by Shirin Ebadi
“I told them that you’re not even in the country,” he said.
“It’s just another warning. They want me to be quiet.”
Between the interrogation and later detention of my colleagues and the scale and severity of the torture at Kahrizak, I knew I could not return to Iran anytime soon. And this saddened me immensely. How was I going to be able to give up my Tehran? After all, I was someone who had stayed put in Iran even under the most difficult conditions. Even during the Iran-Iraq War and during the days when Tehran was under a barrage of missiles, I didn’t leave my country. I was the one who had always been opposed when my friends chose to emigrate. I hadn’t left Iran with the intention of staying away. I had left with only carry-on luggage.
The sadness did not get better with the passage of time. Each day, I stared out at the colors of the houses, neat rows of cinnamon and tulip red, and felt a tremendous dislocation. Nargess had decorated her small flat, which, in the Dutch style, had a sink in the main room, with Iranian kilims and tiles, but despite being surrounded by all these textiles and colors of home, I felt terribly dislocated.
One morning, I looked in the bathroom mirror and noticed that the right side of my throat, just under my jaw, was swollen. A large, walnut-sized lump jutted out. It wasn’t painful, but of course the first thing that comes to one’s mind is cancer, especially since I had lost my sister to cancer. I needed to see a doctor. But who? I had no medical insurance in the Netherlands.
Several days later, I mentioned my problem to a friend, who introduced me to a specialist in The Hague, a physician who knew and respected my work. He received me graciously and refused to accept a fee. After some examination and an MRI, he concluded that nervous tension was causing my saliva ducts to become blocked. He prescribed a tranquilizer, which was moderately useful. But it did not address the key problem. My great sorrow arose from being so far from Iran, and no medicine could alleviate this pain.
Some days, when the sun was setting, I imagined I heard the sound of the call to prayer, the azaan, as we say in Persian. I thought perhaps there was a local mosque, and I would search for it. But I soon realized there was none nearby; it had only been my mind producing the sounds of the familiar. Sometimes I would overhear people speaking in a shop and would think that I’d picked up a scrap of Persian; but when I listened again, I was usually wrong. So I did the only thing I knew how to: I worked harder. I went on more trips, delivered more speeches, gave more interviews. With work I could just manage, most of the time, to keep the darkness at bay.
In August 2009, Nargess and I left The Hague to spend a month with Negar, who was still living in Atlanta. Nargess had been accepted into a PhD program in London that would start in September, and she wanted to spend some time with her sister before the move to Britain. We arrived in the high heat of summer, and spent most of our days in Negar’s cool, air-conditioned apartment. Her place had floor-to-ceiling windows that overlooked a lush green park. This was where I liked to sit when talking on the phone; I would watch the children kick balls about or ride their bikes while holding popsicles.
The telephone had become for me, as perhaps it does for most exiles, the lifeline through which I connected with almost every part of me that mattered. I usually spoke to Javad two or three times a week, on appointed days. He had a special separate SIM card exclusively for my calls, bought under someone else’s name, to make it difficult for the authorities to trace. We avoided landlines, which I had come to think of as simply speakers plugged into the Ministry of Intelligence listening room.
One Monday I wasn’t able to reach him during our usual time, but I wasn’t unduly concerned. He often went on short trips for the consulting work he did or spent long weekends at our orchard cottage with friends. The mobile reception there was weak, and we generally didn’t talk until he was back in Tehran. During the course of that week, however, I still did not manage to speak to him. I called my sister in Tehran, Nooshin, and asked her to check on our apartment, but she found no sign of him. He didn’t answer either of his mobile phones; I even tried our home landline, but it just rang and rang.
Then Nooshin called me to say that she had knocked and found him at home. She said he had just returned from a trip, was unwell, and was going straight to bed.
The next day, Javad reached me on my mobile while I was in Negar’s apartment.
“Shirin?” His voice was tense and shaky.
“Where have you been? Nooshin has been looking for you!”
“Shirin, I don’t know if you can forgive me. Or maybe we’ve reached the end of the line.” I could hear him breathing shallowly.
“Are you crying?” My fingers unconsciously flew up to my throat, where the walnut bulge had finally subsided. “What’s happened?”
“Will you forgive me?”
“Javad, tell me first what’s happened!”
He began to explain, in a crushed, flattened voice, what had transpired in the nearly two weeks since we had last spoken. This is what my husband of thirty-four years relayed to me:
He had been feeling, in his words, “very lonely and empty.” One evening a friend of his, a Ms. Jafari, had noticed that he was not doing terribly well and had invited him over to her apartment, a small two-bedroom flat in Yusef Abad, a neighborhood in north Tehran.
“Very unexpectedly, a mutual friend, Mehri, also stopped by.” Javad’s voice dropped off, and he paused for a moment before continuing.
“Between Mehri and me…a romantic relationship used to exist. But I had not seen her for a very long time. Years. We had stopped our relationship. But Ms. Jafari thought we should get back together. She kept pouring us more to drink and saying that we were both going through difficult times and could support each other. She kept stressing that now that my wife was gone, I was all alone and needed someone to show me some affection.”
Apparently, at that point, this Ms. Jafari said she had an appointment and left her flat, suggesting that Javad and Mehri stay until she got back.
“We realized she’d left us alone on purpose. Mehri started taking her clothes off, hugging me, saying how much she had missed me.”
Javad paused, but I said nothing.
“Shirin, are you there? Are you listening?”
I had gone completely silent. I had never suspected Javad of having cheated on me. By nature I was never a suspicious wife, and I’d never permitted myself to scan his email in-box or his address book. He had never raised questions about my male colleagues, and I’d accorded him the same understanding. It had seemed to work for us, this mutual respect. Until now. I kept staring at the coffee table, with its magazines and a Rembrandt coaster and lavender pastilles; all of it looked exactly the same as it had five minutes ago. How could it look the same?
“Go on.”
“She kept touching me…and I…I succumbed to the situation. We were embracing in the bedroom when suddenly the door of the second bedroom of the apartment burst open. Mahmudi, the intelligence agent, and two cameramen came in. I rushed to stand up, but they said that everything—our entire conversation, the whole event—had been recorded on film. I was so scared, Shirin, I thought I was going to collapse.”
I leaned my head into my hands and closed my eyes. I thought of Mahmudi standing over my husband in that apartment, gloating, finally victorious. The image enraged me. I was far, far angrier with Mahmudi and his agents than I was with Javad.
Javad was now crying openly, stopping every few seconds to draw a breath before continuing.
“I didn’t know what to do. Mahmudi called someone; he told some officers who were apparently waiting downstairs in the street to come up. He told Mehri and me to get dressed. I fumbled and got my clothes on. In a couple of minutes the apartment was full of agents. They handcuffed me and tied a blindfold around my eyes. I stumbled downstairs with them, and they pushed me into a car. They forced my head down, so that no one would see me.”
“What happened to…that woman? And your host?” I tried to keep
the rage out of my voice, but I couldn’t bring myself to say her name.
“They only arrested me. I’m sure Jafari was cooperating with them. How else could they have set up all their equipment before I even got there? I can’t really be sure about Mehri. All I know is they didn’t arrest her.”
—
Javad described how they took him straight to Evin Prison, where I had visited so many clients over the years and where I had been detained for twenty-five days. He said they made him strip down and lie flat on a wooden bench. And then they lashed his bare back for drinking alcohol that evening. Did the lasher hold a Koran under his arm, to prevent him from using too much force? I forgot to ask this. Or perhaps Javad was still blindfolded and did not see.
And then they led him to a solitary confinement cell, perhaps only slightly bigger than an ordinary bathtub, and left him there, with nothing to treat the bloody welts on his back. The cell was so small he could traverse the length in two strides, the carpet dirty and yellowed and smelling of dampness. It had no mattress, but they gave him one blanket. This is a little bit of meanness that I recalled from my own time in solitary confinement at Evin, because the one blanket means you have the choice of either rolling it up as a pillow, and then sleeping in the cold, or using it to cover yourself, and developing neck and back pain from the lack of head support. Either way, the arrangement is meant to inflict sleeplessness and discomfort.
For two full days, Javad was left alone in his cell. He ran his fingers over the cement walls and looked expectantly at the small window that permitted the guards to look in, but no one came. The fluorescent lights in his cell and in the corridor were on around the clock, so he started losing his sense of night and day. He began to grow paranoid. The bread and tea they brought for breakfast, he suspected, was intended to throw him off; that meal meant it was probably really evening.
On the third day, two prison guards came to his cell. They blindfolded him and pushed a stick into his hands; he held on to one end and a guard held the other, as they walked down the corridor, twisting and turning, up stairs and down. Finally they arrived at a room where they took his blindfold off, a sort of courtroom without windows. A bearded cleric, the judge, sat behind a wooden desk, and next to him a court clerk.
The judge, in his early fifties, with an angular chin and a patchy beard, looked narrowly at Javad. “I’ve watched the entire film. There’s really no room for denial. You are a married man and have committed adultery. According to Article 225 of the Islamic Penal Code, you are sentenced to death by stoning. The sentence will be carried out two days from now.”
“I want a lawyer,” Javad said. “I’m not going to do anything without a lawyer.”
“A lawyer!” the judge said, amused. “What for? What is a lawyer going to say? We have a film of you, sir—your entire liaison is on camera! What kind of defense do you imagine you could mount? Just go. Go be ashamed of yourself, and spend your last two days repenting to God. At least your spirit won’t be wretched and tormented after you die.”
The whole trial took about twenty minutes. Iranian judges scarcely ever handed down stoning verdicts, but the situation seemed to require an especially horrific punishment. Afterward, they blindfolded Javad again and led him back to his cell with the stick. As he recounted the terror of being back in the cell, the numbness of not knowing when it was day and when it was night, the suffocating sense of quiet, the cement walls, the lack of anything to read or even look at, I felt a stab of grief. Those who have served time call solitary confinement “white torture,” and ordinary people like Javad suffer the most, because they have not prepared themselves. The political and civic activists we trained at the center knew to expect this. They readied themselves beforehand, practicing mental tricks and ways of coping; they knew what to do to ward off the panic. Javad had had none of that. He had never been particularly interested in politics and had never involved himself in my cases; he worked hard, and when he had time left over, he filled it with music and culture.
The day, or some lengthy time that felt like a day, after the trial, Mahmudi, the man who had devoted his life to destroying mine, came to Javad’s cell. He was accompanied by his boss, a man who introduced himself as Farahani.
When Mahmudi saw Javad crumpled against the side of the cell, unshaven, his hair greasy, with dark circles under his eyes, his eyes lit up.
“Now Ebadi can see the result of her activities,” he said grandly, as though announcing a personal victory to a crowd. “I warned her so many times. So many times I told her, ‘You need to shut up.’ But she never listened.”
Javad pulled himself up, so as not to speak to them from the floor.
“Why should I be responsible for what my wife does? What kind of dirty games are you trying to play with me? Because of my wife, you harass me like this, in the name of Islam?”
Mahmudi’s eyes darkened. He lunged toward Javad, punching him in the face. He slapped his head, punched his face again.
“Don’t you dare ever mention Islam again, do you hear me?” He shoved him back against the cell wall and kicked him in the stomach.
“The word ‘Islam’ is dirty in your mouth. For God’s sake, how can you even say it? You, who’ve violated sharia in the most disgusting way….You haven’t even prayed once since you’ve been here! You dare question our Islam?”
They had been filming him in his cell, Javad realized. How else would they know he hadn’t prayed, not even a single time? He brushed a hand against his mouth to wipe away the blood oozing out of his gashed lip, then raised his arms to protect his head.
“I swear on the Koran, I don’t know anything about what Shirin is up to. Don’t punish me for what she does.”
Mahmudi was panting, tired from the blows. “Ebadi used to say that she had no dark spot. She was so proud of that, thought she was invincible. Now she’ll see what a big weakness she has.”
When Javad saw that pleading or protesting would only provoke Mahmudi to beat him more, he asked what it was they wanted from him.
For the first time, Farahani spoke. He was a wide man, with a considerable gut, a gleaming forehead, and eyebrows that formed a continuous line.
“You’re starting to see what the problem is. If you’re still defending your wife, it means you’re her ally and collaborator. And you should be punished as such. If the truth is otherwise, you need to prove that to us. We need to hear that you think differently than she does.”
“You need to hear about that?” It sounded too easy to Javad.
“Well, we need some good evidence of that. You need to go in front of the camera and say the things that I ask you to say. If you do as I say, we’ll let you go.”
“But what about the court’s verdict?”
Farahani barked a laugh. “My word has more authority around here than the court verdict. You just do the interview, learn your lines, and you can go free as soon as we’re done.”
He took a piece of paper from a manila folder he was carrying and handed it to Javad.
“Memorize this. Say it enough times that you can say it on camera tomorrow morning from memory.”
“Rest up,” Mahmudi said as they left the cell, clanging the metal door hard behind himself.
Javad sank down to the floor, folding the blanket beneath himself. The piece of paper contained this statement:
Shirin Ebadi did not deserve to receive the Nobel Prize. She was awarded the prize so that she could help topple the Islamic Republic. She is a supporter of the West, particularly America. Her work is not in the service of Iranians, but serves the interests of foreign imperialists who seek to weaken Iran.
His fingers, still bloody from the gash on his mouth, left reddish-brown prints on the white page. The paragraph read straight out of an Islamic Republic playbook—the language was the stuff of the Kayhan newspaper or state TV, the regime’s two main propaganda outlets. He would recite it as instructed, he thought, but everyone would surely know that he had been pressured into saying th
ose things. They would understand that the person he had been all his life until that moment had not suddenly ceased to exist but was just parroting something he had been forced to memorize.
He slept fitfully that night, the cold of the floor seeping into his bones. At some hour before dawn, a prison guard arrived, and Javad’s transformation began. He was given the clothes he had arrived in at the prison, and permitted a shower. A barber shaved his beard and tidied his hair. A guard blindfolded him and led him through to another room, Javad again negotiating a maze of corridors with the aid of a stick. Here, when they lifted the cloth off his eyes, he saw what looked like a television set: a staged living room, comfortable armchairs, a side table with a vase of plastic pink roses. Directly opposite the armchairs was a video camera.
Mahmudi was waiting, sitting in one of the armchairs, his arms spread on the armrests in a sultan’s pose.
“Nothing to worry about. You’ve seen a camera before, right? It’s that easy.”
Javad felt queasy, but he sat in front of the camera and, when instructed, started reciting his paragraph.
“No, no, no,” the cameraman cut in. “That’s too wooden. It’s no use to us if you read it like that! Try again, more naturally.”
Javad began again, trying to inject some cadence into his voice: “Shirin Ebadi did not deserve to win the Nobel—”
Mahmudi got up and smacked the flat of his hand across the back of Javad’s head.
“You’re so stupid you can’t even recite a simple text? Come on. We don’t want to be here all day.”
After six more takes, Mahmudi considered Javad’s performance acceptable. Once again, Javad was blindfolded, handed the stick, and led back to his cell. This worried him. They had promised that he would be released immediately after the filming. A few minutes later, Mahmudi’s boss came to his cell.
“Now that you’ve become a good boy, listen carefully to the plan,” Farahani said. “Tomorrow morning after breakfast, you’ll go to your house with one of our staff to pick up your passport, birth certificate, and every document or ownership deed that you have in your name or your family’s name. You bring them here, and after that you’ll be freed. The court verdict is also easy. You and Mehri go to an address that I will give you; there, a cleric will issue a certificate of temporary marriage backdated by five years. You’ll bring that certificate here, ask for it to be included in your file, and tell the judge that the lady in question was married to you on a temporary basis. That’ll take care of the unlawful sexual liaison. At the most, you will be fined one hundred thousand tomans for not registering your temporary marriage certificate.”