Captive in Iran (16 page)

“You must excuse me for talking so much,” she said. “I haven’t had anyone to talk to in so long and I have all these feelings inside me. I feel
like I’m going to explode! From the first moment I saw you, I prayed to God that you would come in here with me because I could see you smiling below your blindfold.”

“Dear Fereshteh, could I pray for you?” I asked.

Fereshteh laughed, a strange sound coming from such a cadaverous form. “Of course. Why not? I love Christians.”

I sat beside my new friend and prayed for her and her family. When I finished, Fereshteh put her head on my chest, and we sat together silently for a while.

“I guess you’re unlucky to have been sent in here with me,” Fereshteh said. “But I am very lucky that God sent you to me.”

“Please don’t say that,” I replied. “If I had been through what you have, I’d be in much worse shape than you are.”

With some gentle urging, Fereshteh ate a little of her lunch and, later, all of her dinner. After dinner, a guard brought her a handful of sleeping pills.

“I have to take these for my condition,” she explained. “I must apologize, but once I take them I can’t stay awake very long.” True to her word, she fell asleep within half an hour.

Too keyed up to sleep and now with a pounding headache, I tried to relax by walking around the cell. But it was only two steps across, and walking soon made me dizzy. I sat staring at the white walls for hours, thinking of all the heartache, injustice, and agony those walls had seen visited upon the lives of women like Fereshteh, the ocean of innocent blood spilled, tender lives like Zeynab’s snuffed out by evil forces. At last, exhaustion mercifully overcame me and I settled into a fitful sleep.

After breakfast the next morning, I pressed the button to summon the guard to escort me to the toilet. She came to the door, blindfolded me, and led me down the hall. Once inside the washroom, I was allowed to remove the blindfold. A reflection behind the sink caught my eye. Between the basin and the wall, balanced on a water pipe, was a cross made from the foil top of a yogurt container.

Marziyeh is trying to communicate!

If she was using the same facilities, it meant she was on the same floor. My heart was filled with joy as I hid the token in my pocket and put my blindfold back on. I could hardly wait to tell Fereshteh.

Later that afternoon, I made a similar cross and left it in the same spot in the washroom. When I heard someone in the next cell leave for the toilet, coughing and dragging her slippers in a distinctive way, I knew it had to be Marziyeh, letting me know she’d received the message. I tried a few exploratory knocks on the wall, and the rapid response confirmed that Marziyeh was just next door.

On my next trip to the toilet, I couldn’t wait to check the hiding place behind the sink for another message. This time, I found a note made from torn-out letters from a newspaper stuck to a piece of tissue with toothpaste. It said, “how are you who are you with.”

Elated, I now had to figure out a way to answer. The only paper in my cell was Fereshteh’s copy of the Koran, which I didn’t dare damage. As I scanned the spare, small room, my eyes were drawn to a tube of toothpaste, still in its carton, resting on the edge of the sink in the corner. I removed the tube, tore open the carton and flattened it out, and then smeared a light coating of toothpaste on the blank inside surface of the cardboard. Once it was dry, I used my fingernail to scratch my response: “Fine. With Fereshteh.” On my next visit to the toilet, I left the note behind the sink.

Our “underground spy” communication system survived for as long as we were separated. We wrote notes in toothpaste and sent each other crosses, stars, and flowers made from yogurt lids or orange peels. Once, when the guards discovered one of our notes, they were angry and threatened us, but we kept up our correspondence without a pause. God was protecting us every minute.

Marziyeh

After Maryam and I were separated, I thought hard about how I could find out whether she was still close by. I had no paper and nothing to write with, so a note was out of the question. I talked with Munis and Mahtab about it, and they suggested some kind of symbol that Maryam would rec
ognize. Munis warned me that if the guards found it before Maryam did, we would both be punished. But I decided it was worth the risk. The next morning, as we were eating our breakfast, I made a small cross from the foil top of a yogurt cup, which I then concealed in the washroom. My heart was overjoyed when Maryam found the cross I had made and left me one of her own. When I found out that Maryam’s new cellmate was Fereshteh, Mahtab told me that she knew her and that she was a kind, gentle woman who would be a great companion.

During the long days, Munis, Mahtab, and I had lively discussions about faith and religion. They observed the Islamic traditions of prayer and fasting, which they tried to explain to me.

“The regime gives people a distorted version of Islam,” Munis insisted, “and its actions have nothing to do with the real principles of the faith.”

These debates helped to take my mind off my continuing sickness—a severe sore throat and chest infection, as well as the backache and headaches I had suffered off and on for weeks. A trip to the clinic in Ward 209—not actually a clinic, but just a room with a bed—yielded another round of ineffective antibiotics. The pills weren’t even in a container. The “doctor” scooped a handful from the table behind her and handed them to me.

When Munis and Mahtab were praying a few days later, I asked them why they covered themselves to pray. “If you believe God is your creator, don’t you believe He is closer to you than your skin? Why cover yourself up from someone who is already in your heart?”

“It’s a sign of respect and part of our faith,” Munis explained. “Otherwise we don’t have to do it.”

“But has God asked you to do this?” I said. “And has He asked you to speak to Him only in Arabic? Can God not understand you in Farsi? Do you really have to bow to Him five times a day? Can’t you pray to Him whenever you want?”

Munis couldn’t answer these questions, and they upset her. Seeing her agitation, I apologized and let the matter drop. That night, Mahtab came over to me and said, “Your conversation with Munis made me think a lot. You’re exactly right, and I wonder why I never thought of these things before. You prayed to your Lord for me and it really made a difference: I felt
much more relaxed. The routine, obligatory prayers I say as a Muslim are rituals, clichés, nothing but habits that have no benefit. I’m going to stop doing
namaz
prayers and pray with you instead.”

Even though Mahtab’s new routine made Munis uncomfortable, Mahtab was true to her word. She and I prayed together daily, sometimes skipping break time in order to pray instead.

MARYAM

As the days passed, the guards in Ward 209 grew curious about Christianity, just as some of the guards in Ward 2 had. One of them surprised me one day by asking out of the blue, “Who is this Jesus, anyway? Some new fake leader who tries to convince people to follow him? It seems like there’s another one every day. I heard a while ago that a man in a distant village claims to be in touch with ghosts and spirits and has attracted quite a crowd. Why have you young girls lost your senses and decided to follow some nut like that? It’s a pity, is it not? In any case, whoever this Jesus Christ is, he’s a very dangerous person to put you in this position.” I knew that any explanation would fall on deaf ears, but I prayed that Jesus would open this woman’s heart to the truth.

In our cell, Fereshteh spent hours every day reading the Koran and using her prayer beads. Her strict views of Islam prohibited her from accepting any new ideas about God. And yet she acknowledged an emptiness inside. “Our religious leaders have made a mess of Islam,” she said. “Because of that, many people have deserted the religion and lost their faith.”

She and I had already shared long conversations about Islam and Christianity. I had prayed for her, but now I decided to remain silent and let God touch Fereshteh’s heart however He thought best. The next day, I made a foil cross and gave it to her. She put it next to her pillow. “From now on, every time I go to sleep, I’ll pray with this cross in my hands,” Fereshteh said. She also became keenly interested in the subject of baptism.

“Before you can do that, you must believe in Jesus as the Son of God and the Savior,” I explained.

Fereshteh hung on every word and wanted to know more. “Could you
sing your hymns louder?” she asked. This from an inmate who had flinched at the slightest word when I first arrived, fearful that the guards would crack down on us. “I hear them when you’re praying and enjoy them very much.”

I happily taught her “Christ Beside Me,” “Come Down, O Love Divine,” and others. Fereshteh was an eager student, learning the songs quickly and singing along with me. It was a wonderful way for both of us to keep our spirits up. Still, there were times when even singing couldn’t distract me from the pain in my ear that had continued ever since my infection. My hearing was only partially restored, and headaches and dizziness still came on without warning. One afternoon, when I became too dizzy to stand, Fereshteh called for a guard to take me to the clinic. I put on my headscarf and a blindfold and went to the clinic.

After a cursory examination, the doctor said, “You have a ruptured eardrum. It will heal in time. Your headaches are caused by stress. I will give you some medicine.”

The “medicine” turned out to be one of the prison clinic’s all-purpose remedies: sleeping pills. After two days of this “therapy,” I veered between a fog of semiconsciousness and deep sleep. One morning, when the guard came in with breakfast, I stood to take the plate and fainted, falling backward. Fereshteh later told me that the crack of my head against the wall was so loud that the guard put down her tray and rushed over to check on me. After that, the clinic sent even stronger pills. After taking them for only a day, I told the guard that I wouldn’t take them anymore. The guard agreed, but made me sign a statement saying I had refused the medication.

The rules demanding quiet, coupled with the fact that prisoners always wore blindfolds outside their cells, created a powerful sense of isolation. The only breaks in the day were meals, trips to the toilet, and a one-hour period spent in the larger room with the clear skylight. Marziyeh and I kept up our clandestine communication, leaving tokens to each other behind the sink, and we deepened our friendships with our cellmates.

The next time I saw Marziyeh was on visiting day, about two weeks after our transfer to Ward 209. After being blindfolded and taken separately from our cells, we were brought outside to wait for a ride to the visitors’ hall. Out in the courtyard, where we were allowed to remove our blindfolds, we discovered we were standing only a few feet from each other. We
nodded, speaking only with our eyes, but one of the guards saw us and shouted, “No talking, you two!”

I was overwhelmed with joy at seeing and feeling the sun after being locked up in a six-by-six-foot cell for two weeks. It was so wonderful! The process of leaving Ward 209, waiting for the car, driving to the visitors’ hall, and waiting again to be escorted inside, took hours. At last, we were allowed to spend fifteen minutes with our sisters. We sat in adjacent cubicles, with Shirin and Elena on the visitors’ side, separated from us by a glass wall. We could see them only inches away, but could not touch them, and we had to use the cubicle telephones to talk. Guards stood close by to listen in on our conversations.