This narrative was told to Zan Times:
My name is Tala, which means gold in Farsi. I wonder what my parents thought when they chose this name for me. Perhaps I was as precious to them as gold, maybe even more. Maybe.
Every Friday, I go to the city’s main cemetery, and I weep and mourn at my son’s unmarked grave. I wander for hours, looking for a grave that matches my son’s name and age. When I see it, I sit there for hours, crying for him. When I’m at home, I don’t even have permission to cry or mention my son’s name.
Although my husband was unemployed, his behaviour was tolerable. That changed after our son’s death. . He blames me for his death. Now, my husband takes every opportunity to beat me and verbally abuse me.
My husband used to work in construction in Kabul. After the Taliban took over, everyone fled. No one builds houses anymore. My husband became unemployed and, due to the high cost of living in Kabul, we decided to migrate to Iran.
The construction industry was doing well in Iran. Our life improved but we had a major problem: we did not have legal documents to stay in Iran. Every day that my husband left our home to work, he trembled until the evening for fear that Iranian forces tasked with the arrest of refugees from Afghanistan would arrest him and send him back across the border.
One night, he said, “I found a good way to get documents.”
Happy that this problem was finally solved, I asked, “What way?” My husband didn’t answer, saying only, “You’ll be informed in due time.”
A few days later, he suddenly went looking for work in another city, and took our son with him. He said if the job were good, he would bring the rest of the family. Although my heart was skeptical, I let them go.
After a week, my husband returned alone. I asked about our son, and he said, “I enrolled our son in the Fatemiyoun Brigade. Now, we can obtain legal documents to stay in Iran. If he serves in Syria for a while, they’ll grant us permanent residency in Iran.”
It felt like the world had collapsed on me. I couldn’t even hear my husband’s words due to my intense anger. The thought of my son going to Syria and, God forbid, something happening to him, drove me crazy. I worried because there is no shortage of families who had lost their beloved youths in the Syrian war.
The next day, I ignored my husband’s objections and resistance and set out to bring my son home. When I arrived at the barracks where my son was stationed, I gave his name and details to the guard. After searching on the computer, he said, “Yes, your son is here.” I said, “I don’t want my son to go to Syria. I want him to come home.” The officer looked surprised and said, “Madam, your son has been here for a week now. He wasn’t brought here forcibly; his father signed and approved it. And now he can’t leave.”
No matter how much I begged that soldier, it was like talking to a wall. He said it wasn’t up to him. I sat outside the barracks’ gate, hoping to see the commander or someone in charge.
It was winter, the weather was cold, and nights were colder, but despite all these hardships, I sat at the gate step of that barracks for two full days without food and water. I was determined to bring my son home.
After two days, the commander couldn’t ignore my distress. He invited me inside. With tears and pleading, I asked him to release my son so I could take him home. When he saw my desperation, he wrote a letter and assigned a soldier to bring my son.
I returned home with my son, but I was afraid that my husband’s unemployment, poverty, and lack of documents would tempt him to send our son to Syria again. Moreover, since our son was unemployed, he was associated with bad companions, which worried me even more. At that time, I heard about people leaving Iran for Europe, where they started new lives.
Without telling my husband, I decided to send my son to Europe so he could build a better future there. I needed a lot of money. I used my savings, sold our daughters’ gold jewellery, and borrowed more money from relatives. I arranged to pay for my son’s migration and sent him away without consulting my husband.
Two days later, after my son crossed the Turkish border, my husband realized that our son had gone toward Europe. He was furious and vented all his anger at me with insults, curses, and beatings, but I thought that my son’s happiness and safety were worth the curses and pain.
My dark days returned when, after a month of trying to enter Greece from Turkey, my son was arrested and deported by Turkish police. When he contacted me from Turkey to say he had been arrested, I told myself it was okay – he’d come back to me, and I’d send him again when the opportunity arose.
About two weeks passed without hearing from my son. During that time, I lived a thousand deaths as I dealt with my worries, fears, and stress as well as my husband’s anger and threats. Then, my son contacted me to say that he had been deported to Afghanistan.
I asked him to use any remaining money to get a passport and visa so he could legally return to Iran. For six months, he tried to get a passport but couldn’t because the passport issuance and distribution process had been halted. So, he resorted to being illegally smuggled into Iran.
After he started his journey towards Iran, his phone was off for three or four days. We tried calling the number of the smuggler he was using but without an answer. Finally, he finally answered and said that Iranian border guards had shot and wounded some of them while they were crossing. Our son was among the injured and was hospitalized in a clinic in a border city. The world had turned dark for us. My husband went to the border city by the first bus.
When my husband returned alone three days later, I realized how difficult my situation had become; my son wasn’t wounded but killed. When I asked about our son’s funeral, my husband said, “Since government bullets killed him, I would have had to pay a lot of money to get his body. I told them I don’t want the body at all.”
No matter how much I cried and mourned, no matter how much I pleaded, my husband never agreed to pay for the return of our son’s body. “My son is not alive for me to pay for his freedom; what good is his body to me?” he said.
My husband blames me for our son’s death. He won’t allow me to mention his name and verbally abuses me if I say it. Sometimes, I come to the city cemetery and sit on the graves of young men with the same name as my son, mourning for his lost life.
*Names have been changed to protect the identity of the interviewees and writer. Nargis Rahmani is the pseudonym of a journalist from Afghanistan, now a refugee in Iran.
