Captive in Iran (26 page)

MARYAM

My stomach trouble had grown worse than usual. The pain woke me up in the middle of the night and kept me awake for hours. One night, after dinner in Room 2 with Marjan and Shirin, I thought my stomach was going to explode.

An hour after going to bed I started feeling nauseated. At first I thought it was my usual stomach trouble, but soon I was running down the hall to the toilet, where I vomited again and again. It was the tuna I had eaten for dinner, low-quality canned food from the prison store. Shirin and Marziyeh came to help me back to the cell, but I was so weak I could hardly stand. They put me in a bed close to the door in case I had to go back to the toilet. The vomiting continued throughout the night, and the pain got so bad that I thought I might pass out. Even after my stomach was empty, I kept heaving. Finally, completely exhausted, I sat on the floor in the hallway and Shirin covered me with a blanket. Someone called a guard and after a few minutes convinced her to take me to the clinic.

Marziyeh wanted to go with me and argued with a guard while I leaned against the wall, barely able to stand. The guard made me put on a
chador
and carefully cover my hair. She was a lot more worried about my hair being covered than she was about getting me to a doctor. Marziyeh was forced to stay behind. The guard went down the stairs in the direction of the clinic—fifty steps in all. I followed slowly behind, afraid I would faint at every step.

“Come on, hurry up!” the guard barked. “I can’t wait all night.”

When we got downstairs, a guard told me to wait until he could coordinate with the doctor. I sat on the floor and closed my eyes. Every time I opened them, the room started moving.

“Quit pretending to be sick,” the guard ordered. “There’s no need for all this. I don’t see you puking.”

I was too weak to answer. As we started down the hall, I began to heave again. I grabbed a trash can from a doorway and threw up into it.

“Okay,” the guard said, “I know you’re not feeling well. Just control yourself and hurry up.”

When we reached the clinic, the doctor on duty gave me a quick glance and asked the guard what had happened. “Couldn’t you have waited until morning?” the doctor complained.

The doctor put me on an IV, put a trash can beside the bed, and left. I threw up again. When the IV container was empty, a nurse took me into another room, larger and very cold. “If you need to get up, you can use that little toilet in the corner,” she said. “But be quiet, because the doctor and I are trying to sleep.”

When the nurse came back later to change the IV, I was shivering with cold and asked for a blanket. The prison’s hilltop location made for chilly nights, even in the summer. For some reason, I had the fleeting realization that my once-cozy apartment was only about five minutes away.

“We don’t have any spare blankets tonight,” the nurse answered brusquely. “They’re all at the laundry.” Then she added, “Why did you do something wrong and end up here anyway?” I said nothing.

The next morning, my hand was swollen and sore where the IV needle had been inserted. The IV drip had stopped; the fluid was completely gone. About ten o’clock, a nurse opened the door and was startled to see me in the bed. “Who are you? What are you doing here?” she demanded.

“Please take this needle out of my hand and let me go back to my ward,” I said. “My hand is completely numb, and I’m completely frozen.”

Shirin Alam Hooli and Marziyeh were waiting for me in the ward. They had stayed awake all night in case I needed them and there was any way they could help. Faithful friends are a great blessing any time. But in a place like Evin Prison, they mean even more because the prisoners have so little else to encourage them. There is nothing we wouldn’t do for each other.

I was still recovering a few days later when Shirin’s name was called on the loudspeaker. As usual, hearing her name was stressful for all of her friends. She had been sentenced to death and was waiting for a final ruling from the court as to whether or not she would get a pardon. Every time her name was called, we were afraid it could be a summons to the isolation cell where she would wait out the last day before her execution. The thought brought Marziyeh to tears.

Marziyeh

Before Maryam and I had gone to Ward 209, I’d had a dream about Shirin that I had never shared. In the dream, Shirin was sitting on a bed and I received a message that “the government will kill this girl.” I couldn’t bear to tell Shirin about it, or anybody else. It was something I desperately did not want to happen, yet I felt the Lord’s message to me was unmistakable.

Shirin went to 209 for further interrogation. An agent from the Ministry of Intelligence was with the interrogator this time. They said if she would answer their questions and betray her friends, they would commute her death sentence. They accused her of giving them false information before and said they would have to transfer her back to 209 and start interrogating her all over again. Returning to live in 209 after two years in prison would be a very bad sign. If only she would “be a good girl,” they would help her.

“I have no information to give you,” Shirin said, her head held high. “Go ahead and execute me.”

As long as she had been in prison and as often as she had been questioned, she sensed that her situation was different now. She felt somehow—with the indefinite intuition of a person who knows something but can’t tell you how she knows it—that the court had already decided to execute her, and now was only trying to coax as much information out of her as possible before killing her. She was worried more than ever, and because she was worried, Maryam and I were worried. We encouraged Shirin not to quarrel with the guards over minor issues, but instead to rethink her attitude and stay out of trouble.

A little while later, she brought us a notebook. “If I’m going to be sent back to 209, I want to give you this diary to write in. If you’re released before I get back, leave it with another inmate to return to me.” She also gave us her books and other things to look after once she was transferred. We waited day after day for her name to be announced again, but the call didn’t come.

Shirin said she was not afraid to die. That didn’t keep her from being nervous about the news of a fresh round of persecution against the Kurdish people. One reason for her latest interrogation was that a judge had been
murdered and the Kurds were suspected. The authorities were grilling Kurdish prisoners to see if they could get any clues in the case.

A few days later, we saw the news that several Kurds had been executed, including a boy. When Shirin came to our room for tea that afternoon, Maryam asked her if she knew him. She said she did not. She wasn’t feeling well and left early that evening. Later, we went to check on her. The lights were out, and several inmates were watching TV. Shirin sat alone on her bed in the dark, knitting.

Maryam said, “You know the boy who was executed today, don’t you?”

Without looking up, Shirin nodded and began to cry. She dropped her knitting and leaned her head against Maryam’s chest.

“Yes, I knew him. He was only twenty years old.”

We had never seen Shirin like this before. She cried her eyes out, as if she’d hidden a huge sorrow inside until she couldn’t hide it anymore and now wanted to let it all go. Our unshakable Kurdish heroine, who had endured months of torture and years of imprisonment without flinching, suddenly seemed broken and defeated.

“If they take me back to 209, I’m going to make them execute me, too,” Shirin said through her tears. “I’m sick and tired of the whole situation. I’ve seen so many people I love executed, lost so many of my friends at the hands of a merciless regime that has no compassion toward anyone, even a twenty-year-old boy. Please pray that they will now execute me, too. I can’t stand this life in prison anymore.”

Nothing they had done to her had ever made her hesitate. Now, though, it was clear that seeing her friends murdered by the government over the years had chipped away at her resolve.

After a long cry, she finally calmed down, but she had a splitting headache. During her past interrogations, they had hit her in the head so many times that her head still hurt most of the time, and she sometimes had dizzy spells and nosebleeds.

She took some painkillers, and Maryam massaged her temples to help her relax. That night, lying in bed, we prayed for our dear friend. We couldn’t imagine how she felt. All we could do was ask God to be with her, to comfort her, and to give her strength for whatever was ahead.

MARYAM

The summer of 2009 was coming to an end. As the weather turned cool, inmates without warm clothing began to suffer when we were all herded out into the courtyard for the morning roll call. Most prisoners still went out before sunrise for Muslim morning prayers, too, and everybody had to go out to register at 6:30.

It was announced that prisoners could receive new clothes from their families. However, no linings or second layers were allowed, and no coats. If these items were found, they would be confiscated. Evidently, the idea was to make it harder for inmates to hide any sort of weapons or contraband.

In spite of the rules, we asked our friend Shamsi to help us get some warm clothes from our sisters. Shamsi was in charge of Room 2 and had become a friend, even though she had been a tough gang member on the outside and most prisoners were afraid of her. She later admitted that she’d hated us in the beginning for being Christians. But when she learned what Christians were really like after being around us for a while, she’d had a change of heart. Now we were happy to have her as one of our best friends. Because she had a good relationship with the guards, they never opened packages sent to her. She agreed to let our sisters put clothes for us in her
packages if she could receive some extra clothes for herself as well. She also organized a system for bartering and buying clothes among the prisoners, and got clothes for the poorest prisoners, who couldn’t afford their own. For a week afterward, we enjoyed modeling our new clothes for each other, complimenting and commenting on the various styles and combinations. It was our version of a shopping spree.

The clothes arrived just in time to help us with a crazy change in our daily routine. We seldom knew why the prison administration changed a policy. A new rule would simply be announced—or enacted without any announcement—and we had to go along; all we could do was guess at the reason. In the wake of all the protests, the arrest of some of the judges, and the overcrowded conditions at Evin, the guards became much stricter about prisoners going outside for morning roll call. In the past, old and sick prisoners had been excused. Because of the poor medical care and crowded rooms, there were always several women who had the flu, and others who were coming down with various maladies, who stayed in their cells, under the covers. Soraya, the huge woman with a cell and a shower of her own, never went out for roll call because it was so hard for her to walk. The guards knew that the women who weren’t in the courtyard were still in their cells, so there was no practical reason to have everybody come out in the cold to be checked off a list. But now they began to enforce the rule—perhaps only because they knew they had the power to do it and because they knew it was uncomfortable and inconvenient. Who knows?

The guards also introduced a new wake-up routine, playing deafening music through the loudspeakers at 6:30 in the morning and screaming, “Get up! Get up! Hurry! Out of bed and into the prison yard for roll call!” Anyone who disobeyed was denied access to the cultural center, lost her phone privileges, and wasn’t allowed visitors or parole. Some of the sick prisoners shivered with cold just getting out of bed, never mind going outside. There were women in their seventies who especially suffered from this treatment. For Marziyeh and others weakened by long illnesses, the trip outside made their symptoms worse and no doubt prolonged their sickness. Typically, we had to stand in the weather for up to an hour. After that, everyone except for Marziyeh and me and a few political prisoners had to face Mecca and recite in Arabic the
omalyajib
prayers.

Sometimes the guards didn’t even take attendance, but made us stand outside just to harass us. Another mean trick was to threaten all of us by insisting that everyone would be punished—denied phone privileges, for example—on account of the slowpokes and slackers who refused to come out. The guards were hoping to make the old and weak prisoners out to be the enemy, getting us to blame them instead of the guards for the inconvenience, and causing disagreements or even fights among the prisoners.

The bad situation was made even worse on days when we had to go back outside a second time for the guards to search our personal belongings or when they came through occasionally spraying disinfectant. Marziyeh and I always took our diaries with us so the guards wouldn’t find them, and when they sprayed we had to wash all our utensils and everything else because of the smell.

One morning, we had just come inside from another bone-chilling roll call and were eating breakfast when we were ordered back into the courtyard. Once we were all assembled, everyone who used the cultural center was ordered to go there, and everyone else was ordered to remain outside for the rest of the day. Even the old and sick inmates were forced to obey.

Though a number of women went to the cultural center, the yard was packed with prisoners. It looked like a crowd on market day, only much more of a crush. There were 150 women or more jammed together so tightly that most didn’t have room to move. Even those of us who had warm clothing were soon uncomfortable; some women wrapped themselves in cardboard trying to stay warm. A group started dancing to lift their spirits and keep the circulation going, which irritated another group. The two factions started yelling and swearing at each other.

After a while, some of the prisoners started sitting and lying on the ground, which made the crowding even worse. Marziyeh’s backache was aggravated by the cold and all the standing, and the chilly weather also caused a spike in my earache pain. Soraya, whose kidney problems were familiar to everyone, called out that she had to go in and use the toilet. The guards ignored her. When she started yelling louder, other women yelled too. Finally, after three or four hours, the guards opened the doors and we all rushed back into the warmth of our rooms. The women in the cultural center had heard the yelling and were very happy to know we had stood together for even so small a thing
as the chance to go back inside. Such an expression of defiance was very rare and very exciting. Some of our guards warned us angrily that our voices were reaching the guards in the men’s prison and making them sexually excited. If the sound of a woman’s voice was enough to tempt these men, they must have been weak and unfaithful little boys indeed!

For all the encouragement our brief protest gave us, it didn’t make any difference. Word soon spread that from now on, everyone had to spend the day either at the cultural center or outside. The reason, we believed, was that the prison warden, Mr. Sedaghat, was under some kind of pressure to show that his prisoners were happy, well cared for, and being educated at his cultural center, where they were all behaving like nice Muslim women. If the security cameras showed rooms full of women left on their own and not participating in cultural center activities, this would be a problem for Mr. Sedaghat. However, if the cameras showed a full and busy cultural center and the rest of the women’s area empty, it must mean we were all down at the center being rehabilitated.

It was curious to think they couldn’t have done this in the spring or summer when the weather was warm. It all started as soon as the cold temperatures hit. Because the cultural center held only about fifty people, there wasn’t nearly enough room for everybody now that we were so terribly overcrowded. On top of everything else, the prisoners who were drug addicts were allowed into the cultural center for the first time, making it harder than ever to get a place there. Most of the women there had no interest in cultural activities; they just wanted to stay warm, and they whiled away the day singing and dancing. Therefore, the women who actually wanted to use the center couldn’t do much because the room was so overstuffed with people. Everyone being out of the ward all day also wrecked our carefully planned schedule of shower times, which was essential since there were more than 150 women and five available showers.

Any sort of coordinated prison protest was almost unknown in Evin. On the eve of an execution or after a major event was reported in the news, our
phones were cut off and we were locked in our cells until it was clear we had no plans to react. There was also always the threat of punishment: We heard many stories of women considered troublemakers who were taken to a building next door and returned swollen, bruised, and bleeding.

Marziyeh and I had been banned from the cultural center since the beginning of our imprisonment. When we told Mrs. Rezaei, the women’s prison warden, about it, she had said we should be allowed to go. But we never went, out of quiet protest against the way the director there had treated us. In the face of the new rules, we decided we still wouldn’t go to the cultural center and that we wouldn’t spend the day outside in the courtyard anymore either, even if it meant they would beat us.

The next morning, when we were all ordered outside, Marziyeh and I were the only ones who stayed in the ward. The guards came through, but they didn’t step inside our cell and didn’t notice us under our blankets. After the other inmates returned, everybody wanted to know how we had managed to avoid the mandatory trip outside. We explained that we simply refused to go. The following morning, a few others decided to stay in with us, but at the last minute, they changed their minds because of threats from the guards.

We knew that someone would soon complain to Mrs. Rezaei that we were being allowed to skip the morning roll call without any consequences. We figured the best way to deal with that was to go see Mrs. Rezaei ourselves first. Because Marziyeh was still in bed with her backache and flu symptoms, I went alone to wait in the long line to see the women’s warden. When my turn came, Mrs. Rezaei ushered me inside.

“Mrs. Rezaei, my friend and I do not go to morning register,” I explained. “The reason is because Marziyeh has a severe backache and chronic cold and flu symptoms and has been in bed for many days. You are aware that the prison clinic doesn’t provide proper medical care. As for me, I can’t stand in the cold for hours because I have a serious ear infection. Many other inmates suffer from various illnesses and disabilities that make it impossible for them to stand outside. We would rather go to solitary confinement than tolerate this inhumane treatment.”

“Miss Rostampour, I am as unhappy as you are about this new routine,” Mrs. Rezaei replied. “I’ve already registered my protest with Mr. Sedaghat,
but he is adamant that the new orders be obeyed. Defiant prisoners will be sent to the security section. Enforcing these new rules is a problem, and I will do my best to resolve the matter as soon as possible. In the meantime, you should go out for the roll call like everybody else, because Mr. Sedaghat won’t make any exceptions.”

“Maybe Mr. Sedaghat should deal with the problem of the worthless prison clinic and its outdated drugs,” I replied, “or the lack of proper hot food on these cold autumn days, before he decides to make these new rules about the morning count. Everybody in the ward is sick.”

“I’m not happy about the situation either,” said Mrs. Rezaei, “but we have no other choice. I’m not the one who makes the decision.”

I could see there was no point in continuing the conversation, so I thanked the warden and returned to my cell. The next morning, Marziyeh and I stayed in our room again while everyone else went out to register. That same day, Shirin Alam Hooli came into the room when she should have been in the cultural center. She had gotten into an argument with the cultural center manager over the terrible overcrowding. There were so many people and so much commotion that it was impossible to do anything. Shirin said going to the center was a waste of time. Though her complaint was justified, it was yet another example of her resisting authority, which looked bad, considering her case and the latest round of interrogations.

Marziyeh and I didn’t want to start any kind of demonstration; we never incited others to do what we did. Most prisoners were afraid of the guards and obeyed their every word. However, political prisoners like Shirin were different. Because some of them had already been through so much, nothing the guards did or threatened to do frightened them. But even some of the prison staff were now saying that the crowding situation was impossible and that the cultural center could no longer function. Prisoners needed to stand up for their rights.

After a week, the new rules were scrapped and we went back to the old routine of people being excused from morning roll call if it was hard for them to get out. Of course, none of the prison administrators would admit that our actions had made any difference. Whether they did or not, we were happy to have the old rules back.