By: Nasrin Parvaz

My Teeth Are Talking to Me

Pary's story:

I am ashamed of myself. I hate myself, because I did a terrible thing. They wanted to beat me and they showed me the feet of one of the prisoners covered with blood. Before I saw her feet I heard the noises of flogging and the voice calling for God, Mohammed and Ali before each lash, and there was a weak moaning. Until I saw her feet I had no idea what would be the outcome of all that I was hearing. At that point I was scared and I agreed to betray my friend, though I hoped she would not come back to work. After all she witnessed my arrest and she might suspect danger. I took them to the factory where I had been working until the day before, and I pointed out my comrade to them. How horrible I am. I’ve always been bad. Everybody said I was bad. My father and brother used to tell me I was just like that whore, my mother. I never knew whether she was a prostitute or if they just called her that because she left us. I never knew why she left us. Maybe she could not bear my father’s attitude. I was still a child that day I escaped from home and I went to my uncle’s house and asked if I could stay with them forever. They agreed and I grew up with my cousins, who helped me to study and I married one of them later. Until then I believed in God and I used to pray; after all my father was religious, but my cousin didn’t pray.

When people stood up against the Shah and the whole atmosphere changed, my cousins became left-wing revolutionaries. At that time I was working in a factory and my marriage to one of my cousins let me see the world from another point of view. There were always meetings in our house and after some time I joined them. I remember one evening after work, I fell asleep during one of these meetings and my cousins sat in such a way that the others didn’t realise that I was asleep - until the meeting was over and my cousins had to move to make the tea. When they stood up I fell and woke up and everybody realised that I had been asleep. What nice days I had, there was no fear at all of anything. Nor the fear of god that was my companion all my childhood, and no fear of authority. We were like birds, free of all the burdens that I always felt on my shoulders before. For a couple of years I enjoyed my life, everything of it is a dream now. The partner that I had, his kisses, the way he touched me, the way he looked at me, the way he talked to me, I miss all of that. I even began to like myself, and feel happy being alive.

That situation didn't last long. Nor did those meetings. One day the security guards surrounded our house. They took my husband and me to Evin prison and I could not face the torture. After that I felt so guilty that I decided to proclaim Marxism so that they would execute me and I would be freed of my guilt feelings. But instead they gave me a life-sentence and everyday life in prison means that torture is always just behind the door. If I do something that they don’t like they beat me up even in front of other prisoners. The fear of torture accompanies my everyday life. Once though, I did manage to cope with it, and that was during one of the most excruciating periods of the entire prison regime. I had to sit down all day long with chador, blindfolded, in a small space and the loudspeaker was all the time telling us about the goodies of the god and mullahs' regime. I wasn’t to move or make any noise. If I did I would be beaten by Haji very hard. This torture was known as Grave and I was one of only about fifteen out of more than one hundred who came out of it after nine months without breaking down and “confessing”. For a while I was proud of that and it helped me to keep the fear away a bit.

After Grave it was important for me to find a group I could be with. Everybody here belongs to a group and each group behaves differently. In prison nobody can be by themselves or unattached. I decided to be among a group of mostly Grave survivors. They were inactive, passive you could say, because they knew all too well what the price was of doing something. However it wasn’t easy to be accepted by them. I had to prove that I was worthy of their relationship. So I tried to do everything that their leader did - saying “hello” to those she said “hello” to, ignoring those she ignored, talking only to those she talked to. However she spent most of her time on her own, walking by herself, gazing at the wall, thinking, or reading books. By changing my attitude towards the other prisoners and ignoring them, I lost my friends. To be alone is what I like to do too. I had to get used to it when I was in Grave and ever since that time it’s still my habit to sit facing the wall for hours on end, not making a noise and keeping perfectly still. It’s what we had to do in Grave, if we didn’t want to be tortured, and I like doing it even now, it makes me feel safe from torture.

Sometimes I like just to watch her, to see what my leader is doing. After I started copying all her activities, she began to see me and smile at me sometimes and even to talk to me after my visits. That’s when I felt they accepted me, because after she talked to me, the others did too. It was important for me to keep this relationship, so I continued acting like her. Even when she felt everybody in our prison was a counter-revolutionary and asked the jailer to take her to the penitents' ward, I waited to see if they would move her and was ready to ask if I could go too. She sensed something was going to happen in our ward soon and she didn’t want to be around when it did. It is true that sometimes even if you stay neutral, you can end up being punished. What can we do if we don’t want to pay a price for someone else’s action? Anyway the jailer didn’t agree to her demands and we both stayed in that ward together. But after that time she set herself apart from everybody else, making her life quite separate. She refused to take her meals in the rota order, insisting on taking her food straight from the communal dish, rather than waiting for it to be handed to her when her turn came, and so I did the same. I didn’t mean to imply by my action that the other prisoners were untouchable*, after all I wasn’t religious, but I just wanted to follow my leader, because she was the smartest and the best and I would die for her. However some of the prisoners didn't like our way of not complying to the ward regulations, and would not leave our food in the main pan and would divide it to the rooms that we were in physically. So those times we didn't eat.

I could bear everyday life in prison forever if they didn’t beat me, but now everything has changed. Every few days they call ten of us out, to be beaten three times a day at prayer- times, until the prisoner denounces her belief or dies. The guards, male and female, are beating prisoners and calling for God and Mohammed with each lash to give them strength. I know they will come for me soon and then what can I do? Some girls under torture agreed to their conditions. They come back broken, with tears in their eyes, ten years older than a month ago. They want to die; sometimes you can hear their crying. They don’t talk; they just wait for their release. What release? With heads hanging down and lips that will never laugh. Laugh? Will they ever be able to forget what has happened to them? Will they be able to forgive themselves for their weakness? I haven’t forgiven myself and I won’t let them make me feel weaker. How do I know if I go under torture again, I'll manage to bear it?

Once you agree to be humiliated by doing what they want, you are defeated and it will change your whole spirit. Like the penitents**, you act like a defeated person, frightened, aimless, hopeless, full of hate. Then to cure yourself, you try to go further and further from what you were and do more for them. Like a diseased person you will carry this personality until death, the very death you tried to escape from. Death is the end I’m choosing now so that my spirit can survive; it will come to us sooner or later anyway. Only death can take me away from this crowded earth. Silence is now even noisy for me.

By the time they call out my name, I’ll be dead and they won’t be able to do anything to me. If they broke me for a second time, how could I go on living? I’m already ashamed of myself for the first time it happened. Oh yes they will let me go after they have broken me, after they have. I’ll be allowed to see my husband more frequently and he will tell me that I did the right thing in agreeing to their conditions. It’s what he did, and that’s why he can come and see me whenever he wants. He tells me to stop acting as a communist and talks to me about tactics. He says that in prison we have to act differently from our aims. But isn’t that just what the jailers want? “Act in the way they want; give your information, and pray to a god that they created to fool us. Don’t laugh, because there is nothing to laugh about. You can think in your own way inside your head.” Which way? The way you act or the way that you believe and are not brave enough to show?

When my husband comes to see me, he brings a lot of beautiful dresses and he says that I should do what he did. But the way he talks now is different from his words before prison. I liked him then because of how he used to speak and if I believe him now how can I love him? He was a decent person then and I don’t know what prison has done to him. I said that I loved him, but what is love? I don’t know anything about love any more. I have forgotten how to love some one. It is now many years since I touched anybody. We cannot even hold each other’s hands. If we do they call us lesbians and even punish us for that. I miss being hugged - by anyone. I wish I could be hugged so tightly I could feel it in my bones. Perhaps I must wait for the earth to give me this final embrace.

Sometimes I put on the clothes that he sends me, but I cannot wear them for more than ten minutes. Then I change back again, into my old dark dresses. When I wear those beautiful clothes everybody looks at me because they are beautiful, soft and colourful, and their attention makes me angry. They must know that my husband has sent them to me, my defeated husband. No, I can't wear them, because he has sent them to me. If I wear them I have to accept him as my husband and how can I? Before that I have to kill the dream that I have of him which is based on our life that we had together. I must kill the husband that I once had and loved. That time we had no money to buy nice dresses. We had to spend our money to produce underground papers and I was happy. He would warm me more than all warm dresses and being with him was more precious that all these nice dresses. But now he is not the one that I loved. Though he has the same name and the same face. But his eyes are empty now, there isn't fire burning in his eyes any more. I don't desire his hugs any more, I'm not sure I can bear his touch any more.

They watch me, they laugh at me, even when I go to the toilet, they come and check what I am doing. They don’t understand that it is my business to decide whether to live or die. It is true that to come to this horrible world is not in one’s hands but to stay or to leave it is in one’s hands. I'm sure I wasn't the fruit of love. Maybe I’m the outcome of a rape on the wedding night? I didn't choose to come to this world but I have the right to leave it. For a while I kept banging my head against the wall when I went to the toilet. They came and told me to stop it or they would come in, so I had to stop. Another time I was going to break a glass to use it to finish my life but they took it by force. Now I’m going to cut my blood vessel with a pencil sharpener when I have a shower. I will hold onto the shower pipe until I die, I won’t let myself sit on the floor like last time, when they checked me from under the door and saw me sitting down watching the water washing my blood away. Next time they won’t be able to catch me, I know what to do. Though they watch me even during the night, I know what to do now.

Lately my teeth have been talking to me. They tell me everything that is happening. They tell me that the guards are talking about corpses and that some of them feel sick from the smell of blood. They are the bodies of our fellow prisoners. My teeth tell me how to kill myself so that they cannot take me to be tortured. Today I told my leader that my teeth are talking to me and she smiled at me kindly and told me to pull them out so that they cannot do it any more. What a clever idea, why didn't I think about it? So now I’m looking for some pliers to take out my teeth. I found some but they took them away from me by force. I am watched by my cellmates all the time. I have two kind of guards now, the Pasdars*** and the prisoners. Sometimes I cannot tell the difference because they are all here to stop me being free from myself.

* The orthodox Muslim concept of “najes” categorises non-Muslims as untouchable, and the objects they have come into contact with as defiled.

** penitents (Tavab in Farsi). Prisoners who have repented of their dissident activities against the Islamic republic and have pledged to work for the regime as born-again Muslims in return for a cessation of torture.

*** Pasdar- guards in support of the Islamic Republic.

Donya

Today is my turn to watch Pary. She takes her bag and goes to the shower. I’m worried. Every five minutes I check her from under the door but I cannot see anything unusual. It seems she is standing under the shower. The last time she cut her wrist under the shower she was sitting on the floor, watching her blood washing away. So the person who was watching her understood quickly and we could rescue her. How about now? It is about fifteen minutes since she went in. I feel there must be something wrong. I’d better bring a chair and climb on it and look over the cabin. Now I can see her better. She is standing under the shower, while holding on to it firmly. I push myself up to see more of her, she looks pale, she is not washing herself, and she is just standing there. Oh no, she is holding the shower and the water is washing out her blood which is running out of her wrist. I scream and call for help; I’m shaking like a leaf. Some prisoners and one of our fellow prisoners who is a doctor come to help. We pull her out of the bathroom and we tie her wrist with a cloth. I can’t hold on to my tears, they are running like a river that is free from any barriers. The doctor tells me to go and have a rest; I go in a corner and watch her. They lay her on some blankets. Different from the other time Pary doesn’t resist them. It seems she has no power any more to push them back and escape. The doctor says that we have to send her to hospital to stitch her wrist. We have no choice, the blood is running from her wrist, though it is tied with cloth. If she doesn’t receive medical attention she will die. However if she is sent to hospital she will still be left to die. Yet we can’t leave her here to die, we have to send her to hospital for stitches. We call for the guard and she takes her to hospital to leave her there to die.

Pary has been in hospital for two days now and we have no news about her. We don’t know if they did stitch her wrist or left her to die. Or they did stitch her wrist but left her alone to kill herself? Now the guard asks for her clothes to hand in to her family. She says she is dead and she was when we sent her to hospital. We knew that she would die. She managed to do what she wanted, but if the cruelty of this year, year 1988, hadn’t taken place, she would be alive now and maybe live for many years.

I miss her very much and I cannot forget her attitudes after Grave. She came back quite different from when she was taken to it. When she came back I felt that she did not see anybody around herself. Perhaps she couldn't realise that the Grave situation in which she had no right to walk or talk to anybody or see anybody is changed. In the Grave she had to live and even sleep blindfolded. Perhaps, when she was there, she had to switch her mind in that way to bear the situation and she could not get rid of the habit when the situation changed. Most of the time she was walking alone with her thoughts and sometimes she could be seen smiling as she watched the sunset. I wondered what she was seeing or what she was thinking of. Her husband? Her mother or her family? Dawn and sunset have different meaning for prisoners, but for her it was even more than that. After coming back from the Grave every day she was sitting face to the wall for a few hours, doing nothing. Sometimes she was face to the wall hugging her feet with her two hands and with her head on her knee, sitting for hours. Lately sometimes after a shower she wore a pretty dress for a few minutes and then changed it again to her old dark dress. Part of her wanted to wear the pretty dresses that her husband was sending to her and most of her didn't want to wear them. Didn't she want to wear beautiful dresses or didn't she want to wear the dresses that her husband was sending to her? I could see the conflict that she was facing over everything and all the time. The conflict that drove her mad. Many times I tried to talk to her to establish a friendship again, but she wasn’t interested and put me off politely.

I was her friend for years and she would tell me about her feelings. Every body needs someone to talk and she would talk to me about her defeated husband. She had no visit, no family to care about her, and I would give her money when she needed to buy things. Her husband was in prison and sometimes she had a visit at her husband's request. After each visit she was upset, and in two minds. In early years when she talked to me she would say that he was a different person from the one she married. That he was denying all his principles and was asking her to repent. She knew that he was wrong because he was broken but she hadn't the guts to tell him. After all he was the one that introduced politics to her and by doing that gave a hope to her life. A hope to fight for a world of equality and liberty which she wanted to donate her life for. Every time after her visit she was telling me that she wouldn't meet him on his next visit, but she couldn't carry it through and she was still going to see him. She was divided between her feelings for him and her idea that he became a penitent. She could not tell him that she believed that she must persist in refusing to make a confession, and the contradiction was eating her from inside. When she was in the Grave, once Haji went to her and asked her opinion about Marxism and she replied, it is the working class knowledge of emancipation. If Haji asked her more she wouldn't say more, because she didn't know much about it.

Now it is about a couple of years since she first wouldn't talk to me. One day when I went to talk to her as usual when she was walking alone with that strange smile on half of her face, she told me that she would not continue our friendship because I talked to some other prisoners. She told me that all the other prisoners except the Jahan group of which there are less than a dozen in prison are counter revolutionist. I asked her how come? But she didn't want to talk to me any more. It seemed I could be with them or against them. It seemed she liked to identify herself with them. The only person she liked to have a communication with was Jahan who wouldn’t pay much attention to her. Perhaps her mind like Pary's was too busy from all the suffering she went through in the Grave. Pary praised Jahan as a leader though she used to ignore everybody not only Pary. She ignored even her friends and her followers. Such an attitude by the leader made the followers more desperate to make themselves visible to her, by doing things that she might like or not doing things that would be forbidden to her. Pary always looked on her as a hero. She used to stand in front of her door and look at her with joy of seeing her. Sometimes she just liked to watch her and you could see that the great joy for her was to talk to her hero.

Seeing Pary and some others looking at their leader for approval for whatever they would do made me think of relationships. Why do some people possess the upper hand over others in a relationship? Isn't it that people who like to become a leader find those who need a leader? Why is it that these two types of personalities make themselves complete together? Why can’t people build up an equal relationship among themselves? Doesn't it mean these two kinds of personality need each other? However some of the Jahan followers try to be a leader in some other relationships too. What do they get from Jahan relationships and what do they get in other relationships? Isn't it a circle of need that makes such relationships exist? I look at Jahan, she is pretty and she talks very well. She is confident which is something here. However if we were not in prison and if these people didn’t need to identify themselves with a tendency, would Jahan become a leader? The reason is that she is one of those few (about fifteen people out of one hundred), who didn't break in Grave, unlike many others who recanted their past; the reason is that she doesn't want to engage in the struggle at the same time that she doesn't want to recant; and that there are prisoners who are tired of torture and struggle too. Prison conditions made her a leader. However one can not stay neutral in prison, one must oppose either the regime or the revolution. To escape torture Jahan drew her line against the revolution and since she can justify it well so that she doesn't fall into the regime hand, some of the prisoners identify themselves with her. Here the situation is like any other community that causes unequal improvement in some people to others. Relationships are such that some people become more educated and find more emotional support than others. Here too people are not free to achieve the goals they need. People are not in mutual relationship that may harmonise them instead of highlighting their differences. Therefore those who have some quality, it doesn't matter if it is good or bad, can lead the others.

A couple of years ago Jahan and her close friend asked the guard to transfer them downstairs, to the penitents ward. The ward in which most of the prisoners are Mojahed and in early days of prison many of them treated people like Jahan as untouchable. Prisoners like Jahan had no right to wash dishes and if they did a Moslem should purify it with water at the end. Most of them don't act the same now because the situation has changed and acting as a penitent is not fashionable any more. But still one must have the nerve to live with them and here one of the heroes prefers to identify herself with them than us. The guard asked them to be ready behind the ward bars. Jahan and her friend packed their belonging and waited with chador all day behind the bars. But the guard didn't turn up to take them to heaven! By now we should get used to the guards playing on our demands. While all Jahan's friends were waiting for her transfer to go and demand the same thing, she with her friend came back to their room and unpacked their belongings.

Lately when the regime started to kill prisoners, Pary's attitude changed. Her face was full of terror and she could not eat most of the time. When they killed all the Moslems who were in our wing and started to call our prison mates for torture, she tried to kill herself several times. I don't know if she knew that our prison mates were beaten at every muslem prayer times, while the torturer was calling for god or Mohamed. I don't know if she knew that they were beaten to accept Islam and pray. For a while she could not manage to kill herself, because of us watching her every moment. After all it wasn’t only Pary in that time who would kill herself, and we had to prevent their action. Because we knew when the situation changed they would be fine again. For a while Pary used to bang her head on the wall while she was sitting in the toilet and it was so terrible. I could hear the noise of banging when I was in the corridor some distance from the toilet. Many times we took glass from her hand before she managed to use it.

Once she told Jahan that her teeth were talking to her and Jahan told her to pull them out to stop them talking. Then she looked for pliers to pull out her teeth. At last she found some pliers to pull her teeth out to stop them talking to her. Though she hadn’t eaten for days, there were five of us to take the pliers out of her hand. Pary was shaking from anger that she could not defeat us and keep the pliers. She went and sat in the corner of the room in her usual place and in a low voice swore at us as counter-revolution. In such time her leader wouldn't do anything to ease her. It was obvious that only her leader would talk to her and she would only listen to her. If she wanted she could even save her life.