My Life as a Traitor: An Iranian Memoir

by Zarah Ghahramani

  Olives and bread appear under my door on a plastic plate. I sit cross-legged and eat greedily, like a dog that keeps a jealous eye out for any other creature that might try to steal her meal. When I’ve finished eating, my brain is properly awake. Fear has uncoiled itself all through me, from my chest down to my toes. The happiness of the escape movie is far, far away now. I am in a state of readiness for whatever these bastards have waiting for me. But by “readiness” I don’t mean ready to resist or ready to gather up all my courage. I mean ready to scream, ready to beg. I asked Sohrab the other day about the special place that is rumored to exist within Evin. In the outside world, it was mentioned in whispers, black whispers, sometimes made the subject of macabre jokes. It is said to have been set up by the Savakis. In 1979, the students who supported the ayatollah’s revolution stormed Evin and displayed the instruments and devices used by SAVAK in this ultimate torture chamber. They were beyond speaking about, beyond writing about. The story goes, though, that when the men of the new regime took power, in 1979, they shot or hanged the Savaki bosses, but they kept the torturers, the hands-on people, recognizing that their skills would be valuable in the coming era. And so it proved, according to the whispers.

  Sohrab said, “Yes, it is there.” And he spoke of it a little more, without dread, because he is mad and far beyond dread.

  It is there.

  And what good can ever come from people who keep such a place? It appears to be the first place that tyrants—the tyrants of my own land, the tyrants of a hundred others—think of creating once they have the whip hand. Such a place is not just a room in a prison; it is a room in a nation.

  If I am taken to the special place, I will bargain at every step on the way to its door. “Whose name do you want?” I will say. “What do you want me to do?” Even if the bargain only amounts to an agreement to be shot in the back of the head, I will greedily accept. Or if that is not possible, if, when it comes to the moment, there are things I will not do, people I will not betray; if I find something buried deep within me, something I have never seen, never heard from, some ultimate strength, then let the light and love of my mother’s God combine with the light and love of my father’s God, and let my life rush from me and be gone forever.

  IT IS STILL early.

  The guard drops the blindfold through the slot in the door.

  I have never been taken for interrogation this early in the morning.

  “I’m going,” I whisper to Sohrab. I’ve heard him moving and I know he’s awake, but he says nothing.

  The guard opens the door and puts what I know to be a chador over my head without saying a word to me. I hate it. It reminds me of those role-playing games I engaged in for Behnam. And why do I have to wear this? What is special about today? Is some big shot scheduled to interrogate me today, some revered holy man?

  “Where are we going?” I ask the guard, not expecting an answer that means anything.

  “Keep walking.”

  We stop after just a few seconds. I hear the scraping and wheezing sound of an elevator. I recall that sound from when I was first brought here. I hear the ding, ding as the elevator reaches this floor, and the hiss and groan as the doors open.

  The guard pushes me forward. I feel the different surface under my bare feet. I hear the groan of the door closing and feel the sudden lurch as the elevator begins to move. I can’t tell if we are going up or down. At first I think we are ascending; then, no, I’m certain we are descending; then I lose all idea.

  I can’t control my fear. Just this one change to the routine, and I am already half insane.

  “Please tell me where you’re taking me. Please tell me.”

  “I don’t know. No more questions.”

  I take a deep breath to prevent myself from fainting. I thought I was used to every sort of fear that this place can provide, but this is a new sort. I want to run and throw myself headlong against something hard. The guard can see or sense how the fear is mounting in me, and he takes my wrist and holds it tight.

  I hear the ding, ding sound again. We must have descended, because the elevator has been in motion too long for us to have been heading upward. Evin is big, but it is not ten stories high. We must be deep, deep down.

  The guard pulls on my wrist to get me out of the elevator, but I won’t budge. My immobility is partly will and partly petrification. I know that when they hang someone here, they do it right after morning prayer. And when they hang a woman, they put a full chador over her head. I have seen hanged women on television. Every Iranian has seen them.

  I cling with my free hand to a niche I have found, a part of the door, I think. I hold with all my strength and scream my head off.

  “Move!” says the guard. “I don’t know where they’re taking you. Transferring you to another place. Just move!”

  The guard must think this will calm me. It doesn’t.

  “I don’t want to go anywhere!” I shriek. “I don’t want to! Take me back to my cell!”

  The guard slaps me hard on the shoulder, then braces my head and slaps at my face. I can’t hold the door any longer. My fingers lose their grip.

  “You made me do that!” the guard shouts at me. “I didn’t want to! You forced me, stupid girl!”

  We walk for what feels like more than a minute, even more than two. Then the guard makes me stop and stand still. He puts a hand on each of my shoulders and makes me more upright. It is as if he is shaping me, making me more presentable. I hear a door opening, then feel a rush of fresh air. This is an open area. I can feel the broadness of the space before me through the chador.

  Where is this? Where? It’s outside, but it’s not the street, I’m sure of that. Surely this is the back of Evin, below the mountains of North Tehran. I can hear birdsong. I stop breathing in order to hear the birds.

  A car door opens. The sound is distinctive. The guard says, “Bend your knees,” and I do, without any resistance. He pushes me into the car. I brush against a figure already seated inside; then the guard urges me along the seat and climbs in himself, so that I am wedged between two people. My feeling is that the other figure is that of a woman. I have heard no voice, but I feel it is so.

  A person in front of me—the driver or someone else—begins talking as soon as the car is in motion. He is responding to someone’s voice, but the guard beside me and the person I think is a woman are not saying a thing. This must be a conversation on a cell phone. I can’t figure out what is being said. It sounds like gibberish, or a play language.

  The car has been moving for more than five minutes. I know how much time is passing because I am counting in my head. Why I should be doing this, I have no idea. Am I trying to calm myself? How could I possibly believe that I could calm myself? I feel furious with whatever foolish part of me is trying to calm me down! And yet, all through my objections, I continue to count, and I am up to my sixth count of sixty. Oh, but I’m counting too quickly! I slow the count, absurdly, and say beneath my breath, “One star blink blink, two stars blink blink, three stars blink blink …”

  I hear no traffic sounds. Is it possible that the hidden part of Evin is so vast that a car is required to move people around in it? The guard I imagine to be female shows that she is indeed female by tutting and fussing with my chador, making it sit properly on my hairless skull. I permit her to do it. Why not? It’s a task she adores. She’s one of those women who get into a high state of excitement by stopping girls in the street and commanding them to straighten their head scarves. “God detests a creature who shows her hair to strangers,” she would lecture, because that is exactly what they say. “Are you prepared for what Hell is like?” I know her type so well; I know how proud she is of her job.

  22

  BY THE END of the war with Iraq, the wail of the red-alert siren in Tehran warning of a missile attack was greeted with a shrug of the shoulders by children like me. After all, for many of us, war was normal. The siren sounded, and children would continue to play in the street
s, ride their bikes, joke and skylark. When a missile exploded close by, the boys (and a few girls, too) would grin at each other and say, “Ha-ha, missed!” I would have stayed in the streets playing after the red-alert siren, but out of concern for my mother, who would have had a heart attack, I always left with Mom and my brothers and sisters for the air-raid shelter, carrying my little suitcase. Inside the case I kept my pajamas, my colored pencils, and a coloring book. People from all over the neighborhood were down in the tunnels sheltering from the missiles. The lights were dim, but you could see. Bedding was laid out, and the smallest children were made to curl up under the blankets and at least pretend to sleep, no matter what time it was in the world above. The tunnels were full of the racket of mothers shouting to their older, more unruly kids and of kids themselves joking and laughing and generally continuing the games they had just left. Many people prayed, too, and the unhurried, rhythmic chanting blended in with shrieks and oaths and shrill laughter and the cries of mothers pleading for some order: “As God is my judge, I’ll take you by your neck and turn your bottom scarlet!”

  I sat quietly and plied my colored pencils. Here was a goblin breaking into a room in which a peasant family was hiding—a great theme of Iranian folktales. Here was a princess picking flowers in the meadow. Here was Rustam, calling on Sohrab to lay down his sword and depart in peace. Here was a hunter in the age of Darius aiming his arrow at a rearing lion. Other coloring books—not among my favorites—gave children the opportunity to do their very best work on the outline of the Ayatollah Khomeini smiling at pious children bowed in prayer.

  Above me, I knew, infernos were devouring houses and people. Soldiers were running this way and that, trying to clear the streets for the fire engines to race through. Naughty boys were ducking down alleys and between piles of smoking debris, lapping up the excitement. Dogs were barking in panic, scouring the streets for their owners. Ambulances were blaring their way to places where people were screaming for help. And there would surely be an old man who felt he had seen too much of fire and death in his life shaking his fist at the sky, or at Fate. Just as surely, there would be an old woman, her wits scrambled, shuffling through the chaos as she called the name of her cat. I had seen all this more than once when the red-alert siren sounded a little too late. It didn’t distress me to know what was happening above. I was taking great care to stay inside the lines as I concentrated on the figure of the mighty Rustam calling to the young man Sohrab, whom he was not to know was his beloved son. Rustam and Sohrab—that was tragedy. The chaos above—that was a nuisance.

  Twelve years later, in my second year at the university, I again had the opportunity to either stay in the streets, where crowds were shouting and shaking their fists, or retreat to a shelter. This time, my mother was not able to demand that I come with her to the tunnels with my small suitcase and something to occupy me. This time, I did what I had wished to do all those years earlier, when I first became blasé about all that might kill me: I stayed in the streets, with no fear of the enemy. I was ecstatic; what was happening seemed to me unstoppable. The protests had only a very local objective—to demand the reinstatement of a university professor who’d been arrested for teaching in a way that was considered subversive by the Ministry for Education—but we were getting a lot of support from the general public and from some of the bolder newspapers. It seemed to me, and to most of my fellow protesters, that the sheer justice of what we were demanding had disarmed the regime politically; that they were scared, unable to look us in the eye and say that we were in the wrong. After twenty years in power, the regime was exhausted, so we believed. This conviction was foolish, of course, as I came to see; those in power were simply waiting to see how much force would be required to shut us up. They had tried a little, it hadn’t worked, and they were getting ready to try a lot.

  I looked around and saw so many young men and young women, just like me, laughing in the face of the enemy—the enemy this time being the police; the security agents; the stupid boys of the Basiji, with their pimples and bad breath and brain-dead fanaticism; the mullahs, the rulers, the nation’s most practiced liars and hypocrites. Harm me? Really? No, they would not harm me, and they would not harm my friends. A great force for reform billowed the sail of our ship. Woe betide those who crossed our bow! There I stood, my scarf thrown back and the wind in my hair, and beside me was Rustam—the Lion himself, the man who made the earth shudder when he lifted his foot and brought it down on the ground. And Rustam’s name was Arash.

  Then one day in autumn, I was walking home from the university with my books in my bag and my scarf revealing a rebellious inch or two of my dark hair. I had just left two of my girlfriends, both of them dauntless firebrands like myself. We’d been discussing the recent student arrests, and talking of how we would call a rally for the next day right within the precincts of the university to protest this blatantly illegal violation of our rights to state our point of view. We’d also discussed boyfriends and enjoyed ten minutes of the tittering and giggling that Iranian girls so relish in the absence of boys, tittering and giggling that would look to a Western girl painfully teenagerish but that was, in its way, deadly serious.

  With not a thought in my head but of the fine figure I made striding along with my hair showing and my chin held high, I was suddenly alarmed by a car, a green Peugeot, that seemed likely to run me down, as well it might because I was walking arrogantly in the very middle of the street. I was preparing to say something like “Hey, watch it, brother!” but I never got the chance. A woman in a police uniform stepped out of the car and rapidly demanded to see my identity papers. Even before my papers had been properly studied, I was in the back of the car with the woman officer on one side of me and a male police officer on the other. A third officer drove. I wrenched my head around to see if my friends had noticed what had happened. They were both running after the car, but with a couple seconds of acceleration, the driver left them far behind.

  I knew that I could be in the worst trouble, that this sort of swoop by the police could end badly for me. I’d heard of other student protesters being grabbed off the street in this way, beaten black and blue, and dumped in some remote suburb in the middle of the night. But this hadn’t happened all that often, and never to anyone I knew well. I’d thought that, if the police took an interest in me, they would make an appointment and ask me a few questions, which I’d answer curtly and then go home. I hadn’t believed that my life could be invaded by people I considered beneath me. A cloak of snobbishness, as I came to see, was what I’d relied on for protection. And I continued to trust in this snobbishness, absurdly. “Excuse me,” I said, “where am I being taken, and for what reason?”

  “The station,” said the woman, without looking at me. “We have some questions for you to answer.” Her tone wasn’t harsh; it was more bored than anything.

  “Questions about what?”

  “You’ll be told.”

  “I wish to be told now.”

  The woman ignored me. The male officer smiled, quite aware, I think, that my composure was fake.

  I was preparing another question when the driver stopped the car. The woman officer produced a blindfold, slipped it over my head and scarf, and patted it with her fingers until it firmly covered my eyes. In the darkness, I had already begun the long and agonizing process of repentance for everything I had ever done that could possibly give offense to people such as those in the car with me. It was a process of consenting and recanting. “Oh, God, what have I done? I’m going to apologize as soon as they ask me to. I’ll fall to my knees, I’ll promise never, ever to do anything bad again. But how dare they! Yes, how dare they! I have done nothing wrong. I’ll demand to be released or I’ll take my story to the newspapers. Honestly, do they think they’re dealing with some peasant from the sticks? Oh, my mother, dear God, my mother! She’ll die. She’ll never be able to bear this! I’m going to tell them that I didn’t know what I was doing. I was sucked into the whole thing.
I had bad friends, they misled me. I’m too young to know my own mind. But Arash—what will he think? He’ll be so ashamed of me. He’ll disown me. He’ll pretend that he understands why I pleaded with the cops, but really, he’ll be disappointed. Well, you know what? There will be no pleading from me! None! This is illegal, what they’re doing—illegal! Dear God, don’t they pay policemen enough for them to buy deodorant? Phew! And her, too. Dad will get me a lawyer. It’ll be okay.”

  I heard traffic sounds as we were driving, but not very distinctly. I had no idea where I was being taken. I doubted that I was going to a police station. There are police stations everywhere in Tehran. They could have reached one in sixty seconds. But if not to a police station, then where?

  With each passing minute, my mouth became drier. I wouldn’t have enough moisture in my mouth to plead, certainly not enough to rage.

  The car finally slowed, made a sharp turn, then stopped.

  The woman officer nudged me. “Move,” she said, and once again, not harshly.

  She walked behind me with a hand on my shoulder. I hadn’t worn a blindfold since I was a kid, playing games with other kids. I remembered the delicious, scary thrill of those games, with my friends shrieking, “Zarah! Zarah! You’re going over a cliff! Watch out!” Now it was different. There was no glee in my fear. I imagined a club raised, ready to strike me, or a fist. I was panting like a cat when it’s terrified, my heart beating so fast it felt as if it would fly into pieces. I could hear twittering, like that of birds in a big cage, except that the twittering was human. The woman officer said, “Stop.” I stood still as I was commanded. I tried to make my stillness seem exemplary, as if to show that I was really a good girl who could follow orders. I tried to imagine what was going on around me. People brushed against me, as if they were busily on their way to somewhere. I heard laughter, and I heard a booming, male voice demanding that the laughter cease.