There was no reason to think that what had worked so well with the Shah’s secret police wouldn’t work with the ignorant mullahs, the mechanics and butcher boys who had become impromptu inspectors and torturers. They had their weaknesses. You just had to find them. Their God, their faith, their obtuse observance of sharia law were all cracks through which I could meddle with their logic, infest it, and redirect it in my favor. I had read the Quran, Nahj al-Balagha, and other Shiite reference works. I could use them to my advantage. No, I wasn’t worried. All I had to do was be myself. Abandon my position as a revolutionary leader. Take off the mask and present myself as I was. As naked, as weak as I was. I had to try. It was the best I could do. I would show them my real face—the face of a traitor.
The Doctor ended up giving in. He secretly delivered the baby of a woman sought by the police. His wife knocked on the door one night when he was alone in his bedroom, probably occupied by a game of backgammon with his imaginary partner. The Doctor opened the door. For the first time in twenty years his wife entered his bedroom, his wife whose existence he had stubbornly ignored. She stood opposite him, looked him in the eyes. Then she spoke to him in a conciliatory voice. It was the first time in far too long that she was finally speaking to him in that tone. Hardly had her hand slid over her husband’s than he confessed that he loved his wife more than his games of backgammon, his friends, and all his mistresses combined. After listening to her, he packed up his medical bag and followed her.
He relapsed. When he was arrested at the bedside of one of his secret patients, and he was beaten and thrown in prison, his wife finally conceded grudgingly that the Doctor was perhaps not a bankrolled agent of American imperialism.
The war got bogged down in the swamps of Shalamcheh,15 in the dust of deserted expanses in the south and the west of the country. The Tehran nights were broken up by the arrival of Russian missiles launched by the Iraqi army over the city. The Iranians retaliated with weapons supplied by Israel. Then the Iraqis dropped chemical bombs designed in the United States and made in Europe. The Iranians responded by crushing the town of Basra, within mortar range, and sending even more soldiers to the front. The operations came in quick succession with canonical names, Karbala 1, then Karbala 2 and 3. Karbala 4 was a total fiasco, unspeakable carnage. The Pasdaran had taken control of the war, annihilating the generals and the soldiers appointed by the former regime, who they replaced with autodidacts, whose apprenticeship in military strategy exacted a high price in human lives. Hundreds of young people died in order to seize a small town, a simple hill, that they would then cede to the next Iraqi counteroffensive. Despite the massacre, no one was interested in putting an end to the conflict. Not the mullahs, who had found in the war a guarantee of remaining in power. Nor the war leaders, aligned with the new businessmen who were earning dizzying sums by bypassing the American embargo. Nor the great European democracies, which were selling weapons to the warring nations, docile and solvent clients, because of their oil deposits. And not the Sunni Arab Emirati rich, terrorized by the ascent of an expansionist Shiite Islam. In brief, each group had its stake in the prolongation of the conflict. Macabre altars topped with the image of young martyrs had been erected in each corner of the street. The walls and doors were covered with photos of young soldiers fallen at the front. Always the same canonical three-quarter pose, the robot-portrait of the model martyr, budding beard, forced smile, eyes fixed on the camera, and that strange mystical breach outside the frame, the focus of the subject’s stare as he contemplates death through us. The cemeteries expanded a bit more each day. Every family paid its tribute in fresh flesh. You remember, don’t you? It was horrific.
§
And Niloufar was missing in action.
Her mother had reestablished relations with the Tudeh Party, which had been reformed after the fall of the shah. You’ve already heard the expression, I imagine: “Once a Tudehi, always a Tudehi.”
The white-haired former leaders had returned to the country, and the party had reassembled its former members like an army of shadows. Why did those rumpled sixty-somethings, those established, important people and their children and grandchildren reunite to put the old rusty organization of the party back in motion? That question remained unanswered. And to do what? Exactly the same thing as under the shah, align behind the foreign politics of the Russian Big Brother! Watch out! At that time, the wall was still standing. They kept calling Russia the “country of Soviets.” And the leaders of the Tudeh Party, still just as sly, still just as aligned with those in power, still just as foolish, had not understood even after forty years that you can’t sleep with a bear without swallowing fur. They sent their base back to the slaughterhouse, but what was different this time, when things started to go off the rails, when the purges began again, even the kingpins let themselves be captured, preferring the jails of the Islamic government to the “golden” exile in the Soviet countries and its satellites. I don’t know what Niloufar’s mother’s role was in the new Tudeh Party, nor the importance she held in the decision-making echelon, but she was arrested and spent five years in prison. They say that she was tortured savagely. So much so that when she was released, she was an old woman with white hair. Her legendary haughtiness was no more. She had a hunched back, and something was missing from her eyes: the insolent flame she had kept alive for all those years, fueled by the hatred of her husband, fed by her detestation of those who had succeeded in profiting off of social injustice, and through her denouncement of the capitalist system. Forgetting until her death that she had been a part of it.
Nilou was still missing. She was no longer there. After his release from prison, the Doctor had been banned from the medical profession, and his office had closed definitively. He was living as a recluse with one of his former mistresses. He was paying her expenses in exchange for a mattress and a few puffs of opium. Their beautiful house had been sold, with all the beautiful things it contained. Niloufar’s mother, taking refuge with her brother, died there a few months later. Upon her death, they found in her pocket a crumpled photograph of her next to the Doctor, squeezing Niloufar with her braids, her chubby little girl legs and her white dress, on the terrace of Villa Rose in Chamkhaleh.
But where was Niloufar? I should have suspected. Everything suggested that she would disappear: her silence during the last few visits, her change in attitude, her somber habits, her strange questions. If I had been a bit less preoccupied by the reflection of my own image in her eyes, a bit less plunged into the hollow of her dimples, less absorbed by the lines of her neck, if I had listened to her words instead of staring at her mouth, I would have understood that she was hiding something from me, that she was working on a secret task, an obscure enterprise. But I was near her for something else. With her, I had never emerged from that pale blue that attracted me to the bottom of the sea. To the silence of the waters. While she, to the contrary, had listened to me. Had believed me, alas. Just like me, she was seeking her revenge on life, the terrible revenge of a spoiled child who wants to pay all at once for all the favors she had received despite herself. Pay for the life that all the world envied. Pay for her father’s car and the driver who dropped her off each morning at school. Pay for the house that was too big and too beautiful. Pay for those rich, refined meals she had savored. For her father’s arrogance. Her mother’s elegance. For poor Parand, who she had ignored and who had died as a martyr. For that unlucky stammerer Mohamad-Réza, who had been humiliated in front of her. She wanted to pay for all of it. In one go, with damages and interest. So she had joined the most radical extreme left movement, who were also the most narrow-minded, proponents of armed struggle and urban guerrilla warfare. An ideological movement imported as contraband from Latin America, during the time of the shah. The “Ashraf Movement.”16 Suicidal purists. I told myself that she could be in the mountains of Iranian Kurdistan, a Kalashnikov in her hand.
§
Forgiveness does not exist. Even if you give me your absolutio
n, I will not be delivered. My faults will not be expiated. I know that. I will have to pay. That’s how it goes. That’s justice. I admit it. I have always decided my own actions. I remember when, as a child, I discovered in myself a firm resistance to guilt. People need to confide in someone. Not me. As a child, when I was caught after doing something wrong, I never confessed. Even when I was caught red-handed. I continued to deny, or remained stoic. I never pleaded guilty. Never asked for forgiveness. What worried my mother wasn’t the lack of a confession, it was that I never claimed my innocence, even when I was accused for no reason. All I did was enclose myself in an impenetrable silence, while continuing to stare my accusers straight in the eyes. I know that at every moment, at each turn in my life, I always chose the shortest path toward the fulfillment of my desires. I never encumbered myself with good and bad. I was indifferent. It was part of my nature.
A gift or a celestial curse? I don’t know. And so I would walk around Tehran for hours without looking at anything other than my feet. The streets continued on infinitely. I didn’t need to lift my head. The landscape was changing around me, the density of the population, the background noise, the accents of merchants on shop steps, voices of women chatting in front of their doors. I found myself in working-class neighborhoods, in the downcast areas in the south of the city. If there was one advantage to Tehran, that was it. Its crooked and borderless geography. The labyrinth of the streets, rarely uncorking onto a dead end. The moans of the muezzins floating in the air, suspended like fog on the branches of burnt trees, on the electricity lines and on the windowsills. I was walking, and I couldn’t stop myself. I crossed and crossed again, over the dry gutters that cracked the macadam, between the slabs of concrete, those overturned mirrors of the city. I shouldn’t have been there. I was too visible. In that time, you could be arrested for less than that. But I didn’t want to acknowledge that. Those days, I was, I know now, in full gestation. Yes, gestation. My body was secreting a new substance. My soul was exhaling the breath held from a free-dive in my past. I felt something that I would know how to identify only later, much later: the soft and smooth blade of guilt working its way through my entrails, patiently cutting me to shreds.
Niloufar left one day, saying she was going to visit a friend in a neighboring city. She had taken a bag and a few pieces of clothing and had not come back. She had made just three phone calls, not one more, to say that she was well and that we shouldn’t worry about her. That she would be back soon. This was something she had done countless times. But I knew that she wouldn’t come back that time, and that it was because of me. I had sent her to the slaughterhouse with my ideas, my guilt-inducing speeches. By working on her patiently, molding her, for years. I had done it, I know, I knew. Then I had abandoned her, alone, in that violent world. A world that I had contributed to safeguarding instead of fighting. I had contributed more than a stone to its structure, I had defended its principles and sung its praises. I might not have been mounted on the platform, but I had given wretched preachers a leg up. I had certainly not lit the fire, but I had held the torch. I had not killed, but I had dug the graves. Without regret. I’ve told you already; I felt no regret.
So why did walking aimlessly in the streets of Tehran engender in me the desire to go back down the thread of history? I wanted to redo my life, go back to the very beginning. Don’t ask me why, but something in me was saying that I could make it so that the bullets shot back out of bodies, the shrapnel from the earth, so that the overturned fields would regain their serenity, so that the wall would never have been erected in front of the Caspian, so that the fire would still be burning on the beach during those short summer nights, surrounded by Hamed, Parand, Mahmoud, Parviz, and Behrouz. Mohamad-Réza would still be singing the poems by Nazim Hikmet, with a flame in his eyes.
Every day, I pushed back the deadline to hand myself over to the Pasdaran. And the time that was passing made the story I wanted to tell them all the more difficult to swallow. The fear of being arrested knotted up my insides even during the day. I almost never went out anymore. Every time I went to a secret meeting, I told myself that it would be the last. But I was there at the next one. Everything continued until the raid. Until one of the group members, captured by the secret services, sent the entire organization into flight.
One day, coming back from a committee meeting, I saw the small flowerpot was no longer in the window. I followed the procedure. As planned, I passed the payphone situated on the north side of Vanak Square several times, but no one came to get me. I was in the street, left to my own devices. Not far away, on Molla Sadra Street, I slowly walked in front of the Pasdaran station without stopping. It was too late to hand myself over. Even with my prodigious talent for persuasion, even by recounting the cleverest story in the world, I wouldn’t have been able to get myself out of this. Not this time. It was over. I had lost all credibility. Turning myself in would have looked like an act of desperation. The hideouts were falling like dead leaves. The Pasdaran army was kicking down doors and scooping up members of the organization. Someone had beaten me to the punch and agreed to tell them everything. Tehran had transformed into a hunting ground, and I was the prey. I spent my first day in taxis and buses that hauled me north to south, east to west, like a lost package. I felt like I was being watched, followed. Fear had put me on edge. Everything frightened me: the passersby, their stares, the cars that drove near me, the people who walked behind me. Then the sun set at the other end of the city, the night came, my first night of wandering.
I couldn’t stay with any acquaintance living in Tehran. In those chaotic times, even the legendary familial hospitality no longer existed. The hotels and guesthouses had to be avoided. Then I had an idea. I bought a suitcase, stuffed it with cheap clothing and, that night, I went to the train station, at the end of what used to be Pahlavi Street, renamed Valiasr Street, where I bought a ticket for the farthest destination I could find. In the early morning, I was in Mashhad, more than six hundred miles from Tehran. I didn’t leave the station; I made the trip back in the other direction. Then I started again the next night and continued for several nights. That’s how I started my strange pilgrimages to the four corners of the country, with Tehran as my epicenter. Like the books of the Tudeh Party, in their bags of rice. A contradictory convoy, sent back endlessly. I saw quite a bit of the country. The arid plains, the mountains, the snowy summits, the verdant valleys, the furious torrents, and the seas of sand. I traveled through it, the villages, and even cities that aren’t on the map. I found myself in nasty hostels, where I sometimes slept on the ground, among exhausted travelers, worn out and stinking. Over time, I would start to resemble them. I didn’t recognize myself anymore. I had their moronic air, I was dirty. I think I was in each of the big cities of the country at least once, with the exception of the Southeast because of the war, and the North to avoid being recognized.
When the train or bus arrived, I would wander around the station, without ever venturing into the city. All those stations looked the same. Surrounded by cheap dormitories, short-term hotels, packed and cheap restaurants. For some time, another element added to this landscape: war icons. Every available surface was occupied by effigies of martyrs, amateur frescoes depicting war scenes. Sometimes, when I had a bit of time to kill, I would bathe in a public bath. It was my favorite thing. I would doze off in the heat of the hammam, I would abandon myself to the hands of the professional washer, I would put on clean clothes and take the train or the bus in the other direction.
As a native of a region isolated by the Alborz Mountains and the Caspian Sea, I had no idea of the country. I discovered it from behind my window. I spoke to strangers, I shared their meals, their worries, their worlds. I was far from books, from polished speeches, from lies. I was living in the real world. I could have continued that way for a long while—in my bag, I had enough money to last me years. But one night, getting off of the bus, I found myself in my hometown. How? I never really knew. I only remember the tr
ip. Leaving Tehran, then the Qazvin plains, flat and dry, then the climb up to the Harâz mountain pass, then the olive trees of Manjil and the gusts of wind, the long tunnel beneath the Alborz Mountains and the drizzle of Guilan that started to fall on the other side. That’s when the windshield wipers started up and stayed on for the remainder of the journey.
My Part of Her Page 13