My Life as a Traitor: An Iranian Memoir

by Zarah Ghahramani

  The woman officer pulled the blindfold away but left the scarf in place. It took only a few seconds for me to realize that I was in some big indoor detention center. A number of officers were standing around looking jaded, but others were busy at a desk writing on documents or recording information from a pair of young women who stood at the counter. My first reflection, other than those to do with my dread, was Why do policemen always look so unhealthy? Don’t they ever eat vegetables and fruit?

  A woman officer—not the one guarding me—started shrieking at the women and girls slouched against the concrete walls. She made gestures as if she were trying to get a whole lot of chickens to hurry along before her. The women and girls gathered around me. I was still standing like a statue, barely daring to move my eyelids. I realized that they were all, even the very young ones, prostitutes. They would have been gathered up in the big sweeps of the city that the cops and Basij militia carry out all through the day and night and brought here to be fined or imprisoned. I said, “Good afternoon to you,” to those closest to me, but they only looked at me and grinned in contempt. “Another uni bird,” one of them said to her neighbor.

  The women were quite argumentative. Actually, all Iranians are argumentative nearly all the time, but these women hadn’t suspended their bad habits just because they were in custody. They demanded to know why they’d been arrested, even though it was obvious. “How about me?” one girl said. “What am I supposed to have done?” She was wearing a pair of shorts. Another one pointed at her lips and said, “It’s not lipstick. I had a lollipop.” The other girls laughed at her story, and she even started laughing at it herself. Oh, God, how I wished I was one of them, one of these bold women! I’d have been happy to share their punishment, happy to share a cell with any of them for a year if necessary. At least they knew what they faced; they’d probably all been through it before. But I knew only that I was either in big trouble or in even worse than big trouble.

  The female officer who’d been in the car with me went off muttering that she had better things to do than stand around all day. I remained standing perfectly still, prepared even to forgo shifting my weight from foot to foot in case doing so was taken as a sign of insolence. The women around me obviously thought I was a sissy. They shook their heads and made little snorts of derisive laughter.

  Finally the officer with the booming voice came over and motioned for all of us to move it. On the far side of the detention room, a tall wire gate was rolled open, and we were hustled inside. Then the gate was shut and locked. The other women, expecting boredom, looked for ways to make themselves slightly more comfortable—lounging against the walls, leaning against one another shoulder to shoulder—but I continued to stand there in my obedient, upright way. When I saw that hardly any of the cops were paying attention to us, I risked speaking to one of the women.

  “Will you call my mom when you get out?” I whispered. “I’d be very, very grateful. Please will you call her and tell her I’ve been arrested?”

  The woman, far from young when I looked at her close up, shook her head unhurriedly. “You’re a political,” she said. “If I do something for you, I’m in shit.”

  “Please? I have a little bit of money. I’ll give it to you.”

  “No.”

  She wandered away from me, but I shuffled after her and caught up with her, all the time looking over my shoulder.

  “Do you know what’s going to happen?” I asked her. “Can you tell me that at least?”

  She didn’t look at me at first, then she risked a glance. “Evin,” she said.

  “Are you sure?”

  “You asked me, little sister, so I’m telling you.”

  I wanted to ask more, but the woman moved away again.

  I thought, God, please protect me!

  I resumed my statue position and waited. My heartbeat had slowed, probably as a result of standing so still for two hours, but now it began racing again. Standing still didn’t help this time. My brain felt as if walls within it were withering away like paper held close to a flame. Thoughts that were normally kept separate were running together. But my one clear thought, the one that resisted the chaos around it, was simply: I don’t have the strength for this.

  23

  ONCE WE ARE out of the car, one of the male officers guides me by prodding me in the small of my back every two steps. I am so used to walking in my blindfold that I have developed a radar perception of what’s around me. I have no way of confirming my guesses, but I feel that I am correct. Right now, I feel certain that a large building is before me, and, sure enough, I hear the rasp of sliding doors a second before the balm of artificially cooled air wraps itself around my body.

  I am prodded forward for quite some distance inside the building. I imagine a vast foyer, dwarfing me in its capaciousness. I hear echoing footsteps. The surface beneath my bare feet puzzles me. It is not concrete; it is harder than concrete, which has a surprisingly resilient feel once you get used to walking on it sightlessly. No, this is more like tile, or some sort of stone. I guard against relaxing my fear, but it does seem that I am in a huge office block; a ministry, perhaps, rather than a dungeon deep in the earth with a scaffold waiting. They will not hang me here, although I may be here for the preliminaries to a hanging.

  I am maneuvered around a corner, and around another. Something brushes my shoulder, something that bends. Foliage? An indoor plant? A door opens, and I pass through. I am moving rapidly, much more rapidly than along the corridors of Evin. My feeling is that business is to be transacted; everything about this experience has the air of briskness.

  The officer tells me to stop and stand still. For a moment, I suspect a trick. A sickly taste of bile comes into my mouth. Have I deceived myself? Am I actually facing a firing squad? But then the officer deftly slips off my blindfold, and, after blinking against the bright overhead lighting, I see that I am indeed in some sort of office building, and that I am facing a door with a plaque fixed to it, a plaque that is a little higher on one side than the other. What is written on the plaque makes no sense; I think it is a misspelling of “Do not enter.” The officer moves slightly ahead of me to open the door, and I have my first look at this person who has been sitting beside me in the car and prodding me in the back. He is neither tall nor short, and completely unremarkable in every other way, too; not good-looking, not ugly, not even plain; just very ordinary.

  The door opens, and I am staring ahead at what appears to be a management suite: a table with a smooth surface of artificial woodgrain; plastic chairs with metal legs; large portraits on the wall, Khomeini and Khamenei, the Father of the Nation and his successor, identical mullahs’ turbans, identical white beards.

  A tall man in a dark suit with an open-collared shirt is standing beside the table looking at me over the top of his glasses, which sit halfway down his nose. Although he is young—maybe twenty-seven, twenty-eight—he is important-looking, just as he wishes to appear, I have no doubt. To his right sits a young woman at a desk with her fingers working on a computer keyboard. She glances at me for a half second without any interest. There is another man in the room sitting to the left of Mr. Important. He’s older, middle-aged, and for some reason I feel I’ve seen him before. Where? I can’t bring the occasion to mind. The older man doesn’t even bother to look at me. I’m staring down at the nails of my bare feet, where a tiny amount of pink nail polish remains. It was my little nephew who painted my nails pink. It was a great project for him, a happy project, with a bit of wickedness mixed in.

  “Have a seat, sister,” says Mr. Important, and as he speaks he takes a seat himself behind the smooth table and makes a motion for the officer to leave. I move a short distance to a row of brown plastic chairs and sit on the one closest to me with my hands folded in my lap. Mr. Important opens a folder and bends forward to read from it. The woman at the computer keeps her finger poised above the keyboard. The older man, the one who is familiar to me, looks away, studying nothing at all. />
  These people are in no hurry. The briskness I was aware of before has diminished.

  Perhaps ten minutes pass; then a knock sounds on the door behind me.

  “Yes, come in,” says Mr. Important, looking up from the folder.

  The door opens. I turn my head just a fraction. It is my interrogator, Stinky. The sight of him instantly triggers a reaction of sickness and disgust in me. My hand goes up to my face involuntarily, as if I am preparing for a blow.

  “Good morning to you, hajji,” he says, addressing Mr. Important. He puts his hands together in the prayer position and gives a small bow in the direction of the older man but doesn’t address him in words. “Sorry for the delay,” says Stinky, and he seats himself two chairs away from me. Some sort of scent reaches my nostrils. Stinky has freshened himself up with cologne! The scent that disguises his vile smell is very like the good manners he pretends to have around other people.

  With the arrival of Stinky, a dangerous reaction has sprung up in me. At first it was hatred and disgust, but what is happening now is far worse, for I feel that I might suddenly stand and spit on him. I am horrified at what I am imagining, but I don’t feel confident that I can maintain control of myself. I drop my head to my chest, squeeze my eyes tightly shut, and hiss silently at this demon that has jumped into my brain: Stop it! Stop it!

  I become aware of a sound quite close by and open my eyes. The older man has leaned forward and is tapping the surface of the table with the tips of his fingers. “Face this way,” he says. His voice carries the crackle of menace, and I obey.

  The demon in my head has gone.

  Mr. Important clears his throat and begins to speak, or really to chant, for he is speaking in formal Arabic and in the manner of a mullah: “In the name of Allah, who will forgive us for whatever mistakes we make, and His Prophet Mohammad, and His Book Quran, which will guide us to His promised Heaven.”

  These words are used on many formal occasions in Iran, always as an introduction to something official. I understand for the first time why I am here today. This is a court. I have heard these words spoken on televised reports from Revolutionary Courts. Is that where I have seen this older man?

  The woman at the computer takes over from Mr. Important, reading from her computer screen. Her voice is very singsong, and she has an irritating way of extending the final syllable of the word at the end of each sentence.

  “Zarah Ghahramani, translating student, Faculty of Languages, Allame Tehran, entered in the Year of the Prophet thirteen seventy-nine. Born in the Year of the Prophet thirteen sixty, thirty-first day of Shahrivar. Birth certificate number eight-four-three. Is this you?”

  I nod my head.

  The woman, who appears to have more authority than I thought at first, says shrilly, “Is this you?”

  “Yes,” I answer.

  She looks back to the screen of her computer and starts reading again.

  “You have been charged with numerous offenses. I will now summarize these offenses. One, deranging the university environment and making it uncomfortable for other students and teachers. Two, encouraging other students to cancel classes on a number of occasions. Three, writing articles critical of the government of the Islamic Republic of Iran and questioning the government’s policies in different areas. Four, delivering speeches on the grounds and within the buildings, classrooms, and offices of the university, protesting the valid judgments of the Revolutionary Supreme Court in regard to judgments handed down in the cases of accused fellow students. Five, encouraging students at the university to lie down in the streets, thus causing tension between students and the police. Six, conducting an illegal and immoral sexual relationship with your fellow accused Arash Hazrati.”

  She stops there and looks in the direction of Mr. Important.

  Nothing is said for a short time. What I want to say is, “So what?” but of course I say nothing. Then I realize that everyone is waiting for me to speak. I don’t know what to say that would please them. Maybe “Guilty. Horribly guilty. Disgustingly guilty.”

  Mr. Important is staring at me. “Miss Ghahramani, do you accept that you have committed these offenses?” he asks.

  I don’t say anything.

  “Miss Ghahramani, you have already been found guilty of the charges brought against you. Do you accept that you have committed these offenses?”

  “Do you mean that I have been to court already? Do you mean that I have been tried?” I try to ask these questions in a casual way, but a certain amount of anger creeps into my tone.

  “We are only announcing the result of your trial to you,” says Mr. Important. “Your guilt was well established.”

  “Who were my accusers? Who said that I did these things?” Again, the anger.

  Mr. Important seems to be exercising patience. He scratches his temple before answering. “Your accusers were the Revolutionary Court and the public representative. All legal requirements have been strictly observed.”

  “Did I have a lawyer?”

  “Oh, yes. You had a very good lawyer. Your lawyer was Arash Hazrati. You would consider him a good lawyer, wouldn’t you, Miss Ghahramani?”

  He looks at me with a little smile, and I notice that the older man has allowed himself to smile, too.

  The demon is now back inside my skull. “Fuck you, and fuck your court!” is what I would say if I had the madness and courage of Sohrab. I drop my head to my chest and mouth these words rapidly, making it look as if I am praying.

  “I have nothing to say” is the only audible response I make.

  The woman with the irritating voice takes her cue and starts chanting the words on her screen once again: “In the name of Allah, the accused Zarah Ghahramani has been found guilty according to evidence recorded during interrogations. The accused will spend thirty days in prison, the days already spent in custody to be deducted from the thirty-day sentence. The accused will be deprived of the benefits of university enrollment. The accused will repay funds provided by the State for her education. The accused has acknowledged that she abused the government’s generosity and abused the government’s budget for education. The accused will not be permitted to reenroll in her course at her former university at any time in the future. The accused will not be permitted to enroll at any university in the Islamic Republic in the future. The accused will not be permitted to take a job with any newspaper or magazine. The accused will not engage in political subversion either by means of speech or by means of writing. Do you have anything to say in your defense?”

  I am astonished by the question, but only for a few seconds. I realize that my appearance here is no more than a grotesque formality. In God’s name, do I have anything to say in my defense? They ask me this after telling me that my case has already been decided? It is obvious that you can prosper in a government such as the one that makes the rules in my country only if you have no sense of the absurd at all. I mean, among my friends, absurdities—even our own—are seized on and made fun of. We are embarrassed by them, and so we mock them. But these people—my vile interrogator, Mr. Important, the older man with the menacing voice, the irritating stooge who sits at the keyboard—they’re not in the least embarrassed. I know they say that power corrupts, but they should tell you that the corruption begins with the powerful losing their embarrassment at being ridiculous. Why should they care if you laugh at them? They know that they can make you forget about laughter forever if they wish. They own pain. It is their servant. In the end, although my friends and I would like to believe otherwise, you will get your way much more quickly with a cruel servant like pain to carry out your bidding than with a witty servant like laughter.

  “No,” I say, staring down at my hands in my lap, and I add, in a whisper, “Why don’t you just kill me?” I am shocked at what I’ve whispered and hope with all my heart that it hasn’t carried to the ears of these people. I continue to stare at my hands. When I glance up, I can’t tell immediately from the expressions of Mr. Important and the
older man if they have heard.

  “Your confession will be made public in due course,” says Mr. Important. “God’s blessing on all of us.”

  It appears that they haven’t heard, because Mr. Important has closed the folder and looks as if he is ready to move on to some other case. Stinky leaves the room and returns with my blindfold. He slips it over my head and tells me to stand. I hear the older man say to Stinky, “God bless you, hajji, I hope I can compensate you one day.” And Stinky replies, “My duty, no more than my duty, hajji.”

  BACK IN MY cell in Evin, all the bitterness and anger that I couldn’t express in the courtroom seethes in my heart and head. I scratch at my scalp in retaliation for my cowardice. I disgust myself. I should have spat on Stinky. I should have spat on all of them, especially on the woman at the keyboard, who in retrospect is even more irritating to me than she was at the time. Is it because she is a woman? Because she would have known what was done to me, what is done to so many women, yet was able to sit there and read all that rubbish from her computer screen like the stooge she is? Maybe. Or maybe it’s just that she is more my size. If I’d jumped on her and punched her, I could have knocked her teeth out with no difficulty at all.

  Then I begin to think of what was said at the end of the “trial.” I think about the older man saying “I hope I can compensate you one day” to that cretin. What did that mean? Pacing up and down in the tiny space I have, I try to work it out, but I can’t. Then, when I have given up, it comes to me, and I stop my pacing and whisper, “You bastards!” It was a deal. My interrogator, Stinky, or Gholam, to give him his real name, had delivered me alive, and now the older guy owes him a favor. This must be what Behnam’s intervention has accomplished. This is the outcome of various bribes and promises and the scratching of backs: Gholam, who must be a law unto himself, has generously agreed not to go as far as he might have. What did they say to him, the people along this line of favor givers and bribe takers? “Oh, have your fun with her, that’s okay, but don’t actually kill her if you can avoid it. And the special place, Gholam? You know your special place? Better not take her there.” And, you know, that’s probably where I’ve seen the older guy—at some gathering of big shots that I’ve attended with Behnam.