My Life as a Traitor: An Iranian Memoir

by Zarah Ghahramani

  I sit back down on my dirty blanket and wipe the tears from my eyes. I am weak again. I am prepared to plead with the guards, with the interrogator. “Be nice to me. I am no threat. I’m a worm. If you want me to wriggle across the floor like a worm, of course I will do it. Tell me what you want me to do. No matter how awful, I will do it.”

  The great thinkers, the great philosophers want us to believe that suffering is ennobling; it makes you a finer person; it builds character. Well, I have to tell the great thinkers something else that is true: suffering corrupts you. It’s okay if you already have character and wisdom and courage, but if you don’t, suffering won’t build such things in your heart and soul. It will consume what little courage you have, and then you are left with nothing. You see the man with the ax and the hood on his head. The wooden block sits before you. “Bend your neck,” the axman says through his hood. “Bend your neck.” Nothing can save you, you might as well die with dignity. Except that there is no dignity left in you. Where your dignity was, there is only fear screeching for rescue, like rats in a cage screeching for release. Suffering has not made you strong. You look up at the axman, you see the glint of the blade. “Bend your neck,” he says, but instead you beg him to spare you, to forgive you. “Not me!” you plead. “Not me, please, not me!”

  18

  WE ARE WHAT would be termed “liberals” in my family, all of us, my father and mother, my older brothers, my sisters, even my younger brother. My cousins and nieces and nephews are liberals, and my uncles and aunts. We don’t like dogma, we don’t trust ideology, we want everyone to be free. We are pretty comfortable with the idea of boys and girls kissing and cuddling before marriage, and we don’t mind much if the kissing and cuddling doesn’t even lead to marriage. And everyone can wear what they like. If you wish to go shopping on Revolution Boulevard in a bikini, do so. It might not seem to us in the best possible taste, but go ahead, hussy. Everyone should read what they like. We are against censorship, mostly. We are also in favor of separation of church and state. Let the priests and mullahs make the law within their cathedrals and mosques, and let those who enter there obey the laws of the mosques and cathedrals. Once outside, let the Muslims and Christians and Jews observe the laws of a secular state. Capitalism, yes, but with an acceptable face, or at least a reasonably attractive mask; welfare, yes; tolerance, yes. We don’t stand out from most middle-class Iranians in our politics; most are like us, though they are cautious about expressing their politics, just as we are—or as some of us are.

  But then there is Ellie, my cousin, fourteen going on forty.

  Ellie is a true Child of the Revolution. Like me, she has lived her entire life under the rule of the mullahs. But in Ellie’s case, the message of the mullahs got through.

  “Zarah,” she warned me when I was dating Behnam, “take care not to have sex with your boyfriend before you are married. You will go to Hell.”

  “Zarah,” she censured me when she saw me indoors without my burka, dressed in jeans and a top that showed my middle, “God can see inside.”

  Being lectured by a fourteen-year-old can be charming, if maddening, but Ellie had no intention of charming anyone. Her business was to save souls, and she had no doubt as to how to go about it because her teachers at school, her teachers on the radio and on television, her teachers at the mosque had provided her with a simple program of salvation: when you see the Law of God ignored, speak up. Ellie’s zealousness became so feared within our extended family that we made efforts to comply with her rules whenever she was around. We weren’t concerned that she would report us to the Basiji or anything like that; she loved us, and it would never have occurred to her to land us in trouble. No, we were simply afraid of her frowns and her tut-tutting, and so we pandered to her in the way that people indulge a censorious grandparent. Her own parents did the same. I drew the line at wearing my head scarf indoors, but I kept as much of the rest of me covered up as I could to placate her. I didn’t utter any criticisms of the regime when she was within earshot. If someone important to her—some revered ayatollah, some gray-whiskered bigot—was talking on the television, I excused my conscience from contributing a volley of abuse.

  Sometimes I would study her in horrified fascination as she sat quietly, piously reading through tracts from the Quran, her expression one of clear and perfect faith. I watched her at other times as she assisted my mother in the kitchen, she a girl in her teens and my mother a matron of fifty and nothing to distinguish the two of them so far as conscientious attention to the needs of the household was concerned. Ellie was ready, while still a kid, to step straight into the role of obedient housewife and strict but affectionate mother. She had taught herself to work rapidly in the kitchen with one hand, using the other to keep her scarf drawn tight under her chin. This is a skill known to the wives of the more pious of the regime’s supporters. For women like my mother, letting your head scarf hang loose while you work with both hands is perfectly acceptable.

  In our household as I was growing up, so many opinions were held in common that we were able to rely on a shorthand of gesture and expression to take the place of outbursts. We would see on the news that some poor young girl had been sentenced to death for having an affair, and we would shake our heads, or put a hand over our eyes, or simply sigh deeply and mutter something like “Dreadful!” We lived in a circle of shared sympathies. Although I was well used to Ellie’s tsk-tsking and fussing, I suppose I must have believed that, deep down, she was still one of us. She might have tedious views on sin and redemption, but she would never endorse the more brutal ways of the regime.

  Except that she did. Practices that were as merciless (and made about as much sense) as medieval trial by ordeal appeared perfectly just to Ellie. An example would be her acceptance of the legal requirement for a male family member to confirm any charge of rape that a woman might make. Utter nonsense. And yet she was not heartless, not at all. She was a gentle girl who fretted over birds with damaged wings and stray doggies getting by on what they could find in garbage cans and gutters. In many ways, even most ways, she was a marshmallow. She would come to my bedroom and sit on my bed, stroking my hand and touching my hair and talking endless affectionate nonsense. But if I were cruel enough to experiment in the way I did with my mother when asking her to recall the glories of the shah’s regime, and so ask Ellie about specific infamies perpetrated by her beloved mullahs, she would caution me, in a kindly, grandmotherly way. “Please believe me, teachers know many things that ordinary people don’t know. They tell us what is best, Zarah.”

  Raising concrete issues closer to home distressed Ellie without seriously shaking her faith in the mullahs. Her aunt, divorced from an intolerable bully of a husband, asked Ellie in my hearing if she was happy with the way “your people” made it impossible for her to see her own children—for that is the law in Iran; you can get a divorce if you’re a woman, but you have to say goodbye to the kids. Ellie had seen my poor aunt in terrible distress over the children, yearning for the touch of a hand. And, watching in my rather clinical way, I thought, Aha! Wriggle out of this one, little darling! Well, Ellie did wriggle; I could see the conflict in her eyes. There stood her aunt, dark circles under her eyes, half insane with grief, never a better opportunity for Ellie to murmur some reservations. But what she finally said was what might have been predicted—a version of the caution she had given me: “About such things I cannot know until I am grown. But my teachers will tell me. I will ask.”

  The teachers, the teachers!

  Is that all it comes down to—your choice of teachers? My teachers made a world of difference in my life, and I suppose the same could be said of Ellie’s. But pray God there’s a little more to it than that, because who could fail to notice that the most zealous teachers are attracted to dogma? Give me a teacher, please, who is sometimes beset by doubt, who might answer your question by saying, “I’ll have to go away and think about that.” Take my beloved Omar Khayyám. He spent a great part of h
is life searching for certainty, only to conclude that not only is the search futile but it distracts you from the vigor of the life around you.

  Dear Omar, under your bough with your jug of red wine of Shirazi grapes, your loaf of bread, and your girl. May the people of my country who live by the certainties of the mullahs come as one to their senses, pack a picnic lunch, and head for the parks and forests with their wives, their girlfriends, their husbands and boyfriends. May they kiss and gambol into the evening. May their children fall asleep under the stars and awake wondering what joys the day will bring. May Ellie awake with her scarf fallen to her shoulders, and may she smile at the touch of the sun on her hair.

  Oh, dream on, Zarah! But it’s a lovely dream.

  19

  I HAVE PUT out the green slip of paper to show the guard that I need to go to the toilet, but he isn’t paying any attention. Sometimes I put the green slip out just to vary my day, but not this time. I pace up and down my cell—three short steps one way, three steps back—clutching my bladder. This will be the fourth time tonight I’ve needed to pee. Is there something wrong with my kidneys? Have I become ill in here? Surely the guards can extend a little lenience. It’s not as though I am likely to make a run for it on the way to the toilet, overpower armed guards, steal keys to a half dozen doors. I just want to pee!

  I begin to moan as I pace, aching for relief. If the guard doesn’t come soon, I’ll have to go on the floor of the cell. Maybe that’s what they want me to do, so that they can scoff. Why should they bother? Is humiliating me more such a great achievement? Don’t they know how easy it is to reduce a human being to the level of an animal? It doesn’t require skill or magnificent insight. Dignity is the first thing you give up when you have to. Not all at once, but bit by bit. Dignity becomes a luxury that you can no longer afford, like perfumes and scented soap and lipsticks from Paris. You can get by without it.

  “Please!” I whimper, not so much for the guard as for God. “Please, please!” Sweat is breaking out on my face from the effort of keeping control. Please let me hold on to this last thing, the feeling that I can keep my cell clean, just this last thing! But even that need is rapidly losing its force. Would it matter if the floor of my cell was wet? How could the cell smell worse than it does in any case? I can feel the urge to surrender gaining control over me, but at the same time I know that when I am sitting here with a pool of my own urine around me, I will have lost something I wanted to keep. It’s not even dignity. I think it must have to do with the idea of a place that belongs to me. The cell belongs to me. Even when they finish with me after an interrogation, I come back to this tiny place and it’s mine. When the door slams shut, what is left of me is protected by these concrete walls. It’s horrible to have to admit it, but this place is my home, and I want it to be a clean home. If I had the opportunity, I would put a little vase of flowers in the corner and a mat at the door. I would sweep the floor each day, maybe twice a day, and once a week I would get down on my hands and knees with a bucket of hot water and suds and scrub the concrete. I would put up a poster, maybe my Kafka poster from my bedroom in the home I used to have. Or maybe not Kafka. I love to gaze at the picture of Kafka when I am safe, but here it wouldn’t be right. This place is a little too much like the places he wrote about. But please, just let my cell be clean!

  This is the truth about me. I am a simple, middle-class girl full of middle-class silliness. I want a husband and babies and a nice kitchen with a food processor and a pop-up toaster and a rotisserie and one of those special kettles designed by some genius all made of stainless steel and looking like it belongs in an art gallery. I want a proper oven for the kitchen, very big, much bigger than I really need, white on the outside and with lots of little red lights that tell you what it’s doing and how long things have been cooking. Also a big set of beautiful plates and bowls and those small bowls that are made especially for desserts, and glasses, too, crystal glasses for wine, and a set of saucepans all the same only some bigger than others. It’s crazy for me to have such a desire for a beautiful kitchen, because I can’t cook and know nothing about shopping for a family or even for myself. Yet the beautiful kitchen sits there in my dream home, waiting for the day when I have learned to cook and have learned to choose a man who will make a lovely husband, instead of some business type with his head full of deals—Behnam, I’m thinking of, who could have made me very happy if he’d tried just a little harder.

  I am gritting my teeth now with the effort of not peeing. I bend over and tighten my arms around my middle. I think I might be able to last another ten seconds, and then I will go on the floor and to hell with my home!

  Ten seconds pass, and many more, hundreds more before the guard comes. I want to kill him. I want to push my fingernails into the flesh of his face and leave deep, bleeding wounds. As soon as he opens the door, I have to clamp my mouth shut on the words that spring to the tip of my tongue—horrible swearwords, foul words that I normally never use. I can’t insult him. He can easily push me back into the cell and slam the door shut on me again.

  “How many times do you go to the toilet in a day?” he says. “This is the fourth time. No more.”

  “I’m sorry,” I say meekly. “I’m not feeling well.”

  “Well, too bad about that. We didn’t invite you to come here. You invited yourself.”

  As soon as I close the toilet door behind me and relieve my aching bladder, I glimpse a message on the back of the door. It’s from Arash. I don’t even try to read it. I just enjoy the happiness of peeing. Finally, I look back to the message and read it. It says, “Be strong. B is trying for you.” The B stands for “Behnam,” as I realize immediately, but then, for a few seconds, I have no further comprehension of the message. Then my eyes are flooded with tears, not just a trickle of tears, but a downpour, a monsoon. My face is so sodden that I can feel the drops merging into small streams and running off my chin. Oh, I have never cried like this!

  I replace the blindfold and step out of the cubicle and into the hands of the guard. He can see the tears running out from under the blindfold. Unexpectedly, he touches my shoulder, very lightly. “I will take you to the toilet again tonight,” he says quietly. “If you need to go, I will take you.”

  “Thank you. Thank you.”

  I stop the tears while I am being escorted back to my cell, but once the door is closed and I have put the blindfold back out through the slot, I let this great storm of emotion have its way with me. I don’t even know where all this stuff is coming from! So Behnam is trying for me? Good for him! If he’d tried for me a little earlier, I wouldn’t have so much to weep about. The tears gush down my face, as if some great organ of my body, something bigger than my heart or even my liver is pumping up huge volumes of water and channeling it all to my eyes.

  When the tears finally abate, I am left sitting on my reeking blanket with a shorn head and a face that must look like that of a scarecrow out in the rain. If Behnam could see me now, he might think again about doing something for me, getting me out of this hellish place. Does he still think of me as his girlfriend? Poor man, such a girlfriend! These people in Evin have beaten all of the girlfriend out of me. I wouldn’t wish my ugly self on any man in Iran. But what exactly can Behnam do? I try to figure it out logically. Can I really begin to believe that there is a way out of here for me? Is that possible? Behnam knows a lot of powerful people, he has connections galore, but I’m reluctant to plant the seed of hope in my heart, for I know that Behnam will always think of his reputation first if he has to choose between altruism and assisting an enemy of the regime. He won’t want to jeopardize his business arrangements with these foul people who run my country. And then there is his mother. She has always considered me unsuitable for her son. Too much of a hothead for her darling boy. No good at cooking, can’t mend anything with a needle and thread, no interest in learning all that stuff you’re supposed to know about keeping your man happy and content. She doesn’t know about the dream house w
ith the dream kitchen, and she doesn’t know how much I want to look down at my own baby and see his tiny hands reaching up toward my face. She just sees a snooty girl spouting quotations from books she doesn’t like the sound of. Well, too bad about me. If she thinks her son can do better, let him go and look.

  Anyway, why is Arash leaving me messages about Behnam when he doesn’t even like Behnam? Each of them used to scoff when I mentioned the other one’s name. Behnam used to call Arash a “peasant,” I think because Arash came from outside Tehran and supersophisticated Tehranis pretend to believe that all of Iran outside Tehran is a wilderness populated by cavemen. They came to the brink of punching each other one time. I can’t even remember what it was about. Probably Arash was talking about the corruption and deceit of the regime, and Behnam said something sarcastic. The odd thing is, Behnam actually respects Arash in his way. He knows that Arash is far braver than he. He knows that he would never risk what Arash risks each day.

  Oh, but if Behnam still wants me, then why should I pretend that it’s all a matter of indifference to me? For the love of God, if he wants me, he can have me. If he gets me out of here, I’ll have his babies one after the other and I’ll wear a chador and underneath I’ll wear Louis Vuitton stuff and frilly underwear, just like the wives of his friends. I’ll go to his idiotic parties and stay with the wives and tell them how ecstatic I am that my children have learned to recite passages from the Quran and go into fresh gales of praise for the way Behnam follows Mohammad with such devotion. I will do anything for Behnam, anything on earth, never even once mention politics again in my whole remaining life if only he gets me out of here. I don’t care the tiniest bit about detesting myself. Let me detest myself until I burst, I don’t care!

  ANOTHER DAY WITH no interrogation. I don’t want an interrogation, so why am I restless? I should be overjoyed. It’s just that every part of me is tired of waiting for whatever is to happen to me. Each part is tired in its own way. My legs and arms feel as if they are made of soft spaghetti, no bones in them, no blood. My feet are not only tired but growing soft on the soles through lack of exercise. Pacing up and down my little cell isn’t going to provide them with what they need. The skin of my face feels like that of an aged grandmother you see on the streets, pale and creased.