“I’ll be right back,” I said, smiling, trying my best to lighten the mood.
It still hadn’t totally sunk in that life as we knew it, the one that my parents had begun cultivating almost half a century earlier, was disintegrating.
I flew that day from SFO to Milan, where Yegi would be waiting for me. She had flown in on AZAL, the airline of the Republic of Azerbaijan, via Baku. It was the only ticket to Europe from Tehran we could afford, as fares during the Iranian New Year high season, which was right then, routinely triple in price.
I had booked us a room at a place called the Hotel New York, the one place in Milan that fit my third-world budget.
It was late night when I arrived, but Yegi was waiting up for me. Seeing her after the toughest weeks helped me relax. I knew she was my future.
We were two tourists, among the thousands, who weren’t exactly on vacation. We walked through the Duomo, Milan’s massive cathedral. Yegi’s first-ever church. We took a bus to Venice, and then another one to Slovenia, where we visited my remaining relatives there.
Finally we made our way to Paris, to spend time with old friends of mine.
Those days are hazy. I would cry whenever I felt the need to, and Yegi would give me a look, head cocked, that simultaneously said “I’m here for you” and “Don’t cry . . . so much.”
I took her to the Rodin Museum and we sat in the sculpture garden, always one of my favorite places.
On our last night in Paris before Yegi was to return to Tehran and I would head back to San Francisco, our friends Charley and Marie, whom we were staying with, hosted a dinner at their place with some of their local friends I’d come to know over the years. Everyone knew Ali and my sister-in-law Naomi. Some of them had met Walker. There were people all around the world who shared great affection for my family. That was a very comforting feeling.
I went to bed prepared for more difficult days but fortified by friendship and love.
The next morning, around six A.M., my phone rang. No number showed up, but I answered it groggily.
“Salaam. What happened to Daie?” I recognized the voice. It was my cousin Samaneh in Mashhad, the daughter of one of my dad’s younger sisters, asking about my dad using the Farsi word for maternal uncle.
“He’s okay, I spoke to him yesterday.”
“Where are you?” she pleaded. “What happened to Daie?”
“I’m in Paris. I’m going home tomorrow. He’s fine.”
She was distraught. “Okay, okay. Goodbye.”
She hung up. I looked at my phone and there was an email from my brother. “You need to call me,” it said.
No. I already knew where this was going, but I went into the living room and called anyway.
“Hey, Jason,” Ali greeted me unceremoniously. “Believe me, I didn’t want to do this again.” He was so strong.
“I know. What do I do now? Should I go straight to the airport?”
“Get on the same flight you were going to. No need to change it. There’s nothing you need to do today, and you don’t want to be here right now.” I could hear some of my Iranian relatives wailing in the background. I knew Ali hated to be there and I loved him for being able to sit through that, without me, after all he’d just experienced.
“Spend the day with Charley. I’m glad you’re with him. He wants to be there for us. Have a good meal and go see the Monets in l’Orangerie and then take a walk through the Tuileries Garden. Eat something good. That’s what I would do if I was there,” he advised.
I sat in our friends’ living room, on the top floor of an apartment building in Paris’s Nineteenth Arrondissement. The sun was rising over Paris. Their place had a complete view of the city, with the Eiffel Tower right in the center of it. I just stared out the window, internalizing for the first time what exhaustion from the pain of sustained grief feels like.
Charley came out.
“You’re up early today,” he greeted me.
“My dad died.”
He heaved a loud sigh and paused.
“J, this is too much.”
“Right?” I asked, searching for some validation that this was not fair.
We spent that day just as Ali suggested. I had a hard time keeping it together, but I didn’t need to. I was with people who loved and knew me.
They took us to Café Marly at the Louvre. Yegi and I walked around the Marais, prolonging the moments before an inevitable goodbye. We had no idea when we’d be back together. The situation back in California had just gone from unbearable to impossible. At the airport we both cried. I had just turned thirty-five years old. This was not what I’d envisioned that age would be. She got on her flight back to Tehran and I waited for mine to San Francisco a couple of hours later.
I’m never there when my people die, I thought.
Siamak picked me up at the airport and hugged me hard. Ali and I were the older brothers he didn’t have. His mom, my aunt Tina, was the middle of my dad’s three sisters who had moved to America. Siamak was born in San Francisco in October of 1979, just a month before the hostages were taken in Tehran.
My dad was the latest casualty in the changing of the generations.
I was at peace with my dad’s death. How could I not be? My brother had just lost a son who was in kindergarten. Dad was seventy-one and had had not only a full life but a rich medical history, too. There was nothing surprising or tragic about his death other than the timing, four weeks after Walker’s.
Siamak drove me to the mortuary. In addition to the shroud—which Dad had bought in Mecca when we went there five years before—and the actual burial there were other funeral preparations, including a multistep ritual washing of the corpse that required several traditional ingredients, camphor and lotus powder among them.
Some of my relatives had been on the phone with local Bay Area mosques to inquire about whether or not they washed bodies for burial. The Sunni ones, it was discovered, wouldn’t bathe Shias. Others charged a substantial fee, which was totally reasonable because we’re talking about a service, but somehow that didn’t sit well with me.
“I’ll do it myself,” I announced. “It’s what he would have wanted.”
In fact, Dad had performed this rite for several other relatives, and that’s why none of us knew about the hurdles of getting a Shia Muslim corpse in America properly prepared for burial. It’s one of those things you don’t discuss much.
When I made that decision solidarity among others who appreciated my dad for their own reasons came quick.
Siamak was there, as was my late aunt Mimi’s lifelong boyfriend, Bahram. My burial buddies. And Reza Rezaian, my cousin and our neighbor since I was three, when he and his parents relocated from Iran to a house a couple of hundred feet from ours. Until just the summer before on hot days we might come home to find Reza in the pool. That was totally normal. My dad had been there three years earlier to help Reza wash his dad’s body. Hassan, another of my dad’s cousins—from my grandmother’s side of the family—also came, with directions on how to do it properly from one of his nephews who was a mullah in Mashhad.
“If anyone complains about how we did this, tell them we had instructions from the shrine,” he said, holding up some notes he had written during a phone call with the cleric at the Imam Reza shrine, where our relatives who died in Iran were all buried.
And Ali was there, which put it all in a new kind of perspective for me. This was absolutely not about me.
After lifting the sheet from my dad’s corpse I paused for a moment, assuming I wouldn’t be able to do it. But grabbing his limp and heavy leg I had the immediate understanding that this was not my dad. It was my dad’s body, but he was no longer there.
It probably sounds stupid, but it was the most comforting feeling of my life.
By the end of the process, which took half an hour, we were all laughing, sharing jokes and memories about my dad.
I realized then that all funeral rituals, no matter what the faith or culture,
are designed to force the dead’s survivors to let go. I learned later that in Iran loved ones are no longer allowed to take part in this process at most mortuaries.
The next day we went to the cemetery for burial. The number of my dead relatives buried at Valley Memorial, in Novato, California, was getting uncomfortably high. A lot of people came that day, but many others who would have just didn’t know, because as a family we were already drained.
We had a slow procession from the chapel to Dad’s plot a few hundred yards away. He was being buried alongside Aunt Mimi, on top of a little hill, at literally the highest point in the cemetery.
There wasn’t any discussion about it ahead of time, but Siamak, Bahram, and I got in the ground, partaking in the ritual burial rites. Sad, but peaceful, just as I’d remembered. Several of my high school friends who were there reported later that a large red-tailed hawk circled above the entire time. Once we had laid him to rest, with his right cheek touching the dirt, head facing toward Mecca, other relatives above lifted us out. Everyone threw red roses and handfuls of dirt over the corpse, as is customary.
It didn’t take me long to realize that the preparation—the washing and the burial of my dad—was the most important act I could perform in life.
I was at a strange peace.
I PONDERED THOSE DAYS NOW, KNOWING THAT IF I COULD SURVIVE THEM, I COULD GET THROUGH this. But I was feeling hopeless.
For months, from where I sat it had appeared as though nothing was happening. My case seemed to be in a state of suspension and it was just life in the cell all the time. I had no contact with the outside world. It had been weeks since the Christmas surprise and my loneliness was becoming unbearable. At least I could still work out, walk in circles in our tiny yard, and read. I poured myself into those three activities to fill each day.
One afternoon in the dead of winter, Yadoallah came back from his daily phone call with his family with a massive grin on his face. “I’ve got good news for you, J,” he said, throwing an arm around my shoulders.
“What is it?” I had to know. In Evin good news was rare.
“Obama talked about you in a speech,” he said, as if he were announcing my imminent release. It was late January so it was possible that he’d mentioned me in the State of the Union address, but that seemed an unlikely moment for a president negotiating a game-changing deal with my captors to insert me into the national dialogue. Still, I liked the idea of that.
“Where? What did he say?” I demanded.
“I just know he talked about you and that means you’re getting out,” he told me, doing his best, as he always did, to focus on the positive.
Somewhere inside I knew he was probably right, but I was finding it hard to believe there was any progress being made toward my release. I couldn’t see a single sign of it. It wasn’t long, though, until I started to catch glimpses of the cumulative efforts around getting me out.
My name was growing into the latest chorus in the antagonistic call and response between Tehran and Washington that has defined relations between these two countries—my two countries—for most of my life. I was now a living centerpiece in a struggle that I had spent years, through my explanatory writing, seeking to defuse.
Any time someone in the U.S. called for my release there was an equally weighted damnation of me in the Iranian state press.
As those flashes grew I began to steel myself for confrontation. The verdict in the courtroom was already a lost cause. I knew that. But that wasn’t the front I needed to worry about.
My battle was for global public opinion, and I had been winning that one since soon after my arrest, as the drama of the epic nuclear deal played out, shining a spotlight on my case, offering a very sober reminder of why a deal that left me and other Americans in prison might not accomplish what it was supposed to in returning Iran to a sense of international normalcy.
A new acceptance of Iran in the American consciousness as anything but a rogue nation never actually happened, and one ingredient of that was the highly visible and preposterous secret trial against me and the way Iran’s supposedly urbane and sophisticated officials were unable to provide any legitimate excuse to support my detention but simultaneously continued to justify it, even in visits to the United States.
And there was another spotlight shining in Washington, one that made it possible for the Washington Post’s editor, Marty Baron, to keep talking about me.
“It would be a farce if it wasn’t such a tragedy,” Marty said of my situation at one of the interviews he gave regarding Spotlight, a film about one of his reporting teams that would go on to win the Oscar for Best Picture.
The Post’s efforts knew no limits. Although some Iran watchers publicly chastised the paper for not doing more, the company’s top brass took on extracting me from Iran by any means necessary as its top priority, with public and secret campaigns to bring me home.
The Post published dozens of op-eds by Marty and the editorial board, as well as articles with updates about my condition whenever the most minute new detail was available. There was also a living cartoon by my colleague Michael Cavna, whose drawing of me was updated daily with a fresh hash mark to symbolize the number of days I’d been in prison, which corresponded with a flash on the news ticker outside of the Post’s longtime headquarters on Fifteenth Street NW.
Of course I couldn’t see any of this, but I started to hear about some of it. Unbelievably and quite absurdly, I was able to see some of the discussions about me on Iranian television, and all the while I was keeping a running record in my mind of all the lies Iranian officials, especially Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif, told about me and my condition. Or perhaps it’s more accurate to say all of the implications he made that could be deciphered as references to me. I was growing to hate him deeply but also respect his ability to bullshit literally everyone he encountered, including himself.
There were many other officials weighing in, as well, some of them calling for my execution to pay for crimes so heinous they could not even be explained, while others in and around the Iranian political system gently, timidly questioned the wisdom of holding a well-known, accredited journalist, very publicly denying him due process and boldly breaking multiple Iranian laws in the process. Doing so, they argued, did little to further the Islamic Republic’s interests.
The Washington Post and other news organizations kept track of these developments and sought to highlight the protections provided to defendants in the Islamic Republic’s constitution that I was being denied. At times it seemed that international media outlets had a better understanding of Iranian law than the Islamic Republic’s judiciary. It seemed that way because it was true.
One afternoon I was watching Press TV and the regular coverage cut to a live one-on-one between Iran’s foreign minister, Javad Zarif, and my Washington Post colleague David Ignatius. I was transfixed. I couldn’t even blink. They were at the Munich Security Conference talking about the nuclear negotiations, Syria, and the Israeli and Palestinian conflict.
And then suddenly, as the conversation was winding down, Ignatius said, “I’m going to take a brief point of personal and journalistic privilege. My colleague and personal friend Jason Rezaian, who’s our correspondent in Iran, has been imprisoned since last July with his wife. The charges have never been made clear, and it would be wrong of me not to use this public forum to say to the Iranian foreign minister that we dearly hope—and I speak for all journalists I think around the world—for his prompt release.”
Lying on my bed of rough blankets atop a rickety iron cot, I suddenly felt very tall.
You can get through this.
I THOUGHT BACK TO MY FAMILY’S DARKEST DAYS AND HOW WE PULLED OURSELVES BACK from the edge. Even then I was sure we’d survive, I just didn’t know how.
Still, so much remained to be resolved.
When my father died, my mom was suddenly a healthy sixty-eight-year-old widow whose first grandchild had also just died; my brother had lost
our dad and his firstborn son. My sister-in-law was trying to hold it together for my surviving nephew, who had just turned three and had shared a room with his older brother every night of his young life thus far. They were each living a scenario that no one wants to imagine.
There was very little I could do to console any of them. Fortunately there was work to be done. There was too much inventory in the annex, Dad had some debts, and I had to figure out how I was going to get back to my life with Yegi in Tehran.
I’d known that this day would come. I couldn’t have foreseen the circumstances, but I’d realized long before that one day my dad would die and I would be responsible for tying up the loose ends, and that there would be plenty of those.
For several years I would periodically ask my dad which dealers had merchandise consigned to him, who he owed money to, who owed him money, and who had any of our rugs. The week before I left for Europe we had lunch one afternoon and I got the updated lists, with him telling me, “Don’t worry. When I feel better I will take care of all of it.”
The more shameless characters in the business moved quickly, putting out feelers for what they wanted. Handwritten IOUs with signatures that didn’t match my dad’s and decade-old postdated checks—a bad Iranian-man habit—were laid in front of me. “Your father owed us $78,000, now you owe us $78,000,” was the line, I think.
“No I don’t,” was my answer. But maybe I did. How could I know?
One crazy bastard who for years used to show up regularly at my parents’ house early in the morning and pace in our driveway until my dad would come home from his morning exercise routine even had a lawyer—an Iranian one, obviously—send a letter demanding payment for a small silk rug he had supposedly consigned to my dad, with an astronomical price tag of $17,500 attached to it.
He had long ago earned the nickname Buster from Dr. Mary, who was annoyed by his annoying unannounced visits.
My dad had done so much for this clown, helping him get set up in America like he had with so many of his countrymen. The gall this guy had. He didn’t realize I knew he ran a hawala, an old-school money-transferring system that became popular as sanctions against Iran mounted. People were getting five years in prison for doing that and he was trying to shake me down. I very easily could have picked up the phone and reported him out of my way. I knew the people to call.
Prisoner Page 15
