Prisoner of Tehran: A Memoir (No Series) (25 page)

I slipped out of bed and walked to the sea. Small waves whispered against the rocky shore, and stars floated in between silver-gray clouds, their pearly lights reflecting off the water’s surface. The Caspian was calling me like an old friend. I thought that I was ready, that I could bear the weight of loss bearing down on me. But nothing felt right. Now, the sea was calling, and I wished to go. This dreadful need, this fierce desire to vanish. I stepped into the waves. They were as warm as I remembered them. Here, I could become a memory, but then all that I held in my heart would be lost.

“Life is precious, don’t let go, live again.”
The voice of the angel.

“I needed you. I called you. You didn’t come. And now you tell me not to let go? Not to let go of what?”

“Life is precious, don’t let go, live again.”

“What will you do if I go under and breathe water instead of air? Will you let me die this time and blame me for giving in to despair and grief? Or will you smile and make me feel guilty about all that I have or haven’t done, sending me back to this torment?”

The wind brushed past me and flowed into the woods and into the valley of White River. Then it silently drifted through the stillness of the desert to find its way to the ocean.

I walked back toward the cottage, dripping. Ali was standing at the gate that opened to the beach. He was crying. Why couldn’t I just love him and let go of the past? I had to surrender to the rhythm of existence, like a child discovering how to float in water for the very first time.

“I woke, and you weren’t there,” he said, lifting me off the wet sand and carrying me inside like a child.

We returned to Evin after five days at the cottage. Nothing had changed. Four weeks went by, and then, in late August, I started to feel terribly sick. After I had vomited for a few days, Ali decided to take me to see his mother’s physician. She ordered a few tests and later told me that I was eight weeks pregnant. It hadn’t occurred to me that I might be expecting. When I agreed to marry Ali, I only considered the effects of my decision on my own life, my parents’ lives, and on Andre. I had never thought about children. Now, there was another life that was affected: an innocent child. A child was going to need me, rely on me, and whether I liked it or not, was going to need its father.

Ali was waiting for me in the car. He was thrilled when I told him the news.

“Are you happy?” he asked me.

His question upset me. I was not happy, and this wasn’t fair. The baby inside me didn’t know anything about my life. All it needed was my love and attention. In a way, I was its angel. How could I possibly turn my back on it?

“I’m happy,” I said, “but I’m also in shock.”

“Let’s go to my parents’ house. I want them to know right away.”

I knew that my parents needed to know, too, and so did Andre. Who was going to throw the first stone?

As soon as we arrived at his parents’ house, Ali phoned Akram. His parents were overjoyed, and it pleased me to see them happy. All evening, his mother gave me advice concerning the stages of pregnancy. It already felt like I knew Ali’s mother better than I knew my own mother. I was so desperate to find some normalcy and happiness that I wished I could forget myself and love Ali. But this was impossible. I could never forgive him for what he had done, not only to me but to others.

“You should stay here with us,” Ali’s mother told me. “You need rest and good food.”

I refused the offer, but she insisted. Mr. Moosavi intervened. “She’ll stay where she wants,” he said. “She’s more than welcome to stay here. This is her home the same way it’s Ali’s, but maybe she wants to be with her husband. Pregnancy isn’t an illness. She’ll be fine.”

Akram arrived and gave me hugs and kisses. She was due in about four weeks, and considering that she was a small woman, her belly looked too big. We went to her old bedroom so we could talk in private.

“Marina, I’ve never been this happy in my life! This is wonderful! Our children will grow up together. They’ll be almost the same age.”

I turned away from her.

“What’s wrong?” she asked.

“Nothing. I’ve just been feeling nauseous all the time.”

“Are you happy to be pregnant?”

I didn’t want to hear that question, much less answer it. It broke my heart because I knew I wasn’t happy. I had tried to be, but I wasn’t. I didn’t want the baby—and it hurt.

“You don’t want the baby, do you?”

“No, I don’t, but I don’t want to feel this way. God knows I’ve tried.”

“It’s not your fault. You’re scared. Come, feel the baby moving.”

She put my hand on her belly, and I felt the baby kick.

“Your baby will grow and move inside you like this. It’s the best feeling in the world. Give it a chance. I’m sure you’ll love it more than you can imagine. I’ll be here to help you with everything. There’s no need to worry. And Marina, Ali really loves you, you’re everything to him.”

Akram had truly become my sister, and, whether I liked it or not, I had become a part of Ali’s family. With them, I felt more loved and cared for than in my old life, and their love made me feel guilty because I realized I loved them in return. But love wasn’t supposed to make one feel ashamed. Love was not a sin, and yet, for me, it had become one. Did this mean that one day I would love Ali, too? Did this mean that I had completely betrayed my parents and Andre?

In a cell that night, Ali and I both lay awake in darkness.

“Marina, I’m resigning from my job tomorrow,” he said.

I was surprised to hear this, but it wasn’t entirely unexpected. Even though Ali rarely talked to me about his job, I lived in Evin, and I had seen how frustrated he had become. I had especially noticed this after Mina’s death. I blamed Ali for what happened to her, and I believed he should have done more to save her, but I had felt his helplessness, too. He had lost the battle to Hamehd.

“Why?” I asked.

He didn’t want to talk about it, but I said I deserved to know. He told me he had gotten into a big clash with the prosecutor of Tehran, Assadollah-eh Ladjevardi, who was in charge of Evin. “Assadollah and I have been friends for years,” he said. “He was also a prisoner in Evin during the time of the shah. But he’s gone too far. I’ve tried to change things in Evin, and I haven’t been able to. He wouldn’t listen.”

I had seen Ladjevardi twice. Once he had come for a tour of the sewing factory where I worked. And once when I was stepping out of Ali’s car, Ladjevardi, who was getting into a car, had come up to us and greeted us warmly. Ali introduced me to him, and he said he had heard about me and was glad to meet me. He wished us happiness and said he was proud of me for converting to Islam.

“I promised you a good life when we got married,” Ali said, “and that’s what we’re going to have, away from this place. I’ll work with my father, and we’ll have a normal life. You’ve been strong, patient, and brave, just as I knew you would. Now it’s time to go home. I only need about three weeks to put everything in order.”

Suddenly, leaving Evin was becoming a reality, but what I felt was not happiness. I knew that as Ali’s wife, I would always be a prisoner.

“I’ll have to tell my parents,” I said. I couldn’t keep my marriage a secret forever, especially with the baby on the way.

We heard a few gunshots in the distance. Ali told me he often thought of the night I had almost been shot.

“If I had gotten there only a few seconds later, you would have been dead,” he said. “I’ve never told you this, but I sometimes have nightmares about that night. It’s always the same: I’m there, and it’s too late. I find you dead and covered in blood.”

“That’s what should have happened.”

“No, it’s not! God helped me save you.”

“How about the others? There are people out there who loved them and didn’t want them to die as much as you didn’t want me to die.”

“Most of them brought it upon themselves,” he said.

I wanted to shake him. “No, you’re wrong! You’re only a human being. Can you say that you knew everything about them? Making decisions about life and death needs a complete understanding of the world that we don’t have. Only God can make decisions like this because He’s the only one who knows everything.”

I was in tears and had to sit up to be able to breathe.

“I’m sorry,” he said, “I’m not defending violence, but sometimes there’s no other choice. If someone holds a gun to your head and you get a chance to shoot and defend yourself, will you do it, or will you die without fighting back?”

“I will not kill another human being.”

“Then bad guys will win, and you’ll lose.”

“If winning involves killing, I’d rather lose. But then, others who witness my death or hear about it will know that I died because I refused to give in to hatred and violence, and they’ll remember, and, maybe someday, they’ll find a peaceful way of defeating evil.”

“Marina, you live in your own idealistic world that has nothing to do with reality.”

I stayed awake that night after he fell asleep. It seemed to me that Ali had begun to realize that violence was pointless—torturing and executing teenagers could never lead to any good and could never please God in any way. And, maybe, this was why he had saved me from death and married me; I was his strange, desperate way of rebelling against all that went on in Evin.

On Monday, September 26, Ali and I went to his parents’ for dinner. Two weeks had gone by since his resignation, and, over dinner, he told me we would leave Evin in about a week and would move back to the house he had bought for us.

At about eleven o’clock, we said good night to everyone and stepped outside. It was a cold night, so Ali’s parents didn’t come out with us. The metal door connecting their yard to the street creaked as Ali pushed it open, and its lock clicked loudly as it closed behind us. We walked toward the car, which was parked about eighty feet away where the street was a little wider. A dog barked in the distance. Suddenly, the loud sound of a motorcycle filled the night. I looked up to see it come toward us from around the corner. Two dark figures were riding on it, and as soon as I saw them, I instinctively knew what was about to happen. Ali also knew, and he pushed me. I lost my balance and fell to the ground. Shots were fired. For a moment that stretched between life and death, a weightless darkness wrapped its smooth, silky body around me. Then a faint light spread into my eyes and a dull pain filled my bones. Ali was lying on top of me. Barely able to move, I managed to turn to him.

“Ali, are you okay?”

He moaned, looking at me with shock and pain in his eyes. My body and legs felt strangely warm, as if wrapped in a blanket.

His parents were running toward us.

“Ambulance!” I yelled. “Call an ambulance!”

His mother ran back inside. Her white chador had fallen on her shoulders, revealing her gray hair. His father knelt beside us.

“Are you okay?” Ali asked me.

My body ached a little, but I wasn’t in pain. His blood was all over me.

“I’m okay.”

Ali grasped my hand. “Father, take her to her family,” he managed to say.

I held him close to me. His head rested against my chest. If he hadn’t pushed me, I would have been hit. He had saved my life again.

“God, please, don’t let him die!” I cried.

He smiled.

I had hated him, I had been angry with him, I had tried to forgive him, and, in vain, I had tried to give him love.

He struggled to breathe. His chest rose and fell and then was still. The world moved around us, but we had been left behind, standing on different sides of an unforgiving divide. I wanted to reach beyond the dark depths of death and bring him back.

The flashing lights of an ambulance…A sharp pain in my abdomen…And the world around me disappeared into darkness…

I stood in a lush forest with my baby in my arms. He was a beautiful boy with large, dark eyes and rosy cheeks. He reached out with his little hand, grabbed my hair, and giggled. I laughed and, looking up, saw the Angel of Death. I ran to him. He smiled his warm and familiar smile, and his sweet fragrance surrounded me. It felt as though I had seen him just the day before, as though he had never left me.

“Let’s go for a walk,” he said and started down a path that disappeared into the forest. I followed him. It was a beautiful day, and it seemed like it had just stopped raining; the leaves of the surrounding trees were shimmering under swollen droplets of water. There were bushes of pink roses everywhere, and the air was sweet and warm. I had fallen behind. He disappeared behind a tree, so I walked faster to catch up with him and found him sitting on my Prayer Rock. I sat next to him.

“You have a beautiful son,” he said.

The baby started to cry. I didn’t know what to do.

“He’s probably hungry. You should feed him,” the angel said.

As if I had done it a million times, I put the baby to my breast, and he took it with his warm, tiny mouth.

I opened my eyes. One by one, round droplets fell from a clear plastic bag into a tube. Drip. Drip. Drip. I followed the tube with my eyes; it was connected to my right hand. The room was dark except for the faint glow of a nightlight. I was lying on a clean white bed. There was a phone on a small table by my bed. I reached for it with my left hand, and a sharp pain filled my belly. I fell back and took a deep breath. The pain went away. I put the receiver to my ear. It was dead. Tears seeped from my eyes.