Camelia (17 page)

My father would turn off the television and curse the world that had confined us to two black-and-white channels. He said it was because turbans came in only two colors. “Either they are black or they are white.” On Fridays, as my father fanned kebabs on the grill in the empty courtyard with a cigarette in his mouth, he'd yell, “Camelia, turn up the radio!” We all listened carefully to the sermons of the Friday prayers. The food would appear on the table amid the
Allahu Akbar
s of the “Minister of Chanting” (as my father called whoever was chanting at the Friday prayers). I'd tell Kati to pass me the quarter-pound hunk of butter, and I would put a large slab of it under my white rice. Rafsanjani, speaker of the Majilis (and later the president of Iran), would talk about world arrogance. Ignoring my mother's glare, I'd pick a large clump of basil leaves out of the other greens. A thousand times she'd said, “They're ‘edible greens,' not ‘pickable greens.' Put a handful on your plate and eat them all.”

We'd eat our
chelow kebabs
in silence and listen to the speech. As soon as they started with
Allahu Akbar
again, we'd turn off the radio and try to guess the truth behind the proclamations of the mullahs. We might guess a portion was a series of excuses for the high price of gas, or we might have gathered that there were secret behind-the-scenes talks in progress with the United States, the government wasn't going into decline, and that the war was going to continue as before. If there were any mention of poorly covered women, we knew that the next day there'd be Basijis on motorcycles armed with clubs making surprise sweeps in shopping centers and restaurants. The leader of Friday prayers would give them the necessary justification to attack.

Many years passed since the war had broken out with Iraq when
in addition to the now-familiar language of “war-stricken refugees” and “martyrs,” a new phrase was added to our vocabulary: “the victims of chemical weapons.” Our hearts gasped at harrowing images of victims killed or horribly disfigured by Saddam Hussein in the 1988 chemical attacks in Halabja. And it wasn't only Iranian soldiers that were targeted. We were afraid. How could we defend ourselves if we were attacked? We listened anxiously for radio warnings. And we knew mustard gas had a pleasant odor, so if we ever detected a sweet smell, we had to cover our mouth and nose with a damp towel and rush around shutting the windows and doors and plugging all the vents and cracks to save ourselves. In Tehran, we had a way to deal with everything.

Families sent their sons out of the country any way they could. The Pasdaran would stop young men in the street to check their identity cards, searching for draft dodgers. Some parents sent their sons over the border legally before they came of age. Others were smuggled out. They'd travel from hideout to hideout in the mountains and plains, disguised as rams in herds of sheep, until they reached Turkish soil. My cousin Omid was sent to England before he reached sixteen, and Mino Khanum's son Ali, most of my friends from school, and our old leftist neighbors, Nima and Mani Vaqadi, all safely made it outside Iran's borders. But not everyone was so lucky. Some were killed in the cross fire between border police and the smugglers, while others were taken alive and sent to prison and then pressed into military service.

Another way to avoid military service was to enroll immediately in university. But Shahryar Nakha'i, my third cousin, was in his final year at high school and not very studious. The year before, he had used a
tak madeh
, a special allowance to drop your lowest grade, to gain entrance to Arabic class. You could use a
tak madeh
only once. The vice principal suggested that he volunteer to go to the front. Volunteers enjoyed particular privileges in their education, so
Shahryar went to war to compensate for his low marks in Arabic.

“Don't go! Son, don't go!” His mother went crazy. Shahryar's father, Sarahang Iraj Nakha'i, had been a commander in the gendarmerie in western Iran. He sadly failed to convince his son that it would better to fail out of school than to gamble away his life. Shahryar was a tall boy with broad shoulders. In 1986 we heard that he had shipped out, and then the next month the news came that he had been wounded. In an operation at Fav, a rocket hit his troop's boat, and everyone fell into the marshes around the island. He was hit in the back, and the marsh water led to an infection. Shahryar lost both of his legs. One had been amputated above his thigh, the other a little lower. It was terrifying. All of us, even those he didn't know by name, cried for him.

I didn't see him again until years later at a family gathering at my uncle Manuchehr's house. Shahryar had a beard and was wearing the kind of green overcoat usually worn by the Basij and the Pasdaran. He was walking without a cane. My uncle told us that they'd attached prosthetic legs and that he was getting payments from the martyrs' foundation. When Shahryar sat in his seat, I could see bright red plastic in the gap between his pant legs and his socks. My mind struggled with what it meant to be crippled. I asked myself how one event could alter a person's life forever.

Then my father told us that it seemed that, in order to hold onto his job, he would have to spend a few months at the front. He started attending the firearms training classes set up by the Islamic association of Shir-e Pak factory. I found the class manual, and as I read the descriptions of locking and loading guns, my heart sank. I was fed up with the manuals and the war and death. Why should my father fight? He wasn't a part of all this death, he didn't belong to Khomeini's revolution.

“Baba, come, let's run away,” I said. Startled, my father asked, “Run away from what?” and he looked at me in wonder. I was
ashamed to look in his eyes and say, “Let's run away for your sake, so you don't go to war and get killed.” Instead I pleaded, “What I mean is let's leave Iran.” My father stared off into the distance and replied, “What would we do anywhere else? This is our country. Where would we go?” Luckily, he was never called to the front.

 

The bombing of Tehran stopped for several years in the middle of the war, though the red alert still sounded at school. Then construction workers appeared and dug a giant hole in the middle of the school's large courtyard. This was turned into an underground shelter with a thick concrete ceiling. It had four stairways leading into it, and we'd sneak down to poke around. “Don't go in under any circumstance,” my mother would say. “If a shell hits, you'll all be buried under the rubble. It doesn't have any ventilation. You'll all suffocate.”

The shelter was a harbinger of worse times to come. Seven years into the war, in early March 1987, only three weeks before the Nouruz holidays, Tehran was once again targeted. We were jolted awake by the sound of a monstrous missile exploding. Voice of Iraq warned that they would keep attacking until they toppled the mullahs' regime. As soon as the missiles showed up on the radar screen, the Ministry of Defense would announce a general state of emergency, but we never knew where they might hit. With the intervention of the United Nations, all the schools were again closed, until almost the end of the year, when the Department of Education blundered through a poor excuse for end-of-the-year exams and gave everyone a passing grade. Kati needed to pass to graduate, and she got her diploma without a hitch.

My aunt Turan was visiting her old neighborhood by the Hesabi intersection when a missile exploded in the vicinity. When we heard the news, my father came home quickly to take us to see her.
She was lying stretched out on the sofa with a hot water bottle. My cousin Bita was in better shape, but they were both faint. My aunt had cut her hand on broken glass, and it was wrapped in bandages. We listened breathlessly as she described the attack. “Bita went to see her friend while I was shopping for groceries. When I was finished and Bita still hadn't come back, I went to a public phone to call her . . . and I heard the air-raid sirens sounding, and I saw that everyone was looking at the sky. I looked up and saw something bright the size of an oil tanker coming straight at us, the sound of its jets drowning everything else out. Everyone was stunned, nailed to the spot. It landed a few dozen meters from me, and after an instant all the windows came crashing down, and there was the sound of an explosion.” My aunt raised her wounded hand. “Thick smoke poured out from the next street. I wanted to run, but it was like my feet were stuck to the ground and I couldn't move. Bita was right there where it landed.”

Bita broke in. “When I saw it, Morwarid and I just froze. Then I automatically turned my back to the window, and there was a huge shock wave. The door and the window and the glass all came down, and we were thrown on the bed. . . . I thought I was dead. I lifted my head and saw that the window frames and the curtains had fallen on top of us. And there, where the neighbor's house had been, there was nothing. The sky was on fire, and there was ringing in my ears. We got up and automatically started running and screaming.”

We turned to my aunt. “Everyone was running away, and I came to my senses. ‘Bita! Bita!' I screamed and ran like crazy. My shoes came off, but I kept running. I could hear the ambulance's siren in the distance. I was screaming and running. I couldn't feel my heart beating. No more sound would come out. I sat down right there on the ground. It was impossible to tell which house had been struck, and I just sat and cried.”

We let out all the air that had been trapped in our chests as Bita
finished. “My ears were burning as I ran . . . I found Maman sitting on the ground like a gypsy, beating her head.”

“I don't know how we got out of that inferno,” my aunt wailed. “When I saw Bita, I started shaking. Like my soul was leaving my body right there . . .”

As missiles hailed down on Tehran, people left in droves—not for the Nouruz holidays, but for safety. Several acquaintances of ours had been killed, and we, too, fled for a villa in Karaj belonging to our close family friend, Aunt Mahin. Her garden was in disarray, and the house was packed with other refugees. Amid all the traffic, there wasn't enough room to drop a needle. We slept next to each other on the ground. When the air-raid siren sounded, most of us crowded into a corner while a few stepped outside to watch the missiles soar over Tehran. Afterward, everyone would sit by the radio and listen to the foreign Persian-language broadcasts on Radio Iraq, the Voice of America, or the BBC.

We stayed in Karaj through the critical peak of the war. Then we returned home, and the hot summer descended. On July 18, 1988, I heard our neighbor screaming uncontrollably from the hallway. As usual, the door was unlocked, and Khanum Bayat had entered without knocking. “It's over! It's over! Khanum Entekhabi, the war is over!” My father stood shocked, still in his underwear. We turned on the television. Khomeini had, in his own words, “drank the cup of poison” and agreed to the United Nations Security Council Resolution 598. We all cried, “The war is over!” It was hard to believe, but it was finally over. All afternoon, people handed out sweets in the streets. We didn't have to worry anymore about my little brother, and soon the soldiers would be coming home.

Then, only a few days after this joyous occasion, we heard about a massive attack on the border town of Islamabad Gharb carried out by the Mujahedin-e Khalgh, who had regrouped under the leadership
of Rajavi in Iraq. With the protection of Saddam Hussein, the
mujahedin
had organized their own radio station and television network and carried out acts of terrorism. Now they had taken advantage of the cease-fire agreement and captured Islamabad and advanced to Hassanabad, moving toward Bakhtaran (also called Kermanshah). Four days later the air force and an army of Basijis and Pasdars crushed them, and thousands of
mujaheds
were killed on Iranian soil. The TV showed the images of the young men and women who'd died. The
mujahedin
called the operation Forogh-e Javidan (The Eternal Radiance) and the Iranian authorities called it Mersad (Ambush). Khomeini's wrathful response was a massacre of political prisoners, atheists,
mujaheds
, and
tudeh-is
—all burned in the fire of his vengeance. Once again, we had family members who sat sobbing in mourning for a loved one who'd been executed without even being allowed a proper memorial. My father's cousin's husband, who'd been a
tudeh
officer, was among those executed, after seven years in prison.

We were not aware of the extent of these executions until years later, when human rights organizations released information about the silent murder of thousands of political prisoners. At the time, confusion reigned. One day national radio broadcast that Khomeini had disinherited his successor Ayatollah Montazeri, who I later discovered (via his online memoir) had written a letter to the Imam about the massacre. That very morning, when we passed Meidan Fatemi, we noticed with utter disbelief that the giant mural of Montazeri had simply disappeared.