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Kitabı oku: «My Prison, My Home», sayfa 2
THE PASSPORT OFFICE
The next day, a Sunday, we went to the passport office on Sattar Khan Avenue in west Tehran. Farhad and I entered separately through the men’s and women’s checkpoints, divided by the usual tatty curtain. The female guard on my side of the curtain conducted a superficial search of my purse and let me through. She was friendly and smiling. In the first decade after the revolution, smiles on the faces of mid-level civil servants were rare, deemed a sign of frivolousness, unseemly in an Islamic state. Thanks to President Khatami, who was elected on a reformist platform in 1997 and spent two four-year terms fighting the hard-liners, the scowls of government officials were no longer de rigueur. (Tehran’s wits referred to Khatami as Seyyed-e Khandan, the smiling cleric, a play on words in Persian that denoted both his sunny visage and his relative ineffectiveness.) During Khatami’s presidency, university students—men and women—mixed more freely; women fought for and secured more freedom in matters of dress; color returned to clothing on the streets; young girls moved about the city with hair showing beneath their headscarves, their nails polished, a touch of lipstick on their lips. I realized how miraculous it was, two years into Ahmadinejad’s far more restrictive presidency, that in a government office I was still encountering a smiling face.
Farhad and I headed straight for the director’s office, past the queues of people waiting to hand in or pick up forms. We ended up in a large room, where, we were told, the final approval for a new passport would be issued. On the wall, as in all government offices, were pictures of the founder of the Islamic Republic, Ayatollah Khomeini; the current supreme leader, Ayatollah Khamenei; and President Ahmadinejad. Three women, one in a black chador, two wearing the ample scarf known as a maghna’eh—which covers the forehead, hair, and ears; fits tightly under the chin; then drapes over the shoulders and upper back and chest—sat behind desks. The lone man in the room, obviously in charge, sat at his own desk, at some distance from the women. We carried our growing file from desk to desk. There was more signing, registering, paper shuffling, and waiting. Finally, the man in charge called my name and handed me two letters. I was to take one back to the Foreign Ministry and one to “the President’s Bureau.” Each of these two offices, in turn, had to give me letters approving my application for a new passport. “Once you get these letters, you should expect to wait at least two weeks before your passport can be issued,” he said.
I was shattered. I had been told it would only take three days. But far more important, I knew that “the President’s Bureau” was a euphemism for the Ministry of Intelligence and Security. I was familiar with the ministry’s fearsome reputation. It was responsible for internal security, and was the regime’s political watchdog, its secret police. It harassed intellectuals, journalists, and even the mildest of dissidents; it made arrests. It had been responsible for disappearances, even assassinations. Still, I convinced myself this merely meant more forms and interviews and, certainly, more delays.
I was directed to see a Mr. Torabi in the same building. Farhad and I went downstairs, found the office marked President’s Bureau, entered rooms which turned out to be quite well furnished, and asked for Mr. Torabi. I do not know if this was his real name or a fictitious one, as was often the case with Intelligence Ministry officials I later encountered. Mr. Torabi was not there. When I went in the following day, he was not there, either. “You just missed him. He won’t be back till Wednesday,” I was told. I felt that I was being sent after black beans, as the Persian expression goes—being given the runaround.
At home, I canceled my airline reservation and once again telephoned Shaul. “There will be a two-week delay,” I told him. “We have to find someone who can expedite things.” In Iran, contacts—and money—are crucial in situations like mine. Shaul promised to make phone calls. Over the next four months, I would make, cancel, and remake these same airline reservations several times, each one a marker on the barometer of my rising, and then dashed, hopes.
A BLEAK NEW YEAR’S EVE
I had expected to spend New Year’s Eve with my husband and our family in Washington; I was now spending it with Mutti in Tehran. My mother loves festive occasions: birthdays, Christmas, New Year’s, the Iranian new year festival, Nowruz. As a child I learned to love these chances to bring people together, to enjoy the company of family and friends, to laugh and tell stories, and, like Mutti, I was punctilious about observing them. In our household, failure to telephone a relative on a birthday or to mark a celebration was a serious matter. Shaul often teased me about the importance I attached to such gestures. Although Mother and I decided to stay home, I wanted to make New Year’s Eve as joyful for her as possible.
I walked to the fancy new grocery store a block from my mother’s apartment and bought salmon and caviar. We set the table with a beautiful tablecloth and Mother’s best Rosenthal china, which she kept in a special cupboard in her apartment. Dinner, however, turned out to be a somber affair. Unease hovered over the table. Both my mother and I sensed that the normal order of our lives had been interrupted. Just how very deeply it had been disrupted, neither of us even dimly understood.
The next day I went with Kami to take care of my cell phone, which was now in the hands of my assailants. In Iran, you can buy a cell phone at a variety of stores, but a number has to be purchased from the government phone company. The number is encoded on a chip that is installed in the phone. I had to cancel my old cell phone number and purchase a new one. At the telephone company office, I handed over a batch of documents to a clerk: my “deed” of ownership, the barely legible Xerox copy of my birth certificate as proof of identity, and the police report, duly notarized by the revolutionary magistrate’s court, attesting that my cell phone had been stolen. But here, too, bureaucracy was alive and well. They could cancel my old telephone number, I was told, but they could issue me a new number only if I produced a picture ID—the original, not a Xerox copy. I repeated the obvious: my ID card had been stolen; it would be months before I could obtain a new one. The clerk shrugged. It was not his concern. I’ll be home in two weeks, anyway, I told myself as I left empty-handed.
Finally, on Wednesday, I saw Torabi, the man in the Intelligence Ministry’s “President’s Bureau,” having called the day before to make sure he would be there. He went over the robbery with me again and asked me a few more questions. “Why don’t you step outside and wait for my colleague, Mr. Ja’fari. He wants to talk to you,” he said. I waited in the reception room. After about half an hour, the door behind me opened and a man asked me to come in.
Ja’fari was sitting at a table behind a laptop. He was in his mid-thirties, of medium height, with a bit of stubble on his face. He wore an open-necked shirt beneath a modified safari jacket. A smirk never left his face. His manner alternated between solicitous official—“Tell me again about the robbery”—and faceless bureaucrat—“Date of birth? Identity card number?” He appeared to be reading the questions from his laptop. At first he asked questions and simply nodded at my answers. Then he handed me a sheaf of blank paper, repeated the same questions and posed many others in writing, and instructed me to write down my replies.
Yet, still, I was only slightly uneasy: the attention of the Intelligence Ministry was never welcome, but I had been assured by friends that clearance by the ministry for lost passport applications was routine. Asking for my responses in writing cast the interview in a more serious light, but most of the information was ordinary enough: name, family name, husband’s name, children, employer, salary. A few of the questions seemed unnecessarily intrusive: occupation and employer of husband, daughter, son-in-law, sister, brother. Ja’fari seemed overly interested in the details of my Wilson Center salary: amount, deductions for federal and state taxes and for Social Security and retirement, the biweekly method of payment. Concerned lest my salary, when converted into Iranian, rials seem to him exorbitant, I made all this as convoluted as possible. (Later, on the day of my release, when I saw Ja’fari’s shiny, silver-gray Peugeot, I concluded that I need not have worried. The Intelligence Ministry took very good care of its own.)
I found it odd that Ja’fari wanted the names and ages of my granddaughters, as well as a list of the people I saw regularly in Washington. I came to understand only much later that, in the style of the now-defunct East German secret police, the Stasi, the Iranian secret police collected masses of information, no matter how insignificant or useless, on everyone who happened to attract their attention. As with the Stasi, such information contributed nothing to national security, but fat dossiers were regarded as proof of “thoroughness” and helped inflate the self-regard of the intelligence officers. When Ja’fari asked me if I was married to a Jew, an alarm bell should have gone off, but it didn’t. I failed to catch the implied menace in the question. He has never met a Muslim woman who married a Jew, I thought. Trying to strike a friendly tone, I even offered to show Ja’fari around if he ever came to Washington. Notwithstanding a very few friends’ skeptical attitudes, I still believed I was the victim of an ordinary robbery and this was routine clearance before a new passport could be issued.
Ja’fari ended the interview around noon. I went home, never expecting to see him again. I assumed that my passport would be issued in a few days. But when I picked up the phone in my mother’s apartment the next day, it was Ja’fari at the other end of the line. He instructed me to appear Saturday morning, this time at an Intelligence Ministry office. Mr. Ja’fari, which may or may not have been his real name, was to become my constant but unwelcome “companion” in the weeks and months ahead—an unshakable and controlling presence throughout a terrifying interrogation that would stretch out over the next eight months, nearly four of them spent in solitary confinement at Evin Prison.
2. AN IRANIAN CHILDHOOD
I WAS BORN MARCH 3, 1940, in Tehran. My mother is Viennese and my father is from Kerman, in eastern Iran. Father came from an old established landed family, many of whose members also served in the government. My paternal great-grandfather, Vakil ol-Molk-e-Dovvom, was the governor of Kerman in the 1870s, and my grandfather Raf’at Dowleh was vice governor of the province before becoming a member of parliament. My paternal grandmother came from a clerical family; her brother was the highest-ranking cleric in Kerman. On the European side, my maternal grandfather, who died in World War I, owned a hotel in Marienbad, in Czechoslovakia, and my mother’s older brother was a cloth merchant in Prague.
For the first six years of my life I lived in Karaj, twenty-five miles from Tehran, where my father was a professor of botany at the College of Agriculture.
My father couldn’t have chosen a better place than Karaj to ease his Austrian bride into Iran, which in the 1930s remained traditional and offered few amenities. The college was a small, closed community, with a river and beautifully landscaped wooded areas. The faculty lived either in two-story houses or bungalows separated by hedges. In the summer, the gardeners sprinkled water over the college’s unpaved streets to help settle the dust and cool the air.
By the time I was born, Mother had spent two years in Iran. She had thrown herself wholeheartedly into the culture and customs of her adopted country. But she ran a European household, and we spoke German at home and followed European customs. The stories she told were of Snow White and the Seven Dwarves, Cinderella, and Hansel and Gretel. I learned Persian stories from my nanny, who doubled as cook and housekeeper.
I loved the garden for its small streams, square ponds, flower beds, rose gardens and old trees, especially the catalpa, poplar, pine, and plane trees. With my nanny in tow, I would play hopscotch in the walkways of the garden and games of hide-and-seek with other children. This was paradise, I thought; but every time I said as much to my nanny, she would scold me, take me by the hand, and make me rinse my mouth to wash away my “blasphemous” words.
It didn’t take long for my outgoing mother to make friends with a number of the professors and their families. The members of the faculty were mostly European-educated and could converse with her in German or in French. Mother had an affinity for those who spoke her native language.
The Schricker family, headed by Hans Shricker, an Austrian forestry specialist, lived next door to us and their eldest son, Adalbert, married my father’s sister, Touran. Mother had lost both her parents at a relatively young age and was raised by her sisters in Vienna. The Schrickers became her surrogate parents. Mr. Schricker, a skilled carpenter, built a bassinet when my mother was pregnant with me, and once I was born, Mrs. Schricker showed Mother how to bathe a newborn, and how to diaper and dress me. Under Mrs. Schricker’s tutelage, Mother sewed and knitted clothes for me, since ready-made children’s clothing was a rarity in those days. Mrs. Schricker—warm, loving, practical, and down-to-earth—eased the pain of living away from home.
Unlike traditional Persian homes, our garden didn’t have a wall around it, but pine trees served to shield it from the street. We had a large living room and a dining room, several bedrooms, and a bathroom with a bathtub and a Persian-style toilet, basically a basin sunk in the floor.
In the evenings Mother and Father would sit in the living room and listen to the radio, while I would play in a corner with my toys. My parents’ friends, especially the Schrickers, would come over to listen to the European news broadcasts. Hitler had invaded Russia in June 1941, and one flank of the German’s three-pronged attack was aimed at the oilfields of the Caucasus on Iran’s border. In Karaj they all worried that the German army would overrun the Caucasus and advance into Iran.
The Allies were already concerned about German influence in Iran. Once Hitler invaded Russia, they desperately needed Iran’s overland routes to supply the hard-pressed Russian army. Unable to persuade a proud and stubborn Reza Shah—the military officer who seized power in 1921, sent the Qajar dynasty packing, and founded a new dynasty in 1925—to abandon Iran’s state of neutrality and join the Allied cause, Russia and Britain invaded Iran in August 1941, the Russians from the north, the British from the south. When Russian troops appeared at Karaj, Father remained at his teaching post in the College of Agriculture, but he sent Mother and me to Tehran, to my grandparents’ house. I was happy to be reunited with my older stepbrother, Siamack, who was going to school in Tehran and already living with my grandmother.
MY GRANDPARENTS
By the time I was born, my grandparents were living near the University of Tehran. They had moved to Tehran from Kerman when my grandfather was elected to parliament.
My grandmother’s home was another world, utterly different from our European household, where we spoke German, followed strict rules, sat around the table to have our meals, and ate Austrian food—schnitzel, boiled meat, soup, roast potatoes, and creamed spinach. Grandmother—Khanum Jan as we called her—ran a traditional Persian household. While my grandfather, who passed away just four years later, when I was five, was no longer the wealthy man he had been (his extensive land holdings had been seized under the previous reign), there was a great deal of coming and going, with visitors from their hometown constantly bringing the best dates and Kerman’s distinctive sweets and pastries. At any given time, the cook would prepare meals for ten or more people. My favorite place was the kitchen, which was dark and smoky from the woodstove, and where the cook would often slip me a spoonful of white rice from the cooking pot. I loved the rice, the aash, a thick soup made of greens; the white cheese and walnuts, yogurt, and the fresh sangak flat bread from the corner bakery that came with every meal.
At home, Mother had been so worried we would get typhoid she insisted on cooking all the fruits and vegetables. At my grandparents’, I was free from all the don’ts I heard at home. We ate sitting crossedlegged around a rectangular tablecloth spread on the floor. Mother sat on a chair at a small table set up just for her.
The house had a large garden with a pond where the household, including my grandmother, made their ablutions before each of the five daily prayers. The garden was divided into four large triangular flower beds. In each, a persimmon tree or a pomegranate tree stood among the flowers, rosebushes, and forsythias. The walls of the garden were thick with grapevines. In the fall, Grandmother would have a servant climb up a ladder and put a small sack around each cluster of grapes so that they would keep, even as the cold weather set in. Before the first frost she would have the sacks removed and the grapes picked. That way, she always had grapes to serve out of season.
The servants’ rooms and the outhouse were at the far end of the garden. There were two toilets in the house, but Grandmother was too old fashioned to let anyone use them. Peddlers came to my grandmother’s door every morning with donkey loads of melons, string beans, cucumbers, and fruit. Then there was the itinerant purveyor of shahr-e farang, or “the wonders of Europe,” which consisted of a copper viewing box on four legs topped with minarets and bells. For a few rials, we could look into the darkened box and view moving images of exotic places and people. The shahr-e farang man offered a running commentary as the pictures galloped across the tiny screen. “Oh, see the queen of England majestically sitting on her throne, her crown on her head,” he would say in a singsong voice and in rhyming couplets. “Now see the fierce tiger of Africa and the lion, king of the jungle.”
In the winter, Grandmother would set up a traditional Persian korsi in her sitting room, which consisted of a low wooden table, measuring about four feet by four feet, placed over a charcoal brazier and covered with a large square quilt. Narrow mattresses were arranged around the quilt, and cushions were placed along the walls to lean against. On winter evenings, the family practically lived around the korsi, snuggling under the quilt to keep warm, eat, read, chat, play word games, recite poetry, and occasionally sleep. Grandmother always retired to her bed, but sometimes allowed the grandchildren to sleep under the korsi as a special treat. The servants had their own korsi, but it was off limits to the children.
Every Monday a mullah would come to the house and conduct a rowzeh-khani, a recital of religious martyrs’ tales. This was the only time we children were not allowed into the sitting room, when adult family members joined the mullah and the servants sat cross-legged by the entrance as he somberly recited the heart-rending tale of the martyrdom of brave Hossein, the Prophet’s grandson and the third Shi’ite imam, on the plains of Karbala in the seventh century.
My time with Khanum Jan helped shape my Iranian-Islamic identity. She read the Quran and explained religion to me as best she could. However, like many in my own and even in my father’s generation, I remained a secular Muslim. Father came of age during the reign of Reza Shah. The king regarded religion and the clergy as obstacles to his furious modernizing. He saw to it that the school curriculum glorified Iran’s pre-Islamic past, not its Islamic heritage. For my father and other Iranians like him, education abroad took care of the rest.
Khanum Jan, whom I loved dearly and who was the most important woman in my early life next to Mutti, was extremely tolerant, despite her religious upbringing. Generally speaking, she was broad-minded and receptive to modern changes—with one striking exception. When the veil was banned by government order in 1936, she stayed home for five years rather than go out into the street unveiled, a reaction not uncommon among women of her generation. The ban was another of Reza Shah’s Westernizing measures. He wanted to bring women into the public space, schools, and the workplace. But the abolition of the veil was a highly radical measure, shocking to traditional society and bitterly opposed by the clergy. One of the first steps taken by the Islamic Republic after the overthrow of the monarchy in 1979 was to reimpose hijab, or Islamic dress, on women. But by then, the situation was reversed. Middle-class women now fought the imposition of the veil rather than its removal.
Despite my grandmother’s own protest, her progressive mind-set was evident in the fact that she let her daughters, my aunts, go to school and did not object that they went unveiled. And when I married Shaul in 1965, when marriages between Muslims and Jews were highly unusual, she gave me her blessing, along with a beautiful pair of pearl earrings.
I don’t recall ever seeing Khanum Jan in a black chador. Her personality was mirrored in the light colors she loved, and she often donned white, flowery chadors, allowing a bit of her hair to show beneath her headscarf. She was kind and welcoming to both her foreign-born daughter-in-law and son-in-law, and with her death in 1973, a piece of the cherished Iran of my childhood vanished along with her.
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