After Tehran

by Marina Nemat

  She asked me to deliver the manuscript to her house so we could meet and chat. I got off the subway a few stops too early and decided to walk the rest of the way even though her home was quite a distance. It was just before 10:00 a.m. Most stores were still closed and office workers were already at work, so the street was quiet. Every few minutes a red streetcar glided by. It was the end of summer, and the sun had already grown weaker. In Tehran, the weather had never been an important factor in my life because the weather was usually good. With the Alborz Mountains north of the city, Tehran does not have a desert climate and enjoys mild springs and falls, hot dry summers, and relatively cold winters, including some snowfall. Shortly after we arrived in Toronto, the obsession Canadians have with weather surprised me. Didn’t they have anything better to talk about? I gradually discovered the reason for their fixation. Anyone who has waited for a bus at –28°C with a wind chill of –37°C understands what I mean. In most parts of Canada, good weather is a novelty, something to be savoured and cherished. Once summer ends, I try to feel the warmth of the sun on my skin as often as I can, because I know that the mercilessly long winter is just around the corner. How fortunate I am to live in a country where bad weather ranks as one of its people’s biggest problems!

  My mind went back to Rachel. She could hate my manuscript. She might not be the Rachel I had come to know from Drumblair. After all, Drumblair was a book and Rachel was a person. Was Jane Austen truly the person I came to know through her writings? Even though she wrote fiction, now that I wrote, I understood that a writer cannot hide behind her words, because the writing will be superficial. Jane Austen was magical in making her readers feel the emotions of her characters, and to do this in such a masterful manner, she had to be honest. So in the end, I decided to trust Rachel Manley.

  Rachel lived in a little brick townhouse on a clean, quiet street. As she welcomed me, her musical Jamaican accent made me think of the gentle waves of the Caribbean Sea. I followed her as she quickly climbed the flight of stairs that led to her living room. She was packing to move to another house, and boxes lay scattered everywhere. She apologized for the mess and explained that she was moving because her current home was too tiny for her many visitors from Jamaica.

  That I was in the house of a great writer who was the daughter of a prime minister was hard for me to believe, yet Rachel seemed as frazzled by life’s little challenges as anyone. Would I have felt the same visiting Jane Austen at her house, nervously waiting for her to read my book? My book? Yes, my book. But what if it never got published? What if no one ever read it? What if my memories died with me? No, I wouldn’t allow that. I would fight to have my story remembered.

  I sat at Rachel’s dining table, and she inquired about my manuscript, tucking her straight brown hair behind her ears.

  “So tell me about your book,” she said with a reserved expression on her face. I told her the same thing I had told Lee Gowan—and I watched her eyes change. Before sharing my story, I had been unaware of the powerful effect it would have on people. To me, it was simply the story of my life, which I was still trying to understand. I didn’t see it as extraordinary. I wasn’t looking for pity or even sympathy. All I wanted was for people to know, remember, and never let what had happened to me and others in Iran happen again.

  I left my manuscript with Rachel, feeling as if I had reached inside my chest, pulled out my heart, and put it on her dining- room table.

  Now I had to wait.

  A few weeks later, I received this email from her:

  Dear Marina,

  I have lived with your book, and therefore with your spirit, for the last month. I cannot say how profoundly it has affected me. It is quite exquisite. It slowly moved into my mind like a plant growing, and I am full of its leaves and musings. It even made me cry, which I haven’t done reading a book in a long time … It has such depth and beauty and human forgiveness, that at the end we are left more with your calm than with the horror of what was done to you …

  Rachel

  She liked it. Really liked it! She had called it “exquisite”! I said the word and it made me smile. For some reason, I had never considered that writing could be exquisite. For me, exquisite was an adjective to describe a soufflé or a creampuff. I read her email again and again, until I had almost memorized it: “… at the end we are left more with your calm than with the horror of what was done to you …”

  My calm? Yes, maybe that was the right word for it.

  Or was it? Two or three people who had read my manuscript told me they had felt a “lack of emotion” in my writing. Of course it had a lack of emotion. What did they expect? That I would allow myself to feel? I had been in a state of shock. Writing about what had happened to me in Iran meant living it again. Was this so hard for “normal” people to understand? The truth is that a tortured sixteen-year-old girl removes herself from the horror surrounding her, because if she doesn’t, she will lose her mind. When raped, she feels ashamed, so she shifts her focus from herself and tries to find normalcy, kindness, and humanity in a world that has slipped into madness. How else could I have felt?

  Calm.

  Rachel was very kind and generous, but she was wrong about my “calm.” What she had called calm was a state of shock that refused to let go.

  Still, she had liked the manuscript. This was what mattered.

  A Sound Recorder

  and a Microphone

  By putting my story on paper and sharing it with others, in a way I marched back inside Evin and reclaimed myself. I am finally free, because I have faced the past and accepted that I cannot alter it. Yes, Evin changed me, but the girl I once was is still inside the experienced woman I have become. I still have faith in the same God. I still despise hatred and cherish compassion and forgiveness. I still respect others and their values and want them to respect me and mine. I still believe we are human beings first and our religion comes after that. The Islamic Republic of Iran tried to win me over through torture and intimidation. I accept none of their beliefs.

  In January 2006, Beverley Slopen, a well-known and respected literary agent in Toronto, took me on and submitted my manuscript to a few Canadian publishers, and in February 2006, I signed a contract with Penguin Canada. They scheduled the release of Prisoner of Tehran for April 2007.

  Signing the contract with Penguin was a milestone in my life. For four years, writing the book had been my purpose and my destination. With every cell of my body, I believed that I had lived to write that book. I had never thought of what I would do next. I wasn’t even sure what next meant exactly. I somehow believed I was supposed to die the day I signed a contract. Yet I was still alive. It was as if I had survived Evin again and had to keep on going.

  I gradually became accustomed to talking about Evin. My trembling diminished, and I hardly ever came close to tears. I had seen people cry while speaking about their traumatic experiences, and I didn’t know why I was in control. Friends had told me that I was strong, but I wasn’t trying not to cry; I just didn’t feel like it. My only emotional outbursts, aside from the episode at my mother’s funeral, had occurred while I was working on my book. While writing about the past, I sometimes felt so terribly overwhelmed that I locked myself in the bathroom and screamed for a few minutes until I felt better. I even turned on the shower to muffle the awful noise I made. If Andre and the boys were home when this happened, I would find them standing at the bathroom door, terrified. Every time, I smiled and told them that I was upset for no good reason and that I needed to vent. They would nod, looking helpless and confused.

  By the time my manuscript landed on my editors’ desks in Canada, the United Kingdom, and the United States, it was well chiselled, so the editorial process did not take long. Once the editing, copy-editing, proofreading, and production work were done, I had to let the book face the world. To me, writing it had been like giving birth, only more so because my book came from my DNA alone. I was my book’s mother and father. Expectant mothers don’t
always bestow a name on their unborn child, but my manuscript needed a working title since I couldn’t just call the manuscript “it.” I chose Echoes of an Angel because of the dream I had had about the Angel of Death when I was a child. As the publishing date drew closer, though, I had to give the work a final title. I was thinking about the key words in the manuscript one day on the subway, when prisoner and Tehran came to mind and connected: Prisoner of Tehran.

  As I waited for the actual publication date, I began to work on a project for CBC Radio. I had sent in a proposal for a documentary about my prison experience to the producers of Outfront, a program devoted to listeners’ stories. Carma Jolly, one of the producers, explained that I could make a documentary about something that had happened twenty years ago only if I could relate it to the present. I had told her that my father and mother had refused to talk to me about my past, and she knew that my mother had passed away and that my father lived not too far from me.

  “Why don’t you interview your dad?” she asked casually, as if this were as simple as my dropping in to say hello to my father. “I’ll give you recording equipment, and you can go to his place, ask him questions, and record what he says.”

  I felt like running out of the room. Was she serious? My father and I spoke briefly on the phone once a month, but after my mother’s funeral, we had avoided each other. Even though he was in good health, he was eighty-five years old. How could I bring up such a difficult issue with a man his age? And if I decided to do it, where would I start?

  Carma handed me recording equipment stored in a small black pouch. She even checked the batteries and gave me extra ones. I accepted the equipment without a word and walked out.

  On the subway train home, I stared into the blackness outside the window. The reflections of passengers floated like phantoms in the underworld. I had a microphone and a recorder. I was not just Marina anymore. I was a reporter, a journalist. I could do this. I had to do this. For twenty years, I had had questions I needed to ask. My father could die without me getting another chance. By writing about the past, I had faced myself. Now I had to face my father.

  Gathering the courage to go to my father’s apartment took me two days. He lived in a seniors building a twenty-minute drive from my house. I had always called him before visiting, but this time I did not. He was surprised to see me. We gave each other a ceremonial hug. He had always been organized, and his apartment was clean and tidy. A black-and-white photo of my mother, taken when she was in her thirties, stared at me from a coffee table. I sat at the dining table and put the recording equipment on it.

  “What’s this?” my father asked.

  “A sound recorder and a microphone,” I said in a small voice.

  “What for?”

  “I’m interviewing you, Papa.”

  “Interviewing me?”

  I nodded and reminded myself I had every right to go ahead. “For CBC Radio. I’m making a documentary.”

  My father looked as if I had just told him I was an alien from another galaxy and could prove it. He offered me some tea and went to make it. As soon as he sat down, I held the microphone close to my mouth and said, “What do you remember about the day I was released and came home from Evin?”

  “We were very happy to see you,” he said in a tone that fathers use to avoid explaining difficult matters to their young children.

  We were very happy to see you. His sentence was a dam so desperately struggling to hold back a flood. Was this all he had to say after twenty years of silence? He was still hiding. This was his way of telling me I had better stop.

  Except, I couldn’t.

  “I remember we talked about the weather and normal things. I was shocked that nobody asked me about the prison,” I continued.

  “The weather?”

  “Yes, the weather.”

  He couldn’t have forgotten. His memory was still sharp. He just had a habit of remembering only what he wanted to.

  “It wasn’t suitable to talk about it. Everything was behind us,” he said decisively.

  Suitable? Wasn’t suitable?

  “As time went by, I was hurt that no one ever asked me anything,” I said. I could see the discomfort in his eyes, but I couldn’t back off now.

  He collected himself. “Well, jail is jail, and we knew that it was not correct to remind you. I didn’t want to hurt you by making you think about the past. We knew that terrible things had happened to you, but we didn’t know what they were. And we were glad we didn’t know, because if we had known, it would have hurt us, and why would we have wanted that? So we decided to stay away from it.”

  We were glad we didn’t know …

  My heart constricted as if shrinking to the size of a pea. What are you supposed to do when something so terrible happens to you that even your mother and father don’t want to hear about it? My early numbness had turned into anger, and my anger had spilled out in screams, but my ordeal was no easier to bear. A poisonous sadness flowed yet in my veins. I couldn’t remain still, or it would slowly and painfully kill me.

  Forgive.

  I remembered my father’s tears on the night of my arrest. He looked so devastated and helpless. As my father, he was supposed to protect me, but he couldn’t. Two members of the Revolutionary Guard had stood in our house with guns, threatening us all. He had to let them take me. Now that I am a mother, I know how difficult this must have been for him. I wondered exactly what to forgive my father for. I had been angry with him, but for so long I didn’t exactly know why. Suddenly, it was obvious: I had to forgive him for trying to forget. I’d needed guidance to understand the horrible things that had happened to me and the person I had become. When my family refused to help me, I’d had no one else to rely on. Then, like everyone around me, I tried to forget. I continued to live in an emotional coma, unable to love, hate, feel anger, find peace, or forgive.

  I had many people to forgive, including myself. I had started with Ali, because if not, I would have gone mad in Evin after he died. What do I mean when I say I forgave him? For one thing, that I am not angry with him anymore. When he forced himself upon me, I felt ashamed and I wanted to die. Because I was so young, I blamed myself even more than I blamed him. Even though I had sympathy for him, a victim who became a torturer, what he did to people in Evin was terribly wrong. His anger, which was the result of the torture he had endured in Evin during the time of the shah, had turned into hatred, and then he had sought revenge as an interrogator in an evil regime. I had seen some humanity in him, but this could not, and would not, justify his actions.

  Yes, I forgave Ali, but forgiving and forgetting are two different things. Forgiving lets you count all the wrongs done to you, remember how terrible you felt when you experienced them, and still wish the perpetrator no ill. With all my heart, I asked God to forgive Ali and help him understand how he had made me feel. I asked Him to give Ali peace. Yet if Ali were alive today, I would want him to stand trial, not for what he did to me but for what he did to others. I would want him, though, to have a fair trial according to the law, not one based on revenge. Revenge destroys any humanity. It has nothing to do with justice, and it always perpetuates the awful cycle of violence.

  I forgave Ali. Now I had to forgive my father, and do it before he died.

  MY TWO-PART DOCUMENTARY, titled “Walls Like Snakes,” aired on CBC Radio One’s Outfront on April 4 and 5, 2006, and those who heard it told me that what my father had not said spoke much louder than what he had. They were right. He said he was happy to see me after two years, but he never said a word about disowning me when he heard I had converted to Islam. My mother told me about it after my release as she and I had tea a few days before I married Andre. I don’t know why she brought it up. It was almost as if she wanted me to hate my father. I was shocked to hear it. But it didn’t matter; I was getting married and was about to begin a new life, and I didn’t care if they approved of me or not. I told my mother that my father could think as he wished, and I left the ro
om. Why didn’t my father himself tell me about this? Why didn’t he ask me the reason for my conversion? Would it have made any difference to him to know that I converted to protect him and my mother? He had placed judgment on me without having all the facts. And the most hurtful part was that he had never cared about religion and didn’t even believe in God.

  In the Outfront interview, my father said that he didn’t want to know about what happened to me in the prison because “it wasn’t suitable to talk about it.” This meant that he did have an idea, if only a vague one, of what had gone on in Evin. He didn’t want to know about the torture and rape of his daughter. I understood quite well that he had suffered and that it was very difficult to bring up such a painful issue, but hiding the truth doesn’t erase it. I felt that I deserved my father’s acknowledgment; yet he wasn’t ready to give it. I was not angry with him any longer; still, I felt sad and lonely and wished he had the courage to face the past and to support me.

  As time went by, my relationship with my father gradually improved. We have not become best friends, but the great stone wall of silence and secrets that had stood between us has crumbled.

  After my mother’s death, my father became quite depressed. My parents had been married for about fifty-eight years, and it was normal for my father to struggle to cope with the loss. He had to start a new life at the age of seventy-nine. After about a year his mood began to improve, and he started making friends with his neighbours, many of whom were Russian and Persian. Following the Outfront interview I began visiting him once a week, and during my visits he told me about his youth. My father and I had never had meaningful conversations, and our talks introduced me to his world.

  My father’s mother, Xena, had opened a boarding house after her husband was robbed and murdered shortly after their arrival in Tehran. This much I knew. I asked my father if he had any idea where Bahboo got the money from to start a business, but he said he didn’t know. All he could tell me was that she began small and then expanded. I was surprised that he didn’t have more information about that period in Bahboo’s life, but then I remembered that after trauma, silence sets in. Bahboo had written a few pages about her life in Russia, and she gave me her manuscript just before she died, but there was no mention of her life in Iran in it. Maybe she was trying to forget her husband’s tragic death. My father told me that seventeen years after his father was killed, the man who had murdered him was released from prison, and Bahboo did her best to make sure that my father wouldn’t hear about this because she was afraid that he might seek revenge. My father discovered the truth many years later.