Prisoner

by Jason Rezaian

  Life became more challenging. He used to tell me that in the month before the hostages were taken, October 1979, he did $400,000 in sales. And that’s in 1979 dollars. But once they were taken he didn’t sell a single item for the next six months.

  Iran had been one of the U.S.’s strongest postwar allies. Just two years earlier President Jimmy Carter had visited Tehran and toasted Iran and the “great people of that country who are our close, present, and future friends.”

  The atmosphere for my dad and our extended Iranian family altered very suddenly and permanently. People he had called friends for a decade or more stopped talking to him, his livelihood was effectively eliminated, and he and other relatives were harassed, were threatened, and had their property vandalized.

  One morning when he arrived at his shop he saw a hole in the front window; inside he found a bullet that had gone right through the glass. He never replaced that pane or plugged the hole. “I keep it as a reminder of what people are capable of. Even here,” he said.

  In the middle of the hostage crisis and all the drama it caused in our lives Dad’s lawyer called with some “good news,” which my dad was eager to hear.

  “Taghi, one of my other clients heard through the grapevine about all the trouble you’re facing and they want you to know they’ve got your back.”

  “Who’s that?” Dad asked.

  “The local chapter of the Hells Angels.”

  He always laughed when he told that story.

  We lived in what was then and still is considered one of the most progressive communities in this country, but for him it became antagonistic.

  But Dad was undeterred. He had a boundless optimism that wouldn’t quit. “God is great,” he would say loudly whenever things seemed to be at their worst. But he struggled to keep his business, and an extended family that relied on him for so much, afloat.

  As the revolution took hold in Iran more and more relatives made their way to California, many with no more advance warning than a phone call from SFO that they had arrived, some of them living with us for months at a time. The door remained open and the fridge stocked. It wasn’t sustainable, but it was what he knew, and my mom never flinched in her role in helping new arrivals acclimate to a life in America.

  On January 20, 1981, the 52 American hostages held in Tehran were finally released. It had been 444 days. As all Americans did, my dad felt genuine relief.

  But his was different. Hundreds of American business owners offered gifts to the returning hostages. There were free steaks for a year from Nebraska, trips to Hawaii from the Aloha State’s tourism board. Major League Baseball presented each returnee with a golden ticket that provided entrance for the hostages (and a guest) to every regular-season baseball game for the rest of their lives.

  And my dad offered each one of them a rug. In fact a $1,000 gift certificate for rugs. More than forty of them took him up on his offer. Some of them came in person, others sent local friends, and some just phoned in orders and my dad mailed them a rug based on their desired parameters. Along with each one of these rugs he put a certificate in the package that said, “As an Iranian I apologize for what you have endured and as an American I welcome you home.”

  News of that gesture spread. A wire story about it was picked up in newspapers all over the world. Some weeks later he received a postcard from Kathmandu from a hippie who used to hang around his shop. The news had reached that far.

  Charles Osgood included him in a segment of his popular rhyming current events feature, “The Osgood Files,” at the end of CBS’s Sunday morning news broadcast; they spelled his name wrong, but that was my dad.

  And of course Iran’s revolutionary government took notice, too.

  For years every time a Rezaian would return home to Iran there were questions at the airport about Taghi and what he was doing. That was natural, because at that point very few Iranians in America had any public profile.

  I thought about that episode as I moved my bones on the elliptical machine and tried to hold on to whatever dignity I still had.

  The gym, it turned out, was my refuge, which was unlikely as I hadn’t done any honest exercising since college.

  It was in there that guards would ask me their own personal questions and I, if I was feeling up to it, would hold court. Always one at a time, because they were too afraid to speak openly in front of one another. I soon learned that it was the only place indoors I was taken to that wasn’t wired. Still, I watched what I said.

  We were in the new cell for less than a week when Mirsani got word that he was leaving. He thought he was being freed, but it turned out he was only getting sent to the public ward.

  So now I was back to a life with one other person.

  Yadoallah had presence and we became fast friends. He was loud and he sang. He joked with everyone, was mostly polite, prayed five times a day, and was one of the few people I knew who could eat more than me. I loved that about him. By the time he was brought into the cell I was down forty pounds, and he weighed about two hundred fifty.

  He chain-smoked, and told me he had never had a cigarette until he was forty.

  He was a near-beer mogul whose only crime was being born Sunni and Kurdish; both were seen as threats to Iran’s ruling Shia establishment. He stayed in prison because he refused to cooperate with the IRGC; they were trying to shake him down. “How can I lie before God about things I haven’t done? I won’t sell the next world to anyone,” he told me.

  He was optimistic, but the isolation was making him crazy. He had four kids, who were living a luxurious life that he never could have imagined for himself growing up in war-ravaged Kurdistan, a western region on the border with Iraq that was bombarded throughout the mullahs’ eight-year war with Saddam Hussein.

  The weather began to cool and soon I was allowed an hour in the gym every day. Yadoallah was a good companion, because as bleak as things were, he always looked on the bright side.

  But on Thanksgiving Day, I woke feeling especially lonely. It was the first real holiday during my time in detention.

  Kazem arrived at the cell gate and said, “Salaam, J. Let’s go. We haven’t much time,” which is something he said often. In the beginning he said it so much, it was the first indicator that he wasn’t being honest. If we had plenty of anything in there it was time, and he and his cohort, I learned, were people willing to wait.

  Kazem hadn’t arrived alone. Rezvan, a guy who, while I was still in solitary, had interrogated me about the many pictures of my life found on my computer, was there, too. He wore a Kangol hat and sunglasses over a surgical mask to hide his appearance, and he was taller than Kazem. He hadn’t been to see me in over two months. “Was your son born yet?” I asked, remembering that his wife had been very pregnant, or so he said, several months earlier.

  “Yes. Good memory.”

  “Well, it’s part of my training.”

  They cracked up, knowing I was nobody.

  They led me to the interrogation building, which was quiet. It was a late morning.

  Kazem produced a Ziploc bag with Yegi’s and my cell phones in it, including older ones that we hadn’t used in years. Each of them had a tiny white sticker with a number in the Arabic script used in Iran written on it. To Kazem and his team they were evidence, but I felt like I was looking at artifacts from another era. They seemed almost make-believe.

  “Which one is yours?” Kazem asked.

  I pointed to the black iPhone 5 that the Washington Post had bought for me.

  “Turn it on,” he commanded.

  I wondered what was happening.

  “Call your mother,” he said.

  “What? Why?”

  “You must call your mother.”

  “And tell her what?” Yegi was the only person from the free world I had any kind of contact with and I was startled by even the idea of expanding that circle.

  “Today is a holiday and you must congratulate her. She is your mother. It is the Great Judge’s gift t
o her.”

  “No.” I don’t know why I resisted, but I did. “I’m not calling.”

  It could have been that I didn’t want to cry on the phone to my mom, whose voice I hadn’t heard in months. Or it could have been that I wanted to tell the Great Judge to take his gift and shove it up his ass. Whatever the reason, I said I wouldn’t do it.

  “You don’t have a choice,” Kazem said.

  This went on for a few minutes and then he said, “Your mother wants to hear your voice.” He paused. “She’s your mother.”

  With that, I relented.

  My own phone didn’t work. The bill hadn’t been paid since my arrest and service was cut.

  Rezvan handed me a prepaid calling card and his very basic and old Nokia. These fossils were popular in Iran and other Asian capitals—retro digital. I punched in the card number, password, and my mom’s number. Nothing happened. And again. Nothing. Finally it rang, but there was no answer. This went on for several attempts. They were getting antsy.

  “Where is your mother?”

  “How would I know? You haven’t let me speak to anyone in four months.”

  “Keep calling. She must answer.”

  I tried another number. It was her cell phone and it rang momentarily, then I got a message in Turkish, probably saying she was out of range. And again.

  Finally it rang and was answered. It was my mom on the other end of the line.

  “Hi, Mom,” I said, trying to sound as calm as possible, fighting back a rush of tears and the biggest lump I’ve ever had in my throat.

  She was equally cool and collected, and I appreciated that.

  “Where are you?” I asked.

  “I’m at Cousin Barb’s,” she said. Her cousin lives just outside of Chicago and has a massive Thanksgiving gathering at her house every year. We used to go when we lived in Illinois. It was the one place I wanted to be right then, surrounded by people who’d known me since childhood. I thought about how weird this must all have seemed to them. They knew my dad and his sisters. Their own extended family had experienced plenty of tough times. But this was different. Other-level stuff.

  “You want to say hi to anyone?” my mom asked.

  “No, Mom,” I told her. “I just called to talk to you.”

  We talked and talked, but with Kazem and Rezvan hovering over me, I knew I couldn’t say all that I wanted. They couldn’t understand our conversation completely, but I spoke fast and colloquially just in case. And made it obvious to my mom that she wasn’t getting the full picture. I kept referring to Kazem, like, “My interrogator says I should tell my mom that they are treating me very well.”

  “I’m sure he does,” Mom would reply.

  And: “My interrogator says I am very sorry for all the suffering I have caused you.”

  “Put him on the phone right now! You didn’t do anything and he knows it. I want to talk to him,” she said.

  I looked at Kazem and said, “She wants to talk to you.”

  He was embarrassed. He didn’t do well with women and talking to my mom was definitely not part of his “mizhan” for the day.

  “I cannot.”

  “He says he can’t.” I was playing telephone, on the telephone. Then to Kazem, “My mom wants to know when this will end.”

  “God willing tell her it will end very soon,” he said.

  “She wants to know when.” She hadn’t asked that.

  “Very soon.”

  “Sure?” I asked. She wants you to swear to God.” She didn’t ask for that, either; I did.

  “I swear to God,” Kazem said.

  “Mom, did you hear that, he just swore to God that I’d be released very soon.”

  “Good. That’s a start.” She and I both laughed.

  We tried to keep it loose and I asked about everything I could remember to. The call went on. At one point I looked at the phone and it had been well over half an hour since it started. I couldn’t believe it. Maybe there was some reason for hope.

  “Mom, is anything actually being done to get me out of here?”

  “Oh yes, honey. A lot.” But she couldn’t tell me what.

  It was time to wrap. I didn’t want to end the call that I hadn’t wanted to make in the first place. This is how it goes sometimes. I was worried I might never hear or see her again. Really, how could I know?

  “You should come here, Mom,” I pleaded with her. “You really should.”

  “I know.”

  She could handle it, I was certain. She had seen plenty by then.

  MY MOM GREW UP IN WARRENVILLE, ILLINOIS. SHE WAS THE ONLY CHILD OF DRS. JOHN AND MARY Breme, an unlikely pair who had divorced by my mom’s fourth birthday. Dr. John was born in Italy and came with his family as a small boy to search for a better life. He became a doctor and taught biology in Chicago. One of his students was my grandmother, nearly thirty years his junior. Sensing her potential, he put her through medical school.

  They were not well matched.

  Dr. Mary, whom we called Nana, left Dr. John and took my mom, little Mary Ellen, with her.

  It was the mid-1940s and Catholic single mothers in and around evangelical Wheaton, Illinois—Billy Graham country—were a rarity. Rarer still was the fact that she was the town doc. She built a clinic there to which people would come from long distances because of the reportedly miraculous results her patients experienced. To this day I meet people who know that she was the doctor presiding over their birth. She was a big deal.

  She never remarried after her divorce, and raised my mom with the help of her older sister Mae and Mae’s husband, Cal—“Unk” to my brother and me—who were unable to have kids of their own.

  Once a year Nana would take my mom on a great adventure. There was the dude ranch in Arizona where they were regulars, an epic and calamitous journey by horse into the heart of Glacier National Park, and a trip back to Slovenia to visit their remaining family there. If Dr. Mary couldn’t take the time off it didn’t stop her from sending my mom to see the world, like Mom’s Atlantic crossing on the Queen Mary.

  Back home my mom raised farm animals, and she was an early adopter of Spanish.

  After graduating from Wheaton Community High School—a year ahead of my Washington Post colleague and journalistic hero Bob Woodward, and several years before one of my comedic heroes, John Belushi—my mom enrolled at Westmont College, a very conservative school that made students sign a contract promising to never dance with boys or drink alcohol, but happened to be in freewheeling Santa Barbara, California.

  It wasn’t long before she realized she had grown beyond the narrow scope of strictly Christian environments, like the one she was raised in.

  First she signed up for a dig—she was an archaeology major then—in what people used to call the Holy Land. It was Palestine back then, or maybe Jordan, but someplace that is now part of Israel. She was a white chick infatuated with the Middle East decades before that was even a thing.

  When she returned to the U.S. she made a calculated move to start fresh, transferring to San Francisco State University just in time to fully experience the sixties.

  One late afternoon in the library, my dad, the young man from Mashhad, Iran, saw this adventurous girl from Illinois.

  After some glances between them he finally went to her and said, “Coffee.”

  “Are you asking me or telling me?” was my mom’s response as she tells the story half a century later.

  Their relationship may sound unique for the time, but all around them were other Iranian guys dating American girls—not only were they enthralled by these exotic young women they found, there also weren’t many Iranian girls studying abroad yet.

  Mom even decided to learn Farsi, trading language lessons with other new arrivals from Iran. Very quickly Iranians became the largest population of foreign students in the U.S. and many of them came to San Francisco.

  When my mom told Dr. Mary that she wanted to marry my dad, my grandmother said she wouldn’t give her blessin
g. Nana suggested they visit Dad’s family, assuming my Mom would be put off by their foreignness; Mom saw it as an opportunity. Soon enough these two ladies from Illinois were on their way to Iran to meet my dad’s family. In 1967. That should tell you much about the two of them, but also about how the world has changed since then.

  I still have pictures from that trip of my mom and two of my aunts, who years later would move to America but were teenagers then, in miniskirts and beehive hairdos.

  When they arrived in Mashhad my grandmother asked her most pressing question of Hajj Kazem, which was designed to be a deal breaker.

  “If my daughter marries your son, will she have to convert to Islam?”

  She wasn’t prepared for my grandfather’s response.

  “As Christians, you are also people of the book,” he told her, using the Arabic term that refers to the single God shared by Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. “So that is not a problem. But more important, it’s the two of them that will have to lay down together each night. The decision is theirs to make, not ours, no?”

  My grandmother was impressed, but remained skeptical.

  Now, I’m not sure if my grandfather treated his six daughters and their various suitors in the same way, but such a forward-thinking attitude at that time was a remarkable thing, and I believe it influenced how my parents raised my brother and me years later in Marin County, California, about as far away from Wheaton and Mashhad in terms of a worldview as one could imagine.

  Neither of my parents responded well to authority or conventional wisdom. They both had goals they wanted to achieve and they didn’t appreciate anyone standing in their way.

  Soon after they were married my dad was working in Emporium Capwell, a popular San Francisco department store, where he managed two of the departments, toys and women’s shoes.