“You can uncover your eyes, Miss Salehi,” Kazem said.
I prepared myself with the biggest smile I could muster. Her eyes adjusted and she burst into tears at the sight of me. She was at once happier and more scared than I had ever seen her. Maybe not scared, but horrified. Her jolly, heavyset husband was now a shadow of his former self.
She smiled and tried to keep her composure and then motioned for me to stand up and turn sideways. She wanted to see the profile view. I was, it turned out, as thin as I thought myself to be. Maybe thinner.
They allowed us four minutes together and then they led her away.
As she left she turned and said, “Jason, I want to have a baby.”
I smiled and told her, “So do I.”
I went from the greatest moment of my life, one that I wanted to just savor, to being alone again in the room with Kazem.
“How was it?”
I didn’t say anything and began to weep the tears I wasn’t allowed to release in my wife’s view.
“You did well,” he said. “I commend you.”
And then he led me back to my cell.
SEEING YEGI FOR THE FIRST TIME BEGAN THE PERIOD OF TINY INCENTIVES. AFTER BATTING ME with the stick of threats for a month they began feeding me carrots.
“Jason, you are a Muslim,” Kazem proclaimed several weeks into my detention, “but you don’t pray. This is very bad.”
To the question of my faith or lack thereof, I’ve always faltered when trying to answer.
My lone visit to Mecca, with many of my Iranian relatives and my dad in 2006, did more to drive me away than anything else could from practicing organized religion. But I realized it was definitely not an argument I was going win in Evin. So I played along.
“How can I pray when I’ve never even read the Koran and you won’t give me one in English?”
“Would you like to read it?” Kazem asked.
“Very much so.” It was true. I was dying for something—anything—to read.
“I will try to get permission for an English one,” he promised.
“You need permission to let me read the Koran?” I asked indignantly. “That is not justice.”
“You are right.” I think he actually meant it.
Before praying, Kazem told me, I had to learn the way to ritually wash myself. This had to be done every time one defecated, urinated, or had sex.
“Or when you sleep and it’s like you had sex,” he explained. It took me a minute to realize he was talking about wet dreams, the only sexual experience he was conceding that he’d endured. He had a real contempt for all things carnal, which was probably just masking a fascination for the same.
He showed me, without water, how one performs the ritual ablution, or ghosl. I learned it quickly. It wasn’t very complicated.
He was obviously proud that he’d gotten me washing myself correctly and on day thirty-five he presented me with a very ornate Koran translated into Farsi and English alongside the original Arabic.
“Please treasure this forever. If you leave here to go to another prison or go home, please take it and remember me.”
“No matter how hard I try,” I assured him, “I’m sure I won’t be able to forget you.”
“It was very difficult to get permission, but I told my chief that it is every man’s right to read Koran. Like you said. He agreed.”
I read it cover to cover. For now let’s just say a man’s faith should remain between him and his maker, if he believes in one.
“YOU SHOULD BE VERY HAPPY. THIS TIME AS OUR GUEST WILL MAKE YOU FAMOUS,” KAZEM announced one day when he didn’t have many questions. “If you are ever released you will be rich and I will still only be a policeman.”
“Is that what you call yourself?” I wondered out loud. “A policeman?”
“It is my job. I have many jobs,” he said, pulling out a wallet filled with many different ID cards; one of them was indeed a police officer’s with his photo on it. He wouldn’t let me see the name. That made sense, but even if he had, I wouldn’t have been able to read it. I was still completely illiterate in Farsi.
“Well, I don’t think there will be any movie. There’s already been at least one about this place,” I remarked.
“Yes, Rosewater. It is coming soon,” Kazem announced. “Do you know him? Maziar Bahari?”
“No.” I was telling the truth. “Never met him.”
“We treated him very well here. But now he says we torched him,” Kazem lamented.
“Tortured,” I corrected him.
“What?”
“You said he said you torched him; that means you put him on fire. You meant torture. Like beating him.”
“Yes. Torture. Thank you. It is very good practice for my English to be with you. He said we tortured him, but it’s not true. I know his expert. He is my friend. Every day when he came to work he told his wife, ‘Make food for two people, not just one.’ And now he says bad things about us. It’s his fault I cannot bring you food from home.”
I think he’s fucking with me, I thought. I am so hungry.
“Yes, we treated him even better than we are treating you.”
“That wouldn’t have been too difficult,” I told him.
“Be fair, J. For all that you have done against our system you should be dead, but we treat you well. Here is like hotel. A nice quiet room. It’s very peaceful.” Yeah, he’s definitely fucking with me. “You are upset today. But be hopeful. You are a very important people.”
I just stared at him.
“Come on, who will be you in the movie?” he prodded.
“If they make a movie I know exactly who will play me,” I said with extreme confidence.
“Tell me.”
“Denzel Washington.” It was my semisarcastic answer to a dumb question that everyone has been asked at least once.
“Which one is he?” Kazem asked.
“I’m sure you’ve seen him many times.” I thought of all the films he’d been in and the ones Kazem might have seen. Glory? American Gangster? The Hurricane? I was pretty sure he wouldn’t have seen any of those.
“Training Day,” I said.
“Yes. I know it. The one about the bad black policeman,” Kazem said, summarizing the plot. “But you don’t look like him. You are too fat. That man is handsome and he has hair.” Kazem was talking about Ethan Hawke.
“No no. I mean the black one.”
“Oh, Malcolm X?” Kazem was puzzled.
“Exactly.” I had forgotten that one. Of course Kazem would know Malcolm X. There were billboards of his grandson, Malcolm Shabazz, all over Tehran then, calling him a martyr; he had been murdered in Mexico that May. Malcolm X was lionized in Iran, and so his biopic, starring Denzel Washington, was replayed often.
“But you are not black.” Kazem was confused.
“It’s my damn movie, I can have anyone I want play me. And I can get you your choice, too. Who do you want to play you, Kazem?” I was just trying to have a little fun.
He thought for a moment.
“I want the bad boy.”
“Who’s the bad boy?”
“The movie. Two blacks. Bad Boys. They are police like me.”
“Oh, you want Martin Lawrence to play you?” Now I was fucking with him.
“I don’t know his name. The bad boy.”
I stuck my hand behind my ears and pushed them out a little and did my best Sheneneh. “Yeah, I guess you do kind of look like Martin.”
“I don’t want the clown. I want Independence Day.”
“Ohhhh, Will Smith. Okay, this could work, but we may have to set the movie in the Caribbean or Nigeria.”
“Yes. They don’t look so Iranian.”
We both laughed. It was a moment that stuck with me. I now knew a little bit about Kazem’s taste in movies, and from that I might be able to extrapolate other information. I had to stop thinking of him as simply an Islamist adversary to my American sensibilities. I had to find the points of c
onnection.
And I recognized he was doing the same thing with me.
6
Circumstances Change with the Season
September 4, 2014
Earlier than the usual time for an interrogation, the door of my cell swung open. It was a Tuesday morning. Forty-two nights in solitary notched on the wall. Six weeks. Six fucking weeks.
The guard was one of the nicer ones, a guy in his twenties, shorter than me, who recited passages from the Koran and had tried to teach me one about asking for forgiveness that he told me he said whenever he felt helpless. It hadn’t worked for me.
“What’s happening?” I asked him as he led me down a corridor out a side of the building I didn’t recognize.
“You’re going to court. I think it’s finished,” he proclaimed.
“Finished? What do you mean?” I asked, bewildered. “My trial?”
“No. I think you’re being released,” he whispered excitedly. “If we have done anything to make it difficult for you, please forgive us.”
“Of course!” I told him as my natural optimism began to kick in. “You have been very kind.” I had no reason to believe him, but I didn’t have any reason not to either.
I was back on a dirt road. I thought I recognized a slope from the night we were hauled in. I was flanked on either side by men who didn’t talk and held me by my arms. They were forceful but remained calm, which made the situation feel all the more sinister. It was nothing like I’d imagined hostage scenes to be: chaotic and filled with threats against a struggling victim. They had done this before. Often. And what was I going to rebel against?
They guided me into the back of a van, to the seat directly behind the driver’s.
A guard sat next to me and another behind me. He put his hand on my shoulder, as if to say, “I’m here.”
Underneath a corner of my blindfold I could see a flap of black cloth draping toward the floor, which was almost certainly a chador, the all-encompassing sheet worn by many pious Iranian women.
Behind the woman I could hear someone else breathing and feel the anxiety she brought with her. It was another woman, but I had no way of knowing who. We weren’t allowed to talk.
I had to know if it was Yegi. When all doors were closed and the engine was turned on I said, “Salaam,” offering greetings to whoever was there, knowing someone had to answer. That’s customary.
She let out a tiny cry, and I knew then that I was with my wife.
I kept talking and the driver—the same bastard who drove us to prison that first night—told me I needed to stop.
“She’s my wife,” I responded.
“You’ll have time to talk when we get there,” he responded.
I wasn’t sure whether I could trust this or not, but I did as I was told.
Yegi cried behind me, and for the first time in the five years we were together she began reciting prayers.
After twenty minutes at high speeds on a highway headed mostly downhill, we began to wind around the hectic midmorning traffic of central Tehran.
Out the tinted window I saw a silly little train on wheels ferrying passengers around carless roads. We were approaching Tehran’s bazaar. I had spent so much time there over the years, from my first visit to Iran in 2001 to all the times I guided foreign visitors through the tiny covered alleys of rug shops and the various restaurants in and around the ancient shopping mall. I went there to work on stories and just for fun. It was one of my favorite parts of Tehran. It made Istanbul’s Grand Bazaar feel like a Disney version of a Middle Eastern souk. There was no map or television screens announcing the local weather, international news headlines, or currency exchange rates. It was all grit and commerce and I loved it. And as we pulled up that morning I understood that the odds of my ever seeing it again as a free man were slipping away and there was nothing I could do about it.
The van pulled into an alley and then passed a security gate. We were back at Tehran’s media court, where we had been processed six weeks earlier.
Yegi got out of the van behind me, and they led us in staggered, so we couldn’t hold each other’s hand. Court was apparently in session and the hallways were bustling with activity. We were the only people dressed in prison clothes and everyone stared.
It was, until that point in time, the most humiliating moment of my life. And it got worse.
Stumbling weakly down the hallway, I could see Yegi’s parents running toward us, and behind her my uncle, my dad’s only living brother, his former business partner, whom he had been estranged from for the final years of his life.
A wave of shame overtook me as I anticipated a harsh reaction from all sides of the family. Leading to that moment the sense of disappointment in us that I was sure our families felt had kept me up at night. But by the time we walked out later that afternoon it was one less thing I had to worry about.
Waiting inside the office was my sister-in-law, Taraneh. Almost immediately she announced, “The whole world is with you. Everyone knows you didn’t do it.”
“Do what?” We still had no idea what was being said about us publicly. In fact, they were still telling me some days that I had been reported dead in a car accident.
Right then the wall of lies started to crumble and there would be no putting it back up.
“John Kerry has spoken about you twice,” Taraneh told me.
“I did an interview with the Washington Post,” Yegi’s mom said, shaking her head and putting her hand on her face, as if to say she was embarrassed. “They called me on the phone and I talked to them.” I wondered which of my colleagues had made that call.
Taraneh’s eyes got big and she said, “Washington Post,” clasping one hand behind the other to say without saying that my employer had our backs.
It was the best feeling I’d had in weeks.
My mother-in-law tried to feed us—she had brought along nuts and a couple of bananas—but I couldn’t eat. That was a sign for these people that something was wrong.
“You’re so thin,” she said, with fear in her voice. “Are they feeding you?”
I made a joke right then, playing on the fact that in Farsi the word “regime” refers to a diet in addition to having the same meaning as it does everywhere, a negative way of referring to a political order. I noted that anyone who thinks the Islamic Republic “regime” is anything but the best in the world is wrong. With this regime I’d lost forty pounds in forty days. Everyone laughed the dreamlike chuckle that is reserved for encounters with loved ones who are temporarily back from the dead.
We sat in that room for half an hour trying to catch up on life. I asked questions and my in-laws answered the ones they were allowed to; others made our IRGC chaperones threaten to cut the meeting short. A secretary in a chador looked up from her work from time to time, looking worried, as if she too might be implicated in our case simply because she was forced to host this bizarre meeting in her office.
Midvisit Yegi was called into the judge’s office. It was Alizadeh, the same young and dapper—and for those reasons out-of-place, really—judge who had signed our arrest warrants and processed us six weeks earlier. I was certain our nightmare was ending.
I continued chatting with the family, trying my best to put on a strong face.
“How bad is it?” my mother in-law asked.
“Oh, it’s not bad at all. My interrogator is a very nice guy. We joke all the time. He says if they ever make a movie of my prison time he wants Will Smith to play him.” Everyone laughed.
My pragmatic uncle repeated a refrain every time we made eye contact: “Don’t sign anything,” he would say under his breath. As though this were day one and I hadn’t signed a thousand pages of lies and half-truths that were at that moment being twisted into my plotting to take down the Islamic Republic. Their collective ignorance about what we were being put through was quaint, and not in an adorable way.
It was my turn to go in the room. The judge allowed Yegi to stay, presumably to help translate
for me. We sat next to each other clutching each other’s hands, forbidden to speak in English, denied a lawyer, as we were told, once again, we didn’t have that right yet.
On Alizadeh’s desk were stacks of documents in the blue and pink folders that are used in every Iranian government office. They were Yegi’s and my interrogations, which we had been forced to write down, and in my case as they were originally in English, there were also “official” translations.
As Alizadeh read through the contents of a summary sheet of my supposed crimes, for the first time I began to see, in practice, how it was possible to take innocuous details and twist them into admissions of guilt for crimes so nefarious they don’t even exist.
The Washington Post’s being the paper of record for the nation’s capital and the possibility that it might make its way to the president’s desk became a major charge against me.
But there were lesser charges, too. I wrote for websites on political topics, I met with officials of multiple countries, I had attended a round of the nuclear talks. All true and all legal by all standards.
That session ended, and when I asked Alizadeh for my constitutionally protected right to be released on bail I was denied.
“For now the investigation must continue,” he replied.
They had absolutely nothing they could convict us of, and so they just held us.
We were back in our cells in time for a late lunch.
IT’LL SOUND OBVIOUS, BUT ONE THING THERE’S PLENTY OF IN PRISON IS TIME. BUT WHEN THE imprisonment is a hostage-taking wrapped in judicial packaging, as it was in my case, time becomes the captors’ faceless accomplice as there is no clear picture of when the abuse, manipulation, and shameless lying will end, or if they will. I was told repeatedly that my case was special and resolving it would be difficult. Over time I understood that to mean “We’ve got no actual case against you, need to come up with something plausible, can’t, and have no exit strategy.”
This is what I told myself as I waited for the door to open and my next breath of human contact, however antagonistic it was, to save me from drowning.
The preliminary investigation stage of my detention was the biggest personal test I’d ever faced, but I knew there were more difficult fates: tighter quarters, beatings, more active forms of sleep deprivation, starvation. Waterboarding. Was I being tortured? And if I was, why wasn’t I more sure of it?
Prisoner Page 8
