After Tehran (8 page)

Lee Gowan walked into the room right on time. I had seen his photo, but he was taller than I had anticipated. He was wearing a black sweater and black pants. The desks stood in a square around the room, and I was one of fourteen students. Lee sat on the chair left empty for him. One by one, he asked us to introduce ourselves and briefly explain why we were taking a creative-writing course. Most of the students were either lawyers or office workers, and said they had always wanted to become writers. When my turn arrived, I looked down and told the truth.

“My name is Marina Nemat. I was arrested in Iran at the age of sixteen for political crimes and was tortured and came close to execution. That was almost twenty years ago, and now I want to write about it.”

My heart was racing, and I felt as though every blood vessel in my body was ready to explode. Everyone was staring at me. I put my hands under my thighs and sat on them, hoping my classmates wouldn’t see how badly I was shaking. I was afraid I might become too emotional. But I did not. In Evin, we had to hide our emotions from our interrogators, or they would use them against us—and we sometimes had to hide our feelings from our cellmates because we didn’t want to upset them. I rarely cried in front of my friends in Evin. Instead, I saved my tears for prayer time when I covered my face with a
chador
. Most of the girls behaved the same way.

I can’t remember what Lee said, but he seemed at a loss for words. He later told me that he had never heard such an unusual introduction and had been shocked.

Our first exercise was writing about an onion. The smell of onions reminded me of
Bahboo
and her cooking, so my piece ended up being about her. Exercise after exercise I became more confident with my writing and began to share bits of my memoir with the class. Lee and my fellow classmates appeared genuinely interested in my work, and their critiques helped me view my story from the perspective of a reader who didn’t know much about Iran. I became aware that I needed much more detail in my story. Things that were basic knowledge to me were foreign concepts to most of my classmates. I had to explain an alien culture to the average Western reader. My story was not only about coming of age under difficult circumstances; it was about a child political prisoner who, like thousands of others, wasn’t particularly political. How politically aware can you be at sixteen? Evin was a dark world of horrors, a real nightmare, and I had to make this strange concept comprehensible. The task overwhelmed me, but what I learned from Lee and later my other instructors was that I had to write the book one scene at a time, then fit the scenes together like a puzzle—which is exactly what I did.

As I wrote each scene, I felt as though I were travelling back in time. When I wrote about the lashing, I was back in Evin, feeling each lash on the soles of my feet. I remembered the strange numbness that came over me the moment I was arrested, which some people mistook for bravery, but I knew I wasn’t brave at all. I had just detached myself from my body. As I recalled being tied up to a pole with armed guards pointing their guns at me, I didn’t feel afraid; instead, I felt sad and tired. I just wanted them to let me go to sleep.

I had been healthy before my arrest, but in prison, I suffered from migraines and stomach problems. I developed severe acid reflux accompanied by horrible pain. After my release from Evin, I went to a specialist in internal medicine, who diagnosed me
with stomach ulcers and prescribed medication and a special diet. My condition gradually improved and eventually disappeared altogether. However, once I began writing, all my physical ailments returned, and I had to see a physician again. This time medication and diet were not as helpful as they had been, probably because I was constantly reliving the same terrible experiences.

I had never talked to a psychologist or psychiatrist, and even though I had heard about flashbacks, I didn’t know exactly what they were. But one day after I had begun writing, as I watched an episode of
CSI
about the rape of a young woman, I had my first flashback: Ali was there with me. I couldn’t see him, but I felt him; his skin brushed against mine. I panicked and ran to the kitchen, my heart racing. Fear flooded my every cell. I gathered my strength and told myself it was only a memory. The shame I had felt so many years ago rose in me, real and present. I fought back, telling myself that
I
was in control. The shame retreated, then disappeared—but I was left shaken.

Describing flashbacks is not easy. For me, they are usually not images but extreme emotions—fear, disgust, or both—and they come out of nowhere. I am amazed that I have never had flashbacks of the torture I endured in Evin. The pain of the lash landing on the soles of my feet was beyond any I have ever experienced. Not only was the lashing painful, but it was humiliating. I never had any flashbacks about being in front of the firing squad. Even though it was terrifying, a part of me knew that death was something everyone has to face sooner or later. At that moment, if someone had given me the choice of being either lashed or killed, I would have chosen death, not because I was brave, but because I had given up. When Ali raped me on our wedding night, even though the pain was more bearable than the pain of the lash, it wounded a part of me that lashing never could. The truth is that I broke under torture; I would have told them where Shahrzad was had I known.
What Ali did to me had absolutely nothing to do with extracting information from me. When I married him, I felt I had become an object. Property. Something the world had completely forgotten and didn’t care about. Ali had unlimited power over me and could do to me as he pleased. That was how I felt on my wedding night, and even though I got to know Ali better and began to feel some compassion toward him, the memories of our wedding night and the nights that followed have remained in my subconscious.

I’D HEARD
that a few ex-prisoners from Evin had published their memoirs in Persian in Europe. To my knowledge, only two or three of these books have been translated into another language, and none has had much success. Even though I was aware of these books, I read them only after I completed my manuscript, mainly because I didn’t want to be influenced by anyone.

At a Persian bookstore in Toronto, I found four memoirs about Evin. All had been written by members of different extremist political groups, and all the writers had been adults at the time of their arrest. They had chronicled the horrors of Evin, but, unlike my memoir, their works were ideological. All the writers claimed that they had never broken under torture and never been affected by the intimidation and brainwashing techniques common in Evin. Apparently, all of them were heroes. Even though these books were published as memoirs, they were painfully dry and impersonal, and I found them difficult to follow. I was more interested in the human experience of the writer than his or her ideology. Yes, the Evin we had all written about was the same, but the way we saw it and the way it had affected us were vastly dissimilar. I suspected that our age difference played a big role in this. The adult prisoners had had much more life experience than the teenagers, and this experience supported them when facing torture. Where my young friends and I felt shame and fear, the adults felt anger and hatred.
While we blamed ourselves, they blamed the regime. For them, prison was all about resistance; for us, it was about survival and going home to our parents.

I found these memoirists’ frequent use of the word
tavvab
interesting. It is an Arabic word that means “repentant.” The prison authorities employed this word to describe the prisoners who had broken under torture: those who had denounced all opposition groups and had confessed to the “righteousness” of the regime. A
tavvab
was a prisoner who had seen the “truth” and had realized that all he or she had said and done against the government had been “evil.” The government of Iran had gone so far as to call Evin and other political prisons “universities” where prisoners were “educated.” Of course, the regime never mentioned that the “educational” methods included physical and psychological torture and extreme intimidation.

The writers of the memoirs divided the prisoners into two groups:
sarehmozei
s and
tavvab
s.
Sarehmozei
is a Persian word that means “those who are firm in their ideological beliefs.”
Sarehmozei
s were the heroes and were good; the
tavvab
s were the traitors who had betrayed their comrades and the cause and therefore were evil. That more than ninety per cent of
tavvab
s were teenagers didn’t seem to bother any of these writers, and they demonized their young cellmates. A few of the writers believed that all
tavvab
s were the same, but the rest categorized them into four different groups: those who pretended to be
tavvab
s in order to fool the officials; those who had broken under torture but minded their own business and didn’t cause any trouble for other prisoners; those who spied on others and informed the interrogators of what they heard in the cells; and those who made life miserable for all the other prisoners and even took part in interrogations and executions.

While in Evin, I had heard about a handful of adult prisoners forced to take part in the execution of their friends as proof of their
repentance. However, neither I nor any of my cellmates knew such prisoners. Reputedly, these prisoners had been important members of anti-government political groups, so the interrogators made them do horrible things to prove that they had changed.

In 246, the cellblock in Evin where I spent most of my time, more than ninety per cent were girls like me. As far as I know, their biggest crime was having sold the publications of opposition groups or having taken part in demonstrations against the government. For this, the majority of them received ten- to twenty-year sentences.

Most of us in Evin were well behaved. We prayed the Namaz, watched the prison’s “educational” programs, and said nothing against the government. We never harmed anyone or spied on anybody. Breaking under torture doesn’t mean you lose your humanity, and those who did lose theirs were definitely a tiny minority.

My visit to the Persian bookstore in Toronto convinced me that my work was important. The heroes had told their stories; now it was time for someone to tell another side of what had gone in Evin. My prison friends and I were not traitors; we were Iran’s children who had been tortured and had broken. But I had faith that we had enough strength to mend our lives and speak out about what had been done to us.

Even though my manuscript was still raw, things began to happen in December 2004. One of my creative-writing instructors at the School of Continuing Studies read it and introduced me to a
Toronto Star
reporter named Michelle Shephard, who wrote about Middle Eastern issues. She was interested in talking to me and maybe writing an article about me for the
Sunday Star
. We arranged to meet at the King Edward Hotel in Toronto. As I stood in the foyer waiting for her, my whole body began to shake. Was I ready for this? The world would know all my secrets and flaws, and once the story came out there would be no going back. Yet despite all my fears, a strong force was pushing me ahead.

Michelle was a petite woman. When we shook hands, I looked into her eyes, and they reminded me of my closest prison friend, whom I had not heard from in almost twenty years. I clearly remembered her happiness when the guards called my name over the loudspeaker just before my release from Evin came. She was so happy for me that she couldn’t stop crying. “Marina, you’re going home!” she said. “I know it! They’re letting you go!” Then she told me to run. She pushed me down the hallway toward the barred door, and I watched her small hand waving to me through the bars as I walked to the office at 246. Where was she now? Had she survived Evin?

Four years later, in July 2008 during an interview in Italy, a journalist asked me which day had been the worst of my life. I considered for a moment.

“The day I went home from Evin,” I replied.

“Why?” he inquired, surprised.

“The day I went home from Evin I left my friends behind. Girls closer to me than sisters would be. I left them behind. I shouldn’t have, but I didn’t know any better. I was a young woman who wanted to go home more than anything. And that was the biggest mistake of my life.”

Michelle and I sat down at the hotel restaurant and ordered lunch. I wasn’t hungry and had soup. She asked me about my life in Iran and the process of writing my book. I had believed that reporters were aggressive, but Michelle was gentle and soft-spoken. I expected her to ask me for the name of someone reliable who’d known me in Iran and could confirm that I had truly spent two years in Evin—and she did. I gave her contact information for a few people who’d known me quite well in Iran but now lived abroad. None of them intended to return to Iran, so talking to a reporter would not put them in danger.

Michelle’s article appeared in the
Sunday Star
on January 30, 2005. Even though I had hardly slept the night before and was
wide awake at 5:00 a.m., I didn’t jump out of bed and run to the door to get the paper. The previous night, Andre had arrived home from a business trip, and he was still fast asleep. I waited. At 8:00 a.m., I couldn’t bear waiting any longer and edged out of bed. When I opened the front door, the frosty January air poured into the house like ice water. I grabbed the newspaper, ran back to our bedroom, and spread the paper on the bed. Andre squirmed.

Michelle had written a two-page article about me that included a photo of me the
Star
photographer had taken in the Swiss Chalet kitchen. I was in my uniform. I remembered the surprise on my boss’s face when I asked him if it was okay for a reporter to come to the restaurant to interview me and for a photographer to take photos.

“Reporter? What’s going on, Marina?” he wanted to know.

I told him about the book. He had always been very good to me, and he said he didn’t have any problem as long as the newspaper people showed up in the afternoon when the restaurant wasn’t busy and they didn’t get in anyone’s way.