Brides of Blood

by Joseph Koenig

  To maintain an atmosphere of terror the bloodstains on the floor were never washed away. Yet no one looked anywhere else; for if they did, they would see in every doorway a man suspended by the handcuffs behind his back from a bar hammered into the lintel so that his toes barely touched the floor. Darius was ordered to halt, and his blindfold was removed. After he had blinked the improbable tableau into focus, he was brought to the end of the corridor and shoved inside one of the few doorways without a hanging sentry.

  He sat in a straight-backed chair shivering in his cold sweat. Here the blood on the floor had not been left for show; it collected too fast and was crusted too thick to mop up. A picture of the Imam looked down at the blood with approval, and at Darius with regret that none was his. In half an hour a young man assumed the interrogator’s place behind a plain desk. He offered Darius a cigarette, and took it for himself when it was refused. The flame from the match was reflected in his constricted pupils, which burned into Darius’s eyes.

  “Confession is good for the soul,” he intoned in a dry voice. “Although the soul is not our concern at Evin, you will be afforded every opportunity to perfect it. You are Darius Bakhtiar, am I correct, lieutenant colonel in the National Police, Teheran district?”

  “Until tonight,” Darius said.

  “I am Sabbagh. It is good you understand that you are no longer who you were.”

  “Who am I?”

  “You are nobody.”

  “If I’m nobody, then how can I be—” Darius stopped, wary of cheap victories. The logic that was his best weapon was no match for the irrationality that was theirs. He would not fight back until he found a battlefield to his liking. “What, specifically, have I been charged with?” he asked. “Under the administrative regulations governing the revolutionary courts and public prosecutor’s office I have the right to know.”

  “You have no rights.” Sabbagh removed a ballpoint pen from his shirt pocket, and clicked the point in and out. “The charges will depend on the quality of your confession.”

  By this, Darius was made to understand that his crimes would be extrapolated from the information he gave up to them. It was axiomatic that the greater the pain inflicted the more encompassing the guilt acknowledged. The agonies of interrogation were but a consequence of the vile deeds they elicited, and thus the prisoner’s fault. Liberation in the form of death was the hard-won gift of his torturers. And so nothing had changed since the former landlords turned over the prison to their former tenants, and took up residence in the cells.

  “Have you anything to say for yourself?” Sabbagh asked. “Anything you would like me to know before we start?”

  “No.”

  “You have a long history of anti-Iranian activity. From the time you went abroad to study you were hostile to the nation’s interests. This was proven by your subsequent employment in SAVAK. When you killed the enemy of God, Ibrahim Farmayan, you were viewed as a man who had come belatedly to his senses, and so were set free by the Revolution and your past not held against you.” Sabbagh studied the bare top of the desk. “This was a mistake, which we see in a continuing pattern of seditious behavior. In short, you are a saboteur.”

  Sabbagh’s interrogatory style was amateur, grand inquisitor stuff picked up from Russian novels. Darius dropped his gaze below the table, and was surprised not to see shiny cavalry boots. “The allegation is preposterous,” he said. “I demand to see a lawyer.”

  “You are a lawyer. Why should you have two lawyers on your case when other prisoners have none?”

  There were no shortcuts through Evin Prison. Darius would not be allowed to make his confession now if he begged to tell everything. By extending the questioning over a prolonged period of time, Sabbagh expected to be rewarded with something more—whether a nugget of truth with which the prisoner hoped to buy release from pain, or a lie of nearly equal value. Though words were suspect, they were the product this harsh factory was geared to produce. There was a ready market in the press and propaganda bureaus for everything that came off the assembly lines.

  Sabbagh lit another cigarette. Darius filled his lungs with its lingering smoke and pretended it relaxed him.

  “I want to make a call,” he said. “My friends will be alarmed when they don’t hear from me.”

  For whom was this ruse meant? To fool Sabbagh into thinking they could not do what they wanted to him because somewhere there were important people who would raise a stink? Or was he bluffing only himself, bolstering his spirits with a fiction that Sabbagh would see through easily—that there was someone on the outside to whom he mattered.

  His wrists were yanked back above his shoulders, and he was dragged from the chair.

  “We will resume shortly,” Sabbagh said. “In the meantime, no calls. Better that you reflect on your situation and consider the advantages of being forthcoming.”

  He was brought to the hospital and chained to a radiator. What was this? If he needed a doctor he would have to wait days to see one, and now, still quite well, he was given a choice place in the waiting area. Ahead of him was a prisoner whose swollen arms were thicker than his waist. Aspirin was administered by a young medic Darius recognized as Kashfi, Baghai’s temporary assistant with the least affection for coroner’s work. The line of patients crept around the radiator, but Darius’s name wasn’t called; and he realized he was not here for a checkup or treatment, but to be acquainted with the stench of ruined men and women.

  When the new shift of guards came on duty he was moved to a cell with two other men, a space less than three meters by two constructed to house a single prisoner. There had been a time when it was a de facto death sentence for a SAVAK renegade to be locked up among the general population. In light of the severe crowding brought upon by revolutionary vigilance the old customs no longer applied. Or maybe they still did.

  A man about his age dressed in the remnant of a fine suit was snoring on the lone mattress. Stretched out on the concrete floor was an emaciated youth whose sandy hair was pomaded with dry blood. Bare-chested, he was wrapped in a blanket. Both feet were bandaged in black rags that had been a blue shirt. By moving them out of the way one at a time with his hands he made room for Darius.

  “It is Anvari’s turn in the bunk,” he said. “You can have it next, I can’t sleep.” He shifted position with difficulty, and settled back against the wall. “My name is Rajab, of the Peoples Mujahadeen. You are—”

  Darius looked away from him.

  “I know it is none of my business, but there has been no one for me to talk to in a long time. This one is a fanatic, although to his eternal credit he embezzled from the government, and will not acknowledge my existence. They are counting on us to tear each other apart.

  “It’s not good here,” he continued after giving up on a response from Darius. “Once I needed to go to the bathroom, and when I called for the guard he beat me and kicked out two of my teeth.” Rajab lifted his upper lip to expose jagged nubs festering in the gum. “Then he threw a tin can at me and told me to piss in that. For two days they did not take the can away, or feed me, or give me water. Another guard came in and asked what I was saving in the can. When I told him, he said to drink it. Naturally, I refused, but then he attacked me with a club, and beat me so bad that I did what he wanted. After, they put sweet tea in the can, and I was forced to drink it, too. I tell you these horrible things so you will know what you are up against.”

  Whether Rajab’s story was true or not, whether he had told it out of loneliness, or because he had been instructed to, the recitation had served the purpose of focusing Darius’s thoughts—as Sabbagh suggested.

  “That one there,” Rajab spit on the sleeping man’s shoulder, “is an antenna. Have no part of him.”

  “What’s an antenna?”

  “A spy. Every word you say around him is transmitted to the administration.”

  Darius wanted nothing to do with either of them. Both men could be spies, or neither. Rajab could be the antenna
, and his goal to isolate his sleeping enemy; or he could be the frightened man he claimed to be. The possibilities in Evin were limited only by the holding capacity of the cells. Conundrums were built upon conundrums until the process of sorting everything out, of thought itself, became torture that begged for the release of confession.

  “Last night,” Rajab said, “returning from being questioned, I saw a man open his wrists with a piece of glass he had secreted in the cuff of his pants.”

  There was no window in the cell. Light came from a metal cage in which a forty-watt bulb never went out. Darius’s sense of time was the first casualty of his incarceration, but his body craved sleep. He listened to Rajab, making a pillow of his arms, letting this grisly bedtime story render him unconscious.

  Breakfast was lukewarm tea and a piece of bread that he wouldn’t touch. Rajab and Anvari eyed the morsel, circling like buzzards. “It’s yours,” Darius said, and while Anvari answered, “Thank you, sir,” Rajab snatched it for himself and gobbled it in a corner with his back to them.

  Waiting, a trick he had not mastered, was now an end in itself, prelude to a performance he would as soon miss. He filled his head with daydreams, and populated them with women he’d had. Farib alone eluded him. Maryam Lajevardi came uninvited in her place, her image so vivid that he saw the faint character lines around her eyes. Less clearly defined was her body, which he stripped naked and supplied with Farib’s form, and then tinkered with until it was more to his liking. By taking away several centimeters from the bust, adding a slight angle to the hips where Farib was graceful curves, he attached personality to the perfect shape. He imagined Maryam as a red-head, and then with raven hair, and without having to concentrate hard as his to do with as he wanted, let his inventiveness run wild until a scream from a distant cell chased her away.

  He was desperate to get a message to her, but couldn’t justify an attempt for hollow assurances that would terrify her when she learned where they originated. His adversaries were aware of every one of his plans. Was the new spy in Homicide that good, a high-tech antenna beaming word even of his thoughts? Or had his work habits deteriorated into inexcusable sloppiness that would have gotten him killed had not room in Evin Prison been found for him?

  When a guard came for the trays Darius asked to be taken to the toilet. The guard considered a plot before unlocking the cell. The toilet was far along the corridor, past the “one-way” stairs to the basement torture rooms. Well before he was there he was met by the smell, and no longer of the opinion that Rajab had been cruelly abused when he was made to use a can as a slop bucket. As he stepped inside, a surprise punch to the back of the head sent him reeling into the wall.

  “Bloody infidel,” the guard said, “don’t you know the Imam has stated that upon entering a toilet the believer must set down his left foot first?”

  His wrists were shackled as the corridor filled with guards. He took a tentative step wondering if the Imam used a right or left foot lead after finishing with the toilet hose. A looping punch delivered to the point of the jaw buckled his knees. He put a foot back to steady himself, and was shoved forward through a gauntlet of fists. Heavy hands pummeled his midsection. When he had wearied them he was given to others for kidney punches, passed on again and kneed in the groin, beaten with a stick. The game was “Evin soccer,” and he was the ball, to be batted around until the air had hissed out of him, and he was too senseless for them to hurt anymore.

  Rajab said, “Welcome home,” and gave up the bunk for him. He examined Darius’s bruises and said, “You’re not too bad off. While you were gone, I saw something you would never believe. A boy thirteen years old was locked up in a cell for three weeks by himself. They brought him out, and he went up and down the corridor like a rabid fox, pounding on the walls, yelling gibberish at the top of his lungs. The guards could not catch him, he was so wild. They let him run till he was breathless, and then they cornered him and beat him unconscious, and threw him back in the same cell.” Rajab pointed through the barred door. “That one there.”

  Darius shut his eyes as Rajab went on as loud and excited as the boy must have been. This time sleep didn’t come, nor respite from his pain. He used his saliva to wash the blood from his face. A tooth was loose in the back of his mouth. When he wiggled it, it came off on his tongue.

  Sabbagh was waiting for him reading the Imam’s treatise on The Determination of the Hour of Dawn During Moonlight—The True and False Dawns. Although he almost never smoked, Darius accepted a cigarette. His puffy lips had no feeling, and the cigarette fell onto the table when Sabbagh gave him a light.

  “Have you been to our mosque yet?” Sabbagh asked.

  “No.”

  “It is a mistake not to go. The mosque is the wellspring of life at Evin, as it is for society as a whole. The reeducation of the miscreant begins in the mosque, because more than any other aspect of human endeavor, prayer opens the mind.”

  “My mind is already open,” Darius said.

  Sabbagh regarded him disdainfully. “Your mind is as closed as any man’s that ever lived. It is just your head that is open.”

  And still spinning, thought Darius. He had practiced answers for anything Sabbagh might say to him. Trying to remember them made the pain that much worse, and he fell back on tired legalisms.

  “I am a political prisoner,” he said, “not a criminal, and must be accorded proper standards of treatment. These are not being met in Block 209.”

  “You are overly impressed with your own importance. You are no different than other inmates. We will do with you as we see fit.”

  “I don’t see any purpose in further interviews. It’s too much to expect we’ll find common ground.”

  “Perhaps, but there is no pressure on our side to revise our attitude, while you will be given incentive to reconsider your stubborn silence.”

  Sabbagh glanced in his book. Darius anticipated more sparring, maybe a discussion of the true and false dawns, but the session was over. He was brought to a distant wing of the block where the cell doors were solid steel, without bars, and narrower than his shoulders. He had to duck his head as he was made to enter a pitch black opening; one step inside he was as lost as if he had stumbled into a subterranean cavern. Groping about with his hands in front of his face, he determined that he was alone in a space smaller than the cell he had shared with the other men. There was no bunk on the wall. He tipped over an object that rolled around the floor distributing the stench of human waste. His feet tangled in a stiff, dusty blanket. He balled it up in a corner and used it as a pillow. When he closed his eyes, the blackness seemed to lessen. Every punch he had taken from the guards, every kick, came back to him with renewed intensity. He amused himself by counting individual sites of pain, curious if each was matched by a dormant pleasure receptor. Past sixty he gave up and fell asleep.

  He was awakened by a crawling sensation on his throat. A dream, he thought, until he felt it lingering against his cheek, and his hand closed on something that bled between his fingers. A two-day stubble had sprouted on his face. In the absence of more accurate means of measuring the passage of time, his beard would be his calendar.

  Despite his protest to Sabbagh, he realized that he had been treated up to now with deferential tenderness. Soccer, while not his favorite game, was nothing he could not endure. Nor did a solitary cell hold any terror for him. The fact was that he did not mind his own company, and preferred it in extended periods to the bickering of Rajab and Anvari.

  The quiet was broken by wailing that he assumed to be the pathetic residue of torture. After several minutes he proclaimed himself an expert on it, and that it was made by a woman. The women’s wing of Evin was far away from the men’s, and he could not figure out how the sound reached all the way to Block 209. Possibly he was imagining things. Not the crying—that was real enough. But its source. He would not be the first man obsessed with the events that brought him to Evin Prison who turned his thoughts to women, seeking reason to sur
vive.

  For three days (or four, or five—his calendar had thickened till it was too fuzzy to read) he was left alone in the cell but for the brief times he was dragged into the corridor for prayer. One day, expecting a meal tray when the door was opened, another man was pushed into his arms. They disengaged awkwardly, and sought out opposite corners.

  “Who are you?” the newcomer asked.

  “Call me Darius. And you?”

  “Habibi. Have you been here long?”

  “I don’t know,” Darius said. “It’s a question of taste.”

  “It is not to my taste. Do they beat you?”

  “No.”

  “Where I came from they whipped me every day on the soles of my feet till I was unable to walk. I wore the skin from my knees crawling. I am here to recuperate, so they can start on me again.”

  Darius wanted to ask what offense had brought Habibi to Evin, but this was a breach of prison etiquette.

  “My crime was a terrible one …” Evidently, Habibi was a mind reader. “I murdered the Imam.”

  Darius pulled back his legs, which were tangled in the other man’s. “The Imam died of old age. He was eighty-nine, and had been sick with cancer for a long time.”

  “So people believe,” Habibi said. “But I had wished him dead every day, until it came to pass.”

  Darius heard the slop can scrape against the floor, and Habibi relieve himself in it.

  “It is enough that I can kill by thought. But I can also project my body outside the walls. Would you like me to show you?”

  “It’s not necessary.” For imagining what he had, Habibi was treated like a murderer and had no reason to doubt his fantasies. Though delusional, he still could be an antenna. Darius had never heard of prisoners doubling up in the solitary cells.

  “My trial was three months ago. I was sentenced to die, but received a postponement until they finished questioning me.”