My Name Is Mahtob: The Story That Began the Global Phenomenon Not Without My Daughter Continues

by Mahtob Mahmoody

  “Mahtob, what do you think we should do?” Mom asked now as sleet and snow stung our bare faces. “I don’t know if they’re coming back. Should we stay here, or should we start walking?”

  “We should wait. Otherwise, they won’t know where to find us.”

  And so we waited.

  And waited.

  We listened with growing desperation for the distant rumble of a vehicle that would signal our rescue. And when we did hear one approaching, we were torn between the impulse to jump up and wave our arms in an urgent plea for help and the instinct to stay hidden to protect ourselves from being discovered and sent back to my father.

  Click.

  Mom and I are alone in a ramshackle stable, sitting on the dirt floor.

  Chickens ran in and out at will, pecking at the ground in their characteristic frenetic way. Outside, sheep were bleating. Sheep had become a familiar sight to me in Iran. It was quite common to see a shepherd, stick in hand, leading a flock down the bustling urban streets.

  Mom had been given clothes to change into. We were high atop the mountains in Kurdish territory now and must blend into our surroundings.

  For the first time in days, we had been given food—one small handful of sunflower seeds still in their shells. My mouth watered as I gazed at this most welcome feast. Mom insisted that I eat the first seed. Even then, I knew her to be generous to a fault, giving beyond her capacity. I refused, certain that if I ate the first seed, she would force me to eat every seed, saving none for herself. Instead, I separated the tiny black kernels with the side of my hand into two portions. Half we would share immediately, and the other half we would save for later. Only after I had taken a seed and placed it in Mom’s mouth did I eat one myself. My greatest fear was being separated from her, whether by my father, the police, or death. She had grown gaunt and frail, her hair stringy and gray, and the decrepit nature of her countenance was of great concern to me.

  I heard a commotion outside the stable. Our guides were busy with preparations—for what, I did not know. I felt an unexplainable attachment to the undisputed leader of our smugglers. He rarely spoke to us, and when he did his words were in a language Mom and I didn’t understand. Still, there was something reassuring in his manner. A large network of men had been leading us through the mountains. Each time Mom and I were handed off, my eyes darted anxiously about in hope of spotting the leader. He wasn’t always with us, though strangely I felt he was always near, overseeing, though sometimes from a distance.

  Click.

  Darkness.

  Outside, the slick ice crunched beneath our feet. A man hoisted Mom onto the bare back of a small horse. Nervously, I waited to be handed to her. To my horror, I was passed to a stranger on a different horse. Silently I squirmed, reaching for her. I wanted to ride with Mom.

  We don’t always get what we want.

  Click.

  Riding gingerly along the narrow, icy edge of the mountain, I don’t know if it’s the same night or the same horse or if I’m riding with the same stranger. What I do know is that Mom and I are still separated, and I don’t like it.

  Feeling as if I were far ahead of Mom, I worried we wouldn’t find each other in the all-encompassing blackness. I couldn’t see the steep drop-off to our left, but I sensed its treacherous void.

  My small contingent moved slowly and with great care. Abruptly a shot rang out, crashing into the rocky ledge near us. We set off at a gallop. Horse still in motion, my rider dismounted, cradling me in his arms. He ran for a shallow cave etched into the side of the cliff. Others followed. I searched the shadows for Mom. Had she been shot? I listened for her and heard only faint whispers of a language I could not understand.

  And then, silence.

  Click.

  I stand at the top of a snowy peak with a group of exhausted men who are gazing apprehensively into the darkness beneath us.

  I had been delivered safely over the mountains. Mom was nowhere to be found. We waited and listened. There was no movement. A sense of dejected gloom grew among my rescuers. My heart ached. Anxiously they checked their watches and peered into the darkness. Their expressions looked as bleak as I felt.

  I can’t remember if one of Mom’s guides ran ahead for help or if one of mine went back in search of them. Things were not going according to plan. I didn’t understand what was happening, but somehow I knew Mom was in danger.

  Later I would learn that Mom’s body had given out. The last summit had been too much for her. Exhaustion had prevailed.

  There is a limit to the power of the human will. There is no limit, however, to the power of God’s grace. In an act of selflessness, the drug smugglers who had been paid in advance to transport us over the mountains into Turkey had picked up Mom’s listless body and carried her to me.

  Click.

  The leader stands before us. He brushes his hands together as if wiping them clean.

  “Tamoom,” he sighed. It is finished. Then he pointed to the ground. “Turkey.” My momentary elation vanished the instant I realized he was not smiling.

  This was as far as he would be traveling with us. He had been hired to get us over the border. His job was complete. Now we were on our own, but the perils of our voyage were far from over.

  As he struggled for words in a language he did not speak, tears filled his eyes. He wanted Mom to know she was like a sister to him. For the second time in a week, I wanted desperately to beg one of our liberators to continue this journey with us. Once more, I held my tongue.

  These are the images that have been preserved through my lens. Time and distance have reduced them to matter-of-fact snapshots, random glimpses of a life that only vaguely feels like it was once mine. I see the images. I know they are real, that they happened to me, in fact. And yet I feel a surreal sense of detachment from them. It is with awestruck amazement that I think back and know the pictures on the View-Master’s circular disk truly belong to me.

  CHAPTER 10

  Passport!” the attendant demanded. We were at the bus station in Van, on the Turkish side of the Iranian border.

  Mom looked bewildered, holding out her hands and tilting her head in feigned ignorance. We needed two tickets to Ankara, and she wasn’t stepping aside without them. “Passport!” the attendant insisted. Mom played dumb.

  Earlier, she had warned me not to translate for her. Knowing my propensity for languages, she knew I would quickly absorb the words spoken around me and, being overly helpful, I would want to assist.

  “Passport!” the attendant bellowed with obvious frustration, as if shouting would make Mom understand.

  Mom persisted. I tugged on her sleeve, letting her know that I understood and would gladly explain. Taking my hand, she gave a gentle squeeze. This time I knew the meaning of her signal and kept my mouth shut. Finally, exasperated, the man handed over two bus tickets and waved us on.

  We were already five hundred miles from Tehran, but a journey of nearly six hundred miles still separated us from our dream of freedom. The bus wound its way on the outer edge of treacherous cliffs that bore no guardrails. The road was covered with ice and snow, at times nearly impassable. Having gone so many days without a meal, we had lost our appetites. Though we struggled to stay awake and be on alert, the cushioned seats, the rocking motion of the bus and the hum of its engine, coupled with utter mental and physical exhaustion, lulled us both to sleep.

  From a deep slumber, my eyes suddenly shot open. I frantically searched my surroundings to get my bearings. Our erratic travels had left me disoriented. As my senses came into focus I realized I was on a bus—toward the back, on the left side—dasta chap. Mom was asleep beside me.

  A man was making his way down the aisle with a worn shaker bottle. He paused at each row to sprinkle a little of its liquid on the hands of the passengers. A lemony scent tickled my nostrils. Glancing quickly from Mom to the man and back again, I wondered if I should wake her for this. We were caked in grime. My hair was a snarled mess. We looked like
the homeless refugees that lined the streets of Tehran because of the war.

  I sat up straight in my seat, awaiting my turn. Looking out the window on the right—dasta ras—I spotted another bus pulled to the side of the road, its passengers standing in the cold holding their travel documents to be inspected by heavily armed soldiers. I had witnessed this sight many times since we crossed into Turkey.

  I shivered, knowing we didn’t have the necessary travel documents. My dad had our real passports. The ones we carried, while authentic, were not valid. They had been issued the previous autumn by the American embassy in Bern, Switzerland, and came to us via the Swiss embassy in Tehran. Without the proper stamps, our passports were worthless little books bearing our pictures, and they would stay that way until we reached the American embassy in Ankara. If the soldiers looked at them before then, we would be sent back to Iran—to prison or to my dad. Either way I would never see my mommy again.

  The refreshing aroma of lemon intensified as the man with the bottle approached. I turned back to Mom, still asleep. She looked so peaceful. I felt torn. Maybe I should let her sleep.

  When he reached me, I kept my eyes averted while I held out my hands. He gave them a generous misting. A smile spread over my face that went all the way to my eyes. Ever so timidly, I whispered my thanks as I raised my hands to my face and inhaled deeply, drinking in the sunny, energizing bouquet of lemon. To my great joy, Mom awoke just in time to join me.

  The man with the bottle couldn’t have known how much his modest act of service cheered our hearts that day. In the context of our lives, it was a pampering beyond words. For hours we delighted in the glorious scent of lemon on our skin.

  I dozed again and awoke to find our bus had stopped. Looking around to see what had happened, I saw the driver reach for the handle to open the door. Instinctively my gaze followed the swinging doors and there, to my great horror, stood a soldier.

  Recoiling, I clutched at Mom. I would not let them take her from me. We watched the driver get off the bus and confer with the soldier. Both men talked with their hands. There was pointing and talking and more pointing. Mom and I held our breath, awaiting the outcome, fearing the worst. At last the soldier stood down, and our driver climbed back aboard his vehicle. Giving no explanation, he dropped into his seat and the bus chugging to life, carried us farther down the road. By the grace of God we had been spared yet again.

  It was dark when Mom and I reached Ankara. Turkey was under martial law at the time, and a strict curfew was in force. We rushed to a row of waiting taxis. When the driver asked where we were headed, Mom said in heavily accented English, “Ho-tel—Hy-att, Sher-a-ton, Hil-ton.”

  Understanding Mom’s request and perhaps recognizing our distress, he drove us past the American embassy. As we approached, he pointed to draw our attention. There, waving proudly high atop the building, was the most magnificent sight—our flag! My heart leapt with gladness. We’re home! I thought. We must be in America. I turned to watch it through the back window of the cab as we drove by and, even in the midst of my exhaustion, my joy was complete.

  The taxi driver dropped us at a hotel across the street from the embassy where, with much trepidation, Mom was forced to hand over our invalid passports. It really was nothing short of a miracle that this was the first time since the bus station in Van that we had been asked for our identification. In exchange for our passports we were given a key to a room where, for a few precious hours, Mom and I could rest in relative peace behind the reassuring solidity of a bolted door. Mom and I hustled hand in hand to our room, giddy at the prospect of finally getting to take a bath and brush our teeth. We felt freer than we had in ages.

  The roar of the water echoed in the bathroom as Mom filled the tub with warm water for me. We were ecstatic to be across the street from the embassy. In the morning we would simply go there. The officials would validate our passports and put us on a plane to America. Our short-order plan had actually worked.

  But our bubble was burst just minutes after we reached our hotel room by a firm pounding on the door. Our cover had been blown. The hotel clerk ordered us to leave at once. Mom pleaded with him to let us stay until morning. The embassy would stamp our passports, and everything would be fine. There was, however, no persuading him. We were illegal aliens, and he would not risk harboring us even for a night.

  From the lobby, he let Mom use the phone to call the embassy. A night-duty guard answered. Mom briefly explained our situation. He demanded to know how we had entered the country if our passports were unstamped and scoffed when Mom told him we had crossed the border on horseback, a seemingly impossible feat. He hung up without affording us refuge.

  Dejected, Mom begged the clerk to permit her to make one more call. We hadn’t notified our family in Michigan of our escape attempt because Mom didn’t want them to worry. She knew my grandpa had been scarcely holding on to life, and she didn’t want his last hours to be spent contemplating visions of us dead in the middle of the mountains.

  When Grandma answered, Mom was relieved to learn that Grandpa was still holding on. Breathlessly she pleaded with Grandma to call the US State Department. I stood by Mom’s side, listening, as she hurried to update her. Mom’s tone was all business. The State Department needed to know that we were out of Iran and in Ankara, literally across the street from the embassy. We had been refused entry that night but would go there in the morning, hoping to receive a warmer reception.

  The call ended too soon, and Mom again pleaded with the desk clerk. “Can’t we just sit in the lobby until morning? It’s only a few hours.”

  Still he refused.

  “What are we supposed to do? We can’t be on the street. It’s past curfew. We’ll be arrested.”

  Our other fear, the one Mom didn’t bother explaining to the clerk, was that my dad was on our trail. He was intelligent and resourceful. His family had connections. We were certain he wouldn’t be far behind us, and this would be a logical place to look.

  The clerk’s solution was that we could either ride around in a taxi all night or find another hotel. He called a cab and sent us on our way.

  Mom did her best to reassure me, but this was a stinging defeat. We had come so close to reaching safety, only to be thrust back into the dangers that lurked in the night. The taxi drove us to another hotel, where Mom woefully explained our predicament. This time we met a more compassionate response. The clerk took pity on us and let Mom register under a different name.

  The next morning, embassy officials were immensely relieved to see us. During the night, the American embassy in Ankara had been bombarded with calls from the State Department in Washington, DC, and the Swiss embassies in Bern and Tehran, all of which had been monitoring our situation for nearly eighteen months. Thankful that our blood was not on their hands, they jumped into action.

  At lunchtime we were taken to a formal dining hall with an impressively long table, where we were presented with a feast of hamburgers and fresh raspberries. But after five days of being deprived of food, our stomachs wouldn’t accept this splendid offering. Despite our best efforts and our excitement at seeing American food, we simply could not eat it.

  Mom and I spent that day waiting. At one point we were taken to a dim and hushed room, where we were introduced to a very serious woman sitting behind a formidable desk. Without hinting at a smile, she handed me a child’s art pad, an activity book, and a metal case of colored pencils. She looked me straight in the eye as she gave her instructions. “These are not for you to keep. You may use them only while you are here. Before you leave, you must return them to me.”

  I sat beside Mom and busied myself drawing. One of my pictures was sketched in pencil on stationery from the hotel where we had spent the previous night. The letterhead, on which I drew upside-down, was embossed with an oval navy-blue logo that depicted an eagle perched atop two elongated letters: HD—Hotel Dedeman.

  I stopped and examined my handiwork. Nearly the entire page was covered in
overlapping rows of imposing peaks, sharp zigzags scrawled with such force that they deeply scored the paper. In the bottom corner, removed from the mountains, lay a lake shaped like a mitten—the unmistakable shape of Michigan, my home. In the middle of that lake floated a boat with a striped flag. Along the northeastern shore of the lake, near the spot on the mitten where my family had lived before Iran, rested a house. Like countless houses I had seen in Tehran and on our trek through the mountains into Turkey, it was riddled with bullet holes. Smoke billowed from its chimney, and a large antenna protruded from its roof. Also jutting from the house was a massive flagpole bearing another striped flag that almost surpassed the building in size.

  I quietly broke the heavy silence of our wait. “Mommy, how do you spell America?” Our voices echoed faintly down the corridor of wood and marble as she patiently told me the letters, one at a time, pausing between each one, so that I could carefully inscribe it above my flag: A M E r I C A.

  Above the scene, in spite of the ominous mountains and the bullet holes, I added a sun, a reminder of the song Mom and I had often sung during our time in captivity: “The sun’ll come out tomorrow . . .”

  Maybe tomorrow wasn’t “always a day away.” Against all odds, it seemed that Mom and I were basking in the proverbial sunshine of tomorrow as we waited for the embassy officials to finalize our travel plans.

  From nowhere came a great flurry of activity to get us on the plane that would take us one step closer to home. In the excitement, I wasn’t able to get Mom’s attention to return the art supplies. They were still in my hands when we were rushed out the door. For nearly three decades it has weighed on me that I didn’t get to return them to the dour woman at the desk.