by Marina Nemat
My father told me that all the boarders at Bahboo’s house were Russian, and this surprised me.
“Were there many Russians in Tehran back then?” I asked.
“Yes. Some were immigrants like us, but many of them were in Iran temporarily and worked for different companies. We’re talking the 1930s here. I had gone to two of those companies myself. One of them was Persaz Neft, which had to do with the oil industry, and the other was Shark.”
“But that’s an English name.”
“That’s what it was called.”
Until the end of the fifth grade, my father had attended the Soviet School in Tehran, which was for Russian-speaking children. Then the minister of culture announced that Iranian citizens could not go to foreign schools. My father had been born in Iran shortly after his parents arrived there, so he had to go to a Persian school. But in the Soviet School they had studied everything in Russian, and he couldn’t read or write in Persian. He could only speak it.
“So what did you do?” I asked.
“My mother got me a tutor that summer. At the beginning of the school year, I went for an exam at a Persian school named Tadayyon and was accepted into the fourth grade. It wasn’t easy at the beginning. The kids and the teachers were mean to me because I was different. They didn’t call me by my name. They called me ‘Roosi’—Russian. I got my high-school diploma at a school named College, which had an American principal. They later changed the name of the school to Alborz.”
From 1925 to 1941, Reza Shah Pahlavi was the king of Iran. Reza Shah didn’t trust Great Britain and the Soviet Union, so Iran’s relations with both countries deteriorated. To counterbalance their influence in Iran, Reza Shah turned to Germany, and before the Second World War, Germany became Iran’s largest trading partner. Reza Shah’s foreign policy of playing the Soviets against the British failed when those two countries joined in 1941 to fight the Germans. Reza Shah declared neutrality in the war and refused to allow Iranian territory to become a transport corridor. Shortly afterward, the two Allies occupied Iran to deliver ammunition and food to the Russian front. Supplies were shipped to southern Iran through the Oman Sea and the Persian Gulf. Then they were put on northbound trains and, using the Trans-Iranian Railway, travelled across the country to reach the Soviet Union from behind the European front. The Allies forced Reza Shah into exile, and Reza Shah’s son, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, replaced his father on the throne on September 16, 1941.
My father’s official name on his Iranian identification papers is Gholamreza Moradi-Bakht—a decidedly Muslim name. When my grandmother arrived in Iran in 1921 and applied for Iranian identification papers,* she was not allowed to keep her foreign name. So, at the government office where they issued the papers, the clerk who handled her case chose first and last names for her that were considered “appropriate.” Her real first name was Xena, but the clerk entered it as Zeenat, which sounds relatively similar but is Persian; for her last name, he gave her Moradi, which sounds close to Morateva, her real last name. But because Moradi was a common name in Iran, the clerk added the suffix Bakht to it, which means “luck.” My father’s name on his baptism papers from the Russian Orthodox Church in Tehran is Nicolai; however, for the reasons I just explained, on his official government-issued papers, his name was changed to Gholamreza.
After getting his high-school diploma, my father began working at a bank. In 1942, at the age of twenty-one, he married my mother. They rented an apartment on Shah Avenue, where I was born twenty-three years later. Bahboo moved in with them soon after the marriage, because she had grown too tired to run her boarding house. Back then, my father’s salary was 300 tomans a month. Rent was 265 tomans a month, so he needed a second job. Since he had been a teenager, my father had regularly attended dance parties at the homes of other immigrants and foreigners in Tehran, and people always told him that he was a great dancer and would ask him to teach them. Because he was not making enough money at his day job, he decided to open a dance studio at our apartment. Before long, his dance studio became such a success that he quit his job at the bank and dedicated all his time to his business. Modern, fashionable cabarets and hotels such as the Astoria and Palace had opened in Tehran, and members of the upper class who frequented them to dine and dance signed up for my father’s class to learn new moves and show off to their friends. My father was even invited to the shah’s court to teach the courtiers.
After my mother’s death, loneliness pushed my father to try to find his sister, Tamara, who was four years older than he. My father had not heard from her since 1966. In 1934, when Tamara was seventeen, she fell in love with a Russian who was staying at Bahboo’s boarding house. They married, and she returned to Moscow with him. Not long before Bahboo died, she told me that for years she had sent care packages filled with soap, toothpaste, and clothes to Tamara because these items were scarce where Tamara lived. Apparently, Tamara had divorced her husband after she discovered he was a KGB agent. She remarried and somehow ended up in the city of Simferopol in Ukraine. In 1966, a year after I was born, the shah’s secret police, SAVAK, summoned my father to their offices and asked him why he was communicating with someone in the Soviet Union. He told them that this person was his sister. The SAVAK official who interviewed my father knew he could read and write in Russian and invited him to work for them, but my father politely refused, saying that he had always avoided politics and wasn’t suitable for the job. They told him that he was no longer allowed to communicate with anyone in the Soviet Union. Tamara’s last letter came in 1966. After that, we never heard from her again.
When members of the Revolutionary Guard arrested me in January 1982, they took a few of my books—all Western novels—as evidence of my activities against the Islamic government. My mother was so terrified that after they left she destroyed all the literature in the house, including Bahboo’s manuscript and Tamara’s letters. We lived in an apartment with no yard or fireplace, so she couldn’t burn them, and throwing them into the garbage could attract attention. So she came up with a painfully brilliant idea: she washed the books in our wringer washer, turned them into a paste, and gradually mixed the paste with everyday garbage. However, my father saved Tamara’s last letter, which was in a bluish white envelope with a blue-and-red border and the hammer-and-sickle Soviet logo on its top left corner. All my father had left from his sister was that letter.
A few months after my mother’s death, my father wrote to Tamara’s last known address, explaining that he was looking for his sister who had lived there forty years earlier. Even though he had little hope of hearing back, to his surprise, he received a letter from a different address in Simferopol. The letter was from a woman named Natasha, and she was Tamara’s granddaughter. Tamara’s neighbours had opened my father’s letter and had contacted Natasha to let her know that her great-uncle was searching for his sister and her family. Shocked, Natasha immediately wrote back to my father. Tamara had died six years earlier. She had had only one son, Victor, who had passed away a short time before she did. My father was saddened to hear about Tamara’s death and Victor’s, but he was overjoyed to have found family.
This was a new beginning for my father. He was suddenly much happier and more optimistic. He began spending hours writing to Natasha every week. He learned that she had a sister named Svetlana and three daughters and a son.
When I was growing up, my father’s family had been a mystery to me. We regularly saw my mother’s three sisters, one brother, and their spouses and children, but a thick fog covered my father’s side. Tamara’s story had always intrigued me, and I became even more interested after Bahboo told me that I looked very much like her. What else did Tamara and I have in common?
In 2004, my father announced that he was going to Ukraine for a one-month visit. Even though he was in relatively good health and was quite active, I was worried for him; after all, he was eighty-three years old. However, he insisted that he had to go. He made all the arrangements and bought his tickets. His en
thusiasm astonished me, but once I thought about it, I understood it. My father had never been close to Alik and me. He had been a severe, cold figure who had hovered over our lives at a distance. As children, we heard his voice only when he was displeased. After my release from Evin when I desperately needed money to pay thirty-five hundred dollars to the government of Iran for a passport, he refused to lend it to me, even though he had just sold our cottage at the Caspian Sea and had enough money. He said he didn’t think that Andre and I would be able to succeed abroad. I was devastated. I got angry and called my father a selfish man who cared only about money. He knew I could be arrested again for returning to my church and marrying Andre. My life was in danger, yet he refused to help me.
Andre’s father had worked at a furniture factory during the last few years of his life. With the help of the factory owner, he and a few other workers had invested in a piece of land to build a small condominium building. When Andre’s father passed away, this project hadn’t started yet, but Andre made more payments toward it. Shortly after my father refused to lend me money for a passport, Andre received a phone call from a lady who worked at his father’s factory, and she informed us that work on the building had begun. We told her we were planning to leave the country but had run into some financial problems. She offered to buy our share in the building and pay us five hundred thousand tomans more than what we had already invested. Strangely, we needed that exact amount. When I put the money in a briefcase to deliver it to Evin prison, my father told me I was an idiot, that they would take the money but would not let me leave. I ignored him.
Now, fourteen years later, my father, who had never shown much interest in his children, was enthusiastic about going to Ukraine to see relatives he barely knew. Gradually, I realized that this was probably because he could start his relationship with them from scratch and become a more loving person. There was no history between them, no painful memories to face. That my father wanted to better himself and be good to others mattered to me. He began sending money to Ukraine, and I was proud of him for it. Even though Natasha was a head nurse, she made just sixty dollars a month. My father was not wealthy and his only income was the small pension he received from the Canadian government, but during his visit to Ukraine, he realized that compared with our relatives in Simferopol, he was truly a rich man. This made him appreciate Canada more.
My father’s trip was a success. Our relatives were happy to see him. They were very kind to him and took him around the city. He went to Tamara’s grave and Victor’s, and this meant a lot to him. My father had connected to his history and had found himself. Once he returned to Toronto, he was noticeably happier. He kept telling me about Maria, Natasha’s youngest daughter, who was fourteen years old. Maria began writing to my father regularly and called him “Great-grandfather.” When I saw her photo, I was surprised to notice that she bore a slight physical resemblance to me. Like me, she was a very good student and wanted to go to medical school. She was artistic and drew sketches of all of us from the photos my father had sent her. One of my hobbies when I was a teenager had been drawing sketches from photos. My father proudly showed me Maria’s work, telling me how lovely and talented she was. As I watched my father, I realized that he was trying to do for Maria what he had never done for me. Goodness and love were spreading in my father’s life, bringing light to his world. Even though our relationship had improved after my mother’s death, I knew that I would always be a reminder of pain and suffering to him. Maria was everything I might have been, and I was grateful to her for making my father happy.
After Prisoner of Tehran was published I gave a copy to my father. Although it took him a while to start reading it, he eventually read it twice and told me he was proud of me. I never thought I would hear him speak those words. He left his copy of my book on a coffee table in his apartment to make sure that all his visitors saw it. He told friends, acquaintances, sometimes strangers that his daughter was a famous author. He had blamed me for my imprisonment and everything that followed. He had been ashamed of me because of my conversion to Islam and my relationship with Ali. Even though we had never talked about Ali, I was sure that my father had read about him in the Toronto Star article, but my father didn’t say a word about Ali to me. Then, after my book came out, my father saw how well it was received, and he admitted that maybe he had been too severe. The book was much more detailed than the article, and it enabled him to see the situation from my perspective.
When in December 2007 my photo appeared on the cover of the Canadian book-publishing magazine Quill & Quire, he left the magazine on his dining table and never moved it. Whenever I go to his place, I still see it there. I look like Cinderella in that photo. They had called me from the magazine and had asked if I owned a nice dress. I only had pant and skirt suits. So they borrowed a dress for me from Holt Renfrew. I gasped when I saw it. It was red, very red, and although I would never have worn it in the real world, I decided to play dress-up and indulge myself, if only for a few minutes. At the photo shoot, I remembered that thirty-eight years earlier, my family and I had gone to a professional photographer for a family portrait. I could see that photo in my mind. My mother and father were young and elegant. I wore a blue satin dress with a white belt and shiny black shoes. Alik looked quite handsome in his very-sixties shirt, which had a ruffled collar and cuffs. My mother had sewn it for him. The photo was black-and-white, but I clearly remember the colour of that shirt. Its mustard-yellow fabric was covered with light- and dark-brown polka dots each the size of a dime.
Soon after the publication of Prisoner of Tehran, Alik wrote to me in an email:
Your life took a very difficult path and now it is great to see you getting some redemption for all your suffering. My congratulations for all the recognition and awards you will be receiving.
I quote Emily Dickinson: “Not knowing when the dawn will come, I open every door.”
Your dawn has come. Enjoy it.
I was stunned.
For a few years after my arrival in Canada, Alik and I had seen each other regularly at family functions, but we’d had a falling-out over my deteriorating relationship with my parents. I had told my parents frankly that I could not live up to their expectations of life in Canada. They wanted me to buy new furniture and move to a bigger house because most of our friends and relatives had a more expensive lifestyle. In Iran, we call this way of thinking cheshm-o hamcheshmi, which more or less means “living to other people’s standards.” I literally couldn’t afford to satisfy my parents, and I refused to go into debt to please them or anyone else. My husband and children were my priority and I had to focus my energy on them. My parents didn’t like that, and their unhappiness affected my relationship with Alik. Maybe if we had been closer in age, things would have been different, but we didn’t have much in common.
Not long after Prisoner of Tehran appeared, Alik and I went out for lunch. I realized I could not remember a time when we had been alone together. He visited my father every Sunday and me every Friday. We had not been trying to avoid each other, but our lives had been separate for twenty-eight years. Unlike Alik, who had grown up during the time of the shah, I had come of age during the time of the Islamic Republic, and my reality was quite different from his. I was sure that every time he saw me, the shadow of Evin and what I had gone through got in his way of connecting to me. Maybe he felt guilty for not being able to help me. He had never talked to me about guilt, but I had wondered about it. A friend of mine who was never in Evin had told me about blaming himself for not saving me from the prison. I laughed and told him not to be silly. There wasn’t anything he or anyone else could have done. I have never blamed anyone for my time in Evin. Only the Islamic Republic is responsible for that.
I told Alik that I had been shocked to see him quote Emily Dickinson; I had no idea that he read poetry. He said that he had always loved literature and was an avid reader. It seemed I knew more about my neighbours than I did about my brother. To my surprise, h
e said he had always wanted to become a writer. We talked about my book, and he revealed that even though he was aware that Evin was a horrible place, he had no idea how awful it truly was until he read my book.
I sat quietly, looking at him.
I had finally found my brother and father in the rubble of the silence and secrets of our past.
A few days later, Alik and my father came to the launch of Prisoner of Tehran, a reception held at the Faculty Club of the University of Toronto. They had told me they would be coming, but I didn’t see them in the audience. However, when I stood at the podium, I spotted them in the front row. As I spoke, I noticed that my editor at Penguin Canada, Diane Turbide, put her arm around my father’s shoulder. They were both crying. I had to look the other way not to lose control.
*She probably did not apply for the papers immediately after her arrival but did so a few years later.
The List of Names
A few days after “Walls Like Snakes” aired on CBC Radio One, I received a phone call from an Iranian-Canadian university professor who had heard it and been impressed. I will call her Professor M. here. When we met for lunch a few days later, she told me she was beginning a project that would study the memoirs of Iran’s political prisoners. Eventually, she would create a website that would be a resource centre for those who wanted to learn more about the experiences of these prisoners. She needed someone fluent in both English and Persian to translate excerpts of prison memoirs from Persian into English and to summarize them. She also wanted to create a haven where former women political prisoners from the Middle East could express themselves by telling their stories through visual arts, dance, music, and creative writing. I agreed to help her, hoping that we would be finished translating by April 2007; my book would be released then and I would have to go on a book tour.
