After Tehran

by Marina Nemat

  Shaadi’s mother, who lived in Iran, had told her about my book when she had seen me on Voice of America’s Persian News Network. She immediately phoned her daughter in L.A.

  “Marina is on TV!” her mother said to her excitedly.

  “Marina? Which Marina?”

  “How many Marinas do you know?”

  “But Madar joon, I’m in the States and you’re in Iran!”

  “The broadcast is live. On satellite. It’s happening at the Borders bookstore close to your house.”

  Shaadi ran to the store, only to find that the interview had not been live after all but had taken place a few days earlier. One of the employees who noticed her distress told her to write to my publisher.

  Shaadi told me that she soon had to attend a family function in New York City—an hour’s plane ride from me in Toronto. I couldn’t miss the opportunity to see my long-lost friend, so I bought an airline ticket to New York.

  On the plane, I went through my memories of Shaadi. In a way, it felt as though I’d known her in another lifetime, but somehow, it also felt like only the other day that we had sat on her bed, our knees crossed and our heads bent toward each other, as we’d talked about boys and gossiped about friends. She had always been carefree, and her joyful laughter bubbled up from deep inside her. She seemed to walk on a cloud. Before the revolution, we’d had no secrets between us. We’d played silly little games as young girls do and lived in a world half real and half make-believe where every wonderful thing could happen.

  When the revolution came and things grew more complicated by the day, I slowly withdrew from her and all my friends. What was left of that joyful young girl? Was I at all the Marina she remembered?

  We had decided to meet at the entrance of my publisher’s building on Avenue of the Americas in New York. People flowed around me like an enormous school of fish. They appeared full of purpose and determination. I wondered if any of them could imagine how it felt to find a friend after so many years and so much pain. I wanted to stop them and tell them about the friends I had lost and the one I had finally found.

  I recognized Shaadi as soon as she turned the corner. She was wearing a red top and a black skirt. At first glance, she looked almost exactly as I remembered her. Even her hairstyle was more or less the same, her long hair falling on her shoulders. As I held her in my arms, tears gathered in my eyes, the world moved backward in time—and I was home.

  We took the subway to the apartment of the relative she was staying with, and we were so busy talking we missed our stop. She told me that after many of her friends, including me, were arrested in the early eighties, she became terribly depressed. Nevertheless, she finished high school and entered university to train as a nurse. After getting a degree, she worked in Iran for a while, but the conditions were so difficult that she at last decided she couldn’t bear the pressure any longer. She was tired of always worrying about the Revolutionary Guard arresting her because a few strands of her hair were showing or because she might have said something “wrong.” She found a job in a hospital in Dubai. The pay was relatively good, and in the beginning, she was happy. Her new home, with its amazing skyscrapers and architectural wonders, truly impressed her. Many Iranians had gone to Dubai for work, so she didn’t feel too out of place. She was happy that even though local women had to wear the hejab, foreign women didn’t have to cover their hair.

  Shaadi worked in the emergency department of the hospital, and she noticed that most nights, at least one badly beaten foreign woman was brought in. The vast majority of these women were from Pakistan, India, and the Philippines, and served as nannies or maids. At the outset, she didn’t make much of the beaten foreign women, because she thought that the attacks were isolated incidents. But one night she had to attend to a woman who had been so badly beaten her skull had cracked. When Shaadi asked the head nurse if the woman’s injuries had been reported to the police, she was told that because the woman worked for a well-known and powerful local family, no report would be sent in. Shaadi was shocked and disgusted. Life in Dubai became unbearable for her when she realized that the authorities did nothing to help the women who had moved there in search of a better life. She went to the U.S. Embassy and applied for a visa.

  When Shaadi and I arrived at the apartment, her parents, who were visiting from Iran, warmly greeted me. Her mother was as beautiful as ever, with her round face and big smile, and her father was as hospitable and wise as I remembered him. They had arrived from Tehran only days earlier. They told me that the apartment I had grown up in was still there, and so was the little convenience store where I used to buy chocolate milk on my way to school. I asked them if the owner, Aghayeh Rostami, still ran the store, and they said he did. I wondered if he remembered me. Speaking to people who had seen the same sights, heard the same sounds, and felt the same joys and fears as I had was heartwarming. These people were a reminder that my memories were not only mine. Shaadi mentioned that when we were kids, her sister, who was a few years younger, loved coming to my house because I let her borrow my books. I owned quite a few titles of a Persian series named Ketabha-yeh Talayi, which she’d loved. I had forgotten all about that.

  Going to Evin was like falling from the sky. It shattered my life, and I spent the eighteen years that followed pretending nothing was broken. Only after I began to write Prisoner of Tehran did I start to put myself back together. My book became a candle that I lit and placed in the window of my life, a light that helped me find myself. My book also made it possible for my friends to find me. Shaadi was the first of many.

  I closed my eyes for a moment and saw Rahzi Avenue, with its dusty sidewalks, small shops, and old houses. I could even smell the crisp scent of freshly ironed linen coming from the dry cleaners close to Aghayeh Rostami’s store. I could see Aghayeh Rostami smiling at me from over the counter. If, from my house, I walked east on Shah Avenue instead of walking north on Rahzi, I would soon arrive at Albert’s second-hand bookstore. He would give me a pat on the back and hand me a new book, sometimes also offering me a Mishka chocolate or a bottle of Coke. We would talk about the last book I had read. One day, Albert asked me if I wanted to become a writer, and I laughed.

  “Why do you laugh, Marina?” he asked.

  “Writers are smart,” I said.

  “You’re smart.”

  I shook my head and said, “No.”

  “Imagine people going to bookstores to buy your books one day! Wouldn’t that be wonderful?”

  “Writers are not like me, Albert. They’re special. I think they might even be fairies or something like that.”

  Even after Prisoner of Tehran was published and became a bestseller, I didn’t see myself as a writer. A part of me still believed that writers were another breed, and I was simply not one of them. I’d written a book because I had had to. Yet I knew that Albert would be proud of me. He immigrated to the United States when I was twelve to join his son. I have no doubt Albert passed away—because if he were alive, he would have found me and reminded me that he had been right.

  A Persian Poem

  in the Russian Alphabet

  As I was writing Prisoner of Tehran, even though I knew that the Iranian government would accuse me of lying and deny that it had ever abused prisoners, I could never have predicted the venomous personal attacks that would be unleashed against me.

  In May 2007 Radio Zamaneh, an independent Persian-language radio station based in Amsterdam that broadcasts via short wave, satellite, and the Internet, asked me for an interview, and I agreed to do it while I was in London.

  I waited for one of the station’s producers, Dariush Rajabian, in the foyer of my hotel. We had never met but had spoken briefly by phone. Soon, a Russian-looking young man with short light-brown hair and blue eyes entered the hotel. I was sure he couldn’t be Dariush. However, the young man approached me and in perfect Persian said, “Ba dorood bar shoma, Khanoomeh Nemat”—which means, “Greetings to you, Mrs. Nemat.” Most Iranians greet each other
with “Salam,” an Arabic word that has entered the Persian language. Ba dorood is old-fashioned and a little unusual. Still, I didn’t make much of it. Many Iranians in exile prefer to call themselves Persians in an effort to separate themselves from the Islamic Republic. They see the Islamic Revolution as the second Arab invasion of Iran, and refrain from using Arabic words that have entered the Persian language—though this is not an easy task.

  In 1935, Reza Shah Pahlavi, who was then the king of Iran, declared Iran the official name of Persia (what the country had been known as in the Western world for a very long time). Iran is a cognate of Aryan and means “Land of the Aryans.” A few Persian scholars protested this decision on the ground that it broke with the history of the country and seemed influenced by Nazi propaganda. But Reza Shah argued that the people of Persia had called their country Iran for hundreds of years, and that Persia derived from Pars or Fars, the name of a province in central Iran. He hoped that officially calling the country Iran would give it a modern image. In 1953, Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi (Reza Shah’s son) decreed that both Iran and Persia could be used.

  To have a very Russian-looking man greet me in an old-fashioned Persian manner was jarring, but I reminded myself that even though I wasn’t blue-eyed, I was part Russian myself. Dariush and I sat down in a quiet corner of the foyer, and I told him that I had to ask him a question before he began the interview.

  “You don’t look Persian. Where’re you from?”

  “Tajikistan,” he said.

  This explained his perfect Persian.

  I had never met anyone from Tajikistan, but I knew that it had once been part of the Persian Empire and that Tajiks, like all Persian peoples, traced their origins to the ancient Aryan nomads who settled in central Asia as early as four thousand years ago.

  When Dariush and I first started talking, I seemed to be interviewing him. I learned that he was born in 1974 in Dushanbe, Tajikistan, and came from a large family. Persian language and literature had fascinated him from a young age. Under the Soviet regime, Persian literature had been taught in Tajikistan schools, but the Persian was written using the Russian alphabet. I found this bizarre, until it occurred to me that in a way a Persian poem written using the Russian alphabet and I could be compared.

  Even though I was born in Tehran, my first language was Russian. At the age of five when I first went to kindergarten, I discovered that none of my classmates spoke Russian, and this confused me. However, they accepted me, and I soon made friends. When Bahboo picked me up at school at the end of the day, she spoke Russian to me. I used to feel embarrassed and responded in Persian. I even tried to make Bahboo speak Persian, but she refused, telling me that Russian was a better language, our language. After Bahboo died, I realized that I wanted to be both Russian and Persian. I taught myself the Russian alphabet and began, with great difficulty, to read the few books of Russian poetry we had at home. I ultimately grew to adore Pushkin as much as Rumi.

  Dariush told me that he had taught himself the Persian alphabet and had eventually learned to read and write properly. He and I had more in common than he knew. As a teenager, he had worked for various radio stations. Then, in 1992, not too long after the breakup of the Soviet Union, Tajikistan became independent and fell into a five-year civil war. Soon after the turmoil began, Dariush left Tajikistan and went into exile. He travelled in Russia and then lived in Iran for some time. From 1995 to 1997, he was the acting editor of Tehran Radio’s Russian Service, worked as a German translator for Graphic magazine, and served as a Russian interpreter and translator for the Iranian Ministry of Foreign Affairs. From 1997 to 1999, he was a member of the Aga Khan Humanities Project for Central Asia. He began working as a reporter for the BBC World Service in 1999, and then he became the producer of the BBC World Service’s Persian program in London.

  When I finally had asked Dariush all my questions, he had a chance to ask me his.

  “Why did you decide to write your book in English, considering that you speak Persian very well and most of the events of the book took place in Iran?”

  Many other journalists had asked me the same thing.

  “When I was nine,” I said, “I discovered a second-hand bookstore that sold only English-language books. The owner, Albert, was a kind Armenian Iranian. I didn’t have much money to buy books, but Albert was generous, and he let me borrow books from him. I loved reading, and now I had no choice but to read in English. Eventually, English became the language of literature for me.”

  Dariush wanted to know if we spoke Persian at home when I was growing up, and I explained that my parents spoke Russian to each other.

  “How interesting!” he said, surprised. “They were Russian?”

  I explained their background, and added that after Bahboo’s death, I refused to speak Russian with my parents because I felt that Russian was something special Bahboo and I had shared.

  Many fellow Persians are probably disappointed that I have chosen to write in English, but the truth is that by sheer happenstance, English has become the language in which I can express myself best. When talking about everyday matters with Iranian friends, I am very comfortable speaking Persian, but when expressing my feelings and thoughts, English comes to me more easily. I have not used my Russian in many years, and it has become quite rusty.

  Dariush asked me why I had finally decided to write Prisoner of Tehran, and as I had told tens of other journalists, I said that I didn’t rationally decide to write it, but that I desperately needed to. I would have gone mad if I had not put my story down on paper.

  “When you left Iran and before writing the book, did you tell your story to officials at the Canadian Embassy so they would accept you as a refugee? Some people think you made up the whole thing to be accepted into Canada,” he said.

  The idea was so absurd it made me laugh.

  I explained that we didn’t come to Canada as refugees. From Tehran we went to Madrid, and there we went straight to a Catholic refugee agency that knew our story through reliable sources. At the agency they told us that we would be accepted as refugees, but because of the heavy backlog, it could take us three years to arrive in Canada. However, Canada was where we wanted to go because my brother had moved there and we had heard that it was a wonderful place to live. The agency suggested that we should go to the Canadian Embassy and apply as immigrants, because they were processed much more quickly than refugees. And this is what we did. At the Canadian Embassy, I didn’t emphasize my imprisonment. Instead, we asked to have Andre’s degree evaluated in Ottawa. Andre was an electrical engineer with a master’s degree from the University of Tehran and had published papers in well-known international magazines in his field. In the end, Canada accepted us as independent immigrants because of Andre’s qualifications. That we were both fluent in English also helped. From Madrid, Andre and I went to Budapest and arrived in Canada ten months later as independent immigrants.

  When we left Iran in 1990, just being an Iranian Christian was reason enough to claim refugee status. I had a few Iranian Christian friends who had gone to the United States as refugees, even though they themselves had never been persecuted. I didn’t need to make up a story. Was the government of Iran trying to discredit me by accusing me of lying, or were the comments about me making up my story those of narrow-minded individuals? Negative reactions shouldn’t have surprised me. Of course they would say that I had lied about my imprisonment and torture in Evin to gain refugee status. The government of Iran had never admitted that it had political prisoners, let alone that it had tortured and executed teenagers. I had most certainly hit a nerve, and now they were doing damage control. Naïve individuals who had not even read my book might fall for their lies. I had to continue what I was doing. As a witness, I had to testify.

  Dariush said that my life story was so interesting it would make a great Hollywood movie.

  “It’s so unusual for one person to have experienced all the strange events that you have recounted in your book,” he
added, “so some of our listeners have asked how much of your book was really the truth and how much of it was the result of your imagination?”

  Some people thought that the torture, rape, and execution of political prisoners in Iran were figments of my imagination? I felt sick to my stomach. So if “strange” and “unusual” things happened to someone, it automatically meant that those events never happened? This was not just about me; it was about thousands of teenagers who had suffered in silence. Knowingly or unknowingly, some individuals were trying to turn the terrible crime of torture into a political game. I couldn’t allow this to happen. I collected myself and responded to the question. I explained that nothing in my book was the result of my imagination. I had changed some details and most names. As I had stated in my author’s note, I had also merged the stories of my friends to protect their privacy. But this had not affected the reality of events. I had been imprisoned, tortured, and forced to marry my interrogator, and I had witnessed the suffering of my friends in Evin. I had in no way made up what happened.*

  A battle had begun, and I was on its front line. I was its flag holder. Was I standing alone? No, many people supported me and stood with me. This was about us, my young girlfriends and me in Evin; about the ones who were not politically active but were caught in the madness that engulfed Iran in the 1980s.

  After the interview, Dariush and I had dinner together and talked for two more hours. He had come to me with bias, but in the end, I felt that he had put it aside.

  That night in my hotel room, I Googled myself out of curiosity and found a handful of comments that called me a liar, a traitor, and a whore. It was easy for people to say anything they wanted on the Internet without being held accountable. They didn’t even have to reveal their real names. No one had ever confronted me at any of my public events around the world. Hiding in cyberspace was the coward’s way out. I hoped that my children didn’t see those comments online. I shut down my computer and went to bed.