Then They Came for Me_ A Family's Story of Love, Captivity, and Survival - Maziar Bahari [5]
Even though Maryam was ten years older than I, we had an uncanny understanding of each other. We were so close that we could communicate with just a look, a sigh, or by a certain movement of our hands. Her taste in music, films, and books influenced me greatly, and our shared love for the arts brought us closer together. Maryam loved Al Pacino, and I have seen every movie of his, beginning with Dog Day Afternoon, which I saw when I was eight. She loved Stravinsky’s music and ballets, and throughout my life, I have tried to see every performance of The Firebird and The Rite of Spring I could get to.
In 1979, at the age of twenty-three, Maryam followed in my father’s footsteps and became a member of the Tudeh Party, which, despite the regime change and Khomeini’s promise of tolerance, was still illegal. Two years later, she fell in love with Mohammad Sanadzadeh, an engineer who had recently graduated from Tehran University. They married in 1981 and moved to the city of Ahvaz, in the southern province of Khuzestan, where Mohammad had grown up. Soon after, their son, Khaled, was born. A year earlier, the Iran-Iraq War had begun, after Saddam Hussein’s army attacked Khuzestan. Iraq’s border dispute with Iran had started in the shah’s time, but in 1975, the shah had forced the Iraqi government to accept an accord, which had brought the dispute to an end. After the revolution, with the Iranian army having, in effect, been destroyed by the Islamic government, Saddam Hussein decided that he could use this opportunity to occupy parts of Iran and settle the border disputes. But within a short time, ordinary Iranians, the remaining members of the army, and the Revolutionary Guards repelled the Iraqi army; they took back most of the Iranian territory by early 1982.
When Maryam and Mohammad moved to Ahvaz, many cities in the region had been ravaged by Saddam’s army. Many lives had been ruined, and thousands of people had lost their homes. Maryam and Mohammad had chosen Ahvaz so they could help the refugees of the war. They also worked hard—she as a teacher and he as an engineer—in order to provide for their son, Khaled. Maryam decided to teach in one of the poorest areas in southern Iran, the city of Shadgan; it took her three hours every day to travel there and back by bus. Maryam never complained about the wretched conditions in which she had to live and work. She was proud of what she did, and thought it was her duty to help the people.
In Ahvaz, Maryam and Mohammad both joined the local Tudeh Party cells. They were low-ranking members, responsible only for attending meetings, distributing literature, and helping the refugees. At the time, the Tudeh Party still supported Khomeini, and some of its members even helped the Revolutionary Guards suppress other political groups that were against Khomeini, in the hope of preventing the return of a pro-Western government.
But in early 1983, Khomeini began to arrest and jail Tudeh Party members. Soon the tortured party leaders, some of whom had spent more than twenty years in the shah’s prisons and all of whom had supported the revolution, were paraded on state television, confessing to spying for the Soviet Union and acting against the Islamic government.
Mohammad was picked up by the Revolutionary Guards in the spring of 1983, in the second wave of arrests. A week later, they came for Maryam. She was sentenced to fifteen years in prison (which was eventually reduced to six), in a sham trial before a judge and no jury. She wasn’t allowed a lawyer, and when she tried to object to the charges against her, the judge refused to let her speak. Though a six-year sentence was wholly unjust, at the time, my family and I were relieved that her life had been spared. The leaders of the Islamic regime were executing many political prisoners, and my parents knew many people whose children had been killed, including one young man who’d been put to death simply for writing to a friend that he feared the regime was on its way to becoming a fascist government.
With both of his parents