I was choking on my tears, thinking about my friends who were free to walk around in the streets and the bazaar. Who was thinking of me? Were they waiting for me?
After I was released, I happened to see Afshin in Faezeh’s office, and I said to him, “Afshin, the guards’ radio was playing while you were reading poetry, and I listened to your voice and cried and cried out of loneliness. If only everyone whose voices are heard in far-away places could know that someone homesick, imprisoned, and heartbroken is listening and they might offer a message of warmth.”
Afshin replied, “Camelia, if I had known that day that you were listening to me, I would have told you this: at the end of the night the darkness becomes light again.”
In the prison ward, I felt the whole world had forgotten about me and that all my friends had turned their backs on me. The only person left who listened to me, who seemed to care about me—though he showed me nothing but abuse—was my interrogator. I told him anything he wanted to hear. I embellished my stories with fabulous details. I even told him my best story of defiance and rebellion.
I told him how the summer before Khatami was elected, my high school friend Ghazal and I were shopping in the bazaar on Meidan Tajrish when a woman in a chador grabbed my shoulders from behind. “You’re coming with us!” I wasn’t wearing makeup and my hair wasn’t showing and my overcoat came down to my ankles. But the woman pointed to my summer shoes and said that I wasn’t wearing socks.
I told her with a sneer that she must be joking. People milling about Meidan Tajrish had gradually formed a circle around us. The woman yanked my coat and dress up above my knees to prove that I wasn’t wearing stockings—she said that if a strong wind came, my underwear would show. All those onlookers saw my body exposed above my knees. It was impossible that a summer wind could blow as hard as she’d whipped up my clothing. Ghazal jumped in and said, “Pardon me, she didn’t realize, she just forgot. I’ll go into the bazaar right now to buy socks and will come right back.”
The sisters of the Guidance stood me next to the goldsmith’s shop, and one guarded me while two more were busy checking other girls and women. A heavy-set girl and her mother were walking toward us; the teen was wearing bright lipstick, and her dyed hair was hanging out of her veil. She was just too perfect for the Guidance. Two sisters marched right up and grabbed them, trying to force them into their minibuses. It ended up in a scuffle, and I looked at the woman next to me, her attention absorbed in watching her colleagues struggle. My blood was boiling in my veins. I knotted my right fist and punched her in the face as hard as I could. She lost her balance, and her face smacked into the window of the goldsmith’s shop. Did I understand the gravity of what I had done? It didn’t matter. The anger in that punch had been building up for twenty years.
The bitch spun toward me as I tried to act naturally, as if I hadn’t hit her. But her friend who was wrestling with the mother and daughter came charging at me like a tiger. They started beating me, and the mother and the young woman came over to help me. People around us started joining in, trying to separate us, and then unbelievably, men started coming out of the alleys and the bazaar, and began to rip the sisters’ black veils and chadors apart. The proprietor of the goldsmith’s shop whispered in my ear, “Quick, go into the bazaar and run away through the little square in the middle. If they arrest you, you’re done for.” At the last minute, I stood facing the woman who’d lifted my dress. I raised my hand and brought it down on her face with all my might. “Whatever you said to me, you were talking about yourself!” And then I lost myself among the crowds in the twists and turns of the bazaar. I found Ghazal near the Khiaban-e Vali-ye Asr exit. There was a pair of cheap nylon stocking in her hand. We walked quickly south, and I opened the door of the first taxi we saw. Frightened, Ghazal asked, “What did you do? The Pasdaran have surrounded the whole bazaar.”
My interrogator reveled in this story. He told me, “Masha-Allah!” The Ministry of Intelligence considered it its duty to help me “unburden” myself. I unburdened myself of many true secrets, and I came to believe my own lies and mythical creations. And with great dramatic elegance, I measured my voice, showing my interrogator my sensitivity, my passion, and my remorse at not having brought my moral corruption, Godlessness, and spiteful contrariness under control sooner.
I prayed at the correct times five times a day, knowing the guards were watching me. What I recited under my breath with the chador over my head was this: “Oh Lord, give me strength and endurance to bear these days. Oh Lord, don’t let me be beaten and broken by these mean, chicken-hearted people.”
One day, while I was performing ablutions, one of the guards, Zohreh, stopped next to me and said, “Oh my goodness, have you always done it like this? That’s not how hands should be washed.”
“In the treatise of Agha-ye Khui, it says only ‘hands.’ There’s nothing about how you wash them.”
She went and got a different treatise, Agha-ye Khomeini’s, and as we discussed again the proper manner of performing ablutions, I slyly asked her to entrust me with the book for a few hours. I thought about the guards watching through the hidden holes drilled in the door as I prayed. I memorized the preferred manner of praying and the correct number of prostrations at each stage. I could not afford to make another mistake.
When was the sun in the sky? Summer ended, and I was still in my solitary cell. I was given religious books from the prison library to read. One of the books was about the candle stuffing of Baha’is by Amir Kabir. The book told how he persecuted them and would stuff all the orifices of their bodies with lit candles and parade them around the city in a ghastly spectacle. My stomach churned, and I shut the book in disgust. It was horrifying.
My interrogator told me that once upon a time under the rule of the Shah, Hashemi Rafsanjani and Ayatollah Montazeri had been prisoners and were tortured in the same detention center we sat in now. I thought of how, in the first week of my imprisonment, there had been many other women in the ward, and we would be brought out to bathe all together. The guards took us out of our cells without a word and lined us up blindfolded. Each of us had a bundle under our arm holding our prison uniform, underwear, shampoo, and soap. We were told to stay silent and take hold of the back of each other’s chadors. There were perhaps fifteen of us, and we moved forward like a train. Down and down we went. Then they sent us to wash in a line of shower stalls separated by green vinyl curtains. We had our own showerheads but the combined dirty water would run across the slimy marble and over all our feet. It was fascinating to think that Montazeri and Hashemi had also washed in that underground shower, and even more fascinating to consider that after the revolution the new Islamic government allowed the same hidden detention center to be used. What about in the future? Would I come back as a free citizen one day to look at my cell and to read the poems written on the walls?
My romance with my interrogator was half serious in my mind and half designed just to pass the time. I knew, but he didn’t know, that he wanted to be at my side. I knew, and love floated like a fresh spring breeze into Towhid Prison. To send my love letters and to nourish this relationship, I had only my hands, and it was with these hands that I spoke to him.
One Friday, Zohreh opened the door of my cell to tell me that my interrogator had come for me. She looked at me carefully and asked, “Why is he coming to interrogate you on a Friday? Don’t tell me you’ve made this believer fall in love with you.”
With my face to the wall, I crossed my legs and sat up very straight in the chair and arranged my chador.
“Don’t think that I don’t have a wife and children or that I couldn’t stand to be away from your highness’s baboon physique. I realized you would be lonely, all alone on a Friday, so I came to see you. Hold out your hand.”
I was afraid. Was he going to give me lashes on my palm?
“Don’t be afraid. Hold out your hand.”
He put something in my hand.
“Raise your blindfold just
a little. Only a tiny bit. It’s a date. I’ve brought you a date! Tell me, what do you do in your room when you don’t have anything to do? The sisters tell me you sit still for hours like a statue or an Indian yogi.”
“I meditate.”
“Yes. You’re very bright. That’s why you haven’t been crying and screaming. Masha-Allah. You’re clever.”
After two months, this was my first sweet, the first outside food I’d had in prison. The food servings were always small, but I’d never asked for more. I hadn’t seen the sun or the color of the sky for two months, but I hadn’t complained about that either. I had never banged on the door begging to use the bathroom like the others, while the guards laughed at them. I had never complained about the condition of my room. My beloved long hair was falling out, like leaves in autumn, and I had made a big ball of it in the corner of my room. I had to stand firm to play my role.
I had always been told that I had beautiful hands. And years of dance lessons had made me graceful. Before I was swamped with work at Zan, I used to receive private pupils. “We lift ourselves slowly on our tiptoes. We move our hands apart, then lift and lower them softly and lightly with the music. Smile and let your hands dance. The audience looks at the dancers’ hands and faces. Float on the air with your hands.” My little pupils would wave their hands up and down as they watched mine.
I knew now that the man in the corner at Towhid Prison was watching my hands, and all of my artistry flowed into them.
chapter eleven
Zan
SUMMER 1998
In Tehran, a brand new newspaper, Zan, was about to be launched. A friend arranged a meeting for me with the newspaper’s distinguished owner and editor, Faezeh Hashemi. Yet again I found myself waiting to talk to a new editor in chief, with my clippings in hand, this time at the guard post in front of Zan’s building on Kucheh-ye Simin off of Khiaban-e Vali-ye Asr. On the second floor, I knocked on the door to Faezeh’s office. Her hoarse voice sounded from inside, “Befarma’id.”
We sat facing one another at her conference table. She studied my face. “Haven’t I seen you somewhere before?”
I smiled. “We were classmates at the university.” Once I mentioned it, she remembered me well, and I asked about another girl from our class, her close friend Maryam. She told me Maryam was now working for her at the Women’s Solidarity Association, which Faezeh headed. Faezeh divided her time between Zan and the Majlis. She had been elected a member of the fifth Majlis with more than a million votes in Tehran. Many of the women I’d gone to college with were now gaining prominent positions in various fields. The job at Zan was competitive, and Faezeh quizzed me in the interview with detailed questions about my work and background.
The mood of the country was fresh and progressive during the promising early period of Khatami’s reform government. Working under Faezeh’s bold, intrepid direction was perfect for me. The first issue of Zan included my exclusive report from Bosnia and the war in Kosovo. I was given the title “special correspondent,” a largely unknown term in the Iranian press, and my picture appeared in the paper above my article.
I was emboldened and sought to be the first journalist on the scene at major political events. In June 1998 I was watching the news in Sarajevo when suddenly a headline flashed on the screen. Mazar-e Sharif had fallen to the Taliban, and the Iranian embassy had been taken in a surprise attack. The embassy staff and a journalist from an Iranian news agency were being held hostage in an undisclosed location. All it took was a call to Faezeh, and I was en route to Afghanistan.
Two days later I left for Karachi, Pakistan, and from there on to Peshawar. But I still needed a visa. For several days, I found myself at loose ends, sitting on the curb in front of the Taliban consulate in Peshawar. The Taliban were now Iran’s premier enemy, and after the seizure of fourteen Iranian citizens, the possibility of a direct attack on Afghanistan by Iran loomed ominously. At Friday prayers in Tehran, there were murmurings about the threat posed by the Taliban, and the military held maneuvers along the border. As I waited, a journalist from a Taliban news agency helped me file my daily reports with Zan. Finally, a man emerged from the consulate and said, “Mulawi Ahmad will see you now.” Two Pashtun men with long beards and big black turbans waited inside, the shadows of their eyes to the ground except for once or twice when they gave me a sideways glance.
“You don’t have a mahram,” they announced. A male relative was required as a chaperone. “It is not possible for you to travel alone in the Islamic country of Afghanistan. Become mahram with one of the brothers, and we’ll even give you a car and a driver, and you can go all over, wherever you want.” This was their awkward marriage proposal. I smiled at them and said, as I walked out the door, “I swear by the Qur’an that I’ll get over that border. I’m going to Afghanistan.”
I was determined to uncover the truth about the seized Iranian journalist and diplomats. Two days later, an Iranian friend in Peshawar found me a pair of reliable Afghans to accompany me over the dirt road into Afghanistan. My escorts were closely connected to the Iranian consul general in Peshawar, and they themselves were going over to collect the latest intelligence for the Iranian embassy. But instead of waiting for them in Peshawar for any news, I decided to go with them to make my reports firsthand. I bought a burqa and cheap used shoes and clothes at the bazaar, and we headed off to Jalalabad. I posed as the wife of one of my traveling companions, and we crossed the border in an elaborately painted Pakistani bus, full of Afghans on their way home. They all had long beards, and some wore large turbans.
We spent half a day in Jalalabad, and in the evening we went directly back to Peshawar. My presence increased the risk for the two Afghans that their mission could be exposed, so we had to return to Pakistan quickly. Agents in Jalalabad had entrusted my guides with video footage of the murder of the hostages in Mazar-e Sharif. In Peshawar I found the first available opportunity to call Faezeh and relay the news.
“Are you sure?” Faezeh asked me. “This is going on the front page!”
I was sure. My report went off like a bomb in the unsettled atmosphere of Iran. A large group of the captives’ relatives gathered on the street outside of the newspaper, desperate for more information. That evening the Iranian Ministry of Foreign Affairs issued a statement denying Zan’s report, proclaiming that they were in contact with the Taliban and guaranteeing the safety of the captives.
In Peshawar, I arrived safe and sound at my friend’s house, covered in mud and dust and drenched in sweat. The following day I talked to Faezeh.
“Camelia, you’re in for it if you screwed up. I’ll have your hide. The phones have been swamped all day with calls from the Ministry of Intelligence and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. They want you to get back here fast.”
“I know what I’m saying. I saw the footage of their bodies.”
In Islamabad, the Iranian undersecretary of foreign affairs, Agha-ye Amini, who had come to Pakistan to try to work things out between Tehran and Islamabad in the face of this crisis, exploded the second he saw me. “You! What made you think you could mess around with our national security? Don’t you understand what will happen if you are captured or killed in Afghanistan? People are upset enough at the seizure of the diplomats. The murder of an Iranian girl—for them it would be a declaration of war. I’m really surprised at Khanum Hashemi. Did you want to cause a war?” A Pakistani journalist brought me the same message from the other side, from the conservative side of their government who supported the Taliban: if I wanted to save my skin, I’d better leave Pakistan immediately.
In Tehran, I walked into the newspaper’s offices like a hero in a blue burqa. Several weeks after my article was published, the Foreign Ministry officially announced the murders. The people of Iran were better prepared, psychologically and emotionally, to bear the horror of the news because of my reports in Zan.
The women who worked at Zan enjoyed total freedom in choosing what they wore. Faezeh believed the hejab was
a matter of personal choice. As a member of the Majlis, she spoke out about such issues as women being allowed to ride bicycles in public. I was proud to be working for her, and I’d leave for the office in the morning humming to myself. One after another, new newspapers followed our lead and added to the ensemble of reformist voices. The tension between the free press and the Ministry of Intelligence grew and grew. I wanted to face the problem head on, to write about the tension that was building instead of keeping quiet about it. I wanted to write about all the pressing issues that had been forbidden to me since my first day as a journalist. And Faezeh never said no.
“Faezeh, you should be president. Twenty million people would vote for you. And I’ll run your campaign.”
“You’re crazy,” she’d laugh. “I’d better ask Hamid to check your head.” Hamid Lahuti, Faezeh’s husband, was a psychiatrist who was as different from his brazen, boisterous wife as night from day. They had two children: Muna, who was the spitting image of her mother, and Hassan, who was the spitting image of his father. Our personal friendship grew closer and deeper. On Fridays, Faezeh and I would go to Karaj or up north with her kids. I’d stay over at their house some nights, and some days Faezeh would stop by our house to eat lunch and chat with my mother. This friendship was kept strictly personal and totally distinct from our professional relationship at Zan. When people would ask me about the salacious rumors that dogged Faezeh, I’d simply knit my eyebrows and reply, “I’m not interested in hearing that gossip.” I’d had to answer their stupid questions a million times. “I swear to God. I swear on the Qur’an that Faezeh lives with her husband. Yes, he’s the only husband she has, and no, she hasn’t been divorced two or three times.” But they would squint at me and say, “OK, you’re right to stick up for her. She’s your friend, and she takes care of you.” Faezeh and Hamid married when she was eighteen, and she’d never had another husband, but for some reason this particular rumor of divorce was relentless, even passing through the thick walls of Towhid Prison, where it was one of the first things my guards asked me about. Because she was a successful woman and because she was Hashemi Rafsanjani’s daughter, people wanted to trash her. There was a certain man she was close to in our office, and in typical Iranian fashion, the rumors had followed their friendship. She didn’t care to defend herself against these accusations. She stood above this kind of talk, and I followed her lead.
Camelia Page 17
