Until We Are Free

by Shirin Ebadi

  They then released him to go home, and by six o’clock he was back in our Tehran living room.

  As he drew to the end of the story, his breath was coming in bursts, and he was speaking with lots of pauses and breaks. He sounded wrecked, nothing like the confident, athletic, playful husband of the many years of our marriage.

  He was waiting for me to say something, but I was, for perhaps the first time in my life, unable to come up with a single thing. As a woman, a wife, I was sick with anger. He had betrayed me. But I was even more furious, more floored, by the depth of evil of the intelligence agents. Their malice and cunning truly had no limit; they were prepared to do anything—crush people’s children, their marriage—to achieve their ends. Tears slid down my face, but I tried not to make any noise.

  What did they want from me? I didn’t permit myself that thought very often. But it came careening into my head, and I wanted to run out onto the balcony and scream it. How much could they take away from one person? They had taken my judgeship, my entire life’s ambition; when I resurrected myself and built a human rights center, they took that, too; with their violence and electoral fraud, I had lost my homeland. And now they had tried to take away my husband. I closed my eyes, wanting nothing but to go to sleep. I longed to put my head on a pillow and let the tiredness wash over me, so that just for a little while I wouldn’t have to think about it. But Javad was talking again, asking me—me!—for advice about his pending stoning sentence.

  “What do you think I should do?”

  “I don’t see any option but to do as they’ve asked,” I said. “But, of course, only if…that woman…agrees.”

  Javad said he would try to contact her and would let me know what happened.

  “I’ll be waiting to hear from you,” I said.

  “I’ll call soon.”

  —

  I waited to hear back. Moving around the apartment, I thanked God for small graces. That Nargess had not been home when Javad called, and that she would—at least for a time—be spared knowing what had been done to her parents. Negar and her husband left the house early and didn’t return until evening, so their ears were safe.

  I sat on the sofa looking out across the park, mechanically checking news websites every hour. I felt as though I were in some sort of daze, bewildered and swinging between rage and a low-lying guilt. Even this I interrogated. Was I right to feel guilty? The intelligence apparatus had simply pushed themselves to the furthest reaches of their inhumanity, but was it not Javad who had fundamentally betrayed me? But I was not in his shoes, isolated, away from my wife and daughters, vulnerable. I thought of telling him that he was not alone—that we were not alone. That I knew of many cases where the intelligence ministry had done the same sorts of things to others, used sexual blackmail and traps of all sorts, in order to force dissident politicians out of public life or simply to wound and silence critics. But knowing this didn’t lessen my anger, and I doubted that it would lessen his pain. I had no answers, just a dull ringing ache in my neck.

  That night, when Nargess came home, I said nothing. I knew she would eventually need to know, but I was in shock and could not yet form the words to tell her. Sparing her, even for a few days, was all I could do. I held on, despite the breathlessness that seized me in the mornings when I woke up and remembered.

  A week later, Javad called again and told me how things had gone. He had telephoned Mehri—he said her name, I did not—and she had agreed to go with him to see the cleric specified by the intelligence agents. The cleric, as promised, issued a backdated temporary marriage certificate that showed them, at the date of filming, to have been sigheh, or temporarily married. Iranian law allows for two types of marriage, conventional and temporary. Under sigheh, the duration of the marriage is determined in advance; it could be as short as an hour or as long as a decade. If a child is born under a sigheh marriage, he or she is a rightful child, with all legal entitlements from both parents. When the sigheh expires, the “married couple” should separate, unless the arrangement is mutually extended. The practice has existed in Iran for centuries and is primarily intended to determine and regulate paternity, should a woman become pregnant. But it is shunned by younger and less traditional Iranians, who see it as an archaic religious loophole that effectively legalizes prostitution.

  Javad had taken the certificate back to the court at Evin, which, in turn, fined him 100,000 tomans, precisely the amount Mahmudi’s boss had specified. So now the punishment they had dangled over him, execution by stoning, the punishment they had used to force him to denounce me before the cameras, was null. But he had been required to turn over his passport and was barred from leaving the country.

  In the days that followed, we talked several times. But I felt as though I were speaking to a stranger. Javad was broken, pleading during each conversation for me not to leave him. He sounded so unwell that regardless of my own feelings, which were still too raw and fresh for me to even contemplate a decision, I was worried for him. Mahmudi had not yet released the denunciation, and the threat of it dangled over our heads. I encouraged him to get out of Tehran, to spend some time with friends, to finally go visit the desert areas of Iran he had always wanted to explore. He did travel a bit, though each time he came back, he said the same thing: “I miss you and the girls, I want to see you. But Mahmudi has my passport. I have to convince him to give it back, so I can come see you all.”

  How he would manage that, I did not know.

  —

  In those first couple of weeks after Javad told me what had happened, we spoke on the phone regularly, and often on Skype. Nargess had been out during the very first phone call, but most of the others she overheard. She wanted to know what was going on. I had no choice but to explain, and one morning after Negar left for work, I sat Nargess down on the couch. I avoided going into any detail, and I tried to tell her in a way that would not be overly distressing. She had her own worries, and I didn’t want to add to them.

  “Why don’t you tell Negar?” she said.

  “Well, because your sister is busy with her PhD. And she can’t do anything about the situation anyway, so I think we shouldn’t worry her.”

  “I think she should know.”

  “Let’s see what happens, and whether they end up broadcasting your dad’s confession. Remember, Negar has a new husband—she might feel embarrassed in front of him and her new in-laws.” I worried about this in particular: the possibility my daughters would be embarrassed or feel awkward because of what had transpired between their parents.

  “I wish you’d tell her, so I could have someone to talk with about it.”

  She unwound her long black hair, pulled at its ends, and then gathered it up again.

  “Why would he do such a thing and speak against you? Why would he go with that woman?” She kept repeating these questions, growing more agitated.

  I decided to be as frank with her as I knew how to be. Her work in The Hague involved her researching and documenting terrible atrocities. She helped prepare files and witnesses’ statements involving descriptions of extreme violence. I felt that she needed to see how that work, the work she wanted to make her future, connected to what she was experiencing in her family. The field of human rights is not about pretty words; it involves the abuse of the vulnerable by those who wield power. That was the fine line that connected massacres in Sarajevo to atrocities in Sierra Leone to the systematic persecution of dissidents in places like Iran and Russia.

  I told her that if she wanted to be a human rights lawyer and activist, she had to cultivate the culture of that world inside herself. She had to understand what that world involved, in all its depth and occasional blackness.

  “Human beings are free, Nargess. But each individual has only a certain threshold for suffering. Your father couldn’t take that kind of torture.”

  She crossed her arms over her chest tightly, and listened.

  “This could have happened to any man,” I said. “This is some
thing between him and me. But you have to look at it differently. You should be wondering why an intelligence agent was hiding with a camera in the second bedroom. Were the country’s problems resolved by determining who was cheating on whom? This was a trap they used against me, and that is how you must think about it.”

  It was a bitter lesson to impart to my own daughter. But she wanted to become an activist herself, to use her knowledge of the law to defend Iranians. She had to know exactly what she, and all the other young women and men taking up such a struggle, would be up against.

  In September 2009, Nargess began her PhD in London at the School of Oriental and African Studies. She found a small flat near the Thames, and I eventually followed her there to make London a base for my travels. Around the same time, Negar and her husband moved from Atlanta to Boston to take a research position at MIT. I traveled most of the year, but when I wasn’t on the road, I divided my time between their two cities. Negar complained a bit that I spent more time in Europe, but this was simply because Europe dealt with Iran more closely and there were more arenas in which to pursue human rights advocacy.

  Often I ended up in Geneva, where a number of United Nations bodies that I dealt with were based. One bright morning in late September, I dressed and went out into the street, wanting to be around people, to feel the bustle of a city, even if it was not my own. I walked toward the water, watching the early sunlight glint off the wheels of the bicycles and the boats anchored in the lake list gently. I sat in a café and ordered an espresso, a short, bitter European preparation that I had grown to like. The habit provided a jolt that carried me into the day. A woman went past holding the hands of two children, weighed down with schoolbags, hurrying them along as they dawdled to point at two birds bobbing their heads along a window ledge. In Persian we have an expression: “to sit at the foot of your life and home.” Broadly, it means that your life is your home life. I realized that if I didn’t have a home life, I still had my other life, my work, and I needed to get back to it.

  I rested my head on my hands for a moment, to collect myself. I found it hard to get the flashing faces out of my mind. The face of Neda Agha-Soltan, who had been shot down in the street during the protests following the election. Javad’s face. The smile my colleague Narges Mohammadi always flashed when she entered the office. She had been arrested on the very first day of the protests.

  I must have looked utterly bereft, because the young woman at the table next to me leaned over.

  “Are you all right?” she asked uncertainly, in English.

  My English was more halting at the time, but I tried to respond: “I don’t know if you follow the news. I come from Iran, and there have been bitter events in my country.”

  She smiled and reached out to touch my arm gently. “I understand. I’m Palestinian. I know what it’s like to have constant sorrow for your homeland.”

  We sat together talking. She was living in France with her family and had come to Geneva for work. I told her a bit about Iran and what the country was going through; she spoke about Palestine and her relatives scattered across the world. And something in that conversation, a connection to a stranger who I would never have guessed might have related so intimately to some part of my own story, buoyed me.

  —

  Two days later, I was meeting with the U.N. high commissioner for human rights, Navi Pillay. We had met several times before, and she was eager to know about the latest developments in Iran. I gave her details about the numbers of arrests, the conditions of the detention centers, the harassment of activists, and the persecution of ordinary Iranians whose only crime had been to show up at a few demonstrations. I told her about the militia gangs who roamed neighborhoods, smashing the cars of those who dared shout “Allaho akbar” from their rooftops in the evenings. She asked me to explain some Iranian laws to her, so she could understand how these abuses fit into the legal context of the Islamic Republic itself. I was pleased that she was so thorough, and I spent much of that day with one of her deputies, an Iranian by background, going through the laws and contraventions one by one.

  As I left the building, I saw that a group of Iranians were staging a protest rally outside. In the months that followed the events of June 2009, Iranians across much of the world, from Los Angeles to Prague, held such demonstrations in solidarity with the Green Movement protesters inside Iran. One of the organizers saw me and ran over, asking if I would address the crowd. There were perhaps a hundred people, and many of them simply held aloft photographs of people killed in the recent events, like Sohrab Aarabi, with his glasses and green scarf, who had been shot in the chest on June 15.

  I took the loudspeaker, and the minute I started to say something, all I could see was the sea of images in front of me, the faces of all these innocent young people who had lost their lives. It was a reflection of the carousel of images that usually just ran through my head. I thought of the courage it had taken for those young people in Tehran to go out into the streets holding those simple placards—“Where is my vote?”—with the openness and simplicity of a child, only to be razed down by bullets. Iranians had shown themselves to be peaceful in their resistance, I told the crowd, and their determination would one day bring about change. Of this, I was certain. It was the first time in my life I had cried while speaking before a crowd. Unfortunately, it was not the last.

  It was after that trip to Geneva that my unending trips started, and they continue to this day. I live in airports, one day at the European Parliament, the next at the European Commission; after that, various universities in South America, other sites across the globe.

  When I left Geneva, it felt good to be working so much again. In Tehran I often worked fourteen-hour days, because I had tangible cases to take forward. With each of these trips, it began to feel as though my work in exile still had a concrete purpose. Wherever I went I told my audience about what was happening in Iran, and how state censorship meant that the world heard little, or not enough, about what Iranians were going through. I was gradually joined in exile by thousands of Iranians who’d had to flee in the wake of those 2009 protests. Journalists, activists, lawyers, doctors, even dentists, students, and ordinary people whose lives had been cast into disarray, for often vague, barely political connections to the events of those months.

  Often these people sought me out, asking how I had managed. I told them that, like me, they needed to focus on work and avoid dwelling on the grief of their dislocation. I saw us as similar to people who’d boarded a ship that sank, leaving everyone swimming in deep waters. We had no choice but to swim; to become tired simply was not an option, as that meant drowning. I told them not to think about the shore and how far it was, how it wasn’t even visible, because this would just bring on despair.

  That is our situation. Swimming in the darkness, not giving in to the pessimism and thoughts of the far-off shore.

  —

  Javad followed the clerk at Tejarat Bank to the vault of our safe-deposit box, passing the staff members typing away at their desks. As they approached the vault, with its heavy steel door, the bank manager ran over to them, a troubled look on his face.

  “I’m afraid we won’t be able to allow you access today,” he said.

  “To our box? Why ever not?” Javad was taken aback. He had gone to put in some documents.

  “A letter has come from the judiciary ordering us to deny access. I’m very sorry.”

  “How do I know our belongings are safe?”

  “I can’t say anything more.”

  Javad went back to his car and called me. “They’ve confiscated your Nobel medal,” he said.

  I was flabbergasted, for it was almost impossible to contemplate what they imagined they would gain from such a crude move. The world press began covering the story around the clock, and newspapers ran caricatures of Ahmadinejad embracing my medal, saying, “I finally got my wish, and a medal too!” “This is the first time a Nobel Peace Prize has been confiscated by national a
uthorities,” the Norwegian foreign minister said, calling the state’s move shocking.

  The furor swelled to such a pitch and became such a global embarrassment to the regime that about ten days later, Mahmudi called Javad and told him to come to the bank.

  “Enough of this—we’ll open up the damn box,” the interrogator told him.

  Mahmudi was waiting for Javad at the bank, together with a camera crew. They stood by the vault while the poor bank manager, a kind man who knew us well and seemed to find all of this excruciating, examined a letter from the court allowing access to the box. Two keys were required to open the box, as usual, and with the cameras rolling, Javad and the manager both inserted their keys.

  “Where’s the medal? Show us the medal,” Mahmudi demanded.

  Javad, now being paraded before the state’s cameras for the second time, took the medal out of the box and handed it to Mahmudi, who held it up before the camera. He then handed it back to Javad.

  “Put it back,” he told him. Javad put it back in the box, and the cameraman recorded the medal’s return and turned off his camera.

  “Now lock it up,” Mahmudi ordered the bank manager.

  “Wait, you said the box was to be opened! I need some documents, and I have some things to put in.”