Then They Came For Me (15 page)

“I don’t think so,” said Rosewater, coming back to the room. “Confiscate them!”

They were suspicious of anything they didn’t know, and they didn’t know much about most of the things they found in my room. Khamenei’s paranoia, and his belief that everyone was conspiring against him, had permeated his system, including the men who were willing to risk their lives for him. I could see it in Rosewater’s eyes. I’d always thought that there was nothing more frightening in someone in charge of your life than paranoia, and as I watched Rosewater clumsily rifle through my belongings, I understood that I could be one of the countless
innocent people I’d known or heard about who’d suddenly disappeared, their bodies later found in a ditch. Drops of sweat slid down my sides.

I sat in silence watching him, and slowly realized that just as I was not prepared for him, he was not prepared for me, or for what he was finding here. This would become very symbolic of the whole ordeal I would go through. The Revolutionary Guards mainly arrested religious reformists—people who practiced Islam but also believed in democracy, and who challenged Khamenei’s authoritarian interpretation of Islam. The Guards knew how to make sense of those people. But now, here I was, with my copy of the Koran next to a statue of Min, the Egyptian god of fertility, with his erect penis and flail, next to French books from the 1930s, a Vietnamese musical instrument, and box sets of an HBO series.

He found my passport and turned to a page stamped with a Cambodian visa. Paola and I had vacationed there a few months earlier. It was there that she’d found out she was pregnant.

“Where is this from? Is this Hebrew?”

“It’s from Cambodia.”

“Are you sure? I think it’s Israeli.”

“No, sir,” I said, doing my best to sound as respectful as possible, hoping that this would help the whole ordeal end more quickly. “It says ‘Cambodia’ on it, so yes, I am sure.”

He dropped the passport on the floor and took a step closer to me. “Don’t answer me like that ever again. Just say yes or no.”

“Well, I’m just telling you: it says ‘Cambodia.’ ”

“Just say yes or no,” he repeated angrily. I noticed the sweat on his forehead.

As much as I was trying to act as if I were not worried, inside, I was growing increasingly anxious. I wanted to have a conversation with these men: to tell them that whatever it was they were looking for, they had the wrong person. In my conversations
with Iranian officials, I always tried to help them understand that the Iranian government was, in fact, lucky that I was working for the Western media. I knew my job. I knew my country. And I was a patriot. If they stopped me, I could be replaced by someone with an ax to grind against the regime. But as I watched Rosewater leafing angrily through my father’s medical records, I knew there was no point in trying to reason with him. How can you reason with a man who sees the word “Cambodia” and thinks it’s Hebrew?

“We should have brought a van,” the clean-shaven man said. “We’ll need to get all of this stuff back.” He motioned to the growing pile beside him: all the things they were confiscating from me. DVDs. VHS tapes. Laptop computers. Several video and still cameras.

I had to go to the bathroom. When I asked Rosewater if I could have a moment to do this, he said yes. I locked the door behind me; immediately, someone began banging on it.

“Do not lock the door!” he yelled.

I opened the door. It was one of the men who had been waiting in the living room. “I have to use the bathroom,” I said.

“I know. But keep it open.”

“Can I close it a little?”

“Yes,” he said, smiling at me. “But don’t try to escape, because then I will have to come and chase you.” The youngest member of the arrest team, he was tall and lanky and had a kind face. I thought of Kafka’s character Josef K., from
The Trial
, getting arrested by men he thought were pulling a practical joke. I half-expected my interrogators to break down in childlike laughter, and explain the story behind this prank.

When I came out of the bathroom, my mother was speaking to Rosewater in the kitchen. He was sweating very heavily, the shirt under his arms dark with circles of sweat.

My mother had obviously noticed this as well. “Do you want a Kleenex?”

“No, no, no. Thank you very much.”

My mother looked pointedly at his shirt and scoffed, “I think you should take it.”

Rosewater suddenly seemed embarrassed. “Okay, thank you. I will take a Kleenex.” He accepted the tissue from my mother and wiped the sweat from his forehead, but he kept his eyes trained on me. It was the look of a hunter, as if he wanted to kill me with a poison dart.

When they were finished, they told me I was to come with them.

“Where are you taking him?” my mother asked. She tried to hide the concern in her voice, but I heard it all too well.

“Don’t worry,” Rosewater said, smiling at her. “He is going to be our guest.”

I hugged my mother and kissed both of her cheeks. I had no idea what they had in mind for me—they’d refused to tell my mother or me what I was being accused of.
It’s fine
, I thought.
They need to make a big show of this. Intimidate me at my home, take me to their base. Question me for a few hours and let me go later today or, at worst, within a few days. Make an example of me for other reporters and filmmakers
. I was quite sure that while many political activists and reformists like Amir had been arrested, no journalists had been detained since the election, and certainly not anyone who worked for the foreign media.

“It’s okay, Moloojoon,” I gently told my mother. “This will be over soon. It’s all a misunderstanding. I will be home soon.”

As the men escorted me toward the door, I hoped I was telling her the truth. As soon as my mother closed the door behind us, they handcuffed me.

There were four Peugeots outside the house. Rosewater got into one, where a driver was waiting. I got into another with the man who’d written up the inventory and the young one who’d wanted to prevent my escape from the bathroom. The clean-shaven man got into the driver’s seat. I noticed two women, fully clad in chadors, waiting outside one of the cars. One of them was carrying a machine gun. Because of the Revolutionary Guards’ warning to Ershad a few days before my arrest, I had guessed that my captors were from that organization. When I saw the women, I became almost certain of it, as the Guards employs women to deal with the female family members of the people they come to arrest. My back stuck to the hot vinyl of the seat, and the handcuffs felt tight around my wrists. The man next to me, the young one with the kind face, noticed it and adjusted them. I looked out the window.

“What do you think you are looking at?! Don’t look outside!” Rosewater’s car had pulled up next to us, and he was yelling from the passenger seat, his large, dark face almost purple with anger. I turned my head away, wondering where one is supposed to look while inside a car, if not outside. I kept my eyes trained on my lap.

The car eventually turned north onto the Kurdistan Highway, and that was when I knew: they were taking me to Evin
Prison. Sitting at the bottom of the Elburz Mountains, in north Tehran, the prison was built in the late 1960s as a high-security detention center for political prisoners. It gained notoriety in the early 1970s when a number of members of Marxist and Islamist guerrilla groups were jailed, tortured, and executed there. Throughout the 1970s, there were rumors about the atrocities committed in Evin, and stories of Israeli and CIA officers helping Iranian agents interrogate and torture prisoners: pulling out their nails, administering electric shocks to their testicles, and raping the females.

Evin’s notoriety as a prison grew after the 1979 revolution, when thousands of political prisoners were detained there and a new warden, Assadollah Lajevardi, was put in charge. Lajevardi embodied the Islamic regime in its nascent stage: he was ideological and brutal. As a political prisoner under the shah, he had himself experienced torture and imprisonment. He knew when torture worked and when it failed to break people. I had once interviewed a former Islamic guerrilla who later became a government minister. The problem with the shah’s secret police, he’d said, was that they thought they could break a prisoner’s will through physical pressure. But that often just hardened the victim’s resolve. “What our brothers after the revolution have masterminded,” he said with a grin, “is how to break a man’s soul without using much violence against his body.”

Evin is officially run by the judicial branch of the Islamic government. Separate wards in the complex are reserved for different intelligence and security branches: the police, the Ministry of Intelligence, the Revolutionary Guards. I wondered if I would be taken to the ward for prisoners of the Guards.

“Where are we going?” I asked the man with the kind smile.

“Why do you ask?”

“No reason—I just like to know where I’m going. Are we going to Evin?”

“We may be going to Evin, we may not be.”

This was a typical response for an Iranian official: keep everything secret and make you insecure in every situation. A few minutes later, the driver looked into the rearview mirror and nodded to the man next to me. “Okay,” my captor said, handing me a blindfold. “Take your glasses off and put your head down.”

I did as I was told. I pulled the blindfold over my eyes and put my head in his bony lap. And with that, the sunshine disappeared.

·   ·   ·

After about ten minutes, I heard the man in the driver’s seat speak to someone on his cell phone, laughing.

“You need to get yourself a better cell phone, so that my number appears. That way, you’ll stop asking me who I am every time I call, Seyyed.”
Seyyed
refers to descendants of the Prophet, but I would later realize that everyone who worked in Evin was called Seyyed, as a means of hiding their identity: Cook Seyyed, Fat Seyyed, Haircut Seyyed, and so on. I heard the sound of large gates creaking open, and the car moved forward again.

I was still wearing the blindfold when they led me out of the car. Someone guided me to a room and made me sit in a chair. I waited there for several minutes, until I was moved again to another room, where I was allowed to remove the blindfold. A man handed me a gray prison uniform and a pair of white plastic slippers.

“Put these on,” another man directed me.

I stood alone in the room, wondering if I needed to remove my T-shirt and underwear. I decided to keep them on—my familiar Sunspel T-shirt and boxer shorts reminded me of my time with Paola in London, and I felt safer in them.

I was led to another room, where a man stood behind a camera set atop a tripod.

“Look at the camera.”

The flash snapped, and the man’s face remained etched in my eyes for a few moments. I remembered being very young and playing badminton with my sister outside. I’d look too long at the sun and then at Maryam, and then close my eyes. The silhouette of Maryam’s face and her long, dark hair would appear behind my closed eyes, as if they had been branded there by a hot spit.

That photographer’s face would be the last face I would see for many days.

One man put my blindfold back on, and I was handed to another prison guard, a man with an Azerbaijani accent. “Welcome to Abu Ghraib, Guantánamo, or whatever you Americans build.”

“Ghardash,”
I said, referring to him as “brother.” “I am not an American. I am Iranian.”

“Yes, but you are working for them, so you are one of them,” he said, confident that he knew everything he needed to know about me.

I wondered what my father would say to this man. My father had been a master of communication, no matter the circumstance. I could hear him now: “Talk to him, Mazi
jaan
. You will be in his hands for the foreseeable future. Talk to him.” I wanted to, but I didn’t know what to say. Before I had a chance to think of something, I was led down a darkened corridor. The sound of a steel door closing behind me echoed in the hallway.

“Give me back the blindfold,” the guard said to me. The door to my cell had two slots: a small square along the top and a wider one below. I handed the blindfold to him through the top slot.

Granted the privilege of sight once again, I looked around my cell. It was small: maybe twelve feet by five. There were two light fixtures attached to the ceiling, only one of which was working, and a small window on one wall, near the ceiling. The
only things in the room were a copy of the Koran and a blanket. No toilet and no bed. I sat down on the floor and took everything in. At Concordia University, in Montreal, where I’d received my degree in communications and film, I had taken a course in communication analysis. One of our assignments was to analyze different spaces: to get a feel for the emotions they conjured. This one was impenetrable. The walls, which were covered in sheets of faux marble, felt as if they were made of cement blocks. Everything was dusty. The dirty carpet on which I sat was made of three different patches of green, laid together clumsily. The cell very much reminded me of how the Iranian government tries to portray itself: strong, enclosed, dominating.

I noticed something written on the wall of the cell. My captors had kept my eyeglasses, so I had to stand up and walk close to read it. There were three sentences, two in Persian and one in Arabic.

I sat back down on the floor, closed my eyes, and whispered these words to myself. I was petrified.

·   ·   ·

I must have fallen asleep, and when I woke up, noticing the spiderwebs on the ceiling, I thought of Zahra Kazemi, an Iranian-Canadian photographer. Zahra, who was known to her friends as Ziba, was an ambitious, dedicated journalist. One day, she called me to discuss story ideas and the difficulties of reporting in Iran. I advised her to be careful while working in Iran, no matter what the story: you never knew what would upset the authorities.

A few days after our conversation, Ziba was arrested while
taking pictures of families of prisoners waiting outside Evin. From what I heard later, the head of Evin security, a man named Elias, came out and tried to take her camera. When she refused to hand it over, he punched her in the head. Elias was wearing an Aqiq Yamani stone ring on his finger, a type of ring the Prophet Mohammad advised Muslims to wear to protect themselves from potential dangers. The force of the ring against Ziba’s head fractured her skull. She fell to the ground and her head hit the pavement. According to the person who told me the story, Elias did not intend to kill her. But after they dragged her into the prison, they did not get her medical attention, and she soon died of internal bleeding.