“We love you too much, Noora,” he said. She let her arms drop. Gave in.
Masood smiled at me, and Noora and I walked away. To be caught with those leaflets in your hands would mean execution. We knew that, and it didn’t stop us. But Noora. We couldn’t put that on her.
Noora walked a few steps behind me all morning, and it uplifted me. To have her there. I was proud of her courage. Sometimes she forgot herself. Started skipping, or humming a song, and then I couldn’t stop myself from laughing. But mostly, we crept. Crouched and swore when we saw someone approaching. Hid in narrow alleys. Her eyes glittered. She liked it, and I understood her. It was fun. It was thrilling. It was scary, but like a haunted house is scary. And we had each other.
When we were done with our stack, we met up with Masood and Rozbeh. The sun started to rise over the rooftops, and we walked together down the street. Down the middle of the street we went. As if nothing could touch us. As if we were immortal. The sun crept over us. Watching us.
“This is freedom,” said Noora. She said it solemnly, and I felt life itself tingling inside me. Masood took off his beret and pushed it down onto her head. He laughed. Put his arm around her and pressed her to him.
She was fourteen, I was twenty. I wonder what sisters do together at that age. What they talk about. My mind is blank, I don’t know. I know what I did with my sister, and I know that it was wonderful. It was like a dream. It lives inside me like a dream.
We walked together toward the university, where there was supposed to be a demonstration. When Noora realized we were actually letting her come along, she ran over to me from behind and jumped on my back.
“Zendegi, jonami jan!” Life!
We laughed together. She and I, and the others at her childish eagerness.
When I think back, I wonder why nobody was worried. Why no one was afraid. Why no one ran the other way. Went home. Hid.
In front of the university a thousand, maybe several thousand people were gathered. We flowed into the crowd and were dragged along, Masood, Rozbeh, Noora, and me. We held hands, moved as a chain. It was important. Important to dissolve the group and spread out so that not everyone was exposed to the same danger at the same time. And important that we still stayed together. We held hands, and we yelled out slogans. The sun beat down on us, and I glanced at Noora a few times. Wondered if the crowd scared her. Wondered if she could stand it, if she would ask to go home. She didn’t. She shouted as if the struggle was hers, hers personally. Fourteen years old.
It is difficult to distinguish one moment from the next. The movement was somehow like a trance. I don’t know how long we were out there. But suddenly the march stopped, and we heard screams ahead of us. Screams and bangs. Masood tried to climb up on Rozbeh’s shoulders to see what was happening, but just then the crowd turned. People started running in panic toward us. Gone were those excited faces. Masood and Rozbeh fell, and I pulled Noora after me in their direction. I don’t know how we managed to find them and get them back on their feet, but we did. Then we ran, our hands still linked. Masood tried to find a way out, but it was too tight. We could only go with the flow. Then there was a bang right in front of us, and for a moment everything froze. That moment when we all realized that the guards were driving into the crowd with their motorcycles and weapons. They were everywhere.
There was no longer any direction, any unity. The human sea moved like a whirlwind. Everyone was looking for a gap, a way out. It took a while until I understood. The finality of how bad it had gotten. How much worse it would get. But then I met Masood’s gaze and it was full of a terror I’d never even imagined. They were shooting to kill. I turned to Noora. She looked at me behind her big round glasses, smiling, puzzled. She thought this was how it was supposed to be. She wondered what we were going to do now. What the next step would be. I smiled at her. Nodded, to keep her calm.
Everything happened in one motion. I know we were never still. But that moment is so vivid, so etched into my retinas, my head, my heart, that it is as though everything stood still. As though we stood on a stage with spotlights directed at us, at the very center of the universe. I nodded toward Noora. Heard a shot that made me jump. It sounded close. More than that. It felt like something passed by, close to me. I turned to Masood again. So fast that my braids whipped me in the face. Then I felt a heaviness, an incongruous weight in my hand. I looked down. It was Rozbeh. He fell. Hit his knees on the ground. He looked up at me, face contorted. His grip on my hand slackened, and he slid down onto his stomach. It didn’t hit me at first. It didn’t hit me that something had afflicted us. The crowd was so large. We were so young. Why would anything happen to us? I bent to grab his hand again. Get him on his feet. But then Masood also fell down on his knees. He fell down hard and grabbed Rozbeh’s torso, pulling it against himself. And I saw it. The blood blooming like a flower on the white of Rozbeh’s T-shirt. The red rose on his chest. Masood turned his head to the sky. His eyes were closed, and he roared. I think I just stood there and stared. Then I pulled off my scarf. Pressed it to the wound. But the blood continued to flow. It spread in an ever-widening circle. I screamed for help, but there was no help to be had. And then he disappeared. One moment he was looking into my eyes with a pained expression, and the next he was gone.
“We’ll take him with us,” said Masood. “Lift him! Rozbeh, dadash, we’ve got you. We’ve got you, Rozbeh.”
Masood tried to lift him, get him onto his back. But the crowd pushed in, and he couldn’t maintain his balance. He fell with the body on top of him, and they lay there amid all those running feet.
“He’s dead. Masood, Masood. Do you hear me? He’s dead.”
He shook his head. Continued pressing on the bullet hole. Kept talking, kept trying to calm the lifeless body. Finally he held him in his arms. Sat there, in the middle of everything, holding Rozbeh, screaming his name.
Only then did I realize that Noora was no longer with us. I had let go of her hand. The crowd pressed in around us, and the smoke lay thick above our heads. Noora was gone. I too began to scream.
We screamed those names. Rozbeh. Noora. Names who were people to us, our people. Our voices couldn’t be heard, but we stood there and howled those names, and people ran by and trampled on us, and the shots exploded through our cries.
It was a minute. It was no more than a minute. It feels like forever. It feels like my whole life.
it took a while for masood to hear me. before he understood that we’d lost her. But then he looked at me and jumped up from the ground. We left Rozbeh, we left him there between the bodies and rifle shots. We didn’t know which way to go, where she could have gone. In the end we just started running. We ran together and cried out her name. We ran and ran, and I thought he was right behind me. I thought I heard his cries. I thought I felt his body close to mine. So I turned into an alley and thought he’d turn too, and steps followed me so I assumed they were his. Thought we’d found cover. We could talk about what to do now. How to find Noora. But when I turned around someone else was there. A man dressed in black with a cudgel in his hand. We stood there face to face. He was no older than me. We were two children staring at each other. And then I realized that he was one of them, he was one of the ones who had killed Rozbeh. My thoughts bounced like Ping-Pong balls in my head. Should I kick, run, climb, do anything I could to get away? Or should I smile and play innocent? Say I was on my way home, I just happened to end up in the middle of this wretchedness, my mother would be worried if I didn’t get home soon. But a grin spread across his face, and it scared me. I realized we were alone in an alley, and he could do whatever he wanted to me. Nobody could protect me from him. I think that thought took over. A fear of death, in a way. Being raped by him would be worse than dying. I have to get past him was my only thought. I have to get past him and into the street. I didn’t want to get stuck there, out of sight, violated, humiliated. So I clenched my fists and bent my knees. Felt a scream rising from my gut and I went for him. Like w
hen a character in a Bruce Lee movie runs up and over his opponent. I don’t know how it happened, but suddenly I was out on the street and back inside the crowd again. I tried to push myself forward, zigzag, but it was smoky and hard to see, and there were too many people. I was suddenly so tired. He caught up. Grabbed me from behind. I screamed! I screamed for Noora, and I screamed for Masood.
“I have to find my sister. Please, please. She’s a child.”
He raised his arm and backhanded my face. The physical pain. I wasn’t prepared for it. I remember that so clearly, how it surprised me. Not even the shot that split Rozbeh’s chest had prepared me for it. The fight fizzled out of my body, and I fell silent. It was clear that they were going to arrest me. They could arrest me and torture me and kill me if they wanted to. As long as I wasn’t raped, I just didn’t want to be raped. I would rather have died; I’d rather have died than be forced to give myself to them. It would have been like being injected with evil, to go around the rest of my life carrying it. Living with evil rippling inside me.
he dragged me across the ground. the gravel cut into my back, and I closed my eyes. I didn’t want to see. I didn’t want to guess. I’d have gone voluntarily if he’d given me the chance. But he liked it. Forcing me. Then he grabbed me around the waist and threw me into the back of a waiting truck. It was pitch-dark inside. Bodies everywhere. Moaning, screaming. I kept my eyes closed. I kept my eyes closed until the doors opened again, and they started pulling us out. Behind me, a guy shouted in a shrill voice:
“They’re going to shoot us! Comrades, let us sing, let us join our voices in song!”
I turned to hush him, but he just smiled at me. He smiled like everything was fine. The men in black pushed me aside and grabbed him. The rest of us just stared. We said nothing. We didn’t sing along. We just stared. They dragged him over the ground, away toward a wall. An elderly woman took my arm, dug her nails deep into my skin. I closed my eyes again. We heard him. We all heard his song. Then a shot rang out through the air and everything fell silent. It was the harshest silence I’ve heard in my life.
they detained so many people that day. when you think about it, really allow yourself to think about it, it’s surreal. So many bodies. I was reminded of it when Göran Persson talked about a meat mountain, wondered if he’d ever seen a real meat mountain, a mountain of human bodies. It wasn’t that we were lying on each other or that we were dead. Not in my cell, anyway, though I know that a mountain of dead flesh was nearby. But we were so many, in such a small area, with so much body fluid rubbed between us. Blood, sweat, tears, urine. I pushed my way in, through it all. My eyes searched for Noora. Please let us be in the same place, I thought. Let me take care of her. I need to take care of her. But I didn’t see her. She’s not here. Of course she’s not here. She’s home with Mama. She has to be. I slumped down in a corner. It felt safer that way. Being tightly enclosed by two walls and out of sight. I sat there a very long time. Slowly the room emptied, one body after another. I followed each person with my eyes. They disappeared, and no one came back. I tried not to think about where they went.
I was one of the last to be led out. Two men in black clothes grabbed me by the arms. They smelled bad. Sour sweat. I who always yelled and argued, I was silent. In silence I stared at their hands. Their hands. They were big, callused. Covered with bruises and small cuts. They were hands that had given thousands of lashes. Hands that burned cigarettes against thin skin, that wrapped themselves around panting throats.
They took me into an interrogation room and left me there. It was dark except for the light from an oil lamp that stood on a rickety metal table. Behind the table was a folding chair. I didn’t know what to do. If I was supposed to sit down. So I backed up instead, pressed myself against the wall with my arms wrapped around my body. My entire body was shaking, and I wished I had cyanide tablets. Masood and I had discussed it, that we would rather swallow cyanide and die than be tortured and murdered by them. But I don’t think we believed it would actually happen, not so soon. I thought it sounded brave. Take your own life, refuse to let it be taken by others. I thought it was something a real warrior would do. But I realized in the interrogation room that the opposite was true. It was my fear that made me wish I could kill myself.
A thin man in a gray suit entered. He had a sparse beard that he seemed to be growing out. He wore a drab yellow polo shirt under his jacket. He came in alone, cradling a stack of papers, but when he saw me he shouted into the hallway, and two more men in black arrived to escort him to the small table. Then he sat down, and they stood behind him.
He began by asking a series of yes or no questions. Was I a Muslim? Did I pray regularly? Was I a Marxist? Did I support the Islamic Revolution?
That is not my revolution! I screamed inside. But on the outside, I nodded to every question on Islam and shook my head at every mention of Communism or the Red Struggle. I didn’t hesitate. During our meetings we’d talked about this very situation. Should we stand up for our ideals even when our lives were at stake? It seemed obvious then that we should. Anything else would be a betrayal. An opportunistic betrayal. But I didn’t. I was too scared to stand up for what I thought I was fighting for. I wanted to live. I didn’t want to die.
But then they wanted information.
“Who told you to go out on the street?” asked the thin man. He slammed his pen to the paper. Every word I said he wrote down.
“No one,” I replied. And it was true. I was the one who’d told people to go out. I was one of those they wanted to remove, eliminate.
They asked whom I had been with, and I hesitated. It would help if I said something. I wouldn’t suffer as much if I gave them something. So I said Rozbeh’s name. I figured they couldn’t arrest him. They couldn’t take his life again.
I told them this was my first time. That I didn’t really know what the demonstration was about. That Rozbeh was my fiancé. He’d said we’d just stop by quickly, and afterward we’d go to the movies. I was just following him. I put everything on him and mentioned no other names. I said I didn’t care about politics. I just followed my fiancé.
“Will you do it again?” the man asked.
“No. Never.”
He looked down at his papers again. Wrote down the words precisely.
“Agha, I just want to get married and have children and live my life. Please. What happened today has nothing to do with me.”
He hummed and wrote. I didn’t dare look up at the black-clad men. I just looked at him. I wondered which laws he was following. Which laws he would consult when deciding what to do with me.
In the end, he pushed a stack of papers across the table.
“Sign here.”
I glanced at him to try to deduce what he meant, and then leaned over the papers and started to read.
“Sign it!”
Now it was one of the black-clad men who shouted, and I scrambled for the pen. I caught a glance of the last few lines before I signed my name. It said that I swore my allegiance to the Islamic Revolution.
The black-clad men grabbed me under the arms again and threw me out a door. It was not the door I’d entered through. I felt my heart skip a beat. They didn’t believe me, I thought. They sent me out through the other door. I stood up and staggered through the corridor. There were no doors and no windows. Not a single person. But I heard screaming. I heard blows. For a moment I stood still and listened. Listening for Noora. But the sounds were indistinguishable from each other. I walked down the corridor and around a corner and came upon another door. A larger door.
I stared at it for a long time. We’d heard so many stories, why hadn’t I realized this was real? That it could happen to me. I sank down on the floor. Threw my arms around my knees. Tried to calm my breathing. A clear image of what stood on the other side of the door floated into my mind. A courtyard. Rows of people. Blindfolds. Black-clad men with guns. Bodies falling to the ground. Bodies being dragged away. New people in rows. I’d heard every de
tail. But some people ended up there and still got away. Those stories would never have reached me if it weren’t possible to escape. I can escape! That’s what I thought. I’m one of the ones who can escape. So I got up again. Went over to the door and opened it. Gently. I tried to look out, see something, prepare myself.
It was pitch-dark and cold, and I knew it was night. I heard nothing, so I stepped out. The door slammed shut behind me. Only darkness and silence remained. I was alone. My first impulse was to turn around and try to open the door again, but it was locked. So I ran. I ran straight out, straight ahead, without any idea where I was or where I was going. And no one stopped me. They’d let me go.
I walked for a long time across an open field before I came to a road. I kept looking over my shoulder the whole way. Thinking, There must be some mistake. They were surely going to come after me. But no one came.
At dawn a truck drove by, and I raised my arms, signaling for help. I wasn’t sure it was the right thing to do, but I was afraid I wouldn’t make it out there. I’d thought I was capable of escaping a firing squad, but I wasn’t even capable of withstanding cold and desolation.
The truck dropped me off in the middle of the city. At the very same square where I was separated from Masood, Noora, and Rozbeh. I couldn’t say if that had happened yesterday or several days ago.
I wanted the square to look just like it had before everything happened. I wanted it to be standing there, stately, with the statue of the Shah in the middle of the roundabout and John Wayne posters hanging on the cinema walls. I wanted to turn back the revolution to the last dictatorship, the old shit. Or at least I wanted to turn back time to any point where I could have chosen to stay out of it.
It was only after I jumped out of the truck that I remembered they took my purse. I didn’t have a cent on me. So I started walking again. I walked and walked. It was an endless walk. I kept thinking as I walked, It’s not easy to fight. The fight is not easy. It’s not easy to fight. It played in a loop in my head. It’s not easy to fight.
What We Owe Page 4
