Love and Death in Iran Page #4

A modern Dostoevskyian love story set in Iran.

• Drama

								


Of course this wasn't an easy matter, Hannah had gotten herself into a terrible little pickle, and, as expected, that evil woman had immediately pressed charges against Hannah for attempted murder. They took Hannah back to the detention center after she wrote and signed a statement, and I promised her to do all I can. The next day through one of my colleagues at the university I contacted a criminal attorney in Isfahan and he soon informed me that the only way out for Hannah was to pay off that lady a huge sum of money. I asked him to negotiate her down and a couple of days later, the lawyer brought the good news that she was flexible and would drop the complaint for ten thousand dollars, which I immediately procured to him the next day; sadly, he was the only one who could visit her in prison. Still, Hannah was not entirely out of the woods yet and the illegal possession of a hand gun and smuggling it into the country were even more serious charges that could potentially land her in jail for several years. As I had feared, detective Nasseri soon found out about the Kish trip -- by checking the photos on Hannah's camera -- and summoned me to his office and yelled at me, threatening to put me in jail for lying to the police. Luckily, he didn't and limited himself to scolding me, without taking any further action, perhaps because of my status and connections and or out of pure pity, not to mention his use of Hannah's photos of those runaway musicians to alert the local authorities about them and take credit -- "so sad," I reacted in my head, wondering if those young souls were now blaming us for their predicament?

Nasseri profusely refused any monetary gift and broke into an angry torrent of moralizing speech, "I'm not like the rest of the world my friend, just don't do it again or I'll book you for trying to bribe a police officer, are we clear?"

"My apology; quite clear."

Irrespective of Nasseri's refusal, I still ended up bribing a prison warden to keep Hannah from being transferred to Tehran, where she would likely end up as a "potential foreign terrorist" in a solitary regardless of the truth of the matter, in which case it would be doubly difficult to get her out soon. The news of Hannah's arrest had reached the media and I evaded a couple of reporters' query calls. I certainly didn't want any adverse publicity and asked another professor at my department to take over my classes for a few days, using the excuse of a personal illness. I also called Zhila and her fiancé and told them everything, hoping that they could assist somehow, but as much as they worried for Hannah they said their hands were tied and couldn't do anything; I was a bit disappointed at their inaction and attributed it to their wariness of any potential backlashes, given Zhila's repeated "be careful, this is Iran, not Paris or New York." Obviously they had no clue about how far Hannah and I had gone in that short space of time and I chose not to get into the details; Hannah too was disappointed when she called one evening, a rare courtesy call she was granted, and learned about Zhila's inaction. I asked her about the conditions in that place and she described it as "barely tolerable, but surprisingly the food is not that bad, a lot of rice and potato cutlet." She also said that she had volunteered to help in the kitchen, had made some friends, including a 16 year old on death row for killing her abusive old husband, asking me if there was anything we could do for her? I said I wish I could but that it was better to focus on her case only; a few days later, I found out that girl had been denied clemency and had been executed, for sure a heartbreak for Hannah. In the course of that telephone conversation, Hannah dropped the bombshell that she was "converting for a change. Prophet Mohammad says, love death so you may live happily and achieve salvation." Understandably, the news of her (temporary) conversion to Shiite Islam surprised me a little bit, although I could see how the creed's unique knack for tragedy hit home with her. Hannah had been raised a Catholic and her favorite Bible quote was one of Paul's Letters: "Not in orgies and drunkenness, not in sexual immortality and sensuality, not in quarreling and jealousy." I told her that mine was "the flood bursts from my eyes," the flood of love! Was she changing religion or simply adding one, I couldn't tell, nor could I rule out the possibility that she was feigning a conversion to Islam for self-protection in a hostile environment or simply donning a new spiritual outfit and throwing the old one away rather whimsically like an unfashionable and outdated robe. "Faith and hypocrisy go hand in hand," I had read somewhere, but clearly this was not the right moment to repeat it! Whatever her real motive, she was clearly savoring the new experience, but for how long? She then recited Goethe's Faust, "The timid maiden mind's deflecting, so that, their guardianship neglecting, they think of their own defense." She muttered something in German about the prison actually being good for her, but refused to repeat it when I asked her to speak louder. Our conversation then turned to her dream of being in Niamey, Niger, again, revisiting the UN refugee camps at the Libyan border after Gadhafi’s downfall, and the beheaded bodies she had encountered in the desert right outside the fenced camps. "I never told you before, but I have some pictures of those gruesome scenes, didn't know that they would come to haunt me in my dreams." I told her to dispose of them at the first opportunity and expected her to agree, but she jolted me with her response after a brief pause. "You know why I haven't, and you're the first one to know this. I kind of like those photos, even enjoyed them, as the quintessential evidence of human barbarism, isn't that terrible?."

She paused and then whispered in the phone, "I was sexually assaulted there by the UN soldiers you know. That's how I got that scar, from a bayonet when I was trying to flee." Pretending that I didn't hear the last part, which was quite disturbing and instantly reinforced my image of her as traumatized and even tragic, I immediately shifted the conversation to my classes, a couple of which I had managed to conduct on the (choppy) internet. She asked me for the nth time to go back to Tehran and to my students, but I assured her that there was no need and I had everything under control -- that turned out to be entirely self-delusional. Absent a self-discipline, and real commitment to my teaching duty, now slipping dangerously close to borderline indifference, I should have known that there would be backlashes at the university and soon I would receive a pink slip from the department chair, Professor Hesabi.

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