Prisoner of Tehran: A Memoir (No Series) Read online

  When I opened my eyes, I didn’t know where I was. As my mind gradually cleared, I realized I wasn’t in the bathroom anymore but was lying on the wooden bed where I had been tortured. Ali sat on a chair, watching me. My head felt very sore, and when I touched it, I felt a big bump on the right side of my forehead. I asked Ali what had happened, and he said I had fallen in the bathroom and had hit my head. He said that the doctor had seen me and had said that my condition wasn’t too serious. Then he helped me sit in a wheelchair, put my blindfold back on, and pushed me out of the room. When he took off the blindfold, we were in a very small room with no windows and a toilet and a sink in the corner. There were two gray military blankets on the floor. He helped me lie down and spread one of them over me; it was rough and stiff and smelled of mold, but I didn’t care; I was freezing. He asked if I was in pain, and I nodded, wondering why he was being nice to me. He left but came back in a few minutes with a middle-aged man wearing a military uniform whom he introduced as Doctor Sheikh.

  The doctor gave me some kind of injection in the arm, and he and Ali left the cell. I closed my eyes and thought of home. I wished I could crawl into my grandmother’s bed as I used to when I was a child, so she could tell me there was no reason to be scared, that it had all been a nightmare.

  Three

  AS A YOUNG CHILD, I loved the sleepy silence and dreamy colors of Tehran’s early mornings: they made me feel light and free, almost invisible. This was the only time of day when I could wander inside my mother’s beauty salon; I could walk between the styling chairs and hair dryers without making her angry. One morning in August 1972, when I was seven, I picked up her favorite crystal ashtray. It was almost the size of a dinner plate. She had told me a million times not to touch it, but it was beautiful, and I wanted to run my fingers over its delicate patterns. I could see why she liked it so much. In a way, it looked like a giant snowflake that never melted. As far back as I could remember, this ashtray had been in the middle of the glass table, and my mother’s customers, women with long, red fingernails, sat in the waiting chairs, which were covered with a fuzzy white fabric, and flicked their cigarettes over it. Sometimes they missed, and the ashes landed on the table. My mother hated it when the table got dirty. Whenever I made a mess, she screamed at me and made me clean up. But what was the point of cleaning? Things got dirty all the time.

  I held the ashtray up. A gauzy, golden light poured in through the room’s only window, which covered more than half the southern wall. The light reflected off the white ceiling and spread inside the ashtray’s sparkling, transparent body. As I tilted it to look at it from another angle, it slipped through my fingers. I tried to catch it, but I was too late: it hit the floor and shattered.

  “Marina!” my mother called from my parents’ bedroom, which was adjacent to the salon.

  I ran to my left and through the door that led to the dark, narrow hallway, dashed to my bedroom, and crawled under my bed. The air smelled of dust and made my nose itch, so I held my breath to prevent a sneeze. Although I couldn’t see my mother, I could hear the sound of her rubber slippers against the linoleum floor; their angry rhythm made me squeeze closer to the wall. She called my name again and again, but I remained as still as possible. When she entered my room and stood next to my bed, I heard my grandmother ask her what had happened. My mother told her that I had broken the ashtray, and Grandma said I had not broken it; she said she had dropped it while cleaning. I couldn’t believe what I had heard. Grandma had told me that liars went to hell when they died.

  “You broke it?” my mother asked.

  “Yes. I was dusting the table. It was an accident. I’ll clean up in a minute,” Grandma answered.

  After a little while, my bed creaked under someone’s weight. I lifted my old beige bedspread a few inches from the floor and saw my grandmother’s brown slippers and her slim ankles. I crawled out from under the bed and sat next to her. As always, her gray hair was gathered in a tight bun behind her head. She wore a black skirt and a perfectly ironed white blouse and stared straight ahead at the wall. She didn’t look angry.

  “Bahboo, you lied,” I said.

  “I lied.”

  “God won’t get mad at you.”

  “Why not?” she raised an eyebrow.

  “Because you saved me.”

  She smiled. My grandmother rarely smiled. She was a serious woman who knew how everything was supposed to be done. She always had the answer to the most difficult questions and had never failed to cure a stomachache.

  Grandma was my father’s mother and lived with us. She went grocery shopping at about eight o’clock every morning, and I usually went along with her. That day, like many others, she grabbed her purse, and I followed her down the stairs. As soon as she opened the pink wooden door at the bottom, the mixed sounds of cars, pedestrians, and vendors poured into the hallway. The first thing I saw was the toothless smile of Akbar Agha, who was at least eighty years old and sold bananas from a broken cart.

  “Bananas today?” he asked.

  My grandmother inspected the bananas; they were a healthy, spotless yellow. She nodded, brought up eight of her fingers, and Akbar Agha gave us eight bananas.

  We turned left on Rahzi Avenue, a narrow, one-way street with dusty sidewalks. To the north, I could see the blue-gray Alborz Mountains resting against the sky. It was the end of summer, and the snowcaps of the mountains were long gone. Only Mount Damavand, the dormant volcano, had a touch of white on its peak. We crossed the road and walked through a cloud of steam saturated with the scent of clean, ironed linen flowing out of the open door of the dry cleaner’s.

  “Bahboo, why didn’t you say eight in Persian? You know how.”

  “You know very well that I don’t like to speak Persian. Russian is a much better language.”

  “I like Persian.”

  “We speak only Russian.”

  “In the fall when I go to school, I’ll learn to read and write in Persian, and I’ll teach you.”

  My grandmother sighed.

  I skipped ahead. The street was quiet; there was hardly any traffic. Two women walked along, swinging their empty shopping bags beside them. When I entered the small general store, the owner, Agha-yeh Rostami, who had a thick black mustache that looked awkward on his thin, kind face, was talking to a woman with a black chador covering her from head to toe so that only her face remained visible. Another woman wearing a miniskirt and a tight T-shirt waited her turn. This was the time of the shah and women didn’t have to dress according to Islamic rules. Although the store was small, its shelves were stocked with many different goods: long-grain rice, spices, dried herbs, butter, milk, Tabriz cheese, candy, skipping ropes, and plastic soccer balls. Giving me a carton of chocolate milk while handing the woman wearing the chador a brown paper bag, Agha-yeh Rostami smiled at me over the counter. As I drank my milk in large gulps, enjoying its silky coolness, Grandma came in and pointed at everything she needed. On our way back, we saw Agha Taghi, the old man who walked the streets at around this time every year and yelled out: “I card camel wool and cotton!” Women opened their windows and asked him to go inside their houses to prepare their duvets for winter by combing the wool or the cotton fibres inside them.

  When we returned home from the store, I followed Grandma into the kitchen. Our two-burner oil stove was on the left, the white fridge on the right, and the dish cabinet stood against the wall opposite the door. With Grandma and me in the kitchen, there was hardly room to move. The kitchen’s small window was close to the ceiling and beyond my reach and opened above the yard of an all-boys school. Grandma put the old stainless steel kettle on the stove to make tea and then opened the cabinet.

  “Your mother has been in here again, and I can’t find a thing! Where is the frying pan?”

  From the other side of the cabinet, pots and pans spilled onto the floor. I rushed to help Grandma put them where they belonged. The kitchen was my grandmother’s domain, and she was the one who took care of me
and did all the housework. My mother spent about ten hours a day in her beauty salon and hated cooking.

  “Don’t worry, Bahboo; I’ll help.”

  “And how many times have I told her to stay out of here?”

  “A lot.”

  Soon, everything was back in place.

  “Colya!” my grandmother called out to my father, who was probably in his dance studio. But there was no answer.

  “Marina, go ask your father if he wants some tea,” said Grandma, putting some of the groceries in the fridge.

  I walked down the dark hallway opposite my mother’s beauty salon and to my father’s dance studio, which was a large L-shaped room with brown linoleum floors where pictures of elegantly dressed dancing couples hung on the walls. In the center of the waiting area—the smaller leg of the L—a round coffee table covered with magazines was surrounded by four black leather chairs. My father sat in one of them, reading the paper. He was five feet eight and fit, with gray hair, an always clean-shaven face, and amber eyes.

  “Good morning, Papa. Bahboo wants to know if you would like a cup of tea.”

  “No,” my father snapped without looking at me, and I turned around and retraced my steps.

  Sometimes, when I woke up early in the morning and everyone else was still asleep, I went to my father’s dance studio. I imagined the music, usually a waltz, because that was my favorite, and spun and danced around the room, imagining my father standing in a corner, clapping and saying, “Bravo, Marina! You really know how to dance!”

  When I entered the kitchen, Grandma was chopping onions, tears rolling down her face. My eyes started to burn.

  “I hate raw onions,” I said.

  “You’ll appreciate them once you get older. Then, when you need to cry and don’t want anyone to know you’re crying, you can just chop onions.”

  “You’re not really crying, are you?”

  “No, of course not.”

  When my parents married, during the Second World War, they rented a modest apartment at the northwest corner of the intersection of Shah and Rahzi Avenues in downtown Tehran, the capital of Iran and its largest city. There, above a small furniture store and a small restaurant, my father, Gholamreza Nicolai Moradi-Bakht, opened his dance studio. Since many American and British soldiers passed through Iran during the war, Western culture became popular among the higher class, so my father found many faithful students who wished to learn to dance like Westerners.

  My mother, Roghieh Natalia Fekri, gave birth to my brother in 1951. When he was about two years old, my mother went to Germany, even though she didn’t speak German, to take a hairdressing course. When she returned six months later, she needed a place to open a beauty salon. There was another apartment identical to my parents’ beside theirs, and they rented that one also and connected the two apartments.

  I was born on April 22, 1965. Since 1941, the pro-Western and autocratic Mohammad Reza Shah-eh Pahlavi had been the king of Iran. Four months before my birth, Iranian premier, Hassan Ali-eh Mansur, was assassinated by reputed followers of Shia fundamentalist leader, Ayatollah Khomeini, who was pushing for a theocracy in Iran. In 1971, Amir Abbas-eh Hoveida, who was the prime minister at the time, organized lavish festivities at the ancient ruins of Persepolis, commemorating the 2,500th anniversary of the founding of the Persian Empire. Twenty-five thousand guests from around the world, including kings and queens, presidents, prime ministers, and diplomats, attended this celebration, the expense of which reached $300 million. The shah announced that the purpose of this celebration was to show the world the progress Iran had made during recent years.

  When I turned four, my brother left home to attend Pahlavi University in the city of Shiraz in central Iran. I was very proud of my tall, handsome brother, but he was rarely around and never stayed for too long. On those treasured occasions when he visited, he would fill my bedroom door frame, smiling at me and asking, “How is my little sister?” I loved the way the wonderful smell of his cologne saturated the air. He and Grandma were the only people who ever gave me gifts for Christmas. My parents thought Christmas was a complete waste of time and money.

  Grandma took me to church every Sunday. The only Russian Orthodox Church in Tehran was a two-hour walk from our apartment. Our path to church took us through the streets of downtown Tehran, which were lined with stores, vendors, and ancient maple trees. The delicious aroma of roasted sunflower and pumpkin seeds floated in the air. Nahderi Avenue with its toy stores and bakeries was my favorite part of the trip. The scent of freshly baked pastries, vanilla, cinnamon, and chocolate was intoxicating. And there were many sounds, which became entangled and hung over the street: cars honking, vendors advertising their merchandise and haggling with their customers, and traditional music blaring. Grandma didn’t believe in buying toys, but she always bought me a little treat.

  One Sunday, we set out early enough to visit one of Grandma’s friends who lived in a small apartment. She was an old, fussy Russian woman with short, curly blond hair, who always wore red lipstick and blue eye shadow and smelled like flowers. Her apartment was filled with old furniture and many knickknacks, and she had the most beautiful collection of china figurines. They were everywhere: on side tables, bookshelves, windowsills, and even on kitchen counters. I especially loved the angels with their delicate wings. She served her tea in the most beautiful china cups I had ever seen. They were white and shiny and had pink roses painted on them. She put tiny golden spoons next to each cup. I loved to drop sugar cubes in my tea and watch the bubbles rise as I stirred it.

  I asked her why she had so many angels, and she told me that this was because they kept her company. She asked me if I knew that everyone had a guardian angel, and I said my grandma had told me this. Looking at me with her pale blue eyes, which seemed strangely large from behind her thick glasses, she explained that we all have seen our guardian angel but we have forgotten what our angel looks like.

  “Now, tell me,” she said, “has it ever happened to you that when you were about to do something kind of bad, you felt a whisper in your heart, telling you not to do it?”

  “Yes…I think so.” I thought of the ashtray.

  “Well, that was your angel speaking to you. And the more you listen, the more you’ll hear.”

  I wished I could remember my angel. My grandma’s friend suggested that I should take a look at all her figurines, and she assured me that my angel looked like the one I liked the most. I examined the figurines for awhile and finally found my favorite: a handsome young man wearing a long white robe. I took it to Grandma to show it to her, and she said that it didn’t exactly look like an angel because it didn’t have any wings, but I told her that his wings were invisible.

  “You can keep it, dear,” Grandma’s friend offered, and I was delighted.

  Grandma took me to the park every day. There was a big park, named Park-eh Valiahd, about a twenty-minute walk from home. We spent hours exploring it, admiring its ancient trees and fragrant flowers. To cool down on a hot summer day, we sat on a bench and licked ice cream cones. In the center of the park was a shallow pool with a fountain in the middle, which shot the water high into the air, and many small fountains gurgled around it. I always stood next to the pool and let the wind spray the water over me. Around the pool, there were bronze statues of young boys, each of them different from the other. One stood tall, looking toward the sky, another knelt next to the water, looking into it as if searching for a precious lost item, the next held a brass stick toward the water, and another had one leg poised in the air, as if he were ready to jump in. There was something terribly sad and lonely about these statues; they looked real but were perpetually frozen into a dark, solid state, unable to break free.

  The greatest fun was being on a swing. Grandma knew I liked to go very high, and she always pushed me as hard as she could. I loved the way the wind brushed my hair and the world disappeared when I was up in the air. In my small seven-year-old world, this was how life was going to
be forever.

  One afternoon as I was running in the park, Grandma called me from a distance to say that it was time to go home, but she had called me by the wrong name; she had called me Tamara. Confused, I ran to her and asked her who Tamara was. She apologized to me and said it was better if we headed back home because it was too hot for her, so we started to walk. She looked tired, which was odd, because I had never seen her sick or tired before.

  “Who’s Tamara?” I asked again.

  “Tamara is my daughter.”

  “But you don’t have a daughter, only me, Bahboo, your granddaughter.”

  She explained that she did have a daughter, Tamara, who was four years older than my father and I looked very much like her, as if we were twins. Tamara had married a Russian man at the age of sixteen and had returned to Russia with him. I asked why she had never visited us, and Grandma said that Tamara was not allowed to leave Russia: the Soviet government didn’t allow its citizens to easily travel to other countries. My grandmother used to send Tamara nice clothes, soap, and toothpaste because those things are hard to find there, until she received a letter from SAVAK, the shah’s secret police, saying that she was not allowed to communicate with anyone in the Soviet Union.

  “Why?” I wanted to know.

  “The police here believe that Russia is a bad country, so they told us that we weren’t allowed to write to Tamara or to send anything for her.”

  As I was trying to understand this new information about an aunt I had never known, Grandma went on as if talking to herself. I couldn’t make much sense of what she said. She mentioned names of people and places I had never heard of before and used words that were strange and unfamiliar to me, so I could only grasp bits and pieces of her sentences. She said that when she was eighteen years old, she had fallen in love with a young man who was later killed in the Russian revolution. She described a house with a green door on a narrow street, a wide river, and a large bridge, and she talked about soldiers on horses, shooting at a crowd.