Prisoner of Tehran: A Memoir (No Series) (29 page)

I touched his soft blond hair and his face and kissed him. “All those days in Evin, I wanted to come back to you. Although I knew it might never happen, I hoped for it.”

Then, for the first time, he told me that on March 19, a week before I was released, my family had received a phone call from Evin early in the morning, informing them that they would let me go that day. He and my parents went to the prison immediately and waited all day but were turned away without any explanation. I was shocked to hear this; why hadn’t anyone told me about it before? Had this delay been another result of the power struggle between Ladjevardi and Mr. Moosavi? If so, Mr. Moosavi had truly put up a fight, and I was sure he wouldn’t have had a chance of winning it without Ayatollah Khomeini’s support.

“We were so worried,” said Andre. “We didn’t know why they had changed their minds, and the guards wouldn’t talk to us. Then they called again on March 26, and we rushed to the prison. At the gates, they told us to go to Luna Park and wait for you there. I parked the car in a parking lot close to Luna Park, and your parents walked from there. I waited in the car. I was really excited but I knew that nothing was certain, so I tried not to get my hopes up. A few minutes after your parents left, a bearded man in civilian clothes came up to the car and said “
salam aleikom”
to me. I greeted him back. I thought he probably needed directions or something. But the man bent close to me and said, ‘Don’t forget that you cannot marry Marina.’ I asked him who he was and how he knew me, and he said it didn’t matter. He said, ‘I’m warning you: she’s a Muslim and you are a Christian, so you cannot get married.’ Then he turned and left.”

After talking to the man, Andre had been shocked and worried. Although he knew that because he had come to the church at the time of my visit from Evin, the guards knew about our relationship, and it was only at that moment that he realized that the prison authorities had kept a close eye on him. Then his fear had turned into anger. It was not anyone’s business whom he wanted to marry. He loved me and this was all that mattered.

“Marina, I understand the situation,” he said. “I know that marrying you is dangerous. But I want to do it. We can’t give in. We’re not doing anything wrong. We’re in love, and we want to get married. How far are we going to let them push us? We have to take a stand.”

He was right.

I guessed Mohammad must have been the bearded man. I knew very well that this marriage could be my death sentence, but, ironically, I had to risk my life in order to make it mine again. In Evin, I came close to death, and Ali saved me. But he didn’t give my life back to me; he kept it for himself. My life was the price I paid for staying alive, and I had to fight to retrieve it.

I told my parents about my decision to marry Andre, and they thought I had lost my mind. Even most of the priests believed we should not marry, but we set our wedding date for July 18, 1985, about sixteen months after my release from Evin. Friends and family repeatedly tried to change our minds. As a final attempt, my parents asked Hooshang Khan to speak to me. He was a kind, wise man and they knew I had great respect for him. When he knocked on my bedroom door one evening, I was sitting on my sofa bed, reading. He came in, closed the door behind him, and sat on a chair. Leaning forward, he rested his elbows on his knees and looked straight at me.

“Don’t do this.”

“What?”

“Don’t marry Andre. I know you love each other, but these are difficult times. You could die for this. Give it time. Things could change. It’s not worth losing your life.”

His words unleashed the anger I had suppressed inside me.

“You have no right to tell me whom I can or cannot marry! Not you, nor my parents, and definitely not the government! I’ll do what I want to do! I’ll do what’s right to do! Enough compromises!”

I had never raised my voice like that in my life. I had never been so rude to someone so much older. I knew I had behaved badly. Color left Hooshang Khan’s face, and he walked out the door as I burst into tears. I was not going to let the government run my life. They had imprisoned me and tortured me emotionally and physically. I had been forced to convert to Islam and marry a man I didn’t know. I had watched my friends suffer and die. What mattered now was doing the right thing, showing them that although I had been forced to convert, I would marry the man I loved, even if doing so would send me back to prison and put me in serious danger. This time, I was not going to compromise. They had not destroyed me, and they would never succeed in doing so.

The day Andre and I went shopping for wedding bands, I tried to tell him about Ali. I knew he would understand. We walked around the jewelry store, looking at the display windows. He deserved to know, and I wanted to tell him. A gold wedding band that looked like two rings welded together caught my eye, and I asked to see it. We both loved it. When we went back to the car, there was a parking ticket on the windshield. Andre told me that it was his very first ticket, and we laughed about it.

As we drove back home, I thought about where to begin. I had to start at the beginning, the very first moment I stepped in Evin. Then, I had to tell about every second, every single thing that had happened. No, I couldn’t do this. I couldn’t travel all the way back and live it again.

That summer, my parents went to the cottage for a few days, and Andre and I accompanied them. The cottage was as beautiful and peaceful as I remembered, but the joy that being there had always given me had become nothing more than a memory. Early the first morning, when everyone was still asleep, I ran to the Prayer Rock. Everything seemed the same. Ancient trees brushed the sky, and the rays of the rising sun saturated their leaves. My shoes and pants were wet from the dew. I lay on the rock and felt its rough, moist surface against my skin and thought of the day Arash and I had prayed here. So much had changed since then. I took my first wedding ring out of my pocket, knelt by the rock, and tried to pry out one of its stones, but it wouldn’t budge. I tried and tried, but the stones were all cemented in. My fingers hurt. I ran back to the house. There wasn’t a sound except for my father’s snoring. I tiptoed into the kitchen, grabbed a knife, and rushed back to the rock. This time, I managed to take out three stones, put the ring inside the dark cavity, and put the stones back. I imagined the ring surrounded by thousands of prayers.

When we returned to Tehran, my mother told me that when I became a Muslim, my father had said that I wasn’t his daughter anymore. She was washing the dishes and didn’t even look at me as she spoke. I wasn’t surprised, but I was hurt. I had expected to find shelter at home, but the doors were closed on me. The distance between us seemed to expand. She dried her hands and walked out of the kitchen. Even if I had told her my secrets, she wouldn’t have been able to give me what I needed from her; I needed her understanding. She was the way she was. Her view of the world and what truly mattered was completely different from mine, and I didn’t dare say that I was right and she was wrong. We were different, and I had to stop expecting her to think like me. I had to accept her the way she was, because that was what I wanted her to do for me. I couldn’t understand why she had told me about my father’s harsh reaction to my conversion. My father had not said a word about it to me, but I guessed she had decided I needed to know his true feelings on this matter.

My mother helped me with my makeup on the day of my wedding to Andre. One of my aunts had made my dress. I couldn’t stop my tears as I took it from the closet. It was hard to believe that I had lived to see this day. I looked out the window of my bedroom and at the pink roses in the backyard, offering a prayer for each of the friends I had loved and lost. I missed them all.

Draping my dress over a chair next to the window, I thought of Ali and our wedding day, about how terrified I had been. Today was different; today was mine.

I wondered if Andre and I would ever have children. I was terrified of getting pregnant again. I often thought of the moments I had spent with my baby in my dream. His smiling eyes, his giggles, his little hand grabbing my hair, and his little mouth drinking hungrily from me.

Andre had gone out early in the morning to buy fresh fruit and soft drinks to take to the church. We had invited our guests to stay after the wedding ceremony and the mass to have some cake and refreshments at the church hall. In order not to attract too much attention, we had decided that I should go to the church early and change into my wedding dress there.

As the wedding march played, my father walked me down the aisle inside the full church, and I felt happier than I had ever felt in my life. Large flower baskets overflowing with white gladiolas sat on the altar, and smiling faces surrounded us.

We took pictures inside the church and in the church’s backyard. We had cake and chatted with guests, and it was soon time to go home to the small condo Andre had rented after his father passed away and his aunt who had raised him left for Hungary. With a view of the Alborz Mountains, the condo was north of Tehran in a high-rise building on the Jordan Hills, facing the Jordan Highway. Just before stepping out of the church, I put on my scarf and Islamic manteau on top of my wedding dress, and then the two of us walked to Andre’s navy blue Fiat. We were both happy and scared, and we hoped for the best, because we had to; we had decided to live our lives.

Almost right after our wedding, Andre found a job at Tehran’s electric facility, and a couple of months later, we rented an apartment with my parents to share expenses. The Iran-Iraq war, now in its fifth year, had begun to escalate. Since the beginning of hostilities in September 1980, the war had mostly skipped Tehran; the distance separating the city from Iraq had protected us. The names of streets in residential neighborhoods changed to the names of the young men killed at the front. Before my time in Evin, this name-change process had been slow and not very noticeable. But after my release, I could see that many street names served as a remembrance to the lives lost in the war.

Not too long before Andre and I got married, air attacks began to hit Tehran and a few other large cities. Without any warning, the first explosion came very early one morning; a missile blasted a residential neighborhood less than two miles from Zenia’s house. It shook us with a big boom and woke me. Although at that moment I didn’t know what the cause of the sound had been, I knew something terrible had happened. From then on, air-raid sirens screamed a few times a day and in the middle of the night, and although no one had a real bomb shelter and the government had never bothered to build any, people tried to take cover in safe spots, which were supposed to be far from windows. With each missile strike, broken glass killed and injured many.

Death had become part of daily life. The ones who could leave the city and go to small towns and villages did so, but most had nowhere to go. But like a river, which always finds its way to lower ground even if it has to dig through canyons, life managed to find the shortest route to “normalcy,” stubbornly struggling against fear. Parents went to work and sent their children to school, but they embraced them a little while longer and said a more patient good-bye. A few schools had been demolished during the air attacks and hundreds of children had been killed as they sat behind their desks or played in their schoolyard. At the war front, Saddam Hussein had begun using chemical weapons such as sarin and mustard gas, killing thousands.

As Andre and I drove through the city to go to church or to a friend’s house, we would see a large, lonely gap where a house had stood the day before. Sometimes, a stairway had refused to collapse in the ruins of a family’s life, leading eerily to the emptiness behind it, or a wall covered with floral wallpaper cast its shadow over the dust of lost lives.

On a Wednesday morning about two years after I had been released from Evin, the phone rang. I was about to leave for the grocery store and had my purse in my hand.

“Can I speak to Marina?” said an unfamiliar voice.

“Speaking.”

“Marina, I’m calling from Evin.”

The world stopped. I put my purse on the floor and rested my weight against the wall.

“We want you to come to Evin on Saturday to answer a few questions. Be at the main front gate at nine in the morning, and don’t be late.”

“What questions?”

“You’ll see. Remember, nine in the morning on Saturday.”

I couldn’t move. I couldn’t even put the receiver down. My life after Evin was only a dream. It was time to wake from the dream and go back to reality. At least they hadn’t asked for Andre. I finally hung up and went to our bedroom. No one was home, and I had time to pull myself together. I tried to think of what could happen. I tried to tell myself that it was okay and that they were just checking on me. But I couldn’t. Feeling exhausted, I lay down on the bed and fell asleep. I woke with my mother calling my name and touching my shoulder.

“Why are you sleeping with your scarf and manteau on?” she asked.

For a second, I couldn’t remember. Then I told her.

“What?” she looked as if she truly had not understood what I had just said.

I repeated myself, and her face turned white.

All I could do was sleep. I couldn’t think about Evin. Thinking was not going to help. Sometimes, when I woke to go to the bathroom or to have a drink of water, I found Andre sitting next to me, his eyes staring into empty space, his face white and pale, and his body terribly still. He knew there was nothing he could do, that he had to let me go. There wasn’t a sound in the house. Silence had swallowed us like a whale.