After Tehran (16 page)

My heart sometimes tells me to leave, and it sometimes tells me to stay, but I cannot bear this. How can I live without you? When one is so deeply in love, the world seems so small. You are always in my heart, and I will never leave you. Only you are the Soltan of my heart. You are my beloved, and we are one. Now that I am far away from you, I will not give my heart to anyone else. I long for you, my beautiful lover
.

As I sang, the princess’s eyes filled with tears. The song resurrected memories for her of all she had witnessed and all she had lost. We were very different; she was an Afghan princess and I was an ordinary Persian woman. But we had both suffered—and now our paths had crossed in Cosenza, where I sang a Persian love song for her. She held my hand in hers as I sang, and it was as if the words of the song brought us into one body, one existence.

Fatelessness
and
The Diary of Anne Frank

A
fter a speaking engagement of mine in a Toronto suburb, a woman in the audience asked me why I showed almost no anger in
Prisoner of Tehran
. This was one of the most insightful questions I had been asked. I told her that in prison I had usually blamed myself for all that had gone on and felt guilty about everything. Years later when I thought of the cruelties I had witnessed in Evin, of the torture and death of my friends, I felt a leaden sadness—thick and dark and desperate for goodness. Anger does not have the ability to carry the weight of what I feel. Maybe nothing does. Maybe a new emotion needs to be created for it. In prison, numbness overtook me. After about sixteen years, it started to diminish. I finally began to feel. I got angry at my father when, at my mother’s funeral, he told me that she had forgiven me before her death. However, my anger quickly turned into grief—a flood threatening to drown me from within. Then came a terrible sense of frustration that melted into helplessness, followed by an overwhelming need to make amends and find humanity and forgiveness. Anger cannot fix; it destroys. I have already had enough death and destruction in my life.

I clearly remember the L-shaped hallway of block 246 in Evin. The cells. The girls. My first night there. My feet were terribly
swollen and I could hardly walk. I had not had much to eat or drink in days. Even though I felt safer in 246 than I had in the interrogation building, the strangeness of the environment made me think I was suffocating. The cell I was put in was about seventeen by twenty-five feet, its floor covered with a worn brown carpet. Just above my eye level, a metal shelf ran across the wall; plastic bags filled with clothes sat on top of it and smaller bags hung from hooks beneath it. The beige paint covering the walls and the metal doors was thin and dirty. In one corner of the cell stood a bunk bed. Jars and containers of different shapes and sizes covered the lower bunk, and plastic bags stuffed with clothes sat piled on the upper. In another corner, next to a barred window, grey military blankets lay stacked almost to the ceiling. There were teenage girls everywhere. Most of them sat talking on the floor in groups of two or three. The barred window looked out over a small, empty, paved courtyard. I was in a world I didn’t understand at all. Tears gathered in my eyes and a terrible pain exploded in my chest. Only when Sarah suddenly appeared beside me did I feel better. She had been in Evin longer than I had. I could rely on her. And time proved that she could rely on me. How do teenage girls survive hell? They do it by being who they are, by remembering that they are human beings and have families who love them. In Evin, the present was so horrible we rarely talked about it, and the future didn’t exist, so all we had was the past. We survived by talking about our homes, moms, dads, brothers, sisters, aunts, uncles, cousins, birthday parties, weddings, New Year’s celebrations, our favourite books, poems, films, and music. These long conversations somehow created a collective memory that became our beacon of hope. The more we shared, the brighter the light of hope glowed. We wanted to go home, and we helped one another believe that we would indeed be released one day. Every minute, we risked facing torture, even
execution, but amid all the horror, there was some happiness. Human beings have a miraculous ability to create hope out of nothing.

MY CELLMATES AND
I were not the only ones in the world able to find light in seemingly absolute darkness. In 2007, I read a book titled
Fatelessness
, a novel written in 1975 by Imre Kertész, a Hungarian writer imprisoned in concentration camps as a youth. In the last two pages of the book, sixteen-year-old Georg Koves is finally going home from a concentration camp at the end of the Second World War. He is on his way to find his mother, who has also survived the Holocaust, when he pauses to rest and think:

But one shouldn’t exaggerate, as this is precisely the crux of it: I am here, and I am well aware that I shall accept any rationale as the price for being able to live. Yes, as I looked around this placid, twilit square, this street, weather-beaten yet full of a thousand promises, I was already feeling a growing readiness to continue my uncontinuable life. My mother was waiting, and would no doubt greatly rejoice over me. I recollect that she had once conceived a plan that I should become an engineer, a doctor, or something like that. No doubt that is how it will be, just as she wished; there is nothing impossible that we do not live through naturally, and keeping a watch on me on my journey, like some inescapable trap, I already know there will be happiness. For even there, next to the chimneys, in the intervals between the torments, there was something that resembled happiness. Everyone asks only about the hardships and the “atrocities,” whereas for me perhaps it is that experience which will remain the most memorable. Yes, the next time I am asked, I
ought to speak about that, the happiness of the concentration camps
.

If indeed I am asked. And provided I myself don’t forget.
*

IT WAS RAINING
when I was released from Evin. I had to walk to Luna Park, an amusement park located about a mile and a half south of the prison. The government had taken over a part of it to use as a base for shuttle buses for visitors to the prison. When prisoners were released, families had to wait for their loved one in the park. A gust of wind heavy with cold droplets of rain whipped against me. Adjusting my black
chador
, I carefully made my way down the few steps that led to the quiet, narrow street. I paused, looked up, and watched the clouds move with the strong wind. For a moment, a breathtaking small patch of blue sky appeared. Although pale, it was still lively against the shades of grey. My eyes followed the road. A white car turned the corner. The driver, a middle-aged man, slowed and stared at me but continued on his path. My socks were soaked inside my rubber slippers, and my feet were freezing. I walked quickly, with steady steps. It was 1984, and I had waited for this day for two years, two months, and twelve days. I wanted to go home and restart my life where I had left off. Unlike Georg Koves, I didn’t pause. But like him, I thought about my moments of happiness in the hell I was leaving. As I walked home, I didn’t think of the horror I had been drowning in for more than two years. There had been times when, briefly, I had been able to surface and breathe. Without those little breaths, I would have died. My cellmates were my air—or, as Kertész put it, “the intervals between the torment.” It was only when I was released and went home that I realized life would never be the same. I had changed.
Everything had changed. I didn’t belong anywhere. During my first nights home, I closed my eyes and listened to the stillness of the night. I missed my friends, the girls with whom I had developed irreplaceable relationships. Without their friendship, which was the warmth that sustained me in a perpetually frozen realm of darkness, I felt a terrible gap in my life. I had wanted to come home, but it was as if my home had been wiped out of existence and the place where I now lived was only a clumsy replica. I wanted to be with Sarah. Would they ever let her go? We had been through life and death together, through madness and hope, through love and despair. We understood each other. I had returned to my family, but they were all strangers to me. Sarah knew what it meant to look straight into the eyes of death and watch it leave you behind and take the people you loved. As Kertész had said, I had to live an “uncontinuable life.”

I have recurring images of my last month of Ramadan in Evin, when we had to fast and refrain from eating and drinking from dawn until dusk. We received larger and better rations to break our fast at the end of each day. The guards sometimes even gave each cell a watermelon. Most of us had not seen one in months or years. During the day we would put the watermelons in large buckets of cold tap water so that they would cool, and we would break them immediately after saying our Namaz at sunset. I remember running my hands over their cold, smooth skin. My friends and I sat together to break our fast, passing pieces of watermelon to one another. The sun had set, but the air was heavy with heat. First, we closed our eyes and let the scent of the fruit fill us, and then we bit into it, allowing its sweet, cold juice to tingle our chapped lips and wash away the bitter dryness of our mouths and throats. We giggled as young girls do. Yes, there was happiness in Evin, and it lived in the sisterhood that connected us to one another.

I READ
The Diary of Anne Frank
after coming to Canada, so it was relatively fresh in my mind when I went to Amsterdam in May 2007. Even though our circumstances had been very different, I felt a special closeness to Anne, as if she were a friend I had lost. The first place I visited in Amsterdam was the Anne Frank House, where Anne and her parents and sister, another family, and a dentist had hidden from the Nazis. In 1960, the house became a museum open to the public. To welcome visitors, the front part of the building—the former business premises—was rebuilt as a reception and exhibition space. Only the back of the house, also known as the Secret Annex, remained in its original state. I cried my way through it. I wished Anne were here to see that a million people visited the Secret Annex every year and that her book was read and cherished by millions more. I felt her presence as I stopped at every corner and remembered parts of her diary—but her presence was not a sad one; it was full of life and energy.

In large font, sentences from her diary are written on walls throughout the house, magnifying the suffering of not only one young girl but of a people. One sentence reads, “We’re very afraid the neighbours might hear or see us.”

Fear, silence, and horror. I knew them well.

Silence has a persistent presence; once it enters, it refuses to leave. After the Holocaust, victims found it difficult to talk about their experiences, and those listening found the experiences too painful to hear—so silence endured. However, Anne’s voice finally triumphed. Those who put her and millions of others in concentration camps and tried to wipe them from memory failed. Anne’s vivid presence in the house became stronger with every passing moment.

Anne’s bedroom in the Secret Annex reminded me of mine in Tehran, but my room had only one twin-size bed, when Anne’s room had two. At first, Anne shared her room with her sister,
Margot. Then a dentist named Fritz Pfeffer arrived; he, too, was hiding from the Nazis. Like me, Anne had a small wooden desk in a corner. However, my room had a glass door that opened onto a balcony, when her room was cut off from the outside world. Both Anne and I had put a few posters on our bedroom walls: hers were of film stars such as Greta Garbo, or Dutch royalty and nature; mine were of Donny and Marie Osmond. How nice it would have been to have posters to decorate my cell when I was in solitary confinement in Evin. Anne and I had a great deal in common, including our love for literature, and I am sure that had we known each other, we would have become good friends. I was astounded to learn that her cat’s name had been Mouschi—the nickname I gave Andre after my release from prison. Anne couldn’t take her cat to the Secret Annex and she missed him terribly.

Of the eight people who had hidden in the Secret Annex for two years, seven died in concentration camps. Only Anne’s father, Otto Frank, survived. In Anne Frank House, I watched an interview with Mr. Frank, done after his release from Auschwitz and the publication of Anne’s diary.

He said, “To build a future, you have to know the past …”

There is much wisdom in this small sentence.

A few weeks after visiting the house, I watched a documentary about a man who had suffered brain damage and had forgotten everything about his past. He had also lost the ability to form any new long-term memories. As a result, he was incapable of planning. He awoke every day forgetting all about yesterday, unable to understand the concept of tomorrow. Because he never remembered the past, the future had no meaning for him. If this can happen to an individual, it can also happen to a people.

The people of Iran have to shake off their collective amnesia, face their past, and then plan for a better future. Facing the past means facing mistakes. We have to accept responsibility. We made decisions
and took steps that led to a revolution. It went terribly wrong and gave birth to a dictatorship that claimed the lives of thousands of young Iranians and left thousands of others broken. Facing the past is not about pointing fingers; it’s about acknowledgment. Each one of us could probably have made different choices that could have saved lives, but we didn’t. We have to remember that it’s never too late to take a stand. In 2009, Iranians rose up and did just that: demanded justice and democracy. As a survivor of Evin, it is my duty to remind Iranians that revolutions and movements can go astray. Violence leads to violence. Torture and murder are wrong and never lead to justice. The end, no matter how sacred it is, can never justify the means. As long as there is a Supreme Leader in Iran who can veto the decisions of the people, democracy cannot root and grow.