Camelia

by Camelia Entekhabifard

  Then, in the fourth grade, Khanum Arablu, my religious instruction teacher, said in front of the thirty students in our class, “Camelia was the name of a depraved Western woman, and it doesn’t befit you, a Muslim girl, to have the name of a disreputable woman. Certainly, your family didn’t know anything about where this name came from.” I looked at her wide-eyed. She was very pale, and the black veil she wore under her black chador covered her whole forehead down to her eyebrows and both of her cheeks. She told me to change my name with the ease she might ask me to close the curtains, saying, “Somayeh. The name Somayeh is becoming of a smart, bold, and articulate girl like you. Somayeh is the name of a woman worthy of Islam, a woman who, because of her unshakeable faith and devotion, is ready to sacrifice herself for the noble cause of all Muslims and freedom-loving people of the world. In sha’ Allah, with the blessing of this name, you will become one of the women who struggle for Islam as mujahedin.” She picked up her pen and crossed out “Camelia” and wrote above it “Somayeh.” “I personally will call you Somayeh from now on.”

  My eyes burned like two little balls of fire. The tears wouldn’t come. When the bell rang for recess, you’d have thought it was a special alarm to spread the news of my humiliation. Mournful sympathizers came to our classroom in droves to stare at me and peek at the attendance book. My name meant so much to me, and it was well known in our school. I was Camelia, the drama star, who performed in the morning assembly and the chorus. I had won prizes every year at the festivities commemorating the revolution. But I didn’t have the courage to fix the attendance book.

  The next period our regular teacher, Khanum Sabzpushan, returned. She frowned, creasing her eyebrows together, and said that people’s names are their personal responsibility and that she would speak with the director. But early the next morning, my father burst into the director’s office like an erupting volcano. He asked to meet personally with this “chaste” woman who had disrespected his family, so he could impress upon her what it means to be depraved and disreputable. “Tell this woman that if she’s unlucky enough to have a name like Sughra or Sakina, she should think first of all about solving her own problems and go change her own name!” Sughra and Sakina were old-fashioned Arabic names, chosen typically by poor laborers or peasants. Simply put, they were ugly and difficult to pronounce, and not the sort of name any urban woman would want to be called. Apologizing profusely, the director just repeated, “The Omur-e Tarbiyati did not mean it this way, they were merely joking around with Camelia.”

  This time when the first recess bell rang, everyone flocked to hear the story of my father’s valor. The director gave our class a new attendance book, and my heartache could be forgotten. Khanum Arablu came to class without any acknowledgment of what had happened. But when it came time to demonstrate our lessons, she called on me in a shrill, wavering voice. “Madame Camelia, if it’s not too much trouble, please go to the blackboard.”

  It was Maman Pari who’d named me after a flower when I was born on the cold and snowy afternoon of January 16, 1973. My father had been looking for a name that started with a k sound to match my older sister Katayun and was immediately pleased with Camelia. At home, my mother sometimes called me Kameli or Kamel. And I hated the nickname Kami, so of course that’s what I was called at school. Kami was short for the boy’s name Kamran. But to my grandmother and my father, I was always Camelia.

  Even now, when I dream about the past, it is my Mader Pari’s home I see, the old building with its red rose bushes and grand old persimmon tree. When her tailoring school and studio were bustling with fashionably dressed clients, we weren’t allowed to go upstairs or play in the courtyard before four. I’d be waiting in my swimsuit for the moment of deliverance when I could run to Mader Pari’s “pool.” The three of us—Kati, my cousin Elham, and I—wearing bikinis, would jump into the water and paddle around for hours. When I got older, I’d gaze at my grandmother’s six by nine feet wide, one and a half feet deep garden pool in wonder. I couldn’t believe that the three of us had been able to swim in it or that I had called this little basin a pool. A small wooden platform would be brought up from the cellar in the summertime and placed at the edge of the garden, and after hosing down the courtyard and watering the garden, my grandmother would place bowls of sherbet, lettuce, and oxymel on the platform and turn on the sprinkler.

  When my grandmother heard about all the upset with the Omur-e Tarbiyati over my name, she took it as a direct insult. “She was wrong, that stupid cow! What does she know about Lady of the Camelias? You should have told her she can name her own daughter anything she likes. It is an honor to be Camelia.” And that was how I discovered there was a book with my name in the title. I excitedly asked my mother for the book about Madame Camelia. We were all avid readers, and our best birthday presents were when my mother would let us pick out any book we wanted from the local bookseller. Our bedtime was nine o’clock, but I’d curl up and secretly read with a flashlight under the covers. But my mother looked at me and said, “That book is not suitable for a girl your age!”

  Being denied permission made me want to read it more than ever. But La Dame aux Camélias was also banned. After the revolution, many Persian and foreign books were only available on the black market. Every bookshop around the University of Tehran had a sign out front saying, “We will buy the books from your library.” They’d sell second-, third-, fourth-hand books for ten times their original price. For several weeks I saved my allowance rather than spend it on chips and cheese puffs, and ordered the book from my neighborhood bookseller. When it arrived, it was a little pocket-sized edition. It looked to me about thirty years old. On the cover was a washed-out picture of young woman holding a white flower; the title read “Alexandre Dumas, fils’ masterpiece, La Dame aux Camélias.” The bookseller wrapped it up in newspaper and gave it to me in a bag. At home, I had to keep the book in my underwear drawer or under the mattress, and read it secretly, hiding in the parking lot. As I remember, the book wasn’t easy for me to understand. I hid that prohibited book for many years before I had the courage to put it on our shelves. But I remember how hard I cried on the day when I got to the final pages where Marguerite dies. I was forlorn for weeks. Marguerite Gauthier was with me everywhere I went.

  chapter six

  The Basement of Towhid Prison

  SUMMER 1999

  “They will beat the soles of your feet so badly that you won’t be able to walk. You filthy bunch of saboteurs and anarchists, now have yourselves a good excuse: President Khatami! Did you think that Agha-ye Khatami is of the same ilk as you troublemakers? Or did you think that now that Khatami is here, you could just throw away the government? Well, you were blind. The eyes of those who give their lives for the Imam and the revolution and the eyes of the soldiers of the Imam-e Zaman are open. They’ll teach you. I will teach you a lesson that your friends seem to have forgotten. There are many ways to make you talk, you animal! I will hang you. Do you understand? For spying and treason. It’ll be easy for me. I’ve signed execution orders many times for girls and boys much younger than you. Blasphemers and traitors both get mandatory death sentences. You understand? Have you been to Behesht-e Zahra? Have you seen the section for the godless, Khavaran? They’ll bury you like a dog, and then your mother can sit and cry over you. Do you understand what I’m saying?”

  A stream of sweat was running down my spine. The waistband of my pants was completely soaked. How many hours had I been sitting there on that wooden chair with my face to the wall? Ten hours? Five hours? A tight blindfold covered half my face. A prolonged, strange noise would interrupt the interrogator’s threats, and then he’d start again. It was a buzz like insects hovering around me or like a bell being hit over and over. His horrible voice and all the sounds gyrated in my head into a howl. Where was I? I didn’t know. The yelling and the insults made it impossible for me to think. I told myself I had to stay strong. No, I didn’t want to meet a fate like Guli’s. I wanted to stay alive and
return home to my mother. My mother . . . She must have been doing something to help me. I thought of all my well-connected friends, of Khatami himself, who I had campaigned for a few years earlier. I had worked for the reformist papers, for the very movement that he’d given license to in taking power. Wouldn’t he notice the news of my arrest and come to support me? I thought of Faezeh. Surely someone must be coming to save me.

  When they forced me out of the car, someone put a metal object in my hand and said that it was a radio antenna and that I had to hold it to follow them. The men couldn’t touch me themselves. I was pulled along with shaking and uncertain steps, like a blind person. I knew that every minute I was in more and more danger, and I kept telling myself to stay rational and calm. We stopped for the men guarding me to exchange some papers with the prison officials, and then we kept going. I heard a buzzer, and a woman’s hand took hold of mine and led me forward until an iron door slammed shut.

  “Lift your blindfold a little so you can see your feet and you don’t trip,” the woman said. “Now take off your blindfold.”

  She was young and slight with an olive complexion. Frowning, she gestured for me to undress. On a table lay a pair of white cotton pajamas with blue stripes, a polyester chador with a gray and violet floral pattern, and a pair of cheap men’s slippers.

  “Put on the pajamas and keep on your scarf and black socks.” My pink shirt, my jeans, my mother’s black overcoat, and my green cotton sash—one by one, they all went into a plastic bag.

  “Put your watch and purse on the table, too.” She took my shoes. “Put the sandals on, fix your blindfold, and move along behind me.” She led me into a cell and bolted the metal latch shut. “Keep quiet. Don’t bang on the door. Understood?”

  I understood. Less than ten minutes later she came back. She threw the chador at me. “Get ready quick. You’re going for interrogation.”

  What was in store for me? I acted calm, but my beating heart was making a dreadful sound. A man’s soft, nasal voice said to the olive-toned woman, whom I later named Humaira, “Follow me.”

  I was allowed again to raise my blindfold only to the point where I could see the ground in front of my feet. I followed the pair of brown shoes two steps ahead of me. I clasped the chador tightly under my chin with one hand and held the front seams together with the other. The sound of my plastic slippers gave me goose bumps. They were opentoed, and the right slipper was torn and slapped my foot with each step. Its chilling sound was the sound of my downfall—the sound my mother called low class, the steps of “laborers.”

  “Come in here. There is a chair. Sit facing the wall, keep your hands away from your blindfold, and don’t turn around.”

  “You creature from hell, this will be your grave. I’ve had my eye on you for years. I know how you throw yourself around, and I know how you like to play. You’ve fallen into the wrong hands now. I haven’t been to a prison for an interrogation in ten years, but I knew, you animal, that you’d play games with the others. I had to come after you myself. You can’t play games here, you Israeli spy. Who is your contact in Israel? Tell me! You’re going to come clean about all your spying. Don’t worry, the memories will come back to you. You’re going to get such a beating that you’ll remember the milk you drank when you were a child!”

  What memory came back to me above all else? The ten days of the Fajr International Film Festival. Ten days when my sole desire was to watch every film shown, knowing that I might never get to see them uncensored in a public movie theater. I would have given anything to see those films. It was winter, but I lined up at seven in the morning despite the cold in front of the Azadi Cinema to buy tickets for Mohsen Makhmalbaf ’s films Naseredin Shah Actor e Cinema (Once Upon a Time, Cinema) and Nobat-e Asheqi (Time of Love), and Bahram Beza’i’s Mosaferan (Travelers). In desperation, as the lines slowly moved, I flashed a big smile at the provincial soldiers who had gotten there perhaps before dawn and were now minutes from the ticket window. They made room for this delicate little girl, and in order to get those precious tickets, I endured the revulsion of their legs pressing against mine, their dry, empty smiles, and their hands running over my back. I was stifled by the swelling crowd and the deadly pressure of uncouth, opportunistic hands, but I stood my ground in hopes of getting into the theater.

  How had I found myself yet again in such a precarious and compromising situation? What might I give up to this man in Towhid so that he would allow me ahead of him? Hours seemed to pass in the ten minutes my interrogator left the room to pray. I could sense that the whole time there was a third person with us, a sinister presence behind me writing, taking careful notes. I trembled at the return of the interrogator’s footsteps as he moved close to yell in my ear. I was terrified he’d kill me. He paced about the room, coming up to me suddenly, smashing a book or a rolled-up newspaper into my head. When he drew near, I’d freeze with fear. I was waiting for a terrible blow or for something sharp to stab my head or back. The beatings and abuse were awful, but my fear was even more exacting. I kept silent facing the wall, afraid in the darkness behind the blindfold. I didn’t want to lose hope. Had there ever been a day in my life when I didn’t have some hope?

  I collapsed in my cell after the hours of interrogation. A guard brought me a cold copper bowl full of rice with stew on top. “That’s your lunch. You missed lunchtime, so it was refrigerated. In two hours, they’ll give you dinner. If you haven’t done your noon and evening prayers, you can go do your ablutions.”

  “Oh. Yes, prayers. Definitely. What time is it?” I stood up, exhausted and dizzy. It was five in the afternoon. Had I really been up there all day? With that polyester chador over my head, I faced the qibleh and knelt and stood a few times, cursing inside.

  My throat was like lead, so tense and stiff I couldn’t even swallow water. I didn’t want dinner. I wanted to be alone. My cell was like an empty crypt with white walls and a blue iron door. There was nothing in the room. The floor was covered with moist gray carpet, and above me a bright light bulb lit up the room like a spotlight. “Turning it off is out of the question!”

  I began the “homework” my interrogator had given me—several sheets of paper marked “Ministry of Intelligence, Interrogation Form.” They wanted to know how many boyfriends I’d had and what we had done together, how religious my parents were, whether I had ever drunk alcohol, what I believed about God. An expression in Arabic was printed in bold black ink at the top of each page: an-Najat fi Sidq (Deliverance lies in honesty). Below the Arabic, the Persian translation read, “Nejat-e shoma dar rastgui ast” (Save yourself by telling the truth). I spread the papers over the rough, damp carpet and lay down on them.

  I couldn’t sleep. That first night seemed it would never come to an end, as I shivered, listening to the moaning and crying throughout the prison. When they opened my cell at daybreak, I picked up the pages scattered beneath me. They glistened with the moisture they had absorbed from the floor. I performed my ablutions numbly. I had forgotten how to pray, but it didn’t matter. What mattered was that I went through the motions, as unseen eyes were watching me and would report my every move to the interrogator. When I finished, the bitch on duty barked, “Get ready. Your interrogator is waiting outside.”

  In those plastic slippers three sizes too big, I shuffled along noisily behind him up the stairs, this time more calmly. The ill-fitting, stinking polyester chador was fastened firmly to my head by the blindfold. I watched his feet, and in a self-assured Islamic tone I greeted him, “Salaamu aleikum.”

  “Aleikum as-salaam.”

  His shoes told me that he was different from the other guards. Out of the corner of my eye, through a small gap along the bottom of the blindfold, I could see that rather than the plastic sandals the other guards invariably wore, my interrogator, who was walking a few steps ahead of me, was wearing neatly polished brown leather shoes. I could see his white socks and the sharp crease in his pressed khaki pants. He must not usually work in this building to b
e able to come in so neat and clean. I remembered how the day before he had said that he hadn’t come in for an interrogation in ten years. He must be a person of higher stature, perhaps a departmental chief in the Ministry of Intelligence. I put the puzzle off to one side but kept it in mind.

  The future would prove me right. To be saved from this mess, I needed someone strong, someone with influence. He would be my savior.

  The days passed, dragged on like a thousand years, without a glimmer of hope in the darkness. It was as if I had disappeared. When I was sent to the court on the second day of my detention with two intelligence agents, they required the usual formalities. I lay blindfolded in the back of a van with tinted windows, with a sheet over my head so I wouldn’t be identified in the Tehran traffic. Our vehicle drove down the congested avenues and sometimes stopped at red lights. In the parking lot at the Revolutionary Courts, they said that I could sit up and take off the blindfold. The city was there before my eyes. I was alive and surging with energy. But I was a prisoner. I was tied up. As I was escorted through the courthouse parking lot, I felt like the criminals I had seen time after time on television or when I was on assignment, brought to the courts in the same detestable prison clothes that I was wearing. Did passersby think I was a female smuggler? Or a woman who had stabbed her abusive husband with a dainty little dagger? I hung my head in shame. Who was I?