Memoirs of Mehri Hajinejad from “The Last Laughter of Leila”— Part Eight
In the previous part, we read about the suffocating routine inside the women’s ward — the endless interrogations, the constant fear, and the small, fragile ways the prisoners tried to hold each other together. Mehri Hajinejad described how the guards tried to crush even the smallest moments of joy, and how every person in the ward lived with the dread of not knowing who might be taken next. In this part, she turns to one of the most harrowing chapters of those years: the small children imprisoned alongside their mothers, innocent children who should have been playing in warm homes, but instead grew up to the sound of gunfire, screams, and torture.
Innocent Children in Captivity
Mahmoud, Golnaz’s five-year-old son, was only one example, and compared to many of the other imprisoned children, his situation was relatively better. At least his mother was with him. One of the regime’s most inhuman crimes in prison was detaining the small children of PMOI mothers who had been arrested or killed.
Lajevardi, whose hatred for the PMOI, especially its leadership, was something animalistic, used to say: “I’ll make those PMOI brats stand against their parents. I’ll turn these little monafeghs[1] into loyal followers of the Imam’s line (Khomeini, the regime’s founder).”
So, they refused to hand infants and toddlers over to their families.
The prison environment had devastating emotional and physical effects on these innocent children. Instead of playing with toys and running around with kids their own age, they spent their days watching torture scenes, seeing the bloodied faces and shredded legs of their mothers and relatives. At night, they heard the machine-gun executions and lived in constant fear.
In May 1982, one of these children was brought into our ward and temporarily placed in the care of one of the prisoners, Soudabeh. They had named him Mehdi. When he arrived, he looked four or five months old. Fragile. Sickly.
He had been captured together with two other children during a raid on a PMOI safe house. Everyone in that house had been killed. When the attack began, Mehdi’s mother wrapped him in a blanket and hid him in the bathroom, hoping it was safer. When the guards finally blasted through and stormed the home, the only living beings they found were the three children.
It was almost sunset when they brought him to our ward. We all gathered around him. Just looking at him filled me with heavy grief. He trembled like a wounded sparrow and only cried, perhaps he understood his mother was gone. I didn’t know who she was at the time. Later I learned that his real name was Ali and he was the beloved son of the martyred PMOI member Fatemeh Abolhasani, a 24-year-old university student killed on May 5, 1982.
I kept seeing the image of his mother in my mind, the moment she must have torn herself away from her baby to protect his life. That grief would quickly turn into a deeper determination to fight these butchers.
Every day I spent several hours caring for him. Later, they said there had been a mistake, that his name was actually Ali. Once we even found a small note tucked into a pouch that said Amir. In the end, none of us ever learned whether he was Mehdi, Ali, or Amir.
Ali grew slowly. His body stayed tiny. But by age two or three, he somehow knew all 600 prisoners in the ward. Whenever a new prisoner arrived, he was the first to get excited. For him, it was a novelty; someone new, someone different. He’d shout with joy, “New one?” Then he’d rush toward her and ask in his sweet toddler language:
“What’s your name? Which branch interrogates you? Who’s your interrogator? Did you get your sentence? Do you have kids? Which room are you in? When were you arrested? Did they hurt you too?”
And then he’d stare at her legs, checking for bruises.
Whenever the loudspeakers crackled, he would run to the front of the ward, tense and alert, trying to hear the name being called. As soon as he heard it, he would rush from room to room looking for the woman summoned, whispering nervously, “Auntie… interrogation… interrogation.”
It was as if his little heart left the ward with every woman dragged out; and every evening, he checked to make sure they had all come back. Without asking anyone, he would look at each woman’s legs himself.
Whenever a prisoner walked down the hallway with swollen injured feet, Ali walked beside her, and with every step she took, he’d say “ouch… ouch…” flinching as if he felt the pain himself.
Ali had become part of our lives. Everyone tried to do something for him.
Shahin-khanoom always saved sugar cubes for him.
Azar sewed him a beautiful little outfit from her chador fabric.
And I walked him up and down the long narrow hallway for hours every day.
He had learned our routine so well that every morning at eight he came to our door, calling, “Mahpooopeh, Mahpooopeh!” — he had no verbs in his speech, but that one word meant: “Come on, let’s walk.”
I often walked with Shahin-khanoom, or Shahnaz, or Aghdas, or Zohreh, sometimes with Jalileh, four rounds a day, totaling eight hours. Ali followed behind us, imitating us with his hands behind his back, walking fast to keep up. He won everyone’s heart. On our walks he practically tracked the daily routines of all six rooms in the ward.
But as he grew a bit older, keeping him inside became impossible. Whenever the door cracked open even slightly, before we could turn around, he’d shoot out like a bullet and run straight down the corridor toward Ward 216.
He wanted to escape those walls — to breathe. The guards would catch him and drag him back. It happened daily and made all of us laugh. Eventually the guard threatened us:
“You people are deliberately sending this kid out to gather information for you!”
His stupidity, or rather his inhumanity, kept him from understanding that a two- or three-year-old child simply couldn’t survive in that dungeon without trying to run.
One day they threatened to remove him altogether, claiming we didn’t want to take care of him and were pushing him out on purpose. Terrified they might take him away, those of us who had chadors tied them together until it formed a long strip, about 30–40 meters. We tied it around Ali’s waist so that if he ran out again, the dragging fabric would alert us.
One day Lajevardi came to the front of the ward for some reason. Ali went right up to him and, in total childish innocence, said:
“Auntie… why does your face look like that? You scare me.”
Lajevardi exploded.
“Little monafegh! Which monafegh woman taught you to call me auntie?!”
Then he bellowed insults, every filthy word that actually described him, he hurled at us, claiming we had deliberately trained the child to provoke him.
Ali didn’t know how to be a child. He had never seen one. He only mimicked adults. Sometimes he picked up a scrap of newspaper and pretended to read like Farideh and Minoo. He’d sling an IV tube around his neck like Azam, our medic. When he walked, he always imitated me.
In the spring of 1985, they took Ali away from Soudabeh and removed him from the ward. Later, in Gohardasht, through Fariba (who was imprisoned in Ward 246), I heard they had given Ali to a family to raise. They told his grandmother:
“You are unfit to raise him. You will turn him into a monafegh.”
For nearly twenty years, until only a few months before the book was published,[2] Ali lived constantly in my memories. I always wondered what became of him.
Recently, by pure coincidence, I learned that he had joined the National Liberation Army — and that he is now one of its fighters.
Saber… that is, Ali. Or Mehdi. Or Amir.
And it was one of the happiest pieces of news I have ever received.
[1] Monafegh — literally “hypocrite,” the regime’s derogatory term for PMOI members and supporters.
[2] “A few months ago” refers to a few months before the publication of Leila’s Last Smile in Bahman 1384 (February 2006).
