Beyond pity
From Griffith REVIEW Edition 15: Divided Nation
© Copyright Griffith University & the author.
Written by Robert Hillman
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I first met Zarah Ghahramani on Tehran's Revolution Boulevard in June 2003, just down the road from the northern campus of the city's university. She was dressed in the tunic of all young urban women in the Islamic Republic of Iran: dark scarf drawn tight over her head, lightweight coat (pale blue this day) reaching almost to her ankles. She asked me in her accomplished English whether it would not be too impolite to inquire what I was writing in my notebook. I told her that I was gathering material for newspaper articles on Iranian politics. "I thought as much," she said without explanation, then offered her hand and spoke her name. As we walked along in the gathering dusk for a minute or more, I could only assume that Zarah had made a habit of approaching people who looked as if they might have a newspaper to report to in the West. But why? At the intersection of Revolution and Azari, where we might courteously have parted, Zarah stopped and made some comment about the rowdy traffic. Then she added that she had a few things to say about Iranian politics herself. Would I listen?
We sat at a kiosk in the Laleh Gardens not so far from where we'd met, and Zarah told her story over two hours. All around us, Tehrani mums and dads feted their children on the peculiarly flavourless ice-cream that Iranians favour, while young men in mock-Benetton tops engaged in air-courtship (the right motions, but no action) of young women dressed like Zarah. Fairy lights blinked on the garden's laurels and date palms.
Sitting hunched over the table, Zarah kept her voice low, and folded and refolded the straw of her Coke into a compact wad. She spoke with astonishing candour of her involvement in reform politics at Tehran University, where she was no longer permitted to study; of imprisonment, torture, severe sexual abuse. As I learned later, her scarf concealed the regrowth of hair shorn from her head in Tehran's Evin Prison eighteen months earlier: she had torn her scalp to shreds with her fingernails while awaiting her daily interrogations and had kept her hair short after her release while the wounds healed.
Before approaching me, she'd satisfied herself that she was not being followed and filmed. She knew she was watched. Her days and nights were vexed by the need to take care: any infringement of Iran's rigid dress code would be harshly punished, any expression of political dissent would see her returned to Evin for a very long time, or until her interrogators judged her so cowed by certain refinements of the torture she'd already endured that she could no longer imagine rebuking her government.
Her story could have been told with variation by thousands of young Iranian men, and without variation by a few young Iranian women. She'd been twenty and studying languages at university when first detained by state security agents late in 2001. Tehran University had been at that time a centre of student activism. Hundreds of young men and women had raised their voices in the streets around the campus, demanding freedom of choice in what they read, in what they wore, in what they wrote. Zarah had been one of the leaders of the protests, intense in her political convictions, but not truly aware of just how hard the other side played the game. Twenty-nine days of interrogation in Evin, much of it in a blindfold, had demonstrated to her the savagery of the regime when roused. By the time her interrogators had finished with her, she'd been prepared to confess to anything at all, and confess she had. She had worked as an agent of the United States of America; she had accepted money from anti-regime organisations in Europe and the United Kingdom; she had committed "immoral acts" with leading male figures in the protest movement; she had attempted to subvert the rule of law in Iran. Her confession was nonsense, but she signed it.
"That is what happened," said Zarah at the conclusion of her story, and she added, with a bestowing gesture of her open hands, "for you to use."
OVER THE NEXT TWO WEEKS, ZARAH NUDGED ME and my partner, Anni, north, south, east and west in Tehran, then took us down to Shiraz and Isfahan. She introduced us to writers, artists, movie-makers, businessmen, and to her many friends and relatives. Her account of her ordeal was confirmed everywhere. In Shiraz we visited her particularly close friend, Eva, who had shaved her head herself to satirise the regime's phobias, and to dramatise her solidarity with Zarah. Her own boldness notwithstanding, Eva was worried for her friend, and Zarah's family was more worried still. Watching Zarah indoors amongst those who cared for her, bare-headed, laughing, lampooning the regime, I could see what it was that made her friends and family so anxious. Her attachment to the liberty she craved was too intense, almost mad. Her face flashed the rage of the humiliated. Her interrogator in Evin Prison had warned her of the torments to come if she were re-arrested. One day, I felt sure, she would carry her rage outdoors to spite him, and would pay all over again.
"Come to Australia," I urged her. "Apply for a study visa."
"Would that be possible?"
"Maybe. We should try."
"Then they win," she said, and dismissed the idea.
Anni and I returned to Australia after our month in Iran, but remained in contact with Zarah by hotmail and regular calls from her friend's mobile phone. What she said to me and what she wrote made it more apparent than ever that she was living on borrowed time. And this was something she would have acknowledged herself if she could have set aside her contempt for the people who had harmed her and think straight for a moment. She spoke of her lapses from the conditions of her release from Evin, and conceded that they were becoming more frequent. She was not supposed to talk to anyone involved in anti-regime politics, for example, but she did. She was not supposed to go anywhere near the university, nor attempt to use its library, but she did. She was not supposed to sign any of the reform petitions circulating in the university precinct, but she did. My response was always a version of "Stop it!"
Then one day, a year after my return to Australia, Zarah sent an me an email to say that she wanted to get out of Iran and would accept any help I could provide. What had changed her mind? "My father," she said. He had taken her by the shoulders and made her stand in front of a mirror. "Look!" he'd said. He wanted her to see what Evin and the relentless surveillance since her release had wrought on her face and figure. She obeyed her father: she stood there and stared. But it wasn't the erosion of her beauty that had persuaded Zarah to flee to Australia; it was the grief in her father's eyes, reflected above hers.