I, Who Did Not Die Read online

  Maman put her head scarf over her mouth and tried to muffle her sobs, and Mostafa, ever the peacemaker, coerced us all to sit down, murmuring assurances that everything was going to be all right and plying us with more tea.

  “Zahed is here for a reason. He wants to get married,” Mostafa began.

  “Married!” Baba snorted. “He can’t even pull up his own socks.”

  My anger flashed and I stood, ready to stomp out the door, but Mostafa grabbed my wrist and gently guided me back down.

  “This is no longer a boy you are talking to,” he said, locking eyes with Baba. “This is a person who has been through a lot, more than you can ever know.”

  Baba waved his hand as if he were getting rid of an annoying fly. Then he rolled his tongue over his teeth and said, “No. I do not accept this marriage.”

  I leaped to my feet. By now I’d seen all the various ways you could kill a man with your bare hands. And I probably would have done it, too, if Mostafa and Maman hadn’t dragged me to another room and shut the door. And so the negotiations began. For the next three hours, while I was sequestered out of harm’s way, Mostafa and his wife, Fatemah, Maman, and a growing crowd of neighbors and friends who wanted in on the action wheedled and cajoled my donkey of a father into changing his mind. I listened by the door and gathered that his major objection was that he might have to take care of Mina, to feed and protect her from other men, if I died on the battlefield. When Mostafa explained that I intended to leave the Basij, he just swerved into a different lane, insisting I could die any old way, like crossing the street, and then he’d be stuck with another mouth to feed. There it was, that same old line again—as if by our very existence as his children we were draining him of his rightful happiness. To my father, everything could be measured by a cost-benefit analysis, even true love.

  Eventually, the old man got hungry. At least, that’s how I would place my bet. Say all you want about the arguments before him: that times were changing and more young people were choosing their own spouses now, that marriage should be for love and not family prestige, or that he could mend our troubled past by granting me his blessing. He never was one to let himself be swayed by talk. To tell the truth, I think it was his internal clock that seized. The deliberations were pushing past his dinner hour, and at one point he just clapped his hands once, said “Fine,” then left for home, where the kitchen was.

  To my utter shock, Baba kept his word. He arranged for the initial khaseghari meeting between parents at Mina’s father’s home to discuss a possible engagement. Before my parents left for the meeting, Maman took me aside and assured me she wouldn’t leave Mina’s house without a yes.

  “Don’t worry,” she whispered, “I’ll make sure he doesn’t say anything stupid.”

  I paced a circle into the fibers of the rug waiting for them to return. Maman blew through the door, and I could tell she had done her job and done it well. Mina’s father had agreed to host the engagement party at his house and invited his whole family, more than one hundred people. Mina’s sisters were already planning a feast: khoresht gheymeh, stew with lamb, yellow split peas, tomatoes and dried lime, and my favorite—ghormeh sabzi—a green herb stew with dried fenugreek and red kidney beans. There would be music, we’d link arms and dance in circles, and the tables would be decorated with coins and candies. Her sisters even insisted on the old-timey tradition of grinding sugar on our heads to guarantee our marriage would be sweet. And the best part: her father would stand up and formally announce our engagement, and I would put a ring on Mina’s finger before the clapping crowd.

  My whole family of twelve—plus Mostafa, Fatemah, and my uncle—rented a minivan to get to the party. My hair was smoothed and plastered in place with some of Mostafa’s hair oil, and I put on cologne. Maman put on lipstick and sprayed herself with rose oil. There was so much perfume colliding inside the sweltering van that I had to roll down the windows just to keep from getting nauseous. I had a cream roll cake that Mina liked on my lap and a bouquet for her mother, but the real prize was in a hinged velvet box inside my pocket. When I’d gone to the Basij office to inform them I was leaving, they’d congratulated me on my years of service, thanked me for my dedicated work as a medic, and slipped an envelope in my hands with the monthly military benefits I’d never collected, a little more than ten thousand dollars. I went straight to the jewelry store and picked out a gold ring, shaped like two hands holding a ruby heart. There was enough left in the envelope for a matching necklace and earrings.

  I looked out the window, and for the first time in my life, Masjed Soleyman sparkled. I saw the light filter through the trees like a stained glass window, and when we passed the marketplace, I saw Bakhtiari nomad women weaving carpets in neon colors that screamed with joy. Birdsong mixed with the laughter of children playing soccer, and I laughed to myself that I’d never seen my city all dressed up before.

  Two blocks from Mina’s house, the long wail of an air raid siren sliced through the conversation in the van, and everyone started shouting at once, directing my uncle where to drive the van to a safer spot. Some pointed left, others right, and my youngest siblings demanded a U-turn.

  This can’t be happening, I thought.

  And then it did. Less than a minute after the siren, I felt the road drop out beneath our tires and we hung in the air for a moment, and then a thunderous blast tipped the van on its side and sent our heads knocking into each other. Someone was able to kick a door open, and we pulled one another out, one by one, our best clothes now rumpled and stained with the food we’d been carrying on our laps. Mostafa’s coat had split clear down the back. Baba had injured his hand, and Maman was holding her head but insisted she was fine.

  “Everyone’s OK,” Mostafa said. “Go, go see what’s going on.”

  As I ran toward Mina’s house, I smelled fire. Then I heard a motorcycle gaining speed on me and recognized the driver as he pulled up and stopped before me. It was another Basij soldier from Masjed Soleyman who had shared a tent with Omid and me at training camp. He now delivered coded messages on his bike for the war effort.

  “Do you know where Mostafa is?” he asked.

  I pointed in the direction of the minivan, where a group was now pushing it, trying to get it right way up again. He stomped on his kick-start, and I grabbed his handlebars.

  “Why?”

  “Unfortunately, Omid is a martyr now,” he replied.

  Omid had been on the front lines in Dehloran when his machine gun ran out of bullets. The enemy got him with five or six shots to the chest, puncturing his lungs. I felt each one of those bullets in my own chest as the news knocked the wind out of me. I sank to the ground and punched the earth with my fists, damning God for taking everything away from me all at once. When I couldn’t sob anymore, I slowly rose to my feet and continued toward Mina’s house, dazed and shocked, as if I’d been struck by lightning. When I got to her block, the buildings were gone, reduced to smoking piles of rubble. The air was so thick with dust that it was like trying to see underwater in a murky lake, and shadows of people stumbled in the cloud, screaming and hitting themselves in the head with grief. I tripped over bodies as I pushed forward toward her house, shouting her name over and over.

  As I knew it would be but chose not to believe, her house was a heap of dirt, bricks, and mangled steel. And when I saw the huge crater where her courtyard used to be, I knew the bomb had fallen right on our feast, the bowls of stew probably still steaming from the stove. All down the block, survivors were lifting bodies from the wreckage and laying them in rows on the street. Women were on their knees ululating and weeping over their broken babies.

  I tilted my head back and aimed my voice at the universe. “May there be an ocean of eternal misery upon these Arab killers who bring God’s name to their filthy lips!”

  I flung away chunks of cinder blocks and torn pieces of corrugated tin, cutting and burning my hands in my frenzy to find her. She was underneath a tangle of bricks, her olive s
kin burned to an unrecognizable shade of orange. A piece of rebar had pierced her through her back and come out through her breast, and one of her legs was twisted so that her foot was up by her hip. Still, she was beautiful. I cleared away the dirt and removed the rebar stake, and as I covered her with my shirt, I felt the ring in my pocket. I opened the box and slid the ring on her finger.

  Then I leaned in and put my lips to hers for our first kiss.

  • • •

  Over the next days, as I helped wrap the bodies of my would-be in-laws into funeral shrouds and dig their graves, steel walls slammed around my heart, trapping my soul inside a tight, dark prison. Life was short, and it was shit. So I returned to the Basij office inside the mosque and asked to be reenlisted. This time, the recruiter was more respectful and told me I was a veteran now and could work in any division I wanted.

  “Give me the most dangerous one,” I said.

  “You’ll have to be more specific,” the recruiter said. “War is all kinds of dangerous.”

  There was no more mercy left in me.

  “I want to kill as many Arabs as possible.”

  My answer received a crocodile smile.

  “How’s your aim?”

  “The best,” I lied.

  So despite the fact that I’d never fired a gun directly at someone, I became a sniper. Sure, I’d fired Omid’s gun in the direction of incoming gunfire, but I’d never known if I hit anyone. I mean, I’d never selected a victim, then aimed. I didn’t know what it was like to intentionally kill another human being.

  My first mission was to spy on an Iraqi garrison in Basra. I disguised myself in an Iraqi uniform taken from a prisoner, and tried to look nonchalant as I obscured myself in the shade of a cluster of palm trees and peered through binoculars and the scope on my rifle to count their tanks, locate their trenches, and report the size of their battalions back to command. I was getting some good intel when, out of nowhere, someone turned on a radio, and the Sadoun Jaber pop song “My Mother” wafted through the air:

  Oh Mom, Mom, you are a rainbow from heaven, the air that I need to breathe,

  You are the most valuable creature to me.

  I peered through my scope and saw an Iraqi officer about six hundred yards away, snapping his fingers to the beat as he made his way to one of those makeshift toilets, which was nothing more than a hole in the ground with a tire over it, enclosed by walls of corrugated metal panels for privacy. In his left hand he carried a small plastic pitcher of water for washing his privates. I raised my semiautomatic Simonov, kissed my trigger finger for good luck, and squeezed. The bullet pierced his temple and he spun in a circle. I fired again, hitting him in the shoulder. I cracked my knuckles as he dropped to the ground.

  One down, a zillion more to go.

  TEN

  DUNGEON

  When the bus sighed to a stop, I instinctively turned to look out the window even though I was still blindfolded. Freedom is a stubborn habit, I guess. I had a stabbing pain between my shoulders from several hours in zip-tie handcuffs but didn’t dare adjust my position or surreptitiously try to stretch because I might draw attention. I needed to be a mote of dust, unnoticed and insignificant.

  Dread collected like bile in the back of my throat as I waited for something, something terrible. I could hear the lumbering feet of Iraqi prisoners getting off the buses ahead of me, which meant I only had a few minutes until it was my turn. These very well could have been my last minutes, and if so, I wanted to die while having pleasant thoughts. So I went inside myself, and back in time, and saw my older brother Jasem wink at me as he detoured from our route to school and slipped through the brush to a secret shortcut to the river, where he dropped his schoolbooks, stripped down to his underwear, and plunged in. I remembered the time we made fishing poles out of branches, and I felt the mud between my toes as I braced against the tug of a fishing line, battling a gasping yellow carp and making a little bit of a bigger show of it than necessary to impress Jasem. Cooking it later over a fire on the shore, I asked my big brother with 90 percent seriousness if we could live outside forever, just him and me.

  He opened his mouth to answer and screamed like a rat in the talons of a hawk. My bones froze when I realized the sound was real, coming from outside the bus. As if on cue, each prisoner shrieked one after another, like they were being electrocuted, wailing with equal parts pain, shock, and outrage.

  The bus door opened with a sucking sound and a hand grasped the back of my collar and yanked me out of my seat. Outside, I stumbled blindly toward whatever despicable horror was happening to the others, trembling with each step. When my blindfold was removed, I was standing at the entrance to a dark hallway lined with a gauntlet of Iranian soldiers, each brandishing some sort of beating tool: batons, leather belts, thick electrical cables. Pools of hot blood and piss marked the path between them.

  My strategy was to lower my head and run past them like a soccer champion. I made it halfway through the two lines of men without getting hit when a soldier kicked me from behind and I toppled onto my face, my hands still tied behind my back. Groaning, I struggled to my knees while the sadistic bastards waited until I started to crawl to beat me. The first blow landed across my spine with a dull thud, spreading out ripples of hot pain. At first I could feel the individual lashes, but then they came so fast and from so many directions that I couldn’t distinguish them. My entire back ignited. I heard a sickening crack behind me and a prisoner protest that his ribs had been broken. There was nothing I could do for him, so I kept going.

  I stumbled to the end, where the hallway emptied into a dungeon of some kind—a musty, dark cave with walls of hand-cut basalt blocks, a high arched ceiling, and no windows. There were Persian words crudely scratched into the walls and the air was fetid, like hope itself had decayed there long ago. The floor had been tiled at one point in history, but it had since crumbled underfoot into a powdery gravel. I crammed inside with all the moaning prisoners, so many of us pressed together that not even a pin would fit between our bleeding bodies. Some were coughing blood; some had eyes that had swollen shut. I was one of the lucky ones, with only welts on my back and arms. Dizzy and stunned, we leaned on one another for support, propping each other up as we shivered together, listening to the echoes of torture until each and every one of us had been properly welcomed to our new quarters.

  Eventually, a handful of soldiers appeared and cut off our handcuffs. One could speak Arabic, and I sensed a touch of pride as he told us that we were deep inside a mountain, in an ancient caravansary, where five hundred years before traders traveling on the Silk Road would rest with their pack animals. But the tea service and carpets were long gone, and the warren of caves hadn’t been occupied since the 1930s, when Reza Shah had locked up Iran’s most notorious criminals. On the map, we were in a village of less than one hundred people called Sang Bast, which translated into “closed rock.”

  “This is the end of the line, Saddamis,” the guard chirped. “Prepare to die here.”

  It was like being entombed in a sewer, or a subway tunnel or abandoned mine, with three hundred others. We’d been removed from the living but were not yet dead. The guards stood silent. I imagined they enjoyed watching us as the realization sank in. They could do whatever they wanted to us underground. So this was our punishment for arguing with the lecturers back at the military base, for defending our country—a country that would have punished us had we refused to defend it, I might add. I lived in a foul pit of constant night, where the hours and days bled into one never-ending moment. Maybe they were going to kill us immediately or leave us to starve underground. I closed my eyes and thought about the Iranian boy who had saved me a year before. Buddy, you went to all that effort for this. The irony of it made me laugh out loud, which drew menacing stares from several prisoners. They were right; I needed to pull myself together.

  The guards ordered us to follow them. Our footsteps echoed as we marched through a maze of hallways that were covered in
black mold, and we made so many lefts and rights that I was completely disoriented. They divided us into five caves of about sixty men each, the only light coming from a three-foot-by-three-foot square cut in the ceiling covered by a thick piece of clear plastic, so guards could monitor our movements from aboveground. The caves were large, like the entire bottom floor of my father’s house including the courtyard, with enough space for all of us to lie down, and we could move freely from room to room. The ceiling was so high that if three of us stood foot to shoulder we still couldn’t reach that square hole.

  Before leaving us, the guard demanded to know if any of us could speak Farsi, and a few men raised their hands.

  “You!” a guard said, pointing a long finger at a quiet prisoner named Rasoul, whose creased forehead gave him a perpetually worried look. Rasoul took a step back, like maybe if he walked away from the fingertip they’d choose someone else. But that only made the guard come closer and raise Rasoul’s hand and bark something. Rasoul translated: “He says I’m in charge of the food and sleeping arrangements. Anyone who disobeys will be beaten.”

  My ears perked up at the word “food,” because that was a sign that they didn’t intend to kill us. Even more proof: we were each given two wool military blankets, rubber slippers, a plastic plate and cup, and a spoon. I found a spot next to my friend Sharshab and sat against the wall next to him. He was staring up at the small square of faint light in the ceiling and twisting the corners of his mustache.

  “Think they ever open that thing?” he asked.

  “They have to,” I said. “How will we get any fresh air?”

  “You’re assuming they give a shit.”

  I unfurled my blanket and carefully placed everything I owned on it in a neat row. Plate next to cup next to spoon, and I bookended the set with my new slippers. Sharshab was the even-keeled one who kept everybody else from falling apart. We couldn’t have him fade on us; morale would plummet.