I, Who Did Not Die Read online

  The sun crossed the highest point in the sky and finally began its downward slide, and my stomach growled, making me wonder if they ever planned to feed us. Mercifully, the bus pulled over a short time later so the driver could get out to pee in a grove of trees, and the other two soldiers passed out hard-boiled eggs and tore pieces of a loaf of bread and handed us each a small section. I bit my egg in small bites so it would last longer, and instead of chewing the bread, I tore it into small bits and let them melt in my mouth to enhance the pleasure of it. The texture reminded me of the samoon bread I used for my falafel sandwiches, and how with a flick of my fingers I had ordered hundreds of loaves a day, and without a second thought I’d thrown leftover crusts into the trash, and now, how I would have given it all back to have just one loaf all to myself.

  I brought a morsel of bread to my nose and inhaled, and I was back in the bread line, blowing cigarette smoke in Alyaa’s direction to tease her. I felt the warmth of the loaves we carried in our arms as we walked the deserted roads, telling each other our privacies—what scared us most about ourselves and how we wanted our families to remember us when we were gone. Funny thing about bread: it’s always there. Bread led me to my livelihood, and to my first love. Now that I’d been stripped of everything, there it was in my hand, still. So much devotion in a tiny crumb.

  When we were finished eating, we were allowed to get off the bus one at a time to relieve ourselves in the grove of trees while a guard stood watch. Most of the passengers went, but I stayed in my seat. I was not an animal. Little did I know, we were driving from one side of Iran to the other, a nineteen-hour trip all the way to the eastern border, to a city called Torbat-e Jam, close to Afghanistan. Ultimately, it was more undignified to wet myself than to relieve myself in the open. After several humiliating squats in front of a soldier, and an impossible night trying to sleep sitting up, at two or three in the morning our caravan arrived at an army base surrounded by a chain-link fence topped with coiling razor wire. As we walked single file into the compound, we were each handed a blanket, and on top of the blanket rested a pair of socks, a plate, silverware, and a cup. Then we were divided into large empty rooms that looked like lecture halls, about a busload per room. There were a lot of us, but there was an enclosed bathroom with a sink and a toilet and enough space for all of us to stretch out and sleep.

  We were exhausted and said little as we quickly spread out our blankets and rested our weary bodies. The last thing I remember before I slipped into slumber was the click of the door as it was locked from the outside.

  A whistle ripped the morning silence into two equal halves—before and after. It took me a second to remember where I was and that my body was no longer my own. In the light of day I could see through the window of our cell that there were a dozen or more identical rooms, and I saw guards whistling other prisoners awake. They were all yelling the same thing: “Boland sho! Boland sho!”

  And those were the first Farsi words I learned: “Get up!”

  Those of us who were able to stand did, and we followed the guards to a central courtyard, where they began to count us and write things down on clipboards. I did a little counting of my own and guesstimated there were ninety or so of us in each room. That’s about how many would fit in the dining room of Bruce Lee Restaurant—people from all over the city who liked me and always asked after my family. The guards didn’t see that guy, the one with so many friends; to them I was a number in an orange jumpsuit, a bug to be squished like all the rest.

  When they were done counting us outside, they went room by room cataloging the injured. I held my breath as I waited for the next thing—my mind racing between me on a chain gang, me before a firing squad, me being locked in a cell—and then . . . nothing happened. The guards ordered us back to our rooms and told us to wait on our blankets. The knot at the base of my skull loosened as my shoulders relaxed on my way back to the room. Collectively, we were starting to allow ourselves to believe they were not intending to harm us. We gathered in small groups, introducing ourselves and asking about hometowns, military divisions, and capture stories. When the guards appeared with large trays of bread and cheese and tea, our room started to feel more like a café as we started to relax a little bit, seeing that the guards were at least taking care of our basic needs. I scanned the room and decided to find out what the animated discussion in the corner was about. When I approached the group, conversation stopped.

  “What happened to your teeth?” one of them asked.

  “Ajam hit me,” I said, using the slur for Persians.

  The men nodded gravely and shifted aside so I could join their circle. They were taking bets on how long we would be in this place.

  “Three months, tops,” said one.

  “Months? I say weeks,” said the one who had questioned me about my teeth. “Khorramshahr was such a disaster that Saddam is already proposing a ceasefire.”

  This was news to me. I’d been unconscious so long I’d missed some important developments, apparently.

  “What? Saddam is giving up?” I asked.

  All eyes swerved to me. The oldest man in the group, somewhere in his forties, with graying temples and bushy eyebrows, cleared his throat and spoke slowly to me, as if I were hard of hearing.

  “We lost thirty thousand soldiers,” he said.

  The group broke into a fusillade of opinions, some cheering the war’s end, others insisting we shouldn’t back down, and some saying withdrawal was not the same as failure. But what I didn’t dare say aloud was, if the war really was ending, why waste all that time and energy driving us one thousand miles away to lock us up? They’d just have to drive us all the way back once they released us. I did not say this, but my expression must have said something similar.

  “Would they be bringing us tea and cheese if they were going to kill us?” another older man proposed. He did have a point.

  “Don’t believe me?” the oldest man continued, getting to his feet. “I’ll prove it.”

  He walked to the locked door and banged on it. When a guard answered, he whispered something and then the Iranian left. Minutes later, the door opened again, and the old man practically pranced back toward us, with a carton of cigarettes and matches in his hand.

  “Room service!” he said, laughing and passing out the cigarettes. We inhaled and passed the cigarettes around the room, so that everyone who wanted could have a drag. Emboldened, a few prisoners decided to make similar requests, with similar success. We smoked so much that we asked for permission to open the windows, and got that, too. Even though I’m not carefree by nature, I ignored my doubts and made believe we were on a temporary holiday. To get along with the group, what other choice did I have?

  As the weeks passed, it seemed the old man might be right. They fed us so well, thick lamb stews and rice with grilled vegetables, that we actually started getting soft around our middles. We snoozed during the day in our rooms or told stories, waiting for the door to open and an announcement that the war had ended, and after being in a constant state of terror on the battlefield, the stillness felt relaxing rather than confining—almost necessary to restore my mental health.

  Finally, after several months, we were told that we had Iraqi visitors. An electric charge coursed through our room as we hustled to smooth our hair and straighten up our blankets in an organized pile, for what we thought was the final time. Three men strode into our room, and our anticipation of being rescued by the Red Cross or some group like it was immediately snuffed out. It was inherently understood by the air of superiority that trailed behind the men that these were not our saviors. They held their heads at a slight upward tilt as they looked down their noses to examine us.

  “Sit!”

  So many butts hit the floor that it almost sounded like applause. They were teachers, they informed us, and our lessons were about to begin. Now it made sense why we were sleeping in classrooms—we were there to be indoctrinated. Our visitors took a position at one end of our living
quarters and lectured us for four to five hours about the virtues of the Islamic Revolution. The words seemed wrong coming out of Iraqi mouths, but they had turned against the Baathist regime. Every day different teachers came, and my renewed hopes to marry Alyaa receded further. Some of the lecturers had turned on Saddam after he exiled them from Iraq because of their politics or family name or association with Shia religious leaders; others were former prisoners of war who had flipped under torture or brainwashing, or both. Whatever brought them to their beliefs, they spoke Arabic, and they were here now to urge their fellow countrymen to come to Khomeini’s side.

  At first the lectures were a break from the monotony, something to listen to. After a week they became annoying, like a mosquito in my ear, but I could tune them out and pretend to listen. But my brain, I vowed, would never be theirs. No matter what bullshit I had to say or do, my real thoughts would never leave me. But when the weeks turned to months with no end in sight, some of the college-educated in our group began challenging the speakers. Verbal fights broke out, and it became more and more tense as some of the prisoners began siding with the teachers, and allegiances started forming in our room between the converts and the loyalists. We began noticing which prisoners were talking in a friendly way with the teachers, and the teachers were taking note of which of us were asking polite versus antagonistic questions in class. A fog of suspicion took up residence in our room, and now instead of the raucous café chatter that had marked the beginning of our confinement, we spoke in whispers. We never knew which one of us was a spy. The teachers were using politics to divide and conquer us, and one day I just got fed up.

  “Islam is a religion of equality and fairness,” the speaker was droning on, “so who can tell me, then, in Iraq why is all the power given to the Baath party and not the Muslim people?”

  I stood, and the speaker waited, a hopeful look on his face, probably thinking he’d finally turned another one.

  “Look, we aren’t in Iraq anymore, so if you guys have a beef with the Iraqi government, go back to Iraq and talk to them. We’re prisoners because we were defending our country, not Saddam. We’re countrymen, not political men.”

  Some of the prisoners hooted and hollered, but just as many remained loudly silent. The teacher gave me a patronizing look and said there was much I did not understand.

  His arrogance was a match and I was the dynamite. I slammed my fist in my palm and exploded: “What’s to understand? We are Iraqi soldiers. We were ordered to fight Iranian soldiers. Now the war is over! Everyone should just go home, and that should be the end of it!”

  Something I said must have been hilarious, because the teacher broke into a cascade of laughs.

  “Don’t ever believe the war will end as long as Saddam is in power,” he said. “Until he’s toppled, the war will never end.”

  I crumpled back to the floor, defeated. All this time that we’d been smoking our free cigarettes and silently celebrating our impending freedom, Khomeini and Saddam had been taking their argument to a higher, more intractable level. I actually learned something in class that day. I learned that in a bid to end the war, Saddam told the United Nations he would withdraw his troops and agree that the shared border should stay as it was. But that wasn’t enough for Khomeini. He demanded that Saddam step down and be punished as a war criminal. That the Baath regime become an Islamic Shia republic and give Iran $150 billion as a form of apology. And that was never, ever going to happen.

  Once I lost hope, I lost track of time. So I can’t say how many weeks had passed after my outburst when armed soldiers entered our room at midnight, flicking on the lights and jarring us awake. They chose one of the prisoners, a Kurd, and told him to read a list of names. Those on the list had to gather their belongings and go to the soccer field outside. In a shaking voice, the Kurd ticked off the names, and only a moron wouldn’t have deciphered the pattern. All those on the list were the ones who had argued with the teachers. I clenched my jaw and waited until, inevitably, I heard my name. There were thirty-five from my room, and we joined a couple hundred others on the soccer field, where we sat in rows silently eating and smoking until sunrise. A few tried to whisper, but all the guards had to do was point their weapons at the talkers a few times to express their displeasure at our conversations.

  With the morning light came a long line of buses. Muscled guards with torsos like action figures spilled from them and marched toward us like invaders. They shouted and kicked us, then blindfolded us with black strips of cloth. They secured our hands behind our backs with plastic zip handcuffs. Somebody jerked me off the ground by the back of my shirt and pulled me onto the bus and into a seat. He shoved my head down, out of sight of the window. I acquiesced, familiar with the position. A prisoner near me asked where we were being taken.

  “Khafe sho! ” a guard shouted—Shut up.

  My Persian vocabulary was growing.

  NINE

  MINA

  Every once in a while I wondered what had happened to the Iraqi, and I didn’t imagine it was good. All I knew was that they took him to one of our military bases, and from what I heard, that was just the first stop before prison. When I left him in the hospital, I told him the part about going to a base and left it at that. He looked so pitiful with his banged-up head and the mangled words tumbling out of his mouth. I was sure he already knew he was a POW, yet still he smiled at me with 100 percent trust—as if I was living proof that no harm would come to him. Or his big grin was because of the drugs. Maybe he was so dopey that he didn’t sense danger. But he did recognize me; that I’m sure of. He was the only person I’d ever met who saw through my shirt and my skin and inside of me to the person I really was. It gave me a chill just to think about it.

  Back in the passenger seat of the ambulance, Ahad-Amin gunned the engine and squealed the tires too fast like he always did. I rolled up the window to block out the huge dust devil he’d kicked up.

  “Thanks,” I said.

  “For what?”

  “For helping me with that Iraqi.”

  Ahad-Amin gripped the steering wheel tighter, and I could see his knuckles turn white. He scanned the horizon, looking for fallen soldiers.

  “Don’t ever do something that stupid again, unless of course you’re trying to get yourself killed,” he said.

  I didn’t bother to argue with him. Anyhow, it didn’t matter anymore because things had changed since we’d recaptured Khorramshahr, and we weren’t supposed to kill wounded Iraqis anymore. Our orders were to take anyone who needed a doctor to the doctor. Iranian, Iraqi, it made no difference. There was a big red cross painted on the top of our ambulance, and we wore smaller ones on our armbands, and those red crosses meant it didn’t matter where you called home.

  Ahad-Amin and I made a good team. He was an easygoing road dog with quick reflexes and a repertoire of corny jokes and puns like the kind your grandparents thought were funny, and when he told one he’d throw back his round head and hee-haw like it was the most hilarious thing he’d ever said. I was good at pretending to laugh, but my real skill was spotting things, steering us away from potential hazards such as suspicious wires sticking out of the ground or high walls where snipers could be hiding. I guess you could say that along with Omid and Daryoosh, he was among my closest friends in the Basij, especially now that he’d proven he could keep a secret. What I really wanted to ask was why he hadn’t reported me. Did he ever feel like helping the enemy, too? I couldn’t be the only one. What I did wasn’t special; it was normal, right? Maybe someday when we were old men sitting on a park bench eating pumpkin seeds and reminiscing about our war days, I would ask him. But Ahad-Amin clearly didn’t want to discuss it now, and I understood why. If anyone heard us talking about it, we could be killed.

  We had a long drive ahead, nearly four hours north to Dehloran, where there was heavy fighting on the border. Our instructions were to clear the dead and the wounded from the battlefield, which meant dragging them from the front line to ou
r waiting ambulance in the back. Diseases could spread to our soldiers if we left the dead in the open; plus if the wild dogs got too accustomed to eating people, they might start hunting us when we were alive.

  It was almost dawn by the time we arrived, and the shelling was so intense that at first I thought I was looking at a lightning storm in the sky. Mortars screamed through the dark and shook the ground, and flashes of orange burst from behind dirt embankments where the enemy fired on us with machine guns. We had to shout to be heard, and ended up using hand signals instead, and my sergeant’s hands told me to crawl on my stomach through the gunfire and pull fallen soldiers back to the ambulance. I got as close as I could to the fighting and then dropped down like a commando and squirmed my way toward the first corpse I saw, as bullets rained down and kicked up chunks of dirt all around me.

  The dead guy was older and heavier than me, and he made me an easy target as I struggled to crawl and drag him at the same time, cursing under my breath. A bullet winged by my head so close that it sounded like someone snapping their fingers behind me and I ducked under him, using his worthless body as a shield. I panted like a rabid animal underneath him until I heard the volley of gunfire stop, then continued. I was so close; I could see the ambulance in the distance, maybe fifty feet away. I remember looking at the guy’s face and thinking how odd it was that he had an open smile and wondering what his last thought must have been. Then I heard a thunderclap so loud that I felt my eardrums rattle and everything clicked off, just like turning off a TV set.