Words At Large

Voice of America’s Persian Network did an interview with me. The program was called “Roundtable with You” and was broadcasted around the world via satellite. They accepted phone calls and e-mails during the show, and I was overwhelmed by the kindness and support of Iranians from around the world, including Iran. In Iran, those who had a satellite dish had been able to see me.

Of course, not all comments were positive. A few times, I was verbally attacked by supporters of the Iranian government, who were in denial over the atrocities committed in Iran’s prisons after the revolution, and also by members of a few Communist and Islamist groups who called me a whore and a traitor for marrying my interrogator, Ali. They didn’t seem to care that I was 17 years old when this happened and that I was forced into marriage.

In Toronto a few weeks later, I received a large brown envelope from my American Publisher, Free Press/Simon and Schuster. I shook it over a table in my living room, and a small white envelope fell out of it. It was addressed to Simon and Schuster, and on it, these words were neatly printed: “Author Mail, re: Prisoner of Tehran, Marina Nemat.”

I looked at the sender’s name, and I froze. This couldn’t be. I read the name over and over again, my heart beating faster and faster.

I ripped the envelope open. It was from one of my best friends in elementary and high school in Tehran. She was never arrested, but she had watched her friends disappear one by one. Now she lived in the United States. After I was released, I never tried to contact her, because I didn’t want to cause her any trouble and I had decided to forget the past.

I called her immediately. “Is this really you, Marina?” she kept on asking. She told me how she had always been thinking of me, and that she had read the book and was so happy to find herself in it. It was very comforting to talk to someone with whom I shared so many memories. She remembered my room, my balcony, my father’s blue Oldsmobile, and many other things.

She told me she was in touch with a few of our friends who had also been in prison. I was surprised to hear that her mother, who lived in Iran, had told her about my book. Her mother had called her one day and told her to turn on her TV.

“Marina is on TV!” Her mother said to her.

“Marina? Which Marina?”

“How many Marinas do you know?”

“But Mom, I’m in the States and you’re in Iran!”

“It says it’s live. On satellite. It’s happening at the bookstore close to your house.”

“She’s here?”

And my friend ran to the bookstore, only to find out that the interview wasn’t live and had taken place five days earlier.

But the important thing is that we have found each other. And I hope that this is the first of many reunions.

Another story. During a publicity trip to Amsterdam, I was interviewed in my hotel room by Kim, a young woman with a cheerful smile and silky honey-coloured hair. Every so often, Kim would pause, overcome by a dry, severe cough that seemed to come from deep within her chest.

“Are you okay?” I asked. “Would you like me to order some tea?”

“No, thank you,” she said and smiled. “I have cystic fibrosis. I’m 32 now and the doctors told me that I would die before the age of 30, but I’m still here. My husband, who also had cystic fibrosis, died about a year ago.”

She told me how she had related to my book, to living with death, to fighting a seemingly impossible-to-win battle. But she had decided to keep on fighting. Just like me.

We stood by the window and watched the quiet street. It was late afternoon, the water shimmered, and the reflections of the old-fashioned buildings across the street quivered on its the dark surface. A couple of bikers, two young men who were speaking and laughing loudly, went by.

Kim and I were both taking in the beauty around us, knowing quite well that life could leave us behind at any moment. Even though the past was still alive and present inside me, and even though I had come to understand that there was no such thing as closure, I felt a strange sense of peace, almost like happiness.

I knew that the guilt I felt would never fade away, but this was all right. I was who I was, and I was ready to accept myself, the real me, the one who had no secrets. I was not afraid anymore. Neither of the past, nor of the future. I was free and at peace in that little moment called the present–and so was Kim.

Marina Nemat has lived in Canada since 1991, and her memoir Prisoner of Tehran was published in spring 2007 by Penguin Canada. It has been published in 20 countries, and in some is already going into multiple reprints in some translations.