Camelia (24 page)

“Camelia confessed yesterday that she went to see Farah Pahlavi,” they told her. And in anger Kati answered, “She never said any such thing, nor have I heard any such thing. You must have beaten my poor sister for her to be confessing to lies.”

My mother told me, “That week Khamene'i led the Friday prayers, and he launched right into talking about spying and Radio Free Europe and treasonous Iranians. We went to Faezeh's house. We told her to do something to help you, or they would kill you. And even Faezeh said that this speech was hinting at the news of your arrest.”

I'd heard about the Friday sermons from my interrogator. He
told me, “We have reported to his eminence Ayatollah Khamene'i the big news about the spy we snagged, and he referred to this very thing yesterday at Friday prayers. Oh, you'll be in trouble if you're not cleansed in time. Everyone is disgusted with you. They want you to die. The charges against you were published in today's
Kayhan
. You don't have any friends left.”

He wanted to crush my faith that I'd be released, but a sprig of hope was living inside of me. My father was very attached to one of Hafez's sayings and would repeat it often. It was a line of poetry that he'd use to give you courage whenever things looked hopeless: “
Morgh-e zirak chun be dam oftad, tahammol bayadash
” (When a clever bird is caught in a snare, it has to be strong and wait).

If I want to do something, I find a way to do it. I wanted to get of prison, and I gave myself courage, knowing that I was going to get out.

 

They tried to bring me to my breaking point, to the point where nothing mattered. I was moved from the damp room to a dry cell, but the same powerful light was on twenty-four hours a day. The same coarse carpet covered the floor. I had a plastic cup for drinking water and a copper plate and bowl for food. The bath schedule was once a week on Sundays, and once a week we had cleaning duty. One week we'd clean the baths and the toilets and the following week we'd sweep and mop the corridor and the space in front of the cells. On one of the Fridays when it was my turn for cleaning duty, I was listening to the sound of the guards' radio as I swept the corridor. The guest on the show was someone I knew, Afshin Aala, an author and poet who wrote for children and young adults. He started reciting a poem.

I was choking on my tears, thinking about my friends who were free to walk around in the streets and the bazaar. Who was thinking of me? Were they waiting for me?

After I was released, I happened to see Afshin in Faezeh's office,
and I said to him, “Afshin, the guards' radio was playing while you were reading poetry, and I listened to your voice and cried and cried out of loneliness. If only everyone whose voices are heard in far-away places could know that someone homesick, imprisoned, and heartbroken is listening and they might offer a message of warmth.”

Afshin replied, “Camelia, if I had known that day that you were listening to me, I would have told you this: at the end of the night the darkness becomes light again.”

 

In the prison ward, I felt the whole world had forgotten about me and that all my friends had turned their backs on me. The only person left who listened to me, who seemed to care about me—though he showed me nothing but abuse—was my interrogator. I told him anything he wanted to hear. I embellished my stories with fabulous details. I even told him my best story of defiance and rebellion.

I told him how the summer before Khatami was elected, my high school friend Ghazal and I were shopping in the bazaar on Meidan Tajrish when a woman in a chador grabbed my shoulders from behind. “You're coming with us!” I wasn't wearing makeup and my hair wasn't showing and my overcoat came down to my ankles. But the woman pointed to my summer shoes and said that I wasn't wearing socks.

I told her with a sneer that she must be joking. People milling about Meidan Tajrish had gradually formed a circle around us. The woman yanked my coat and dress up above my knees to prove that I wasn't wearing stockings—she said that if a strong wind came, my underwear would show. All those onlookers saw my body exposed above my knees. It was impossible that a summer wind could blow as hard as she'd whipped up my clothing. Ghazal jumped in and said, “Pardon me, she didn't realize, she just forgot. I'll go into the bazaar right now to buy socks and will come right back.”

The sisters of the Guidance stood me next to the goldsmith's
shop, and one guarded me while two more were busy checking other girls and women. A heavy-set girl and her mother were walking toward us; the teen was wearing bright lipstick, and her dyed hair was hanging out of her veil. She was just too perfect for the Guidance. Two sisters marched right up and grabbed them, trying to force them into their minibuses. It ended up in a scuffle, and I looked at the woman next to me, her attention absorbed in watching her colleagues struggle. My blood was boiling in my veins. I knotted my right fist and punched her in the face as hard as I could. She lost her balance, and her face smacked into the window of the goldsmith's shop. Did I understand the gravity of what I had done? It didn't matter. The anger in that punch had been building up for twenty years.

The bitch spun toward me as I tried to act naturally, as if I hadn't hit her. But her friend who was wrestling with the mother and daughter came charging at me like a tiger. They started beating me, and the mother and the young woman came over to help me. People around us started joining in, trying to separate us, and then unbelievably, men started coming out of the alleys and the bazaar, and began to rip the sisters' black veils and chadors apart. The proprietor of the goldsmith's shop whispered in my ear, “Quick, go into the bazaar and run away through the little square in the middle. If they arrest you, you're done for.” At the last minute, I stood facing the woman who'd lifted my dress. I raised my hand and brought it down on her face with all my might. “Whatever you said to me, you were talking about yourself!” And then I lost myself among the crowds in the twists and turns of the bazaar. I found Ghazal near the Khiaban-e Vali-ye Asr exit. There was a pair of cheap nylon stocking in her hand. We walked quickly south, and I opened the door of the first taxi we saw. Frightened, Ghazal asked, “What did you do? The Pasdaran have surrounded the whole bazaar.”

My interrogator reveled in this story. He told me, “
Masha-Allah!
”
The Ministry of Intelligence considered it its duty to help me “unburden” myself. I unburdened myself of many true secrets, and I came to believe my own lies and mythical creations. And with great dramatic elegance, I measured my voice, showing my interrogator my sensitivity, my passion, and my remorse at not having brought my moral corruption, Godlessness, and spiteful contrariness under control sooner.

 

I prayed at the correct times five times a day, knowing the guards were watching me. What I recited under my breath with the chador over my head was this: “Oh Lord, give me strength and endurance to bear these days. Oh Lord, don't let me be beaten and broken by these mean, chicken-hearted people.”

One day, while I was performing ablutions, one of the guards, Zohreh, stopped next to me and said, “Oh my goodness, have you always done it like this? That's not how hands should be washed.”

“In the treatise of Agha-ye Khui, it says only ‘hands.' There's nothing about how you wash them.”

She went and got a different treatise, Agha-ye Khomeini's, and as we discussed again the proper manner of performing ablutions, I slyly asked her to entrust me with the book for a few hours. I thought about the guards watching through the hidden holes drilled in the door as I prayed. I memorized the preferred manner of praying and the correct number of prostrations at each stage. I could not afford to make another mistake.

 

When was the sun in the sky? Summer ended, and I was still in my solitary cell. I was given religious books from the prison library to read. One of the books was about the candle stuffing of Baha'is by Amir Kabir. The book told how he persecuted them and would stuff all the orifices of their bodies with lit candles and parade them around the city in a ghastly spectacle. My stomach churned, and I
shut the book in disgust. It was horrifying.

My interrogator told me that once upon a time under the rule of the Shah, Hashemi Rafsanjani and Ayatollah Montazeri had been prisoners and were tortured in the same detention center we sat in now. I thought of how, in the first week of my imprisonment, there had been many other women in the ward, and we would be brought out to bathe all together. The guards took us out of our cells without a word and lined us up blindfolded. Each of us had a bundle under our arm holding our prison uniform, underwear, shampoo, and soap. We were told to stay silent and take hold of the back of each other's chadors. There were perhaps fifteen of us, and we moved forward like a train. Down and down we went. Then they sent us to wash in a line of shower stalls separated by green vinyl curtains. We had our own showerheads but the combined dirty water would run across the slimy marble and over all our feet. It was fascinating to think that Montazeri and Hashemi had also washed in that underground shower, and even more fascinating to consider that after the revolution the new Islamic government allowed the same hidden detention center to be used. What about in the future? Would I come back as a free citizen one day to look at my cell and to read the poems written on the walls?

 

My romance with my interrogator was half serious in my mind and half designed just to pass the time. I knew, but he didn't know, that he wanted to be at my side. I knew, and love floated like a fresh spring breeze into Towhid Prison. To send my love letters and to nourish this relationship, I had only my hands, and it was with these hands that I spoke to him.

One Friday, Zohreh opened the door of my cell to tell me that my interrogator had come for me. She looked at me carefully and asked, “Why is he coming to interrogate you on a Friday? Don't
tell me you've made this believer fall in love with you.”

With my face to the wall, I crossed my legs and sat up very straight in the chair and arranged my chador.

“Don't think that I don't have a wife and children or that I couldn't stand to be away from your highness's baboon physique. I realized you would be lonely, all alone on a Friday, so I came to see you. Hold out your hand.”

I was afraid. Was he going to give me lashes on my palm?

“Don't be afraid. Hold out your hand.”

He put something in my hand.

“Raise your blindfold just a little. Only a tiny bit. It's a date. I've brought you a date! Tell me, what do you do in your room when you don't have anything to do? The sisters tell me you sit still for hours like a statue or an Indian yogi.”

“I meditate.”

“Yes. You're very bright. That's why you haven't been crying and screaming.
Masha-Allah
. You're clever.”

After two months, this was my first sweet, the first outside food I'd had in prison. The food servings were always small, but I'd never asked for more. I hadn't seen the sun or the color of the sky for two months, but I hadn't complained about that either. I had never banged on the door begging to use the bathroom like the others, while the guards laughed at them. I had never complained about the condition of my room. My beloved long hair was falling out, like leaves in autumn, and I had made a big ball of it in the corner of my room. I had to stand firm to play my role.

I had always been told that I had beautiful hands. And years of dance lessons had made me graceful. Before I was swamped with work at
Zan
, I used to receive private pupils. “We lift ourselves slowly on our tiptoes. We move our hands apart, then lift and lower them softly and lightly with the music. Smile and let your hands dance. The audience looks at the dancers' hands and faces. Float
on the air with your hands.” My little pupils would wave their hands up and down as they watched mine.

I knew now that the man in the corner at Towhid Prison was watching my hands, and all of my artistry flowed into them.

In Tehran, a brand new newspaper,
Zan
, was about to be launched. A friend arranged a meeting for me with the newspaper's distinguished owner and editor, Faezeh Hashemi. Yet again I found myself waiting to talk to a new editor in chief, with my clippings in hand, this time at the guard post in front of
Zan
's building on Kucheh-ye Simin off of Khiaban-e Vali-ye Asr. On the second floor, I knocked on the door to Faezeh's office. Her hoarse voice sounded from inside, “
Befarma'id
.”

We sat facing one another at her conference table. She studied my face. “Haven't I seen you somewhere before?”

I smiled. “We were classmates at the university.” Once I mentioned it, she remembered me well, and I asked about another girl from our class, her close friend Maryam. She told me Maryam was now working for her at the Women's Solidarity Association, which Faezeh headed. Faezeh divided her time between
Zan
and the Majlis. She had been elected a member of the fifth Majlis with more than a million votes in Tehran. Many of the women I'd gone to college with were now gaining prominent positions in various fields. The job at
Zan
was competitive, and Faezeh quizzed me in the interview with detailed questions about my work and background.

The mood of the country was fresh and progressive during the promising early period of Khatami's reform government. Working under Faezeh's bold, intrepid direction was perfect for me. The first
issue of
Zan
included my exclusive report from Bosnia and the war in Kosovo. I was given the title “special correspondent,” a largely unknown term in the Iranian press, and my picture appeared in the paper above my article.