After Tehran (28 page)

“Do you speak English?” I asked her, trying to make small talk.

“Yes,” she said, “but not very well.”

“I’m sure your English is better than my Italian,” I said, and smiled. “What do you do?”

“I’m a journalist.”

“Do you travel abroad a lot?”

“Oh, yes …”

“Have you ever been to the Middle East?”

“Yes, to Iraq, Afghanistan …”

“When were you in Iraq?”

“Many times. Last time in 2005.”

“How was your trip?”

“I was kidnapped and held hostage.”

I felt like an idiot. How didn’t I know this? She did look a little familiar. Maybe I had seen her on TV.

“I’m so sorry … I didn’t know. What happened?”

“They kidnapped me outside a mosque in Baghdad where I was interviewing refugees from Fallujah on February 4, 2005, and they let me go a month later. I don’t think they were fundamentalists. They were probably members of the Bath Party or something like that.”

“How did they treat you?”

“They didn’t beat me or really mistreat me. What bothered me more than anything was that I never knew if I was going to be alive in five minutes. It was a state of constant terror.”

I knew exactly what she meant. A place between life and death.

“What was their demand?” I asked.

She said they wanted Italy to pull out its troops from Iraq. She told them that she was against the war, and that she was there to interview Iraqis to show the world how the war had affected the average person in Iraq. But they didn’t care. They said they didn’t want any foreigners in their country. They couldn’t see what good she could do for them. She had dedicated her life to getting people heard. Real people. Victims of violence. But they didn’t care. She believed this was what war had done to them: killed any possibility of communication.

I asked her how they had let her go and she explained that the Italian military secret service negotiated her release. One day, her kidnappers took her out in a car. They had blindfolded her, and she couldn’t see where they were going. They told her not to move or make noise and then they left her in the car. About twenty to thirty minutes later, a friendly voice called her name. It was Nicola Calipari, an official from the Italian military secret service. He said she was free and he was taking her to the airport to go home. Another man was with him. They escorted her to a car and Nicola
sat next to her in the back seat because he knew she was disoriented and scared. He was talking to her and comforting her all the time. They drove toward the airport in Baghdad. They were only a kilometre from it when an American armoured vehicle parked off the road behind a bend opened fire on them.

“The
Americans
opened fire on you?” I asked, shocked.

“Yes, the Americans,” she said.

“Was this at a checkpoint? Did you fail to stop?”

“No, no, it wasn’t a checkpoint. There was only an armoured vehicle. No signs. No warning. They just opened fire. As soon as we heard the guns, Nicola pushed me down and lay on top of me. He died right there. I was shot in my left shoulder. The bullet exploded in my body and my lung collapsed.”

I could see the scene she was describing, and it was terribly familiar. Ali. I could see Ali. He pushed me down and lay on top of me, shielding me from the bullets that killed him. He drew his last breath in my arms. I shoved away the memory.

“The driver was yelling ‘We’re Italian! We’re Italian! Don’t shoot!’ And the Americans finally stopped,” Giuliana continued.

“This is horrible! What did the Americans say? Why did they shoot at you?”

“They just said that this was war, and took no responsibility.”

They had shrugged off the incident as acceptable loss. War is supposed to justify anything and everything. How many innocent Iraqis have been killed at checkpoints? What about those massacred in the violence between Sunni and Shia that erupted after the U.S. invasion? How many lost innocent lives are too many? When there is no accountability, there will be no justice.

I asked her if she was still working as a journalist, and she said she was. She had been a war correspondent for many years. This was what she did.

She told me that some people said she should have stayed home
and never gone to Iraq, that what happened to her was her own fault.

“It’s always easier to blame the victim,” I said, “especially if the victim is a woman. I’ve been blamed for what happened to me, too. This is just the way it is. How are you now? Do you have any health problems?”

“Yes, I do … and I can’t sleep … I’ve become an insomniac.”

I said that I didn’t know how her experience had affected her, but mine had made me look at my life differently. I now lived in the moment, and imagining what things could be like in a month was hard for me. Every night before I went to bed, I considered that I might not wake up the next day or that I might lose the ones I loved.

She said that she was the same.

The distance between Giuliana and me had disappeared as if it had never existed. She and I had been strangers only a few minutes earlier, and now I felt as though I had always known her. I felt her emotions, and I knew she felt mine.

I told her that I might have seen her briefly on TV when she was kidnapped, but that I’d never heard about the Americans shooting at her. She said that she had published a book about her ordeal. The book had been translated into English and was available in the United States. Later, I read
Friendly Fire,
^*
in which she explains that an American military inquest into the shooting incident that killed Nicola Calipari ended with full absolution for the soldiers who had opened fire on the car. The U.S. military concluded that the car was speeding at forty to fifty miles an hour and did not stop despite repeated signals, so the soldiers were forced to shoot. This conclusion went against the testimony of Giuliana and the driver
of the car, Agent Carpani, who both testified that the car hadn’t been speeding and there had been no warnings.

Giuliana worked for a newspaper called
Il Manifesto
, an independent communist paper. The word
communist
always leaves me with a strange, uneasy feeling in the bottom of my stomach, because most—though not all—communists I have met have been dogmatic people whose idea of a dialogue is not letting others speak, pushing their ideology on others, and mocking the religious beliefs that others hold. But I liked Giuliana, and I could see that she was a highly intelligent, compassionate woman. I believe in real dialogue and sharing human experiences; clearly, Giuliana and I had connected in this way. I despise political boundaries that separate human beings as if we are from different species. “Religious” and “left” seem mutually exclusive, but are they really? I am a Catholic who doesn’t agree with all the policies of the Catholic Church and many of my views are “left.” What does this make me? I am tired of being categorized, and I believe that in general, all ideologies have proven to be dangerous political tools that usually divide people into “us” and “them.” I have never blindly followed the Catholic Church.

Very early in the morning when it was still completely dark, a cab picked up Giuliana, two other people, and me to take us to the airport to catch our flight to Rome. Giuliana sat next to me in the back seat, and I wondered what she was thinking. We were both silent. I was sure that travelling in a car in darkness brought back terrible memories for her. Perhaps she replayed the shooting, again and again, each time trying to remember one more detail of the ordeal. This was what I did, and sometimes still do, even if not as frequently as before. I am afraid to forget, as if forgetting means dying a sudden, meaningless death.

“Look at the moon! It’s so beautiful!” one of our companions said.

I glanced up and was surprised that I had not spotted the full moon. It was large and silver and perfect, and yet the darkness of the night felt heavy and absolute. I could feel the spaces between us, the occupants of the car. And then I remembered how Giuliana and I had connected. We lived distinct lives but had somehow shared a similar experience. And the spaces between those of us in the car grew smaller and smaller.

At the airport as we sat at our gate waiting to board the plane, I noticed that a man standing nearby was staring at Giuliana. The stare wasn’t casual; it carried recognition. For Giuliana not to have noticed him would have been impossible because he stood directly in her view, yet her calm, serious expression didn’t change at all. I was sure that she was recognized frequently, but one could never get used to that kind of attention. Her story had received a great deal of publicity in Italy, and her picture had been in newspapers, on TV, and on posters all over the country. I was proud of her for putting up a fight, for doing what she believed in, and for keeping her head up. I knew that she probably wished her ordeal had never happened. Except it had, and the experience had made her who she was—and she had chosen not to run away from that reality.

As the plane glided in the grey morning air that was slowly filling with light, I looked out my window and saw the deep blue of the Tyrrhenian Sea washing the western shores of Italy. I had flown over the Atlantic Ocean many times, but the Italian waters were the calmest I had ever seen; the surface of the sea was like blue silk. When I crossed the ocean for the first time in my life, looking forward to a new life in Canada, I could never have imagined that seventeen years later, I would go to Italy to receive an award for telling the story of my darkest days. What was Giuliana’s life like when I was in prison? I tried to compare my time in Evin with hers in captivity. In order to expand my understanding of the world and
feel that my experience transcended my limited life, I needed to understand others who had suffered trauma.

Unlike my experience, Giuliana’s had been public from the start. Moments after her kidnapping, news agencies around the world reported the event, and most people in her country were openly concerned and wanted her to return home safely. For Iranian political prisoners incarcerated in the 1980s before YouTube and Facebook, things were vastly different. In a way, we were kidnapped, too, but by our own government; as a result, our disappearance remained a secret that our families and the local media could not discuss openly, or they would share our fate.

Just like Giuliana’s abductors, ours had complete power over our lives. In her case, luckily, they chose not to physically harm her, even though the possibility of execution at any moment was excruciatingly real. What would have happened had Italian officials decided not to negotiate with the hostage takers? Giuliana could very well have been killed—maybe beheaded gruesomely, as other hostages had been. We, on the other hand, thousands of Iranian teenagers, were brutally tortured while we lived under the constant threat of execution by firing squad or hanging.

Giuliana told me that what gave her hope during her incarceration was knowing that the people of Italy were aware of her ordeal and were asking for her release. A few days after her kidnapping, her captors let her watch a report on the EuroNews Network. It showed a giant photo of her displayed at city hall in Rome. Later, the kidnappers were surprised when, at a soccer game, members of Rome’s top soccer team wore jerseys that read Free Giuliana. Italians demonstrated for her release and made their voices heard, giving her strength. In our case the world, it seemed, had decided to forget about us. No one cared what happened to us, as if we had never existed. Our families cried silently and knew very well that they might never see us again, but their fears had
to remain secret; in other words,
we
had to remain a secret. The terrible secret of the Islamic Republic of Iran. Our photos did not appear at city halls and were never published on the front pages of newspapers. We found hope in each other instead of in the outside world. The only way for us to survive was to remember that we were human, that we had families—brothers, sisters, mothers, and fathers—and that we used to go to school, celebrate birthday parties, read books, watch movies, and go on holidays. And by sharing these memories with one another, we created a collective hope that helped us believe that our nightmare would end one day and that we would somehow go home.

Once Giuliana was released, she fell straight into a media frenzy. Some regarded her as a hero, some a victim, and some severely criticized her, but her experience was known, and this mattered, even though she never received the attention she deserved in North America and the government of the United States did not take responsibility for the events that led to the death of Nicola Calipari. On the other hand, those who survived Iran’s political prisons in the 1980s and were eventually released—in most cases after years—entered a world that was dominated by silence. We were forced to push aside our memories and deal with them alone. Giuliana dealt with her trauma immediately after her release, when we had to create new realities for ourselves from which the prison experience had to be erased. Only after twenty years did I begin the journey that Giuliana travelled right after her ordeal. I have a twenty-year hole in my life that is impossible to fill, but at least I have found my way to myself. I fear there are thousands of others like me who are still living false lives.

In June 2009, after the disputed presidential election in Iran, Maziar Bahari, an Iranian-Canadian journalist who worked for
Newsweek
magazine, was arrested in Tehran and accused of espionage. He was tortured, psychologically and physically, and
forced to make false confessions. He spent four months in Evin. After he was released and returned to Canada, I listened to his interview on
The Current
, a CBC Radio One show. He said that his interrogator repeatedly asked him why no one in the outside world was mentioning his name. Didn’t he have friends? Didn’t he have anyone who cared about him and wanted him released? Bahari had been cut off from the world, so he had no way of knowing that in the West a great deal of publicity surrounded his case. Only when one of the nicer guards called him “Mr. Hillary Clinton” did he realize that a serious campaign to end his imprisonment existed. Bahari asked the guard what he meant, and said the guard replied that Hillary Clinton had mentioned his name in a speech that day. This gave Bahari a huge morale boost.