The Ministry of Guidance Invites You to Not Stay: An American Family in Iran

by Majd, Hooman

  “You know, I’ve never been a religious person,” my friend continued, after I returned to the kitchen and turned the tape recorder back on. “Years ago, though, after I came back from Paris, where I had been studying and learning music and art, I was taken by the voice of the narrator of a television program on the Iran-Iraq War, which was still raging. I don’t know why—it was a magical voice—but I felt god had chosen him to tell the story of the war. I loved my country, and as a student of history, I knew that never before had there been a war when the entire world was gathered on one side of the conflict—all on Saddam’s side against us Iranians—and yet we were not just holding our own but regaining territory we had lost in the early stages of the attack.

  “The war: I was fascinated by this attack on us by the Arabs. I knew from then on that whatever regime came and went in the years, the centuries, to come, this regime and the way it had defended our nation would be forever remembered. The way Leonidas and his three hundred who fought Xerxes at Thermopylae are by the Greeks. You know, this was difficult for me, to see the brightness in what I considered a dark regime. But it was our bright moment. And I realized then, with the heroic sacrifices of our people, how our people view Ali and Hossein [Shia saints] as virtuous and heroic.”

  He paused again, staring into space. “But back to the elections,” he suddenly continued. “People had gathered at the square by my apartment building and were shouting slogans. After shedding my few tears, I returned to my apartment, but before I could enter, three of the mothers of young men I knew, neighborhood youths, besieged me, asking if I could help find their kids. I went back out and found two of them in the square, convincing them to return home. Then the Basij came. I told the kids in my building that they shouldn’t think that they’d be able to go out and demonstrate all the time—that the authorities might have been caught off guard this time, but now they knew exactly what they had to do and would extinguish all protest.

  “I knew that, so you’d think I’d just sit home, wouldn’t you? But for whatever reason, I was drawn, as so many others were, to the streets. By the third night—and you know, Saadatabad was almost like a war zone—with the Basij surrounding us and with people chanting slogans at them, occasionally throwing stones, I suddenly realized that some of the protesters were in all probability regime agents, and since I was the oldest person among all these young people, they would finger me as the leader. So, the protests had spread all over the city, and actually were over in my neighborhood within a few days, but I decided I wouldn’t go to any other protests, since I felt we had made a point, and it wasn’t the right time to challenge the regime this way, anyway.

  “But about a week later, I found out that a shopkeeper’s assistant down the street from me had been arrested, and I knew he had seen me at the demonstrations on our street, so I sensed a little danger. And a few nights later, actually on the eve of my fiftieth birthday, I heard a knock on my door, and three men were standing there. I let them in, and they looked around at my studio apartment—with no proper furniture anywhere—with obvious surprise. ‘You don’t have satellite TV?’ one asked. No. ‘No computer?’ No. They were very polite and respectful. ‘Sorry,’ another said, ‘but you have to come with us. If you have any prescription drugs, you should bring them with you.’ I changed my clothes and followed them outside, to two Peugeots. I got into the backseat of one, and two men got in next to me, on either side. When we reached Evin, one said apologetically, ‘We have to blindfold you now.’ Sure, I said. A few minutes later I was walked into a building, and someone came up to me and whispered in my ear, slowly, “Dahan-et ga’eed-ast!” [“You are so fucked,” but literally “You are fucked in the mouth.”] That was the first indication to me that things were really not going to be okay.”

  He stopped to light another cigarette, took a long drag, and exhaled slowly. I watched him without saying a word. I was getting drunk. But what must have gone through his mind, blindfolded, at Evin, with some thug telling him he’s fucked? Everybody in Tehran at the time knew about the torture and rape of political prisoners—they were hardly political prisoners, actually, just ordinary people voicing their displeasure at the government, not even at the regime—and in the early days of the post-election unrest, one could only imagine that if arrested, one might very well be subjected to all kinds of torture, too. My friend is the gentlest of artists, a soft-spoken single man who lives simply, without any furniture even, and whom young—much younger than him—Iranian girls find irresistible. Just this evening he had introduced us to his latest girlfriend, a twenty-something who stared at him adoringly, prompting Karri to deem him the Iranian Casanova. He loved Khash and would play with him for hours if we’d let him, or if we had no pity on our friends. Dahan-et ga’eedast. For what?

  “So they then took me to a room, where they gave me a change of clothes. A white T-shirt and blue pajamas! Who knew that when I changed at home, putting on a white T-shirt and a pair of jeans, that I was matching what I’d be wearing in prison! I was told to sit down on a chair—you know, the old classroom chairs with a desk built in—blindfolded again, and I was in it for an hour or so before I was led to another room and told to sit and raise my blindfold slightly. They wanted me to see the wall I was facing. Some men stood behind me and began the interrogation, which went on for hours, I think. This happened a few times later, too, by the way.

  “But after that first interrogation, they took me to another place to give me dinner. Again, someone came up to me and whispered in my ear, gently, ‘You’re like our brother here.’ Wow. That was strange. Dinner was fine, sangak bread and tuna, and I ate it all. And then they took me to my cell, solitary confinement. A small cell—I later found out less than two square meters—with a small carpet and some army blankets, that’s it. So I spent the night of my fiftieth birthday, which I had once thought was such a big deal, in solitary. It’s weird, but you know, I was happy in a way. I thought to myself, what an important man I must be! And the impression that we all had of Evin was that it was a terrifying, horrible place, but I found that it wasn’t. The next morning, though, when the interrogation resumed, I realized that this was more serious than I could have imagined. They viewed me as a leader of an insurrection, sedition or whatever, and as someone who planned things—”

  “Did you know who had arrested you at this point?” I interrupted him.

  “No, I didn’t then. I assumed it was the Intelligence Ministry but later found out that I was in Section 2A, the Sepah [Revolutionary Guards] section. And if you were with Intelligence, you were much better off—you had fruit, vegetables, et cetera, since Intelligence is a ministry under the president, at least somewhat accountable, but the Sepah is velayat-e-faqi—the Supreme Leadership, and a completely different story. They answer to no one. I was in solitary for about two months, where I thought I was going mad, every day.

  “But then one morning they blindfolded me and took me out, I could tell I was outdoors, to a room somewhere. They took my blindfold off, and I was in a room, a big room, with a refrigerator, and all these bearded men were lounging about. I thought to myself, ‘The prison must be full, and they’ve brought me to a room where off-duty guards relax!’ But of course I found out it was actually where they incarcerated Sepah guardsmen who were being disciplined for some infraction or another. It was the best section of Evin—where they keep people like the British sailors they had for a few days—and quite a nice place. I was there a few days, with some other people, young people but also other artists, people in the arts. You know, I calculated that half the people were artists of some sort—maybe that tells you that we’re politically stupid enough to get caught up in such things! Anyway, it was us and Revolutionary Guards—people who wanted to spill our blood on the outside, and we who wanted to spill theirs—and we were friends in there. We had a good time there; we even had a yard. So I was there for a while, maybe two weeks.

  “And then one day they took me back to solitary, which was horrific. Just
horrific to go back to that, after being with all these people, playing games and entertaining ourselves. It’s unimaginable, what it’s like to be out for a while and then to have to endure solitary again. I was in solitary for a while, I don’t know how many days, until one day they came and said, ‘You’re free.’ They asked me to sign a piece of paper, a questionnaire, where of course I ticked off boxes saying everything had been great! The food, accommodation, sanitation, that I hadn’t been abused, and so on and so on. They gave me back my clothes.

  “But of course I wasn’t free. I was now in what they called ‘quarantine.’ You know, Evin only houses political prisoners or perpetrators of financial crimes, debtors and check bouncers. The financial guys get thrown into a quarantine area, a big space with room for thirty or so beds, there’s even a phone in there, until they either get released because they’ve made good on their debts or whatever, or get sent into the general prison population. But now they had given over the quarantine section to political prisoners. There must’ve been way more of us, I guess. We could get released if we made bail, theoretically, and we found out later that most prisoners from the unrest, the protests, had been in quarantine and had been released between two weeks to a couple of months later. But we were still under the Revolutionary Guards’ control.

  “A few nights later we were taken to yet another building. There was a person there by the name of Heydarifar. Do you know who Pezeshk-ahmadi was?”

  “No, I can’t say I do,” I replied, entranced by my friend’s storytelling, as poetic as the language allows, all the more tantalizing for his deep and soothing voice.

  “Pezeshk-ahmadi was the state’s murderer—by syringe injection—during Reza Shah’s era. He had killed people like Teymourtash [Abdolhossein, minister of court], and Sardar Asad Bakhtiari [an early Constitutionalist]. He would go around and execute people by any means, syringe if possible, but even by suffocating them with a pillow if necessary, like with Teymourtash. So this guy Heydarifar was a thirty-something man like Pezeshk-ahmadi, a government murderer who was one of the people ordering torture and killings at Kahrizak before it was closed.” Kahrizak was a prison where many detainees in the 2009 Green uprising were sent. A number of them were raped and died under torture, including the son of a prominent conservative with close ties to the Supreme Leader, so Khamenei ordered it shut down and the offending guards and authorities arrested.

  “Anyway, in the Green uprising, millions came out into the streets and protested; a few thousand were arrested, and later one hundred of those were determined to be ‘leaders of the fetneh.’ Eighty of those were Intelligence Ministry prisoners, people who were actually politically active. The Revolutionary Guards didn’t have any of the so-called leaders of the sedition, so they told this Heydarifar to round up twenty of the street protesters and label them as leaders, too, so they would have their own high-profile prisoners. A case of intergovernmental jealousy, I guess. I became one of those twenty, but I didn’t know it at the time.

  “A couple of days later we were taken to a hall, where we recognized some faces. You see, in Section 2A at Evin, there are Hajis and Seyeds—the Hajis are the interrogators whose faces you never see, and the Seyeds are the guards, who you sometimes see. When we saw the Seyeds, we realized we were back in the dreaded 2A. This was the hardest part of our entire incarceration. They threw us into a van, some twenty of us, and some of them were just kids. And those kids would hold my hand—me being this older guy—and it made me want to weep. I had strength: I didn’t have a wife or kids to worry about, and I don’t know, maybe it’s my age, the fact that I was in jail for my fiftieth, but I had a strength that these kids, kids who still had a whole life ahead of them, probably didn’t. So we were taken back to 2A, turning our own clothes in again, being issued prison garb, back in solitary.

  “A few days later, I discovered that we were to be put on trial. The first of the sacrificial lambs! We were taken by bus one morning to the court, the Revolutionary Court. This was the day that Abtahi and Behzad Nabavi were being tried along with us—the big guys!” Mohammad Ali-Abtahi was a vice president under Khatami who had been arrested post-election for allegedly leading the sedition. He confessed, to the shock of his supporters, that he had indeed been agitating to overthrow the regime. Behzad Nabavi was a politician and former MP and an active reformist also charged with sedition.

  “There was one other famous guy—do you know who I’m talking about?”

  “No,” I said. “There were a bunch of very well-known people in the trial, right? That’s what astonished everyone—that the regime was going after its own children.”

  “Yeah, I’ve never been interested in these people, so I never remember their names,” he said, nodding. “Anyway, we appeared that day in court, then again a couple of weeks later, and yet again for the third session. We were the only ones to have three trials! Everyone else only had one, if that. You know, they showed us a film in that last trial, a film about the Basij who had been beaten up by protesters. It was really interesting. I mean, it was so effective that I wanted to attack my fellow prisoners, and even myself, for having been so evil to them! The film was professional, with incredible music—it really tugged at your heart.

  “It influenced me, I’m not afraid to admit, which is what great propaganda does. Imagine, it made me hate myself momentarily for deigning to hurt the poor, innocent Basij! Made me think that maybe I had been wrong all along. Anyway, when my turn came to have my verdict announced, it was an incredible sensation. Here I was, a nobody, and there were TV cameras and reporters and photographers with the rapid clicks and flashes of their cameras making a calamitous noise, and I held on to a railing with my hands, tight as I could, so no one could see them shaking.

  “Wait!” he suddenly exclaimed. “I forgot to tell you this.”

  “No problem,” I said. “Just carry on.”

  “Well,” he continued, “the night before, I was taken out of my cell and introduced to someone in a room. ‘You have your trial tomorrow,’ he said, ‘and I’m your lawyer.’ I said to him, ‘How come I’m hearing this now, that my trial is tomorrow and you’re my attorney?’ He replied that I didn’t have to accept him, so I asked him why he took my case. ‘Because it will bring me fame,’ he replied. So I told him that because he was so honest with me, I’d accept him. He asked me to sign a paper agreeing to have him represent me.

  “And then I was taken to yet another room, where two men were standing, wearing sunglasses. At night! So that I wouldn’t recognize them, of course, but what a joke! It’s funny, really, in the same way that in the darkest human story, there’s always humor, isn’t there? On the table in front of me there was fresh fruit, and pistachios and almonds, and even potato chips! Chips! I hadn’t seen these things in over two months, and I kept staring at them. ‘Eat something,’ one of them said, adding, ‘Your trial is tomorrow, so you might want to think about helping yourself.’ I asked him what he meant by helping myself. He said, ‘You’re a smart guy. You should think about your own skin. You could get five years in prison, unless you help yourself.’

  “I didn’t eat any of the treats, knowing that he was telling me to basically say something like, ‘Yeah, I confess, Mousavi or Karroubi made me do it,’ and beg for leniency. So after a short while they took me back to my cell, but not before one of the guys poured some of the almonds, big beautiful ones, into a bag and handed them to me. When I reached my cell, the guard grabbed the bag out of my hand. ‘What’s this!’ he cried, and took it away. So much for the treat!

  “So only two of the twenty of us ended up confessing, and blaming Mousavi for their seditious actions, but we who didn’t weren’t heroes. I remember saying to people who called them traitors that they shouldn’t say that—who knew what they had gone through? Maybe we had it easy, which made it easy for us to stand on our principles. Maybe they didn’t. We don’t know. It’s a very strange thing, prison, with torture and confessions. You can’t judge someone in prison. Ever
yone at the trial would start their statement with Besm’illah, ‘In the name of god,’ and end by asking for Islamic mercy and forgiveness, but I didn’t. People came to me after, when we were in the prison yard, and said how brave I was, but actually all it was, was that I’d forgotten to say those things! It wasn’t out of bravery, quite the opposite—I was scared. I’m not ashamed to say it. Anyway, not to bore you, but after the trial we were sent to the general population, the story of which is in itself a whole book! I’ve been talking too much, right? Too much detail. I’ll make it brief—”

  “No, no,” I said. “Whatever you want to say, and detail is good. I’m interested.”

  “The eve of the day the final verdicts were to be announced, for they weren’t final in the courtroom after all, I was tense and depressed,” he continued. “We’d been there a while. Some of the others, political prisoners all, wondered why, telling me that I was the one who always seemed calm and collected and who gave the younger ones strength. I said I was sorry, but I really was sad that night. We, the twenty Revolutionary Guards’ prisoners, had been in jail longer than almost all the other political prisoners—people who had been arrested after us, too. How could that be, we who had been picked up in the first few days—when it wasn’t even clear that what we were doing was forbidden yet—that we were in prison while others who were arrested after Rafsanjani’s speech, even in the Qods Day unrest, were long gone? I even, for the first time, went to the evening namaz in the prayer hall! You can’t believe that, can you? Me praying?