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Mrs. Ghandsaz I interviewed Mrs. Ghandsaz (pseud.) over a two-day period in her apartment in Los Angeles in 1992. She had somehow heard of the interviews I was conducting, telephoned, and asked me to visit her. I apologized, saying I had no time and was leaving in two days. She called again insisting that I record her story, which she was certain would be unlike any other. It was. Once I started the machine, I felt in the presence of a one-woman play by Samuel Beckett—perhaps Not I. At the end of the first three hours, which focused entirely on her own sorrow, she hadn’t yet reached the death of her husband. She claimed that her suffering had been greater than that of any other human—comparable, she said, to the Holocaust. This is a highly condensed version of her six-hour monologue over two days; she resisted any effort to turn the meeting into an interview and ignored most of my questions. I decided not to split her narrative into other parts of this book, to keep it intact and centered on her obsessive reading of the life and death of her husband. She spoke in Persian. At the age of twelve I was married to my cousin through an arranged marriage. My husband had lost his father when he was twelve years old and was forced to become the head of the family. My father, a well-respected merchant in the bazaar, took my future husband with him to his chamber in the bazaar and introduced him to other merchants. We started our married life in a two-bedroom house, where, when I was fifteen, my first son was born. My husband was honest and gentle—everybody liked him; he saved factories from bankruptcy and workers from joblessness. He also set up a factory about thirty kilometers from Isfahan that produced 180,000 meters of cloth a day, and ninety-two types of fabric including a worsted wool that competed with the best from England. But I lost everything in this revolution. During the twentyseven years I was married to my husband, only twice did he travel abroad with me. His whole love was his work. Everyone worshiped him like an idol because of his modesty and reserve. mrs. ghandsaz 157 After the Shah left the country, the harassment started gradually. I have two beautiful daughters. We started receiving telephone calls from men who claimed they were my son’s classmates. One would say, “Now it’s your turn to be on foot and our turn to ride. Your daughter is mine. At which registrar’s office shall we be married?” Then arrests and lootings and imprisonments started. The banks were set on fire. My husband rationalized all the other killings by saying the victims had done something wrong. This went on until we heard Elghanian was executed. Elghanian was another rich Jewish businessman, not much below my husband in rank. They accused him—like they did my husband—of Zionism. One day, three men with machine guns burst into my husband’s office and told him that the governor wanted to see him. My husband was stunned. They pushed him into a jeep and drove away. This was in September 1980. The workmen, who had always been very friendly, told my son about his father’s arrest and offered to help him escape. But while my son was getting out of his work attire, gunmen arrived and grabbed him by the neck and took him away, too. We were completely unaware of all this until a worker at my husband’s factory called to inform us. I called several friends who said, “Mr. Ghandsaz is liked by everybody. They probably want to ask some questions. No problem. He’ll be back.” I got in the car and drove to Najafabad, about thirty miles away. I went to the court with some factory workers I had picked up on the way. Whenever I asked where my husband was, the guards would tell me, smirking, “We didn’t take your husband. He is at his office.” I threw myself in the middle of the street, beating myself, and calling to God and the prophet, saying, “I want to see my husband. No matter what he has done you have to let me see him and find out on what charge you have arrested him.” For fifteen days, I did not know where...

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