Rosewater (Movie Tie-in Edition)

by Maziar Bahari

  Things continued to get worse for Iranian communists. In 1949, there was an assassination attempt against Mohammad Reza Shah. The shah’s bodyguards killed the would-be assassin immediately. There are still debates about the would-be assassin’s political affiliation, but the attempt against the life of the monarch was blamed squarely on the communists, and the Tudeh Party was outlawed. Many leaders of the party were arrested; others fled to the Soviet Union. Even so, the party’s rank and file continued to hold public meetings under different pseudonyms, especially under the banner of the unions. The communist workers’ unions held illegal meetings all over the city and prepared for an attack by the police and the army. “We all had a piece of wood with us, and as soon as the police arrived we would start beating them,” a friend of my father’s remembered, smiling affectionately at my father. “And your dad was always in the first row of any fight with the police.” My father was arrested several times between 1949 and 1953, mostly during clashes with the police.

  My father’s time in prison seemed to have worked much like Mafia initiation rituals. Inside, he met Tudeh leaders who would indoctrinate him further in party politics, and he would leave jail with more responsibility than before. The Tudeh Party had a vast underground military network whose members even included bodyguards of the shah. “Some of the prisons were practically run by our comrades,” my father said. “We could mingle freely with other party members; we had classes about the history of communism and poetry-reading sessions.”

  My father was not accustomed to being surrounded by such educated people, and he absorbed what they told him like a sponge. In prison, he forged many friendships that would last throughout his life. These men were like uncles to me. It was not unusual for me to come home from school and find a famous Iranian singer or writer sitting at our dining table. There was Mr. Hosseinpour, a poet whose long hair and thick mustache reminded me of a Soviet intellectual; he and my father had shared a cell for many months. My father and Mr. Banki, an engineer whose big cheeks shook whenever he remembered his torturers, recited poetry together during their daily walks in prison. Mr. Abdollah, an industrialist, shared a room with my father, once they were both out of prison, in an apartment given to them by the party.

  Whenever three or four of them got together, they would tell stories. These aging men looked at their time in prison with pride and would talk about the torture they endured, and their near-death situations, the way some people talk about a culinary tour of France or a hiking trip in Peru. To a stranger—or to a son—the stories could be both fascinating and horrifying. As a young boy, I was also enthralled by the language my father and his friends used to describe their prison experiences. It was as if talking about a painful past gave them permission to use obscenities. “The motherfuckers punched my head as if it were a boxing bag,” Mr. Banki would say.

  “The bastards had no mercy,” Mr. Abdollah would add.

  “The prison was a shithole and stank like a pigsty,” Mr. Hosseinpour would interject.

  Eventually my father would conclude, “Those thugs tried to break us, but what they did just made us stronger.”

  These men, and many others who were not lucky enough to survive, endured imprisonment and torture because they stood for freedom. What was happening in Iran in June 2009 was a continuation of the same struggle. My father and his friends loved to recite the poem “The End of the Game,” by Ahmad Shamlou, which Shamlou wrote about the shah.

  How can you enjoy

  trees and gardens

  for you spoke to Yassmin

  with shears.

  Where you step

  plants

  refrain from growing.

  For you

  never believed

  in integrity

  of soil and water

  As the Islamic regime consolidated its power after the revolution, the poem became not only about the shah anymore; it referred to all despots who have ruled my country. As I sat in Khamenei’s prison, I thought of him while I recited the poem.

  Alas! our destiny

  was the faithless ballad of your soldiers

  returning

  from the conquest of the harlots’ fortress.

  Wait and see what the curse of hell

  will make of you,

  for the grieving mothers

  —mourners of the most beautiful children of the sun and wind—

  have not yet

  raised their head from their prayers.

  · · ·

  I had been reporting on the Islamic Republic for twelve years. I knew how irrational and dangerous the regime could be. The longer I sat in my cell waiting for someone to explain to me what was happening, the more concerned I became. In my better moments, the journalist in me found the experience, even the interrogations, fascinating. Not many journalists had gotten so close to the inner workings and secrets of this notorious prison.

  I concentrated on remembering every detail for an article I imagined I’d eventually write: “Seventy-two Hours in Evin Prison.”

  That first night, I shut my eyes and tried to sleep. Immediately, I started to dream. I was with Paola in Hampstead Heath on a foggy London morning. We were lying on top of a hill. Paola was wearing her white pajamas and a white tank top. I was kissing her pregnant stomach and rubbing baby oil on it. In my dream, I did not miss any opportunity to kiss Paola. I told her about the absurdity of my seventy-two hours in Evin, and we laughed about Rosewater’s absurd allegations. Then we were back in our flat in London, her dark blond hair spread across the pillow beside me. Then, suddenly, someone was banging on our door.

  “Prepare yourself. You’ll be going back to your specialist soon!”

  In my dream state, I couldn’t make sense of those words.

  “Get up! You leave in five minutes.”

  “What time is it?” I asked, aware only of the throbbing ache in my lower back and the stiffness in my legs.

  “If you were supposed to know the time, we would have put a clock in your cell,” said the guard. I recognized the voice: it was Blue-Eyed Seyyed. “Now hurry up!”

  I was led blindfolded through the courtyard again, and guessed it to be around four A.M. When Rosewater came into the interrogation room, I could hear him yawning. He once again told me to remove my blindfold and sit facing the wall. He then took a bite of something and chewed loudly.

  “Would you care for some of this?” he asked me.

  “What is it?”

  “A salted cucumber.”

  “No, thank you.”

  He sounded insulted. “What? Do you think that interrogators don’t wash their hands?”

  I accepted the cucumber and took a bite of it. Rosewater placed another sheet of paper in front of me.

  “I want you to write down the names of all of your friends and the countries you have been to.”

  I took my time listing all the countries I had visited. When I was nine years old, I spent a month touring Europe with Maryam and my mother. Because of the oil boom of the 1970s, Iran’s economy was doing well, and the currency was strong. We visited twelve cities in nine countries. The trip opened my eyes to other cultures and people, and instilled in me a love of travel that persists to this day. As Rosewater hovered around me in the interrogation room, I remembered visiting the Houses of Parliament in London with Maryam and my mother. It was that day when I first learned of a concept called “democracy,” and I fell in love with London because of it. As a child growing up in the shah’s Iran, all I knew about politics in Iran was that the shah—or, as they called him on state television, His Royal Majesty the Shah of the Shahs—had all the power in the country and the people had none.

  “So what do they do here?” I asked Maryam. “Why don’t we have a parliament in Iran?” To my surprise, Maryam told me that we did.

  “So why don’t we hear about them?” I asked. Maryam and my mother exchanged an exasperated look. They didn’t know how to explain to a child my age that the Iranian parliament in th
e time of the shah was just a charade, and that no one who was even remotely critical of the shah would ever be allowed to run for office.

  “Well, it’s different in Iran,” Maryam said. “The parliament is not that active.”

  “Why?”

  My mother was growing impatient. “Mazi jaan,” she said, “don’t repeat this to any of your friends or at school. We have a shah in Iran and everyone has to listen to him. Everyone—cabinet ministers, members of parliament, and all other people.”

  “And how’s it here?”

  “People vote for people they trust, their representatives, and they are the ones who select the prime minister,” my mother said, obviously hoping that I would drop the issue. “In England, the queen has no power; she has to listen to the people. It’s called democracy. In Iran, people have no power; they have to listen to the shah.”

  “But why?” I wanted to know, but my mother’s patience had run out.

  She smiled at Maryam and me. “Shall we go to Madame Tussauds?”

  Now, as I wrote down the names of all the countries I had visited, I smiled at the memory. When I finished, I slowly listed the names of my friends, leaving out the Iranians. I wanted to avoid answering any questions about anybody the Guards might be able to locate and arrest.

  “Mr. Bahari,” Rosewater said after I’d handed him the paper. “Why is it that you do not write down the names of your Iranian friends?”

  “I don’t have that many Iranian friends, sir,” I answered. “I spend most of my time outside Iran. I only come to Iran to work, and don’t socialize much while I’m here.”

  He knew I was lying. I heard him take a piece of paper in his hands, and he began to read off a list of names of my friends, foreign and Iranian. I realized he must have gotten the names from my emails and phone. When I’d first arrived at Evin, the guards had requested that I give them the passwords to my email and Facebook accounts. They had also confiscated my London and Tehran cell phones. I hadn’t resisted—I had nothing to hide. “I want an entire tak nevisi on these people,” Rosewater said now, meaning an explanation of how I knew each individual and the nature of my relationship with that person. As with his previous interrogations, he didn’t seem interested in finding new information. He’d already made up his mind about me and what I’d done. He just wanted to prove a point.

  “The more you tell us about the anti-revolutionary and seditious activities of each person, the more we can have an understanding,” said Rosewater. “And a better understanding means that you can have an easier time in prison.”

  He interrupted me as I wrote, asking me questions about why I’d been to certain countries, how I’d met certain people. Rosewater was particularly interested in anyone named Jonathan and Mary. He gave me a list of all the people I knew with these names.

  “Write down where you have met each one of them and how you know them,” he said.

  I stared at the list. The Jonathans I knew included three broadcasters and a cameraman. I knew more than a dozen Marys from different periods in my life. I couldn’t imagine why he had singled out these people; there were no connections between them. I started with my friend Jonathan Miller, a correspondent for Channel 4 News in England. I explained that we’d worked together on several programs about Iran and Iraq.

  “Good,” Rosewater said from behind me. “Now write down which spy agency he works for.”

  “I beg your pardon, sir?”

  “Am I talking Turkish here?” he asked brusquely. “Tell me which intelligence agency this Jonathan works for.”

  “Sorry, sir,” I said desperately. “He’s not a spy. He’s a filmmaker.”

  “You are lying, Mr. Bahari.”

  “No, really. I don’t think he’s a spy.” I paused for a few seconds, then continued. “Even if he were, he probably wouldn’t tell me that.” I explained that we had worked on a series of programs about human-rights abuses in Iraq after the American invasion, as well as on a few films shot in Iran. Rosewater seemed to know all of this already. He mentioned a program we had collaborated on about Hossein Ali Montazeri, an ayatollah who was a vociferous critic of the Islamic regime. The film showed footage of Montazeri questioning the legitimacy of the government.

  “It’s so interesting,” Rosewater said. “You’ve worked on anti-revolutionary television programs together. His name is Jonathan. Yet you say he’s not a spy.”

  “I don’t understand the connection,” I said. In high school, one of my favorite subjects had been logic. I’d always thought I could follow people’s reasoning, even if it was riddled with non sequiturs. But I had no idea what Rosewater was talking about.

  “With friends like that and making films like that, how can you tell me that you are not a ringleader of the foreign media in Iran?” he asked.

  Years of covering Iranian politics and trying to draw conclusions about the irrational behavior of the Iranian government had not prepared me for understanding Rosewater. All I could do was follow out a logical sequence of my own:

  These people are in charge of my life.

  They are ideological, ignorant, and stupid.

  I am screwed.

  · · ·

  Back in my cell afterward, I lay down again on the green carpet and talked to my father. “Mazi jaan, whatever you do, just don’t name names,” I heard him say in my head. My father had always told us about how prisoners who revealed information about one comrade would only be pushed to reveal more information about others. “Be careful, Mazi. You name one name, and the list of questions will go on forever.”

  Over the next two days, between interrogations, I did my best to remember the kinds of conversations I had had with my father, and I concocted further dialogues with him in my head. Meanwhile, Rosewater made sure that I understood that he was going out of his way to be polite and patient with me. “Please answer these as well,” he would say sarcastically as he handed me page after page of questions about different Iranian journalists working for the foreign media. It was clear that the aim of the questions was to connect me to a vast array of journalists from different Western news organizations, in order to prove that I was the mastermind of the Western media in Iran. In response, I wrote out long, general answers that revealed very little.

  Explain your relationship with Nazila Fathi of The New York Times.

  Mrs. Fathi is a journalist for The New York Times. The New York Times is a national newspaper, with headquarters in New York City. Its building is located around Times Square, at 42nd Street in Manhattan. It is privately owned, by the Sulzberger family. It publishes a daily edition, as well as a popular Sunday edition.…

  After writing down everything I knew about the paper, I would then add pages and pages of general ideas about the history of the media in the West, things I had learned in my journalism courses at Concordia University. On the second day, Rosewater began to take the pages away and provide me with new ones before even reading my answers. At first I still hoped that he was communicating with someone above him—someone who was, I prayed, supervising this charade; but I soon realized he was just busy interrogating another person in the room next to me.

  “Mardak!” I heard him yell through the wall, calling the prisoner “little man.” “I’ll finish your life here. Do you think you can fool me?! Stop writing this bullshit and answer me.” These words were followed by the sound of a man being slapped repeatedly.

  Hearing this, I felt the sweat collect in the small of my back. I tried to keep my writing hand steady. Then Rosewater was back in the room, offering me a snack.

  “Please, have some nuts, Mr. Bahari,” he said, placing a plate of cashews and pistachios on the writing arm of my chair.

  “Thank you very much, sir,” I said.

  “You are most welcome.” He was breathing heavily. “Would you Americans treat your prisoners like this in Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo?”

  I didn’t reply.

  “You know something, Mr. Bahari? It would be in your interest to j
ust end this all and confess to masterminding the Western media in Iran. That’s all you have to do. Tell us about it. Tell us your methods for directing the media.” He picked a cashew from the plate. “To be honest, we’re really quite amazed by you. We know that you operate in a certain way. Quite mysterious. Almost invisible.” His tone was uncharacteristically controlled. I was not sure whether he really believed what he was saying or was trying to frame me. “We’ve been living with you for months. You didn’t know that, did you? Well, it’s true, so you better not deny anything. We know the answer to most of the questions we’re asking. We just want to know how willing you are to tell us the truth.”

  I tried to keep my voice calm. “I think you have the wrong person here, sir,” I said. “None of the attributes you mentioned fit my character. You make me sound like James Bond!”

  Rosewater laughed heartily. “James Bond should take lessons from you, Mr. Bahari. The devil himself should learn playing mischief from you.” He seemed to be enjoying this. “Surprise me, Mr. Bahari. Tell me something I don’t know.”

  “I have nothing to hide,” I said. “And I’m glad to hear that you know everything about me, because then you must know that I’m innocent.”

  “Oh, really?” growled Rosewater. “So why did you use a motorcycle to travel around Tehran?”

  So Davood was right, I thought. We were being followed. “You know about the traffic in Tehran, sir. I always use motorcycle cabs.”

  “And you always use the same person?” Rosewater said sarcastically. “Mr. Bahari, we’ve arrested your personal biker. Or shall I call him a courier? He’s told us everything about you.”