Prisoner of Tehran: A Memoir (No Series) (14 page)

Suddenly, the street was filled with loud, thunderlike roars. People began to run.

“On rooftops!” someone yelled.

I looked up and saw revolutionary guards everywhere. A young man standing close to us fell to the ground and moaned. He pressed his hands to his stomach. A narrow red line emerged from between his fingers, moved down his hand, and dripped onto the pavement. I stared at him and couldn’t move. People screamed and ran in different directions. There was smoke in the air, and my eyes were burning. I looked around; I had been separated from my friends. I couldn’t leave the injured man like that. Kneeling beside him, I looked into his eyes and saw the stillness of death. Arash had died like him—as a stranger. Somewhere, someone loved this man and was waiting for him to come home.

“Marina!” a familiar voice called.

Gita grabbed my hand and pulled me along. The air was thick with tear gas. Bearded men wearing civilian clothing swung wooden clubs in the air, attacking the fleeing crowd. People screamed. We ran through the madness surrounding us.

When I got home, I locked myself in the bathroom. I wished I had been shot to death. I didn’t want to live. What was the point of so much suffering? I went to my parents’ bedroom and opened my mother’s medicine drawer. It was overflowing with jars and boxes of different shapes and sizes: cold syrups, antacids, aspirin, and different kinds of painkillers. I rummaged through them, found an almost-full bottle of sleeping pills, and rushed back to the bathroom. Death in a jar. All I needed to do was to remove the lid and swallow the little pills. The angel would come for me, and I would tell him that I had watched enough people die. I filled a cup with water and opened the lid of the container. But deep inside me, I knew that swallowing those pills was wrong. What if everyone who believed in goodness decided to commit suicide because there was too much suffering in the world? I closed my eyes and saw the eyes of the angel. I wanted my grandma, Arash, and Irena to be proud of me; I wanted to do something with my life, something good and worthwhile. I had watched a young man’s life pour into a swollen circle of blood on the pavement. I couldn’t hide; death was not a hiding place. Closing the lid of the container, I returned it to my mother’s medicine drawer. Maybe there was something I could do. I ran to the store, bought a white sheet of bristol board, and wrote about the attack of the revolutionary guards on the peaceful rally.

The next day, I went to school earlier than usual. The hallways were empty. I taped the bristol board to a wall in one of the hallways and stood in front of it, pretending to read it. In about half an hour, students gathered, and soon, a big crowd was trying to read the story. It didn’t take Khanoom Mahmoodi long to show up. She stormed down the hallway with quick, angry steps, her face red with rage.

“Move aside!” she yelled.

We stepped aside. She read a few lines and demanded to know who had written it. When no one answered, she ripped the board from the wall, shouting, “These are lies!”

“They are not!” I protested. “I was there!”

“So,
you
wrote it.”

I told her the revolutionary guards had opened fire on innocent people.

“What innocent people? Only antirevolutionaries and the enemies of God and Islam attend rallies like that. You are in big trouble!” she said, pointing her finger at me. Then, she turned and left. I was enraged. How dare she call me a liar!

A few days later, my friends and I started a small school newspaper. Every week, we wrote a few short articles about daily political issues that had affected us, copied them by hand, and circulated them in the school.

The government had shut down a few independent newspapers, accusing their staff of being enemies of the Islamic revolution. I felt as if the country were slowly being submerged in water: breathing became a little more difficult every day. But we remained optimistic, believing they couldn’t possibly drown everyone.

Since the war with Iraq had started, the Islamic regime had blamed everything on it. Prices had soared. Meat, dairy products, baby formula, and cooking oil were rationed. My mother usually went to the store at five in the morning to line up for our share and returned around noon. It was possible to find almost everything on the black market, but it was so expensive that low-income and middle-class families couldn’t afford it, and the rations were very small.

In Tehran, the war felt distant; now, the sirens hardly ever sounded, and even if they did, nothing happened. However, cities that were close to the Iran-Iraq border paid dearly. Casualties were mounting. Every day, newspapers displayed dozens of pictures of young men killed at the front. And the government did its best to take advantage of people’s emotions to coerce them to seek revenge. At mosques, through loudspeakers, mullahs yelled and screamed that the war was not only about protecting Iran but it was about Islam; Saddam was not a true Muslim but he was a follower of the devil.

Slowly, almost everything I loved became illegal. Western novels, my escape and solace, were declared “satanic” and became difficult to find. Then, in early spring of 1981, Khanoom Mahmoodi told me I needed to earn religion marks. Religious minorities had always been exempt from attending Islamic or Zoroastrian religion classes. Now, I either had to attend the Islamic religion class or provide my school with religion marks from my church. Although I had voluntarily attended Islamic religion classes in school before, I resisted doing it again. I had received enough Islamic education. Getting religion marks from church sounded like a practical and fair idea, but not in my case. Tehran’s Russian Orthodox church hadn’t had a priest for a long time. My mother called a friend who attended church regularly, and she directed me to a Roman Catholic church. Although this church was only a couple of blocks away from our place, I had not noticed it before, because without colorful stained-glass windows facing the street, it looked as gray and dull as the government offices and foreign embassies around it. The priests offered to assist me with my studies and to mark my efforts.

Once a week, I went to church for my catechism class: I had to ring the doorbell at the metal door that connected the street to the backyard of the church and be buzzed through. I would close the door behind me and walk along a narrow walkway wedged between the church and the brick walls surrounding the yard. Asphalt covered the ground. The church office and the priests’ residence were in a separate building adjacent to the church. The priest would welcome me warmly, and we would read the Bible and discuss it. After the lesson, I would open the heavy wooden door that connected the yard to the church building. The door always creaked, and its sound spread into the deep silence, bouncing off the tall, curving walls. I loved to sit on a pew and look at the framed image of Mary: her long pink dress, her blue cloak covering her hair, and the peaceful smile on her face. Candles flickered in front of her. She knew about loss. She had experienced this pain. Here, I somehow felt at home.

E
ARLY IN THE AFTERNOON
of May 1, 1982, Taraneh and five other girls were called to the office over the loudspeaker. Silence fell upon the prison. Everyone knew that the other five girls from this group were sentenced to death, but I was the only one who knew about Taraneh. As usual, Taraneh was sitting in a corner reading the Koran. She was the only one who had been called from our room. Everyone froze and stared at her. She stood up as if she were going for a little walk to stretch her legs. I went toward her, but she looked at me and shook her head. She grabbed her small bag, which was hanging from a hook, and her larger bag, which was on top of the shelf, walked over to me, and pushed them in my arms.

“You know I don’t have much stuff. This is it. Find a good way of getting them to my parents.”

I nodded. She put on her chador and walked out the door. I knew that my friend was going to her death. If I screamed until my throat bled, if I hit my head against the wall until my skull cracked, it would not save her. With Taraneh’s bags in my arms, I stood in the middle of the room for a long time until my legs gave out. All day, not a word was said. We preserved the silence as if it were capable of preserving life, of performing a miracle. We waited, prayed, and cried silently, our lips moving without a sound. But the day came to a silent end and the horizon filled with reds and purples and the night crawled into the air. We listened for gunshots, and soon they came, as if glass clouds were falling from the sky.

A
BOUT FOUR AND A HALF MONTHS
after my arrest, my name was called over the loudspeaker.

“Marina Moradi-Bakht, put on your
hejab,
and come to the office.

I didn’t know why they had called me. Maybe Hamehd had missed me again. I covered my hair with my shawl and went to the office.

Sister Maryam greeted me with a smile. “Brother Ali is back,” she said. “He’s asked for you.”

I put on my blindfold and followed her to another building, where I waited in the hallway. My breaths felt like stones in my throat.

“Marina, follow me,” said Ali’s voice, and I obeyed him. He closed the door behind us and told me to sit down and take off my blindfold. He seemed taller than I remembered, but maybe this was because he had lost some weight.

I looked around. We were in a windowless room, and there were no torture beds. On one of the walls hung a picture of Ayatollah Khomeini, who, as Ali had told me, had given the order to spare my life. The ayatollah’s dark eyebrows were knotted in a deep frown and his eyes stared at me with intense anger. He looked like a very mean old man. Next to Khomeini’s picture was a picture of the president, Ayatollah Khamenei, who, compared to the imam, had a rather kind expression.

Limping, Ali brought out a chair from behind a metal desk and searched my face with his eyes. I had almost forgotten what he looked like. There was a new scar on his right cheek.

“You look a lot better than the last time I saw you,” he said, smiling. “How have you been?”

“Well enough. How about you?”

“Are you just being polite or do you really want to know?”

“I want to know,” I said, not meaning it. I just wanted to get out of that room. I wanted to run back to 246.

He told me he had spent four months at the war front fighting the Iraqis but had to come back when he was shot in the leg. I said I was sorry to hear it, which was true. I would never have wanted him or anyone else to get hurt.

He was watching me carefully, his smile changing to a serious expression.

“Marina, I have to discuss something important with you, and I want you to listen to me and not to interrupt me until I’m done.”

I nodded, puzzled. He told me that his main reason for leaving Evin had been to stay away from me. He had believed that not seeing me would change his feelings, but it had not. He said he had had feelings for me since the moment we first met. He had tried to ignore them, but they had only become stronger. The night he walked me to the bathroom, he felt he had to save me at any cost, and this terrified him. When I didn’t come out of the bathroom, he called me, but I didn’t answer, so he came in to see what was wrong and found me on the floor. For a moment, he thought I was dead, but he took my pulse and realized I was alive. He knew that my name was on the execution list and that Hamehd didn’t like me. He tried to reason with Hamehd, but Hamehd wouldn’t listen. He said there was only one way for him to save my life and that was to go to Ayatollah Khomeini. Ali’s father had been a close friend of the ayatollah for years. So Ali went to the imam and begged him for my life, explaining that I was too young and that I needed a chance to change my ways. The ayatollah told him that the charges against me were serious enough to put me on death row, but he kept pleading with him. The ayatollah finally agreed to reduce my sentence to life in prison. Ali rushed back to Evin and asked the guards where I was, and they told him Hamehd had taken me for execution. He said he prayed as he rushed to the site.

I felt a sense of panic rise inside me.

He said that after speaking with the ayatollah, he decided to send me to 246 and to go away. Since I had the imam’s pardon, Hamehd could no longer harm me. Ali had tried to forget me but had found himself thinking about me all the time, and he was glad when he was shot, because he had a reason to come back. He said his father had always told him to sleep on every important decision of his life and to think about it thoroughly. He said he had slept on his decision of marrying me, had thought about it for more than four months, and had made his decision.

“I want you to marry me, Marina, and I promise to be a good husband and to take good care of you. Don’t answer me now. I want you to think about it,” he said

I tried to understand all I had just heard, but I couldn’t. It didn’t make any sense. How could he even think of marrying me? I didn’t want to marry him. I didn’t even want to be in the same room with him.

“Ali, you have to understand that I can’t marry you,” I said, my voice shaking.

“Why not?”

“There are many reasons!”

“I’m ready to hear them. Don’t forget that I’ve thought about this for months, but you never know, I might’ve forgotten something. Go ahead and tell me your reasons.”

“I don’t love you, and I wasn’t destined for you.”

“I don’t expect you to love me. Love can come in time, after you’ve given me a chance. And you said you weren’t destined for me. Who were you destined for then? For Andre?”

I gasped. How did he know about Andre?

He told me that once when I was sleeping, he had stayed by my side, and I had called Andre’s name in my sleep. He said he had done some research and knew exactly who Andre was and where he lived. Although Andre didn’t have a political record, Ali said, he could arrange one for him if he had to.

Even though I knew I sometimes talked in my sleep, it was hard for me to believe what he had said. Maybe they had been watching me before my arrest, and this was how they knew about Andre. I had dragged Andre into this. What could I do?

“Do you want to see him here?” Ali asked. “Maybe on a torture bed? Let him live his life. You have to accept the fact that your life completely changed when you were arrested. And don’t forget about your parents. I’m sure you don’t want to put them in danger. Why should they pay for you? I promise to make you happy. You’ll learn to love me.”

I told him he had no right to do this to me, and he said he did. He told me maybe I had forgotten that he had saved me from certain death. As an enemy of Islam, I had no rights. He believed he was doing me a favor. He said I didn’t know what was best for me.

I desperately searched for an escape. My death would solve many problems.

“I know you too well,” he said, his voice separating me from my thoughts. “I know exactly what you’re thinking right now. You’re thinking of suicide. I can see it in your eyes, but I also know you’re not going to do it. You’re not the kind to give up. It’s against your nature. You’re a fighter just like me. Let go of the past, and we can have a wonderful life together. And just to be on the safe side, I promise you that if you put yourself in harm’s way on purpose, I’ll have your Andre executed. He’ll pay for you.”

How could I possibly have a “wonderful” life with him? He was threatening to execute Andre and to arrest my parents.

“I give you three days to think about this, but remember not to do anything stupid. I’m very serious about everything I said.”

I had put Andre and my parents in danger, and I had to do everything I could to protect them. I had to remember that I had a life sentence. For me, there was no escape. I almost wished I had never met Andre.