Moon at Nine

by Deborah Ellis

  The sun was setting when they pulled into a refugee camp. Ahmad got out of the car and left her sitting there while he went off to talk to the men in the camp. Farrin felt conspicuous sitting in the car by herself. Anyone who passed by looked through the window at her. She told herself that they couldn’t see her face, that all they saw was a woman in a burqa, but she still felt vulnerable. She could no longer see Ahmad. What if someone asked her what she was doing there? What would she tell them? That her husband had gone off and left her? Wouldn’t they know she was a stranger?

  Finally, after a long time, Ahmad returned. ‘Get out,’ he said, opening her door.

  ‘Where have you been?’ she asked.

  ‘Don’t speak,’ he said.

  A thousand comebacks popped into her head, but she forced herself to keep mute.

  Just get me to Sadira, she said to him in her mind. Get me to Sadira.

  He led her through the assortment of tents, rag shelters, and lean-tos made of trash to a tent on the far side of the camp.

  ‘You’ll sleep here,’ he said to her.

  Then he left.

  Here was a tent already crowded with women and children. But it wasn’t fun like it had been at her grandparents’ place. There were not enough blankets. Some of the younger children coughed all night – deep chest coughs that sounded nothing like a regular cold. She wasn’t sure if it was all right for her to take her burqa off, so she left it on all night. Several times she woke up in the night struggling for breath, as the burqa had tightened itself around her as she slept.

  The next day, not knowing what else to do, Farrin sat inside the tent and did not talk to anyone. Some of the women asked her questions, but she pretended not to understand. After a few times, they left her alone. They had enough other things to worry about.

  Ahmad collected her at last, and she followed along behind him as they headed out of the camp.

  He led her to another vehicle, this time a small pickup truck with a cover over the back. He gestured for her to ride in the back while he sat up front with the driver. It was crowded in the back, full of women and children and sheep and chickens, but she climbed on. The other women squeezed over to make room for her. She had her choice between holding a small child or a cage full of live chickens on her lap. When she hesitated, someone handed her the chickens. She gripped the bars of the cage to keep it from falling. Chickens pecked at her fingers.

  She had no idea how long she would have to sit like this. Her body cramped up from sitting in the same position for so long. She wanted to talk to Ahmad but did not want to draw attention to herself. So she sat and endured the pain. Every uncomfortable kilometer brought her closer to Sadira.

  Hours later, the truck pulled over to the side of the road. Ahmad appeared at the back.

  ‘Out,’ he said.

  There were several women in burqas in the back, so Ahmad didn’t know which one he was talking to, but Farrin knew. She passed the chickens on to someone else and staggered out of the truck. Her feet were asleep. She stamped them and looked around.

  All she could see was a whole lot of nothing.

  ‘From here, we walk,’ Ahmad said. He handed her a small bundle. ‘There is a bottle of water in here, and some food. It is a long journey, so don’t waste them.’

  Farrin didn’t know how long they walked over the bare, rocky hills, which were hot as an oven during the day and bone-chilling at night.

  ‘The border is just ahead,’ said Ahmad. ‘We must be extremely careful here. We need to avoid the Iranian and Pakistani guards. And there are bandits who rob the refugees. Stay close and do what I tell you.’

  Farrin did. When Ahmad said to go flat, she threw herself onto the ground and kept her head down. When Ahmad said to run, she ran, ignoring the angry blisters that now covered her feet. They scrambled up hills and down valleys, dodging behind boulders and tripping on rocks.

  ‘Get in here,’ Ahmad said, pointing to a crevice in the rocks. ‘We will wait until nightfall and cross over into Pakistan once it is dark. Don’t move. I will be back.’

  Farrin squeezed herself into a small space between the rocks. All she could see from there was the blue sky and the tops of distant rocky hills. It was a new kind of torture to stay put and to stay quiet, especially when she heard cars drive by. She could not see where she was and she had no way to escape if someone found her. All she could do was watch the sky turn from blue to gray to black.

  The night was well underway, and Farrin was ready to jump out of her hole and take her own chances when Ahmad appeared again.

  ‘Come. Quickly,’ he ordered.

  I can’t wait to get away from him, she thought, scrambling after Ahmad on legs that had, once again, gone to sleep.

  She stayed behind him and pulled her burqa close to her face – it was the only way she could see anything through the screen. It was difficult to breathe. She had to keep choosing between breathing and seeing.

  The walk seemed to go on for hours. Finally, just below the crest of a hill, Ahmad stopped.

  ‘We’re here,’ he said. ‘We’re in Pakistan. We are out of Iran.’

  TWENTY-THREE

  FARRIN WANTED TO toss off her burqa and do a celebration dance. But before she could move a muscle, Ahmad stopped her.

  ‘Keep covered,’ he said. ‘Follow me.’

  Your days of ordering me around are numbered, Farrin thought but did as she was told. They climbed up the rest of the hill. At the top, Farrin paused. Below them stretched a huge refugee camp. She saw tents and mud houses – and lots and lots of people.

  ‘What is this?’ she asked.

  Ahmad did not answer.

  ‘Are my parents here?’

  He just walked faster.

  She had no choice but to follow after him.

  They entered the camp. She stayed close behind him as he hurried through the winding alleys and narrow walkways. The stench was terrible. On either side of them ran an open sewer. Flies, children, and garbage were everywhere. A man approached them pushing a cart piled high with oranges. He kept coming even though the pathway was too narrow. Farrin struggled to keep her balance, but she tottered and stepped off. One of her feet landed right in the stream of sewage.

  ‘Look what you’ve done!’ Ahmad scolded her. ‘How will you get clean? This is not good!’

  He kept walking. He didn’t even offer to help her out of the stream.

  She tried to step back onto the path, but her feet kept slipping. Finally another woman in a burqa took pity on her, held out her arm, and helped Farrin back on the path.

  Farrin thanked her and hurried after Ahmad.

  Finally he stopped in front of a gate set into a high mud wall. The opening had a torn, dirty curtain over it. He pulled it aside and called in.

  People came forward and greeted him. They led him to a seat and brought him tea. Then they gathered around and talked. Farrin stood by the entrance and waited. She was afraid to reveal her face in case it was the wrong thing to do.

  They all spoke in a language Farrin didn’t recognize. She was surprised to hear Ahmad converse so easily. He had always spoken Farsi with her. At one point it was clear they were talking about her, as he pointed at the filth on her foot and everyone turned to stare.

  Finally, several women came over to her and took her away to another part of the little compound. She could see that there were a few mud houses and lean-tos enclosed by the wall. It was a relief when they took off her burqa and the fresh air cooled her face and entered her lungs.

  ‘Are my parents here?’ she asked, but the women did not appear to understand her. They helped clean her up and then left her alone.

  Farrin sat and waited. A large group of children stopped in front of her and gawked at her as if she were some sort of entertainment. They all had runny noses and matted hair. Their clothes were filthy and most were barefoot.

  ‘Hello,’ she said. The children just giggled.

  Someone brought her a cup of tea and some
bread. She started to eat – she was starving! But the children’s eyes widened as they watched her. At last she held out the bread to them. They grabbed it and devoured it within seconds.

  Work went on all around her. The women carried in buckets of water and attempted to bathe the children and wash some clothes. A girl about her age swept the dirt in the yard with a broom made of a few branches tied together. Bedding was spread out to air in the sun. Other women brought in a bucket full of animal dung, patted it into flat pancakes and slapped them onto the wall of one of the huts. Farrin could not figure out why they were doing that until one woman broke up some of the dried dung pancakes and used them to fuel a cook fire.

  It was interesting for a little while, but finally she became impatient and went looking for Ahmad. She found him in one of the huts, drinking tea and talking with some men.

  ‘Where are my parents?’ she asked. ‘Where is Sadira?’

  Ahmad jerked his head, indicating that she should leave the hut.

  ‘Where are my parents?’ she said again. ‘You said Sadira would be waiting for me. Can we go there now? Why are we spending so much time here?’

  ‘You should not interrupt us,’ Ahmad said. ‘Right now, we are talking.’

  ‘Talk away,’ Farrin said. ‘I don’t care. But let me know what is going on. How long are we going to be here?’

  Ahmad stood up angrily and pushed her out into the yard.

  ‘You cannot talk to me like that anymore,’ he said. ‘I am no longer someone you can boss around and threaten.’

  ‘All right,’ Farrin agreed. ‘Fair enough. I understand. You have done your last job for my father and you don’t work for him anymore. I just want to know what is going on. That’s all. How long do we stay here? When will I see Sadira?’

  ‘We are staying.’

  She waited a moment for Ahmad to say more. He didn’t.

  ‘We are staying? Where? For how long?’

  ‘As long as I say,’ he said. He took a paper out of his pocket and unfolded it. Even before he was finished, Farrin knew what it was. Her heart sank.

  ‘This paper says we are married,’ Ahmad said. ‘This is part of my payment for saving your life. Your father gave me money and he gave me you. The paper is real. You are my wife.’

  With that, he refolded the paper and turned to go back to the other men.

  ‘I never consented to this,’ Farrin said. ‘I don’t want to be married to anybody, and certainly not to you.’

  ‘You are alive,’ Ahmad said. ‘You should thank me, but it doesn’t matter. This is your home now. We are staying here. You are not going to be waited on in a big fancy house anymore. You will have to work. The other women will teach you what to do, and you had better do it and not make me look bad, as if I can’t control my wife.’

  ‘What about Sadira?’ Farrin asked.

  ‘You should be grateful to your parents,’ he said. ‘You spat on their family honor; they had no need to spare you. But they paid a lot of money to save your life and to save you from yourself.’

  ‘Sadira,’ Farrin said again. And then she knew what he was going to say.

  ‘That was part of the arrangement,’ Ahmad said. ‘Your father wanted you out of prison, and he wanted to put an end to your deviance.’

  ‘What happened?’ Farrin asked, even though she dreaded to hear it.

  ‘She was hung,’ Ahmad said. ‘Sadira is dead.’

  TWENTY-FOUR

  THE DEMON HUNTER’S heart was broken.

  Her love, her heart, her joy was dead – killed by demons who exist only to celebrate death. They take the shape of leaders on the world stage, posing for cameras and lying to their people, receiving flowers from small children at public events and then killing others in the darkness of prisons and in the white light of bombs.

  The demon hunter does not know how she will go on without the companion who gave her a reason to live. They had only a brief time together and still there are so many more demons to fight.

  The demon hunter is on the edge of surrender, on the edge of submission – that mortal act of bowing down, of allowing injustice to kill the fighting spirit in all creatures. It would be a relief, she thinks, to forget everything she knows about standing up and speaking out. It would be so much easier to forget everything she knows to be true.

  She looks at those around her. They mean well. They work hard and struggle against terrible odds just to stay alive one more day. There is nothing undignified about them, only about what the world has done to them. Joining them in their daily toil would not be a curse, since work itself is never a curse, and poverty is an injustice, not a decree from God.

  But it would not be her truth. If she submits, the demon hunter knows that a large part of her will die. She will become a shell, empty of all but grief, but soon to be filled with bitterness and rage.

  The demon hunter watches the day change into evening, and the evening change into night. She sits and watches and thinks and waits.

  And when the full moon rises over the wall and shines down on her, she gets to her feet. She slips into shadow and passes through the gate.

  She puts one foot in front of the other, and the moon stays with her.

  She doesn’t know where she is going. She doesn’t know when the next demons will appear.

  But she will keep on walking.

  She will follow the moon.

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  AT THE BEGINNING of the summer of 2013, I met a woman who told me about her early years in Iran – a story that eventually became this book. She wanted to share her experience, but she needed to keep her identity secret to protect the members of her family who are still in Iran. Some of the details have been changed, but this story is essentially hers.

  Iran is a great nation of poets and scientists, of filmmakers and craftspeople, of athletes and academics. It is a land of many cultures and points of view, full of people who are reaching out to engage the rest of the world. It is also a nation of deeply held traditional and religious beliefs, full of people whose vision does not embrace coexistence and progress. And, like every nation, its history is full of the push-pull between these two ways of thinking.

  Iran has been inhabited for over 10,000 years. Since 1501, the beginning of the Safavid Dynasty, until the revolution in 1979, Iran was ruled by a Shah or king. The early twentieth century saw a demand from the people to have more say in the running of their country. A parliament was created in 1906, but its powers were limited.

  In 1908 the British petroleum companies discovered oil in Iran. During World War I, Iran was occupied by the British, the Ottomans, and the Russians, who all wanted to secure their grasp on the oil supply lines.

  A military coup in 1921 put Reza Khan Pahlavi in power as the new Shah. He pushed for modernization – roads, telephones, radio, cinema, schools – but did so at the expense of human rights and their religious traditions. He also became friendly with the Nazi regime. In 1941, Soviet and British forces, who were back in Iran protecting the oil supply, ousted the Shah. In his place, they enthroned his son, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, who remained Shah for almost thirty-eight years.

  The new Shah was very young when he took power. The parliament used the opportunity to gain strength and hold popular elections. In 1951, the prime minister, Mohammad Mosaddeq, moved to nationalize the Iranian oil industry, taking it out of foreign hands to keep the profits in Iran. He was kicked out of power later that year in a coup orchestrated by the American CIA and the British MI6.

  From then on, the Shah held onto power with the military support of the United States. The Shah’s secret police – known as SAVAK – arrested, tortured, and executed political opponents. In 1964, the country’s spiritual leader, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, was sent into exile.

  Opposition to the Shah, and to his backers in the West, grew until in the 1979 Revolution, when the Shah was forced to leave the country. Ayatollah Khomeini returned from exile and became the Supreme Leader of Iran.

&
nbsp; Not long after the revolution, Iraq, backed with weapons supplied by the United States, attacked Iran. The war between the countries lasted ten years. Iraq used chemical weapons, and it is estimated that 100,000 Iranians died in the attacks. The Ayatollah Khomeini declared chemical weapons to be against God, and the country never used them against Iraq. Instead, Iran sent waves of soldiers across the front lines, many of them children. In 1988, by the end of the war, up to one million Iranians had died.

  In the months after the war, the Iranian government stepped up its battle against those Iranians it considered to be enemies of the state. Thousands were executed.

  According to the Iranian gay human rights group Homan, over 4,000 lesbian and gay Iranians have been executed since 1979.

  Iran is not the only nation that still imposes a death sentence on lesbians and gays. Others, as of the end of 2013, are Saudi Arabia, Mauritania, the Republic of Sudan, Yemen, and parts of Nigeria and Somalia. In more than seventy countries spread over Asia, Africa, the Americas, Europe, and the Caribbean, being gay or lesbian is a criminal act. Some countries impose fines. Others sentence lesbians and gays to hard labor or time in prison. In Barbados and Sierra Leone, gays and lesbians can be sentenced to life in prison. In Dominica, they are forced into psychiatric ‘treatment,’ and in Malaysia, they can be whipped.

  For more information about gay rights in Iran and around the world, check out:

  Amnesty International at: www.amnesty.org

  The International Gay and Lesbian Human Rights Organization at: www.iglhrc.org

  The Gay and Lesbian Arab Society at: www.glas.org

  The Iranian Railroad for Queer Refugees at: www.english.irqr.net

  The Iranian gay human rights group Homan at: www.homan.se/English.htm

  As a proud, gay woman, I am honored to have been entrusted with the story of Farrin and Sadira, and I hope that the real-life Farrin will be able to spend the rest of her life with whatever peace and happiness she is able to find.