Until We Are Free

by Shirin Ebadi

  When the Board of Settlement of Tax Disputes finally issued its verdict, the state moved to dispossess me with an astonishing swiftness, perhaps the single most efficient action committed by the Islamic Republic in the name of tax compliance. They put all my properties up for sale within days, aided by already having the deeds in their possession. It struck me that back in August, when they’d freed Javad and asked him for the deeds, this plan had already been under way; they had known what would unfold, and had readied themselves.

  And with that, everything Javad and I had built and earned together in the course of our thirty-five-year marriage, except for our apartment, was seized. This included the commercial flat that housed the center’s office and our orchard house and land outside Tehran. These were all the fruits of forty years of hard work and effort, aided in the last years by the Nobel Prize money and some other awards I had received. While my own work had been largely pro bono, Javad had spent a career as a senior engineer and manager on some of Tehran’s most prominent construction projects. In the safe-deposit box at Tejarat Bank that had ended up in the midst of the controversy over my medal, I held some family jewelry, a gold watch, and the diamond ring Javad had given me when we married.

  I never personally saw the notices printed in the national newspapers to sell my properties. Javad saw them, as did my sister and brother, and I think of them staring at the page, seeing that our lives had been put up for sale.

  In most such cases, the prices are set by an assessor, but what could I have expected? The authorities estimated the value of what I owned at laughably low prices—just a fraction of their actual value. The flat used by the Defenders of Human Rights Center was priced at $70,000. Tehran real estate is some of the most expensive in the world. That apartment, though modest, was in a respectable, favored district in north Tehran; it would have easily commanded several times that value. But the price had its own logic. First, the revenue raised would be insufficient to cover my tax debt, and I would remain, forever, a debtor to the government, my debt climbing each year. Second, this artificial price would allow a relative or friend of the officials to snap up a desirable flat for a fraction of its actual value. I knew one of the intelligence agents or their associates would be the buyer, and after the property sold, I made inquiries and learned that it had been acquired by a trusted government employee.

  Soon it was the orchard’s turn. When Javad and I bought the land, before the revolution, it was just an arid stretch on the outskirts of Tehran, the dirt rubbly and bare. We planted trees year after year, cherries and pomegranates, plums and walnuts, and in time the plot grew green and we began calling it the orchard. I could tell you how many feet separated the row of apricots from the pomegranates, and where near the southern edge the ground slopes down toward a brick wall. I can feel the smoothness of the wooden bench we bought the year Negar was born, and the spot on the back where the girls carved their initials into it, near a knot in the wood. I know the hour at dusk when the mosquitoes begin to buzz and hurl themselves toward the light, and the smell of night-blooming jasmine that hangs over the terrace. My children grew up in that orchard, it was where the family always gathered, and as Tehran became increasingly polluted and chaotic, it became the place I sometimes drove to just to breathe deeply. I could not permit that orchard to go to Mahmudi’s cronies; it was just not in me to allow that.

  I contacted some close friends in Tehran and asked them to bid on it at the public auction. I promised I wouldn’t be upset if they became its owners, that I would view it as a great act of loyalty, actually. They agreed, and on auction day, the intelligence officials were surprised to see a crowd of bidders there, determined to secure the land. The price climbed a bit, but my friends managed to prevail in the end. When I heard the news, the only thing I could think was When spring comes and the trees grow heavy with plums and cherries, I will never enjoy that sight again; but thank God my friends will eat that fruit, and not Mahmudi and his accomplices.

  Of the main bank account I held in my name, I managed to withdraw $50,000 through a third party who had power of attorney. But the rest, nearly the same amount, the officials confiscated to pay my debt. Once they sold everything off and seized all my accounts, it became clear that the wholesale financial dispossession at the hands of the state still had not generated enough money to pay my debts. In addition to the standing charges against me for conspiring against national security, I also became a formal debtor to the Islamic Republic and, in absentia, was barred from leaving the country. This means that if I ever go back, my passport will be taken at the airport and I will not be permitted to exit again. In the space of just one year, the country whose justice system I had once represented at the highest level determined that I must be a penniless traitor.

  —

  It began to rain softly as I reached my apartment building, pulling my grocery bags with me into the elevator. It was one of those rare evenings when the city looked as it did in old films, wreathed in fog that hovered above the Thames, the sky and the air and the river blending together in a bleak expanse of gray. I put some tea on to brew—is there anything lonelier than brewing a single teaspoon of loose tea for one person?—and sat down to check my email, hoping to see a message from one of my daughters.

  Instead, the glowing screen showed a message from Javad:

  Mahmudi has told me that if I don’t pass along this message to you, he’ll arrest me again. He insists on speaking with you, and this is his mobile number.

  I felt a burst of anger so strong it sent my pulse racing. I began to type quickly in reply:

  I’ve read your message. And I know that before you read this, the agents will be reading it themselves. Tell Mahmudi for me that he’s a nobody. If I want to speak to someone from intelligence, I’ll speak to his boss’s boss’s boss. But if they want to speak to me, they have to prepare themselves to answer one question first: What law gives them the right to videotape someone’s bed? If they can answer me this, I’m ready to speak to Mahmudi’s boss’s boss’s boss.

  After I sent that message—which, naturally, they read—this line of inquiry stopped. The intelligence agents realized that though they could interrogate my husband and my siblings and my friends, they would never establish a direct line to me. In the weeks that followed, I had a whole series of conversations with friends in Tehran, on lines that I knew were bugged. “Does Mahmudi think that if he gets a new ID card and passport he’ll be clear?” I said. “I have his picture, and I’ve shared it with Interpol and every security agency in Europe. He can never set foot outside of Iran.” I knew he preyed on fear. And though I was thousands of miles away, I could find ways to show him that I was not scared.

  —

  That spring, I lost my eyebrows. The culmination of Javad’s arrest and everything they did to him, my sister’s arrest, and then our final dispossession—all of this hurt me in ways I felt every day. And then slowly my eyebrow hairs started to fall out, until I was left with almost none, just a pale moon of forehead above my eyes.

  I am not an especially vain person, but this bothered me as much as I imagine it would bother anyone else, losing an essential part of one’s face. I used a pencil to color them back in, but every morning I would see myself in the mirror and feel that part of me had gone missing. And I suppose it had.

  What the authorities in Iran had done to Javad, to our marriage, was something that could never be put right. Even if we learned to trust each other again and were able to forgive—how this could be accomplished if we were never able to see each other, I did not know—we would have permanently lost the goodness and purity of what we’d had before. I mean purity not in a moral sense but in terms of our ownership over our own story, our own history; our marriage was what we had built, a strong, loving bond forged over years of accommodation, a bond that had survived a revolution, a war, the loss of my career as a judge, the later regeneration of my professional life as a lawyer. That partnership was forever gone, and the question of
what we might create in its place loomed. Javad still pursued his passport application through the various authorities, but so far he had met with little success. And though we still talked on the phone several times a week, the distance between us stretched wide.

  I knew that one day the filmed confession would air, and finally that day came. In June, Iranian state television broadcast it on the prime-time flagship news program, 20:30, named for the hour of the evening when most Iranians gathered around their televisions. The authorities wanted to reach the widest possible audience in order to tell them, Look and see for yourself who your heroes really are; see how the West is interfering in our country’s affairs. The show it appeared on was prominent, always watched by Iranians who followed politics closely. As soon as they saw it, friends starting calling me. “Do you know this is happening?” everyone asked me. I thought it best not to embarrass Javad any further.

  “Yes, I know. We both know everything.”

  Nargess saw it before me and rang, sobbing.

  “We’re humiliated,” she repeated, over and over again.

  “No, of course we’re not. Only the Ministry of Intelligence is humiliated. They are, not us.”

  I didn’t watch the confession. Friends recorded it for me, and later it emerged on YouTube. My assistant finally emailed me a link, and I realized I would have to see it sooner or later.

  Even though I was prepared, this was one of my darkest hours. The authorities didn’t air it as a straight confession; that would have been too ham-handed. Instead, they wove Javad’s comments into a segment of news analysis that purported to examine the “real face” of one of the players of “political chess.” What role was Shirin Ebadi playing? they asked. The segment showed me receiving the Nobel Peace Prize, but the announcer claimed that my activities were more like those of a political opposition figure. Because the piece was meant to be a historic overview, they included old photos of me and said that I had “managed to play a role in Iran’s courts with the help of Ashraf Pahlavi’s reforms.” So my judgeship, reduced to “a role,” was presented as having been enabled by the shah’s sister; they superimposed my face on a glamorous photo of Ashraf Pahlavi, implying that I was a monarchist.

  They said I had a grudge against the Islamic Republic that I was compelled to mention at every opportunity, and it was at that moment that they brought Javad onto the screen. The loss of my judgeship, he said, using crude terms he would never have uttered, “was such a blow that it gave her a complex against the Islamic Republic.”

  Anyone who knew Javad could feel him trembling inside, could see the tension in his frame and the way his hands fluttered awkwardly as he spoke. He cleared his throat every few seconds and spoke in the most unnatural way, repeating words randomly, as though dizzy. He wore a white shirt and looked as though he hadn’t slept.

  The narrative of the news segment was that I had received the Nobel Prize as part of a grand global conspiracy to undermine the Islamic Republic. This view they had to put in the mouth of my husband:

  “Why did they give the prize to her? They wanted to give her an international standing, so that the Islamic Republic couldn’t get in the way of her work. And they wanted to provide her with the funds to pay for that work. So she could work against the Islamic Republic.”

  The Nobel Prize, the voiceover noted, “has also been awarded to Shimon Peres and a number of other Zionists.” And they made Javad say that I had taken on the Baha’is’ case through some shady collaboration; I would defend the accused Baha’i leaders, and the community would try to make me “more famous internationally.”

  But the lowest point was when the presenter dropped his dripping tone of faux objectivity and turned openly tabloid. “And what’s more, Shirin’s husband moans about life with her,” the voiceover said triumphantly.

  Despite my international reputation, the script, as I recall it, had Javad saying, “In our house she couldn’t even oversee the human rights of four people. I didn’t even have the right to be in a bad mood. She fought with me often—once she broke my glasses, and on another occasion she tore my shirt. She would attack and hit me.”

  He went on: “We didn’t have a good life together; it was one-sided. I had become Mr. Ebadi, my friends joked, saying that I had ended up with a husband rather than a wife.”

  And at the very end, he said this: “It is from this point that I feel I need to separate my path from hers.”

  When it was over, I thought, This is what they do. They take the person you love the most away from you and crush them. I looked curiously at the set they had constructed, the red sofa with wooden trim, the ugly beige satin curtains, the fake flowers on the table. Was that meant to be our home? Or where else was it meant to be? I felt a dull pain thudding in my temple, and tried to wipe out the image of that fake living room. In its place I had real memories: of us entertaining friends at the orchard, sitting around the old oak table, of the trip we took together to New York to see a fertility doctor, and how tightly we had held hands in the waiting room. I took a couple of pills for my headache and went and lay down on my bed. I closed my eyes, but sleep did not come.

  Just in case anyone missed the segment, they aired it again a few days later. I don’t know precisely what they were expecting from it, but it seemed to cause no ripples. The state television station had broadcast a number of forced confessions that same month, by other political prisoners. Iranians were growing to detest these show trials, these televised forced confessions; they found them reminiscent of the KGB, of North Korea, not worthy of Iran.

  In December 2010, a miracle happened in the Middle East. A miracle that started in Tunis, then grew and spread across the Arab world but never reached Iran. That was the month the people of Tunisia rose up and, within weeks, managed to oust their ruler.

  I was transfixed by the news and started taking my tablet to bed with me, checking it before switching off the light and again first thing in the morning, to see whether there were any new developments in the tumult that was sweeping the region. The rumbling first spread to Egypt. In January 2011, Egyptians gathered in Cairo’s Tahrir Square and began demanding that Hosni Mubarak step down. In those early days, the fast-moving events and the individuals who emerged to lead them sounded impressively inclusive and moderate, even the Islamists. Rashid al-Ghannushi, the leader of the Tunisian Islamists, who returned to his country after twenty-two years, announced, “I am neither Khomeini, nor the Taliban!” By this he meant he would not be seeking to bring Islamic fundamentalism to Tunisia. Even the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, for its part, called the protests a national uprising of the people of Egypt, both Muslims and Christians. The Islamic Republic of Iran watched these events with some nervousness, and then boldly declared the change sweeping the Arab world an “Islamic Awakening” inspired by Iran’s own 1979 revolution.

  Soon, in February 2011, it was the turn of Libya’s Muammar Gadhafi, one of the region’s most enduring and brutal leaders. Unlike Mubarak, Gadhafi held out stubbornly to the end, launching a killing campaign to crush those who opposed him. He would end up hiding in a drainpipe eight months later, and then be killed at close range.

  For Iranians, it was an unsettling and emotional time. The first real shake-up in the region had started in Iran during the summer of 2009, after the stolen elections. At no time in the contemporary history of the Middle East, before that day in June 2009, had millions of people converged on the capital of a country in the region, demanding change. Although Iran’s movement fizzled, crushed by the state and the chaotic, conflicting demands of its supporters, the first crackle, the first spark, had been Iranian. So it was painful for Iranians to see the upheaval and excitement in these neighboring Arab countries; if change was coming, why was it not Iran’s destiny as well?

  On February 9, less than two months after the start of Tunisia’s revolt, the people of Tehran felt emboldened and applied for a permit to demonstrate in support of the Tunisian and Egyptian uprisings. For the regime, it was a
sticky situation to handle; on the one hand, the Islamic Republic had supported the Arab uprising in the name of “Islamic Awakening,” but on the other, they well knew that if Iranians were permitted to express their own solidarity and discontent, the implications for the regime could be dangerous.

  The opposition leaders who had led the Green Movement, Mehdi Karroubi and Mir Hossein Mousavi, called for demonstrations, and even though the authorities refused to grant permission, Iranians came out into the streets anyway. Many were wounded, some were arrested, and some were killed. Six days later, people went back into the streets, and they were again crushed by the police. In Shiraz, security forces threw a university student off a bridge, killing him instantly. Scores were arrested there, too.

  As students kept their protests going across the nation’s universities, classes were canceled and the police stepped up their arrests. Those activists already in detention faced more severe restrictions and deteriorated conditions. Iran’s largest cities, especially Tehran, were under total lockdown. Police in black riot gear lined key squares and public parks; police convoys hulked up and down the expressways. The state was taking no chances; it would not permit Iranians to seek the same freedoms the Tunisians and Egyptians had rallied for. The authorities moved to arrest Mousavi and Karroubi, the opposition leaders, tacitly admitting that the state was fearful enough about the prospect of a challenge that it had to arrest the key candidates in the most recent national election. No institution admitted responsibility for the arrests, but in interviews some Revolutionary Guards commanders and the intelligence minister suggested that the supreme leader had ordered everything personally.

  In prison, even Mousavi and Karroubi’s status as former senior officials did not secure them decent treatment. The authorities refused them regular visitation rights with family and kept them in secret apartments in undisclosed locations; they denied them access to the outdoors and adequate amounts of fruit and vegetables in their meals. Soon both fell ill, but even in the hospital, security officers lingered in their rooms day and night. At first, both men’s wives stayed with them in detention, but after a few months, the authorities released Karroubi’s wife. It was said that he preferred this, for he was a cleric and a traditional Muslim and felt aggrieved that the security agents often burst into the room without notice and would not even permit his wife to close the bathroom door when bathing.