Camelia

by Camelia Entekhabifard

  Farhad opened the door of the public relations building across the courtyard and called to me. “Miss Entekhabi, Agha-ye Muhandes has arrived.” A little shudder ran through my body.

  I took my chador out of my bag.

  The day after my release, my mother, my sister, and I had gone down to Khiaban-e Zartusht to pick out material for a chador. It wasn’t a hard decision; I chose a light fabric, just thick enough. The shopkeeper who cut the piece congratulated me. With the cloth wrapped up in a bag, we took a taxi straight to my paternal grandmother’s house. Her name was Parvin, so I called her Maman Bozorg or Maman Pari. She’d been a successful seamstress in the old days. Forty years ago, her tailoring school on Khiaban-e Amiriyeh was bustling with the most chicly dressed women in Tehran. When I was a child, I would often play there. There was a display case full of cloth flower decorations, handmade by my grandmother, and another with tiaras and bridal bouquets. Each flower was a masterwork of beauty and craftsmanship. And my grandmother’s fine floral hand embroideries on tablecloths and cloth napkins were exquisite worlds unto themselves. There were wardrobes filled with evening gowns and jeweled and sequined dresses, and there were half-sewn wedding dresses on mannequins. We weren’t allowed to touch anything. But on Fridays, after our elaborate noontime lunches, a general naptime was enforced. The pillows and bedsheets were brought out of the walk-in closet, and everyone had to rest until four. While everyone else was sound asleep, my cousin Elham and I would get up, quiet as mice, and creep upstairs to the tailoring shop. We’d open the wardrobes full of dresses . . . fabric . . . threads and needles . . . and the displays of flowers and bridal hair clips. . . . Time and time again, I pinned them to my hair and stood in front of the mirror looking at myself from behind and from the front, standing away and up close.

  But that day I wasn’t coming to my eighty-year-old grandmother, now living in a small apartment in the north of Tehran, for evening finery. I wanted her to fashion the piece of black cloth into that pyramid they call a chador. It was a simple matter. I stood at the table where she ate her lunch and draped the cloth over my head. My grandmother looked worried.

  “Maman Pari, I’ve been swallowed by a black cone,” I joked, hoping to cheer her up. She seemed to understand that if I needed a new chador for “official” visits, it meant that the Ministry had kept a hold on me—that I wasn’t really free yet. My mother interrupted, “No, it’s like people who have epilepsy. They draw a line around you to keep Satan away.” Then we all laughed.

  The cigarette fizzled on the soaking wet ground and went out. I murmured to myself, “May Satan keep away from me . . . ,” and threw the black chador around myself and headed toward the public relations building. Agha-ye Muhandes was waiting.

  When I came to the prison, I chose names for the guards so I could tell them apart. Each group started their shift at nine in the morning and finished at nine in the morning the following day. They were employees of the Ministry of Intelligence and were not permitted to disclose their names to the prisoners. They referred to themselves as nameless soldiers for the Imam-e Zaman, the Imam of Time, who, according to the Shi’a faith, will reappear to guide the faithful at the apocalypse. I chose names that suited their shapes, appearances, and ages. The interesting thing was that they took a liking to my names and started calling each other by them. Zohreh and Monir and Taibeh were on one shift and Leila and Humaira and Hajiya Khanum were on another.

  “Well! What do we have here? So at last it’s come to the chador? There isn’t a single proper chador in your whole house! What, now you’re Muslims?” Leila mockingly held the hem of my chador to show off its fine knit to Humaira, the half-wit, and Hajiya Khanum. It was a chador of fine black chiffon with raised velvet roses.

  I had been in prison nearly two months. The day before, I had been moved from Towhid Prison to the Revolutionary Court for my first court appearance. All I had to cover my head was the black overcoat that I had thrown on when they came to arrest me. Taibeh Khanum, the plump guard with half-blond frizzy hair who specialized in dream interpretation, auxiliary prayers, and in all manner of irregular religious supplication, had lent me her black chador. She was a kind woman and had taught me a verse from the Qur’an to recite four times during interrogation and breathe at my interrogator to block his mind.

  The women who guarded us, from the moment their shift started until the following morning, were locked in just like us. They sat all day eating and keeping the corridors under watch on closed-circuit television. They would take turns calmly checking on us in our cells every fifteen to thirty minutes through little peep-holes but would only open our doors four times a day. The first for early morning prayers, then three more times for prayers, which also coincided with the three daily meals. Aside from that regulated cycle, under no circumstances would they come open the door; you couldn’t even have unscheduled bathroom visits. But over the months I was in prison, they started talking about my good behavior, and I was allowed to have an occasional cup of tea or an extra bathroom visit.

  The chador that Taibeh Khanum had lent me was thick and heavy, and the second I put it over my head, I was seized with a feeling of being pulled backward from behind. It weighed twelve or thirteen pounds, and I had to press my hands together under my chin like a vice so it wouldn’t slip off. When I came back from court, my head ached and my wrists hurt so much I couldn’t move them. I complained to Taibeh and asked her how she held it on her head every day. The three guards laughed. Taibeh Khanum lifted up my wrist and brought it next to her own. Her wrist was at least two times thicker than mine. They took a look at my petite form and said, “Who is going to marry such a weak and sickly girl!”

  The next morning, before I was to be moved again to the courthouse, my interrogator visited my cell block with a plastic bag. My mother had sent me the most beautiful chador in our house. We had other chadors at home. We wore them to funerals at the Behesht-e Zahra or to government offices where “sisters without chadors will not be received.” They were worn when we went with my mother to the imamzadehs to pray and make votive offerings. But the exquisite chador with the velvet flowers was my sister Katayun’s, bought during her wedding shopping. In Iran, it is customary for a black chador to be bought for the bride.

  Now the chador was in the hands of Leila, the fat prison guard. Her sly eyes were fixed on the expensive, delicate fabric as she worked it vigorously. What did she understand of the message carried in the heart of that chador? I knew that my mother and Kati had sent me the best they could to tell me they loved me. I clenched my teeth together.

  One after another, each guard said a little piece, using the chador to judge my family. I wanted to thrust out my hand and slash Leila’s face with her deceitful little eyes. She was a lot younger than me, maybe twenty-two, and I knew what she wanted. She wanted to hear my cries swell until I’d have to be sent down to the basement to be whipped like the others I’d heard her drag across the floor.

  I could bear their laughter. Leila’s world was the world of her Revolutionary Guard husband. She would come and see my newly washed underwear, hung on a nail behind the cell door to dry, and would say in a loud voice filled with contempt, “But are you not a virgin? Aren’t you ashamed to be wearing these? Who did you want to show them to anyway?” She was fascinated with my yellow ruffled Victoria’s Secret underwear that I had bought in New York. And when my mother sent me underwear from home, she sent fine lingerie, and it became another source of jealousy for little Leila. On bathing days during Leila’s shift, I’d wash myself and run out, even if I wasn’t completely finished, because she’d secretly watch me. One time I shouted, “Oh, for the love of God!” and she turned her head away, and then she brought it back. She had been comparing her body to mine, it seemed, and took pleasure in my discomfort.

  When they left me with Kati’s chador, so I could dress to go to court, my tears poured forth. Inside my cell, I buried my face in the black fabric. The sweet smell of my sister’s perfume rippled th
rough the cloth. Kati was right there with me; I could pinpoint the moment she sprinkled the perfume on the chador for me, to give me the fresh scent of the freedom outside these walls. I shut my eyes. I threw my arms around my sister and wept with all my heart.

  I had fallen in love with my interrogator—but the chador brought me painfully back to reality. In those two months alone in my cell, I’d tried to forget my life before. I was determined to find salvation by becoming a good Muslim, and being a good Muslim required sacrifice. So I sacrificed the memory of my family, believing that the only way to be released was to gain my interrogator’s trust. My faith and my future were in his hands. I needed love and the power of love to change my desperate situation, and the person closest to me was the person I saw every day, my interrogator. I started loving him in my own way. First I began to trust him and believe that he truly could help me. Then I confessed to him, I told him about everything, from the way my parents had met and married to stories from my childhood and growing up, to my years as a poet and writer and a reformist reporter. I felt like a nun, I felt that I needed this confession.

  In love, I concentrated only on him. I couldn’t think about my beloved family outside. When I dreamed of him, it gave me peace and serenity, and I could forget his cruel treatment. I’d hear him coming down the hall for me, and I couldn’t wait—I would imagine he wasn’t coming to torture me but to love me. I needed this peace of mind to keep from going crazy and to store up energy to stay strong. How could I force him to love me, too? He thought of me as mofsed, deserving execution. I couldn’t change him and I couldn’t change the world. But I’d fallen in love, and I felt it, real love. I couldn’t control my heart’s beating when I heard him approaching.

  With concentration and self-control I had cleared my family out of my mind, cleared out even my own existence. In order to win, I had to play a difficult part. We had never seen each other, as I always faced the wall in the interrogation room. I used my voice and my hands to draw him in—my voice soft and contrite as I confessed, and my hands dancing like swans. I could sense him changing slowly. I knew he couldn’t wait for the moment he could turn me toward him, when we would face each other. I knew that to be able to do this, to ever have the chance, he would have to help me escape. Then my sister, with her scented chador, brought back to life my memories of the people I loved, of all the beauty outside the walls of the prison. The chador warned me that I had to hurry, that I couldn’t lose any more time.

  I also couldn’t wait to see his face. I was confused, and I wondered—could seeing his face tell me whether I was really in love? My adventurous side, at least, wanted to see him, badly. His voice was strong, and at that vulnerable moment I desired a strong man to keep me safe. And he kept telling me that I was different. I believed that I was a smart and capable journalist who was different from others. I believed that he understood this about me, that he knew I was a person who could take risks that others wouldn’t dare consider.

  Sometimes, in the room together, he’d put photos in front of me, taken from the album the guards had seized from my room when they arrested me. Supposedly, they were used to illustrate some point, to have me explain an occasion or identify the foreigners I was with, to reveal secret information. In some of the images, I was made-up and posed at a party in a low-cut dress. He’d chosen some photos from my vacations, to Germany or southern France, where I was wearing a bikini, and he’d ask me, “Aren’t you ashamed to be dressed like that!” I’d see beyond the harsh question and my meek answer, and would imagine a pious, religious man afraid of his forbidden love, battling with himself as he looked through my photos one by one.

  chapter three

  Snapshots of the War

  SEPTEMBER 1980

  “Attention! Attention! The signal that you are now hearing, the signal that you are now hearing is a declaration of a state of red alert. This means that an air raid is imminent. Please leave your place of work and proceed to a shelter. Ooooooooooooooooooooooooooo . . .”

  Whenever this emergency broadcast came over the airwaves of Radio Tehran, wherever we were, we froze in our tracks. “Feridun! Feridun! Kati! Camelia?” My mother would call for us during the sudden blackouts that followed.

  “Maman, I’m here.”

  “Don’t move.”

  When I saw the flashlight shining in my face, I knew that a minute later I’d find myself being carried upside down under my father’s arm into the cellar under the courtyard of Maman Pari’s old house on Khiaban-e Amiriyeh. We would descend the dark and narrow stairs two steps at a time. My father and I would be followed by my mother, who was three months pregnant with my brother Kai Khosrou, with Katayun, and behind them, my grandmother with my youngest uncle, Behzad. My grandmother had sewn a neck purse for everyone in the family, and we put our identity papers and a little bit of money in them. I don’t know why—maybe so the rescue crew would be able to identify us in case we were found buried under debris? From the cellar we heard the sound of airplanes and the stammer of antiaircraft fire. My father and my uncle usually left us women alone in the cellar and went up to watch from the roof.

  We were homeless, temporarily living with my grandmother. My mother, sister, and I had recently returned to Tehran from Frankfurt, where we’d been waiting for my father to join us. We had gone to Germany after my parents finally realized that the situation in Iran for people like us, with our background, was only getting worse. The “tomorrow” we looked toward wasn’t coming fast enough. But for a few weeks, while we waited in Frankfurt, my father had been dragging his heels. He had sold our house (our villa that we had so longed for, built right next to the princess’s palace, and in which we had lived for only three months) for the cheapest price imaginable, and the buyers had moved in early, with our furniture still in the house, without paying the full amount. One day, after she had gotten off the phone with my father, my mother immediately called the airline and told us, “We have to go back so I can straighten things out with your father. He has thrown away not only our house, but also our brand new furniture.” The plan was that we’d return to Germany with my father before the schools opened.

  At Mehrabad airport in Tehran, my mother was very nervous as we lined up to be searched. She had hidden in her clothes the latest issue of Paris Match that had pictures of His and Her Royal Highness in Panama. “Excuse me, this lady is pregnant. Please let her to the front of the line,” called out a woman’s voice. Everyone moved aside for my mother. Three months pregnant, she made her way slowly to the front. The sisters, draped all in black with black gloves, stepped forward meekly. They fixed their eyes on my mother’s, and seeing the cold indifference she wore on her face, they made a quick, cursory search of our things, and we were on our way. The next morning was September 22, 1980, and when we woke, the announcement came over the radio: “Respected citizens, Iraq has attacked our southern borders and has bombed Mehrabad airport.” We all knew very well what that meant. Until further notice it would not be possible to leave Iran.

  At the beginning of the war, enemy planes were constantly breaking the sound barrier with a dreadful sound, and my grandmother, along with everyone else in Tehran, had secured all the windows of her house with an X of thick duct tape so that, in the event of a nearby explosion, the shattered glass would not end up strewn about inside our house. She also covered them with a dark-colored blanket lest any light escape, alerting the Iraqi planes and subjecting our neighborhood to bombardment. We’d try to finish our supper quickly in the dim light, before seven o’clock, my grandmother warning, “Hurry! Hurry up and eat! The electricity will go out soon.”

  The main topic of conversation at school in the morning was the attacks of the night before and whether any of us had lost any family or friends. There was also plenty of excitement whenever the red alert sounded over the loudspeakers. My classroom was on the third floor, and we’d drop our books and notebooks in a rush and hurl ourselves out of the building, terrified we’d wind up buried under fallin
g debris. The stairwell was extremely narrow and a good place for mischief. Everyone would start screaming, and from the back, I would push the others. We’d get jumbled up, nearly all of us stuck on the stairs with the sound of explosions above us. When we finally poured outside, I’d wink at my classmate Farnaz to set things in motion. “That was either Amirabad or Yusefabad.”

  Farnaz, nodding her head in agreement, would add, “Oh yeah, THAT’s right. Last night on Voice of Iraq, we heard them SAY that they were going to strike those two neighborhoods today.” The handful of kids near us who had family and friends in those neighborhoods would start screaming and crying. The rumor spread rapidly, and in no time half the school would be sobbing to be sent home. The superintendents never could figure out where the rumors started and could only decry our wickedness over the loudspeakers after we were back to the white level of alert. They gave cups of sugar water to all those brats who were sitting in the school office almost passed out from crying.

  But secretly, my heart would be about to explode, as I asked for permission to call my father’s office at Shir-e Pak factory, near the heavily shelled Mehrabad airport. When the receptionist would answer, I’d start to calm down, then the weighty and measured voice of my father would ring clear, “Befarma’id.”