government. Oh, sure. If they cared so much, they would be in Tehran doing exactly what they want us to do, but no, it’s so much more pleasant to make money in America and England and give a little bit of it to people who run the TV channels. They call themselves “the True Persians.” They are as bad as the regime itself. And if they had the chance, they would be doing exactly what the regime is doing: throwing people into jail. “Go on, kids! Get your brains bashed in! We love you!” Maybe this is a little too harsh, and yes, I suppose it’s also unfair, but I am not in the mood to be fair to those people. I never watched their rubbish. No one I knew ever watched it.

  “No, none of us watched those channels. Not ever.”

  “Fascinating. Has anyone ever contacted you or Arash Hazrati for an interview or to get any information? Were you giving any information to newspapers?”

  Interviews? I feel like asking this idiot if he is on drugs. Interviews? Who on earth would interview me? Who would care? I am the smallest fish in a school of very small fish. Nobody took any interest in us. Does he think I had some sort of celebrity status? I was nothing. We were all nothing. And what would be the sense of interviewing one of us? We were all in it together. There were no leaders.

  “No, never.”

  “Indeed. And would you do it if you were asked?”

  “I wouldn’t have anything to say.”

  “What about later, if we let you go, would you have things to say then?”

  If he would take off the blindfold, I would put on a lovely performance for him. I’d open my eyes wide and say, “Oh, no. I’d never dream of doing a thing like that! I promise!”

  “No, I would have nothing to say.”

  “You know, if you do,” he says, “I will welcome you back here. And there will be a big reception for you. A lovely reception. You know what I mean, don’t you?”

  “Yes.”

  “Another question. Did you accept any financial help from anyone during your activities?”

  I did, actually. I accepted financial help from my regime-supporting boyfriend. But I can’t say that.

  “No. We had no expenses. We didn’t need money.” In fact, sometimes we had to hire buses or pay for things we needed for our rallies. We normally pooled what little money we had, but that wasn’t always enough. Behnam helped us buy items for the office, such as our fax machine and also a computer. That was his version of solidarity—running with the hares and hunting with the hounds, as I’ve said. But even so, our expenses were trivial. It wasn’t as if we dined in expensive restaurants discussing what we were going to do at our rallies. We were students. We were used to getting by on next to nothing. Student protest was just an extension of normal student life.

  “What about Arash?” the interrogator asks. “Did he provide money? Did he use his personal staff to help organize your nonsense?”

  Ah, this is what I had feared. The whole Arash subject. They know very well that he is the one who matters: not because he is in charge, because he isn’t, but because of his courage, his persistence. They home in on courage, these regime people, like sharks homing in on the smell of blood in the water. It maddens them. In the small sphere in which they operate, they know everything. Stubbornness probably means very little to them. Stubbornness can be eroded over time. Being a smart aleck doesn’t mean all that much to them. Wiping smiles off the faces of smart alecks is their bread and butter. But courage, real courage—that torments them. I knew that they had offered Arash the opportunity to go to America to live and work, just to get rid of him—buy him off in a way. If he had accepted their offer, then, in America, complained about the regime, they knew that his complaints would have had no credibility in Iran. He would have become like the people who run the antiregime channels—an apartment house protester. But Arash said no.

  “I don’t know. He never talks about his personal staff. He never speaks about anything personal.”

  “Is that so? What about going to his house? Wasn’t that personal?”

  I don’t answer. For a t
ime I hear nothing. Then I hear the interrogator leaving his seat and moving closer to me.

  “That was very personal, wasn’t it?” he says.

  I have a sickening sense that he intends to take my interrogation in a direction I don’t want to contemplate. The only possible preparation is to renew the license I have given myself to beg, to grovel. I am ready to beg, ready to grovel.

  I hear the interrogator shuffling around me, circling me. He circles me more than three times, so far as I can gauge. His garments brush against my shoulders in each circuit. On his final circuit he stops directly before me, takes my knees in his hands, and squeezes his thumbs into the flesh above the bone. I wince, but don’t cry out. I sense that any shriek of pain will act on him like a spur. He is making a seething sound, like someone imitating the noise of a steam train, except that the seething is broken by short grunts. He moves behind me, takes the flesh of my neck on each side, and twists. I am baring my teeth in the effort not to scream. My face is bathed in the reek of his breath as he bends to speak into my ear. In a rising and falling whisper, he tells me of what he has inflicted on other victims, other women, giving their names, each name repeated and drawn out; he tells me of their hopeless attempts at suicide, he imitates their screams.

  He gathers up the flesh of my lower back through my tunic and twists. If it were not for the pain, I would scream. It is the pain that keeps my teeth clenched. As his chanting goes on, his spittle wetting the inside of my ear, I realize something that I must have been groping toward for weeks: I am the beginning and the end of what interests him; not any information I can provide, just my pleas. In my Spanish studies, I read of the practice of the Incas of Peru when they took captive a high-born enemy. They would cage the man or woman and crush a bone each day, starting at the feet and working their way up the body, harvesting screams for months.

  I shriek at last and hurl myself forward. The interrogator has hold of my arms at the elbows. I throw myself about as furiously as I can but he is extraordinarily strong. He forces one of my elbows against the back of the chair with his knee, freeing one hand to brace my head against his mouth. The chanting is coarsened by the effort he is expending, but it goes on and on, another name, another name.

  Then he releases me so suddenly that I crash from the chair to the floor. My shrieking has brought on a fit of coughing. I struggle to my knees and labor to catch my breath. Inside me, when the hacking subsides, there is nothing but a loathing for life, for all life, for my own. I don’t want to be part of anything living.

  The interrogator has no more to say. I hear him cross the floor and take a seat at his desk. He calls for the guard as he always does when it is time for me to be taken back to my cell.

  SOMETIME LATER, I am back in my cell. I know I will not be disturbed for the time being. It is their way. They finish, they begin to work on someone else, they don’t even think of you until the next interrogation.

  I am struggling to understand exactly what it is I feel. I make very sure I don’t think of the details of what was hissed into my ear, of the degradation of all those women, of their agonies, their helpless pleading. But it seems I have no feelings to discover. My brain is still as unwilling to accept the world as it was when I laid on the floor of the interrogation cell. I am not in pain, but I wish to die. I don’t want to die in a gradual way, not even over a period of minutes; I want to die immediately. In all truth, I can’t even say it is death that I wish for; death is simply the closest thing to it. I wish not to have a life.

  With appalling timing, the madman above me, Sohrab, welcomes me back and asks in a sardonic way if I had fun. I scream at him, tell him to go to hell. He becomes quiet immediately. He doesn’t even moan.

  I want to wash my body, but there is no water.

  Will I ever rid the smell of that repulsive man from my nostrils?

  Feelings are returning. A type of wildness has invaded me. I could kill someone right now.

  I put the green paper out to go to the toilet. Half an hour later the guard drops the blindfold in. I pray for an argument or a fight with the guard. I want him to fight with me so I can scream.

  “I think you people are all sick and disgusting!” I shriek as the guard pushes me along. It’s unthinkable to say such a thing. For a second or two, he doesn’t respond at all, as if he can’t believe my temerity. But then he pushes me forward so violently that I fall over. Curled on the concrete floor, I scream out my abuse. The guard kicks me where I lie. I shield my head and stomach from his boots, but I keep swearing and cursing at him. The kicking hurts, really hurts, but at the same time it gives me a wretched relief; perhaps it’s psychotic what I am doing; I don’t know. But the fury that boils in my brain is somehow served by having enraged this guard. It feels good.

  Another guard, a woman by the sound of her cries, has come to stop the beating. She helps me to my feet. “Why wouldn’t you just shut up?” she whispers.

  When we reach the toilet, I tear off my blindfold and begin howling, all of my hatred and fury and disgust with the interrogator and disgust with myself channeling itself into this fit.

  What have I done to myself? What have I done!

  My tears begin to die away. I am staring at the back of the toilet door. This is where messages are left by other prisoners. They remain for only a short time before the guards scrape them away. I am staring at a message to me, a message from Arash. I know it is from Arash because it takes the form of lines from a famous poem, lines that Arash recites before giving a speech. The fact that the lines are scratched here means that Arash is now in Evin himself. This is no shock to me; it had become obvious that he would be arrested soon.

  The lines come from a poem about love. The voice in the poem comforts a woman whose heart is aching.

  You will fly your birds soon and a kind hand will hold your empty hand.

  I snort in disgust once I’ve read the lines. What on earth is he trying to tell me? Actually, I don’t want to know. Half of what has happened to me is because of him, and the other half is because I’m a woman. I have brought with me my spoon, secretly kept back when I returned my food tray in case I ever wished to leave a message here. I use the end of the spoon handle to write below his message, “My bird’s wings are broken.” This is my message to him. I have no interest in the wings of birds at this time. I replace my blindfold, conceal my spoon, and go back to my cell.

  The pain I could not feel earlier is now all that I can feel. The pain in my body accompanies the pain in my heart and my soul at each throb.

  I keep thinking about Arash’s message, against my will. I happen to know that the poet himself was a protester, and that he spent years in jail. But what is in Arash’s head? Is he trying to give me hope? Is that what he means? If that was his plan, it’s been a complete failure. I don’t feel stronger in the slightest.

  I have lost everything here. That is the truth. I will never fly birds again, not even ugly, stupid, screeching birds. Not now.

  IT’S BEEN A few days with no interrogation.

  I go about my business, such as it is. I was permitted to have a shower yesterday. I washed my prison clothes. Thrilling.

  But something is wrong in my head. My anger and sadness have withered away. What I think of now is murder. I think of it all the time. Murder. When I sleep, I dream about murder. But the dreams are not so triumphant in my sleep as they are in my waking life. I murder the interrogator in my dreams, but the blows I inflict don’t kill him. He collapses and seems good and dead, but then he sits up and smiles. I know what this is all about, of course. I’ve read Freud in my philosophy classes. These are dreams of impotence. Okay, but just give me a knife or a hammer and put me in a room with that vile man, and impotence won’t be a concern. Not for a moment.

  Yet it distresses me to be turning homicide over and over in my brain. This is the sort of corruption that violence breeds in its victims. Do I really want this? Do I want the interrogator to have succeeded so completely that he can twist my
mind out of shape and make me relish what I have always been sickened by? Or maybe this is simply a type of therapy my imagination is administering. Fantasies of revenge. Fantasies of power.

  I have been reading the Quran for the last two days. One passage says, “Respect your women even when they are walking past you in the street because they are God’s gift to the earth, to give birth and make you happy.”

  I want my Islamic rights.

  THERE’S A NOISE at my door. No blindfold has been dropped through the slot, but someone is about to enter. I am instantly hysterical with fear. The door is swung open, and there stands the interrogator, the man I have been putting to death over and over, the man who screams for mercy after I have struck him to the floor and stand above him with my knife raised.

  He is not alone. A man in a doctor’s white coat stands a little behind him. But no guard.

  “Hello, sister, how are you today?” the interrogator asks mildly, as if this is his normal tone in addressing me. “This gentleman is a doctor. He’s here for an inspection.”

  The interrogator looks straight at me without the faintest suggestion of shame. He knows that I could tell the doctor what he did to me, but he knows, too, that I won’t. Such an accusation would be meaningless in this place. They execute people here every morning of the week. I know from the whispers outside of Evin that the methods of torture at the disposal of men like the interrogator go as far as torture can possibly go. What complaints of inhuman abuse were made by the inmates of Nazi death camps as they waited for the end? Did those poor, wretched people believe that any protest they might make would change their fate?

  “Do you have any health problems?” the doctor asks politely. “Any pain? Do you feel sick?”

  “No,” I reply. “I’m fine.”