Pact With The Devil

The Age

Saturday May 19, 2007

Tim Bouquet

As a teenage prisoner of Iran's Revolutionary Guard, Marina Nemat narrowly escaped a firing squad - but she paid a high price.

MARINA Nemat is strikingly matter-of-fact about the horrific events of 25 years ago. "I was arrested at 10 o'clock at night on January 15, 1982," she says in her heavily accented English. "I was only 16. During the next two years, my mother and father suffered a great deal."

She smiles a lot as she speaks; it is as though she is talking about someone else. "Like everybody, they knew that political prisoners were tortured," she says as we drive towards her home in Aurora, near Toronto. "They had heard about the rape of young girls and knew about daily mass executions. Every day they waited for the phone call that would tell them to go to the prison gates to collect my belongings because I had been executed."

Nemat, now 42, is stylishly dressed, her jet-black hair elegantly cut; she looks more like a fashion editor than a political prisoner. But it is as a Prisoner of Tehran, the title of her autobiography that chronicles the brutal end of a childhood in Iran, that she is about to become known. "It is first and foremost my experience, but it is also the collective experience of a generation of teenage girls and young women, which the government of Iran has succeeded in erasing from history," she says. "Thousands of them have vanished. Who will ever know how many exactly?"

Her problem, she says, is that she could never keep her mouth shut. Until that day in 1982, Nemat had had a pretty normal middle-class existence, enjoying basketball, the Bee Gees' music and her family beach house on the Caspian Sea. Her father, Nikolai, was a dance teacher and her mother, Roohi, a hairdresser. Both had studios attached to their apartment in Tehran. Her grandmothers were Russians who had married Iranians, and Nemat was brought up a mixture of Orthodox and Catholic. But it wasn't her religion that upset the Muslim clergy and their Revolutionary Guards who swept the Shah from power in 1979.

A keen student who taught herself English by borrowing classic novels from a friendly bookseller, Nemat aimed to be a doctor. For a short while after the revolution there was some freedom, but religious dogma began taking the place of regular lessons as a new Islamic Republic enforced strict laws and went to war with Iraq in 1980. When, in the late spring that year, Nemat asked the 19-year-old female Revolutionary Guard who was supposed to be teaching her calculus to return to the curriculum, she was told that if she didn't like the politics, she could leave. Headstrong and fearless, Nemat walked. The rest of the class followed, and then the whole school. "The strike", as it became known, lasted three days and she was deemed its leader.

"I honestly and seriously believed that I could change the situation in Iran if I worked hard enough at it," she says. By 1981 most of the good teachers had been purged and replaced by fanatics and propagandists. "I knew I would never get an education." She started a school newspaper to protest. "I wasn't anti-Islam," she says. "It was the lack of freedom that made me want to join others to protest. The regime was taking knowledge away from us." Waves of arrests began that spring: her friends began to disappear.

Nemat's father had to take work as a translator because dancing had been ruled Satanic. Around this time Nemat began dating a tall, blond, blue-eyed man of Hungarian descent called Andre Nemat. He played the organ at her church. Seven years older and instinctively more cautious, he urged her to be less publicly critical of the Government. But to her, the abuse of human freedoms outweighed the danger. "I felt I had nothing to lose, and at 16 you feel nothing bad will happen to you."

But on January 15, 1982, while she was getting ready to have a bath, the doorbell rang and two Revolutionary Guards walked in and pointed a gun in her face. The sleepy silence and dreamy colours of Tehran's early mornings were about to be replaced by "a black nightmare of angry voices, lashes and screams". Marina Nemat was taken to Iran's most notorious jail, Evin. Originally built by the Shah to house his political opponents, its ugly blocks, walls and searchlights still snake over the barren foothills of the Alborz mountains north of Tehran. Even today it is a place that people never talk about. "Do you know that now in Iran they don't officially have political prisons any more?" Nemat says. "They call places like Evin 'universities', where people are sent to be re-educated. For re-education, read torture."

Inside the gates of Evin, she was tied to a bed and her bare feet were beaten with a length of black electrical cable. "It's difficult to describe the pain of that first strike, but even now when I think about it the soles of my feet begin to hurt," she says. Her interrogators demanded to know who her friends were, and took bets on how many lashes a teenage girl could take. They reckoned she wouldn't get past 10. It was 16 lashes before she passed out. One of her interrogators, who had witnessed the beating, told her that they had details of everyone she knew already. His name was Ali Moosavi, a powerfully built 27-year-old with short black hair and a trimmed beard. He took pity on her and called a doctor.

Any kindness was short-lived. With three other teenagers, Nemat was dragged to a place where wooden posts were sticking out of the ground. A firing squad was waiting. One of the girls tried to escape and was gunned down. Tied to a stake, Nemat closed her eyes and prayed. The guards took aim. But then, instead of gunfire, she heard a car approaching. Climbing out of a black Mercedes was Moosavi, holding a piece of paper. He cut her bindings, put her in his car and drove her back to jail.

Nemat remembers waking with the taste of chicken soup in her mouth and a voice saying, "Swallow. It's good for you." It was Moosavi. Interrogators in Evin had enormous power. They could spare a life just as easily as they could take it away. In addition, Moosavi's family had connections at the very top of the regime. He told her that the piece of paper was a reprieve signed by the Ayatollah Khomeini himself. She soon learnt the price of his mercy: he was besotted with her. He wanted her to become his wife and convert to Islam; he vowed to "be a good husband and to look after you. I promise to make you happy. You'll learn to love me."

Nemat wanted to die, but as a devout Christian suicide was not an option. "He gave me three days to say yes or he would arrest my parents and execute Andre." What followed in her story was the most difficult part of the book to write. "It is partly why it took me 20 years to put pen to paper," she says. She converted to Islam and adopted the name Fatemeh. But she asked Moosavi if she could visit her church to say goodbye to her mother and Andre. He took her out of jail.

"When are you coming home?" Andre asked her.

"Never," she whispered.

"I'll wait for you," he said. He knew what happened to girls in Evin, some of them virgins who were ritualistically raped before being shot to prevent their souls going to heaven. Moosavi, who had been waiting outside, drove Nemat back to Evin.

"My feelings then were beyond desperation. Knowing that Andre was waiting was the only thing I had left to cling to."

Incredibly, she didn't tell him about the marriage. "As long as my family and friends didn't know about it, the girl I had been before Evin had a chance of survival," she says. "She was the real me, the one Andre loved and wanted back."

Nemat shared a dorm with 200 other undernourished and terrified girls, and was summoned by Moosavi to spend nights with him in a small cell. On his evenings off, he took her to the house he had bought for them, returning her to the prison at daybreak. He could do what he liked; there was no need for bars to keep her with him. She knew that if she tried to escape, her family and Andre would be killed.

She was repeatedly raped by him and found it difficult to accept that this was the man who had also saved her life. But she began to find comfort and solace in his family. "I was the lowest of the low, a prisoner, and yet because Ali had married me, they began to accept me," she says. "I was ready to hate everybody, but Ali's mother opened up her heart and her home to me." In August 1983 Nemat's sentence was commuted to three years. Then, a visit to the doctor confirmed that she was eight weeks pregnant. Moosavi and his family were thrilled; she was trapped. "I was bringing this child into my prison." Whether it was impending fatherhood, she is not sure, but Moosavi announced that he was leaving Evin. "He had once believed that his work was protecting his beliefs and way of life as a Muslim, but now he had come to see that the violence was not taking us anywhere."

But he was not going to be allowed to leave. On September 26, 1983, they were leaving his parents' house after dinner when Nemat saw a motorcycle approaching with two men on board; one of them was taking aim. Moosavi shoved Nemat to the ground and threw himself on top of her as shots rang out. "Father, please take her to her family," were the last words Ali Moosavi spoke as he grasped his wife's hand. "He knew his father would do what he had asked, no matter what, and return me to my old life," Nemat says.

She was returned to jail and released six months later. On March 26, 1984, Nemat emerged from Evin clutching a plastic bag with her few possessions. In just over two years, she had lost a husband, miscarried their baby, been forced to turn her back on her religion and witnessed the death and defilement of a generation of her contemporaries. Only one thing in her life remained unsullied: Andre was waiting to take her home. "He asked me if I had been tortured, then he said, 'Even if you had come home with a baby in your arms I would have loved you just as much.' That's all I wanted to hear."

"I prayed every day that she would be released," Andre says now. He gave Nemat time and space to tell him her story, but she said little. They married, and moved from Tehran to the Afghan border, where he taught at a university, and their son Michael was born in December 1988. Eventually, an amnesty allowed them to leave the country. After selling everything they owned, they raised $5000 on the black market and on October 26, 1990, boarded a plane for Geneva. Nemat's elder brother was already living near Toronto, and explained that Canada needed qualified electronics engineers such as Andre. They found an apartment in suburban Toronto, bought a bed for their toddler, a dining table, four chairs and a sofa. After the rent was paid they had $200 left. And still Nemat kept from Andre what had happened to her in Evin. "There are a large number of ex-women prisoners in Iran who choose to remain silent," she says. "Their experiences are so horrendous, you would not believe them. Most families have relatives and friends who were tortured. Fear dominates every aspect of life in Iran."

"It's a fear that travels with you," Andre says. "I did not want to question Marina. I would wait until she was ready to tell."

So what took her so long? "I had to concentrate all my thoughts and energy on working hard and making it possible for my family to survive," Nemat, whose second son, Thomas, was born in 1993, says now. It would be another 11 years before she began to write of her experiences, during which she waitressed at fast-food restaurants in Aurora, the Toronto dormitory town where she still lives. Once her family was secure, she started to write.

"It took me three days before I summoned up the courage to read the first draft," Andre says. "It wasn't easy to read and I am sure it was not easy for her to write. The book has brought us closer together and I am very proud of Marina for telling the truth about all the cruelty that goes on in countries like Iran every single day."

For Nemat, who is working as a research assistant at the University of Toronto, putting names to the disappeared is a painstaking task. "So far we have identified around 2500 women," she says. She hopes that "maybe some of them will see this book and make contact".

Nemat began to write as a way of letting go of her experiences. She is free now, but she cannot completely escape the past. A recurring dream seeks her out: she is standing on the side of the highway that cuts through the desert of central Iran. "I am always waiting for Andre, or my dad, or a friend to come and collect me." Then she sees a car coming. "It stops right by my feet. It is a black Mercedes and the window cranks down. It is Ali. He says to me, 'Are you going somewhere?' I tell him I am waiting for someone to pick me up. 'Nobody's coming,' he says. 'Get in.' " -- TELEGRAPH

Prisoner of Tehran ($35) will be published in Australia by John Murray on June 1.

MARINA NEMAT CV

BORN April 22, 1965, Tehran, Iran.

FAMILY Married to Andre for almost 22 years. They have two sons, Michael, 18, Thomas, 14.

EDUCATION At 16, organised a student strike at her Tehran school to protest against the lack of a proper curriculum.

PRISON Arrested and tortured in 1982 and held by Revolutionary Guards.

1990 Moved to Canada with her family.

CAREER Waitress for 11 years; certificate in creative writing, School of Continuing Studies at University of Toronto; made documentary for CBC Radio's Outfront program. First book, Prisoner of Tehran, released 2007.

INTERESTS Writing, going for walks, cycling and swimming.

© 2007 The Age

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