I had no idea what he was talking about, but armed with tools I knew how to use and a lot of time, I was no longer alone. I stretched out on the floor of my cell, folding my two blankets and placing them under my torso. It was the closest approximation to a desk in that environment that I could muster. I lay down and started to write.
From the very beginning my life has been another episode in a long series of improbabilities. That’s not really that unique. I’m American, the product of parents who were raised in very different but equally conservative settings and got out.
My brother was born in 1970, and then so was I, on the Ides of March of America’s bicentennial year, 1976. The Year of the Dragon on the Chinese Zodiac. By all accounts I was a happy kid in a happy family.
My dad’s business, Rezaian Persian Rugs, thrived. A year after I was born he remodeled his shop front to resemble a Persian dome, becoming an instant landmark at the beginning of a well-traveled strip of Highway 1 that people all over the world talk about even now. It still stands, and it’s still a rug shop, but it’s been a long time since it was Rezaian Persian Rugs.
We lived in a large two-acre compound in San Rafael, fifteen miles north of San Francisco. My parents bought it in 1972, before it was a desirable location and around the time the town served as a shooting location for American Graffiti.
Everything about our home was big. A five-bedroom house with an eighteen-hundred-square-foot guesthouse, both covered in Persian rugs. We had the biggest home pool I have ever seen.
My parents loved the openness and seclusion of the land with space for horses and fruit trees, and the privacy we had as the property butted up against county land that still hasn’t been developed.
The door was always open and weekends meant large gatherings of relatives and friends by the pool in “Taghi’s garden,” barbecuing and laughing.
We were less than a mile from the Marin County fairgrounds and on the Fourth of July everyone would climb to the roof to watch the fireworks display that danced above the patch of massive eucalyptus trees on the eastern border of our spread.
For my dad his entire identity became wrapped up in that piece of land, and for us it was an idyllic place to grow up.
My brother, Ali, and I went to private school, where we fit in just fine. I can’t recall a single instance of anything even resembling discriminatory treatment from classmates or teachers. We were different from many of the other kids only in that we weren’t Jewish and had just one set of parents.
I made friends easily, which is good, because I was always the fat kid.
I loved Star Wars. That was my thing. All the action figures. Star Wars birthday cakes, Halloween costumes, bedsheets. Even wallpaper in Ali’s and my bedroom. No one else had all those.
Later I fell in love with baseball, specifically the Oakland A’s. Aunt Mae and Unk, who had helped raise my mom, moved into the guesthouse—“the cottage,” we called it—when I was five. Unk, who was in his midseventies by then, became my closest friend, and he and I had season tickets starting in the mid-eighties, just before the A’s got good. We went to an All-Star game, the playoffs, and two World Series.
We were typical Americans with a few Iranian twists.
Three of my dad’s six sisters and his younger brother had all moved to Marin by the early eighties. My grandparents, who had come from Iran for an extended visit before the shah had been toppled, stayed. More of their children were now in Marin County than were in Mashhad. Twice a week we would gather at my aunts’ home for dinner, learning the initial lessons of the culture through our stomachs.
On the Persian New Year, or Nowruz, the first day of spring, we would all get together just like we would on Christmas or Thanksgiving. Our life was a quintessentially blended one and that suited me fine.
I remember quite vividly the visceral responses of my mild-mannered and fun-loving aunts and cousins who would curse the television every time reports of fuming Iranians burning American flags were aired.
“That is not who we are,” they would plead, as if someone inside the set were listening, waiting to be convinced.
And from my point of view they were right. “Iranian” to me meant vibrant, talkative, generous, colorful people who liked to dance, wore too much makeup and perfume, and had funny accents.
The early 1980s had not been good to my dad. Shortly after the Iranian revolution, when any endeavor remotely involved with Iran or Iranians was considered suspect or taboo, he helped usher in a new and enduring stereotype: the never-ending rug shop liquidation sale.
It was 1984 when my dad started his first one, and it worked.
The haze of the cocaine-and-marijuana-infused seventies was wearing off, and even in ultraliberal end of the road Marin County, the bigotry of America against a new boogeyman worked to devastating effect. Following the euphoria of the fifty-two U.S. embassy hostages’ release in early 1981 for my dad and other Iranians in America, life would never be as it was.
“The Sale,” as it forever became known in local rug man lore, was his chance to settle the score. For well over a year the signs hung in the window and the radio ads pounded the “all-news, all the time” and classical-music airwaves. The advertising men said that was his target audience, because none of the online tools to quantify an ad campaign’s efficacy existed yet.
A phenomenon that has devolved into a stereotype of popular culture started off as an event.
Customers drove from hundreds of miles away to buy rugs at “up to ninety percent off!,” because in those days people still listened to the far-reaching waves of AM radio. There were deals to be had. Friends who had never considered buying a rug walked home with ten. They thought he was doing them a favor. Little did they know it was the other way around.
Searchlights lit up the sky. I had only ever seen those outside of a circus before, but these were drawing the people to us. I say “us” because on some weekends my brother and I became part of the sales force. The fish were biting and Dad needed as many lines as he could get in the water. I remember the buzz of shaking hands to close a deal, and the exchange of stacks of hundred-dollar bills. Selling rugs, like selling drugs, is often a cash game.
It’s impossible to know how much Rezaian Persian Rugs did in sales during the liquidation, because due to industry norms the books were notoriously incomplete, but it was in the multimillions. For a nine-year-old kid who was suddenly recognizable locally, it was thrilling. And then it stopped.
I didn’t understand what bankruptcy was or how someone got to be called a creditor, I just knew my dad had a lot of them, and it was messy.
For several years after that Dad tried his hand at different businesses. He opened a shoe store in San Francisco—Shoes, Shoes and More—and later the first Persian restaurant, Shiraz, in Marin County. But rugs were in his blood.
On weekends before I could drive I would often end up at flea markets and estate sales with him. He enticed me with the possibility of baseball cards, which I collected passionately from the time I was seven. We’d pay the entrance fee, he wandering in search of rugs and I looking for cards. Once we found what we were looking for his opening offer was a standard “How much for all of them?”
We ended up with a lot of baseball cards and a lot of rugs. Decades later I’m still trying to figure out ways to unload them all.
As I grew up he picked up an appreciation for baseball, accompanying me to games when Unk got too old—he’d wear an all-denim ensemble with a mesh Oakland A’s cap, and was invariably confused for a migrant worker on a night off. As he was almost everywhere, at the ballpark, Taghi Rezaian was an anomaly.
He’d have a black coffee and a hot dog, and fill a cup with sauerkraut, which he’d eat as though it were a side salad. He grew to understand and love baseball—further evidence of his Americanness.
In the years after his bankruptcy, though, and until he could start building credit again, he was very restless and these excursions did little to distract him.
His experience was gold to a lot of rug men. In those days it was easy enough to get a permit in most communities to run a liquidation sale. He knew where you could and could not do one, depending on county regulations, for a very wide radius. He had a nose for where a sale would work and where one wouldn’t. It was just one more of the many formulas—equal parts median income, common sense, and gut feeling—that he had unscientifically worked out to rationalize a project. Some worked, others didn’t.
Election years, he would tell you, “are very good for sales.” Unless they aren’t. When gas prices are high sales are low, because “people won’t drive as far as they used to for a deal.” Retail businesses must stay open on Super Bowl Sunday because “it’s a great day for women to shop.”
There was always an answer and it didn’t always line up with reality. Opacity was an industry-wide problem that chipped away at the rug community’s credibility until it became the joke that it is today.
That stereotype stuck, and I always considered it a great shame, not because it wasn’t deserved—it most certainly was—but because the Persian rug man, although never overly respected, was always the best link to the old country. For one thing, they continued to do business with Iran even when it was illegal, figuring out new and inventive ways to skirt U.S. embargoes on rugs. That alone kept them connected to the beat of commercial life in Tehran from the other side of the world. And in a country where commerce is everything, those who understood what was happening in the bazaar provided the best analyses of events on the ground.
True, they weren’t married to facts and figures, but statistics coming from Iran and other Middle Eastern countries are notoriously flawed. The rug man’s information, like that of a good reporter, was gathered at the street level from a variety of sources: exporters, housewives, transport professionals, weavers, repairmen, trade ministers. A cross section of the society.
Maybe that’s why from the mid-1970s until he died, my dad was always on the list of people to consult about Iran, whether it was local media, members of Congress, or federal agents, who started appearing at our home in Marin periodically, unannounced, in 2007. They were trying to retrieve a former agent named Bob Levinson who had disappeared on an Iranian island. At the time of writing, he’s still missing. For some reason the Feds thought my dad could help.
It wasn’t that he was a “person of interest,” but rather he was someone who could provide color, a granular read on Iran, beyond headlines and bombastic statements made by Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and others.
As the years passed and I spent more time in Iran, but also in my dad’s rug shop, that legacy was being passed to me. All of it.
Revisiting where I came from felt good. Someday this will also be just a story. One that someone else gets to tell. The tiny act of being able to write my own story as my captors tried to rewrite the realities of my life was a weapon. It offered me an escape from my present circumstances and the sliver of perspective. It was a gift that they hadn’t meant to give me but couldn’t take back.
Writing about my family history, in that great void where I couldn’t touch or hear anyone I loved, was soothing. By then comfort was all I was looking for.
“The Great Judge says it is not good,” Kazem told me solemnly two days after I had given him the pages.
Tough editor, that Great Judge, I thought.
“It is not complete.”
“How do you know? It’s my life story.”
“There is nothing about your ’spionage.”
“Because there is no ’spionage.”
“The Great Judge wants to know more about where you have traveled. He says tell him about Thailand. Specially any negotiations with Israeli agents there.”
“Bring me more paper.”
At my core I’m a travel writer. I wrote about everywhere I’d been and why I’d gone. Maybe that would put an end to all of this.
JUST OVER A MONTH INTO MY TIME, KAZEM CAME BACK AND TOLD ME THAT WE WERE GOING FOR a trip.
“Where?”
“Court.”
“Where is my lawyer?”
“You don’t have the right to a lawyer yet,” he said as calmly as always.
I sat in a waiting room, where I was brought a glass of tea, and then was taken into the office of Tehran’s prosecutor, Abbas Jafari Dolatabadi, considered by most Iranians a caricature of the most sinister members of the Islamic Republic’s legal establishment.
He was the farcical character you might expect. He dressed in a shabby gray suit over a black shirt—“perpetual mourner,” which is a look in Iran—with a large ashy bump on his forehead, or the “stamp” of prayer, one of the most clichéd revolutionary bona fides, and his missing hand, presumably lost on the battlefield in the war with Iraq and undoubtedly his highest qualification for holding this influential post as long as he had. Another possible badge of honor was his 2011 designation by the United States as a human rights abuser.
I had seen him once before in 2013 at the Interior Ministry in Tehran when he, along with hundreds of other Iranians, flirted with a presidential run. I wrote a story about the carnival scene there, which I headlined “Want to Be the Next President of Iran? Take a Number.”
He wasted no time in launching into questions about me and my work. It seemed as though I was finally making some progress, as he was the first person I’d seen since my arrest that wasn’t addressing me as a spy. But that’s probably because he wasn’t really talking except for his very short questions.
“Why did you make the ‘Happy’ video?” he asked.
“What?” This was the first time I was hearing this particular accusation.
“You directed this ‘Happy’ video. That is a big problem for you,” the prosecutor told me. “It’s why you are here.”
A few weeks before my arrest there had been a brief hullabaloo about an Iranian-produced video clip for the Pharrell Williams song “Happy.” Fans all over the world shot amateur video of people in their local countries dancing to the hit tune. It was a viral thing on the Internet and some industrious young Iranians had gotten in on the act—and were quickly arrested for anti-regime activities. I didn’t see this as a big story, or at least not the kind that was worth a lot of space, but my editors did, citing an interest from our audience. So I wrote it up, significantly later than other outlets. Now, a couple of months later, the clip’s production was being pinned on me.
I resisted.
“That had nothing to do with me. If that’s what this is all about it’s time to let me go.”
Dolatabadi wasn’t the type to get very animated. In fact he seemed disinterested. If I shut down a line of questioning he wasn’t persistent. He just moved onto the next thing, and there was a ton of them.
Finally he, too, got into the avocado act.
Jesus Christ, I was thinking. The fact that my failed avocado project ever got legs as an accusation is so far beyond far-fetched that I struggle with whether I should even bring it up in retrospect.
After I attempted to explain Kickstarter and crowdfunding one more time, he cut me off.
“At least tell us where the avocado farm is.”
He can’t be serious. I shook my head and rolled my eyes. Hard to tell with this guy.
He was irritated. This is a typical look on Iranian bureaucrats. I knew it well. It was August and the room was hot and smelled of one too many goons who hadn’t showered in days.
“I’m not convinced,” he concluded after an hour and a half of abrupt backs-and-forths.
“Of what?” I asked.
“That you are reliable. I don’t have enough trust.” He said the last word in English. “Maybe next time.”
“When will that be?”
“Only God knows.”
And with that I was blindfolded again, put back in the van, and redeposited in solitary.
AFTER WEEKS OF GETTING NOWHERE WITH THE TRUTH I TRIED TO SWITCH GEARS. THE ONLY GOAL I had at that point was to get out of solitary confinement. I unders
tood, to some degree, the case they were trying to build against me. There was no backing up what they accused me of, but in the vacuum there was no way to disprove it either.
I labored long and hard. What’s the right thing to do here? They see me as representative of the enemy strictly because of my employer.
“I’m an officer in the West’s soft war against Iran,” I wrote. I felt disgusted with myself, but also relief.
Kazem was excited.
“This is very good.” It was exactly what he wanted.
But he came back the next day dejected and a little angry.
“The Great Judge says you can’t say that,” Kazem said.
“Why not?”
“It sounds too much like our way of talking.”
That’s what I was going for.
But it worked. Sort of.
The next day Kazem told me at the end of a long session that I was being rewarded for my cooperation. It was late August and the days were getting shorter.
“You do something for us, we do something for you. This is our way,” he said arrogantly. “Today you will see your wife.”
“You’re lying,” I said, but I was desperate to have some reason to hope. “When?”
“Now,” he said. I didn’t believe him. “Prepare yourself. Be a man. Do not cry.”
“This is really happening?”
“Yes. Why not?” As if I’d only imagined the past month.
He led me into an interrogation room that I knew well.
“Sit here and do not talk. You can only see each other. No speaking.”
Even in these circumstances that seemed an excessive demand, but it wasn’t a moment for me to try to make deals.
Yegi’s interrogator Siamak arrived and said, “She will be right here,” as if he were my friend. I was anxious and they were oddly giddy.
A middle-aged woman in black chador walked into the room ahead of Yegi, who was wearing a pink version of the same kind of prison pajamas I was wearing and a veil. She was blindfolded. They sat her across the room, facing me.
Prisoner Page 7
