My Life as a Traitor: An Iranian Memoir

by Zarah Ghahramani

  I sit and look around my cell, switching my gaze from one wall to another, then to the door, then to the floor. My eyes are famished. They yearn for something to feast on. I wish a bug would visit me—an ant, a mosquito, a fly, a cockroach, any sort of bug at all, just so long as I could use my vision and notice things about the bug that my brain would then go to work on. It’s strange, but when you sit around with no stimulation for your eyes or your brain and nothing for your muscles to do, your body blames you, as if it were you who had chosen to impose this fast of the senses and the muscles. So when I get to my feet and pace these three short steps one way and three short steps back, it is because some angry and impatient being inside me is saying, “You! Do something! Walk! Read a book! Go to a movie! What’s the matter with you?”

  No friendly bug comes to stir my senses, and so I reluctantly allow my brain to indulge in its one recreation: imagining murder. This comes over me each day, and I always resist it for a time and always give in, like someone who knows it is a sin to find erotic gratification all alone, and promises to stop, and can’t stop, and promises again, and again breaks the promise. It is always the fat man who is my victim. Sometimes he walks into my cell alone, gloating and snorting, thinking that I am completely at his mercy, but what he doesn’t know is that I have found some way to arm myself with a big hammer, such as those I have seen laborers using when they are replacing cobblestones on the street. Yes, it is a very big hammer that I have concealed behind my back, and as I watch the fat man approach (for I have refused to wear my blindfold), I am conscious of the great weight of my weapon, so aware of its deadliness. But do I give the slightest hint of the weapon I am holding with both my hands, out of sight of this pig? No, none at all. I wear an expression of girlish fear that delights him all the more. I simulate a trembling all over my body. I seem to be saying, “Oh dear, what can I do, what can I do? My situation is—well, it’s just hopeless!” Then, when he is close enough, I bring the hammer out from behind me and smash it down on his melon skull with all my strength. For a moment he appears undamaged, merely staring back at me with a puzzled expression. But wait, wait! Because now, see! See how his head breaks in half and the hideous mess within erupts from the gape and pours down his chest and his piggy gut!

  Oh, more wonderful than anything! More, more, more wonderful!

  But sick.

  Within a minute of the fantasy’s completion, I am full of disgust with myself, ill with self-loathing.

  No more of that, Zarah! No more!

  I’VE JUST HAD a shower, my third in what I estimate to be the three weeks I’ve been here. The water on my scalp made me shriek, for I’ve been scratching at my stubble, scratching uncontrollably, and it’s all a bloody mess up there.

  I sit with my face buried in my hands wondering if I’ll ever be pretty again. I was used to being pretty! It was so nice! I know how shallow it is to be wishing to have my prettiness back, but it was mine and it was lovely and I was never vain, I never went around preening myself and feeling gorgeous. Well, in fact I did now and then, but I just thought of it as good fortune, I didn’t think it made me a better person.

  Where is Sohrab? Why isn’t he making any sounds up there? Have they taken him away to interrogate him? What could they possibly hope to learn from someone who has been here for ten years or more? He doesn’t know anything about the world outside. Surely they don’t take him to a cell and torture him just for the pleasure of it!

  Oh, where is my madman!

  I rock my head side to side with my face in my hands, my hands resting against my raised knees, and whisper a prayer for Sohrab. I ask God to spare him more beatings, more torture. I ask God to give him back to me.

  Prayers, prayers, prayers! Is there some enormous archive somewhere in Heaven or Hell where all the prayers of those who begged and pleaded are kept? Those who prayed and pleaded without hope? Forgotten prayers in folders, gathering dust.

  20

  IF YOU WERE born in Kermanshah province in the west of Iran, you are still an Iranian but, in all likelihood, an Iranian of a different sort. Kermanshah and its two neighboring provinces, Kurdistan and West Azerbaijan, are home to most of Iran’s five million Kurds. Having most of Iran’s Kurds cooped up in the west suits all of the non-Kurdish Iranians just fine, for Kurds are considered weird in some ways and nuisances in others. My mother and father are both Kurdish, both born in Kermanshah, and so I am a Kurd, happy to be thought of as weird and a nuisance.

  The Kurds are the oldest ethnic group in Iran’s part of the Middle East. They’ve been there for four thousand years, and their roots go down to soils created by gods who lived in fire and ruled by magic. Such places still exist in the world, places where visitors, completely unaware, suddenly sense something strange, as if the air above these ancient soils is full of fugitive whispers. That magic of the gods of fire still feeds into the blood of Kurds, and even though they are mostly Muslim, other Muslims consider Kurdish Islam primitive and full of pagan impurities. And on top of the pagan impurities, Kurds are Sunnis, which makes them even more suspicious to the majority Shi’ites of Iran, in something of the way that a Protestant minority in a country might be regarded with suspicion by a large Catholic majority.

  It was the Kurds who gave me the heart and soul I have had to rely on all these years, and in particular it was my grandma, my father’s mother, who taught me the Kurdish language and plaited into my consciousness the ancient beliefs and customs of these strange people. I must concede that many of these customs and beliefs were ritualized superstitions (secretly putting salt in the shoes of a visitor to your house whose return was undesired; telling fortunes by running fingers through the subject’s hair; sleeping while pregnant with a holy book under your pillow; keeping wedding celebrations running for precisely seven days, seven being a sacred number), but it all went to my heart.

  I spent my early years seeking the company of my grandma, both in Tehran, where she lived part of the year with my family, and on visits to Kermanshah, the great city of Kermanshah province, when Grandma was staying with my uncle’s family. I was the only one of her grandchildren who found the sort of delight in her stories and language that she was hoping to pass on, and I think this was because of a knack for languages that must have been nestled in my genes when I was born, waiting to have its say in my life. What sparked this knack was the realization that the same message could be conveyed in the different words of different languages. I can’t claim to recall the moment when this dawned on me, but I know there must have been a day and an hour when I fashioned something from my grandma’s language, and so grasped this amazing fact. A pomegranate in Farsi was a pomegranate in Kurdish, only its name came out of my mouth altered for Grandma!

  Grandma was a widow during all the years I knew her. Her husband had died when she was still quite young, and her children had been taken from her to live with her brother-in-law’s family. Such is the law in Iran, and a truly wicked law it is. My poor grandma had to walk a round-trip of six hours to see her children, something she did regularly and without a murmur of complaint, as if it were a labor of love. I think, in some ways, the closeness that grew up between my grandma and me expressed years of Grandma’s underemployed affection for her own children and gave her the opportunity to fuss over and adore and cosset and teach a child in the way that had been denied her. I was a glutton for affection and pampering as a child, as if my mother’s endless endearments merely whetted my appetite for more and more. I went everywhere with Grandma—to the market, to the bazaar, to the homely little shops of her Kurdish friends. I came to think of the way my grandma dressed as a model for myself when I grew older: her beautiful long hair exposed in the Kurdish manner, wrapped only at the back in a coiled scarf or a headband; long, colorful dresses. Our resemblance went beyond the physical; I gestured the way she did, tilted my head in just the same manner to express wonderment, smiled the same way. No doubt I learned these things from Grandma, but perhaps there is room to specula
te on the inheritance of a complementary set of genes, too.

  Kurds have been, for a long, long time, an unlucky people, never free to draw a border and say, “This is our land, the nation of the Kurds.” They live like impoverished second cousins on the fields of more fortunate relatives, at best pitied or ridiculed, at worst hunted and killed by their relatives for not showing enough gratitude. They spill over into Turkey, Iraq, Syria, and wherever they are found, they are a minority. Those who rule them regard them as a burden. I know from what I have read that the Kurds have wanted a homeland but have never had the luck or maybe the skill to win great, decisive battles. Fierceness in fighting has never been for them a handicap; bravery has never been a problem. Like most of the peoples of the Middle East, Kurds will rise at dawn on the first day of the week if need be and fight without thought of rest or sustenance for the next seven days. The great leader, the military genius, the merciless egomaniac who spreads his influence far and wide—the Kurds have never produced this man, and so they keep to their mountains and by turns accept their oppressors’ rule and rebel against it.

  I can’t speak with any intimate knowledge of the Kurds of Turkey and Iraq, but I do know that thousands of years of being ruled by others has bred a type of versatility into the Kurds of Iran—or into some at least. These versatile Kurds are the ones who are driven not by a passion for a homeland of their own but for equality within the borders of Iran. My father is a Kurd of this sort. He employed his military and administrative talents in the service of the shah; when the shah was deposed, he turned his hand to business and found a way of getting along with the mullahs. His priority always was the survival of his family, not on any terms but on terms of equality. My father has always been a pragmatist, except when it came to the question of leaving Iran altogether when the mullahs took charge, in 1979. He had the opportunity to sell everything and flee, but he stayed out of sheer love of country, and so ceded everything he owned to the regime. His versatility shows in the way he was able to accept that the shah’s reign was over and then cast about for some means to support his family. My father wants things to work in the best way they can, not in the best way that can be imagined; he is not an idealist, he is not altruistic. He draws lines in the sand indicating points from which he will not retreat, but he makes sure that the lines he draws provide latitude for movement. And this choice of pragmatism over passion is, I think, typical of the type of Kurd he is.

  I am a Kurd of my father’s sort, a versatile Kurd. I have no interest in the ultimate. I want things to work as well as they can, given human limitations. When I run into the street and shout and shake my fist, I am not shouting, “Utopia or death!” I am shouting something much humbler: “I want my pink shoes!” That would be enough, for once the mullahs conceded my right to wear pink shoes, so much that is good and wise and kind and just plain human would follow. I have no argument with Islam, not even with the career and progeny of the Prophet’s son-in-law Ali or with forms of words in the Quran; my argument is with the mullahs, and it’s the same argument I would have if I were Jewish and were compelled to live a life regulated by an unyielding ultraorthodox regime of Jewish mullahs, or if I were Catholic and had to listen to a Catholic mullah telling me that my flesh exists only to be mortified, or to a Buddhist mullah insisting that the joy and excitement of my lover’s kiss is an illusion. Mullahs all over the world fear what women make them feel—that’s my complaint. They seem to detest so much of what nature has provided. I am quite sure that human beings can contemplate the divine without denying their desires. I can, my girlfriends can, and there’s nothing special about us.

  My father, as I say, is one of these versatile Kurds that I speak of, but it is my Kurdish mother who understands most about making the best of what is provided.

  Western women think that the typical Iranian woman lives the life of a vassal, and I can understand why they think that way. I know of many Iranian women—unmarried and married—whose lives are made miserable by the laws that regulate their days and nights. And nothing on Earth can be said in defense of laws that permit the males of a society to hold the spirits of women hostage. Such laws are evil, wherever they are enacted. But the life of an Iranian woman, under a saner interpretation of the Quran than applies in Iran now, has much more in common with the lives of women in the West, or with those of women anywhere, than might be supposed. My mother lives under laws that Western women would probably think insufferable, but she is as free in her heart and soul as anyone on Earth, male or female.

  My mother’s path to freedom grew out of her convictions, just as mine did, only my path ended in a swamp. For her, as for many women, freedom is love. I don’t mean to say she lives in a pink mist and dreams of endless kisses in rose bowers; her vision of love is as tender as that, yes, but it is tougher, too. Love for my mother is something expressed with the hands even more than the heart. People may talk of their love, and talk and talk, but until they use their hands, the talk is only talk. My mother’s hands are no longer as beautiful as they once were. When she strokes my cheeks and frames my face with her palms and holds me captive so that I have no choice but to look her in the eyes, I can feel the roughness of her flesh. I could say that her hands show the wear and tear of being a woman, but I’d prefer to say that she has the hands you earn after years and years of being a human being; years and years of hands-on interventions in the lives of your children, of your husband; years and years of approaching salvation in the humblest of ways.

  These interventions of my mother’s were not restricted to her family. Because of her knack for finding workable compromises, she was sought out by neighbors to find a path to peace. In Tehran, our neighbor had two wives and had fathered five children with each. The combined ten children were more than those two wives could manage. Things would have been easier if the two wives had been able to get along, but instead they were terrible rivals under one roof. Their bitter arguments were known all over the neighborhood, and people would shake their heads and cluck their tongues. Polygamy is frowned upon by middle-class Muslims; it is considered a relic of the past. Sharia law—the scriptural law that permits multiple marriage and a wide range of dreadful sanctions for crimes of certain sorts—is thought of in the same way: cruel and degrading. But when my mother was called on by the two wives of our neighbor to make peace, she set aside her feelings about Sharia law and did what she always did: looked for a way in which some dignity could be reestablished. This was her policy. As I’ve mentioned, whenever there was an argument within our family, my mother would descend like a ministering angel, forcing my brother to kiss me and apologize after he’d perpetrated some vile trick on me; forcing him to call me “Dear sister.” Of course, she couldn’t compel the two wives of our neighbor to kiss and make up, but she would sit for hours listening to their grievances, offering suggestions, soothing the agitated hands of each wife with her own hands.

  Recalling my mother’s addiction to peacemaking makes me wish to lampoon her, and I’m certainly capable of that, but at a deeper level I see something that should be spared my sense of humor, something that has persisted in women for so many ages, and that is a deep distrust of abstractions. It is always much more difficult for a woman than for a man to say something like “All property should be shared, and those who don’t wish to share must be put to death.” Or “It is God’s will that those who dispute God’s will should be thrown into the flames.” Or even “The world does not exist, and those who think it does exist must be disabused.” Women hold children in their hands; they wipe the snot from children’s noses; they sit at bedsides soothing the child who has woken from a nightmare. Men care for their children, too, very lovingly, and I would not wish to denigrate the contribution of the male parent in child rearing. Not at all. Nor would I say that women cannot be savage and ruthless. At the same time, it would surely be true to say that women historically have been in the better position to judge how much painstaking attention is required in rearing a child, and I thi
nk it could also be argued that they are less inclined than men of a certain sort to thrust their children into harm’s way. Women like my mother know that abstractions are useless in the day-to-day struggle to preserve the lives of children, and just as useless as a foundation for happiness. Of course, nothing much can be done about injustice if peaceful acceptance of the status quo is forever breaking out, but for women like my mother—versatile, practical, hands-on women—the injustices employed to overcome injustice can be foreseen, and any eventual victory will seem pyrrhic. My mother knows injustice when she sees it; it is only the path to justice that rouses her doubts and trepidation.

  Among our neighbor’s ten children there was one little girl named Azam. She had no self-confidence at all and struggled to make herself heard in her rowdy family. She couldn’t hold her speech together, and stuttered and blundered over simple statements. She was ridiculed within her family and without, ridiculed even by her father, our neighbor, Arman Agha. At the time I knew Azam, Iraqi missiles were exploding in Tehran. All the children in the targeted parts of the city—including my neighborhood—saw things that should never make their way into children’s heads: hills of rubble from which smoke rose in clouds, the material beneath the stone and concrete burning with a crackling sound; hands and arms and feet and legs protruding from the burning debris—hands that still wore wedding rings, feet with the shoes blown away and with toes that twitched; people staggering like zombies in the clear places between the hills of rubble, their clothing shredded on their bodies. After the first missile bombardments, it felt to me as if some terrible mistake had been made and things that I had heard of on the news and from my teachers about the deaths of martyrs on battlefields had broken out in the wrong place by accident. Because it didn’t seem possible to me that the fires and the screaming and the bleeding could have been made to happen on purpose, here where I lived. What I saw, Azam saw, and she ceased to talk at all—ceased trying to make her awkward and hesitant attempts at speech, at least to anyone except me. I was her friend and supporter, through the intervention of my mother.