My Life as a Traitor: An Iranian Memoir

by Zarah Ghahramani

  13

  ALTHOUGH I CAN’T be sure, I have the feeling that it’s morning. If I happen to be sitting in my cell in a daze, as I am often, I can lose track of the last prayer call. Was it twelve hours ago, was it ten minutes ago? Even mealtimes provide no gauge, since the food is the same whatever the time of day: olives and bread, and sometimes a strange paste, possibly containing fish or meat.

  I must have been sleeping, not that I can remember. But I am experiencing the familiar, slow return of awareness that follows awakening. At first, all that I can think about is how cold and uncomfortable I am. My hand goes to my head to touch what is left of my hair. The feel of the stubble on my palm brings tears to my eyes, but it also fills me with anger, just briefly; I don’t have the emotional strength to sustain the anger.

  The blindfold is dropped into my cell through the little slot. This means I’ll be taken out, I’ll be interrogated again. I can’t think further ahead than the moment. I must have the blindfold on by the time the guard opens the door or I will be punished. I draw my scarf over my bald head and slip on the blindfold. If this really is morning, then it will be the first time the interrogations have begun so early. I ask myself if this is a bad sign, as if there were any such thing as a good sign in this prison.

  The sickness and fear develop rapidly, and by the time the door is opened, I am trembling with paranoia. As on many earlier occasions, I find myself murmuring something that is both a prayer and, in a weird way, the opposite of a prayer: “They can do anything. They can do anything. They can do anything. Dear God, they can do anything …”

  The guard grabs my arm and pulls me out of the cell.

  “Where are you taking me?” I plead, even though it’s a foolish question; the guard is not likely to give me any information, and in any case, where could he be taking me other than the interrogation room? I think what I am trying to ask him is whether I am being taken to somewhere more dreadful. In my Spanish studies, I read of Republican prisoners in something of the same situation recalling how important it was to know if they were being taken to execution. Knowing could not make any difference, and yet it was vital to know. This is how it feels to me. If I am to be shot in the back of the head, I want those few minutes of knowing. I want to say a farewell to my parents. Why should this be? My parents would never know what became of me if I was shot; they would not be told. They would never know that I said something loving. Just as at the time of marriage, burial, or coming of age, people crave ritual to mark this most significant of all events, the final farewell.

  The guard pushes me forward. “No talking,” he says.

  Abruptly, I stop. I stand motionless in what I know to be the corridor. My legs won’t move. Somehow, my senses tell me that we are not following the regular route to the interrogation room. The guard nudges me, but I remain motionless. Animal instinct has paralyzed me.

  “Move it!” he growls.

  “Where are you taking me? Where?”

  “To a nice café,” he says and gives a little grunt of a laugh.

  The sickness I am feeling enlarges and throbs all through my stomach and chest.

  “Please! Where are you taking me?”

  He doesn’t answer. He shoves me forward.

  I tell myself, Don’t move, Zarah, don’t move! but the guard whacks me hard on the shoulder, and my legs respond instinctively to avoid further pain. If I refuse to move, he will beat me. He has done it before. But, at the same time, the strength is draining from my limbs. Conflicting instincts are contending for the right to control my body. The guard is now dragging me. My feet attempt to keep up with the momentum of my body.

  We stop. I can hear the guard opening a door. He pushes me into what I assume to be a cell somewhere in this city of a prison. He gets me seated on a chair. He wrenches my arms behind me and begins tying my wrists together. The same foolish instinct that made me stop in the corridor compels me to struggle against the bonds on my wrists, but the guard has no difficulty in overcoming my resistance. He is much stronger than I.

  I hear the guard’s footfalls on the floor. I hear the door closing behind him. I sit stock-still, waiting for whatever is about to happen. First, I imagine the most appalling thing—rape—then things that are less horrifying—a beating, torture. I recognize that my mind is attempting to prepare me. It can’t help doing this. Since my physical strength is too paltry to help me in any way, only my mind can help me. But how does it help me to imagine these things? In what way will it make them easier to bear?

  Nothing is happening. The room is silent.

  I try to move, but it’s not possible. Even the chair is anchored to the floor.

  Dear God, what are they planning?

  The only sound I can hear is the rapid hiss of my breathing.

  I doubt I would be so terrified if I had been taken to the usual room, questioned by either of the interrogators I have had before. It’s mad, but I begin to long for the room I am used to, for the abuse I am familiar with, for the stink of the fat man’s breath, which I know and abhor. Even without my realizing it, my mind and body have been preparing themselves for the expected. The unexpected throws the preparations into disarray.

  I wait. I strain to catch any new sound. I wriggle what muscles I can to relieve the onset of pain. Simply sitting can become excruciating.

  How much time has passed with me strapped to this chair? Surely an hour. A mind, any mind, cannot endure nothingness for very long. Certainly my mind cannot. I attempt prayer, but talking to God is unavailing when your mind is demanding concrete experience. I sniff the air, smell the moldy stink of wet carpet left to rot. Have I been stuffed into some ancient storeroom? Has this room been chosen for its special stench—the stench we imagine we’d encounter in crypts? That would appeal to the sense of humor of the cretins who guard this place.

  The bonds on my wrists are making my hands numb. I open and close my fingers to the extent that I can. Now I am becoming aware of a number of sites of discomfort all over my body. I want to rouse my shoulders and stretch them, lift my behind from the seat of the chair, raise my legs. And what will happen if I need to pee?

  The immobility is acting on my brain like the screetch of fingernails drawn down a blackboard.

  Is it two hours now? Surely it is two hours. I’m going to say two hours, because it must be that long. It must be. Perhaps it is even longer. Perhaps I am underestimating. It could be three hours. Maybe three hours is the limit. Maybe the interrogator will come after three hours. He might slap me across the face. Well, let him. Let him do what he likes. Let him curse me, call me a whore, a bitch, a traitor, whatever he likes. I will say, “Yes, yes, I am a whore, the worst whore you can imagine and the worst bitch and the worst traitor! Yes yes yes!”

  I am no longer afraid. Boredom has eroded my fear. I think of people who have withstood solitary confinement for long, long periods, for months or even years. What sorts of minds must these people have to overcome the murderous boredom? Extraordinary resources of character and conviction, they must have. I am not like those people. My resources are very limited. Why don’t they realize, the interrogators, that my resources are limited? Why don’t they just give me one really big beating and break my spirit completely, then make me do whatever they want? Because I will, I know I will. I know I don’t have the courage of a martyr. I want to scream out, “Fools! I am just a girl! If you tried, you could destroy me easily! Come and try!”

  Now a suspicion grows in my mind, slowly at first: they have forgotten me. They don’t remember where I am. Maybe they are looking for me even now. One guard is saying to another, “That stupid girl, that Zarah what’s-her-name, where did you put her?”

  “Is anyone here?” I whisper.

  There is no answer. I say again, “Is anyone here?”

  My back is beginning to hurt badly. I resent them having forgotten me. I am a prisoner here! I deserve to be watched and guarded! If I have no other rights, at least I have the right to be watched and guarded
!

  Where have they gone? Has something incredible happened outside the prison, making all the guards and interrogators run away? Some great catastrophe? But what catastrophe?

  The idea of having been forgotten brings back fear—the fear that the boredom had destroyed. Or no, this is a new fear—the fear of being thought irrelevant, completely unimportant, not worth the effort of torturing.

  My neck is aching unbearably.

  “Hey, is anyone here? For God’s sake, I am here, in this room!”

  I haven’t dared to shout very loudly.

  I try to compose myself, regain my wits. I tell myself, “All you are doing is sitting in a chair for a few hours. So, big deal! Anyone can do that!”

  I think of the university entrance exam, a year ago now. It took four hours. It was a nightmare. Every muscle in my body ached. But I survived. “Make yourself calm, Zarah, silly Zarah,” I say aloud.

  Instead of thinking calming thoughts, I begin to mutter bitter rebukes to the invisible interrogators. “What sorts of interrogators are you? No beatings, no torture, just letting a person sit in a chair? You don’t even know how to do your job. Just a simple job like this, probably the only job you morons can do, and even then you fail.”

  I repeat these rebukes and repeat them again, adding more detail each time. I realize that I’m veering toward madness, but I can’t stop myself. All at once, I’m screaming my head off, rage and fear and disgust pouring from me in a torrent: “I’m here, you idiot! You, whatever your name is, I’m here! Why don’t you come in? I’ve got things to say! You don’t even know a tiny bit of what I’ve done! I’ve done horrible, horrible things! Come in, you stupid bastards!”

  The door opens right away. I instantly experience a crazy delight. I made something happen! But before I can comprehend anything more, I feel tape being stuck over my mouth. Fingers smooth the tape tight, from hinge to hinge of my jawbone. Then the door slams shut again.

  My ears are full of the sound of my breathing shrieking in and out through my nostrils. I can feel my chest heaving with the effort of gaining enough breath to live. In a normal, relaxed state, respiration through the nostrils is sustaining. In a state of terrified arousal, the absolute removal of the option to breathe through one’s mouth is physically traumatizing. It takes long minutes before my breathing is again under control. Tears of frustration wet my eyes behind the blindfold. Oh, what a clever Zarah! You can’t see, you can’t move, and now you find a way to make yourself mute and make breathing ten times as hard! And guess what, idiot? When they pull this tape off, your lips are going to come off with it! Idiot idiot idiot!

  I’m so tired now. The aches and pains in my body have spread everywhere. Each muscle, hundreds of them, is pleading for relief. Even worse than the aching of my muscles is the silence. I attempt to make a sound by tapping my foot on the floor, but there is no response. Either the floor is made of something that muffles sound or I don’t have the strength in my ankles to create enough force. I’m quite desperate now. Any sound, any confirmation of my existence, would be like a huge dose of painkillers. But I can’t make even the tiniest sound, just nothing. My tears are turning my eyes into pools.

  It has become impossible for me to judge how long I have been sitting here. Pieces of my brain and body seem to be fading. I can sense the gaps.

  I have suddenly realized that I am hungry, and now it is hunger that has become my chief torment. It seems such a long time ago that I felt food in my mouth. Thinking of the taste of food makes my gorge rise for some reason I can’t understand. Is it that I crave food so much that I am making myself sick? I try to block out the urge to vomit, but it gains strength until I can’t fight it any longer. My mouth fills with vomit, but I can’t eject it. I can barely breathe now. I try to swallow the vomit back down, but it returns and returns. I try to blow the vomit out through my nose, and my head fills with stink.

  I awake, still in my chair. I am sopping wet and freezing cold.

  They must have thrown a bucket of water over me. I must have fainted. I can feel trickles running down the flesh of my back.

  With the passing of time, the only thing I am hoping for is that an end will come. I don’t mean death, just an end to what my body, both the outside of it and the inside and the stuff in my brain, is enduring. I am holding as fast as I can to the idea that things have endings. I know now that they haven’t forgotten me. I know now that what I had thought of as neglect is in fact a form of torture. This is all that they have in mind for me today. The sitting-anddoing-nothing torture. It will have an end. They don’t intend, I am sure, to make me sit here until I die of hunger or thirst or exhaustion. For all I know, it may be an experiment. Maybe they are making bets on how long I last before I faint again. That would fit in with their mentality. They are torturers, but they like to make their job as entertaining as possible. The pain in my body makes me moan, but the moan that comes out of me is shocking. It is not the deep, anguished moan of a woman but that of a tiny child, almost of a baby, a weak, wispy little sound. I sound to myself like someone in a spooky movie, like a child-wraith. But it’s scary all the same. Is this all the strength that is left in me?

  Time is passing like the time in deep space. Time that goes on and on and means nothing. Time that is never recorded on the face of a clock. Black time.

  And now what?

  I am being dragged. I can feel four hands on me, two on each arm. I must have fainted again. The feel of my body on the hard surface below me is strange. Although I am moving, it’s not me who is making the movement happen. So odd! The tape is gone, and my mouth hangs slackly open. I can smell vomit and also the denser smell of blood.

  The dragging stops. I can hear a cell door being opened. Is it my cell? Happiness begins to build in the pit of my stomach. It rises into my chest. This could be my cell. This might be where they have been dragging me, to my cell, my home. Now, as I am dragged a little farther and left and the door slams shut, I am sure. The happiness is overwhelming.

  I take off my blindfold and drop it out through the slot in the door. The beauty of seeing! The wonder of it! And there was an end! I waited, and an end came! Dear God, thank you for endings!

  The weird man in the upper cell stops moaning. “Are you still alive?” he asks.

  “Yeth,” I answer in that scary, lisping, child-wraith voice.

  “It’s been twelve hours and nine minutes since they took you,” he says.

  How does he know this?

  He starts giggling, but the giggling lasts only for a short time. Now he is moaning for Leila again. “I’ll kill you, Leila! As God is my witness! I’ll kill you!”

  A tray of food is pushed under the door. I can smell it from where I’m lying on my blanket. It’s only a yard away from me, but a yard is too far. I can’t make myself move over such a distance. It’s too far, too far. But the smell of the food—very ordinary stuff, just prison glug—is unbearably beautiful. I make my body do things it doesn’t wish to do, I make muscles and bones move across the concrete floor. I try to grasp the spoon, but my hands are still so numb from the binding that the spoon drops from them. Again I fold my fingers around the spoon, and again no success. My wrists and hands are a weird blue, nothing like the color of healthy human flesh. It’s impossible to imagine that my hands can be a normal color again. I make a very concentrated effort to hold the spoon, and this time it remains in my grasp. I heap the food into my mouth; it’s horrible food, stale rice with a sauce that stinks like an open garbage can. Oh, but the taste of it! The heavenly taste of it!

  I WAKE IN the morning to the sound of Azan, the morning call to prayer in Arabic. The first thing that comes into my head is an image of six-year-olds, many of them, sitting in front of me in my old classroom at primary school. I see myself in this image, too, even though, at the time, that would not have been possible. And what am I doing? Why am I standing there in front of the class looking so sulky and resentful? I was never a sulky kid, so what is the matter with m
e? I take myself back to that time, struggle for comprehension. Then without warning the memory rises into my consciousness. This was punishment! I had been making fun of Azan or, more correctly, making fun of Arabic. All of us kids made fun of Arabic. We hated learning it, hated speaking it, and considered it unpatriotic to use the language of the stupid Arabs. In my Zoroastrian household, Arabic was held in particular contempt, for it was the language of those who had swarmed over Persia and forced the people to their knees fourteen hundred years earlier. The resentment of that invasion and subjugation had been passed down from generation to generation. And I must have been the loudest in my protests, for in this memory, I am being compelled to sing the call to prayer at the top of my voice. So there I stand, hating what I am about to do, but I do it anyway. I throw my head back and bawl out Azan.

  Come, ye faithful,

  Bow to God and give Him your praise.

  Praise the Maker of Earth.

  Praise the Father of the Prophet.

  Come, ye faithful,

  Bow to God and give Him your praise.

  I sit running my fingers over the stubble on my head and itching my neck. I use my finger as a pen and write messages to myself or else just my name on my skull. How ugly I must look now! What a fright for people to see! Oh, the interrogator knew exactly what he was doing when he made me ugly in this way. He saw my vanity. He saw how much of my self-esteem was invested in maintaining myself as a Persian princess. And what do I think now? Have my looks, bastard! What do I care? What good does looking pretty do me here? What good does looking pretty ever do anyone? Oh, but that is disingenuous. Looking attractive does people a lot of good. But not in any crucial situation, and not when anything that you hope to rely on all through life, like your soul and its influence over you, is involved. Oh, but I wish I had my hair back!