Letters to My Torturer: Love, Revolution, and Imprisonment in Iran (31 page)

We enter the courtyard, and I am taken to the right, up a long staircase. I enter a place like a classroom. I sit down on a school chair next to somebody else. A little later someone calls out:

“Houshang!”

I hear the voice of the person next to me ask: “Which Houshang? There are two Houshangs here.”

My God. It’s Amir (Houshang) Nikayeen. With his beautiful, humanist smile.

The guard is saying: “That one.”

And is pointing at me.

As soon as I stand up, I see my wife. Wrapped in a black chador she is dragging herself towards me. She stands still and says: “Is this my husband? No ... What have you done to him? What have you done to him?”

She sees me with my bushy beard, bloated stomach, dressed in my prison uniform and slippers, and for a moment she’s horrified. She
throws herself into my arms and shouts out for everyone to hear: “I love you!”

She hands me my new glasses. I put them on. For the first time in months I am able to see everything clearly again.

When we walk down the stairs, we see people dressed in the blue prison uniform filling all corners of the courtyard. Blankets have been neatly spread on the ground and a guard is seated in the middle of each one. Like the rest of the people, my wife and I sit down on opposite sides of a blanket. After thirteen months and in the company of total strangers, what else could we say apart from repeating, yes, I am well and how are you? In the middle of this exchange, I ask her: “How is uncle?”

Apart from Rahman, we had no other uncle, but I had not seen Rahman in the crowd. My wife shook her head. I don’t know what would have happened had she told me then and there that Rahman was no longer with us. Would that have made a difference to the way I felt or the decision I had made? The visit ends too quickly. I return to the prison with a box of sweets. On the way back, the men whisper to each other and share the news that ten individuals from the Party’s secret organization have been executed.

The lines I have carved on the wall to count the days, the pigeons’ cooing, the spring breeze and the pleasant air all tell me that the New Year holiday is almost upon us. For a second time, I am to be your guest on New Year’s Day, Brother Hamid. I am not permitted to see anybody apart from the prison guard. I am only allowed to hear my wife’s voice once a month. Each time, after the excitement of going to the telephone, I am plunged into the deepest depression when the phone call ends. I return to my cell and I spend my days crying and memorizing poetry.

I’ve been quarantined, and kept completely cut off from the outside world. I read the Qur’an from cover to cover many times. I read
The Book of Eloquence
again and again and finally, the long journey of my quest for truth leads me back to Rumi and Hafez. By now, I understand full well that the path that I had taken in the past was of no use to me. I am a poet. I don’t belong in politics. I had lost myself in
politics but am rediscovering my lost self in poetry.

I don’t even have access to newspapers, although the “news” is broadcast every day at two in the afternoon. I have reviewed my life a thousand times and my resolve has grown with every day that passes: “I’ll try to stay alive, if I can do it without hurting others. I shall be independent and have nothing to do with politics. If I can, I’ll write, and finish what needs to be finished.” Then I become agitated. I feel I am running out of time and my creative energy is going to be lost forever. My spirits sink. I throw myself against the walls and the door. I want to be taken to the court soon. I want them to make up their minds: either finish me off or let me find a way to the future.

I celebrate New Year’s Day alone and preoccupied. For this New Year’s ceremony, I seek out seven items beginning with the letter ‘s’. For
sabzi
, greenery, I use a green leaf. I have been saving an apple (
sib
) for just this purpose, and I have a safety pin (
sanjaq
) and a piece of wire (
sim
). I use the butt of a cigarette (
sigar
) for another ‘s’ and a piece of soap (
saboon
, though it is not the right ‘s’), so I have most of my seven items starting with ‘seen’ ready for the New Year’s ritual. I sit down, facing the seven items. At the moment I assume the New Year has started, I kiss the imaginary image of my wife, and open the book of Hafez’s poetry to a random page in the hope of finding a clue about my future hidden in the poem. And I cry, quietly.

The next day, the door opens. It’s Brother Rasouli. He sits down by the door, watching me compile my list of books, and says: “I’ve been feeling bad since the day you received your visitor. We’ve been told that communist women are loose. That family doesn’t mean anything to them and that everyone is having an affair with someone
else. But the visit confused me. I haven’t seen this much love and warmth in a family before.”

I don’t know what to say. I talk about my love for my wife and our simple life. He picks up the list and asks: “Do you need anything? I am about to leave this place and the Corps altogether.”

I say: “A dictionary, if that’s possible.”

He says: “I’ll try.”

He stands up. We shake hands and kiss each other. A few days later, when I return from the bathroom, I see a little dictionary on the cell floor. I’ll never see Brother Rasouli again, but to this day, I can remember his face.

The Ornament of the Righteous
was penned by the renowned Shi’a scholar Muhammad Baqir Majlisi. The book was written in the seventeenth century at a time when the ruling Safavid dynasty in Iran had made Shi’ism the official religion of the country. This popular book offers advice on recommended customs and modes of behaviour, organized by topic. Certain sections of the book deal with sexual matters, which in places read like modern pornography.

The book was seriously in demand in the prison. Initially, they were pleased that a canonical work of Shi’ism had so many readers in a prison full of communists. Later on, when they realized that the prisoners were only interested in the book’s sexual content, they took it away.

This twentieth letter has no direct connection to you personally, Brother Hamid. But it reveals the depths of the culture you believe in. After the revolution, you assumed that by censoring the sexual content of this book,
⁸³
which is one of the most important reference works for Shi’ism and an essential source of all of the Ayatollahs’ writings, society’s morals would be protected. Just as you thought that you would kill all thought except for your own Taliban-style way of thinking by killing and torturing the best of Iran’s sons and daughters.

Iqbal (an Arabic and Kurdish name meaning good fortune) was only twenty-four when the Islamic Republic clamped down on Iran’s
Kurdistan region. Thousands fled to safety, among them Iqbal, who sought refuge in Tehran. He was eventually arrested and for a few days in 1984 became my guest in the solitary confinement cell.

In search of employment and a roof over his head, Iqbal went to a public loans office,
⁸⁴
run by a religious couple in the south of Tehran. Some men who work in Islamic institutions are addressed by the common title of Haj Aqa and their wives, who are wrapped in black chadors, are referred to as Haj Khanum.

As luck would have it, when Iqbal arrived at the loans office, Haj Khanum was in the director’s office. He managed to sweet-talk her into employing him. When Haj Aqa arrived, Haj Khanum explained that the helpless young Kurd should be hired because he had lost all his family. Unlike most Kurds, they were Shia Muslims, and the enemies of Iran had killed them.

Haj Aqa believed the lies that Iqbal had fed to his wife and so Iqbal was hired. He was a hard-working young man, and more importantly, he was seriously committed to fulfilling his religious duties. He never missed his prayers, performing them exactly on time and taking part in all of the religious rites and ceremonies. On Monday nights, he attended prayer ceremonies where radical believers placed the Qur’an on their heads and punched their chests, weeping profusely. He had even been spotted performing the Jafar Tayyar prayer
⁸⁵
in the middle of the night. On Friday nights he would certainly attend the Kumayl prayers
⁸⁶
and his Fridays were spent fasting as well as attending the Nudbah
⁸⁷
prayer ceremony at Tehran’s large cemetery. Whenever he had time off work, he either read the
The Book of Eloquence
or
The Ornament of the Righteous
. Iqbal was one of the latter book’s devotees, and he used to tell me: “You are stupid. Prayer is not going to help you, no matter how much you pray. You have to study this book so that you can act in line with Shia scholars’ instructions from early in the morning when you get up to go to the toilet, until the night when you lie beside your wife.”

He would then stand up and walk. He would pace up and down the tiny cell and ask:

“In your view, is it allowed to kiss a woman down there?”

I would laugh and say, “Drop it, Iqbal.”

He used to reply, “Fear not.”

“Meaning?”

“Meaning that it
is
possible. There are a thousand hadith
⁸⁸
about this.”

Then he would walk up and down, reciting the hadith. When he reached the “fear not” passage, I’d join him and we would read together, laughing out aloud:

They asked what will happen if the man and woman’s clothes are removed at the moment of intercourse. He said, fear not, it’s allowed. Again, they asked, what if the woman’s vagina was kissed? He said, fear not, it’s allowed.

It has been related in numerous credible hadith verses that there should be no speaking during the moment of intercourse. But looking at the vagina and kissing it is allowed.

They asked if someone undressed his wife and looked at her, what would happen to them. He said that there is no pleasure greater than this. They asked what if he played with his wife or slave’s vagina with his hands and fingers? He said, it’s allowed but nothing should be placed inside the woman unless it’s part of the human body. They asked is it allowed to have intercourse in water pool and he said, fear not, it’s allowed.

They asked explicitly about having intercourse in a bath and he said, it’s allowed.

It has been related that if someone has intimately embraced a slave and wanted to sleep with another slave before performing the ritual bath, he should perform the ablution. They asked, is a man allowed to sleep with two slaves? He said no, it’s banned. What about sleeping with two free women? He said, that’s allowed.

We kept holding sex education classes in our little cell. But making him talk about the rest of his life was not easy, although his life story was worth listening to.

Haj Aqa and Haj Khanum had no children of their own. They fell head over heels in love with this pious young man and decided to get him a wife. First they bought him a little flat and furnished it. Then they started looking for a girl to his taste. Iqbal told Haj Khanum and Haj Aqa: “You are my guardians. If you come across a pious girl, get her for me. I don’t care for looks.”

But they insisted that Islam allows men and women to see each other prior to marriage and they took him with them on their matchmaking visits. First there would be lengthy discussions with the girl’s family. Then the girl would appear, wrapped up in a white chador. Iqbal rejected them all until it came to Zahra’s turn. She was fair like marble. Pretty like the moon.

Iqbal agreed to the marriage without hesitation and in the blink of an eye, he became a groom, entering the wedding chamber with the moon-faced girl. But Moonface turned out to be a pious girl in the truest sense of the word. She wouldn’t undress in front of her husband. Iqbal was not allowed to enter the bathroom while she was there because this was a sin. But the main adventure was on Friday nights. She would take a bath
⁸⁹
and would accompany Iqbal to the Kumayl prayer ceremony. They would perform a lengthy prayer and weep and sob, asking God for forgiveness. When they returned, Moonface would insist that Iqbal should sleep with her. This religious duty has to be performed on Friday nights, except when the woman has her period. It has its own special rituals and prayers and Iqbal would oblige and perform them.

But that was not the end of it. It was not only that the night in question had to be a Friday night, there were numerous conditions relating to the time and place that had to be taken into consideration. Every aspect of such matters is meticulously detailed in
The Ornament of the Righteous:

Do not have intercourse under a fruit tree because if a child is created, he would either become a torturer and killer or will lead the brutal and the unjust.

Do not have intercourse in sunlight. Pull the curtains or else, if a child is created, the child will always live in a bad state and worry until it dies.

Do not have intercourse in the middle of the call for prayers or else, if a child is created, it would not fear to shed blood.

Do not have intercourse on the rooftop or else, if a child is created, it would create divisions, be deceptive and would want to introduce unlawful innovations.

If you are intending to travel, do not have intercourse on the night prior to travel or else, if a child is created, he would become wasteful and wasteful people are Satan’s brothers. And if you are setting off on a journey that takes three days, do not have intercourse or else, if a child is created, he would become a supporter of those who are brutal and unjust.