Then they asked, “Do you have any poetry about the revolution or the Imam?” I immediately answered, “Yes, of course. I have a poem written for the Imam.” There was no way I’d pass up this opportunity. That settled it, and they toured my bedroom to decide whether they should shoot there or at the studio.
Later, I opened my poetry notebook. Which of these were for Khomeini? None of them. But was there any other way to grow up in Iranian society? Everyone lied and so I lied, too. When my father woke up from his nap and heard what had happened, he was beside himself with joy. We didn’t tell him that they had wanted poetry glorifying the Imam. He was only given a one-sentence summary: “They want to do a show on Camelia.”
At the studio, there were other teenagers like me sitting and waiting with their parents for their chance to record their spots. We each had ten minutes to present whatever talent we possessed in front of the camera. The boys in front of me started by rehearsing, but when Seda va Sima started shooting, they slipped up dozens of times. The director, Khanum Parvin Shemshaki, would cut and have them start over from the beginning. When my turn came, I decided to pull out all the stops. “Would you like to run a test?” they asked me. I shook my head. I had a few of my watercolor paintings in one hand and my poetry notebook in the other. I had picked out one of the poems I most loved reading. They pulled my veil as far forward as they could. The director had sharp eyes. “Please take off your bracelets,” she said. I took them off. “Ready . . . Begin!”
I read my poem carefully, introducing it as “for the Imam . . .”
Man tura
Ta nehayat-e sepidehdam,
Az faraz-e shakhehaye purtavan-e bid,
Asheq o sarseporde am.
Man tura
Chun zolal-e cheshmeh sar-e deh,
Az miyan-e kuhsar o meh, asheqaneh dide am.
Man tura
Chun sedaye parandeha
Me to you
til the dawn’s end
From atop the strong branches of a willow tree
I am in love, devoted to you
Me to you
like the limpid waters of a pure village stream
Lovestruck, I caught a glimpse of you
Between the hills and the fog.
Me to you
Like the singing of birds . . .
Then I showed my paintings to the camera one after another. I spoke for ten whole minutes without a glitch. Khanum Shemshaki said, “You were terrific, kiddo. That was great. Great delivery. Confident. You’re a born newscaster.”
At sundown on one of the ten days of the Bahman celebrations, the program was broadcast, and quite accidentally everyone happened to be home. My father was sleeping, and I ran to wake him up. We quickly stuffed the blank video cassette we had bought to record the occasion into the VCR. My little family watched the screen attentively as my ten-minute segment was shown all over the country. Out of the corner of my eye, I looked at my father. He seemed thoroughly engrossed in the program and was beaming with pride. I knew that winning this celebrity had required deception on my part, and that I would never have been accepted in the popular crowd and on television without lying. I learned this well in school, faking my prayers in front of the Omur-e Tarbiyati each morning, pretending in order to get through the day. Yet, seeing my father’s face, I was satisfied.
SPRING 1989
When Khomeini got sick, he was shown on television in a private hospital that had been built near his house in Jamaran, and it seemed that he would recover quickly. Our relatives in Jamaran, who’d assembled at the husseinya to pray for the Imam’s health, reported faithfully the rumors that he was recovering. On the evening of June 2, 1989, my mother had hosed down the courtyard like she did every evening, and we were sitting pleasantly on the grass, eating dinner. Our upstairs neighbor Shabnam, a girl from my school, had joined us. We had our end-of-the-term English exam the next day, and I was mindlessly hoping that it would somehow be canceled. As we said goodnight on the steps, I said to Shabnam, “I’ll come get you in the morning at seven. That is, of course, unless Khomeini dies!”
The next morning at 6:45, my mother called me from the top of the stairs. I came sleepily into the kitchen. The radio was on. They were broadcasting the Qur’an. I perked up my ears. There was some thing odd about hearing the Qur’an on the radio at that time of day. The radio sounded three chimes for the start of the seven o’clock news, and then the announcer’s voice came back on. “Enna l’illah wa enna aleihi raja’un” (Verily, we come to God and to God we return). He followed with his report in Persian. “Oh great and martyr-yielding nation of Iran, the Spirit of God has rejoined with God.” I didn’t even have the decency to listen to the rest of the announcement. I let out a shout and sprung up and down, yelling, “Khomeini died! Khomeini died!” And then my mother started raining blows down onto my head and shoulders. I escaped and ran outside. “Shabnam! Shabnam!” She opened the door. “He died! He died! Khomieni died!” Shabnam’s sleepyheaded mother, Khanum Mir Eskandari, appeared behind her and quickly followed me downstairs to our apartment. My shoulders stung. My mother sat dumbfounded by the radio. When she saw me, she started going crazy all over again. She was completely hysterical. To this day I still don’t know why, with news like this, on a day such as this, I needed to get a beating.
Khanum Mir Eskandari asked, “Now what are we going to do?” The war had come to an end, but the economic and social situation in Iran showed no sign of improvement. Was there going to be another revolution? Would Iraq attack us again? Would mobs pour into the streets? Would the mullahs in line to succeed Khomeini start fighting? Would civil war break out?
To me, the first important thing that happened was that the schools were closed for a week, and the final exams were postponed. A period of national mourning was announced. A council of experts elected the president, Hojjat ul-Islam Ali Khamene’i, as the successor to Ayatollah Khomeini in his position as supreme leader. New presidential elections were rapidly scheduled, and Hashemi Rafsanjani was elected president, an office he would hold for two terms.
Tehran sunk into an uncharacteristic calm over these heaven-sent holidays. Khomeini’s funeral was held at Tehran’s large musala and was broadcast live. My family didn’t budge from our places in front of the television the whole day. We weren’t going to miss a second of Iran’s most historic moment. We ate breakfast, lunch, and dinner in front of the television. Everyone would just dart into the kitchen to fetch their own food.
Khomeini’s glass casket was carried vertically so people could see him. He was covered all over with white gardenias. Millions of mourners had come from all over Iran, men and women, all of them crying and beating their heads and faces. And Khomeini, up there in that glass coffin, was sleeping peacefully. From the musala, where the mobs bid farewell to the leader of the revolution and the founder of the Islamic Republic, the funeral procession wound its way to Behesht-e Zahra for the burial.
Millions more waited for Khomeini at Behesht-e Zahra, and thousands had climbed up on top of huge rectangular containers, which reminded me of those a movie crew might have, that had been set out to hold back the crowd. The grave had been dug, and there were piles of dirt surrounding it. When the procession arrived, the people rushed forward, breaking through the police lines. The mounds of earth reserved for covering the corpse vanished in the blink of an eye. Everyone grabbed the blessed dirt as Khomeini’s body bobbed through the crowd, passed from one set of hands to another. Everyone wanted to touch the body or make off with a piece of his shroud. We watched in astonishment as his shroud was torn off, and his naked body fell out of it. The photographers seized on this unique moment, and the cover of next week’s Time magazine showed the leader of the revolution with his shroud falling to expose his bare chest and arms.
The corpse was rescued from the clutches of the screaming, surging mob and put in a helicopter. According to Uncle Ali, they flew him back to the Manzeria clinic to be wrapped up in a new shroud. Soldiers drove t
he people back, and more troops arrived on the scene. I can’t recall exactly how much later the helicopter returned with the body, but when it did, they quickly buried him and blocked the grave so the crazed mourners couldn’t dig up his final resting place and steal the soil.
The rumors we heard later told another story. People said that, among the mourners, it was mujahedin and family members of victims executed by the regime who were tugging wildly at Khomeini’s body and who ripped his shroud to pieces.
Little by little, my poems and ghazals were starting to get published in newspapers and magazines. When I won first prize in a poetry competition for our province, my reward was to join with a group of other distinguished students to meet the new supreme leader, Khamene’i, and then visit Khomeini’s tomb. The magnificent mausoleum was fashioned after the Al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem, and the building had progressed with unbelievable efficiency. It would be completed sometime around the first anniversary of his death. I carried in my purse a black chador and the letter of permission from my mother (my father didn’t know anything about the field trip, and we didn’t say a word to him).
At the entrance to the mausoleum, we took off our shoes. The construction still wasn’t quite finished, and there were men at work on the exterior. We approached the gold-encased grave, and the teacher with us from the Omur-e Tarbiyati kissed the railings and tossed an envelope of money into the tomb. The interior of the tomb was full of coins, women’s gold jewelry, and envelopes that people had thrown as votive offerings. On the white marble floor in front of me, there was a ghostly image of a red tulip. I looked up, and above the grave I saw stained-glass windows decorated with pictures of tulips. A line of poetry that had been written on doors and walls around the city came to mind: Az khun-e javanan vatan laleh damideh (From the blood of the young, the nation has sprouted tulips).
Tulips had sprouted here, too.
chapter eight
I Will Plant My Hands in the Garden
JULY 1999
“Tell me, you whore, who is your Israeli contact! How many times a year did you meet with him? I’ll have them beat you like a dog! Do you need me to tell you the name of your contact in Israel? I’ll tell you. Yaqub!”
I racked my brain. Yaqub . . . Yaqub . . . Nothing came to mind. They must have known I’d met George Soros in America . . . maybe that’s what he was talking about.
“I swear to God I don’t know. I swear on the Qur’an you’re mistaken.”
“Dirty little rat! Our intelligence is very accurate. Yaqub came with you from Jordan to Dubai so the two of you could sleep together, and then you left for Tehran. Tell me what information you exchanged with him! Tell me, or I’ll let you rot in your cell until you put your vile ways behind you.”
I had made that trip as a reporter for Zan. His shouting was lost as that strange horrible buzzing tore through the room again. My head was filled with its insect sound. And it surprised me into remembering Yaqub, as my interrogator’s voice drifted further away.
I’d been exhausted by my trip to Jordan but so excited to tell Faezeh and my friends at Zan everything about it that I’d gone home from the airport only to drop off my bag before heading over to the paper. I hadn’t even taken a shower. When the funeral of King Hussein had been announced, I had made the decision overnight to report on the event and had bothered the Jordanian ambassador in Tehran at his home late in the evening in order to get a visa on the spot. Now I was back home, jet lagged and thrilled that my article had made the front page.
“And you are? Let me see if she’s in the office.”
My co-worker Farnaz fixed her big green eyes on me. She covered the receiver and said, “What a voice . . . Who is this guy? He said he’s Yaqub from Dubai.”
I jumped up and grabbed the handset. “Salaam . . . Yes, I made it back fine . . . Thanks for calling . . . Bye.”
The biggest charge I faced in prison was spying for the Israeli government. The sick paranoia of the Ministry of Intelligence could not accept that I had merely drunk a cup of tea with Yaqub, that I had met him and his friends accidentally, with no idea where they were from or where they were going. I had stopped in Dubai for only eight hours to transfer to my flight home to Tehran. With a transit visa I went to a hotel in the city to shower and have breakfast. And with the hospitality I was raised to display, I introduced myself as soon as I noticed that the strangers seated next to me were speaking in Persian. “Salaam,” I said. “I’m Iranian, too.” Typically, all Iranians outside of Iran will do this. Regardless of how the stranger looks, they’ll great each other with a warm, “Are you Iranian? I heard you speaking Persian!” (I should say that my attitude has changed. Since I left Iran the last time, if anyone asks me if I’m Iranian, I curtly answer, “Yes, I am,” and avoid further conversation.)
I told Yaqub and his friends about King Hussein’s funeral in Jordan. They explained that they were on a trip to buy antiques; one of them was from Tehran and the other two had a shop in London. Yaqub was wearing a fancy chain around his neck. I looked at the pendant and asked, “You have a Faravahar—are you Zoroastrian?”
“This is the sign of a commander in the Israeli armed forces. We are Jewish. That’s not a problem, is it?” I shook my head. He explained that like many other Iranian Jews, he had left Iran at the beginning of the revolution. He’d gone to Israel and served in the military, though now he was living in London. They walked me to a taxi, and we exchanged business cards, and I promised to stop by their store someday on my travels, if possible. That was all.
My interrogator kept asking me about a pendant I used to have, a chai I always wore, shining under my thin head scarf. Several girls in my office had asked to see it, wanting to know about the Hebrew word. I told them it meant “life” and that the charm was a gift from a Jewish friend in Germany. Then I’d joke with them, making my eyes wild and saying, “Didn’t you know, I’m Jewish!” and laughing at their shocked faces. But I didn’t have the chai anymore—I’d given it away to a lovely woman from the United Nations whom I’d met in Bosnia. She’d invited me for her birthday, and all I had with me to give her was my necklace. Since I had nothing to show my interrogator, I swore to him that it never existed.
Yet now that it had been settled that I would confess to sleeping with sixty-seven people, I threw Yaqub’s name in there, too. And so I confessed that Yaqub had followed me up to my room and that we had slept together and had kept in touch by phone after that, but that I never knew he was a spy. If it was a sin to have sex outside of marriage, the sin was raised to the sky to sleep with a Jewish man. I talked about Yaqub like I’d known him for years. They wanted so many details, I began to think that maybe Yaqub really was a spy sent by Israel to Dubai to contact me. . . . Or maybe he was double agent, and the Iranian government had told him, “Camelia seems too easygoing, check that girl out for us.” I was frustrated and confused to the point where I couldn’t concentrate on anything beyond giving my interrogator what he wanted. I promised him I was terribly sorry, that I’d never speak to strangers again in my life. He asked me, “How could you sleep with him?” And I answered, “I wasn’t educated properly, I wasn’t a good Muslim, I was addicted to sex. I’m full of sin, you should punish me however you decide . . .” I was so tired. I told him I had wanted to find someone to marry and that I’d tried out anyone who seemed interested in me, but I’d failed, and now I wanted to become clean, to become a good Muslim and beg God for forgiveness.
Seda va Sima regularly broadcasted interviews with young people who had been arrested in the student strikes. They’d bring the helpless captives in tied up, and they’d confess to ties with the monarchists and agitators against the government and to accepting money from various groups to undermine the Islamic Republic. I’d seen Manuchehr Mohammadi and Qolamreza Mohajeri Nezhad, two leaders among the student activists, brought before the camera. In the glorious dawn of the reform movement, Mohammadi had been on fire. He was outspoken and brave and toured the globe, from East to West
and even to the Americas. He lectured Iranians in exile, inviting them back to Iran to witness a new era, proclaiming an “Iran for all Iranians,” the message of Khatami’s campaign. Iranians in exile had never heard someone speaking out so boldly against the government. Now as I lay on the hard, smelly carpet, I could sometimes hear what I recognized as Manuchehr Mohammadi’s sickly voice somewhere above me. He cried like he was out of his mind and begged God for help.
My whole body hurt. I had waited days in a vacuum, through the harsh interrogations, imagining Faezeh or Golriz, my friend from a human rights organization, appearing like angels to save me. And now, from among all the voices that surrounded me, the strongest voice came from inside me, saying that if I ever wanted to get out of here, I had better help myself.
I buried my head in my hands and had a conversation with myself. I was a good actress. I had starred in leading roles in plays in high school. I loved the theater, but drama wasn’t an acceptable pursuit to my parents. I had always told myself that I’d get another chance to prove my brilliance on the stage and that it would be the greatest performance of my life. I knew that building up my focus would take days or months, and I resolved myself. I took a deep breath and plunged into my role.
Every night and every morning, when I was alone in my cell, I’d close my eyes and meditate. My painting instructor, Feiruzeh Gul Mohammadi, had taught me this invaluable art of gathering energy and channeling it toward a specific goal. I was focusing my energy to work on the mind of my interrogator. Feiruzeh was a dervish, and steeped in those principles, she channeled her overflowing energy and light into the creation of her art. At the end of her watercolors class, we would sit cross-legged and meditate as Feiruzeh asked us to find a point within ourselves and concentrate. “Your eyes will open themselves to the images that will be embodied in your paintings.” She inspired me, and over the New Year’s holidays I even went to find the dervish in the main Tehran bazaar who sat from the first twilight till dawn writing Sharaf ash-Shams prayers on the backs of yellow carnelian stones. I didn’t have my carnelian ring with me in prison, but I closed my eyes and envisioned the outcome I most desired: to be free. Free as I was when I sat in my painting classes during the summertime, watching the butterflies circling the sunflowers in Feiruzeh’s beautiful garden, or when I sat by her fireplace in the winter as the snow fell heavily outside. Where were those days, when did they disappear? I longed for the freedom of my youth that was gone forever, but I still hoped for a day free from threats and fear, a day I could send flowers to my mother to thank her for giving birth to me, when I could simply sit and say to God, “I am happy.”
Camelia Page 13
