Free After Tehran by Marina Nemat

happiness when the guards called my name over the loudspeaker just before my release from Evin came. She was so happy for me that she couldn’t stop crying. “Marina, you’re going home!” she said. “I know it! They’re letting you go!” Then she told me to run. She pushed me down the hallway toward the barred door, and I watched her small hand waving to me through the bars as I walked to the office at 246. Where was she now? Had she survived Evin?
    Four years later, in July 2008 during an interview in Italy, a journalist asked me which day had been the worst of my life. I considered for a moment.
    “The day I went home from Evin,” I replied.
    “Why?” he inquired, surprised.
    “The day I went home from Evin I left my friends behind. Girls closer to me than sisters would be. I left them behind. I shouldn’t have, but I didn’t know any better. I was a young woman who wanted to go home more than anything. And that was the biggest mistake of my life.”
    Michelle and I sat down at the hotel restaurant and ordered lunch. I wasn’t hungry and had soup. She asked me about my life in Iran and the process of writing my book. I had believed that reporters were aggressive, but Michelle was gentle and soft-spoken. I expected her to ask me for the name of someone reliable who’d known me in Iran and could confirm that I had truly spent two years in Evin—and she did. I gave her contact information for a few people who’d known me quite well in Iran but now lived abroad. None of them intended to return to Iran, so talking to a reporter would not put them in danger.
    Michelle’s article appeared in the
Sunday Star
on January 30, 2005. Even though I had hardly slept the night before and waswide awake at 5:00 a.m., I didn’t jump out of bed and run to the door to get the paper. The previous night, Andre had arrived home from a business trip, and he was still fast asleep. I waited. At 8:00 a.m., I couldn’t bear waiting any longer and edged out of bed. When I opened the front door, the frosty January air poured into the house like ice water. I grabbed the newspaper, ran back to our bedroom, and spread the paper on the bed. Andre squirmed.
    Michelle had written a two-page article about me that included a photo of me the
Star
photographer had taken in the Swiss Chalet kitchen. I was in my uniform. I remembered the surprise on my boss’s face when I asked him if it was okay for a reporter to come to the restaurant to interview me and for a photographer to take photos.
    “Reporter? What’s going on, Marina?” he wanted to know.
    I told him about the book. He had always been very good to me, and he said he didn’t have any problem as long as the newspaper people showed up in the afternoon when the restaurant wasn’t busy and they didn’t get in anyone’s way.
    The title of the article was “The Woman without a Past.” I truly
had
been a woman without a past. I had been stripped of my identity in Evin—at least, this was what the prison authorities had tried to do to me, and for a long time, they seemed to have succeeded. For close to twenty years, I had floated in the world like a shadow, meaningless and without a destination. Now everything was different. I had taken charge. I had stood up.
    Within a few hours, my inbox was full of supportive emails from friends and acquaintances. One of the messages was from Flavia, my book-club friend:
    Dear Marina
,
    Are you moved? In a stupor? I imagine your feelings are very mixed today
.
    Thank you for allowing some of your heart to be placed on the page. I know there will be many people who will be touched—all for different reasons. You did the right thing.
    People were indeed touched. Telling my story had become such a desperate need for me that I had not thought much about reactions. My neighbours now looked at me as if they had never seen me before. When we ran into one another after the article appeared, they stopped and shook my hand and said they had no idea I had