After Tehran Read online

  AFTER

  TEHRAN

  ALSO BY MARINA NEMAT

  Prisoner of Tehran

  Marina

  Nemat

  VIKING CANADA

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4P 2Y3 (a division of Pearson Canada Inc.)

  Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, U.S.A.

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  Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  First published 2010

  1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 (RRD)

  Copyright © Marina Nemat, 2010

  All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

  Manufactured in the U.S.A.

  ISBN: 978-0-670-06462-5

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication data available upon request to the publisher.

  Visit the Penguin Group (Canada) website at www.penguin.ca

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  To Shahnoosh Behzadi

  and Neda Agha-Soltan

  Author’s Note

  Although this is a work of non-fiction, I have changed names and some details to protect the identity and privacy of individuals.

  Nineteen years after leaving Iran, I began to have recurring dreams about putting different items in a suitcase to take to the next world with me. I was getting ready for death.

  In my waking life, I knew that I would like to wear a red dress to the grave and to keep my wedding ring on.

  This book tells the story of every one of those dream items. Each object (sometimes paired with another) stands as the title of a chapter.

  There are other things I would have liked to take to the next world with me. But during moments of anger, frustration, madness, or surprising sanity, I have given them away, thrown them out, or buried them.

  My Grandmother’s Silver Jewellery Box

  Ed’s Receipt

  My Mother’s Crocheted Tablecloth

  Chocolate-Chip Cookies

  The Sunday Star

  Rachel’s Letter

  A Sound Recorder and a Microphone

  The List of Names

  Shaadi’s Card

  A Persian Poem in the Russian Alphabet

  A Persian Song Named Soltan-eh Ghalbha (King of Hearts)

  Fatelessness and The Diary of Anne Frank

  My Dragonfly Brooch

  Photos of My Children

  My Canadian Passport

  My Rosary

  A Star-Shaped Christmas Cookie

  A Jar of Folic-Acid Supplements

  My Happy-Daisy Slippers and a Broken Umbrella

  A Dream Catcher

  Jasmine’s Poem about the Night Sky

  Letters from My Cellmates, and My Barbie Doll

  An Elastic Band for Making a Ponytail

  My Grandmother’s

  Silver Jewellery Box

  “Look what you’ve done now! You’ve killed your mother!” my father said to me in Persian as paramedics carried my mother on a stretcher down the narrow flight of stairs in my suburban Toronto house on a cloudy day in October 1998. Standing in the tiny foyer with the front door wide open, I shivered in the cold wind that held the scent of winter, relieved that the paramedics didn’t speak our language. But one of them looked at me with questioning eyes, and I guessed that he had felt the anger in my father’s voice, as cutting as broken glass. My father was trying to place blame, as if finding a person responsible for my mother’s sudden illness would fix things and make her well.

  The paramedics rushed my mother past me, and I caught a glimpse of her face. It was paler than usual, and the lines around her brown eyes seemed deeper. But there was more: her eyes were different; they were not as stern and condemning as they had always been. She looked like a defiant child who had been caught red-handed but didn’t regret what she had done, not even for a moment. I followed the paramedics and my parents out the door, and tears rolled down my face. I wiped them with the back of my hand. I was stronger than this. Yet here I was, a thirty-three-year-old woman, feeling as if I were eight again and back in Tehran.

  I watched the lights of the ambulance disappear around the corner. Then I went back into the house. My husband, Andre, and I had bought it in July 1993, two years after our arrival in Canada as landed immigrants. My parents had joined us in the fall of that year. The top half of the wall next to the stairs was painted yellow, the bottom half a pistachio green, and a wide border of blue and white flowers separated the two. I had wanted to paint that wall as soon as we moved into the house, but because I was working part-time at McDonald’s and then Swiss Chalet in addition to being the mother of two young boys, I didn’t get to it for a while.

  I locked the door behind me and, unable to carry my weight any longer, sat on the floor in front of it. I was grateful that no one was home; my children were at school and Andre was at work. I knew I had to call him, ask him to pick up the kids and come home so we could go to the hospital and find out what had happened to my mother. But I couldn’t move.

  “Look what you’ve done now! You’ve killed your mother!”

  Was my father finally reacting to what had happened in Tehran sixteen years earlier? In 1982, at the age of sixteen, I was arrested for so-called political crimes, then locked up in the notorious Evin prison. I knew my incarceration had taken its toll on my parents. But it had taken its toll on me, too. I hadn’t thought about Evin in years. My past was a ghost that I, like my family, had chosen to ignore, even though its presence was undeniable. I had never talked to my parents about what happened to me in prison, because not only did they never ask me, they also made it clear they wanted the experience forgotten. Immediately after my release, I didn’t want to talk about my imprisonment, but I would have felt reassured to know they would be willing to listen when I was ready. Now my mother was dying, and my parents still had no idea what had gone on behind the walls of Evin. How could I tell them that I had been tortured and had come close to execution? How could I describe being forced to marry one of my interrogators and spending nights with him in a solitary cell? And there was more, much more—

  The phone began to ring, but I didn’t dare answer it. What if my mother had died? What if my father was right and I had killed her?

  I soon learned that I had not caused my mother to have a heart attack. She had gallbladder cancer and had to undergo surgery. My mother had known about her cancer for a while but had not said a word to any of us. When later we asked her why she hadn’t told us, she said she hadn’t wanted us to worry.

  My parents and I had never communicated, never gotten along. As a punishment when I was a c
hild, my mother sometimes locked me out on the balcony of our apartment in downtown Tehran. We rented two connecting apartments above a small restaurant and a furniture store on the northwest corner of Shah and Rahzi avenues. Our three bedrooms, small kitchen, and bathroom lay on either side of a dark, narrow hallway between my mother’s beauty salon and my father’s dance studio.

  I can clearly remember why my mother locked me out on the balcony the first time. It was shortly after the death of my paternal grandmother, Xena, and I was seven years old. My grandmother Xena—or Bahboo, as I called her—lived with us and ran the household, cooking and cleaning and caring for me. She took me to the park every day and read to me. She was my best friend. I hardly ever saw my mother. She worked in her beauty salon all day and usually went out at night. Bahboo, like my mother’s mother, was of Russian descent and Christian. My Russian grandmothers had married Iranian men who had gone to Russia for work before the Communist revolution of 1917. After the revolution, both families had to leave the country; the men were not Russian citizens, and foreigners were no longer allowed to remain there.

  Xena and Esah, my grandfather, left Russia for Iran when Xena was pregnant with my father, and my father’s only sibling, Tamara, was four. My father was born in the city of Mashad in 1921, shortly after the family’s arrival in Iran; soon after his birth, they moved to Tehran. Only weeks later, Esah, a jeweller, went out to sell the jewellery he had brought with him from Russia to buy a house for his family—but he was murdered, and everything he had with him was stolen. Xena, who didn’t speak Persian and was a stranger in Iran, managed to survive. She eventually opened a boarding house and provided a decent living for her two children. She never married again.

  Esah had given Xena a silver jewellery box. After his death, she used the box to store sugar and kept it on the kitchen table. Every time she sweetened her tea, she was reminded of him. I loved that box, and after her death, I wanted it to be only mine, so one day I dumped all the sugar onto the kitchen table and hid the box under my bed. My mother soon discovered who had made that mess, and she locked me out on the balcony to punish me. Of course, this would not be my last time there. I was a curious, opinionated, and articulate child who wanted to know everything and never took no for an answer. “No” always set up an intriguing challenge for me, and I always responded to it with “Why?” My mother, who was beautiful, busy, and short-tempered and was going through a difficult menopause, simply didn’t have patience, so she came up with the perfect punishment to keep me out of her way: locking me out on the balcony. My brother wasn’t around to help. Alik, my only sibling, was fourteen years older than I was. He had left home at the age of eighteen to go to university in another city.

  I hated the balcony. It was either too hot or too cold, and, worst of all, it was lonely. However, this was where I learned patience, a virtue that didn’t come naturally to me. One thing I hated even more than being locked away was being humiliated, so I never made a scene; I never screamed, banged on the balcony door, or stomped my feet. I cried silently and watched the street below from above the bamboo shades encircling my eight-by-four-foot roofless cell.

  The paved four-lane street seethed with traffic during rush hours and the air smelled of exhaust fumes. Across the street, Hassan Agha, the vendor who had only one arm, sold sour green plums in spring, peaches and apricots in summer, cooked red beets in autumn, and different kinds of cookies in winter. At one corner of the intersection, an old blind man held out his bony hands to passersby and cried, “Help me, for the love of God!” from morning till night. Opposite our apartment, the large, mirrored windows of a fifteen-storey office building sparkled in the sun and reflected the movement of the clouds. At night, the neon lights above the stores came on and coloured the darkness.

  My sentence on the balcony would last from half an hour to several hours. For most of this time I could hear a waltz or a tango through the windows of my father’s dance studio, and sometimes I heard my father counting. “One, two, three … one, two, three …” In my mind, I could see my father’s students, elegantly dressed couples, spin and glide to the music, and I wished I could be a part of the forbidden world of the studio. But my father never let me in when he was working. Often when I awoke very early in the morning and everyone was still asleep, I would go into the studio and swirl to an imaginary waltz until I became dizzy and collapsed on the cool brown linoleum floor that smelled of wax.

  As a child, I was afraid of my father. I would watch him while he sat on his favourite black leather chair in the waiting area of his studio every evening, reading the paper. His posture was always perfect—as straight as a ruler. If I disturbed him by saying something or making a sound, he would look at me with his serious amber eyes, his mouth an unbending line that seemed incapable of ever breaking into a smile. He, too, had no patience for young children. I knew quite well that if I misbehaved, he would slap me on the face, which was the most humiliating thing I could experience.

  This was how I grew up, an outsider, observing my family from a distance, as if a brick wall that became thicker with each passing day stood between us. I found refuge in books, school, and friends, and I spent most of my time reading and studying. Having always been one of the top students in my class, I decided when I was twelve to become a doctor. All my teachers encouraged me, telling me that with my perseverance, I could become whatever I set my mind to. Meanwhile, in other ways my life resembled that of an average North American girl. Every Thursday night, I watched Little House on the Prairie (dubbed into Persian), and every Friday, I watched Donny & Marie (in English). At the age of twelve I was madly in love with Donny Osmond! We owned a cottage by the Caspian Sea; there I spent my summers riding my bike, sunbathing on the beach, partying with friends, or dancing to the tunes of the Bee Gees.

  The Islamic Revolution succeeded when I was thirteen and changed my world beyond recognition. From my window, I watched the gathering storm. It was a drizzle at first, but then it turned into a flash flood, engulfing the streets, washing away the normalcy of our lives. Our street, which had always been congested with cars and crowded with pedestrians who strolled or rushed along or haggled with vendors, was empty and silent. Even the beggars were gone. Soon, military trucks shadowed every corner. Once every few days, hundreds of angry demonstrators filled the street, bearded men leading the way and women wearing chadors* following them; with their fists raised in the air, they screamed, “Down with the shah!” and “Independence, Freedom, Islamic Republic!” For the first time in my life, I heard gunshots; the military had opened fire on the demonstrating crowds. My mother ordered me to stay away from windows, and now I obeyed her without an argument.

  Even though the revolution was gaining momentum, my parents believed that a bunch of mullahs and unarmed civilians would never defeat the shah’s military. But they were wrong. The shah went into exile; Ayatollah Khomeini, who had been in exile for years, returned to Iran; the Islamic Republic of Iran was born, and with it, our world and all the rules that had held it together collapsed. The people of Iran wanted democracy, but that is not what they got. Soon, dancing was declared satanic. My father closed down his studio and began working as an office clerk at a friend’s stainless-steel factory. He hated his new job but was hopeful that the new Islamic government would not last very long. Makeup, pretty clothes, and Western books became illegal. Before I knew it, my dream of becoming a doctor slipped away, because fanatic young women of the Revolutionary Guard, most of whom didn’t even have a high-school diploma, gradually replaced our teachers. These unqualified new teachers spent most of the class time spouting political rhetoric. When I protested to the new calculus teacher and asked her to teach calculus instead of enumerating all the great things Khomeini had done for the country, she told me to leave the classroom if I didn’t like the new order. I left and unintentionally began a school-wide strike that went on for three days.

  During the next few months, I started a school newspaper and wrote articles against
the government. Our new principal, who was about nineteen years old and a member of the Revolutionary Guard, came to know me as one of her worst enemies. Most of my friends were now supporters of anti-government Marxist or Marxist-Islamist political groups, and I tried very hard to fit in with them. But even though I hated the new government, I was a devout Christian who attended Mass every day, so I soon found myself isolated and depressed. My parents were aware of most of my activities, but they never tried to stop me; after all, by normal standards, I wasn’t doing anything wrong. All I wanted was to study math, science, and literature instead of government propaganda. Finally, the principal gave my name and the names of many other “anti-revolutionary” students from our school to the Courts of Islamic Justice.

  I was arrested at about nine o’clock at night on January 15, 1982, just sixteen years old. My imprisonment lasted two years. During that time, my mother and father suffered a great deal. They knew that political prisoners were tortured in Evin. They had heard about the rape of young girls and the daily mass executions. Every day, they waited for the phone call that would tell them to go to the prison gates to collect my belongings because I had been executed.

  Evin was a country within a country. It had its own unwritten rules, and in a way, it had its own government and army. Its guards and interrogators had extreme powers. Evin prisoners were stripped of every right and were considered less than slaves. Most prisoners were allowed regular visits with close family members, so I saw my parents for five to ten minutes once a month. A thick glass barrier divided the large visiting room in half. For the first few months of my time in Evin there were no phones in the visiting room, so we couldn’t talk and used a sign language instead. Armed members of the Revolutionary Guard stood in every corner and monitored our every move. My parents cried constantly, and I tried to smile and assure them I was all right. At one of the visits about six months after my arrest, I told them I had converted to Islam. They didn’t ask why. They knew I had been forced to. No one dared question what went on in Evin.