Prisoner of Tehran: A Memoir (No Series) (28 page)

“You still have the station wagon?” I asked Andre.

“Yes.”

I was surprised he still had the same car, but then, I realized that although my time in Evin felt like a lifetime, it had only been two years, two months, and twelve days.

I
N
Z
ENIA’S HOUSE
, I had a bedroom with a window that covered almost an entire wall and overlooked the backyard. The walls and the curtains were pink, my favorite color, and two armchairs sat close to the window. Running my fingers over the soft fabric covering the chairs, I imagined myself sitting in one, reading a novel or a book of poetry. There was even a small vanity table, which was a part of a wall unit, and on it, in handmade frames from Isfahan, were two pictures of me. In one of them, I was about eight years old, leaning against my father’s shiny blue Oldsmobile, wearing a white sundress, staring intently at the camera with an uncertain, questioning smile on my face. Had I ever been that young? In another, I was thirteen, on my bike in front of my aunt’s cottage, wearing a blue T-shirt and a pair of white shorts, impatient to go to the beach to meet Arash. My brother had taken both pictures.

Instead of my old bed, a sofa bed covered with a tweedy brown fabric sat in a corner. I touched every piece of furniture. Everything seemed real. Why did I feel like I was dreaming? Somehow, my real life still existed in Evin, and this other world I had stepped into, this place I had called home and had longed to return to, was intangible and alien.
This is real. I’m home. I’m back. It’s over. The nightmare is over. It’s good that we’ve moved. This is a new beginning. I have to forget the past.

I took my folded clothes out of the plastic bag I had brought from Evin. I thought of throwing all the contents of the bag into tha garbage, but I knew I couldn’t. My white wedding scarf was on top of the pile; I had wrapped it around my wedding ring. Taking a deep breath, I unwrapped the scarf, opening each one of its silky folds. I could see Ali in my arms, struggling to breathe. Wishing the world were a simple place where people were either good or evil, I wrapped up the ring again and hid it in a dark corner of my closet. Then I went to the window. It had stopped raining, and sunlight streamed through the clouds in lacy golden ribbons. The backyard was very private, encircled by tall brick walls. Many bare rosebushes surrounded the empty swimming pool. There was a soft knock on my bedroom door.

“Come in.” I kept my eyes on the peaceful garden.

Andre came in, stood behind me, and put his hands on my shoulders. I could feel the scent of his cologne and the warmth of his body.

“I was ready for you to come home with a baby in your arms, and I would have loved you just the same,” he said. “Nothing would have changed for me.”

I didn’t move. He had no way of knowing about the baby, but he had said what I needed to hear the most. I guessed he had heard that girls were raped in the prison. I fought my tears.

“I’m not pregnant.”

“Were you tortured?”

“Yes. Do you want to know why I converted?”

I wanted him to know what had happened, but I didn’t know how to tell him.

“It doesn’t really matter to me, but I know you did it only because you didn’t have another choice. Right?”

“Yes.”

“I love you.”

“I love you, too.” I faced him.

This was the first time we had said this to each other.

He put his arms around me. His lips touched mine, and for a few moments, Evin became nothing but a memory, unable to keep me captive.

That night, we all sat around the dinner table. My mother had made beef and celery stew with rice. At the beginning, silence dominated the dining room, broken only by the sound of silver against china or a little cough.

“Thank God it rained today. It had been dry for too long. The lawn looked really sad but looks much better now,” Zenia broke the silence with her warm, musical voice. She was about five feet one and a hundred and twenty pounds, with short blond hair and dark eyes.

“The more it rains now, the better the roses will bloom,” added Hooshang Khan, a close family friend of Zenia’s, who was eating with us.

Sisi, one of Zenia’s three cats, was under the table, rubbing herself against my leg. I reached down, scratched her head, and she purred.

My father was looking at his food most of the time, but every once in a while, his gaze slowly moved around the table and lingered briefly on me. I tried to read the expression on his face. It was as blank as usual. He had looked devastated when he came for visitations, but now I was back and things had returned to normal. It was probably easier for everyone to pretend my imprisonment had never happened. But was this silence their way of protecting me or protecting themselves?

Ali’s mother had made beef and celery stew and rice on the night of his assassination. How could I tell my family about Ali, about my marriage, and about his death? I felt like a stranger, a guest no one really cared about but had invited over to their house out of a sense of obligation. Once the visit was over, I was supposed to say good night to everyone and go home. But which home? To the Moosavis’, or to Evin?

I couldn’t sleep that night, watching the unfamiliar shadows on the walls. Ali saved me twice the night he died: once when he pushed me down, and then with his last words when he asked his father to take me to my family. If I didn’t have Mr. Moosavi’s support, I would either have spent the rest of my life in Evin, or much worse than that, as Mr. Moosavi had told me, Hamehd would have married me off to one of his friends, and I wouldn’t have been able to do anything about it except commit suicide.

When he returned from the front, Ali had told me that if I didn’t marry him, he would arrest Andre and my parents. I had believed him then, but now a whisper of suspicion spread inside me. What if it had just been a threat? If so, I could have refused him without putting anyone in danger. What would have happened if I had said no?

Now that I was lying safely in my bed, it had become much easier to be brave.

The next day, I searched the house for my books, most of which had been gifts from the old bookstore owner, Albert, and the golden box containing my grandmother’s story. I couldn’t find them. I went to my mother. She sat in the family room, smoking a cigarette.

“Maman, I can’t find my books. Where are they?”

She shook her head and looked at me as if this was the most irrelevant question she had ever heard. “Your books. You still haven’t learned a thing, have you? Your books were as dangerous as a ticking bomb. Do you know how terrified we were when you were arrested? I destroyed all the books the guards didn’t take with them. It took me days, but I got rid of them.” She couldn’t burn them, because we didn’t have a fireplace or a yard. So, little by little, she had ripped their pages, washed them into a paste in the wringer washer, and gradually mixed the paste with the garbage.

I dropped into a chair, thinking of beautiful words turning into an ugly paste.

Washed books. The written word drowned, silenced.

The Chronicles of Narnia
were what I missed the most. Albert had signed them.

“There was a little golden box under my bed. What happened to that?” I asked my mother.

“Your grandmother’s writings. Think, Marina! If the guards came to our house again and found them, papers with Russian writings, what do you think they would’ve thought? It would have taken us years to prove we weren’t communists.”

I didn’t blame my mother; she had been scared. This was the doing of the Islamic revolution.

Grief was a strange thing. It had many shapes and forms, many varieties, and I wondered if anyone had identified them all and given them fancy names.

Soon it was my nineteenth birthday and my mother invited a few friends and relatives for the occasion. Before the guests arrived, I went through the clothes hanging in my closet: blacks, navies, and browns, and all long-sleeved and depressing. I wasn’t eighty years old. I wanted a bright sleeveless dress; I wanted to slip into it, look in the mirror, and find the girl I used to be. I wanted to wear it and walk into my life where I had left it.

I went to my mother and told her that although the clothes she had made for me were very nice and I loved them, I wanted something brighter and more cheerful for my birthday. I asked her if I could borrow one of her old party dresses; she used to have a pink strapless one I adored. I knew it probably was a little too big for me, but I could fix it. I had learned how to sew in Evin. My mother agreed. After I spent about half an hour behind the sewing machine, the dress fit me just fine. I squeezed my feet into a pair of high heels. I was going to find my life and reclaim it.

The guests smiled, hugged, and kissed me and told me I looked great. I was happy to see them all, but there was a tangible distance between us, between the girl who had been gone and those who had lived a normal life. There were uncomfortable pauses in every conversation.

“Marina, you look lovely. How are you?” someone would ask.

“Very well, thank you,” I would answer.

Then they would force a smile and try to hide the discomfort that was as visible as the color of their eyes.

“Oh, those pastries look delicious. Has your mother made them?”

It wasn’t their fault. Everybody was polite and kind, but that was where it ended. No one wanted to know. One of the priests, Father Nicola, had joined us; he played Russian folk songs on the accordion, and my parents sang along. It was good to be surrounded by the smiling, familiar faces of friends and relatives and the melodies that had been the background of my childhood. Ali had been right. Home wasn’t the same, because I wasn’t the same. The comfortable, safe innocence of my childhood was lost for good.

After dinner, my godmother, Siran, sat next to me. She was a wise woman, and I had always liked to know her point of view.

“How are you?” she asked.

“Good as new,” I answered.

“I’m happy you haven’t lost your edge,” she laughed. She was as elegantly dressed as always in a cream-colored blouse and a well-tailored brown skirt. “You have to be proud of yourself. Most people who are released from Evin lock themselves up in a room and don’t talk to anyone for a long time. You’ve inherited your strength from your grandmother.”

A waltz played and people danced around us.

“Why doesn’t anyone ask me anything about the last two years?” I asked her.

“The answer is very simple. We’re afraid to ask because we’re afraid of knowing. I think this is some kind of a natural defense. Maybe if we don’t talk about it, and maybe if we pretend it never happened, it will be forgotten.”

I had expected my homecoming to make things simple again, but it hadn’t. I hated the silence surrounding me. I wanted to feel loved. But how could love find its way through silence? Silence and darkness were very similar: darkness was the absence of light and silence was the absence of sound, of voices. How could one navigate through such oblivion?

After my birthday, I decided to work toward my high school diploma; I had to get on with my life. I could study at home and go for the exams. Although Andre was completing his bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering, he came to see me every day and helped me with my calculus and physics. He told me about his classes, his professors, and his friends, and he sometimes took me to his friends’ houses for get-togethers and birthday parties. In a strange way, this was our “dating” period.

At the time, the revolutionary guards had checkpoints throughout the city. They would stop cars at different times of day, but especially at night, and would conduct random searches. It was considered a crime for a man and a woman who were not closely related or engaged to be married to be in the same car alone together. So to be on the safe side, even though we had not discussed marriage, Andre asked the priests to give us a letter that explained he and I were engaged, and he always kept this letter in his car in case we were stopped and questioned.

I studied about ten hours a day, either in my room, or pacing, book in hand, around the empty swimming pool. Maybe I subconsciously filled my time with math and science to avoid thinking about the past. My father was at work all day, six days a week—he still worked as an office clerk for Uncle Partef—and my mother spent most of her time in lines for groceries, in the kitchen, or knitting, and I kept out of her way.

One warm day as we sat in the backyard, Andre moved his chair closer to mine and put his arm around my shoulder. Sparrows played around us, and red, pink, and white roses sweetened the air with their fragrance.

“When should we get married?” he asked.

In Evin, Mohammad had warned me that I was not allowed to marry a Christian. According to Islamic law, a Muslim woman isn’t allowed to marry a Christian man, but a Muslim man is allowed to marry a Christian woman. The fact that I had converted to Islam by force and under extraordinary circumstances was irrelevant before the government. If I confessed that I had renounced Islam and returned to Christianity, according to Islamic custom, I deserved to die.

“You know that if we get married and they find out, I, and maybe you as well, will be condemned to death,” I said.

The wind turned the pages of the math textbook on the table.

“Remember when we first met? That day at the church office?” he said. “It was love at first sight. From that moment, I knew you were the one for me. And I felt like I had to take care of you. And when they took you away, I knew you’d come back. We belong together. This is the way it was meant to be.”