Camelia

by Camelia Entekhabifard

  Bravely I answered, “I’m going home—I know that these days are ending soon, and I will be set free.”

  He laughed. “Masha-Allah, I like you, you’re very cheeky. But I’m sorry to say I think the only way you’ll be getting out of here is dead. How are you so sure you’ll be freed?”

  “I dreamed of a letter written to my mother that read ‘this is a letter from the Imam-e Zaman’ and of my mother crying from joy.”

  “Ha! Haven’t you heard the saying ‘khab-e zan chap ast’ (a woman’s dreams deceive her)?” Then he pounded his briefcase against my head and said angrily, “When the imam comes to your dream, dirt on your head, he’s coming to tell you to correct your path!” He quickly became calm again and said, “Probably the letter your mother received was news of your death. Don’t be so optimistic.”

  Love, like a wisp of fresh air from paradise, had been blown deep into the heart of this hardened man. I knew, even when he punched me, that he felt he was touching a delicate flower. His mood swings were harsh because this love confused him. He had given his whole life to the Imam and the war and the Islamic Revolution. The fires of love consumed this “man of God.” And they consumed me as well. I was really in love with him. With my whole being, I could feel my freedom though the halls of the prison, the halls that seemed to lead nowhere. The dream I meditated so long on sprang forth with boundless energy.

  “The brothers who see you on the walkway say they have worked in this prison for twenty years, and they have never seen a prisoner like you. They say you walk up the stairs behind me with your head held high.”

  This was true. I hadn’t broken. I looked at prison, at the difficult days of interrogation, at the contempt and the hunger, at the solitude and the suffering as a performance. A great performance—the performance of my life. But after three months, I was tired. I had sung all the songs I knew.

  My interrogator was able to obtain the order for my conditional release through convoluted negotiations with high-ranking colleagues. I first had to be tried in a formal proceeding. The Ministry of Intelligence told the judge assigned to my case to enact certain formalities and to release me on bond. He was told that I was willing and able to work for the Ministry of Intelligence, and they wanted to start me on a trial basis. I would monitor other journalists inside the offices of various newspapers and report back to them. I signed all my confessions and filled out my tak nevesi, each page reading on top “Save Yourself by Telling the Truth.”

  I was told that if I turned on the Ministry and revealed our secret agreements, I would be subjected to the worst punishments imaginable and killed.

  The next step in my conditional release was for me to appear in a videotaped court proceeding. They wanted to shoot two different films. We rehearsed dozens of times as I read my statements off a script.

  “It’s not natural. You have to speak naturally.”

  They explained that I could perform taqiah on the day of the shooting. I didn’t understand and asked what taqiah meant.

  “It means you must lie for the good of your religion. In your heart you intend to lie, purposefully, so your lies will not be seen as wrong by God, because it is for the sake of your religion.”

  On the day that my rehearsals were deemed satisfactory, they gave me my old clothes back to put on, along with a chador I wore on top of my scarf and overcoat. My interrogator brought me into a room and told me to take off my blindfold. The room was divided by a thick curtain. The camera lens stuck out through the seam of the curtain, and a table and a chair were positioned in front of its gaze.

  “Sit in the chair and start the interview.”

  He was on the other side of the curtain, filming. On my side, I played the role of the errant girl, distraught and repentant. The first tape was about me—my role in lashing out at the government; my corruption and inability to control myself; descriptions of my sexual relations with an Israeli spy and of how I took advantage of my voice as a newspaper reporter to create opposition to the State and to undermine the revolution and the velayat-e faqih; and an acknowledgment that I knew that the crimes I had committed carried a death sentence. They wanted the second tape to be about Faezeh and the rest of my colleagues. In this segment, I admitted that Faezeh was irreligious and uncommitted to the Islamic Revolution and that she had numerous boyfriends, and I mentioned one of them by name and said that I had seen them alone together in Faezeh’s office. I talked about whomever else they asked me to.

  “What are you going to do with these videotapes?”

  “I’m going to put them in a special drawer in my office. No one has access to it.”

  “What are they for?”

  “For someday, just in case. This is standard procedure with the Ministry of Intelligence. We have to tape all the accused.”

  OCTOBER 1999

  At the court I told the judge, as planned, that I didn’t need a defense attorney and that I would defend myself. He and the clerk sat up there and read my charges, and I answered each of them. They admitted my mother and sister after the hearing. I hadn’t seen them in seventy days. My mother looked like Afsar Khanum, Guli’s mother. Her hair had gone white in spots, and one of her eyes was drooping. I found out later that she had suffered a mild heart attack in her sleep and that the nerves in her left eye were paralyzed. And my sister, thinner and paler than ever, pressed me to her bosom like a baby chick and sobbed. We weren’t allowed to talk; I could only whisper, “I’m coming home soon.”

  When they left, my mother was limping, and my niece, Yasbanu, cried out that auntie had to come with them, too. My heart was bursting out of my chest. Why had they been torturing my family like this? Why was I here?

  But when she first held me, in the middle of our weeping, my mother noticed one of the guards and abruptly changed her tone. “Hey, aren’t you Agha-ye Amir? Your house was in Manzeriah, next door to my aunt Nargess.” Everyone stared at her.

  “Yes, yes, Zahra Khanum. Salaam aleik. What a good aunt you had, God rest her soul. I remember you. And your brother, Ali Agha. God rest his soul, too.”

  I started laughing. My mother, even in the most dangerous of places, in the middle of the Revolutionary Court, couldn’t stop being a busybody.

  “You better watch out. My daughter is in your hands. For God’s sake, tell them not to hurt her.”

  I jabbed my mother in the side.

  That afternoon, in the prison, my interrogator laughed. “Today your mother found her relations from Jamaran.”

  Then one day the guards came for me, not to take me for more questioning, but to send me home. They gave me back my old clothes and wallet, then covered my face for the ride from the prison. “Don’t touch your blindfold yet,” one said. “You will take it off only when I tell you to go. After that you must get out of the car. Above all, don’t look back.” They let me out in the middle of the street somewhere in downtown Tehran. It was a rainy fall day, and I was wearing a threadbare chador, clutching a plastic bag with my few belongings. Strangely, nobody seemed to notice me. I hailed a cab for home.

  My mother rarely locked the front door to our apartment—I simply turned the knob and stepped in. Yasbanu looked up from where she was playing on the floor, her face frozen in amazement. Every day the courts had promised my mother I would return, but at last I had really come home. She came from the kitchen, crying and pulling me close. I was shocked when I looked in the mirror; those long weeks under the artificial light had turned my skin a pale and pasty color. My eyes were locked in a squint. For the first few days I could barely sleep. Every day, I stood at the window and watched for the officers to return, waiting for him to call . . .

  At our fourth or fifth meeting after our disastrous first encounter in the offices of Zan, when he threw me out for wearing perfume, “my commander” asked me to sign a slip of paper. There-after he carried it, hidden in his planner, whenever we met, in case anyone arrested him and charged him with having an improper relationship with me. It was a temporary marriage
certificate, a sigheh, though he’d just written it out himself. We never saw a mullah.

  “We’ll be spending many hours together alone, and it’s not right. I’m a religious man. I must answer to God.” This moment changed the meaning of our relationship irrevocably.

  “Okay. What am I suppose to do now? Shall we stop seeing each other?” I pretended I didn’t understand what he wanted. I thought about those women in Qom. I waited, wanting him to be the one to say it.

  “I mean, it’ll be good for both of us. I’ll feel more comfortable, and we can talk freely when we work together.” And he slid the paper toward me to sign.

  I wasn’t sure what this meant to me. I still didn’t know his name, he always told me to call him Farmandeh whenever I asked him. I thought about how people joked in Iran about zan-e sighehi, how they show clients they’re waiting by wearing their chador turned inside out. Should I be ashamed at this point in my life, after all I’d been through? I had dragged this man to this spot, and now what was I supposed to do? Though he might have believed it protected him from God, his little piece of paper didn’t mean anything to me. I thought it might perhaps strengthen our relationship, help keep me safe, keep him committed as my protector. But what would my family think? I calmed myself by thinking that the sigheh was shameful for him, too, for his wife and family and that we would never let anyone know about it unless he was arrested.

  Later, I think the sigheh also helped me escape him when I left for America. It gave him the confidence to trust me when I promised that I’d come back to him. It let me become closer to my commander and to gain some command over him. He changed after he had that paper signed. He was gentler with me and let me flirt with him more directly. But signing that paper also made it clear to me that though I was out of prison, the game hadn’t ended. This was a new beginning. I wondered how long could I go on leading two lives.

  In contrast to our first painful meeting when he made me scrub my face, he now started asking me to wear makeup for him and attractive clothes when we met. “A Muslim woman should save all her beauty and talent for her husband.” That was his word and the word of the Prophet Mohammed.

  My job was to return to work at a reformist newspaper and secretly gather information for the Ministry of Intelligence about relations between Seyyed Mohammed Abtahi and Alireza Nourizadeh in London.

  “Will they hire me?”

  He wrinkled his eyebrows. “What do you mean?”

  “I mean they’re afraid of me. They say that Intelligence is after me, and my working at a newspaper is as good as that newspaper getting shut down.” I was lying. I didn’t want to go back to any of my former jobs. I didn’t want to spy on my friends. I knew I’d have to stay in the shadows for a while, so in the daytime I arranged with Faezeh to help her run a small women’s NGO newsletter, Saba. I was the only writer, and Faezeh was the editor in chief. It was only about four pages long and quite a step down from my previous work, but it kept me away from the spotlight and away from the people that Intelligence was most interested in, except Faezeh.

  Laughing nervously, I’d told her, “Faezeh, I’m meant to spy on you.” She answered with grace, “Tell them the worst things you can imagine. I know they have problems with me, not with you. They brought you in because of your friendship with me.”

  Soon, the carefully planned agenda for my work for the Ministry turned into mostly taking long romantic drives with my interrogator. Sometimes we drove far out of Tehran to find places where we could sit together in public. We’d travel up north or northeast to small shops where only tourists on their way to the Caspian Sea would stop and where there was almost no chance we’d be recognized. At first, it was enough to spend this time together talking, to drink doogh on Jade-ye Ab’ali or to go to a teahouse in Lavizan.

  Then we also started to meet more often in different hidden “security offices” around Tehran. I wouldn’t leave until nightfall. As the shops of Tehran began to pull down their rolling shutters, I would put on my chador to wear home. My chador was a deeper shade of black than the shadows on the walls, and I’d dart from dark corner to dark corner through the streets of Haft-e Tir to be sure no one was following me. He’d told me, “It’s possible that you are being followed by Intelligence task forces!” His eyes filled with hunger and desire as he instructed me on how to go to and from our rendezvous, telling me to change cars a few times, to take different routes, and to put on or take off my chador in hiding so no one would be able to recognize me. I felt like a prowling stray cat as I slipped through the night.

  We’d gone to a film studio on Khiaban-e Karimkhan. To a gynecologist’s office on Haft-e Tir, where a friend of his was the practicing doctor. We had to be careful so no one suspected we ever did anything but talk. We’d sit, chatting softly, listening for anyone in the hall. One time by accident I came face-to-face with his son when he came to find his father. It was in a medical office we were using. By mistake his son opened the door, and our eyes locked.

  As he and I became closer, sometimes we did more than just talk. He’d press up against me and then break away suddenly if we heard anyone coming. We stole some private moments in those public offices, terrified of being caught if we stayed quiet too long. But those short hushed moments were never enough. Just as my heart had begun to leap in Towhid Prison when I heard his steps coming down the hall, now I waited anxiously for his calls to set up another meeting. But he always wanted more, and I was never sure how far I was willing to go. He kept making more demands, wanting to find a more private place for us. . . .

  NOVEMBER 1999

  “Who are these children? They must be your son and daughter.” I stood facing a framed picture of a boy and a girl on the wall. I was being nosy, looking around his parents’ home. The little girl was wearing a puffy pink dress and sitting in a chair. The little boy was standing up. He was wearing a coat and pants and had very short hair. “My commander” had been tempted to take me to his mother’s house a thousand times, as he had the key. Then this particular Friday, his parents had gone to Behesht-e Zahra to pray for his brother, who he told me had been martyred at the front. He’d never been able to fulfill his desire to sit and look at me undisturbed, as long as he wanted, as if we were in his own home. He wanted me as if I was his wife.

  “Keep your head down so you don’t know where you are,” he had said as we approached the building. I knew exactly where I was. I had come to this neighborhood time after time with my father. We’d park here to go see my uncle at his dental practice. I’d put my little hand in my father’s as we’d cross the street. My father took big steps and I took small ones, lagging behind him as we crossed the broad Khiaban-e Sepah.

  Now my father wasn’t with me, and I had to cross the street by myself. When we stood in front of the house, he’d said, “Keep your face covered. The neighbors have been here for ages, and everyone knows us. I’ll leave the door open. You come in a minute later.”

  It was a large, old house. There were dozens of pairs of shoes in the entryway. “You have to take your shoes off in a house where people pray,” he reminded me. I took my shoes off by the doormat and carried them with me. In the entryway hung a picture of a young man dressed as a Pasdar. “This is your martyred brother.” He didn’t answer. In their large dining room, like in most Iranian homes, there were objects adorning every surface—bowls with birds engraved on them, religious wall-hangings, and a piece of black fabric in an elaborate inlaid frame. He pointed to the latter and said, “This is a piece of the covering of the Ka’aba.”

  We were going upstairs when I stopped on the way up to look at the picture of his children. I dared to ask him again, “What’s your name?”

  “Same as always. Nothing . . . Farmandeh!” His eyes sparkled from behind the bushy line of his eyebrows.

  “Really, I don’t know what to call you.”

  “Take off your chador and let me see how beautiful you are. Amir. I’m not going to say more than that.” Then he came closer. Too cl
ose. I shut my eyes. Even now, I can close my eyes and see every detail of his face. I hated myself for being weak. I wondered why I didn’t kill myself. Why would I want to live like that—like a rat? Even now I can’t answer that question. I shut my eyes and repeated the mantra I used when I meditated every morning: “Camelia, you are dreaming . . . What’s happening to you is only a dream . . .”

  Afterward, I noticed he was praying under his breath as he tucked in his shirt. He was looking down at me, where I sat on the thick rug. I couldn’t hear what he was saying, but I saw his lips moving, and I knew it was a prayer. Then he asked, “Do you want some water?” I nodded, and he went back down the stairs toward the kitchen. I started looking around the upper floor of the house and found another fancy room, obviously used for parties and special occasions. Every corner was decorated with bowls and plates. I shuddered. What else did he want to do with me in this empty house? How many hours would he keep me here? I tried to guess how long his family usually stayed at the cemetery—perhaps half a day? I hoped I’d be allowed to leave sooner than that. But I couldn’t tell him, “Please take me home.” I couldn’t let him see I was disgusted. I kept myself deep in my role as the perfect lover, pretending that I couldn’t get enough of him either. And I waited, silently making my own prayer, asking God that he’d come back with the water and say, “OK, get dressed and go.”

  I heard a commotion below, and he came scrambling back up the stairs. “Where are your shoes?” They were in my hand. He moaned, “My parents came back. On the way, my mother couldn’t decide whether she’d turned off the gas or not. When they were halfway there they turned around and came home.” He was trembling. “Oh God, my reputation is ruined. Lord, have mercy, I repent. Go hide under the sofa. Don’t make a sound. Don’t even breathe till I call you.”