Children of Paradise (43 page)

Prisoners, including the Japanese yakuza boss and other criminals as well as young journalists, used the bathroom in groups of four, but there was no door on the toilet stall. They were forced to defecate in view of one another. There was a camera in the shower. Omid refused to undress before it until he could no longer stand his own smell, sixteen days into his detention. Then he broke down in sobs. He could only imagine who was watching this footage, to what end. For a year even after he was released, he could not bear to touch his own body to wash.

Day and night, Omid could hear the guards screaming and laughing at him and his fellow inmates. “Come out, animal!” they would taunt a prisoner when they opened his cell for a trip to the bathroom or the interrogation chamber. Once Omid saw another prisoner in the bathroom whose pants were caked with blood and his foot broken. He was an ordinary guy from the south of Tehran, imprisoned for getting into a fight with a Basiji.

Interrogators told Omid he was a traitor, that he would never be released. They ordered him to write a list of the “shit” he’d been up to in recent years, then pounded his head into the wall when his list included nothing illegal. Once they kicked his stomach until he vomited. Nausea was his resting state, prison food churning on anxiety. One day the interrogators demanded he confess about his trip to the United States. They knew all about it already, they told him. Others had confessed against him; they had copies of his speeches and photographs of his meetings with royalists in Washington. The file was a hundred pages long.

“I never went there!” Omid protested. “I couldn’t! I’m on the no-fly list, like all you gentlemen!”

Keshavarz, or Fallah, was a sick person, Omid sensed, given to ecstasies of violence, periods when he was lost to Omid even as he pummeled him with fists or feet. On one occasion Omid dodged a kick and Keshavarz’s
foot landed hard on a chair. The interrogator flew into a rage, flattening Omid to the wall. Omid managed to open the interrogation room door. “Leave me alone!” he screamed. “Stop it!” But there were only other prisoners to hear him. Maybe Omid would like to talk to someone who could give him some advice on confessing, Keshavarz said when Omid was on the verge of breaking.

He called on Shahram. Shahram agreed to talk to Omid, but not in the interrogation room. He would see him in the prison yard. Keshavarz agreed.

• • •

S
HAHRAM HAD NEVER MET
O
MID
before prison, but he’d heard of him. And he could see now that Omid was very upset and shaken. The pressure was always worst in the first two to three weeks, Shahram knew. His own experience had been altogether more intense than he had imagined even from researching “The Miracle Room.” He saw an opportunity not only to help Omid but to forge a relationship that could supply a lifeline to both of them.

Shahram understood that the only way to earn trust was to give it. And so he took a chance. He gave Omid advice that Omid would later say changed his life. But it was not only the advice that had this effect. Shahram looked into Omid’s eyes like a brother. Omid did not relax into that warmth right away, but once he decided to, he found in Shahram a deep reservoir of decency and strength.

“There are secrets you are keeping, people you want to protect,” Shahram told Omid the first time they met in the prison yard. It was true: Omid had seen colleagues go to parties and drink alcohol. He’d had relationships of his own with women, and he knew personal secrets that could be used to hurt people. He didn’t want to give any of this away. “You need to hold one story to yourself and make up another story for the interrogators,” Shahram advised. “Otherwise, you will tell them everything.”

Shahram told Omid to build a wall around the personal secrets he knew, his own and other people’s. If he gave those things away, he would never get them back. He should not talk about contacts in foreign
countries, lest he be charged with espionage. He should not confess against his friends or colleagues. But he had to give away something, to at least appear to cooperate. To the extent it was possible, he should direct his confessions against people he couldn’t hurt, either because they were dead or because they were very famous.

Omid cleaved to this advice. He sealed away what he knew about people’s personal lives. To the extent he was able, he would not supply the anvil on which others were broken, and he would not allow his tormentors to sever the relationships that mattered most in his life. Still, he confessed.

For his sexual confession, he made up names of women who did not exist. Keshavarz circled him, caressing his cheek or his arm suggestively as he pressed him for graphic detail. How did the sexual encounters begin? Did he use pornography? Who brought the condom? Did she open her mouth like so? Omid was shaking with fear and disgust, sweating through his clothes. He did not disclose this kind of detail to his closest friends. The fifty-five-year-old bearded, supposedly pious interrogator liked to call Omid “pretty boy,” and he seemed quite possibly to be stroking himself through the pocket of his pants.

Omid would never know for sure whether the sexual violation and the lack of physical privacy served his wardens’ predilections, or whether they were calculated to humiliate Muslim men raised in a culture that observed strict boundaries around the body and erotic life. Maybe both were true. At one point Keshavarz presented Omid with a picture of Jennifer Lopez he’d found on Omid’s computer. Who was she? Had Omid had sexual relations with her?

Omid’s political confessions, like Roozbeh’s, were to follow the template of “The Spider’s House.” Omid was told to confess that under the direction of reformists like Mostafa Tajzadeh and Behzad Nabavi, he had written articles and blogposts whose aim was to “blacken the face” of the Islamic regime and to bring about a velvet revolution. For the reformists planned to destroy Islamic society within fifteen years, and they had tasked Omid with increasing the influence of Western culture and reporting back to them about any “revolutionary resistance” that might stand in the way.
In exchange for Omid’s cooperation, the reformists paid for his foreign travels.

Omid’s objections to this narrative—that he had never met or barely knew the politicians in question, that his writings expressed his own views, that his foreign travels were paid through transparent channels, including the newspapers he worked for and the organizers of the conferences he attended—quickly collapsed. Keshavarz made sure Omid understood that if he did not confess to these charges, he would face much more serious ones, like espionage. The confessions Omid signed contained maddening kernels of truth. He had visited foreign countries, interviewed foreign dignitaries, and spoken with foreign journalists in the course of his work, and he had written about these encounters. Now he was to explain that he’d done these things in order to inflate these foreigners’ status in Iranian society in the service of the CIA plot.

Omid came to believe that he and the other bloggers—for by now there were twenty of them in detention—were pawns in a battle between two parts of the Iranian intelligence establishment. Hajjarian’s held that to save the regime required reforming it; the late Saeed Emami’s believed that opposition had to be violently eliminated. The two groups shared a common origin in the bloody security apparatus of the Khomeini era. Keshavarz claimed to have personally broken the most famous Tudeh leaders in the 1980s. “We smashed Ali Afshari’s head in,” he boasted as well. But Omid should have no illusion about his allies’ past.

“
We
didn’t make these secret prisons for you,” Keshavarz jeered at him. “This was your friends—your reformist friends have built these places.”

Even so, Omid was rarely alone in his mind and never imagined himself alone in the world. The reformists were his friends and colleagues. He was sure they would support him when he got out and told them what he’d endured and what danger they, too, clearly faced.

• • •

B
RANCH 9 OF THE PROSECUTOR’S OFFICE
, at Mehrabad Airport, was a dead end, Solmaz decided. The deputy prosecutor had no real
power. She needed to talk to Mortazavi himself. But the chief prosecutor’s reputation was monstrous; the Zahra Kazemi affair had sealed it. A fellow journalist told Solmaz that if she met Mortazavi, he would hypnotize her with his eyes and she would give up all the information he desired. No young journalist met the prosecutor if he or she could avoid it. Solmaz didn’t think she could avoid it much longer. She screwed up her courage and left Mortazavi a message.

When he called her back, it was evening, and she was walking across an empty expanse near her mother’s home. The space was quiet, the air chilled. “I got your message,” Mortazavi informed her.

“I called to follow my husband’s case,” Solmaz explained. “I’d like to know when he will be released.”

“How do I know that you’re his wife?” Mortazavi countered.

Before she could stop herself, Solmaz snapped at him. “I don’t think anyone else would go to this much trouble.”

She wished she could rescind the words the moment they escaped her. Her tone was all wrong. She had controlled her temper with everyone else, only to lose it with the most dangerous and powerful figure of all.

She listened fearfully to the dead air that followed. Finally, Mortazavi said, “Meet me tomorrow.”

Her stomach dropped. What had she done? She burst into her mother’s apartment and told the relatives assembled there about the call.

Roozbeh’s uncle laughed. “Why did you say that?”

“I don’t know,” said Solmaz miserably. “He asked me a stupid question.”

The prosecutor’s office reminded her of an aquarium. Upstairs, she passed through a security door to a room with a glass wall. On the other side of that wall was the reception area. Solmaz had arrived with her mother, who was determined not to leave her daughter alone in a room with Mortazavi, at 8:30 in the morning. By afternoon they still had not seen the prosecutor. Solmaz began to wonder if Mortazavi had called her there just to keep her idle and waste her day.

She surveyed the reception area. Surely there was a camera somewhere. When she spotted one in a corner near the ceiling, she contorted herself to
stare directly into it fixedly. She stared so awkwardly and long that other people in the waiting room were compelled to turn and look where she was looking. After half an hour of this, the receptionist ushered her and her mother in to see the prosecutor.

Mortazavi did not stand up when they entered the room. But he directed them to sit, in a tone of calculated warmth.

“You’re an active lady,” he told Solmaz.

She studied his face. He was not happy to see her, she understood. But he was curious. She was startled to see how short he was. Across the room from his desk was a small television set that displayed the feed from the waiting room.

“I want my husband back,” she replied. “He’s innocent.”

“You’re mistaken,” Mortazavi said. “He’s not innocent. He hasn’t told you everything.”

“I don’t care what he did before our marriage,” Solmaz replied. “I don’t believe he has committed any crime.”

“I would recommend you go and live your life,” Mortazavi told her. “Remarry. You’re a young, beautiful woman. Your husband will be in prison for twenty years.”

Solmaz understood that she had just one card to play. Her record was clean, and she was a bereft new bride. “We married just five months ago,” Solmaz entreated. “If you release Roozbeh, I’ll take care of him. I’ll make sure he doesn’t commit any crime against the system.” She had heard of wives playing this role.

But Mortazavi didn’t seem interested in anything she had to offer. His manner was confident, almost breezy. “Roozbeh isn’t worth anything to us,” he told her dismissively at one point. She’d remember that.

She left, seemingly with nothing, but with the feeling that she’d gotten somewhere at last. She had the beginning of a relationship with Mortazavi, and she would thrash it for all it was worth.

She became a fixture in the prosecutor’s waiting room. Each time, she’d wait an hour or two, and then she’d turn to face the surveillance camera until he let her in. She felt strangely unafraid.

“You talk back a lot,” Mortazavi observed once. “You seem to be hallucinating about where you are. More important people than you break down here. Akbar Ganji’s wife comes here to plead with me for her husband’s life.”

Solmaz saw Ganji’s wife in the waiting room on one of her visits. Aware of the surveillance camera, Solmaz kept her distance. Mrs. Ganji was admitted to the prosecutor’s chambers first. From within, Solmaz could hear her reading Mortazavi the riot act at the top of her lungs. Solmaz smiled to herself.

Between visits to the prosecutor’s office, Solmaz was frantically active. She let Roozbeh’s family members talk to the press, while she spent most of every day on the phone to powerful people who might use their weight to press for Roozbeh’s release. Roozbeh had come into the crosshairs on account of his association, however tenuous, with reformist figures like Mostafa Tajzadeh and Behzad Nabavi, she reasoned. These people were far more powerful than Roozbeh was. Surely the reformists could keep Mortazavi’s phone ringing with requests for Roozbeh’s release. Every day, Solmaz would call politicians’ offices and request that they call Mortazavi. Then she’d call back, again and again, to inquire if they’d done so. She didn’t care if she annoyed them; she was good at that, and it had its uses. But the experience embittered her. Ebrahim Asgharzadeh, for whom Roozbeh had worked, even supporting his brief and ill-fated campaign for president in 2001, would not take Solmaz’s calls or return her messages. Mostafa Tajzadeh did not call for weeks, until he heard that Solmaz had been complaining. When he did get in touch, he pointed out that a call from him might not have helped her situation, which was undoubtedly true.

Only two politicians were helpful, and she would never forget them. Mehdi Karroubi, the onetime radical cleric who was now a centrist reformist in the parliament, took her calls and responded promptly through his son, who also updated her regularly on Karroubi’s actions on Roozbeh’s behalf. And Khatami’s vice president Mohammad Ali Abtahi, who wrote a popular blog and was himself named in “The Spider’s House,” was sympathetic enough to check in with her from time to time, even texting her jokes at night to cheer her up.