Now, take off your clothes! Let me take a good look at you!”
“No! I’m not gonna do such a foolish thing! Leave me alone!” infuriated, she refused his outlandish demand adamantly, hoping the obnoxious little bastard would go away.
“Oh, come on. You look just fine. Things can get easier for you here if you let me have some fun. You know what I mean?” Though he softened his voice, his approach was very crude and his method of seduction even more repugnant.
“Please go away! Leave me alone!” she resorted to begging.
“I won’t leave until I have some fun with you,” he said, his voice laced with anger, ignoring her pleading and leaving no doubt in her mind that he meant business.
“I will scream!” she threatened.
Enraged by her threat, he grabbed her throat, his hands like the claws of a wild animal seizing its prey, using enough pressure to make her breathing difficult. Her stomach turned. When she offered resistance by grabbing his wrists, he released her throat and slapped her twice, hard across her face. He then drew a revolver from under his belt, released the safety, cocked it and held its cold barrel to her temple.
“Try to understand me, you fuckin’ trash! I’m gonna’ kill you, you bitch, and fuck your dead body! Which will it be, fucking you dead or alive? Come on! Let’s have it, bitch!”
Feeling the coldness of the gun on her temple, unnerved by his brutal and atrocious words, deadly jagged fear ran through her mind and paralyzed her entire body. It instantly made her realize the seriousness of his threat and the inevitability of his actions.
“Do whatever you want with me, but ... please don’t kill me!” she said, her voice quivering. Those were the only words with which she pleaded her case, before involuntarily turning her face to the wall, staring – an expression of docile resignation, relinquishing her shivering body to him.
He didn’t even trouble himself to take off or dropping his pants. Instead, with a grin on his face, he hurriedly peeled off her skirt and panties and began fondling her shaking legs and thighs. He then unzipped his pants, took out his erect penis and without paying any attention to her trembling body, he pulled her up on her knees and elbows and penetrated her from behind. She felt a piercing pain. It surged throughout her body. It nauseated her. To prevent vomiting, she placed her palm over her mouth. She had to swallow her saliva repeatedly to stop from throwing up. Hurting, shivering, moaning, crying, the thought of death crossed her mind. She wished that she could have had the guts to encourage the bastard to shoot her.
The fast few miserable minutes that it took for him to receive his life-long dreamed reward for his participation in the revolution felt painfully, agonizingly long to her. He then withdrew himself, smiling victoriously, happy and content that he had done his duty by humiliating and inflicting pain on the enemy, as any devoted soldier of the mullah’s version of Islam should do. He felt proud that he had had sex with a famous dame – a celebrity from the last regime. And, above all, he had proven his manhood to himself. He was absolutely oblivious of the fact that he had robbed her of her last ounce of dignity.
He left her on the floor crying. Separated by a hair from going completely mad, she went on crying, as if the flood of tears could wash away her misery. Before she had time to pull herself together, two more young guards entered the cell and used her partially numbed and battered body to enjoy themselves. When they finally finished with her, joking and laughing, they left her motionless on the cold floor. They were unaware that they had shattered the last likelihood that she would ever again find a soft spot in her heart for any man.
All the agonies that the name Zee-Zee had brought her were too much of a heavy load on her frail shoulders. She began to dislike the sound of her name. She decided to call herself Fatemeh again. By changing her name, she wanted to go back and be the little five-year-old girl, who only wanted to dance on her little feet and sing happy songs with her velvety-soft, high-pitched voice. But she was thirty-six years old now, broken down, terrified, and betrayed. The glow of laughter and youth had long since left her face. She had been reduced to trash, a champion of degradation in the eyes of the Islamic government.
When she could no longer see the splendor of living, and saw only an evil world in her solitude, the thought of committing suicide crossed her mind repeatedly; but each time, the thought of death terrified her and left her no other choice, no other option, except to keep on living.
Only the resonance of Omar Khayyam’s poems hummed with her soft voice and accompanied by a flood of tears could temporarily wash her pain away and put her to sleep each night.
Chapter Six
After hundreds of hours of sleepless nights and countless gruesome interrogations, after they had received a detailed list of her fortune and were absolutely convinced that she had nothing else left, they let her go. Although she was no longer useful to them, she was still warned not to leave the city.
The night following her release, before she had time to dust off her few old pieces of furniture, several Revolutionary Guards woke her up and threw her out into the street. They confiscated her house and everything else that had survived from their previous raid. The homeless Fatemeh who had by now lost all her capacity for independence was forced to share a small apartment with an old friend of her mother’s, whose memories of her as a child were still fresh in her mind.
She had lost her job, her position in society and her purpose in life, which had once defined her identity. In the eyes of the revolutionaries, she had become completely irrelevant – as if she were invisible. Of course, she didn’t know that even in the last regime, a lot of people had traded their identities to join the ranks of irrelevancy – invisibility, so that they could eat better. And she was not aware that the cruel newly-formed Islamic Republic of Iran would fiercely insist on making entire masses of people even more irrelevant – invisible, and, as time would go by, as an unavoidable process for all revolutions, it would “eat its own children”, those who worked tirelessly hard to oil its machine.
Left with nothing else to do except count the days, Fatemeh resigned herself to the passing of long days and sleepless nights, those two cunning elements that seemed heartless thieves of her life. But she kept a small hope alive in her heart, at times insisting to her hopeless self that things would get better, that things would go back to “normal” soon. They never did.
On September 23, 1980, the radio stations and TV channels all over the country announced the unexpected attack of Iraq’s ground forces on the Iranian forces on all fronts: from the port cities of Khoramshahr with the largest oil refinery in Iran, and Abadan, the main oil-exporting pipeline artery of the country in the south on the Persian Gulf, to the northern border cities in Kurdistan province. Although the attack came as a surprise to many Iranians, there were numerous convincing reasons as to why Saddam Hussein decided to embark upon such a lofty military venture. The Shah had supported Mostafa Barezani, the popular and charismatic Kurdish leader of northern Iraq’s insurgence against Saddam Hussein, and that had left deep animosity and resentment in Saddam’s heart against Iranians. Later, when the relationship of Saddam Hussein and the Shah improved to some degree, Saddam Hussein, per the Shah’s request, forced Khomeini and his family out of Iraq. This insult to a spiritual leader of Iran who had led a successful revolution against a tyrant wasn’t going to be easily erased from the minds of the zealot revolutionaries.
That is why, immediately after the revolution, Iraq became the target of the propaganda against Saddam Hussein. The Islamic Republic of Iran, looking at the 60 percent Shi’ite population of Iraq, decided it was the best ground to export its revolution. The province of Khuzistan in Iran, with an ocean of oil reserves under its soil, once militarily
