My Life as a Traitor: An Iranian Memoir

by Zarah Ghahramani

  The interrogator smiles at me. It is a practiced smile, perfectly judged for its effect. It is meant to satisfy the feelings of the doctor, in case the doctor should believe that the interrogator is just a regular guy going about his rounds, but at the same time the smile acts as an instrument of torture on me, a more effective instrument than a gloating laugh.

  The doctor does a quick check: eyes, mouth, pulse. He records the results of this conscientious examination on a form.

  When the doctor and the interrogator leave, the man I yearn to kill smiles at me and says, “Thank you, sister, for your time.”

  “Have you ever been inspected by any doctor?” I ask Sohrab a little later.

  The madman laughs. I’m so exhausted by his laughter and his craziness, but who else is there to talk to?

  “Yes,” he says. “Always say that you are good, otherwise Gholam will get angry.”

  “Why do they send a doctor?” I ask him. “Why do they bother?”

  “To show that they care,” says Sohrab.

  This is beyond belief, but I am laughing. And Sohrab joins in with my laughter. The two of us, one a madman with a brain so abused that he doesn’t even know how many years have passed since he was anything other than a prisoner of Evin, the other a madwoman keeping herself alive on bloodthirsty fantasies, and both of us laughing.

  “Heaven forbid you should get ill in here!” says Sohrab, and our laughter renews itself.

  “How do you know his name?” I ask Sohrab.

  “You find out a lot of things when you live here,” he replies.

  Oh, that cuts deep! “When you live here.” That’s what the madman accepts—that this is his only home, his only address. But I haven’t accepted that yet. I don’t live here. Unless it’s true.

  “Have you ever had any visitors?” I ask.

  “I did at the end of the first year. My mom. She had a heart attack a week after seeing me, and they told me that she was dead. I refused to see anyone else after that.”

  “Did you cry? Did you miss her?”

  “No, I was happy because she didn’t have to wait for me and suffer anymore.”

  “I don’t want my mom to die.”

  “No one does.”

  He is right, no one does.

  I feel sorry for Sohrab, deeply sorry. It is maternal, such a strange thing. Perhaps it is the news of his mother dying of a heart attack all those years ago that has aroused this odd protective instinct in me. I don’t know.

  “Do you want me to tell a story?” I ask him. “You might fall asleep.”

  “Story, what story? I don’t want to sleep. Tell me a story if you want to. I will listen. But it would be better if you could sing. I like singing.”

  “I don’t sing all that well. What song would you like me to sing?”

  “Do you know that new song, the one about the girl singing to her doll? Do you know that one?”

  I’m shocked. The pop song he is talking about came out years and years ago. But he thinks it is new. Maybe he has been here much longer than he knows. I don’t tell him this, however. I don’t want to upset him.

  My baby doll, it’s bedtime,

  It’s bedtime and you must sleep now,

  I will sing about your pretty eyes even when they close.

  You must sleep now, my baby doll.

  I don’t want you to see that I’m crazy in love with a doll.

  So you must sleep now, you must sleep.

  I can’t go on with the song. Its foolish innocence makes me weep.

  “Don’t cry,” says the madman. “What would make you cry? You just become thirsty, and you won’t get any water to fix it.”

  “Oh, God. Oh, God! I don’t want to be here!”

  “No one does, but you’ll be gone soon.”

  “How do you know?” I say scornfully. “What does ‘soon’ mean to you? You don’t even know how long you’ve been here. ‘Soon’ could be ten years to you. It could be a hundred years!”

  I shouldn’t have said that. I repent instantly. I can’t tell if Sohrab has taken offense, since he is silent. Then, just when I am beginning to feel that my despair has chased away the only voice I can rely on, the madman asks me a question.

  “Did you kill someone?”

  “No,” I answer, quite startled, for it is as if my fantasies of murder have seeped out of my brain like a colorless gas and drifted up through the fan grille into Sohrab’s cell.

  “Why do you ask me that? Do I sound like I murder people?”

  “I did,” says Sohrab. “My boss. Years ago.”

  I am shocked to hear this. Or no, it isn’t true to say I am shocked. I am surprised, but more fascinated than anything. My pet madman is a killer? I have a newfound sense of solidarity with killers, or with killers of a certain sort. My fascination has to do with a hope that the victim of my lovely madman’s crime was a prison guard or, even better, an interrogator. But knowing what I wish to hear jolts me. My hunger for revenge is out of control. Here I am, listening to a lunatic telling of his crimes as a spur to my own sick appetites. I shouldn’t go on listening. I shouldn’t encourage him to tell me anything more. But I do.

  “Is that why they brought you here? Not because of a bad check but because you killed someone?”

  “No.”

  My madman doesn’t volunteer anything further, and I become impatient.

  “Tell me!” I demand.

  “Will I tell you?”

  “Yes. Tell me.”

  He is silent for long minutes. I begin to feel that I would slap him and beat him and make him tell me if I could walk into his cell.

  “I will tell you,” he said. “You sang for me.”

  And he tells me his story in a completely matter-of-fact way. I am enthralled from his first sentence. I don’t even question the truth of what he is saying. I believe him. If his story is all lies, at least it is entertaining. But in my heart, if not my brain, I don’t believe he is making up a single thing. Whatever he is, he is not a man who makes up stories. I think he is telling the truth, so far as he can judge.

  The madman, my lovely madman, my beautiful mad friend tells me that he was a surgeon. He worked, so he says, in Imam Khomeini Hospital, and when he says this, there is no hint of irony in his tone. It was at the hospital that he met the famous Leila, the woman who so haunts his days and nights. Leila was his patient, very beautiful. The madman fell in love with her instantly.

  “You fell in love with your own patient?” I gasp.

  “Yes. Are you ashamed for me?”

  “No,” I answer. “But you were a particularly naughty doctor.”

  He laughs in delight at this. It is a different laugh altogether from his normal laugh, so tinged with sarcasm. I laugh along with him. I can’t explain why in any intelligent way, but despite everything, even what was done to me a few days ago, I am happy. How can this possibly be? I am happy. I know it is a small space of happiness, but I hold it in my heart thankfully. Oh, you beautiful madman! I think. You beautiful, disgraceful, scandalous madman!

  Within two months of meeting Leila, Sohrab was married to her. He adored her, she adored him. Also, she was pregnant.

  “You certainly didn’t waste any time,” I say.

  “This was love,” he replies, and there is just a faint note of chiding in his words.

  “Yes, I understand.”

  “It was all good. All romantic and loving. Too good to be true.”

  He stops for a time. Oh, please, please keep going! I exhort him, although without saying anything aloud. I sense that levity is no longer going to please him, and I must judge what I say carefully. This is my madman’s great story, the story that keeps him alive—love, betrayal, fantasies of revenge. I mustn’t bruise him.

  “Then what?” I urge him, once his silence has gone on for too long. “Any kids? Where did you go for your honeymoon?”

  “No honeymoon. She was pregnant, remember. We couldn’t travel because she wasn’t feeling well.”
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br />   “Oh, such a shame. Then what? What happened?”

  “I got a big promotion. I was hired by a big shot in the health system. A boss. Big administrator.”

  “Wow, did you? You must have been good.”

  He falls silent again. Oh, God, surely he didn’t take what I said the wrong way? I was being sincere, not satirical! But then he speaks again, and I am relieved. “Yes, I was good. Evin is heaven. Only the very best come here.”

  We laugh together. It’s okay, I haven’t upset him. His sense of humor is stronger than I judged.

  He goes on to explain that he was so good that the big-shot administrator had to get rid of him. He’d stumbled on evidence that the administrator was helping himself to money from the department budget—very large sums of money. They worried him, the thefts, and he questioned his boss but was told that it wasn’t his job to study accounts. He persisted because it distressed him; corruption of that sort always made him feel ill, he said. It was, after all, money that was supposed to be used to provide medical care. He probed deeper, in secret, and came to the conclusion that the big sums of money that regularly went missing were going to overseas accounts.

  “But what did this have to do with Leila? How did she become your enemy?”

  “They made false documents to show that I had a drug addiction and to prove that I wasn’t competent as a surgeon. I was sacked, but I had to prove them wrong, at least to my wife. I didn’t want to lose her. So I broke in the office one night to collect what I needed to take to the court, but I got arrested by security and the rest is history.”

  “You haven’t told me what made you hate Leila.”

  “She swore in court that she’d seen me taking drugs, and she said I was violent and that I’d threatened to kill her if she ever told anyone.”

  “But she loved you. Didn’t she? You said she did.”

  “I saw her in the court for the last time. She was sitting next to my boss and laughing with him. Did I tell you that she had a dimple in her cheek?”

  “Yes, you told me.” About a hundred times, in fact. “When did you kill him?”

  “I tried to kill myself, but it didn’t work out. I ruined it. They took me to Ghasr in Tehran, the hospital for crazy people. I ran away in the afternoon and killed him the same night. I couldn’t find Leila.”

  “Did you feel any better after killing him?” This was something I wanted to know.

  “I did, but I would have felt even better if I could have killed Leila, too.”

  “But you loved her. You said you loved her. You wouldn’t have killed her. Even if you’d found her, you wouldn’t have killed her.”

  “Yes,” he says, “I would have killed her. She ruined my life. So long as she is alive, she will ruin lives.”

  I have to think about that. I don’t ask him any questions for the time being, and he falls silent, my madman. I think about justifications for murder. I don’t believe that Sohrab had the right to murder Leila, even if he’d found her that night, but I think I have the right to murder the man I despise. What will he ever contribute to the human race? He exists to make misery. I can kill a person like that.

  But it is too much to tease out the full argument of justification. I’m not in court. I just want to murder someone who wouldn’t even be missed by his mother. I’ll settle for that.

  16

  IF MY MOTHER’S vision of the perfect life for a family were painted on canvas, the portrait would show a father and mother hemmed in by a half dozen smiling children standing before a cottage overgrown with roses. The father would be attempting to look both stern and a little remote, as if the affairs of the world weighed on him heavily. But this same father would not be able to conceal his great pride in his children; it would show in his eyes. The mother would be helpless to display anything other than the joy of being surrounded by the six most physically beautiful and spiritually refined children to be found anywhere on Earth, ever. The children themselves would be holding hands, as if to demonstrate their inexhaustible affection for one another. A golden radiance would hover over the family, suggesting a type of blessedness, for this family was smiled upon by the Almighty.

  My mother knew that her vision would never be realized all by itself; she knew she would have to roll up her sleeves and make it happen. She worked day and night to nurture its elements. If my elder brother found a wicked pleasure in punching me on the arm until I bruised, then denying that he had been within a mile of me all day, my mother would dismiss his protestations and force him to embrace me, look me in the eyes, and tell me that he loved me with all his heart. If my sisters annoyed me enough to make me hiss at them, I would be required to smile at them for a lengthy period (through gritted teeth, however). When we went on camping trips in the forest, Mom had us all holding hands and singing songs over our cups of hot chocolate. My father was compelled to heap extravagant praise on our artwork, and each member of the family had to give evidence, every day, of his or her delight and gratitude at being part of this radiant family.

  And my family was, in fact, as lovely as it pretended to be. My mother created us in the image of her ideal; she succeeded. We did indeed love one another. My father adored each of us and found some special way of showing it; in my case, as I’ve said, by brushing my hair as I sat on his lap and crooning sweet songs into my ear. Of course, a family created in this way has to turn a blind eye to a great deal of what is going on around it. And both of my parents were very accomplished turners of the blind eye.

  Let me explain.

  My father was a senior army officer in the latter years of the shah’s reign. He was well informed and would have known a great deal about the rough-and-tumble (sometimes the very bloody rough-and-tumble) of Iranian politics. The contending forces in Iranian politics over the period of my father’s appointment included the Communists, a disenfranchised clergy, liberal and social-democratic parliamentarians, and archconservative nationalists. Of these groups, the Communists and the disenfranchised clergy were the most volatile. The shah detested the Communists as the natural enemies of his class and as the avowed enemies of the United States, his principal backer among world powers. (The CIA had put him on the throne, after all.)

  The shah’s antagonism toward the clergy was even more personal; there has never been a formally legislated division of church and state in Iran, only a de facto division, ramped up steadily by the shah from the beginning of his reign. Despising Communists is one thing—everybody in Islamic Iran other than the Communists themselves despised them, atheists that they were—but despising the clergy, and finding ways, year by year, to erode their power and influence reflected the shah’s ambition for a semisecular Iran to take its place among the more sophisticated nations of the world. The clergy is among Iran’s biggest landowners, but its lands were the chief target of the shah’s land reforms of the 1960s. This tactic might have won him some popular praise, except that it didn’t, since it was well noted that the land for land reforms and redistribution did not come from the vast holdings of Pahlavi’s wealthy backers. In any case, the great majority of Iranians are Muslims before almost anything else.

  The shah was never a popular figure; he was always seen as an American stooge with a very tenuous claim to the Peacock Throne. Enraging the clergy was never going to strengthen his hold on power. Out in the countryside, where most Iranians lived, the mullahs planted seeds of hatred for Pahlavi and watered the ground assiduously. The rest of the world may have been baffled by the reception Ruhollah Khomeini received when he returned to Iran in 1979, but anyone with a basic grasp of Iranian politics would have anticipated the rapture.

  The shah could not rely on the love of the people to remain on the throne; he relied instead on a highly effective secret police force and on the security agency, SAVAK. The shah’s agents spent most of his reign grabbing political enemies off the streets and bustling them into prison. Files and records seized after the shah’s downfall revealed the extent of surveillance during his reign a
nd just how widespread the summary arrests and executions were. Details of interrogation were also revealed, including methods of torture. Skilled tormentors of medieval times would not have exceeded in cruelty and barbarity the torturers of SAVAK. The worst things that can be inflicted on the human body were inflicted in my country under the rule of the shah.

  What I have learned about the Iran of my parents I learned from sources outside my family. My father was capable of criticizing the Pahlavis but not with any great gusto. He didn’t know the worst of what was being done, and neither did the shah. Of course, the shah’s ignorance was policy; my father’s was, I would guess, much more genuine. Can I say that without dissembling? Can I claim that my father’s tales of his time in the army were truthful, so far as he knew the truth? I know perfectly well that the world is used to stories of sons and daughters passionately disputing the reputed involvement of their fathers in shocking episodes of murder and torture. I know that these sons and daughters are often blinded by loyalty, unable or unwilling to look at the facts objectively. I know that sons and daughters who have experienced only one version of the suspected or accused parent, often a reformed version, find it impossible to believe that a second, more sinister version rounded up Armenians or Czechs or Poles or Greeks or Jews of a dozen nationalities or Vietnamese villagers and watched them die. I know that skepticism is justified. But my father chose to remain in Iran after the fall of the regime he supported, when it would have been a simple thing for him to flee.

  Within two weeks of Khomeini’s triumph, the ayatollah’s supporters were working through a prepared list of enemies, a very long prepared list, and lynching those enemies in sheds and warehouses and on the streets of cities. Many were carted off to be subjected to the very torments they had sanctioned while in power. My father’s name was not on that list. Later, when squads of zealots combed villages, towns, and cities through the length and breadth of the country, sniffing out second– and third-level Pahlavi supporters, my father was not a target. Basiji came to our suburb in Tehran and conducted an ad hoc investigation of people who had served the shah in any capacity whatsoever, arresting anyone with a tang of complicity about him, closely questioning the neighbors of people they suspected for hints and suggestions, conducting a modern-day auto-da-fé, but they had nothing to complain of when it came to my father’s service to the Pahlavis. He had served his country loyally and was unapologetic about having done so. He said so. He was let be.