‘Where are we going?’ she asks.
‘It’s a surprise.’
An hour later we’re in a fancy hairdressing salon in Turramurra. I say to the hairdresser, ‘My mother has come to visit us after twelve years. As you can see, her hair is all grey and I want her to look younger. I will pay for it, whatever you think is appropriate.’
The hairdresser smiles. ‘Okay, I understand. Where’s she from?’
‘Iran.’
‘She doesn’t speak any English?’
‘I’m afraid not.’
‘That’s fine. I’m from Greece – whenever my mother comes to visit she does the same thing, so don’t worry about anything. Leave it with me.’
Newsha, Niloofar and I sit in the waiting area, watching.
‘Kooshyar jan, I don’t really need this. It’s going to cost a lot,’ my mother says.
‘Please don’t worry, just stay there and let her do her job.’ But I know my mother. I’ve never seen her wearing any real makeup, except for on New Year’s Eve when she’d wear the one lipstick she owned, which a friend gave her.
The hairdresser starts and my mother tries to ask her something. They’re gesturing with their hands and fingers, indicating numbers to each other. Suddenly my mother yells out, ‘She says it’s going to be two hundred dollars!’ and begins to climb out of the chair.
I rush over to her and ask her to sit down again. ‘Maman jan, please stay there. It’s going to be twenty dollars, I promise.’
‘No, I know you’re lying to me. I really appreciate the thought but I don’t want you to spend that much money on me – you should save it for your daughters.’
‘Maman jan, please, I beg you.’ The hairdresser is laughing, and my mother submits. The whole process takes more than two hours, and every five minutes she wants to flee. But in the end I win.
I pay with a card so my mother can’t see how much it really is but she demands to know, standing there with beautifully blow-dried brunette hair and subtle makeup. She looks twenty years younger.
‘It was twenty-five dollars,’ I say, staring at the ground.
‘Look into my eyes and tell me,’ she orders. I do – she can still scare me.
‘Okay, I lied. It was thirty dollars.’
‘Stop lying to me!’
‘It was forty dollars,’ I mumble.
‘I said look at me!’ I turn my head and look into her eyes.
‘You haven’t changed at all.’ And she smiles. ‘Okay, I’ll let you go but next time I’ll take my slippers out and teach you a lesson.’ She says it just as she did years ago when I did something naughty, which was almost every day.
We drop Newsha and Niloofar at Azita’s house and my mother and I drive another two hours to Tea Gardens. On the way I explain that Azita and I have separated. She’s not as shocked as I’d feared; in fact, she’s relieved, and she tells me she’s been expecting this for many years. She is very supportive and only concerned about the children.
That night we sit up till late and talk about the past. When I finally ask about her arrest she falls silent and tries to hold back tears. I know she’s afraid to talk about the ruthless treatment she suffered because of me.
‘Maman jan, stay here. Stay in Australia with me. I’ll look after you,’ I tell her.
‘I don’t know.’ She sighs, then opens her luggage and takes out a box, which she gives to me to open. It contains two books, my best friends during those dark nights in our decrepit slum. One, with a blue cover, is the Old Testament and the other, with a green cover, is a collection of classic Persian stories. I pick up the stories and hold it in front of my nose. The smell of the paper takes me all the way back home and unearths so many memories, mostly of nights when I was a frightened child and my mother read me the stories. They’re wonderful presents, and I hug her.
Over the next three weeks I work five days a week instead of six, and on the weekends we drive to Sydney to see my daughters in the Baulkham Hills house. Bijan calls to say that my home loan has been approved, and my offer on the house at Gordon has been accepted. Before long he gives us the key for the new house, which has two storeys with four bedrooms and three bathrooms, as well as a massive backyard full of trees.
Having it means so much to me as now Newsha and Niloofar can stay with me in a house instead of me being alone in a hotel when I visit Sydney.
‘Thank you, my Adonai,’ I whisper.
My mother is delighted too. Then she adds sadly, ‘I knew that your marriage would fall apart one day, but it still breaks my heart. It’s my fault. I should’ve let you marry Mahshid, the girl who loved you. You and Azita had nothing in common. You must hate me for it. I can imagine how miserable it’s been for you over the years.’ She looks at me seriously. ‘You must find love, Kooshyar. You work so hard and come home to nobody. You need to have someone in your life.’
I tell her that my family days are over, but she isn’t convinced. ‘Remember what the Torah says: “Man plans, God laughs!” You’re still young. There are many nice people in the world, and I’m sure you’ll find the right person.’
I go to work in Tea Gardens while my mother stays in my small house there, cleaning and cooking and washing. I know her: she can’t stay still. Late one afternoon I go to the waiting room to call the next patient and see my mother sitting there. She says she was bored and lonely at home so she started walking to the medical centre, limping along with her sore knee, when a car stopped nearby. ‘I gave her a lift,’ explains Robert, one of my patients, a very nice man in his late sixties.
‘He speaks French so we were able to communicate,’ says my mother, looking pleased. Since she arrived her biggest issue has been the language barrier. The school she attended in Isfahan was run by the French government for Jews in Iran. That was where she learned French, and she still remembers it.
‘Her French is so much better than mine,’ says Robert, smiling.
In May we move to the new house in Gordon, spending weekends there and weekdays in Tea Gardens. The weather is getting cold and I take my mother to buy warm pyjamas in Kmart. I find a pair for ten dollars but she tells me they’re too expensive, saying she can live on that amount for a month. She refuses to let me buy any clothes for her. However, when I come home from work one afternoon she’s wearing a very fancy pair of pants and a trendy blouse.
‘Look how nice they are,’ she says in excitement. ‘And they cost me three dollars!’
‘Is that all? What was the shop called?’ I ask.
‘Viniz or something like that,’ she says. I realise she’s found the St Vincent de Paul shop. I smile and say, ‘That’s so you, Maman jan.’
While she’s been here I’ve been eating proper food instead of the meat pies, sausage rolls and hamburgers I’ve been living on for seven years in hospitals. For the last two and a half months I’ve had wonderful Persian dishes every night. Nothing tastes as good as one’s mother’s cooking.
One night, after we finish eating a delicious stew, she says sadly, ‘Kooshyar jan, I have to go back to Iran. My visa expires in two weeks.’
‘You should stay with me. You don’t have anyone in Iran. I can apply for a bridging visa for you,’ I say, desperately trying to persuade her.
‘No, I don’t know the language and it’ll be too hard for me. I don’t want to be a burden for you. I’m working as a bookkeeper for a big company in Iran – they’re paying me well.’
‘Maman jan, I want you to stay, so you can help me look after Newsha and Niloofar. I need you.’ I’d become used to my desolate life before she arrived but having someone to talk to now and share my feelings with means I’ll be lonely when she leaves, and I can’t bear the thought. But my mother is an independent woman. She will not live in a foreign country and be a burden to me.
I tell her I’ve been writing a memoir describing what the Islamic regime has been doing to its citizens, to Jewish people, to other minorities and to women. ‘When this book gets published the government will be furious. They might d
o something to you, just to put pressure on me. I’m so worried about you.’
‘I’m a tough woman, Kooshyar jan. Go ahead and get your book published. I’ll be fine.’ I hope she’s right.
On my mother’s last night in Australia she cooks my favourite meal: lamb stew with celery and rice. The smell takes me back thirty years to when I was a naughty little boy and would run into the house starving. As I eat it now I wonder how I’ll cope after she’s gone. I want to see her all the time and feel her presence. I wish I could convince her to stay somehow. But it’s not possible.
Finally we retire for the night. I lie down in bed and shut my eyes but I can’t sleep. Suddenly the door opens and my mother’s in the doorway.
‘Can I come in?’ she asks.
‘Of course, Maman jan.’ I try to sit up.
‘No, just lie down.’ Then she sits down next to my bed. She has the green book in her hand and she starts reading me my favourite story, ‘The Little Black Fish’. It’s about a tiny river fish that wanted to leave her parents and friends and find out about the ocean. My mother reads in the soothing voice she used when I was a child. I listen and pretend I’m falling sleep. I can feel my warm tears on the pillow.
It’s cold and grey when I take my mother to the airport for her flight back to Iran. I’m not sure whether I’ll ever see her again and I cannot bear to let her go. She whispers a Hebrew prayer and blows on my face.
‘Adonai protects you,’ she whispers. ‘You will find love and start a family again.’
Then my mother walks away, leaving me lonelier than ever.
EIGHTEEN
In July 2012 the publisher rings from Melbourne to say my book is about to be released. I’m elated. The memoir covers my life from birth until I fled Iran. It’s satisfying to have my words in print, but I know the book will jeopardise my safety and that of my mother.
I soon learn how carefully the regime has been keeping a check on my life. My email account has stopped working so I have my computer examined for viruses. The IT expert rings me and asks, ‘Are you using your email now?’
‘No, I’m at work.’
‘I’m looking at your computer now. It definitely has a virus but what I don’t understand is how someone has your email open right now.’
‘Someone’s checking my email?’
‘Yes, it seems your emails are being intercepted,’ he says.
He advises me to open a new account, which I do. I gather that the previous one stopped working only when I received or sent an email to a publisher or an organiser for a book event.
It all makes sense: the regime giving permission for my Khalil Gibran book to be published, and returning my mother’s passport so she could visit me. Why? Because they know my memoir is going to expose their treatment of its citizens and they want to say, ‘Dr Karimi is a free man; we haven’t done anything to him. His mother is free too and has visited her son in Australia. We also let Dr Karimi’s book be published in Iran, so anything bad he says about the government is rubbish!’
Yes, my Gibran book was published. But I can’t forget when a young university student named Neda Agha-Soltan was demonstrating in the streets of Tehran with thousands of her colleagues. The Iranian forces opened fire and she was shot in the chest. She collapsed right in front of the Caravan office. Dr Arash Hejazi, their chief editor and a medical doctor, tried to save her without success. Someone filmed the entire event on a mobile phone and put it on YouTube.
The next day the footage was seen all over the world. Neda became an icon for Iranian women and the new movement for reform in Iran. Hejazi, who did nothing except try to revive her, was pursued by intelligence agents. He managed to escape to England, was interviewed by CNN and the BBC and gave evidence about Neda. The regime denied the whole thing. Caravan was shut down and my book was given to a different publisher, Kondor Publications. It sold more than four thousand copies, and I told the publishers to give the royalties to my father.
Despite his many faults my father has always held a special place in my heart. I remember when I was fourteen he came home from work, had a couple of shots of his homemade vodka and said he wanted to give me some advice. It was the first time he’d expressed a desire for serious conversation with me, and I was excited.
‘A man must do three things in his life, Kooshyar,’ he said. ‘The first one is fight. The second is gamble. And the third is go to jail – it’s where real men are formed.’ At the time this perplexed me, but thirty years later I realise I have, in fact, done very well with my father’s advice. I’ve fought passionately against an oppressive regime. I’ve gambled – not with cards, but with my life, in my fight for freedom. And I’ve gone to jail for it. All this would surely be enough to make my father proud of me.
On 12 August 2012 Wild Dingo Press launches I Confess: Revelations in Exile at the Melbourne Writers Festival. The book’s dedicated to Habib Elghanian, an entrepreneur and philanthropist who in 1979 was the first Jew to be executed after the Islamic revolution. There’s a large crowd at the launch and soon I’m invited to interview after interview. Every time a reader asks me to sign their copy I feel proud and pleased. The majority of the Jewish community in Sydney, Adelaide and Melbourne are supporting the book.
Meanwhile, my reputation as a doctor has been building in Tea Gardens, thanks to a few special cases. One afternoon in December 2011 a woman and her husband, in their early sixties, came to see me at the surgery. The woman had woken up that morning feeling very nauseous and had vomited once. ‘I’ve got food poisoning,’ she told me.
When I pulled up her shirt to examine her I noticed a few red spots on her stomach, and she told me they’d just appeared. I checked the rest of her but there was no rash anywhere else. The spots disappeared when I pressed on them but her temperature was a worrying 38.2 degrees.
She reluctantly let me give her an injection of penicillin, and I typed a letter of referral to John Hunter Hospital’s emergency department in Newcastle. They protested, saying they were just visiting Tea Gardens and when they returned to Sydney they’d go to a hospital there. But I insisted.
They shook their heads and walked out obviously dissatisfied. I hadn’t mentioned the frightening term ‘meningococcal infection’ to them but I’d written in my letter that I was concerned that’s what it was. The disease can kill in less than four hours, and because it’s endemic in Iran I easily recognised the symptoms.
The following afternoon I received a phone call from a specialist doctor at John Hunter Hospital. They’d diagnosed the woman with a viral infection, but a test had revealed meningococcal bacteria in her blood. ‘We’ve asked her to go to Sydney Adventist Hospital immediately. She’s on intravenous antibiotics now and she’s going to survive, but if you hadn’t given her the penicillin she would almost certainly have died,’ said the doctor. A month later the couple came to see me with a big box of chocolates and a bottle of red wine to say thank you. The story had also spread around town, reinforcing the community’s faith in me. To me the people here and in the surrounding towns are not just my patients; they’re like my family. Without them my life would be meaningless.
Shortly after the book launch, I arrange to give a talk about my memoir in the local town hall. Almost everyone in the area has read it and every day at my surgery I sign copies. It’s six in the evening and I have to be at the hall in an hour. I decide to call my mother as I haven’t heard from her in a few days, but she doesn’t answer. I ring her sister Nosrat, who also doesn’t answer, but her other sister, Soraya, tells me my mother is in a small town near Isfahan for a few days’ holiday. ‘She’ll be back soon, she’s fine, don’t worry,’ says my aunt.
But I can tell something is wrong from her tone. I ring my uncle Mansoor. He tells me a different story. ‘They’re repairing phone lines near your mother’s house so her phone’s not working. It’ll be fixed soon, don’t worry.’ Now I am certain my mother’s in danger.
I ring my friend Makan, who’s a Muslim member of
my monarchist party in Iran. He’s a very smart man with contacts everywhere. Calling him is extremely dangerous but I have no choice. I speak to him using our code words.
‘Salam, Makan. I’m Saeed, just checking the results of your test drive with the car.’
‘The car was taken last week from the garage by the dealer. The same one who took your own car years ago,’ he says.
‘Okay, take care,’ I say.
I hang up and put my head in my hands. My mother has been imprisoned again by the intelligence service. Her relatives in Isfahan must know but they’re too fearful to say anything. I think about my mother, an old woman with bad joints and a cardiac condition, at the mercy of those brutal monsters.
By now it’s time for me to go to the hall so I pull myself together and drive there. After forty-five minutes of talking and answering questions I decide to tell the audience about my mother. I know the intelligence service has taken her to silence me, but I will not be silenced. ‘I would like to share some horrible news with you,’ I say, and tell the story.
The response is overwhelming. People are highly sympathetic and want to do something – contact the authorities, blog, tell the media. I appreciate their help and ask them to stay calm. Over the next four weeks I contact many organisations and groups including the UNHCR, the Jewish community, women’s rights activists and feminists in Australia, and PEN, an international organisation representing imprisoned or persecuted writers. At every book event, at every interview, I talk about my mother’s arrest. I try to hire a lawyer in Iran but no one has the courage to defend her. She’s not allowed to contact anyone in the outside world, and no one is able to communicate with or visit her. I’m not even sure she’s still alive. I can’t eat or sleep but I continue to publicise the book. I have to do this for my campaign against the regime, for the Iranian people, for my mother.
The Australian foreign ministry tells me twice that the government is trying to secure her release but I can’t be optimistic. Though some Iranian politicians might be concerned about deteriorating ties with Australia, the extremist hardliners in the government wouldn’t care about international relations. So many people in Iran are thirsty for Jewish blood. Amnesty International, the UN and others all promise to do something but still my mother is in prison. I can’t concentrate. I don’t know what to do. I even consider going to Iran on a fake passport, though I know that would be suicidal.
Journey of a Thousand Storms Page 21
