After Tehran (12 page)

I quote Emily Dickinson: “Not knowing when the dawn will come, I open every door.”

Your dawn has come. Enjoy it
.

I was stunned.

For a few years after my arrival in Canada, Alik and I had seen each other regularly at family functions, but we’d had a falling-out over my deteriorating relationship with my parents. I had told my parents frankly that I could not live up to their expectations of life in Canada. They wanted me to buy new furniture and move to a bigger house because most of our friends and relatives had a more expensive lifestyle. In Iran, we call this way of thinking
cheshm-o hamcheshmi
, which more or less means “living to other people’s standards.” I literally couldn’t afford to satisfy my parents, and I refused to go into debt to please them or anyone else. My husband and children were my priority and I had to focus my energy on them. My parents didn’t like that, and their unhappiness affected my relationship with Alik. Maybe if we had been closer in age, things would have been different, but we didn’t have much in common.

Not long after
Prisoner of Tehran
appeared, Alik and I went out for lunch. I realized I could not remember a time when we had been alone together. He visited my father every Sunday and me
every Friday. We had not been trying to avoid each other, but our lives had been separate for twenty-eight years. Unlike Alik, who had grown up during the time of the shah, I had come of age during the time of the Islamic Republic, and my reality was quite different from his. I was sure that every time he saw me, the shadow of Evin and what I had gone through got in his way of connecting to me. Maybe he felt guilty for not being able to help me. He had never talked to me about guilt, but I had wondered about it. A friend of mine who was never in Evin had told me about blaming himself for not saving me from the prison. I laughed and told him not to be silly. There wasn’t anything he or anyone else could have done. I have never blamed anyone for my time in Evin. Only the Islamic Republic is responsible for that.

I told Alik that I had been shocked to see him quote Emily Dickinson; I had no idea that he read poetry. He said that he had always loved literature and was an avid reader. It seemed I knew more about my neighbours than I did about my brother. To my surprise, he said he had always wanted to become a writer. We talked about my book, and he revealed that even though he was aware that Evin was a horrible place, he had no idea how awful it truly was until he read my book.

I sat quietly, looking at him.

I had finally found my brother and father in the rubble of the silence and secrets of our past.

A few days later, Alik and my father came to the launch of
Prisoner of Tehran
, a reception held at the Faculty Club of the University of Toronto. They had told me they would be coming, but I didn’t see them in the audience. However, when I stood at the podium, I spotted them in the front row. As I spoke, I noticed that my editor at Penguin Canada, Diane Turbide, put her arm around my father’s shoulder. They were both crying. I had to look the other way not to lose control.

*
She probably did not apply for the papers immediately after her arrival but did so a few years later.

The List of Names

A
few days after “Walls Like Snakes” aired on CBC Radio One, I received a phone call from an Iranian-Canadian university professor who had heard it and been impressed. I will call her Professor M. here. When we met for lunch a few days later, she told me she was beginning a project that would study the memoirs of Iran’s political prisoners. Eventually, she would create a website that would be a resource centre for those who wanted to learn more about the experiences of these prisoners. She needed someone fluent in both English and Persian to translate excerpts of prison memoirs from Persian into English and to summarize them. She also wanted to create a haven where former women political prisoners from the Middle East could express themselves by telling their stories through visual arts, dance, music, and creative writing. I agreed to help her, hoping that we would be finished translating by April 2007; my book would be released then and I would have to go on a book tour.

In early October 2006, I signed a six-month contract and began reading and translating prison memoirs. The task was emotionally exhausting—I was reading and writing about torture four to five hours a day. But I pressed on because I believed the work was important.

I had a few meetings with Professor M. and an ex–political prisoner from Iran who was working on the same project, and the project was going well. However, within two months it became clear that we would have to continue our work after I came back from my book tour: the amount of material to read was simply too large.

Shortly before I left on my book tour, Professor M. asked me if I could transcribe the names of about twenty-five-hundred women political prisoners executed in Iran’s prisons. This list was by no means a complete one. The names of many who lost their lives in Evin and other Iranian prisons have never been recorded. I hesitated a little before taking on this task. Twenty-five-hundred names … twenty-five-hundred lost lives. How many of those women did I know? How many were my friends?

Before every name, I paused and took a deep breath. After transcribing an unfamiliar name, I would stop a few moments and try to imagine what her owner had looked like. What colour were her eyes, her hair? Was her hair long or short? Did she have any brothers or sisters? Was she married? Did she have children or was she a teenager? What were her hopes and dreams?

Eventually, I came to a name I knew. Shahnoosh Behzadi. I read her name over and over. Up to that instant, I had somehow hoped that the news I’d heard in 1981 about her death had been false, that she had somehow survived and was living a happy life in a quiet, safe corner of the world. But those little black letters printed on a sheet of paper confirmed, with terrible finality, that she had died a horrible death at fifteen. Tears blinded me.

Shahnoosh Behzadi had been my classmate from the fourth grade on. We met when I transferred to Giv Elementary School, a Zoroastrian school for girls that accepted students of every faith.

On my first day at Giv just before the morning bell, I stood in the middle of the schoolyard and glanced around, desperate
to find a familiar face. I knew that a few of my friends from my former school were supposed to come to Giv, but I had yet to spot one. A loud, moving sea of children surrounded me, and I felt overwhelmed. My heart pounded and sweat dripped down my forehead.

Suddenly, I found myself squeezed tight. I had no idea who was embracing me. All I could see was grey fabric and strands of curly, dark-brown hair.

“She’s so tiny and cute!” the girl said.

I tried to break free from her arms. Finally, she released me and I had a look at her. She was tall and thin. I later discovered that she was a Zoroastrian. With a motherly smile, she stroked my hair.

“You’re new here! What’s your name?”

“Marina,” I said breathlessly.

“What a pretty name!” she exclaimed, and turned to the friend standing behind her. “Fariba, her name is Marina. Isn’t that cute?”

Fariba nodded, smiled, and tucked her straight brown hair behind her ears. She was taller than I was but shorter than her friend.

“What grade are you in?” Fariba asked me.

“Four,” I responded proudly.

“Us, too!” said the girl who had hugged me. “We’ll help you with everything! Follow us!”

The bell rang, and when I gazed around me, I didn’t feel like a stranger anymore. I had friends: Fariba and—

The two girls had begun to walk away from me.

“Hey, wait! What’s your name?” I called after them.

The tall girl looked back and said, “Shahnoosh. Hurry up!”

I ran.

Shahnoosh was goodness. This is the best way I can describe her. She simply didn’t know how to be mean. She wasn’t what would be considered pretty, but she had so much love in her heart that it
created beauty. I suspect she had a learning disability, because she struggled to keep up in class. Later, in high school, she asked me to help her with science and math. Tutoring her was fun, because she made me feel special and always told me that I was very smart. We never became best friends, but when I think of my school days, I realize that her presence made those days much happier. She always had a hug for everyone who needed it and befriended those who were the loneliest.

Revolutions take societies apart. When the Islamic Revolution succeeded, it changed everything, especially school. My generation had grown up with the old regime’s laws, which all of a sudden no longer applied. However, the new regime needed time to establish itself and write new laws. This short transition period lasted only a few months. During it, Marxist and Marxist-Islamist groups, which had been illegal during the time of the shah and had operated underground, surfaced and became popular in high schools and universities. I was in the eighth grade then and far too young to understand political groups, but many eleventh- and twelfth-grade students suddenly announced they were followers. Despite ideological differences, many of those groups had supported the Islamic Revolution, and had played a large role in its success. Their plan was to take over the country once the shah was deposed, but they failed. Marxist and Marxist-Islamist students organized political discussion meetings during recess, but I rarely saw Shahnoosh at any of them. She was probably the only person in school who remained more or less unchanged by the Islamic Republic. After a while I grew tired of those meetings. Even though I wanted and tried to fit in, I couldn’t. I was a devout Catholic and could get along with neither Marxists nor Islamists. Soon, I drifted away from all my friends and became so depressed that when the academic year of 1981–82 began, I refused to go back to school. Seeing my fragile emotional state, my parents decided to let me take a year off school.

In early fall of 1981 I heard from a young man at my church that Shahnoosh had been arrested and then executed. I simply could not believe it. This was impossible. Why arrest Shahnoosh? She was not politically active. Executed? It had to be a mistake.

Now, twenty-five years later, I sat with a list of the names of the executed on my desk. The list included Shahnoosh Behzadi. My beautiful friend.

IN 2009
, another beautiful young woman, Neda Agha-Soltan, was killed in Iran. Unlike Shahnoosh’s death, hers was captured on a cell-phone camera and broadcast on YouTube. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad had just become the president of Iran for a second term. The Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Khamenei, and the Council of Guardians, which overseas elections in Iran, obviously favoured him. There had been many signs of irregularities and fraud during the election. Supporters of Mir-Hossein Mousavi and Ayatollah Karroubi, two reformist presidential candidates, filled the streets of Tehran and other large cities to protest. Such crowds had not been seen since 1979 and the days of the rallies against the shah. The people were shouting “Death to the dictator!” and “Where is our vote?” Basij (a civilian militia), Revolutionary Guard, and the police attacked the crowds and killed, injured, and arrested many. YouTube filled with images of violence. The clip of Neda Agha-Soltan’s death spread across the Internet and millions saw it.

A bullet hit Neda in the chest just below her neck, and she lost her balance and fell. In vain, people rushed to help her. A doctor present at the scene applied pressure to her wound and tried to slow the bleeding, but suddenly, blood spilled from her nose and mouth, her eyes rolled back, and she died on the sidewalk. Another innocent life lost. I watched the video only once, but it burned itself into my soul. I can play it over and over from memory, rewind, pause, or fast-forward it. She is wearing a knee-length
black coat, a black head scarf, blue jeans, and running shoes. She has beautiful hands with long fingers. Perfect eyebrows. Gorgeous eyes. The shock on her face when the bullet hits her is unbearable. It is as if she wants to scream “Why?” but can’t.

MY MEMORIES OF SHAHNOOSH
and all the friends I lost seethed in me as I travelled the world to speak about
Prisoner of Tehran
and the horrors of Evin. In strange hotels, when and if I fell asleep, I dreamed of going for walks on the shores of the Caspian with my prison friends. We cried and laughed, grieved and danced. In one of my dreams, Shahnoosh and I held hands and spun until we collapsed, laughing. Once we caught our breath, she turned to me, smiled, and said, “Happiness is our only revenge.”

Shortly after I returned from my book tour, I received a phone call from Professor M. I thought she might want to talk about my book—I had given her an advance copy to read. Or maybe she was going to ask me to sign another contract to continue the work we had started a few months earlier. But I was wrong.

“I can’t work with you anymore,” she said in a measured tone.

“Why?” I asked, puzzled.

She explained that her political friends, who were supporters of far-left Iranian political groups operating in exile, believed that I was a traitor, a
tavvab
, because I had broken under torture and married Ali. They were angry that I had shown no sign of remorse.