These days I have a new guest in my cell.

Hussein Abi had finished performing his prayers at the Imam Reza shrine in Mashhad and had prayed to God to find him a good wife to relieve him of his lonliness. He had just turned thirty, was short and stocky with a big, round belly. In Mahshad bazaar, everybody knew him as Hussein Abi, Hussein the Blue. He was mad about football and supported the Blues and was dead against the Reds…He was returning to his little shop when the sound of sobbing caught his attention. He walked in the direction of the noise and saw a woman draped in a black chador. She was crying and her shoulders were shaking. “Excuse me sister, are you alright?”

The woman explained that she had lost all her family in Iraqi attack in the south of Iran and that she herself had fled, fearing rape at the hands of Iraqi soldiers. She had come to Mashhad to seek protection under the auspices of Imam Reza. Hussein Abi told her that if she wished, she could stay with his old mother a couple of days. The woman accepted the offer and set off with Hussein…From time to time, when Hussein turned his head to check whether the stranger was following him, he noticed the outline of a good figure, and this would make him restless.

…The beautiful olive-skinned Fatimeh Khanum, who was called Fati, was a woman of few words and having found her place in the neighborhood, soon married Hussein who was madly in love with her. She gave birth to a baby girl, Ziba and three years later she became sister to a new baby girl, Rana.

…It was on the night of Rana’s birthday that the family heard loud knocks on the door. The room was filled with men and machine-guns. They were all taken away. When Hussein Abi, my new cellmate reaches this part of his story, he becomes silent and tears run down his face…His feet are still in bandages and it took him days to warm to me and talk in his thick Mashhadi accent….he is asked to provide information about organization matters and since he’d never been exposed to this type of vocabulary and had no answers, they assume he’s a real professional. They send him to Tehran and under torture all he does is to call out God’s name in praise. Eventually Fatimeh gives in…”I have been telling you lies Haj Agha…I am an active member of the Peykar organization…I fled and came to Mashhad with a fake ID. Divorce me. I am not into politics anymore and have fallen in love with our simple life. Go away and look after our children.”

A cleric present at the meeting says: “This woman is forbidden to you. She is a communist, a polluted infidel”. Hussein Abi answers: “My beloved saint, Imam Reza, gave her to me as a gift…You, who are torturers, cannot forbid me what God has allowed me. I have no idea what this Peykar thing is about. I am not going to leave my wife and if you make me, I’ll go straight to Mashhad’s main market, shout and yell and set fire to myself and my children, there and then”