The two dogs were soon upon us, barking with spit flying and teeth bared. Behind them, two figures emerged—soldiers in white winter uniforms. They talked at us, rather than shouted. I knew enough Turkish to recognize the language but not enough to know what they were saying. They helped us up and had us follow them back the way they had come.
We dropped down from the plateau and joined a track that led us to another hollow, like the one we’d just come from. Only, this time, there was a fire that sent flames as tall as a man into the darkness. We sat close to the fire, Roksana in the bag between us.
I could see the soldiers better in the firelight. One was a boy no older than myself; the other was old. Neither of them seemed to know what to say to us, and the boy smiled awkwardly as the older man spoke into his radio.
Asghar was tense beside me. “What’s wrong?” I said.
“Maybe they’re not Turkish. Maybe they’re from Azerbaijan.” It was possible, after all. The language was similar, but the politics of Azerbaijan were different than Turkey’s. If the soldiers really were who Asghar suspected they were, we’d be sent back to Iran straight away.
The old soldier finished with the radio and walked over to us. He looked at us carefully before turning his eyes to the bags. Dropping his rifle from his shoulder, he went to prod Roksana’s bag with the end of his bayonet.
I shouted at him to stop and threw myself across the bag. Carefully I undid the zipper to show them her body.
Two eyes stared back at me.
Her skin was still white, but her eyes were wide open. She was breathing again, straining her head this way and that in search of food. I couldn’t understand it. I had been sure that she was dead, that it was over. There had been no breath, no sound, and no sign of movement from her when we were up on the mountain. But now, here she was—alive again.
My cries were incomprehensible to the soldiers. “Bebek! Bebek!” they said. “It’s just a baby!”
I held onto her, sobbing. I was so happy that we hadn’t left her under the rocks, so happy that Asghar had brought us both out from our open grave. I was so happy that she was back. All the pain I was feeling—from where I had hit my head, from the frostbite on my feet and hands, from the exhaustion and the cold—it all disappeared in an instant.
I paid no attention to Asghar or the soldiers anymore. Roksana was alive. That was everything.
I barely noticed when two jeeps arrived. Roksana and I climbed into one, while Asghar was taken away in another. I only glanced about me as we moved farther and farther down the mountain, finally coming to stop at a cave that went back deep into the mountainside. I saw the soldiers moving around and took the place against the wall that they showed me.
The sun could have fallen from the sky, and I would have paid it no attention. All that mattered were the two dark eyes staring back at me from the bundle of blankets that I clasped to my chest.
It felt like hours passed while I crouched there and whispered my love to my baby. I could not begin to understand what had happened to her; all I could do was replay in my mind the moment when I opened the bag and saw her looking back at me—alive after I had been so convinced that she was dead. I cried constant tears of gratitude, though who I was thanking I did not know. Was it God? Had he forgiven me my rages against him? It did not seem likely, but who else could be behind such a miracle?
When I finally did look up and out of the cave, the sun had long since faded and a pale moon had climbed into the clear sky. I wasn’t as cold this far down the mountain, and a fire gave extra warmth.
I heard feet approach and looked up to see a soldier not much older than Asghar walk toward me with a bucket. He put it down at my feet and gestured to Roksana. I could not understand what he was saying. I panicked, pushing myself back against the wall, pulling Roksana even tighter. The soldier spread his hands and gestured to Roksana. “Wash?” he said slowly. “Wash baby.”
I stared as he retreated, tracing every step until he disappeared into one of the buildings on the other side of the yard. The bucket was half full of warm water, but before I could do much more than contemplate washing her and cleaning her diaper, the sound of more footsteps broke the silence.
The soldier was back, but this time he was struggling to keep up with an older officer speeding toward me. Before I had time to get up and run he was in front of me, crouching down, his eyes wide and smile broad as he peered in at Roksana. As he carefully edged back the blankets I saw his hands were creased and cracked.
“She is beautiful,” he said in near perfect Farsi. I pulled Roksana back toward me, burrowing her deeper down within the blankets. He pulled his hands back and looked at me. “Are you hungry?”
I didn’t know how long it had been since I had eaten. We had run out of food long before Roksana started crying. It felt like a whole year had passed since we met the last farmer and ate the bread and cheese he had sold us. The thought of food sent a painful wave of hunger through me. I studied the officer’s face. “Yes,” I said eventually, nodding.
“Then come with me,” he said as he stood. “My wife will take care of you and the baby.” I followed behind him and the young soldier, across the cave, and toward a waiting car. My legs burned as I walked, my muscles screaming their protest with each step.
The officer was as good as his word, and his wife was every bit as kind as I could have hoped. He and the young soldier soon left us with her, and she fussed around just like my own mother did whenever she encountered a newborn baby. She spoke no Farsi at all, which suited me fine. I was happy just to sit somewhere safe and warm and watch as she took occasional peeks at Roksana.
Then the officer’s wife turned her attention to me, bringing out hot, sweet tea and fruit. The taste was better than anything I could remember, and the feeling of being full again reminded me of home. Though the room was small, dark, and barely furnished apart from some low chairs and a heater in the corner, my mind took me back to the summer days in Isfahan. I could close my eyes and be back in the bright main room at home. It was easy to recall what it felt like to be surrounded by people and laughter and never-ending feasts spread out across the floor as we sat around the edge of the room on brightly colored cushions.
I pictured Daniel running after his cousins, trying to keep up with longer legs and stronger lungs. I remembered what it felt like to crouch next to him in front of a cake with two candles. The way his eyes grew wide with the flames. How the soft heat on our faces and the rhythm of his breathing next to me seemed perfectly matched.
It hurt to think of these times. They felt too distant, too far back in the past and too many mountains away from me. I had left everything behind—my home, my family, my son—in the hopes of safety, in search of refuge. Would I ever find a home again? Would I ever see my son?
When Roksana drifted off to sleep the woman urged me to place her between two cushions and go with her through a curtain at the back of the room. She showed me to a washbowl and a mirror, motioning for me to look at myself.
I did not recognize the face that I saw.
It belonged to someone far older than me. To someone who had never smiled but only ever cried. To someone who looked as though she had been eating nothing but dirt and coal for months.
I tried to wash away some of the dried mud from my lips. Nothing came off. As I examined my hands I saw it was spread across my fingertips too—patches of black surrounded by open, bloody sores. I looked closer at my face. It was not mud, but frostbite.
For two days Roksana and I stayed in the officer’s house. His wife cared for us, feeding me hot soup and constantly bringing warm water for me to bathe with when I was awake, leaving me to sleep for hours and hours at a time with Roksana curled up in my arms. She was a newborn again, sleepy and content just like she had been a month earlier back in Iran. I needed to recover too, to let my body begin to heal from the ordeal it had just been through.
The officer came and went, and we spoke little. Whenever I asked him about wher
e Asghar had gone or when he was coming back he just tutted and told me to rest some more and that he would tell me soon enough.
Early on the third day I woke up to see him standing over me. “You can see your husband now,” he said. “Come with me.”
I followed him out of his home, Roksana in my arms and her bag—heavy with almonds, dates, and cheese that the wife had given me—dragging at my side.
Asghar was waiting by a police car. He looked tired, but nothing worse.
Before we could talk much we were put in the car and driven off. Two soldiers I did not recognize were in the front, and while I assumed that Asghar and I were free to talk, his fixed stare and tense body told me that it would be better if I kept quiet.
It did not take more than an hour to reach our destination—a large police station. It took less than a minute to understand that we were no longer to be treated as guests. As we were ordered out of the car and through the metal gates that were shut quickly behind us, it was clear we were now prisoners.
Asghar was taken away by two soldiers. A boy barely old enough to shave took Roksana and me to a cell on our own, locking the bars behind us without saying a word. There was no water, no heat, and no bed. Just a rough blanket on the asphalt floor, a rusted bucket that smelled like a sewer, and a cracked and barred window set high in the wall.
I tried to listen for clues that might tell me what was going on. There was nothing to hear. I tried looking out of the window, but there was nothing but sky to see. Roksana slept for a while but soon grew hungry. I only had a little milk for her, and once it was gone her cries returned. The more I tried and failed to feed her the more upset she became. She cried so loud that I started to fear that a soldier would come in and threaten to kill her. When I closed my eyes all I could see was the Smuggler with his gun in one hand and Roksana’s bag in the other. I begged her to be quiet, pleading with her with all my strength.
When the door finally opened, I scurried to a corner, trying to hide Roksana from view. I needn’t have worried, for it was the boy soldier again. In one hand he held out a small packet, in another a drinking canteen and bucket of water. He placed them by the door and left.
I added the sugar to the water and hoped that it would be enough to keep her going. She cried some, slept some, and I did my best to keep her happy and clean. There were times when she curled into me and I would kiss the soft skin on her head and cheeks and forget all about where we were or what had happened. But for every one of those moments there were many more where I feared what would happen when the door next opened. We were like winter leaves in the wind: without power, without strength. Just waiting for the moment when we would be thrown out of the eye of the storm.
I was taken for questioning more than once. They spoke good Farsi and always wanted to know the same things: Where was I from? Why was I in Turkey? Why had we come the way we did? Why did we leave? What was happening with the regime in Iran?
Whenever they asked about Asghar, it was clear to me that they thought he was a big deal. They asked what I knew about his military career. I told them the minimum that I could: that he worked in Isfahan and that he never told me anything about his work. In truth, I knew a little more, like the fact that he was an officer working with technical systems and that he probably had valuable information that they would want. But that was his story to tell, not mine.
And so they would return me to my cell, letting me out occasionally to use the bathroom. I was trying to wash out Roksana’s diaper in the bathroom sink one morning, when a woman greeted me in Farsi.
“Where are you from?” she said, quietly.
I told her, and she asked where I was going next.
“I don’t know.” I shrugged. “Do you?”
She smiled weakly. “They’re sending us back home to Tehran.”
I tried to imagine what returning home would be like. I felt the joy of seeing Daniel as well as the fear of the Sepah. “If you can, would you phone my parents and tell them I’m okay?”
She nodded and smiled, and I wrote the number down for her before a guard came in and split us up. I had no idea whether she would remember, or even whether she would be allowed her freedom once she returned, but the thought of Daniel and my parents getting the message warmed me deep inside.
“You’re done,” said an officer later that morning as he stood in front of my cell. “You can leave now.” I gathered Roksana and my bag—now almost empty of the food that I had been given—and followed him out to a waiting car. Asghar was already inside, and the engine was running.
“Where are we going?” he asked as I got in.
“We’re taking you to a hotel,” the officer said as he shut the door behind me.
The driver laughed and pulled onto the road.
From the outside it looked like a hospital from another lifetime. Tall walls and smeared windows stared down as we drove in through the gates. Inside it looked like a school that had long since been abandoned. Long corridors were punctuated with identical doors, all of them scratched and stained. All of them closed.
Apart from the guard who led us, we didn’t see a single person as we walked along behind him. The place looked empty, but it did not feel that way. Behind the doors and around the corners there were the faintest noises of people moving. We were not alone, but we had no idea who else was hidden within these walls.
We walked up a narrow stairwell and out onto the fourth floor. The guard walked us to the far end of the corridor in silence, unlocked the door, and waved us inside.
He locked the door behind us, and Asghar and I looked about. It was a big room, and each of the windows were painted over in white paint that almost smothered the daylight outside. Between the dim bulb overhead and the little light that leaked in where the paint had grown thin, we could see enough to know what secrets the room held.
One corner had two metal cages, divided down the middle by a wall. Each cage was small, only just big enough for a man to crouch in or sit with legs hunched up close to his chest. The rest of the room was empty, apart from a single wooden bed, its foam mattress hanging down through the gaps in the metal wire that was trying to hold the frame together. When I touched the mattress my fingers came away damp and smelling of vomit and urine.
But it was the room’s last bit of furniture that really worried me. A large table stood in the middle, its wooden top covered in deep scratches and dark stains. Scattered around the floor like bird feed in a city park were dozens of bloody fingernails and broken wooden sticks.
Every wall had blood on it.
“I’m scared, Asghar. What will they do to us?”
He walked over to the window and tried to scratch off some paint. He pulled his hands back quickly when we heard the lock turning and a man and a woman walked in. Asghar was soon taken out, while the woman remained. “Your pockets,” she said, motioning to me to empty them onto the table.
She said nothing as she poked among the handful of items I still possessed. There were a few coins, some nail clippers, none of it either valuable or dangerous. “Your clothes too,” she said, casually. I hesitated, but she looked up, staring hard at me.
When she had finished patting me down and was finally satisfied that I was not hiding anything, she had me take Roksana out of the bag where I had placed her, searching through it as though it contained some hidden secrets. The bag that had carried her over the mountains, that I had been convinced was her coffin, was now her crib. Besides a blanket and a few outfits for Roksana and myself, the bag was all the lady let me keep.
In return she gave me an empty bottle and took me out of the room and back down to the end of the corridor. She wanted to show me where the bathroom was and demonstrate how I could collect water and wash Roksana’s diaper. There were three toilet booths, two with closed doors. She saw me looking at them. “Only this one,” she said, pointing to the third. “Never those.”
Asghar and I were sitting on the floor by the bed when the door opened again. What little
light the painted windows let in had long since disappeared, and I was drifting in and out of sleep. The noise of the lock was enough to shock me awake.
Two men with rifles walked in and marched us back down to the courtyard in silence. A jeep was waiting, its engine running. I couldn’t see inside; every window was covered in cloth.
One of the guards pointed at Roksana and jerked his head at Asghar. I handed her over, and someone immediately put a thick, dark bag on my head. My hands were pulled behind my back and handcuffed before I was pressed into the jeep.
I could feel one of the guards getting in next to me, his hips pushing me over toward the door, his shoulder pinning me back against my seat. Asghar complained loudly about his bag from the other side. I could hear Roksana stirring in his arms, protesting that she had been taken away from me. I wanted to call out to her, to let my voice try to soothe her a little, but between the stench of the bag and the pressure of the guard next to me, my voice choked. I willed myself to breathe, to stay calm and not to think about what might happen next.
The first moment I felt hands touching me I tried to jerk my body to the side and get out of the way. But I was already pressed up against the door and had nowhere to go. The hands wouldn’t stop. They carried on, touching me wherever they wanted. I had no idea who they belonged to, but I knew I couldn’t tell them to stop. If I did protest, who knows what they would do to Roksana? All I could do was wait, to cry in the darkness and wish the drive would end soon.
The jeep finally stopped, and the hands retreated. Once we were out in the air again my hands were freed and Roksana was placed back in my arms. The bag, however, remained on. I tried to keep my footing as Roksana and I were led away, beneath the orange glow of lights and into a building that was full of heavy, metal doors.
Stranger No More Page 8
