A State of Fear (13 page)

Also among my cellmates was Mohammed Abrandi – Amou. Amou was a veteran of more than half a century of struggles in the southern oilfields. Arrested as a Minority supporter, he became very close to Rahe Kargar in the course of prison
discussions. Amou was a popular, respected and sociable man. Even the royalists enjoyed his company. They sought to enlist his sympathies and so use him to liaise with the left prisoners. Amou was often a guest in their cells, where they would ply him with good coffee, imported chocolate, cigarettes and sandwiches. This old worker was treated as a dignitary among the dignitaries. Of an evening he would often be found in the cell shared by the ambassador to France, the Shah’s dancing master and a four-star general.

In the tense environment of the block, such courtship was not appreciated by the left, and Amou was often criticised by his comrades – myself included. But in the prisons, fine coffee and good cigarettes and celebrity company are powerful arguments, outweighing our verbal ones. Anyway, the old oil worker, whose body was bent, scarred and calloused after a lifetime keeping the indolents supplied with rum truffles, was no doubt amused by finding himself in the bizarre position of being served them by those who had fed them to the Shah.

Amou’s hobnobbing aside, this block was more treacherous and threatening than most. Fortunately, it was transitory and we were soon moved on again.

F
irooz Alvandi was a medical student at Tehran University. Around the campus in the late 1970s, roadside pedlars would see a well-dressed, good-looking young man hurtling back and forth on a Honda 250cc motorbike. He would race out of the University entrance to the bike and, wearing a shiny red fibreglass crash helmet, fly off down the road. Sometimes they would see a young woman riding on the back.

Firooz came from a well-off family in north Tehran. He was also extremely clever; one of the lucky 100 who passed the medical school’s entrance exam out of the 400,000 who sat it. Looks, money and intelligence made him a centre of attraction for female students. When the revolution happened, he was in his fourth year at college.

Firooz wasn’t worried about tomorrow. His family was secure and affluent and he would soon qualify and be able to make his own fortune. Ambition for greater money and status directed him to dentistry, the fast track to success in Iran’s medical profession.

He must have felt satisfied and lucky then; he had few unfulfilled desires. But he observed conditions around him, and wondered at the situation of those less fortunate. Probably every young man wonders about such things, but the turbulent conditions of the time drove him towards practical solutions that may otherwise have remained the musings of another student on the way to the good life. He became involved in some of the activities against the Shah’s regime organised by opposition groups at the University, although this part of his life ran counter to his upbringing.

Firooz’s family was Bah’ai and they were strong supporters of the Shah. Bah’ais teach non-interference in political matters and this was impressed on their children. Political activity of any kind was frowned on, and that against the Shah was totally taboo. But this was probably not the only rule Firooz broke without his family’s knowledge.

Before the revolution, Firooz had no political affiliation. Like a million other young people, there were a thousand things more important than activism. But the spirit of the times swept away this apathy. Firooz along with millions of others was drawn into resistance to the Shah’s regime. But for the extraordinary revolutionary conditions of the late 1970s, Firooz would now in all probability be an affluent dentist in north Tehran, and no doubt something of a ladies’ man; haggling over the price of land or a Caspian villa, phone in one hand, pen and prescription pad in the other, with a queue of patients in reception.

The closure of Tehran University by the Shah in late 1978, and the occupation of its administration building demanding it be reopened, helped push Firooz towards activism. He would take part in the daily demonstrations through the streets surrounding the University in support of the occupation. With those of us inside the university on 24-hour red alert, Firooz’s Honda became part of the supply train that brought food to those occupying the University. He quickly became one of a
small group of illicit suppliers, passing goods through the barricaded streets surrounding the campus under cover of darkness. It was inevitable that our paths would cross. We would frequently exchange words of solidarity or a conspiratorial grin as he passed over his cardboard boxes of food.

He was one of our major sources of information, as we couldn’t trust what we saw on the television and weren’t at liberty to go wandering round the streets to find out for ourselves. Since this information was of an inevitably political nature, I found myself more and more able to engage in political conversation with him. This would sharpen both our perceptions: me as an old hand of the left who was fed desperately needed information on what was going on outside our barricades, and him about the wider nature of our fight. As the days progressed I witnessed a naive young student become an invaluable and keen-minded activist.

One night when Firooz was smuggling meat, vegetables and rice through the back door, he witnessed a poorly dressed, middle-aged woman, delivering two boxes of pastries. With great emotion, she handed over the boxes to a professor at the service entrance. With the boxes came a message: ‘As a representative of the hundreds of working mothers who have lost their loved ones in the fight for freedom and democracy in Iran, I want you to know that we support your campaign to reopen the University. With the overthrow of the Shah’s regime, we’ll see the light of freedom, democracy and social justice’.

She was the mother of one of those who had taken up the gun to fight the regime. It wasn’t just the intellectuals who opposed the Shah: masses of working people like this woman and her son were the very cutting edge of the struggle.

What she said deeply affected Firooz. As she left, he followed and engaged her in conversation. She told him that her son had been captured in Kurdistan and executed. Now she lived in the
shanty town behind the University, and took in washing to survive. Firooz went back to her cardboard hut and spent the rest of the night listening to her stories. She told him how her family had been uprooted from their village in Kurdistan by the landlords, and about how they were forced to come to Tehran in search of a livelihood.

That night had a decisive effect on Firooz. He wanted to become like her son: to fight for, and make real, those same ideals. But he had to come to terms with his past and present. to make a clean break from the affluent college playboy if he wanted to live up to what the woman’s son had died fighting for. Firooz continued to visit the woman, learning from her, as he became ever more involved in radical student politics, and the struggle against the Shah.

His activity intensified until the Shah was overthrown. But decline came hard upon this highpoint, and the consolidation of theocracy placed new questions before Firooz. He could not stand aloof and become like his parents. And now he was in no position to ingratiate himself with the new regime.

Firooz fought back. He became an active supporter of the newly formed Rahe Kargar, and could now be seen running its stall in front of the University. From now on he planted both feet firmly in the revolutionary camp. There was no going back. He threw his energy into selling books and distributing pamphlets. Bundles of literature, piled head high, replaced the girls on the back of Firooz’s Honda.

This work totally absorbed Firooz. It cut him off from his parents and made his home life difficult and lonely. As the first shots were exchanged with Iraq, the family sold up and fled to the ‘paradise’ of America. With his parents gone, the essentially conservative Bah’ai community severed their strained ties with Firooz. At the same time, the Hezbollah took over the University. All that was left for Firooz to focus his energies on was the fight to overthrow the Khomeini regime – but in a
way that was placing him in an increasingly isolated and vulnerable position.

Firooz was blacklisted as a known subversive and was arrested in front of the University one day in 1981. His Honda was confiscated, the books on the back burned. The Hezbollah raided his home and took whatever they wanted. Firooz was taken to Evin for selling books and pamphlets. His ‘crimes’ were manifold: a socialist, communist, militant atheist – and a Bah’ai! Enough to earn him a ten-year sentence after a five-minute, Islamic kangaroo court hearing.

He kept his mouth shut right through interrogation and torture in Evin, not giving one name away. He was then transferred to the Golden Fortress, spending two months in quarantine. It was there that I met Firooz again, in December 1984. We were roommates, of a kind. I moved in to the bunk below his. The happy noisy and vigorous young man of
pre-revolutionary
days had become introverted, and would not communicate with anyone. We would study the faces of others in prison. Each prisoner becomes an expert at ‘reading’ those around him; able to tell the degree of pain inside from the expression outside. Marks of unsettled and unsettling questions in Firooz’s mind were deeply imprinted on his face.

His day would begin at one in the afternoon, when I would wake him for his lunch. He would eat little and silently. After he had finished lunch, he would pick himself up and walk hurriedly to the prison yard, looking only ahead, smoking as he went. Here he was finishing a project he had started a month before my arrival in the block. He had collected five or more empty 50kg rice sacks, made from plastic twine. He would unravel them into long single strands and then wind them together into a rope. He had created a rope of more than 50 metres long.

One day in the spring of 1985 I went out after him to see what he was doing. He had tied one end to the far corner of the 
yard and was standing in the opposite corner, twisting the threads into rope with a rubbing motion between his palms, hands held above his head. He was completing the final touches.

Firooz’s project was a nuisance. He had diagonally bisected the yard with his rope, preventing the 600 other prisoners from exercising by running round the perimeter, unless they were prepared to limbo dance under Firooz’s rope twice each circuit. I asked him what he was up to.

‘Making a rope’, he said, continuing with his winding, not even looking at me as he talked.

‘I can see that. Why?’

‘To hang my clothes on.’

‘What’s wrong with the common rope that we all use?’

‘I don’t want to use it. I’ve decided to make my own.’

‘But why are you making it so long? You don’t have that many clothes! One shirt, one pair of trousers and underpants won’t stretch to 50 metres.’

‘Well, if my clothes won’t fill it, at least it fills my time.’

I was still perplexed, but Firooz hadn’t much patience with conversation. I left him to it.

After the exercise period had finished, Firooz coiled up the rope and returned to the block. He tied one end to the bars at the far end of the corridor, sat at the other, and continued as before. He gave the impression that he was committed to finish this work as soon as he could, almost as if he was working on a commission. There were no guards in the corridors – often no guards would come along for 24 hours at a time.

Firooz had come under a great deal of pressure from Haji Davoud and the Tavabs in the past. When Haji Davoud visited the block, Firooz was always singled out for the first beating, often at Haji’s own hands. Firooz would be mocked for being both a Bah’ai and a communist. Many prisoners reckoned that Firooz’s rope project was his way of cutting himself off from the other political prisoners and so reducing the pressure from
the authorities. It was not unusual for prisoners to occupy time by making themselves a rope. It was the prison equivalent of knitting. But other prisoners made ropes of 10 or 15 metres, not 50.

After supper, Firooz went back to bed, putting the finishing touches on a painting he had started almost three months ago. He continued this through the night, even though he only had moonlight to work by. Between midnight and one, he would rise, take a pack of cigarettes and walk to the small toilet area, where he would pace backwards and forwards, smoking, until around 3 or 4am. Initially, this led to a beating from the Tavabs, but when they saw that he had isolated himself from the other prisoners and immersed himself in his rope project, they left him alone.

Firooz lay on his bed, lit by the moon through a small window, finishing his painting. It was of three tulips. There are two types of tulips native to Iran. One stands straight, head upwards. The head of the other bends down and grows in the mountainous areas, on the slopes of Kurdistan. We call them weeping tulips. Firooz’s three tulips were all weeping. He had sketched them in black pen and painted the petals a deep burgundy. The people working in the kitchens could always supply materials of any sort for payment. That’s how Firooz got his pen and paints, and the rice sacks to turn into rope.

By 30 April, Firooz had finished both his tulips and his rope. That night he sat on his bed and showed his tulips to everyone. Some cellmates, unhappy with him for cutting himself off from us, said nothing. Others openly admired his fine work.

It was my day as elected cell monitor. I had made the tea and was handing it around the others. Firooz sat on the bed, rope coiled beside him and the painting propped up against the wall by the bed. Unusually, he was openly discussing politics: American foreign policy towards Iran. I offered him a rather strong tea; again unusual, as this was regarded as showing favour.
Normally we made the tea weak to stretch out our resources. A cellmate questioned my generosity.

‘I know my customers,’ I joked, ‘This one only takes his tea strong.’ But really it was to encourage Firooz because this was the most positive he had been for a long, long time.

The Tavabs called lights out and we all went to bed. As usual, Firooz lay a while then went to the toilet with a pack of cigarettes. Prisoners whose bladder infections and injuries forced them to go to relieve themselves frequently saw Firooz pacing back and forth and smoking in these confined and reeking toilets.

When I rose at 5am the following morning, I went to collect his share of breakfast, so that he could eat it at lunch when he eventually woke. He was not in his bunk, but nothing registered with me about it. As we sat over our common breakfast, I asked if anyone had seen Firooz around. No one knew were he was. Someone suggested that he might have been moved from the block because of illness. I asked at the control room. They said that no one had been moved. We became more concerned, and went from one cell to the next in search of him. Some comrades then went to the showers, and I went to the toilet to look.

I couldn’t see him pacing up and down, so I checked each of the six cubicles, shouting out his name. As soon as I pushed the fourth door I saw him. He was hanging from his rope, quite dead. His eyes bulged from his face. But he smiled.

Firooz had hanged himself in what we call the Palestinian way. He had looped the rope over the water pipes and then through his legs, noose about his neck, in such a way as when he lifted his feet off the ground, the rope snapped taut and killed him instantly.