Camelia

by Camelia Entekhabifard

  My heart was beating so hard that I could hear its sound filling the room. Would I have to stay under the sofa all day? Two days? As I lay there I thought of my French classes and of all of my mother and father’s other efforts to raise a proper, worthy, sophisticated daughter. And now where had I ended up? Under a dull brown couch in a house at the end of one of Tehran’s historic back alleys.

  After what seemed an eternity, but was about five minutes, I heard his voice. “Come out. Be quick. Put on your chador. They’re sitting in the courtyard. Go downstairs and get outside, hurry like the wind! Go down the hill. I’ll come in fifteen minutes. Get as far away as you can.”

  He stood watch on the stairs. I was sweating as I ran, but I thanked God to be out of there. Fifteen minutes later, his gray Peykan pulled up in front of me.

  “That was too close . . . After a respectable, pious life, how close I came to total devastation. Thank God.” He took a deep breath and looked at me. “Why did I fall in love with you?” I knew, but I replied only with a charming smile.

  After much coaxing, Amir agreed that I had greater potential to spy for the Ministry outside the country’s borders. He agreed to let me go to London and from there to America. In return, I promised him that I’d get the tapes from my interview with Reza Pahlavi, collect information on Manuchehr Mohammadi, and look into the ties between Nourizadeh and Abtahi.

  “How are you going to get a visa to America?”

  “My friends at the university in America will take care of that, don’t worry,” I assured him. In truth, I planned to call Jean from England, and she’d help me secure a visa.

  Before he’d allow me to travel to America, Amir ordered my mother and I to go back to the Presidential building on Khiaban-e Jordan to hand over her passport and the title to her car. Only then did I receive my own passport back, which had been confiscated when I was arrested. I had been released from prison on a thirteen-million-toman bond (about $13,000). The deed to my mother’s apartment had already been put in the custody of the Revolutionary Court to make bail (it was worth about ten-million and she’d paid cash to make up the rest). Compared to other released prisoners, the cost wasn’t that much—Amir had handled everything to let me out relatively easily and quickly.

  As he waited with me at Mehrabad airport, he gave me one last warning: “Remember that your family is here. Keep in mind that if you betray my confidence, I will do something that you won’t forget for the rest of your life. You will be gone for only ten days.”

  DECEMBER 1999

  In New York, people were passing freely by me, so why didn’t I feel free? I traveled to Washington, DC, to tell Reza Pahlavi the truth, that I had seen Manuchehr Mohammadi in Towhid Prison and that even now I had come to spy on him. I spoke so frankly that I don’t know if he was able to believe what I told him. Many of the Iranian friends I’d made on my first trip to New York wouldn’t speak to me anymore because of rumors Golriz had spread while I was in prison. I heard that she claimed I’d never even been in Towhid—that it was all a set-up, that she hadn’t abandoned me but had instead escaped some trap herself. She thought I was lounging by the Caspian Sea for three months. Her betrayal of our friendship overwhelmed me with anger. But it was as if her gossip had predicted my fate. On this trip, I actually had agreed to come to New York to spy for the Ministry of Intelligence. But I didn’t intend to give Amir any useful information—I didn’t think of myself as a spy at all. I’d only agreed in order to get out of prison and out of Iran. Now I didn’t know how I could begin to defend myself and set the record straight. I didn’t have the courage to open up and admit to the affair. I felt completely alone with a truth that no one would accept, and I fell into a deep depression. How could I tell anyone about the debasement, the humiliation, and the suffering that I’d endured to restore my freedom?

  Jean, one of my few remaining friends, was a great comfort. “Don’t go back—you should stay here in America. They’ll kill you in Tehran,” she said, tenderly putting her arm around me. “I’ve been so worried about you.”

  “I’m not ready to stay here,” I told her. “I have to be sure that my family is safe.” I remembered Amir’s warning and feared for my mother and sister. And I began to think that if I went back home, maybe by some miracle it would turn out that nothing with Amir was really as dangerous as I imagined. I was furious with everyone in New York who’d turned against me. I felt angry at the whole world. A hundred thoughts ran through my mind—and I had only ten days to decide.

  On the eve of the new millennium, I stood in Times Square cheering with millions of people around me, witnessing the end of a thousand years. I said to my friend next to me, “I always wanted to be here in New York for the millennium . . . Always. And here I am.” But in the middle of this dream come true, I was pulled backward by the painful love I felt, the role I’d convinced myself to play, and by all the dreams I’d had to leave behind.

  I returned to Iran. I returned to my savior. I don’t know what kind of shape my mind was in—I was both in love and not in love. My ambivalence was consuming me from within. I would tell my friends and family that I was fine, that I felt normal, but I wasn’t fine or in any ordinary state. I was consumed with dread. I’d wake in the night with cramps, my leg muscles tight, and I would be beside myself with pain. I would limp the next day, and when anyone asked, I’d just say I was fine.

  JANUARY 2000

  In Tehran we faced each other again for the first time in the office in the Club for Creative Literature, as I made my report. He glowed at my return. “You seem to have genuinely repented.” We talked for what seemed like hours. But I didn’t have much to tell. I told him that Golriz had completely ruined my reputation. I told him I’d gone to Washington, DC, to speak to Reza Pahlavi and that he really hadn’t given any money to Manuchehr Mohammadi. I set the tapes of my interview with Reza down on his desk.

  Now he started to grow surly. “Nothing? You’re giving me nothing? This is what you meant when you promised you could be a great spy in America? You could have done this in Iran.”

  In fact, I couldn’t do this anymore at all. I knew I didn’t want to work for him—why had I even come back? I wanted to live, and I wanted to get back to my real work, to my life as a journalist.

  While I was away, he’d also been traveling. He’d gone with his family to Karbala in Iraq to visit shrines, along with one of the first groups of Shi’a pilgrims after the war. He’d brought me souvenirs, a silver ring and a piece of green fabric, which he told me came from a holy shroud. The green swatch wasn’t bigger than his palm. “This ring is identical to the one that I bought for my wife. I think I should go knock on your mother’s door soon and ask for your hand. There have been many cases where repented mujaheds have married the single brothers who interrogated them. But what are we going to do when this time the brother who has fallen in love with his charge already has a wife and children?”

  I wasn’t in love anymore. Whatever I’d done—self-deception or self-defense, meditation or role playing—whatever I had told myself to make me feel I was truly in love, it was over. It was over as soon as the captain of the plane announced we had reached Iranian soil. At that moment I’d woken up. I changed my mind, and I was amazed at how naïve I’d been to come back and take this risk. Come back for what? To be the mistress of some unknowable, mysterious, nobody of a man? To hide under a black chador, sneaking through the back alleys of Tehran? My eyes were finally opened, but it was too late. By then, the plane was already circling Mehrabad airport. In that moment of clarity, I promised myself I’d plan carefully how I could leave. The love I’d felt disappeared like fog before the sun. Where was I going with this man?

  He was still in love, and though I was not, I was still his lover. He called me his Persian miniature rose. . . . He kept asking me, “Are you tired of this job?” and promising that if I was tired of the job or of him, I could simply tell him and he’d release me, that no one would harm me. I wasn’t stupid. I wasn’t
going to say, “Yes, I’m sick of this. Please let me go back to my life, khoda hafez!” But I was deeply depressed, and he could see it. I hated being without my real work as a reporter and instead writing daily reports for him that were full of nothing, of boring details that were less than lies: “I went to a café by the Caspian Sea with Faezeh and her daughter and son, and we talked about sports and my assignments for Saba.” He’d shake his head and say, “What kind of a spy are you?”

  APRIL 2000

  He found a vacant apartment building in Sa’adat-abad and convinced the realtor to give him the key. He told me he was planning to show the apartment to his wife. Maybe he was, but he also took me there a few times. He’d lay cardboard down over the bare floor. I remember we spent the morning of Ashura in that apartment, the holy day when the Shi’a mourn the martyrdom of the third imam, Hussein, the hero of Karbala. My mother had asked me to go with her to Jamaran for Ashura, but I told her, “I have something very important to do, I’ll join you later. I’ll be there by noon.”

  Amir picked me up early, not far from my home. The Tehran streets were silent. Everyone was in the mosques or tekiyehs, beating their chests in lamention for Hussein. It was traditional for the pious to prepare meals to share with the masses as a nazr to the imam. People would stand outside their doors and invite passersby inside, and mourners would stand in line with pots held out to take the food home to their families. As we drove, I saw that he had a couple of cooking pots on the backseat. He must have told his wife he was going out to collect food for the family, but instead he was driving to Sa’adat-abad to spend the national holiday with me. He giggled like a child getting away with something and then said with a serious voice, “What am I doing with you? This is the first time in my life I haven’t been in the Bazar Mosque on Ashura. God forgive me. You are a devil.”

  I smiled sweetly, but in my heart I felt awful. The game had gotten away from me. How could I tell him that after our meetings I’d stand under the shower, crying and washing myself a hundred times, asking God why he’d given me this destiny? As we drove toward the apartment I felt like vomiting. I couldn’t say a word. Quietly, I followed him up the stairs to the third floor. . . .

  It was around noon when he dropped me off at Meidan Tajrish, where I took a cab to Jamaran. Mader-jan had passed away in the spring of 1997, but my mother’s family still gathered in her beautiful old home in front of Jamaran’s husseinya during the Ashura and Tasoa holidays, watching the chest-beaters from the courtyard. It was the first time I’d seen some of my more distant relatives since I’d left prison. Though it had been almost six months, they examined me as though I’d been freed yesterday. Their stares and questions were even harder to bear as I’d come directly from seeing Amir. “God, you’ve really changed! Your face seems a little swollen—did they beat you?” they asked. Someone looked at my expression and whispered in my ear, “Did they do anything . . . wrong to you?” Uncle Ali’s widow, Iran-Dokht, told everyone to leave me alone. She walked with me to the mosque and said, “Ask the imam to give you peace. Pray to be happy and free.”

  I didn’t want to act like a good Muslim any longer for Amir. He even asked me to refuse the invitation to my cousin Elham’s wedding because it was mixed, with both men and women as guests. I couldn’t imagine missing my first cousin’s wedding—what would my mother say! I lied to him, telling him that my aunt Avid, the mother of the bride, had decided to separate men and women at the wedding. I danced to the live band all night, dancing so hard that at two in the morning, when my mother, Kai Khosrou, and I drove home, I had to take off my high-heeled shoes to walk barefoot from the car to the front door. I met with Amir the next day, and my stomach twisted when he asked me about the party. But I coolly replied, “It was nothing special—a quiet, traditional wedding.” I felt sick—I had to stop lying, even if it meant ending my life. I wasn’t a journalist anymore. I was no one.

  I never told my family about the affair. Even now, I still haven’t told my mother and sister all the details. But despite the risk, I decided to seek the advice of someone outside the family who I could trust. Korosh was an influential man I’d known for many years. I visited his office, and he told me, “Go, Camelia, don’t stay here a minute longer. You are playing with fire. When he gets enough of you, when he wakes up from your spell—or if you ever reject him in any way—you’ll simply vanish. They’ll kill you to protect this secret. It will be a car accident, or it might look like a suicide. Think about it. You tell me that he told you himself that he had signed death warrants for young girls in prison not all that long before you were arrested. He might have been ‘in retirement’ for ten years, but people like him don’t change that much in a decade. These days, he doesn’t need to send you to the firing squad. It’s easy to kill someone. Find a way to leave as soon as you can—you don’t want to play this game out to the end.”

  “You teach at the university. I know,” I told him once. Amir looked at me curiously.

  “How do you know? Maybe you follow me around instead of me following you! How did you guess?”

  “I knew. I knew long before this. From the clothes you wore in prison and the educated philosophical discussions you’d have with me. I can even guess what your field is!”

  “That’s enough. That’s enough. The prying stops here. Believe me, you’re the strangest case I’ve ever worked.”

  There were a lot of things I had figured out. I’d figured out that he enjoyed high status in the Ministry as a special consultant, that he was the chief investigator on my case. I’d figured out that only his wife knew that he worked for the Ministry. For the rest of his family and friends, he was an academic. I’d also figured out that the Ministry wanted to do away permanently with reformist journalists and intellectuals—that I had no future in Iran. And with Korosh’s help, I’d figured out that I had to end my relationship with Amir before I wound up dead, wrapped in a plastic bag on the side of the road or hanging with a forged note in my hand.

  My mother found smugglers who would take me across the border for four million tomans (about $4,000). But crossing the border was risky—I knew what would happen if they took me alive. I told my mother to be patient. And I told Amir, “I’ve been invited to a conference in New York. They want me to participate in a program in America.” It was true. I had sent my request when I was still at Zan to attend a special session of the UN’s general assembly in New York, “Beijing +5,” and the invitation had arrived in response, though Zan no longer existed. Faezeh’s office called the conference and asked them to change the invitation to Saba, her newsletter, so I could still join the group representing Iran.

  “Ha!” He looked at me in disbelief. “The one time I let you go was a mistake. We’re not having anymore coming and going. You need to get to work right here.” But I arranged through a connection of Korosh’s to buy plane tickets and planned to again call on Jean during the London stopover to arrange my visa. When I left New York the last time, she’d promised to help me whenever I needed her. I kept putting the bug in Amir’s ear. “It’s a prestigious program and could be very useful for us. You know that Ayatollah Khomeini’s granddaughter Zahra Eshraqi-Khatami is going as well?” That set off a bell. She was suspicious alone for being Ayatollah Khomeini’s granddaughter, and in addition she was now President Khatami’s sister-in-law. It most certainly was of interest to the Ministry of Intelligence to track her.

  It was hard to tell my family I was leaving. We had survived in Iran from the day the Shah left through all the infernal trials of the revolution and its aftermath. Now, I was fleeing under threat of death. All they could do was sit and pray. If Amir didn’t give in, I might never get another chance to leave the country legally. My mother of course knew something was wrong. How could she not? I’d leave home almost every day with a black chador in my bag, telling her, “I still have more interviews with the Ministry and the courts.”

  She’d say, “My stomach is boiling with nerves. You call me if you need to st
ay out late. Please call me, wherever you are.”

  Amir would eye me suspiciously when I’d leave the room to phone my mother at eleven. He’d ask, “What did you tell her? Where did you say you are?”

  “With Faezeh.” My mother knew that the line might be tapped. She’d say, in a strained voice, “Thanks for checking in, say hello to your friend.” I’m sure she knew that I wasn’t with Faezeh. No matter how late I’d come home, she’d be standing in the dark kitchen, watching out the window for me. She would tell me, “Whatever you’re doing, think of your father. Do what he would agree with, were he still alive.”

  MAY 2000

  Then it happened. Amir told me, “Your trip has been approved.” I convinced him I had to leave immediately. I knew I wasn’t coming back. At home in my room, I took a last look around at all the things that I loved. I looked at my bed, thinking how I’d never sleep there again; out the window to the neighbor’s courtyard and their beautiful rose garden, which I’d watched so many summers sitting in my room; at my father’s clothes still hanging in my closet. I had kept one of his coats and one of his shirts in his memory. I looked at the framed photos on my wall and at my unfinished watercolor paintings. I packed a very small bag. A large suitcase would have aroused Amir’s suspicion.

  He was waiting for me at the airport. I took the plastic bag he handed to me with presents he’d brought, and when I looked inside I saw he’d given me pistachios packed in a little heart-shaped bamboo box. I knew he was still in love. There was also an envelope with two hundred dollars inside—about a month’s salary in Iran. “It’s very little, but buy something for yourself with that,” he said. He took my passport over to the immigration officer to be validated, and when he returned, he asked, “What would you say if I told you you couldn’t go?”