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Chapter Nine

My lunch was once again waiting for me when I returned to my cell. But I couldn’t eat. I picked at the piece of bread that came with the meal.

I thought of the conversations we had had with Maryam when she’d called us from prison. I’d always envied Maryam’s sense of responsibility and her dedication to her family. She, in turn, had always wanted to travel and roam around the world as I did. We shared the same tastes in film and music. We both loved the HBO series Six Feet Under. Many nights, after everyone had gone to sleep, we’d watch the show together, then talk for hours about the intertwined stories of the characters’ lives. Like the family in the series, Maryam and I felt the presence of our father in our daily lives. We, too, had had our share of fights with our father and at the same time respected his values and his free spirit. We had even both dreamt about our father as embodied by Richard Jenkins, the actor who plays the ghost of the father in Six Feet Under.

Yet our father had a more important presence in Maryam’s life because of their shared experience of spending years in an Iranian prison. Now, as I watched a row of ants climb over the plate of ghaymeh, I remembered my long talks with Maryam and hoped that these recollected conversations would give me strength and hope.

Over the six years of Maryam’s imprisonment, I was able to visit her only twice, as siblings were typically not allowed to see prisoners. The first time was two years after her arrest, when I was eighteen years old. When my mother, Khaled, and I arrived, after a seventeen-hour bus ride, the guard in charge would not let me in. “Only parents and children of the prisoners can come in,” he said. He was a tavab, a prisoner who had repented and, therefore, had been given special perks and responsibilities inside the prison. At the time, among the families of prisoners, the word tavab was used as an insult: a tavab was someone with no moral principles who was willing to rat on his friends to save himself. Despite my protests, the tavab simply repeated the reason why I could not get in. I took a chair in the waiting room and, although I was not proud of this at the time, sobbed into my hands.

“Why is it so important for you to see her?” the tavab asked me, once the other families had gone inside.

“She is my sister.” What else did I need to say?

“Too bad,” he said. “The answer is still no.”

Anger took hold of me. I stared the man in the eyes. “When you come out of prison, I will know what to do to you. You better watch yourself.”

He walked out of the room, and when he returned, he told me the warden wanted to see me.

I was afraid, but I had no choice. I stood and followed the tavab to the warden’s office.

“Who do you think you are, threatening this man?” the warden gruffly asked me. He got up from his chair and walked toward where I stood. “You want to be where your sister is?” With that, he started to slap my face. I wanted to fight back, more than I had ever wanted to fight in my life. But I couldn’t. I just stood there and took it.

His slapping was not hard. He didn’t want to hurt me; he wanted to humiliate me. “Begoo goh khordam,” he kept on telling me. “Say ‘I ate shit.’ ” I was too proud to say that, so I said, “Bebakhshid, eshtebah kardam”: I apologize, I made a mistake. That was enough for him, and he stopped slapping me.

I was shown back to the waiting room. Not long after, the warden walked into the room and told me I could see Maryam.

“Five minutes,” he said. “That’s all we’ll give you.”

I don’t know what made him change his mind, but I didn’t care.

Five minutes with Maryam was well worth the humiliation. She was waiting for me in a private visiting room. Her body was draped in a hideous gray chador embroidered all over with the logo of the judiciary, but I could tell how thin she’d gotten. She looked skeletal. I couldn’t stop crying, and Maryam took me in her arms to comfort me. I didn’t tell her about the scene with the warden;