I'm Writing You from Tehran

by Delphine Minoui

  “I have to tell you about it,” whispered Niloufar. “It’s a long story, but I’d prefer not to talk about it while I’m in Iran. The walls have ears.”

  NICE, FRANCE, two months later and almost twenty-five hundred miles away. A sunset-pink sky caressed the Promenade des Anglais. Sitting at a table on the terrace of a small café at the edge of the sea, Niloufar blew rings with her cigarette smoke. After her ordeal, she had chosen the sun of the South of France to treat her inner wounds. Until she regained her strength, she would squat on the office couch of a lawyer friend, one of the many Iranians of the diaspora scattered around the world since 1979. On a trip to Paris to visit my parents, I had come to see her for the weekend. Seeing me walk into the café, she smiled. The small wrinkles around her almond eyes had disappeared. She had recovered her normal laugh and put some weight back on. After lighting her umpteenth Marlboro, she took a deep drag and then plunged into the abyss of her memories:

  “Everything happened really fast. I was taking photos on Valiasr Square. It was the fourth day of the protests. I had decided to join the crowd out of solidarity with the students. You remember Forouhar, whom I talked about so often? After his death, I threw in the towel. I shut myself in at home. I didn’t call anyone anymore. With the campuses ignited, I regained hope. They had killed the thinkers, but they hadn’t managed to kill their thoughts. So I decided to join the crowd. A plainclothes policeman saw my camera and yelled at me, asking if I was a reporter. I didn’t have time to respond. I felt hands grabbing me, violently. I tried to fight back. No use. All around me, batons and knives were raining down on the youth. Blood was flowing. It was chaos.”

  I listened attentively to Niloufar. When she described the circumstances of her arrest, I finally understood why my interrogator from the intelligence service had been so curious about her. In the eyes of the regime, she had committed the unforgivable by documenting with a camera those unprecedented riots in which the name of the Supreme Leader had been tarnished for the first time. Obviously, they had tried to shut her up, stifle the testimony.

  “And afterward, where did they take you?” I asked her.

  “I wound up, a little dazed, with some other protesters in the Den of Spies … That’s the official nickname of the U.S. embassy. It had been transformed into a detention center. The next day, they blindfolded me and started to bombard me with questions, about religion, politics, my ideas. I had no idea what was in store for me. And then, after some time, they announced that they were transferring me elsewhere. It wasn’t until I was released that I realized I was at Towhid Prison—”

  Niloufar abruptly cut herself off. Head lowered, she ran her hands over her eyes, her mouth, her forehead. Then she glanced nervously over her shoulder, before reminding herself that she was in France, that there was little risk of being under surveillance here.

  “Towhid Prison was a nightmare. They threw me into a minuscule, isolated cell, two meters by a meter and a half. No window to look out of. Thick walls, the void around me. That kind of solitude drives you crazy. With a fluorescent light on the ceiling, just above my head, always on, day and night … That light was blinding, it hurt my eyes—it’s a current method for getting prisoners to give forced confessions. They call it ‘white torture.’ I rapidly lost all notion of time. It was a stifling place, haunted by jinns.”

  “Jinns?” I asked, to be sure she was really referring to the spirits of Middle Eastern mythology.

  “Yes, they were everywhere. In the middle of the night, I would hear the voices of the dead, of Forouhar, of my mother … They invaded my dreams … They were so loud … And then they ended up settling into my cell. They lived with me. Sometimes the living came to talk to me, too. Once, it was Khatami, the president, who visited me … It’s true, it’s true … He said he had come to help me; he tried to calm me down, pacify me … But the guards stopped him. They started to beat him up; they punched him. He was shoved and fell backward. It was horrible! I couldn’t stand to see him like that. Since he couldn’t get back up, they dragged his wounded body to the bathroom. They sprayed him in the face with jets of water … Women were standing around him and laughing … I was ashamed … I was nervous … I cried for all of it to stop. ‘Stop! Stop!’ I said to them.”

  Niloufar’s face had contorted with horror. Her words were disjointed. Her lips were trembling. Her gaze was lost, elsewhere, disoriented. I took her hand to try to comfort her. Images of her incarceration were bombarding her, pulling her between fantasy and reality. Had they slipped hallucinogens into her meals? Had they inundated her cell with recordings of her own telephone conversations, a well-known interrogation technique used to extract information from their victims? Or was it simply the isolation, the despair, the lack of sleep, that had made her lose her grip during her imprisonment? To the point where she felt as though the “evil eye” had followed her to France?

  Her first four months of prison were the most grueling. At irregular intervals, her tormentors would wake her with a start and make her walk blindfolded down a staircase to the interrogation room. How many of them were there? Two, three, four—she had trouble remembering because she never saw their faces. Sometimes the torture lasted more than five hours. Five hours of being inundated with questions, her nose plastered to the wall: Where were you born? What did your parents do? Where are your brothers, your sisters, your cousins, your friends? Why did you write in your dissertation that in Iran a woman is worth only half a man? Why did you go to the protest? What relationship did you have with Forouhar? How did you know him? Did you see him alone, or was his wife there? Obviously, unable to find any concrete proof of her opposition to the regime, they had tried to smear her reputation, accusing her of having sex outside marriage, a “crime” punishable by death by stoning.

  When she refused to reply, they assailed her with insults, called her a spy in the service of France, of Germany, of America … She was a “traitor.” They accused her of trying to overthrow the regime. If only they understood, she said, just how fragile the opposition was, utterly incapable of deposing the Supreme Leader. Her silence irritated them even more. As soon as she refused to cooperate, they resorted to force.

  “They would lay me on a bed and handcuff my wrists and ankles. Then they would hit the soles of my feet with cables. The more I screamed, the more I felt like I was suffocating. I would sweat under my chador. To make me suffocate even more intensely, they would roll me up in a wool blanket—in the middle of summer! I’d struggle to pull the blanket back with my teeth, to breathe a little. On several occasions, I fell in and out of consciousness. I could have died like that.”

  One morning, her prison guards announced that they were bringing her to the Islamic Revolutionary Court. She would finally go before a judge! She told herself that it was over, the rule of the arbitrary designed to make you lose your mind. With a bit of luck, her family would have been informed. But her trial unfolded behind closed doors, with neither lawyer nor witnesses. After a five-minute hearing, the judge condemned her to five years: two behind bars and three out on parole. Grounds for sentencing: taking photos during the protests, insulting the Supreme Leader and the verses of the Quran. Only one relatively joyful bit of news: the charge of espionage had been dropped.

  Leaving the court, she ran smack into her brother-in-law. He finally had confirmation that she was alive! “We looked for you everywhere. We even went to the morgue,” he said. But when he heard the verdict, he was dumbfounded. “You should have fought it!” he moaned, distraught. Exhausted, poor Niloufar had conceded unconditionally to all the charges brought against her, out of fear that the judge would give her an even harsher sentence.

  The verdict had one advantage: she was transferred to the large Evin Prison, in the north of Tehran, not far from Darakeh Mountain, where the young Basiji couple lived. With the right to have visitors for ten minutes every other week. Her aunt was the first to go see her. She told Niloufar how, a few days after her disappearance, without any news fro
m her, she had gone to her apartment. The dresser drawers had been pulled out. The furniture and paintings had been damaged. Niloufar’s books had disappeared from the shelves—including her doctoral dissertation on Iranian women. It was as if barbarians had passed through. It took her aunt a week to tidy up each room.

  Once Niloufar was at Evin, her life regained a semblance of normalcy. The interrogations, torture, and threats were over. In the women’s section, she shared her cell with a half dozen other inmates. She quickly realized that the world of prison was not immune to Iranian paradoxes.

  “My cell opened onto a hallway, where there were six other cells. Sometimes we counted up to forty women per cell. During the day, the doors remained open and we could move freely from one cell to another. We even had the right to take off our chadors and walk around in pajamas. In the morning, we had an aerobics class, set to American music! We could watch TV and take courses in sewing, languages, literature … In the library, we could get the daily newspapers: Iran, Hamshahri, Kayhan. Toward the end of my detention, I was even allowed to read books my family brought. That’s how I read On Revolution and The Origins of Totalitarianism, by Hannah Arendt. We also had access to a garden, even if it was so small it took only a few steps to walk its perimeter. Imagine: three hundred women crammed into two hundred seventy square feet. The women who had been there a while quickly explained the rules of the game to me: if you have money, you can get anything behind bars—sandwiches, chocolate, cigarettes, alcohol, drugs! There were pros among us. The guards would smuggle things in for a small bribe. Talk about Islamic morality! Such hypocrisy.”

  Niloufar was a prisoner of conscience. But, in Iran, being involved in politics is a crime like any other. So she shared quarters with common criminals: delinquents, prostitutes, junkies, and drug dealers. The few other political prisoners were members of the People’s Mujahedin, an exiled opposition group backing the overthrow of the Islamic Republic.

  “The guards called them ‘terrorists’ or ‘anarchists,’” recalled Niloufar. They had been collared before committing an attack on official buildings of the Islamic Republic. Some of them were serving thirty-year sentences; others were in for life.

  One New Year’s Eve, Niloufar even saw a contingent of teenage girls arrive sporting stilettos and powdered faces. Their New Year’s Eve celebration had been prematurely interrupted by a raid of the morality police. But of all those memories, it was her cell mates’ executions that haunted Niloufar most.

  “In two years, seven of my cell mates were executed. And we don’t know how many men suffered the same fate in other prisons. One of them was Mohammad Reza Pedram. He was a former air force officer. Exiled to the United States, he came back in 1996 and was arrested a few years later for spying for the CIA. Condemned to death, he spent ten years in prison before his May 2001 execution. If they wanted to kill him, why had they made him wait so long? To give him false hope that he was going to get out?”

  Niloufar paused again. Head lowered, she rubbed her eyes with a weary hand. With the other, she played nervously with the cigarette butts piled up in the ashtray.

  “At Evin, the unpredictable gnawed away at us. With each sentencing, death took us by the throat. The inmates asked themselves: Whose turn will it be next? The days of the executions were unbearable; we lit candles and prayed together for the dead. We mourned for more than a week. And then there were also suicides. With my own eyes, I saw girls try to end their lives by swallowing pills and cutting their wrists with bits of broken teacups. One day, one of them even tried to hang herself with her chador.”

  A woman hanging by the end of her chador! The level of despair you would have to be in to make that choice. I couldn’t let go of that image. My tangles with the Iranian intelligence service were trivial compared to what Niloufar and all those women had had to endure in darkness and silence.

  “And now that you’re free again, what do you plan to do?” I asked her.

  To my great surprise, she replied without batting an eye:

  “I know that in Iran my hands are tied. Before I was released, they made me sign a document renouncing my political activities. But I plan to go back as soon as possible. My place is over there. I need to stand with my fellow citizens, to feel my country beneath my feet, to visit my parents’ grave.”

  “Really? Even after everything they put you through?”

  “Of course!”

  “But you have so many friends in France, a residency card. With your diplomas you can teach at a university. You’re single. There’s still time to start your life over here.”

  “I know. But I miss Iran. I can’t wait to go back. It’s hard to explain, but that’s how it is.”

  So her decision was made. Once her vacation in France was over, she wanted to go back to her country. As soon as possible! In her place, others would have preferred exile to the daily war against a system that eats away at your marrow. But nothing would stop Niloufar. Despite the suffering she had endured, she was attached to her country. She forgave it everything, just as some battered women forgive their violent husbands.

  “In prison, I developed feelings toward Iran that I had never imagined. All those days, left to my own devices, I did a lot of reflecting. I hate the people who tortured me, I won’t ever forgive them, but vengeance is pointless! Our prisons are full of innocent people, our intellectuals have been assassinated, but perhaps that’s the price to pay for a better future. We don’t want another revolution. We’re just fighting for democracy, but not Western democracy, like the Americans want for the Middle East … I think it might even be possible to find a happy medium separating politics from religion without actually eliminating the clergy. In my opinion, there are good people in the government, like all those women members of Parliament, for example. Let’s give them a chance. Maybe with such people, Iran will evolve.”

  “So you’re still optimistic?”

  “Do I have a choice? It’s my country.”

  In saying these last words, her voice started to tremble. Her eyes filled with tears. She burst into sobs.

  “You know, when Dariush Forouhar said that he was ready to sacrifice himself in the name of Iran, I had a hard time understanding. He always said that he would die on his feet, head held high. When I think about it, he and his wife taught me to love my country despite all its faults. Yes, I love my country. I’m truly tied to it.”

  Such steadfast devotion! I watched her dry her eyes and lift her head.

  “You know, I would do anything for my country.”

  * * *

  I had heard that phrase elsewhere. Her words were mixing strangely with those of Mahmoud, the Basiji. And yet, to all appearances, the two had nothing in common. She, the Westernized polyglot, always meticulous and put together. He, the Islamist in baggy pants, speaking only in Persian and dreaming of becoming a martyr. They would certainly have detested each other had they met. And yet, a profound and invisible thread linked them despite and through everything: an unconditional love for their country, a quasi-carnal patriotism that constitutes the most solid bedrock of Iranian identity, the one that you, Babai, handed down to me and that, as the years passed, has settled into my heart.

  AUGUST 14, 2002. Your country was on the front page of every newspaper. From exile in France, the People’s Mujahedin had just revealed, with photographs to back it up, the existence of two secret nuclear sites: the uranium enrichment plant in Natanz and the heavy-water plant in Arak. The Islamic Republic was put under the spotlight immediately. No more reporting on civil society, Iranian youth, the future of reforms—anything to do with social issues and politics was old news. In Paris, editors in chief were obsessed with only one question: Does Iran want the bomb?

  In the following days, a legion of experts would take over Western televisions, boring viewers with particularly unpalatable jargon: “yellow cake,” uranium, plutonium, centrifuges, isotopes, hexafluoride … Some cried danger, warning the masses of an imminent risk to the planet. Others,
playing devil’s advocate, wondered why information already in the hands of Western intelligence services had taken so long to be released. After all, the Iranian nuclear program, momentarily interrupted after the revolution, had been launched during your time, when the shah ruled over Iran. But this turned out to be a happy coincidence for some neoconservatives in Washington, as in that summer of 2002, it validated George W. Bush’s infamous “axis of evil.”

  Iranian authorities reacted swiftly. “Civil nuclear power is our inalienable right,” Ali Khamenei hammered away at every opportunity, arguing at the same time that the Bomb was haram—that is, “forbidden by Islam.” “Why them and not us?” insisted many Iranians (including opponents of the regime), in reference to other nuclearized countries—Israel, India, Pakistan—whose nuclear programs didn’t unleash the same passions as Iran’s. As a signatory to the International Atomic Energy Agency’s Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons in 1986, Tehran claimed it was under no obligation to declare any ongoing work.

  Whom to believe in this deluge of contradictory and unverifiable information? Whom to trust? What objective proof was there? Once more, I felt your absence. Your knowledge would have been of precious help to me. In that frantic race for information, there was unfortunately little room for reflection. Or verification. The demand for news reports rained down from Paris. In twenty-four hours, one had to be able to prove that the “mean ayatollahs” of Tehran wanted the Bomb. At that rate, it was impossible to get hold of any expert to try to decrypt the “crisis.” I had a friend who was a nuclear engineer, but she wasn’t responding to my calls anymore. At yoga class, where we had met, an empty spot had replaced her mat. She’d vanished! Later, I learned that the employees of the Atomic Energy Organization of Iran had been ordered to distance themselves from the foreign press, under threat of serious consequences.