Then They Came for Me: A Family’s Story of Love, Captivity, and Survival

by Maziar Bahari

  As I looked forward to my mother’s visit, I remembered the way she had supported me during my difficult high school years. I’d never been interested in my studies. My mother was often called to my school after I was caught skipping class to go to the national library to read old newspapers or, during class, when I was caught reading novels or books about politics or cinema instead of listening to my teachers. Whereas other parents might have been infuriated by such rebellious behavior, my mother, who had been a primary school teacher for twenty-seven years, until she retired in 1973, always defended me. “You just don’t understand the youth,” my mother would say to the principal. “You don’t know about their ideas, their needs, and what a difficult time they have in this society. So you just kick them out of your institutions and think your problems are solved.”

  The incompetent school administrators never knew how to rationally answer my mother. But in their minds, the fact that I had such a strong mother was just one more reason to expel me and not have to deal with me for another year.

  · · ·

  In the days before the visit of my mother and Mohammad, I was allowed to call home twice, for a few minutes each time. Rosewater wanted to know which of my friends were in touch with my family. Each time I called, Rosewater would put his head against mine and say, “Ask who’s been calling your family.”

  Rosewater didn’t know that my mother was too smart for this. “No one,” she would answer. “No one is calling us except for Paola and your nephew.”

  I couldn’t even imagine what my mother was going through. But her trembling voice calmed me down. I remembered the times when Maryam used to call us from prison in Ahvaz—how Moloojoon would cry immediately before and after talking to Maryam, always in her room, so she wouldn’t upset anyone else. But when she talked to Maryam she would muster every ounce of courage and strength she could for the duration of the call. Afterward, I often thought that my mother’s soothing words and her compassionate, strong tone helped Maryam endure prison.

  On the morning of the visit, I was given a haircut and allowed to shave. As the barber cut my hair, Rosewater stood behind me and gave me instructions on what I should and should not say during the meeting. I could not ask my mother anything about the lawyer she had mentioned or my case. “Nothing about your friends outside of Iran and nothing about political events in the country,” Rosewater said. Our conversation had to be limited to family matters and my mother’s and Mohammad’s health. Someone was going to be assigned to sit at the table with us, to monitor our discussion. “A word out of normal family greetings and conversation and I will stop the meeting,” Rosewater said. “Do you understand?” he yelled before slapping me on the back of my head.

  “Is he your interrogator?” the barber asked after Rosewater left the room.

  “Yes.”

  A look of sympathy passed his face. “Poor you.”

  They blindfolded me, led me to a car, and drove me the few minutes from the building where my cell was to the visitors’ hall. Rosewater stayed next to me every step of the way, and used the opportunity to give me further warnings. “Remember your mother’s face, Maziar. This may be the last time you see it. Imagine how she will feel in a few days’ time while you are walking to the noose because you chose not to tell us which foreign agency you’re working for.”

  The visitors’ hall was a large space with white walls lit brightly by fluorescent bulbs. There were about twenty white round plastic tables, each with four white plastic chairs around it. The hall was very clean, and it seemed that the judiciary, which runs prisons in Iran, tried to make sure that visiting families were left with a good impression of life inside Evin. A few men in relatively clean blue uniforms were mopping the floor. There were no uniformed guards in the hall, but there were security cameras all around us.

  A few prisoners sat at the tables, sharing meals with their families. I didn’t see any familiar faces. I sat down with the guard assigned to monitor our conversation. A chubby middle-aged man with a small mustache, he wore his white shirt with the tails outside his pants. He smiled and offered me a small pack of salted sunflower seeds. As we waited, the man explained that, in the past, the space had been divided into cubicles. “But because of Islamic kindness, the government decided to get rid of the cubicles so the prisoners and their families could enjoy a larger space,” he told me.

  There was no trace of irony in his voice. It seemed perfectly fine to him to arrest, jail, and torture innocent people as long as you gave them a haircut, provided a nice place for them to meet their families, and offered them a snack.

  I kept my eyes trained on the door, waiting to see my mother’s face. Since I’d said good-bye to Moloojoon on the morning of my arrest, more than a month before, I’d been haunted by the sad look in her eyes. Remembering this now, I felt tears begin to roll down my cheeks. “Mr. Bahari, you’re a grown-up, you shouldn’t cry like this,” the guard said. I wanted to tell him to go to hell, but instead I asked him to take me to the washroom so I could wipe my face. I didn’t want my mother to see me crying. In front of the sink, I tried to remember a funny scene from a movie to help me stop crying. But as I attempted to summon a scene from Wedding Crashers or The 40-Year-Old Virgin, instead I kept thinking of how Rosewater had beaten me for not liking Nescafé.

  Since damaging her back carrying a heavy box of Tudeh Party leaflets while she was pregnant with Babak in 1953, my mother has had a difficult time walking up stairs. In order to reach the visitors’ hall, she had to climb a steep flight of stairs, and when Moloojoon finally entered the visitors’ hall, I could see that she was in pain. I felt guiltier than ever for putting her through this experience again—of having to visit someone she loved in prison.

  During our telephone conversations, I’d known that my mother was trying hard to appear strong, just as I was—desperate to keep from her the fear and loneliness I felt each night, alone in my cell; the way my thoughts still often wandered to my eyeglasses and the idea of slitting my wrists. But the façades we’d both been working to present crumbled as we hugged each other.

  “Mazi jaan, Mazi jaan, cheh ghadr laghar shodi,” she said, immediately noticing how thin I’d gotten. Her eighty-three-year-old body shook with the strength of her sobs.

  Mohammad, always the epitome of calmness and strength, stood by my mother’s side. He tried to calm both of us down, and encouraged us to take a seat. We did as we were told, but we couldn’t stop crying. At first, my mother didn’t notice the prison guard sitting at our table. When she finally saw the man, she gave him a uniquely insulting look.

  “Who is this?” she asked me loudly so the man could hear her. Then she turned to him, asking, “Do you have any children?” The man, clearly surprised by my mother’s uninhibited disgust, said he was not married.

  “Why not? I thought your mothers forced you to marry early,” she said, referring to the religious families of many government supporters. I tried to change the subject.

  “How are you, Moloojoon? How are you feeling?” I asked.

  “I’m fine,” she answered dismissively before turning once again to the guard. She clearly wanted to shame him for his career choice. “Why is it you don’t have a family of your own?”

  “Don’t worry about this gentleman’s family,” I said. “I’m sure he has good reasons for not getting married. Have you been in touch with Paola?”

  “Yes, she’s called me a few times.” Paola doesn’t speak Persian, so she had asked my half-Iranian friend Lizzy to translate her calls. “Paola, mahshareh,” my mother said, calling Paola “amazing.” I understood immediately what this meant: Paola was campaigning for me and staying strong. Years of visiting political prisoners had taught my mother how to communicate her ideas in one or two words. It was all I wanted to hear, and my mother knew that.

  Because we couldn’t speak about anything related to my case or the lawyer my mother had hired, we spent the fifteen minutes of our visit talking about different relatives and distan
t cousins. I actually began to feel sorry for the prison guard, so every now and then I explained whom we were talking about. At times, to our surprise, he would offer a comment about our family affairs.

  “Are you still in solitary confinement?”

  “Please, talk only of family subjects,” the guard said.

  “Of course,” my mother answered. “But you keep on interrupting us.” I gave the guard a “she’s out of control” smile and tried to change the subject, asking Mohammad about the swine flu epidemic that had started a few months before my arrest. My mother interjected before Mohammad could respond.

  “The real swine flu is this government that has plagued the country for the past thirty years,” she said.

  “Moloojoon!” I tried to look upset, but inside I was proud of her. The guard was dumbfounded by her audacity. He sat quietly during the rest of the conversation. When we said good-bye, my mother hugged me and whispered into my ear, “Don’t worry about anything. Paola is doing all she can to get you out.” Mohammad didn’t have any special message for me. Looking at his calm and peaceful face, I was confident that all that could be done for me outside of the prison was being done.

  I was hoping to return to my cell, where I could cherish the memory of my mother’s voice and face, but instead I was taken directly to an interrogation room, where Rosewater was waiting for me. He pulled a chair up next to me and whispered, “I feel sorry for you, Mazi.” It was the first time that he’d called me Mazi, and I figured he’d eavesdropped on our conversation and heard my mother address me that way. When my friends and family call me Mazi, the nickname is familiar and affectionate. When Rosewater said it, it sounded obscene. “You are the most miserable of creatures, Mazi. You’re rotting in this prison for people who are laughing at you. Haven’t you come to your senses after seeing your mother’s sad face? Don’t you want to cooperate?”

  After everything that had happened that day and the last few days, I felt on the verge of a mental and physical collapse. I knew that I was never going to cooperate with Rosewater, but the pressure was becoming unbearable. I lowered my head and whispered my own mantra: “Moloojoon, Maryam joon, Paola, Moloojoon, Maryam joon, Paola.” Saying these names gave me strength.

  “What are you whispering?” Rosewater said, pulling my hair. I didn’t pay attention to him and kept on repeating the names of my loved ones. “What are you whispering, I asked,” he demanded, hitting me on the back of my head. I continued, ignoring him. Rosewater rolled up the papers on which I was supposed to write my confessions about the reformist leaders and hit me on the head with them. “Bad bakht, you miserable man, you’re gonna die here, you bad bakht,” he repeated as he swatted at my head and face.

  In order to protect my face I raised my hands, but he shoved them away with such force that I fell from the chair. I was on the floor, but that didn’t stop him from striking my head with the rolled-up papers. I looked at his face, red with anger as he bent over to hit me in the head. “Negah nakon! Don’t look at me!” he ordered, continuing to punch me. “Bad bakht khodam mikoshamet. I will kill you myself, you miserable man.” He then kicked me a few times in the back. I lay on the floor, breathing heavily. His cell phone was ringing, but he didn’t answer.

  A migraine crept over my head as Rosewater’s spit began to dry on my face. I felt sullied and violated but also encouraged: I hadn’t signed the false confession. In that moment, I was proud of myself. When I returned to my cell afterward and lay on the green carpet, I felt my father’s presence beside me. I knew that he was proud of me, too.

  · · ·

  I once filmed a man hanging from a noose. He was Saeed Hanaei, a religious serial killer who had murdered sixteen prostitutes in the city of Mashhad, in northeastern Iran. I had interviewed him inside the Mashhad prison a few months before his death, and knew that he had no remorse about strangling those women to death. Hanaei told me that he wanted to rid the earth of corrupt elements; he knew that his killings had paved his path to paradise.

  When I woke up a few hours later that night, feeling the familiar ache in my back and legs from sleeping on the floor, I couldn’t get the image of Hanaei’s death out of my mind. As I tried to fall back asleep, I worried that my nightmares would be riddled with images of a dead man hanging from the noose. But I didn’t dream of Hanaei. I dreamt of Rosewater. We were alone in a prison sometime in the future, and this time, I was interviewing him. Unlike the serial killer, Rosewater regretted his past deeds and was uncomfortable talking about them. In my dream, I could see Rosewater’s face. His big head was covered with drops of sweat, his stubble was longer, and his thick glasses were foggy with steam. The school chair in which he sat was too small for him, and he kept fidgeting in his seat.

  It was my turn to ask questions. I stood in front of him and stared him in the eye. It was surprising, what I found there: not the gaze of a monster but signs of humanity. “Do you really believe that I am a spy?” I asked him.

  He didn’t answer and looked down, trying to avoid my stare. “I have to make a living,” he said quietly. “I don’t make any decisions.”

  “Why are you accusing me of espionage?”

  “I’m sorry about that,” Rosewater said.

  “Why me?”

  “I don’t know. I’m sorry.” Rosewater’s expressions reminded me of an interview I had seen with a South African torturer after the fall of the apartheid regime. Faced with questions about his crimes, the man had no answer, except to blame it on others and say how sorry he was.

  “Why did you beat me? Why did you slap, kick, and punch me?”

  Rosewater’s head was still down. “I don’t think you’re a spy,” he said. “But they told me they needed a spy. It was my job to force you to become one, even if it was through lies.” Each word caused Rosewater more regret. I was not sure if he was acting or if he really felt guilty. He seemed to be struggling with an invisible force that was pushing him off his chair. I wanted to punch him the same way he had beaten me, and to stomp all over his body, but at the same time, the thought horrified me.

  “Stop interrogating him,” my father’s voice said to me. “He’s making you into a monster.”

  Suddenly, Rosewater was far away from me, on the other side of the room. I tried to get close to him, but he was already on the floor and someone or something was killing him. He was dying fast. By the time I reached him, he was already dead. His body was rotting. Maggots were crawling all over him. I heard loud laughter in the darkening room.

  I woke up feeling nauseous. I threw up in the plastic bag in which my breakfast had been delivered that morning. I sat in the corner of my cell, sweating and shivering.

  · · ·

  A week later, I was walking as fast as I could with my blindfold on during my hava khori. My body was still hurting from Rosewater’s beatings and many nights of fitful sleep, and the fact that I hadn’t seen him in several days made me anxious about what they might have in store for me.

  “You exercise too much,” Blue-Eyed Seyyed said, leading me back to my cell afterward. But this time, he didn’t shut and lock the door behind me as he usually did. Instead, he looked around my small cell. “We think you need a smaller place. Pack your stuff. You have to change cells.”

  My “stuff” included two blankets, a bottle of water, the Koran, and a book of prayers. I was desperate for anything to read, but both books were written in Arabic, which I didn’t know. I gathered them and followed him up a flight of stairs. Despite what Blue-Eyed Seyyed had said, the new cell was much bigger and, most importantly, had a window. Left alone there, I could hear two other prisoners speaking to the guard. I immediately recognized their voices: former vice president Mohammad Ali Abtahi was in the cell next to mine, and former deputy speaker of parliament Behzad Nabavi was in the cell across the hall.

  They were both among the most outspoken and influential figures in the reformist movement. Mohammad Ali Abtahi, a rotund man in his early fifties with a permanent smile, was an ope
n-minded cleric. Abtahi had been reformist Mohammad Khatami’s vice president for eight years. He was also the first prominent Iranian politician to start his own blog, in which he criticized the conservatives who ran the courts and the army.

  Behzad Nabavi had spent many years in prison before the revolution and had held a number of high-ranking positions in the early years of the Islamic regime. Prior to the election, Newsweek had asked me to compile a list of the most influential Iranians. According to a pro-Ahmadinejad conservative pundit I interviewed, Nabavi was “the most devious element in Iranian politics.

  “I’m sure he’s behind all the conspiracies against the supreme leader,” the pundit said. Khamenei must have thought the same thing. Nabavi had been among the first group of people arrested after the election, on Khamenei’s specific orders. Nabavi later claimed that his arrest warrant had been issued weeks before the election, and that the Guards had only been waiting for an opportunity to jail him.

  I didn’t know why they had put me on the same level with such influential figures. I sat on the floor, gazed out the window, and searched for the strength to look on the bright side. After all, my cell was larger and cleaner, and I could see the sunlight again. I carefully rolled the blankets into a wide pillow, like the ones that covered our big bed in London. Placing the pillow on the floor, I leaned back into it, closed my eyes, and focused on the sun.

  · · ·

  A few days later, on the morning of August 1, 2009—forty-two days into my stay at Evin—I was dreaming the most beautiful dream. I was in Croatia, making love with Paola. We had just finished one of my favorite dishes in the world: Croatian grilled calamari, accompanied by a cold glass of white wine. We were lying on a sandy beach and her soft skin was slowly growing dark with the sun. I rubbed the beads of sweat that covered the small of her back.

  The top slot of my door opened. “Shazdeh, pasho. Get up, my prince.” It was Brown Sandals. “Put these on.” A new prison uniform and my blindfold landed on the floor of my cell. Brown Sandals waited outside while I changed. I wasn’t sure what was going on, and my thoughts remained with Paola in Croatia.