I wasn’t concerned about what Davood could tell his interrogators, because there was nothing to tell, of course. But I was worried about Davood. What had I gotten him into? He had moved to Tehran to support his family with his motorcycle, and now … a chance encounter with me may have ruined his life. I tried not to imagine what Davood might be suffering at that moment.
“Sir, that poor man is just a motorcycle cabbie,” I said. “All he did was take me from one place to another, and I paid him at the end of each day.”
“I’ll keep you posted about him, Mr. Bahari. We know that he’s part of your vast network. He seems to have a lot to say about you.” He tapped my chair with his fingers. “So tell us about the dinner at Nazila Fathi’s house on the twenty-eighth of April.”
The pen shook in my hand. For the first time, he was asking me about something that had actually happened. He was referring to a dinner I’d attended with eight other journalists and photographers at my friend Nazila’s house in Tehran several weeks before the election.
It had just been a friendly get-together, and it surprised me that Rosewater knew about it. Nazila had been the Tehran correspondent for The New York Times for years. She and her husband, Babak, had told me that they thought that their house was under surveillance but that they didn’t know which branch of the government was staking them out.
“It was just a dinner. It wasn’t anything special,” I said as dismissively as I could.
“Who were the other guests?” he asked.
I told him the names of each of the guests except for two. One was a Spanish journalist whose presence there I had genuinely forgotten. The other was my Newsweek colleague Babak Dehghanpisheh. I didn’t mention Babak’s name in order to test Rosewater—I wanted to see if he knew as much as he claimed to. I was also worried about Babak and wanted to know whether they had arrested him.
“And?” he asked.
“That’s it,” I answered.
“This is a very dangerous game you’re playing, Mr. Bahari,” Rosewater murmured into my ear. “Very dangerous.” He paused and then put a piece of paper in front of me. “You forgot your dear friend Babak Dehghanpisheh and a mysterious foreign woman.”
So he knew everything. “Yes, I forgot to mention Babak. Of course he was there. And I totally forgot the Spanish journalist. I can’t remember her name.”
“Is that so?” he said. “You are part of a very American network, Mr. Bahari. Let me correct myself: you are in charge of a secret American network, a group that includes those who came to that dinner party.”
“It was just a dinner.”
“It was not a dinner! It was a mahfel!” This word, which means “cabal,” suggested that I was part of a group of seditious reformists and journalists conspiring against the Islamic Republic. “A very American dinner,” he went on. “A very American mahfel. It could have happened in … New Jersey.”
The strangeness of the accusation was unsettling. New Jersey?
“You’ve been to New Jersey, haven’t you, Mr. Bahari?” The thought seemed to infuriate him.
The worst thing that can happen in any encounter with Islamic Republic officials is for them to think that you’re looking down on them, so I was careful to control my tone. “Well, yes, sir. New Jersey’s not a particularly nice place,” I said, trying to sound conversational.
“I don’t care if it’s nice. All I know is that it is a godless place, like the one you were trying to create in this country. With naked women and Michael Jackson music!” He paused. “Your own New Jersey in Tehran.”
His questions were having a weakening effect. I felt dizzy all of a sudden. I tried to muster the strength to answer him. “I’m sorry. I don’t understand.”
“You were planning to eradicate the pure religion of Mohammad in this country and replace it with ‘American’ Islam. A New Jersey Islam. Tell me,” he said, “did any of the women at the dinner party have their veils on?”
“No.”
“Then don’t tell me that you didn’t have a secret American network. A New Jersey network.”
The absurdity of his fascination with the Garden State almost made me laugh. But the fact that my life was in his hands horrified me. Where is Paola? I thought. She is the master of divining theories about people’s behavior. How would she define this Islamic Republic torturer’s fascination with the birthplace of Frank Sinatra and Bon Jovi?
“I have news for you, Mr. Bahari,” Rosewater went on, his voice calmer now. “We will never let people like you change our country, to make it like New Jersey. I wish your American masters could hear me now. It will never happen.”
I remained silent. The potent mixture of the Garden State and ideological zeal had numbed my senses.
“Now go back to your cell,” Rosewater ordered, putting his hand on my shoulder, “and think about what I just said.”
My father and Maryam had told me how they had cried in prison for what had happened to our country. I’d never thought they’d meant it literally. Yet when the guard shut the door of my cell behind me that night, I could not stop my tears. I was not missing my mother or Paola at that moment. I was shedding tears for my country. I felt as if Iran, my country, had been invaded by monsters—men like Khamenei and his odious gang. I thought of the first lines of the poem “Winter,” by the Iranian poet Mehdi Akhavan Sales.
They are not going to answer your greeting
Their heads are in their jackets
Nobody is going to raise his head
To answer a question or to see a friend
The eyes cannot see beyond the feet
The road is dark and slick.…
Akhavan Sales wrote this poem after the 1953 coup, when the shah was silencing any voice of dissent. The poem was one of Khamenei’s favorites, and before the revolution, he often recited it to members of his cabal. I wondered if he still read it.
The breaths are clouds, the people are tired and sad
The trees are crystallized skeletons, the earth is low-spirited
The roof of the sky is low
The sun and moon are hazy
It’s winter
· · ·
On my fourth full day in Evin, I was allowed to call my mother. “You have exactly one minute,” Rosewater said in the interrogation room that morning as he handed me my cell phone. “Just tell her you’re fine. That’s all.”
When my mother picked up, I had a hard time controlling my voice. I could tell that she had been sitting near the phone, waiting for this call, every day. Her voice was steeped in relief.
“Mazi jaan, how are you?”
Rosewater’s head touched mine as he leaned down to listen to what she was saying. I tried my best to not reveal the desolation in my voice. “I’m fine, Moloojoon.”
She had been through this before, of course, and knew exactly what to say. “We’ve hired a lawyer for you: Mr. Saleh Nikbakht. He’s trying to arrange a meeting with you.” Nikbakht was one of the most courageous lawyers in Iran. He was famous for his persistence and for pestering judges to make quick decisions in favor of his clients.
“Khaled spoke to Paola,” my mother said as Rosewater made a motion for me to end the call. I felt an immediate sense of relief. I had been sick with worry about Paola’s well-being, and it was at least a little comforting to know that she wasn’t under the impression that I’d simply vanished. It also meant that Khaled had done as I’d asked, as I’d known he would. In the updated list I had sent him a few days before my arrest, I had included Paola’s name. The fact that Khaled had contacted her meant that he must have also contacted the other people on the list—and perhaps, I hoped, that meant that Paola, Khaled, and others were making as much noise about my situation as possible.
“Paola’s fine,” my mother assured me. “She’s worried about you.” Those were my mother’s last words before Rosewater reached for the phone and ended the call.
“Do you know this attorney? This Nikbakht?” Rosewater sounded concerned.
>
I was lost in thoughts about Paola. Was her sister Barbara with her? Had she been in touch with anyone at Newsweek?
“Not really,” I answered absentmindedly. I was sick of talking to Rosewater. I’d had more than enough of his questions.
“He’s a really timid lawyer,” Rosewater said, going on to explain that my mother’s hopes for me to meet Nikbakht were empty. Rosewater told me that because I was still going through interrogation, I would be denied access to an attorney. That would change only after the interrogation process was complete.
“Mr. Bahari, let me advise you on this matter,” he said before exiting the room. “In our judicial system, it is the interrogator who makes the final decision. It is better if you cooperate with us, rather than rely on anyone outside of this room. You are here, and here, I am the only one who will make decisions about your life.”
Chapter Nine
My lunch was once again waiting for me when I returned to my cell. But I couldn’t eat. I picked at the piece of bread that came with the meal.
I thought of the conversations we had had with Maryam when she’d called us from prison. I’d always envied Maryam’s sense of responsibility and her dedication to her family. She, in turn, had always wanted to travel and roam around the world as I did. We shared the same tastes in film and music. We both loved the HBO series Six Feet Under. Many nights, after everyone had gone to sleep, we’d watch the show together, then talk for hours about the intertwined stories of the characters’ lives. Like the family in the series, Maryam and I felt the presence of our father in our daily lives. We, too, had had our share of fights with our father and at the same time respected his values and his free spirit. We had even both dreamt about our father as embodied by Richard Jenkins, the actor who plays the ghost of the father in Six Feet Under.
Yet our father had a more important presence in Maryam’s life because of their shared experience of spending years in an Iranian prison. Now, as I watched a row of ants climb over the plate of ghaymeh, I remembered my long talks with Maryam and hoped that these recollected conversations would give me strength and hope.
Over the six years of Maryam’s imprisonment, I was able to visit her only twice, as siblings were typically not allowed to see prisoners. The first time was two years after her arrest, when I was eighteen years old. When my mother, Khaled, and I arrived, after a seventeen-hour bus ride, the guard in charge would not let me in. “Only parents and children of the prisoners can come in,” he said. He was a tavab, a prisoner who had repented and, therefore, had been given special perks and responsibilities inside the prison. At the time, among the families of prisoners, the word tavab was used as an insult: a tavab was someone with no moral principles who was willing to rat on his friends to save himself. Despite my protests, the tavab simply repeated the reason why I could not get in. I took a chair in the waiting room and, although I was not proud of this at the time, sobbed into my hands.
“Why is it so important for you to see her?” the tavab asked me, once the other families had gone inside.
“She is my sister.” What else did I need to say?
“Too bad,” he said. “The answer is still no.”
Anger took hold of me. I stared the man in the eyes. “When you come out of prison, I will know what to do to you. You better watch yourself.”
He walked out of the room, and when he returned, he told me the warden wanted to see me.
I was afraid, but I had no choice. I stood and followed the tavab to the warden’s office.
“Who do you think you are, threatening this man?” the warden gruffly asked me. He got up from his chair and walked toward where I stood. “You want to be where your sister is?” With that, he started to slap my face. I wanted to fight back, more than I had ever wanted to fight in my life. But I couldn’t. I just stood there and took it.
His slapping was not hard. He didn’t want to hurt me; he wanted to humiliate me. “Begoo goh khordam,” he kept on telling me. “Say ‘I ate shit.’ ” I was too proud to say that, so I said, “Bebakhshid, eshtebah kardam”: I apologize, I made a mistake. That was enough for him, and he stopped slapping me.
I was shown back to the waiting room. Not long after, the warden walked into the room and told me I could see Maryam.
“Five minutes,” he said. “That’s all we’ll give you.”
I don’t know what made him change his mind, but I didn’t care.
Five minutes with Maryam was well worth the humiliation. She was waiting for me in a private visiting room. Her body was draped in a hideous gray chador embroidered all over with the logo of the judiciary, but I could tell how thin she’d gotten. She looked skeletal. I couldn’t stop crying, and Maryam took me in her arms to comfort me. I didn’t tell her about the scene with the warden; in fact, we barely spoke at all. It was hard for me to speak through my tears, but I tried my best to answer her questions about school, and what films I had seen. All I wanted was to remain in her arms. When the tavab knocked on the door five minutes later, I realized I’d barely said a word to my sister. I kissed her cheek and left the room quickly. As I walked back into the sunshine that day, my legs and heart felt as if they were made of lead.
When Maryam was finally released from prison, in 1989, I was living in Montreal, where I was about to begin my university studies. The first time we spoke on the phone, I thought I was speaking to a zombie. I could hear the exhaustion and pain in her voice. I was desperate to go home and visit her, but that was impossible. When I’d left Iran, in 1986, I had avoided being drafted, and if I returned, I would be arrested immediately. As a former prisoner, Maryam could not leave Iran. The best we could do was speak by phone, and we did, once a week for six years, until they finally allowed her to travel outside Iran. We met in Turkey. When I first spotted Maryam walking toward me with my mother, Maryam’s son, Khaled, and her daughter, Iran, at the Istanbul airport, I was overcome with emotion. The last time Maryam had seen me, I was eighteen. Now I was twenty-eight. I had become a man.
We spent ten days together, staying mostly inside our hotel suite. Maryam and I both looked forward most to the hour when everybody else would finally fall asleep and we could have some time alone.
It was here that she first told me about the things they did to her in prison. It was hard for me to hear her stories. The Revolutionary Guards had ordered that she be kept in solitary confinement for one year. She spoke to nobody during that time, except the prison guards who would deliver her meals. At times, they would bring her to a room simply to beat her, most often with a cable on the soles of her feet. Thousands of people perished in Iranian prisons in the 1980s, and there were many times when Maryam thought she was going to die.
In 1988, five years into her sentence, many of her cellmates—even some with light sentences—were dragged from their cells and executed, in a nationwide massacre. This crime against humanity was precipitated by the fact that the MKO, the terrorist group based in Iraq, had organized an attack on Iran at the end of the Iran-Iraq War, in the summer of 1988. The leader of the MKO, Massoud Rajavi, sent thousands of his followers to attack Khomeini’s defeated army. Rajavi had brainwashed them into believing that when they arrived in Iran, they would be greeted like heroes and be able to take over the government within a few days. But the Revolutionary Guards and the Iranian army repelled the attack in less than a week, and arrested and killed hundreds of MKO members.
Khomeini, like Massoud Rajavi, believed that murder was the most effective political tool. After the military defeat, to teach all political dissidents a lesson, he ordered the massacre. Within a few weeks, thousands of people who were suspected of supporting the MKO were rounded up and killed. Khomeini’s henchmen also killed hundreds of people who supported other political groups, including the Tudeh Party. No one knows exactly how many people died during this barbaric slaughter, but Amnesty International recorded the names of more than 4,482 people. Maryam never understood why she was spared.
Her worst experience in pris
on happened not long after the massacre, when she had gone on a hunger strike in protest of abuse by the prison guards. One night, Maryam and several other prisoners were summoned to an area outside of the cells. They were then marched to a field and lined up against a wall. Maryam had no idea what was happening, and was too afraid to ask. Prison guards began to hand out blindfolds and asked the prisoners to repent. This was when she knew: it was an execution ceremony.
“I thought I was going to die, Mazi,” she said, her eyes brimming with tears. “All I could feel was guilt. I felt guilty for putting our parents through this, and I felt responsible for what could happen to Khaled. I was a bad parent. A bad daughter.”
The Revolutionary Guards who were in control of the prison ordered the prisoners to face the wall. And then the shots were fired. But Maryam felt nothing. It took her a few seconds to understand what had happened: this was a mock execution, and the guards had fired blanks. She felt confused by the fact that she was still alive.
Maryam’s whole body shook as she told me about the mock execution. It was 1996 as we spoke, seven years after the fall of the Berlin Wall and five after the defeat of the Soviet Union. In those years Maryam had learned about the atrocities committed by the Soviet Union. She felt used by the Tudeh Party and the Soviets, and brutalized by Khomeini’s regime.
“Why did I join that party? I hate that party,” she told me in our hotel in Istanbul. “Nothing is worth dying for, Mazi. Nothing is worth what I went through.”
It was November 2008, nineteen years after she was released from prison, that Maryam called to tell me she had been diagnosed with leukemia. After we hung up, I felt shattered and hopeless. I left the small Soho editing room where I’d been working on a film for the BBC and called Paola. When she answered the phone, I could barely get the words out. “Why?” I kept asking her, as if she could give me an answer. That night we went to an Indian restaurant. I ordered the spiciest thing on the menu, hoping to feel something besides numbness.
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