Prisoner of Tehran: A Memoir (No Series) (15 page)

I
MET
A
NDRE
the very first time I attended the Sunday mass at my new Catholic church. That day, after the service ended, I went to the small office to chat with the priests. As I waited, Andre, who was the organist, came in. During mass, although I had sat at the back of the church, I had noticed that he was quite handsome. Now, I realized I was looking at the clothed version of Michelangelo’s David. His face was oval, with a long, aristocratic nose, curls of golden hair covered his wide forehead, and his eyes were the color of the Caspian on a calm day. He was beautiful. Blushing, I looked down, hoping my thoughts were not as transparent as I feared. We introduced ourselves.

The church served a very small community, so every newcomer attracted a great deal of attention and curiosity. He asked me if I was a university student and when I told him I was in the tenth grade, he turned scarlet. I told him about my Russian background, and he said he was an electrical engineering student at the University of Tehran, but since all universities had been shut down to undergo the Islamic Cultural Revolution, he had been teaching English, physics, and math at an Armenian school.

As our conversation progressed, I felt a wave of trembling excitement wash through me. He was poised and soft spoken. I told him I had enjoyed his music, and he told me he was a novice. After the revolution when the government took over the all-boys school that belonged to the church, many of the priests who had run the school were deported, accused of being spies. Andre had attended their school for twelve years. One of the priests awaiting deportation had been the organist for a long time. He gave Andre, who had never played any musical instruments, a few music lessons, and once he left, Andre took over his job.

“You should join our choir,” Andre told me. “We’re looking for new members right now.”

I said I couldn’t sing.

“Give it a try. It’s fun. Our next practice is on Wednesday night at six. You don’t have any special plans for that night, do you?”

“No.”

“Okay, I’ll see you on Wednesday night then.”

He stood up and shook my hand.

Once he was gone, I had a chance to catch my breath.

Aram still walked home with me at least once a week. He was in the twelfth grade, his last year of high school.

“We’re planning to leave Iran in a few months and hopefully go to the United States,” he told me on a warm, sunny spring afternoon. I knew this day would come. We had been good friends for more than two years. I didn’t want to lose him, but I knew that the best thing for him was to leave and to start a new life away from all the painful memories we shared.

I told him I was happy for him. He stopped and looked at me; there were tears in his eyes. He said he wished I could go with him; he was concerned for my safety. Many kids from his school had been arrested and taken to Evin, and he had heard that no one got out of there alive. I told him he was being paranoid, but he argued that it had nothing to do with paranoia.

“Aram, there’s no need to worry,” I insisted.

“Arash used to say the same thing…Hey, wait a second; I just thought of something, but no, it can’t be…but on the other hand…”

He stopped in the middle of the narrow sidewalk in front of a small produce store. Boxes and baskets filled with fruits and vegetables blocked part of the sidewalk. The strong scent of fresh parsley, dill weed, chives, and basil thickened the hot afternoon air.

“You’re not trying to get yourself killed, are you?” he suddenly asked, almost in tears.

I told him I had no intention of committing suicide.

A large woman, who was trying to get past us to enter the store and tired of waiting for our conversation to end, said a frustrated “excuse me” and almost pushed both of us into a big box of onions. Regaining his balance, Aram looked at me. I stepped out of the way and onto the side of the road and again reassured him that I’d be fine. As we walked along, I reached for his hand. He shook me off.

“What’re you doing? We’ll get arrested!” he said, glancing around, his face a deep red.

“I…I’m sorry! I’m an idiot! I wasn’t thinking.” I swallowed my tears.

“I’m sorry, Marina. I didn’t mean to be rude. But how will I be able to live with myself if you get lashed for holding my hand?”

“I’m sorry.”

“See, this is another reason why you should leave. Holding hands is not a crime. You tell this to someone who lives in a normal country and they’ll think it’s a bad joke.”

A few minutes later, I remembered I had meant to ask him if he knew anyone who could translate Russian into Persian. I explained to him that my grandmother had written her life story and that she had given it to me before her death. I needed someone to translate it into Persian. He asked me why I didn’t ask my parents to do that and I told him that my grandmother had entrusted it to me. Maybe she didn’t want them to have it. I wanted someone who didn’t know me to help me with it. He told me that Irena had had a friend who was a little strange but spoke many languages and was fluent in both Persian and Russian. He promised to call her.

We were almost halfway home when I noticed that a storm was approaching. Dark clouds covered the sky. It was strange how a beautiful sunny day could change within a few minutes. We heard the first roll of thunder. It started to rain. We were still far from home, and there was no shelter. At first, it came slowly; I could see each drop of rain as it hit the ground. Maybe we could still make it home before the peak of the storm, but no, it was too late. Thunder roared and the perfect drops of rain mixed together. A strong wind bent the trees and transformed the rain into a fierce wave of water. We had to stop. The familiar street faded, and its warm colors disappeared. Unable to find our way, we stood confused, knowing we had to stand up to the storm. We had to close our eyes and believe that this was only a passing moment.

The next day, Aram phoned and told me he had spoken with Irena’s friend, Anna, and Anna had agreed to meet with me. A couple of days later, Aram accompanied me to Anna’s house, which was on a quiet street off Takht-eh Tavoos Avenue. We rang her doorbell, and a dog began to bark from behind the door that connected her front yard to the street. “Who is it?” a woman’s voice called out in Persian. When we answered, Anna opened the door. She was in her seventies, tall and thin, with beautiful thick black hair, which fell on her shoulders. She had large gray eyes, wore a silk white blouse and a pair of blue jeans, and greeted us in Russian. A German shepherd followed her. Her small, two-story house was filled with large and small tropical plants. We had to push their leaves out of our way in order to be able to follow her into the living room, where a colorful parrot sat on a perch, a couple of canaries sang in a cage, and a black cat rubbed herself against my legs. The air smelled of wet soil, and every wall in the room was covered with bookcases overflowing with books.

“Where is the text?” she asked me as we were sitting down. I gave it to her, and she sifted through the pages.

“It will take me a few hours to translate this.”

She stood up and motioned us toward the door. “Irena was very fond of you, Marina. You can come back for it tomorrow afternoon at four-thirty.”

The next day, almost as soon as we rang Anna’s doorbell, she opened the door and handed me my grandmother’s writings and the translation.

“There you go, my dear. Your grandmother was a sad but strong woman,” she said and closed the door on us.

“I told you she was a little strange,” Aram said and burst into laughter.

I read the translation as soon as I got home. It was about forty pages, was written in beautiful handwriting, and was grammatically perfect. If I didn’t already know, I would never have guessed that Persian was not its writer’s first language.

At the age of eighteen, my grandmother, Xena Mooratova, had fallen in love with a handsome, twenty-three-year-old man named Andrei. He had golden blond hair and large blue eyes and was a communist. Xena had begged him not to go to demonstrations and protests against the tsar, but he didn’t listen to her. He wanted Russia to become greater than it was and he wanted poverty to disappear. Xena wrote that he had beautiful but impossible ideas and was very naïve. She started going to protests with him to protect him. During one of the demonstrations, the soldiers warned the crowd to go away, but nobody listened, so the soldiers opened fire.

“People started running,”
Xena wrote.
“I turned around. He lay on the ground, bleeding. I held him in my arms until he died. The soldiers took pity on me and let me take him to his mother. I dragged his body through the streets of Moscow. A few young men came to my aid; they carried him for me, and I walked behind them, watching his blood drip to the ground. I never slept peacefully after that day. I still wake to see his blood on my bed.”

Xena met her future husband—my grandfather, Esah—a few months later. He was a jeweler and a kind young man. She wasn’t sure how or when she had fallen in love with him. Soon, he asked her to marry him, and she accepted. They got married, had a daughter, and named her Tamara. Soon, they were forced to leave Russia and come to Iran. It was an especially difficult journey for Xena, because she was pregnant with her second child, my father. Once in Iran, the family first went to the city of Mashad, where my father was born, and then to the city of Rasht, where Esah had a few relatives. They didn’t stay in Rasht for long and came to Tehran. Tehran was very different from Moscow, and Xena felt homesick. She missed her friends and family, but it didn’t matter too much to her because she was very happy with Esah. But her happiness didn’t last long. Esah left the house one morning and never came back. Thieves murdered him for the jewelry he planned to sell in order to buy a house.

Life was very lonely and difficult for Xena after this. She longed to go back home to Russia, but everything had been lost; her home and her way of life were destroyed by a bloodthirsty revolution. She had nowhere to go and believed she was to be a stranger forever.

She started a boardinghouse and worked hard. Years went by, her children grew up, and Tamara married a Russian man and went back to Russia with him. Then, Xena met Peter, a Hungarian man who was staying at her boardinghouse. He helped her and kept her company. After the beginning of the Second World War, he asked her to marry him, and she accepted, but they never had a chance. Countries were divided, and Hungary took Hitler’s side. All Hungarians who lived in Iran became prisoners of war and were sent to special camps in India. Peter died there from an infectious disease.

I was in tears when I finished reading the translation. I knew how sad, helpless, and lonely my grandmother must have felt. Revolutions had devastated both of us. The communist revolution and the Islamic revolution had both resulted in terrible dictatorships. My life seemed like a distorted copy of her life. I could only hope that the future had better things planned for me. I had to remember that she had survived, and so would I.

The following Wednesday night, I went to choir practice. Andre smiled at me from behind the organ. I stood next to a woman who had a wonderful voice. Andre came up to me after the practice. Wearing blue jeans and a plain T-shirt, I wished I had nicer clothes on. Although the
hejab
was mandatory and not wearing it could result in lashing and imprisonment, women could wear what they wanted underneath the
hejab.
When I went to church, to visit friends, or to relatives’ houses, I could take off my
hejab
after arriving.

“You have a beautiful voice,” Andre said to me.

“No. I was standing beside Mrs. Masoodi. She has a beautiful voice.” I laughed.

I asked him where he was originally from, and he told me both his parents were from Hungary, but he and his sister were born in Tehran. His sister was twenty-one and had recently moved to Budapest to go to university. He was twenty-two.

It was such a strange coincidence that he was Hungarian. But when I thought about it a little, I realized it wasn’t that strange. Christians were such a small minority in Iran that we were all somehow connected in one way or another.

“Would you like to learn to play the organ?” Andre asked me.

“Is it hard?”

“Not at all. I’ll teach you.”

“Okay. When do we start?”

“How about now?”

Despite the frightening events at the rally in Ferdosi Square, I attended many other protest rallies organized by different political groups from communists to the Mojahedin. This was the least I could do to show my disapproval of the government and its policies. I didn’t say a word about this to my parents, to Aram, or to Andre. All the rallies were more or less the same: young people gathered on a main street, placards condemning the government went up in the air, the crowd began to move, slogans were yelled out, and, after only moments, tear gas thickened the air, making eyes water and throats burn. Then came the sound of bullets. The revolutionary guards had arrived. Everyone ran as fast as they possibly could, keeping their heads down. Everything became focused and clear. Colors became sharper.
Avoid military green. Stay away from bearded men.
It was a mistake to try to escape through narrow streets; the possibility of being arrested or beaten was much stronger there. The wider the street, the better the chance of survival. A few times, I had to hide behind smelly garbage cans or boxes of rotten produce to escape the guards. Except for the one time at Ferdosi Square, I never saw anyone shot, but someone would always tell me that he or she had seen people fall or had seen smeared blood on the pavement. Every time I arrived home safe after a rally, my heart beat with excitement. Again, I had made it. Maybe I was immune to the bullets and the swinging clubs.