The sun was just coming up as we drove into Saffron Village. We went to our summer house, the one my father had built in the time of Reza Shah. I hadn’t been there for years, but Tina and my sisters often spent the summer there.
“Golden Bell, will you make Tina some soup? I’ll make the tea. And Father, will you go and get some fresh bread? I’m starving! Are you hungry, too, Golden Bell?”
My sister Golden Bell — the best, the prettiest, the sweetest sister in all the world — walked with such a cheerful bounce that I suddenly felt optimistic. Surely hope, health and happiness were on their way to our summer house! She picked up a basket and went off with my father to get some vegetables.
Tina lay like a corpse in bed. But all the signs — my burst of optimism, Golden Bell’s cheerfulness, the light in my father’s eyes, even the birds singing in the garden — pointed to Tina’s recovery. Soon she would open her eyes and look around quietly, without screaming.
Suddenly I saw a white rabbit. We didn’t have white rabbits in our part of the country, but there it was, sitting outside our door. It hopped around for a while, quite merry, then disappeared.
Now I was sure that things would soon be all right.
The next day, when a fire was blazing in the stove and the soup was bubbling away, my father gestured, “Look! Tina’s trying to open her eyes.”
I stayed for five days, days filled with the smell of soup, milk, fresh bread and burning logs.
We took care of Tina and walked around the hills, laughing at the antics of a little white rabbit.
Those days, too, came to an end.
Mount Damavand
Let’s climb to the roof of our country
and pray.
One night dozens of Iraqi airplanes appeared above Tehran and bombed the city for the umpteenth time. It was the heaviest bombardment to date.
Radio Baghdad regularly issued warnings that warplanes were going to bomb Tehran. The broadcasters also urged people to leave the city, so twelve million inhabitants took to their heels. Sometimes the planes came, sometimes they didn’t. Saddam Hussein played the same game over and over again. People no longer knew whether to stay or go.
If you grabbed your children and fled, the planes didn’t come, but if you stayed, the city was bombed. It was psychological warfare. When the planes did come, the nights were hell. They flew over the city with a terrifying roar. Your house shook, pictures fell from the walls, pots and pans bounced off the shelves, the cat crept under the covers, the baby cried and the bombs thudded to the ground, accompanied by the rattle of anti-aircraft guns. The all-clear finally sounded, only to be followed by the shriek of fire engines and ambulances. You’d rush outside to see which houses had been hit.
But that night, when dozens of planes bombed Tehran simultaneously, killing and injuring hundreds, Khomeini took advantage of the chaos. He ordered his secret police to arrest the leaders of the leftist opposition. For years they’d been pinpointing hiding places, so even before the Iraqi planes had finished, most of the important party leaders had been rounded up.
In the morning, on my way to an editorial meeting, I ran into one of my fellow editors. “We’ve got to get out of here fast. Almost all of the leaders have been arrested.”
It meant the end of the party. I immediately went back to my flat to warn my wife, Safa, who took our daughter, Nilufar, to her grandmother’s house in Kermanshah. Then I destroyed whatever documents were in my possession. After that, all I could do was wait.
So far I’ve said very little about Safa. That’s because I don’t want to stray from my father’s cuneiform notebook. Otherwise I would also have written more about my sisters and about their husbands’ tragic fate.
I met Safa at the university. She sympathised with the party, although she wasn’t a member. She hadn’t been the one to seek contact. If we hadn’t met, she probably would have led a normal life, but because of me, she got involved in all kinds of underground activities.
Until the revolution broke out, we met in secret. We knew that every rendezvous might be our last. The revolution made it easier for us to get together and we gradually dared to talk about the future.
The day after the fall of the shah, I had a date with Safa. I asked her to marry me.
Our wedding was a simple affair: just two of our friends who acted as witnesses and the civil servant who performed the ceremony. In such momentous times, when we were all so busy, a wedding banquet was out of the question. We celebrated our wedding in a café, talking with our comrades deep into the night.
Three weeks later I took Safa to meet my parents.
“This is my wife.”
“Really?” cried Tina. “She’s beautiful.”
My sisters, surprised at this unexpected turn of events, embraced Safa. My father kept his distance. He knew I had a girlfriend, because I’d shown him a picture of Safa. In his eyes, however, the bride’s health was of prime importance in a marriage. He scrutinised her from head to toe.
Not only did she appear to be healthy, she was also vivacious and sociable. I could see the approval in his eyes. Safa walked over to him and embraced him. And because she knew the story of his first wife’s death, she took his hand and held it to her cheek. “See,” she said, “I’m healthy.”
What else? I can’t imagine that my father would have written more about his first meeting with Safa.
She once spent a week with my family in Saffron Village. She reported that she’d had a wonderful time, that she’d quickly mastered our sign language and that she and my father had sat up late every night discussing the state of the world.
“The state of the world?” I asked.
“Yes. And we roared with laughter. I really laughed a lot.”
“About what?”
“Oh, I don’t know. I’d use the wrong signs and they’d burst out laughing.”
She never got another chance to visit my parents.
When Safa was in the final stages of pregnancy, she invited Golden Bell to our apartment. After that, when we had to move again for reasons of security, Golden Bell no longer knew how to get in touch with us.
In the dark time that followed the arrest of the party leaders, Safa and my daughter went to Kermanshah. She was planning to stay for a few weeks.
As fate would have it, those few weeks turned into years. By the time Safa was finally able to leave Kermanshah, her whole life had changed.
She was forced to move to a new country, where every-thing — from the front-door key to the bathroom mirror — was different. The teapot, the floor, the ceiling, even the ground beneath her feet, all were different.
A KLM flight brought her to Amsterdam, where I welcomed her with a bouquet of red, yellow and orange tulips. We took a train from the airport and then a taxi from the station to 21 Nieuwgracht.
But let’s go back to Tehran.
A week after the arrests we still didn’t know how badly the party had been hit or what the movement was going to do next.
While we waited, the secret police did their utmost to break the will of the party leaders, subjecting them to various forms of torture, in the hope that they would eventually bow down before the mullahs. The prisoners were thrown in separate cells and not allowed to sleep or sit. For five days and nights, they remained on their feet. Every time they nodded off, they got a bucket of ice-cold water thrown in their faces. They were given nothing to eat but a bowl of soup. Banned from using the toilets, they were forced to go in their pants. To weaken their resistance even further, their captors put tape recorders in their cells and forced them to listen night and day to Khomeini’s speeches. The torture went on until the prisoners agreed to kneel before the prison imam on TV, confess that they were Soviet spies and beg for forgiveness.