Journey of a Thousand Storms Read online

  On the way to the park we pass a big grocery. Out the front a man sells fruit from a few boxes, probably paying rent to the shop owner to allow him to have his small business there. Each time we walk past him Newsha stares at the large peaches, apples and oranges. The peaches are almost a dollar each but they’re so ripe and tempting.

  We don’t have enough money to buy luxuries such as fruit. I can’t remember the last time I had an orange or an apple. The only thing we purchase each day is a loaf of bread to eat with the bowl of rice from Saklamak Haneh. I follow Saeed’s advice and change my money into Turkish lira daily, converting as little as possible. The word ‘zam’ is one of the first I learned here: it means inflation. When the cost of bread rises a few cents every day, the seller shrugs his shoulders and says, ‘Zam.’

  One day while we’re walking past the fruit boxes Newsha stops, stares at the peaches, and says she wants one. I kneel down next to her and say I’ll buy one for her soon but not today. Suddenly the fruit seller picks up a big juicy peach, sits beside Newsha and offers it to her, saying in Turkish, ‘Here, sweetheart.’ She’s too shy to accept it but he grabs her hand, places the peach in it and pats her hair. Newsha looks at me.

  ‘Take it, baba, and say thank you.’ Newsha whispers ‘thank you’ to the seller and we go to the park. I think, There are plenty of nice people in Turkey. It’s a very poor country but I’m impressed by how democratic it is. I can see how free the people are and that religion is separate from the constitution. Though Turkey has many Muslim hardliners who want to take control of the government, the majority are pro-democracy and secular. Music, writing, art, fashion and the media are significantly more relaxed than they are in Iran and I hope that one day this model is applied throughout the entire Middle East.

  There’s still another two weeks until our UN interview but my anxiety is sky-high. All the other Iranian asylum seekers I’ve spoken to have been rejected. However, I notice a lot of them are here for economic reasons – they simply have a difficult life in Iran and want to go to a more affluent country. Many pretend to be dissidents who’ve opposed the regime, but UN officers have in-depth know­ledge of Iran and its prisons so they know immediately that these stories are false.

  One day in front of the UN I meet a young Iranian man who tells me he participated in student demonstrations in Tehran, and that if he’s deported he’ll be arrested. He shows me a large scar on his arm. ‘See this? The police bashed me when I was protesting for regime change.’

  I look at his scar. It’s easily at least ten years old. I tell him that, and he laughs. ‘Yes, I got this when I fell off my bike.’ He admits he had no real problems in Iran – he wants to go to the US just to drink alcohol and have fun in nightclubs.

  I also meet four women who are part of the People’s Mojahedin, a Marxist–Islamic group that opposes the Iranian regime. I know the organisation well: two of my friends were executed for being members. All four women are aged between twenty and thirty-two. Their UN interview was fourteen months ago. Though they’ve escaped from Iran, many of their comrades have been jailed or executed.

  A week before our interview we’re invited by Ziba, the head of the group, to their house. They live in a slum on the outskirts of Ankara, on the top floor of an old two-storey house, and it takes us almost two hours to get there by bus. Ziba tells me about their activities in Iran. I admire their courage, and am disappointed the UN is likely to reject all their cases because of Mojahedin’s increasingly armed resistance in recent years. The conversation bores Newsha, who asks if she can go outside and play with the children in the street, and we let her go.

  Ziba tells me her group is working on exposing Iran’s nuclear weapons program. I knew the Shah had a nuclear program, but after the revolution it was cancelled. Ziba’s group say they have evidence the Islamic regime is developing a nuclear bomb to blackmail Israel and the West, and that Iranian scientists have been receiving secret nuclear training in Pakistan. In 1989 the Revolutionary Army received their first centrifuge assemblies, and in 1995 more than two thousand components and subassemblies were shipped to Iran.

  ‘If they get their hands on nuclear weapons,’ I say, ‘nowhere on this planet would be safe.’

  ‘I know. This is what we’re trying to tell the UN.’

  Suddenly Newsha returns, crying. She tells me that a much bigger Turkish boy has pushed her off the swing. I examine her arm and assure her it’s just bruised. When we finish talking with Ziba and the other People’s Mojahedin women, I wish them luck. On the bus going home I wonder, If these warriors against the Iranian regime are likely to be rejected by the UN, what are our chances?

  We arrive back at four. By six Newsha is in agony, so we go by bus to the hospital at Hacettepe. The emergency department is overcrowded and we have to wait hours before we’re seen. When the doctor finally gets to us the first thing he says is, ‘You’re not Turkish citizens, are you?’

  ‘No, we’re asylum seekers.’ I show him our UN papers.

  ‘In that case you have to pay sixty-five dollars for the consultation and the X-ray.’

  ‘Okay, that’s fine.’ This amount is equal to one month’s living expenses, but I would give my heart for Newsha. Once I’ve paid, the doctor starts examining her arm and when he puts the X-ray on the light box my heart sinks. Her bone has snapped in half. I hug Newsha in my arms. ‘Can you give her something for the pain, please?’

  ‘First she has to be seen by the orthopaedic registrar,’ he replies as he walks away.

  Half an hour later a young orthopaedic registrar comes to us and looks at the X-ray. He realises we’re asylum seekers and I tell him I used to be a doctor. Thankfully he speaks reasonably good English.

  ‘I’m going to apply a cast but I won’t charge you for that,’ he says.

  ‘Thank you so much.’ The kind-hearted orthopod gives Newsha some pain relief and explains she needs to wear the cast for at least four weeks. By midnight we’re finally home and Newsha falls asleep immediately. I sit and watch her sleeping, tears blurring my eyes.

  I can’t stop thinking about my UN interview. I know I’m honest and my story is true, but how will they know that? How can they verify what happened to me? I don’t blame the UN for being sceptical about asylum seekers when so many people fabricate their stories, but how do people who are genuinely in danger prove their case?

  Later on I ring my mother on my mobile but she doesn’t answer. I just want to hear her voice, to make sure she’s okay. I feel dread in the pit of my stomach – maybe she’s been taken by MOIS. I try again in the afternoon and then once more the following morning, but still she doesn’t pick up. It’s very out of character. I’m extremely concerned but I need to stay calm and focus on my interview. The lives of my children are at stake. Besides, I know there’s nothing I can do to help her.

  I decide to go back once again to the crowd outside the UN building. As usual there are a large number of asylum seekers around the building. I approach an Iranian-looking man in his thirties and start talking to him. His name is Dariush and he came to Turkey with his wife fourteen months ago. Not long after they arrived, while they were waiting for their interview, his wife became pregnant. Two months later they had their interview, with a French UN officer.

  ‘She’s a butcher – she has no compassion,’ Dariush tells me. ‘I explained I was arrested for writing an article in an opposition newspaper. I told her I was detained for four months, the newspaper was shut down, and when I was released I wasn’t allowed to have any government job. Basically, I had a black mark against my name and no one would hire me, so we decided to leave Iran.’ He pauses and then says, ‘Sometimes I’m so frightened, I wish we’d never left. This is worse than being in jail.’

  Dariush’s story sounds genuine. But his heartbreak didn’t end there. ‘A few months ago, after our daughter was born, my wife got sick. I took her to hospital and they discovered she has a rare form of cancer that develops after pregnancy.’ He’s talking about c
horiocarcinoma, which is very aggressive: the chance of survival beyond six months is virtually zero.

  Dariush shakes his head. ‘It’s been almost a year since I had my interview with that French officer. I’ve sent them the paperwork showing my wife’s grave situation but they have no mercy. They still won’t tell me the result of my interview.’

  I also speak to a 22-year-old man from Tehran called Babak. He tells me he went to that Turkish lawyer, Mr Kamal, to prepare his case and paid him four thousand dollars – his father’s savings after working for twenty years as a teacher. ‘Kamal is a crook. He claims he used to work for the UN and knows everything about it but he’s full of shit. He said that if I told the UN officer I’m gay my case would be successful. But in the interview I was asked to give details about having sex with another man. And, as you can imagine, I wasn’t convincing.’ Babak smiles bitterly.

  I’m still cautious about being followed so I give everyone a vague story about myself, simply saying I’m an author who got into trouble with the government. Another man, Morad, who’s been waiting for his interview results for two years, asks me if I have any documents to show I was arrested.

  ‘I have a copy of some of my books, but nothing else.’

  ‘That’s nothing,’ Morad says. ‘I have an original document from the jail, from when I was given three days’ leave. I showed it to them but it wasn’t enough.’

  I can’t find anyone who’s been successful, and I realise that even if my interview goes well, it’ll take more than a year to get the results and then several more months after that to be sent to a new country.

  ‘I knew a woman who was successful last year,’ says Kamran, another asylum seeker. ‘After eighteen months the UN sent her to Norway, a frozen hell. She was devastated.’

  ‘So you don’t have any choice even if your case is accepted?’ I ask.

  Kamran shakes his head. ‘Are you kidding? The UN isn’t a travel agency. You could end up in Iceland!’

  It’s not hard to see why asylum seekers approach people smugglers.

  SEVEN

  In the summer of 1992 I was on my way to a lecture at Tehran University, walking down Valiasr Street. This is the longest street in the entire Middle East, and its southern end is close to the slum I grew up in. Running for almost 18 kilometres, Valiasr Street connects the north of the city and the south, massive villas and shantytowns, modern civilisation and ancient Persia, those who embrace Western values and the fanatical militiamen who oppose them. There are some eighteen thousand sycamore trees on the street, although most of them are at the northern end.

  Tehran has some bizarre street and place names. There’s Execution Square, a famous large square in the middle of a round­about. Khaled Eslamboli Street is named for the assassin who murdered Anwar Sadat, the Egyptian president, after he signed a peace agreement with Israel in 1981. The main square in south Tehran is called Shush Square – so much for freedom of speech. There’s also a Jihad Street, a Jihad Square and an Islamic Jihad Foundation in every town.

  I eventually reached the university, where Mr Naseri, a publisher and history academic, was giving a lecture about his pro-monarchist views, ideas that could have had him publicly hanged. While he spoke I remembered my father’s reaction when the Shah went into exile on 16 January 1979. I’d never seen my father cry: not when his mother passed away, not even when his youngest son from his first wife died suddenly from a ruptured brain aneurysm. But while he watched the Shah kiss the soil then climb the steps into the aeroplane, my father sobbed. At that moment I became a monarchist.

  Two months after Mr Naseri’s lecture I became a formal member of a subversive monarchist party with its headquarters in London. I knew that by joining I was significantly endangering my life but I couldn’t resist a chance to fight for a better Iran: for democracy, for freedom of speech and of the media, for human rights. Almost a hundred thousand people had been executed since the Islamic regime came to power, and I could no longer stay silent.

  Out of the group’s hundreds of members across Iran I was introduced to only four, who all lived in Mashhad. There were no written notes or tape recordings of our meetings, which happened once a month in one of our houses. Our chief was Mr Naseri, and our mission was simple: to gather support for a monarchy similar to the European model, with a prime minister elected by the people and the monarch being a unifying figurehead. Because everyone knew how corrupt the last king had been – jailing and punishing his opponents – we had to convince Iranians there’s no conflict between a monarchy and a democracy. We also wanted to remind them of the Islamic regime’s crimes, and advocate for separating government and religion.

  In our meetings we’d discuss how we could subtly approach people to talk to them about our views. We’d also create flyers and work out ways to distribute them; this latter part was the most dangerous aspect of our mission. We knew that if we were caught, we’d be tortured to death. According to our instructions, if one of us was arrested he had to resist for twenty-four hours to give the rest time to escape. Between meetings we made sure no one had been captured by calling each other then hanging up every second evening just before midnight. Four calls meant the group was intact; three meant one of us had been caught, and we’d all have to disappear. If we had to cancel a meeting, or if the group was in danger, we’d mail coded letters to each other, the post being safer than any form of electronic communication.

  We memorised the number of the head office in London. We knew each other’s names and membership numbers but never used them. The four other members of my cell were single university students. Six months after joining I was assigned to be the leader of our small group and felt great responsibility for the safety of these remarkable young men. When I saw the hope and passion in their eyes, I could feel our country move closer towards freedom, justice and democracy.

  Though we took turns hosting the meetings, we never met at my house because Azita knew nothing about my involvement with the group. I knew that if she found out she would beg me to divorce her. Azita was already appalled by my Jewish faith and fed up with the risks my writing entailed, and would refuse to tolerate any further stress. Sadly, even without meeting any Jew other than me in her entire life, Azita sincerely believed ridiculous myths about Jewish women kidnapping little Muslim boys, severing their heads and drinking their blood.

  It’s not long until my UN interview and I am thinking about contacting my monarchist group’s headquarters in London. I don’t tell anyone about this, not even Azita.

  ‘If you end up escaping Iran, contact the head office,’ said Mr Naseri when we last met. ‘They’ll protect you and get you to a safe country.’

  Since going into hiding, I haven’t heard what’s happened to the rest of my group. I hope they’re okay – I haven’t said a word about their identity. When I was kidnapped in February 1997 MOIS knew I supported the idea of a monarchy, and that from the age of ten I’d read forbidden books, but they didn’t know about my involvement in the monarchist group. Though they were aware of our meetings, they thought I was teaching literature during them. They had no idea about my relationship with Mr Naseri, other than that he published one of my books.

  A couple of weeks ago I heard from other asylum seekers that the UN supported members of peaceful opposition groups, but I wasn’t sure it was true. After a lot of thought, though, I decide to seek help from the party I’ve risked my life to support. It’s seven o’clock in the morning and Azita has fallen asleep again after dealing with Niloofar, who cried all night with what seemed to be abdominal cramps. I sneak out of the house, walk for a few minutes and then stand on a corner. The street is quiet. I take out my prepaid mobile phone, insert the SIM card and call the head office. As it rings, I look around anxiously.

  ‘Good morning, Karmel Bakery, Steve speaking.’

  I hang up. I must’ve dialled the wrong number. I try again but the same man answers the phone. I hang up immediately, disappointed and betrayed. It seems we’ve been
given false infor­mation. What if the whole organisation was fake? What if it was a trap? But that can’t be the case, because in all their torture MOIS never mentioned my monarchist activities. Maybe I’ve mixed up the number due to all the recent stress. I decide to dial again and talk to the man this time.

  ‘Hi Steve, my name’s Kooshyar and I’m calling from Turkey. I am a member of the party and they gave me this number to ring when I got out of Iran.’

  He hesitates for a few seconds.

  ‘Hello? Are you still there?’ I ask.

  ‘Yes, Kooshyar, yes.’ I can now hear a hint of a Persian accent in his words.

  ‘Is this the right number?’

  ‘Yes it is,’ he says. I feel relieved knowing we haven’t been deceived.

  ‘Can you help me, please? I fled Iran three months ago and I need to get to a safe place.’

  Steve asks for my full name and membership details, as well as my phone number in Turkey. After I’ve given these to him, he promises someone will contact me in half an hour.

  While I wait, I pace up and down the streets of Dikmen. I worry that Azita has woken up and is looking for me but I can’t let her know about this.

  Finally, after fifty minutes of anxiety, my mobile phone rings.

  ‘Mr Kooshyar Karimi?’ It’s a different man. ‘My name is Kasra and I’m in charge of recruitment for the party. I understand that you have fled Iran. Can you tell me a bit more about your situation, please?’

  I explain my story and he assures me he’ll do what he can to help me. Then he asks for my special code, which was given to Mr Naseri by one of the organisation’s secret agents. I tell him this as well as my date and place of birth.