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

by Maziar Bahari

  The subject I most wanted to avoid was my televised “confession.” Many of my friends and relatives had spent time in prison. They recognized that I was uncomfortable talking about it and wanted to let me know that I hadn’t done anything I should be ashamed of. “We’re all proud of you, Maziar,” they told me. But their words never gave me comfort. Sitting in the living room, I often stared at the chair where my father used to sit. I could feel my father’s gaze on me until the moment when I left the house for the airport. He wanted to know what my plans for the future were. “What are you going to do now, Maziar?” he asked me. “Just sit on your hands and do nothing? Or will you speak out against the injustices committed against your people?”

  Before I left, I held my mother in my arms for a long time. I felt her tears seeping through my shirt, and onto my skin. We both knew that I would not be back in Iran for a long time, if ever. I kissed her cheeks several times and told her repeatedly, “Dorost misheh, dorost misheh”: It will be fine. But even as I held her, I was also talking to my father. I was promising him that I would not be silent—that I would make the world aware of the injustices suffered by the people of Iran. I would never forget my people, or my duty to help my friends and colleagues languishing behind bars. I would do my best to defeat Rosewater and his masters, in any way I could.

  Chapter Nineteen

  The hours between five A.M., when I left the house, and eight A.M., when the British Midland flight took off, were the longest of my life. As I showed my passport and passed through the two security checkpoints, I fully expected to be prevented from boarding the plane. A few days earlier, three of my friends—fellow filmmakers—had had their passports confiscated just as they were about to board a plane, and a few months before that, another friend and his wife had been arrested and escorted off a plane.

  Even after the plane took off, I still did not feel safe. In fact, I would not feel safe until we had crossed out of Iranian airspace. I switched on my TV screen and selected the funniest movie I could find: The Hangover. I then leaned over to the empty seat next to mine and selected the channel displaying the route map. I tried to concentrate on the movie—as the various characters stole Mike Tyson’s tiger, married a lap dancer, and fathered a baby—but my attention kept straying to the other screen. It seemed as though the plane were edging forward tentatively. Every time I stole a glance at the map, the plane seemed to be standing still. When I saw that we were over Tabriz, in the western part of the country, I closed my eyes and waited for as long as I could. When I looked up, it had happened: we had crossed into Turkey.

  I took a deep breath; it felt like the first breath I’d taken in months. I was a free man. The flight attendant appeared beside me.

  “Is there anything you need?” she asked.

  I knew the exact answer. “Yes,” I said. “A whiskey.”

  Within a few minutes, seven or eight passengers—total strangers to me—were standing beside me congratulating me on my freedom and, to my surprise, on the impending birth of my child. Even though I had, by this time, learned about the efforts to release me, and read the reports of my ordeal that had appeared in media outlets around the world, it was only on the flight that I fully realized that my imprisonment had not been a private matter. I had become a public figure. I was surprised by how much people knew about me. I hadn’t expected anything like this.

  “How’s your mother?” asked a middle-aged woman, who told me that she was living in Sweden, and like me, had lost her father.

  “Is it a boy or a girl?” her husband asked, holding their son in his arms.

  “Whatever it is, a child is a blessing,” the woman said.

  Many people also asked me about the conditions inside Evin and wanted to know the details of my experience. Before long, I realized how eager these people were to express themselves, especially about human-rights abuses in Iran. The questions went on. Did they beat you a lot? Who did you see inside? Were you in solitary confinement or a communal cell? Were you able to talk to your wife? Where is your wife from? As I answered their questions and sipped my whiskey, I hoped these well-wishing strangers would sense my unease and allow me some space to be alone. Because even though I smiled and chatted amiably with them, deep down, I still feared that at any moment the plane would reverse course and return me to Iran.

  · · ·

  At Heathrow, Chris Dickey was waiting for me with a security officer. In order to avoid reporters and any unforeseen problems, Newsweek had organized my exit through a private corridor. Even though Chris knew that I had left Tehran, he still couldn’t believe that I was free until he saw me with his own eyes. “There he is!” he said with a broad smile.

  I was finally in London. I’d never thought that I would love so much the sight of yellow-suited maintenance workers strolling across the gray tarmac under a light drizzle and a dull London sky. Soon I’ll be on the M4, Euston Road, and with Paola at University College Hospital. I was finally free to go where I pleased; to go to see Paola. There were so many things I wanted to tell Chris.

  Barbara was waiting for us in the VIP lounge. Since I’d met Paola, in 2007, Barbara had become like my own sister. She was all smiles when she saw me. “Talk to Paola, talk to Paola, she’s waiting,” Barbara said, a cell phone in her hand.

  I took the phone and excitedly told Paola that I was going directly from the airport to the hospital to see her. In the car, Chris and Barbara peppered me with questions about what had happened and how I felt. My mind was elsewhere. I knew there was something I needed to do. I asked the driver to stop by our flat on the way to the hospital.

  When I walked inside, I felt as if I had stepped into one of the drawings I’d left behind on the floor of my cell. Everything I had experienced since leaving Evin still didn’t seem real. It felt more like the way I had imagined things when dreaming in my prison cell. I felt Rosewater’s ghost following me everywhere. I needed to get rid of him.

  I took my laptop to our bedroom and typed the email I had been composing in my mind for the last several hours:

  “Baa man tamas nagirid. Man ta beh hal barayeh hitch kas jasoosi nakardam va barayeh shoma ham nakhaham kard.”

  Don’t contact me anymore. I’ve never spied for anyone and I’m not going to start by spying for you.

  I couldn’t stop myself from adding one more sentence: “Gooreh pedaretoon!” Fuck you!

  I breathed a deep sigh of relief. At last, I was free. I turned off the light and walked downstairs, ready, finally, to see Paola, prepare for Marianna, and take back my life.

  · · ·

  I was on the fourth floor of the hospital, outside Paola’s room. I opened the door slowly. On hearing me, Paola, who had been lying down in bed, pulled herself up into a sitting position. As I walked into the room, my eyes immediately met hers. For a moment we stared at each other like shy strangers. Then tears overwhelmed us both. We smiled at each other weakly, with an unparalleled relief and a look that seemed to say, “We’ve both changed, haven’t we?” She was shocked by how thin I was, and I, by how beautiful she was. I felt overwhelmed by sadness. I had missed most of Paola’s pregnancy.

  I crossed the room and sat down beside her. Taking her in my arms, I leaned over and kissed her belly for a long time. I put my head on her bump and talked to our daughter inside her belly: “Hello, honey bunny, hello, darling, Mummy and Daddy are waiting for you.” I had been imagining this moment for months.

  I could feel Paola’s tears on the nape of my neck. I was assaulted by so many thoughts and emotions that I felt numb. I didn’t want this moment to end. All I could do was tell Paola how much I’d missed her and ask her questions. The last thing I wanted to do was to speak of my experience.

  As Paola ran her fingers through my hair, I was transported to the time before my ordeal. Her touch felt unnaturally normal. I held Paola’s beautiful face in my palms and looked into her wide blue eyes. I almost felt normal. I had defeated my captors. I hadn’t turned into what they wanted me to b
e.

  · · ·

  I decided that I was not going to do any interviews for the time being. Instead, I spent almost all my time with Paola. We asked for an extra bed in the hospital room so that I could stay overnight with her. I also threw myself into the many practical tasks—rearranging the spare room for the baby, and buying clothes and other necessary items for the nursery—so that I didn’t have much time to think of anything else. And thanks to the fact that Newsweek had continued to deposit my monthly retainer into Paola’s account, I didn’t have to worry about my finances.

  But at night, as soon as I shut my eyes, I was back in Evin, back beside Rosewater. His face hovered in my dreams, turning them into nightmares. In a recurring nightmare, I was sitting in the school chair in the interrogation room while Rosewater walked around me, kicking and punching me intermittently.

  In my waking hours, I forced the images of him—his stubble, his glasses, his stench—out of my head and strove to replace them with images of Marianna growing up. I would often think about the “Sisters of Mercy” dream I’d had in prison. When I played the Leonard Cohen song for Paola in the hospital room, she understood that I was still grieving over the death of my sister, Maryam. I knew that one of the sisters in my dream was Maryam, but I wondered who the other one was.

  The next day I listened to the Cohen song over and over again. In the afternoon, Paola hummed the song in her hospital bed while reading a book. I watched her without saying anything. Knowing that I was sitting only a few feet from her, Paola looked peaceful and relaxed. I was fascinated with her belly and the angel resting inside it. At that moment I knew who the other woman in my “Sisters of Mercy” dream was: Marianna Maryam Bahari.

  · · ·

  The night before Marianna’s birth was the night Rosewater vanished from my dreams. I was sitting with Paola and Marianna—who was a beautiful precocious teenage girl, with long, curly brown hair—at my family dining room table in Tehran. Opposite were my mother, my father, and Maryam. I was telling my family about my prison experiences. My father was angry: “Those sisterfuckers who work for this regime are as stupid as those who worked for the shah.” There was a large bottle of Johnnie Walker Black Label in front of him. As I poured him a glass of whiskey, my father gazed at me with a chastising expression. He seemed to still be mad at me for making the false confessions and apologizing to Khamenei. Marianna grabbed my father’s hand and pointed toward the television. There I was, revealing what was happening in Iranian jails and campaigning for the release of other prisoners. Marianna leaned forward to my father and smiled at him. My father looked at me and nodded. His eyes were much softer.

  The next morning, as I sat beside Paola, just hours before Marianna’s birth, I slowly tried to absorb the idea that a difficult period of my life was over and a new, more gratifying period was about to start, but I couldn’t stop worrying about what might happen. I slipped out of the room for a moment and called my mother.

  “I hope Paola and the baby will be okay,” I told her. “Paola’s been through a lot.”

  My mother had no time for my unnecessary worries. She spoke to me with her usual strength and directness: “Mazi jaan, you shouldn’t worry about Paola or the baby’s health. They will be fine. All you have to worry about now is how well you can raise the baby. And I know you won’t have any problem doing that. Now go back to Paola.”

  We were called to the operating room soon after. Given the difficulties Paola had experienced, the doctors planned to deliver Marianna through cesarean surgery, and the room was filled with nurses and the doctors’ assistants. Even though we’d been told that Marianna’s birth had a higher than normal risk for complications, the mood in the room was jovial and Paola and I were full of excitement.

  Within minutes, Marianna was born into the world, in even better health than we had dreamt of. A nurse placed Marianna in Paola’s arms. We were both mesmerized by her beauty. We looked at each other but didn’t say anything. As Marianna let out a tiny, perfect cry, I could have sworn I heard someone singing a familiar song:

  They were waiting for me when I thought that I just can’t go on.

  And they brought me their comfort and later they brought me this song.

  · · ·

  We were able to bring Marianna home within a few days. She slept like an angel. Paola soon recovered from her surgery. At night, as I watched Paola sleeping with the baby beside her, a voice inside me, perhaps my father’s, urged me on: “Okay, that’s done. What now? Are you going to rest on your laurels and let those bastards get away with murder?”

  Chapter Twenty

  It didn’t take very long for the Revolutionary Guards to contact me. “Mr. Bahari, we’re waiting to see you,” said Rosewater’s boss in a message left on my cell phone one day. “We’re sure that we’re going to see you very soon.”

  Many of my friends and colleagues who had spent time in prison in Iran had remained silent about what happened to them. They feared that their comments about their experiences in prison would incense the regime, and that their families would have to suffer the consequences. But their silence gnawed at them from inside. Like me, many of them had been forced to make confessions. They felt guilty and angry about what the regime had put them through, and their anguish swelled because of the fear they suffered, even in freedom.

  I couldn’t allow that to happen to me. Instead, I knew that I had a responsibility to campaign on behalf of the hundreds of people who remained in prison. But I had to consult with Paola and my mother first. My decisions would affect them more than anyone else.

  “Throughout the ordeal, I was sure of one thing only,” Paola told me when I explained to her what I felt I had to do. “It was that you knew what you were doing. I still believe that.”

  My mother was even stronger in her support. When I called to ask what she thought about me writing about my experiences, she didn’t hesitate. “What’ve you been waiting for?” she said with her characteristic candor. “Of course you should talk about these ashghals, this garbage. They’ve ruined the lives of people inside the country, and they think that they can get away with bullying people outside of the country as well.”

  A few weeks after my release, I wrote a cover story for Newsweek entitled “118 Days in Hell.” It was one of the first accounts of postelection brutalities in Iran, but a few months after the article was published, many prisoners said that they’d gone through the same ordeal as I had. After the article, I did a series of television, radio, and print interviews in which I provided more information about my captivity. I was sure to make two points clear: (1) I had made my confessions under duress, and (2) hundreds of innocent prisoners remained inside Iranian jails, enduring the same brutal ordeal I had.

  Back in London, with the help of a number of international organizations, I started a campaign calling for the release of my journalist friends and colleagues. More than one hundred journalists had been arrested after the June 2009 presidential election, and since then the Islamic regime has made journalists its prime target in its fight against what it calls “sedition.” To kick off the campaign, I wrote an open letter to Khamenei that was published in the International Herald Tribune and subsequently translated by dozens of Persian websites. “The only accusation against many reporters who are languishing in Iranian jails is that they held a mirror to the actions of the Iranian government,” I wrote. “They did not want to overthrow it. They never took up arms. All of them did their job as peacefully as journalists elsewhere in the world. Many a time my torturer told me that he kicked me to make you happy. He told me, ‘Each time I slap you I can feel that the Master is smiling at me.’ Ayatollah Khamenei, I think you are responsible for what happened to me.”

  The Guards reacted immediately. An article in Javan, a newspaper run by the Guards, called me “a natural born criminal who should never have been allowed out of jail,” and Iranian television mocked my media appearances by calling my actions “courage in the comfort of the West.” Ros
ewater’s cohorts also tried to intimidate me by threatening my family. The Guards instructed my brother-in-law, Mohammad, on the phone, “Tell Maziar that he shouldn’t think we can’t reach him because he is not in Iran. The situation is getting really dangerous now. Anything can happen without advance notice.” The Iranian government has assassinated dozens of dissidents outside Iran, and the threatening calls unsettled me. In the beginning, I thought it best to remain silent, believing that publicizing the threats would only make the situation worse for my mother and Mohammad. But the calls continued for months, so in April 2010, after a particularly menacing call to my family, I decided to break my silence and talk about the threats publicly.

  In interviews after the threats, I asked those who made the threats a simple question: “I know that the mighty Revolutionary Guards have agents around the world and can get to me whenever they want. But then what? What do they want to do to me? If they want to kill me, then they’re accepting that they’re part of a terrorist regime, and if they want to kidnap me, then they are admitting that they are a hostage-taking government. I think the brothers in the Revolutionary Guards should be more transparent about their intentions.”

  Publicizing the threats made them less frequent. The Islamic regime was still worried about its image in the world, so, according to my sources, the smarter people within the Iranian government told the Guards to stop threatening me through my eighty-four-year-old mother. Yet the Guards were so infuriated with me that they decided to harass my family in a different way. To this day, they have been calling my mother periodically, telling her to be ready for an imminent confiscation of her house because I jumped bail. That confiscation has not yet taken place, but the threat of being forced out of her home hangs over my mother’s head.