Camelia

by Camelia Entekhabifard

  When the invitation arrived from the Boston Globe for Faezeh to travel to America, she selected me to go in her place. It was the first exchange program for journalists between Iran and America since the Islamic Revolution. Khatami’s victory with twenty million votes and the subsequent lessening of the restrictions on freedom of the press had taken the world by surprise. In 1998, journalism in Iran was itself a hot news topic in the global media. Just about every week, the BBC’s Persian service or Voice of America or Radio France interviewed me. A German television station filmed a segment on me, and I was interviewed by the Japanese newspaper Asahi. “How lucky I am,” I said to my mother. “Today I have everything I’ve always wanted.”

  Five of us were chosen to participate in the American exchange: the editor in chief of Hamshahri, Mohammed Atrianfar; the editor in chief of the monthly magazine Zanan, Shahla Sherkat; the editor of the foreign edition of Iran News, Mojghan Jalali; a member of the editorial board of the newspaper Salaam, Karim Arghandeh Pour; and myself. I had worked for Agha-ye Atrianfar at Hamshahri and hated him. He had been an oppressive figure, always carrying a tasbih in his hand. He’d given me such a hard time that I had resigned from the paper in part just to get away from him. But in America, where I could finally give him a piece of my mind, he said, “Forgive me—those days have passed, and today has come, and you are successful.”

  We became friends on the trip, and I began to confide in him. Our program in New York consisted of speaking at Columbia University’s School of International Affairs and at the Asia Society. At Columbia when a few Iranian girls, students at the journalism school, volunteered to give us a tour around the campus, I looked sadly at the buildings and said to Atrianfar, “You know, what I want more than anything is to continue my education here. Do you think that’s too much to ask? But with all that’s going on in Tehran, how could I leave now?”

  We had serious journalistic work to do to reclaim our civil liberties and turn forward the wheels of reform. I couldn’t leave Iran just as our freedoms were expanding. But I still dreamed and made hopeful plans, never realizing then that I would become an exile before I could return and become a student.

  After we gave our presentation at the Asia Society, our American hosts were showing us around, when one of our escorts, Cynthia Dikstine, excitedly told us that we had been invited to George Soros’s house for tea that evening. None of us were overwhelmed with joy. She got impatient and said that he was the most important man in America and had paid for our trip. We still had no idea who he was. I racked my brain and only vaguely recalled an article I had read someplace. As we hailed two taxis to Soros’s house on Fifth Avenue, I whispered into Atrianfar’s ear, “Now I know who he is! He’s Jewish and the wealthiest man in America, and he has an empire in central Asia.” He absently nodded his head, but my wild description didn’t seem to impress him.

  In Soros’s magnificent home, a servant brought us tea in fantastic china teacups. I sat with the other women and looked at Khanum Shahla Sherkat and smiled. Mojghan looked at us, too, and giggled. And then for some reason that to this day is unclear to me, the three of us started laughing in a most ridiculous and idiotic fashion. The whole time we sat in Soros’s apartment, we couldn’t stop laughing. I went to the washroom and took a deep breath and went back to my seat. It was useless. We were laughing so hard we couldn’t even bring the teacups to our lips, and all three of us were pouring tears. Giving us a disapproving look, Atrianfar asked us in Persian to mind our manners. Even Soros interrupted himself midspeech to say, “The ladies must have spotted something quite interesting . . . It would be nice if you’d let us in on it so that we might benefit from the joke, too.” We were still overcome with laughter, making it impossible for us to answer. As we were saying good-bye and Soros was signing a copy of his book for each of us, we apologized in nervous flurries.

  A few days later, Agha-ye Atrianfar had amassed enough information about George Soros to panic. In the distinctive Esfahani accent that he was always trying to conceal, he warned us, “Soros is one of the most prominent Zionists in the world, and there may have been some kind of conspiracy behind this meeting.” He worried that by going to his house without knowing who he was, all of us would be in danger when Tehran got wind of the visit. He implored us to get rid of Soros’s book so we wouldn’t be caught when our luggage was searched in Mehrabad airport. Mojghan and Shahla Sherkat bit their lips nervously at Atrianfar’s predictions, but I only cursed my silliness and stupid laughter, and wondered why I couldn’t have shown better character. Who knew that only two years later I would end up as a freelance correspondent for Soros’s news Web site, EurasiaNet.

  Before I flew back to Iran, I stopped over in London. My first piece of unfinished business was to set up an interview with Salman Rushdie. I lay stretched out on my friend Susan’s bed in London, wondering how I could possibly track him down. In what I thought was a flash of brilliance, it came to me that I should contact the press office of the Iranian embassy. When I called, they wouldn’t give me any information over the phone and told me I needed to come in person, so I tied on a head scarf and calmly went to the embassy. But the official in charge of the cultural center challenged me immediately, wanting to know what business I had with Rushdie. The foreign ministers of Iran and England had shaken hands at the United Nations and the fatwa against him had been lifted, I explained, so it was quite natural that I, as an Iranian journalist, would be interested in interviewing a man who had lived in the shadows for years, fearing for his life. I assured him that Khanum Hashemi had given me permission.

  At two in the morning the phone rang, waking me to Faezeh’s sharp voice on the other end. “Camelia, whatever steps you’ve taken to meet with Salman Rushdie up to now, keep them to yourself. As of tomorrow, you will deny them. I just got a call from the highest level of the Ministry of Intelligence about this. Wherever you are, whatever you’re doing, put a stop to it. Got it?”

  Despite these midnight calls, relative to what I’d grown up with, the Iranian press was in full bloom, burgeoning with unprecedented freedom and gusto. It was a time when it seemed we could expose all the old taboos, when it appeared that the red tape had been rolled up and stored away. I felt like I was exposing what had always been captured in my mind, like I could step into the darkroom of the revolution and put whatever forbidden subjects caught my gaze under the light of an enlarger. Whatever I proposed to Faezeh, she had always supported me. I had built up so much courage that I had even contacted the head of Farah Pahlavi’s office in New York to ask for a future interview with the Queen. And from London, I reminded Faezeh that we’d planned for me to take a train to Paris to try and meet Abulhassan Bani Sadr, the first president of the Islamic Republic of Iran, who’d fled Tehran for Paris in 1981.

  It was snowing in Paris as my French friend Sonia and I stood at the door of a large house, waiting for the police to finish going over our identity papers. We were ushered into a cold waiting room where the fireplaces had been lit only minutes before. A young boy apologized and said that “the President of the Republic” didn’t have enough fuel to heat the whole building and that he rarely used this room. He brought us tea and gaz from Esfahan on silver trays.

  When Bani Sadr entered the room he evoked in me an immediate sense of nostalgia for the time of the revolution, the days when my father would read to us about him from the newspaper and my uncle would brag about his coming to his practice to get his teeth fixed. Now, there was no longer an invisible red line that bound my expression, and it was strangely intoxicating. This was true freedom—to be able to use the power of the press to bring the message of our hope after Khatami’s election to the world.

  Bani Sadr recognized my last name and asked after my uncle, expressing homesickness for my uncle’s excellent medical treatment. He also knew my father, and so I told him that he had passed away just a few years earlier. We continued in polite conversation, and he asked about Zan. I explained that I had come to interview him f
or an article, and to the complete surprise of his staff, with whom I’d prearranged the interview, he placed two bags full of books at my feet and said, “These are books and articles that I’ve published. Please read them all the way through first and become acquainted with my thinking and writing and then come back for the interview another time.” We bid our farewells, and I lugged the two heavy bags back to Sonia’s in a taxi. When I was leaving Paris for London, Sonia cried, “You forgot your books!” I laughed. “Like I’m that crazy that I’d bring two hundred pounds of books with me. Give them to the library!” I also asked her to keep George Soros’s book and the applications I’d picked up to Columbia’s and Harvard’s school of journalism, so they wouldn’t be found when I entered Tehran.

  Listening to Persian-language radio weeks later, I was completely astonished when Bani Sadr said in an interview that former president Hashemi Rafsanjani had sent a woman in the guise of a journalist to Paris carrying a special message for him. God knows what he meant—that I was there to invite him to join the government?

  At Mehrabad airport, when I presented my passport, the policeman wouldn’t return it. He brought a man in civilian clothing to take me into a room marked, mysteriously, The Presidential Section. The man wrote a telephone number on a scrap of paper and told me I’d need to call the Presidential Passport Office the next morning. I think they couldn’t call it “The Ministry of Intelligence Secret Passport Office” or everyone would panic at the airport. I was outraged and afraid. “But why have you taken my passport?”

  “You’ll be informed.”

  That night I went with my mother to Faezeh’s house, and she promised that tomorrow she would look into it herself. I went to work as usual the next day, and at noon Faezeh called me into her office. “It was the Ministry of Intelligence that took your passport. I spoke with Agha-ye Moghadam, a friend of mine who is their representative at the Majlis and told him that any questions they have about your reporting, they can ask me. I told them I’m directly responsible for your work. But he said they’ll only deliver the passport to you in person. A man will wait for you in front of the Presidential building, the stone building on Khiaban-e Jordan. Watch out—once they have you in their grasp, nothing will save you.”

  At noon in front of the stone building, I met the man, and he looked like an ordinary person. That this guy was an intelligence agent would never have crossed my mind. He had a mustache and was wearing a casual short-sleeve shirt. He put on a cool act, slyly asking me, “Are you really so afraid of what’s inside?”

  “I’m smart enough to know I don’t want to see it,” I responded.

  “I want to tell you, you should appreciate Khanum Hashemi. You’re lucky she’s looking out for you,” he said. I took my passport and left.

  FALL 1998

  Suddenly, writers for reformist papers and intellectuals opposed to the government were enveloped by fear like never before. It seemed that every day the earth-shattering news of the killing or seizure of a writer would reach us or the tragic fate of a colleague who had disappeared years before would be revealed. From Sa’idi Sirjani, a writer who they claimed had died of heart failure in prison, to Piruz Davani, who suddenly called his mother and said he was going to Mashhad, then disappeared like a drop of water in the ocean. His body never turned up. Dariush and Parvaneh Foruhar were stabbed to death in their home. Dariush had been in line to be minister of labor in the cabinet of Doctor Bazargan’s provisional government directly following the revolution. Khomeini had charged Bazargan with nominating the first Islamic government in Iran, but Bazargan resigned after the American embassy hostage situation. In the years that followed Dariush Foruhar had earned a reputation as a critic of the Islamic Republic and became the leader of the Mellat Iran party. The heartbreaking killing of the Foruhars heralded the dangers in store for political and social activists. Mohammed Mukhtari was seized, and it surfaced in the media that his body had been dumped in the desert of Karaj. His throat had been cut, and gradually we heard murmurs that a segment of the government had had a hand in his death. Many more writers had received death threats over the phone. We asked ourselves who was responsible for this string of killings.

  Khanum Simin Behbahani, a renowned poet, and I sat together at the shrine of Taher at Karaj. The two of us had come, along with the rest of the writers and journalists of Tehran and thousands of others, to escort the body of the greatly respected writer Mohammed Ja’far Puyandeh to the imamzadeh.

  As they interred his remains, I shielded my body and pushed my way forward through the folds of the crowded mass, which was encircled by plainclothes agents from the Ministry of Intelligence. I wanted to see his face when they uncovered it once he was in the grave. His white shroud had turned red with fresh blood leaking from his slit throat. We had all heard that he and Mukhtari had been killed in the same fashion. They had both been snatched off the crowded streets of Tehran and silenced with a metal wire.

  I couldn’t bear to see anymore, and I went back and sat next to Khanum Behbahani at the edge of an open grave in the newly expanded section of the cemetery. We were talking about our shock and apprehension at the complicity of the Ministry of Intelligence in this wave of killings when she unexpectedly fell backward into the grave. I controlled my impulse to laugh as a young man helped me pull her out. She was shaken and dazed, but luckily, she hadn’t been hurt. Her clothes were covered with dirt. “This fall is a sign that I will be next,” she kept saying. “I, too, am in danger, and today I’ve been given a sign.”

  In the midst of all these killings, I continued to take risks. I knew that by insisting on freedom of the press, I was also helping to ensure freedom for ordinary Iranians. One especially dangerous interview involved several visits to the home of the former secretary-general of the Tudeh party, Nureddin Kiyanuri, and his wife, Maryam Feiruz, on Khiaban-e Karimkhan Zand. Kiyanuri and his wife had been freed after years of imprisonment in Evin, but Kiyanuri was still under house arrest. This elderly couple cheerfully welcomed me into their home, and I would sit for hours talking with them, recording all their stories and memories. Kiyanuri was about eighty-five, and though he used a walker around the apartment and couldn’t always hear me clearly, his memory and intelligence were still sharp. He listened to all the foreign radio broadcasts and read the paper daily, keenly analyzing recent social and political news. “Aren’t you afraid these killers will come after you?” I asked him.

  His answer was clearheaded. “We’re being monitored from the building across the street, so if any stranger comes to our door, the Ministry of Intelligence would be watching. And that would mean they wanted us killed, and who could escape their wishes?” He felt the government condoned, or likely participated in, the recent spate of deaths of writers and intellectuals. As he told me about the guards holed up across the street, I felt again how much danger I was in, as their home was very likely bugged with secret microphones. But I hoped only to fashion a worthy-enough investigative piece from the interviews. I would go at night and bring my photographer friend, Vahid, and when we left under the cover of darkness we hid my tapes and his film in our clothes. If I saw anyone coming or if a car turned its lights on, I’d shout, “Vahid, run!” We were ready to literally run for our lives.

  The editorial departments of all the independent and reformist newspapers came together in a single harmonious, cohesive movement bent on exposing the perpetrators of these crimes. At Zan, I began my column with headlines such as “Who Knows Whose Turn It Will Be Tomorrow?” There I wrote about my own investigations into the series of murders. When finally, under pressure from Agha-ye Khatami’s commission of inquiry, the Ministry of Intelligence confessed that there were soiled hands within their ranks, the press never rested. We now set our sights on the resignation of the minister of intelligence.

  A source leaked to Zan a list of people marked for punishment and death, names that had been gathered from the interrogation of prisoners. The list had been faxed to the paper addressed to me. O
ur newspaper broke the story, announcing, “Ministry of Intelligence Has Compiled a ‘Black List’ of 179 Intellectuals, Writers, and Political Activists to Be Punished and Killed.” Some of the people listed had already disappeared, and some had been killed. Among the well-known figures listed, such as Nushabeh Amiri, Ebrahim Nabavi, and Mehrangiz Kar, was my own name, number 164. I shuddered.

  The story shook Iran. It was a courageous, incendiary story. The constantly ringing telephone drove me crazy. Thousands of people called to be reassured that their names were not on the list. Still others insisted that their names must have been mistakenly omitted. One well-respected man came to the office, and swearing that he had been targeted time and time again, kept begging, “Please put my name on this list and, in sha’ Allah, I shall repay your kindness.”

  “Sir, please leave,” I said angrily. “We are reporters doing our job—this is not a private printing outlet.” And then there were the terrifying calls from the Ministry of Intelligence asking me how I’d gotten the list.

  I remember one evening in particular when I left for home, exhausted from the excitement. Before getting into the car service provided by the newspaper, I had called my mother. “Maman, I’ll be home in fifteen minutes.” As we drove up, I could see her waiting for me in the kitchen, outlined in the lit second-floor window. All I had to do was walk from the car to my front door, and I’d asked the driver to wait to make sure I got into the house. But my hands still trembled as I took my keys out of my purse. The sharp, menacing shadows of the trees seemed to leap out at me, and I kept turning to look for the cold flash of a dagger, a vision that kept rising from the darkness. Try as I might, I was shaking so hard that I couldn’t find the keyhole. Helpless and numb, I finally got inside and collapsed in a chair while my mother fretted over me, repeating her conviction that the Ministry of Intelligence would show up any day.