Then They Came For Me (16 page)

Judge Mortazavi—the man who had signed my arrest warrant—declared that Ziba was a spy and that her death was the result of a stroke. Mortazavi was later accused of being personally responsible for Ziba’s death by repeatedly kicking her in the head inside the prison when she objected to her arrest. Her body was buried under tight security. Elias was never tried and, as far as everyone knew, he still worked in Evin. To this day, no one has been held responsible for the murder.

I paced the length and width of my cell thinking about Ziba’s tragic death, knowing that the man in charge of her case could be the one handling my case. I continued to pace: Six steps long. Two and a half steps wide. Six steps forward. Six steps back. Six steps forward. Six steps back. I started to count. I had almost gotten to one thousand when the top slot on the door opened. A man reached in, holding the blindfold.

“Put this on,” he said. “Your specialist wants to see you now.”

·   ·   ·

Strangely, my main worry at that moment was the thought of getting an eye infection.
What if others have worn this blindfold?
I thought as I fingered the threadbare black velvet. I wanted to wash it, but there wasn’t a sink in my room.

“What are you waiting for?” the guard asked impatiently. I could see part of his face through the slot. His eyes were a deep blue. “Put it on.”

I slipped it over my head.

“No, no. It’s upside down. Put it on the other way.” I began to pull it off. “Do not look at me! Turn around and face the wall. Face the wall! Don’t you know how to put on a blindfold?”

“No, I don’t,” I said. “I don’t have a lot of experience with them. This is my first time in prison.”

That wasn’t entirely true. In 1984, when I was seventeen, I was arrested and imprisoned for the crime of disturbing the public morality. My girlfriend, Anita, and I were in a café, drinking tea together. It is, of course, illegal in the Islamic Republic for a man to be alone with a
namahram
woman—a woman other than his wife, mother, or sister. The police who stormed the café that day let Anita go after some questioning, but I was taken to Qasr Prison. Being taken to the same prison where my father had been held for three years, three decades earlier, was exciting. I wanted to tell my own stories to my family and my friends. Soon after I arrived at Qasr, I was put in line to be interviewed by a social worker. There were two men in front of me. One of them had robbed a bank, and the other had raped a pregnant woman.

“And what did you do?” they asked me.

“I had tea with my girlfriend.”

For four nights, I was kept in a communal cell with about forty other men: purse snatchers, drug smugglers, and—I remember this clearly—eight men accused of committing sodomy on a single young boy, whom they called “the peach.” After my father used all the connections he had in the judiciary, the judge eventually gave me a suspended sentence of seventy-four lashes and let me go. My mother was waiting for me at the front door when I returned home, fresh lines of worry around her eyes.

“Seventy-four suspended lashes for having tea with your friend!” she said, with as much hatred as I’d ever heard in her voice. “What do they expect young people to do? Pray and say ‘Death to America’ all day?” She looked at my father. “Mazi should really leave this country next year.”

By then, the Iran-Iraq War was in its fourth year. All high school graduates had to serve in the military, unless they performed very well on the universities’ national entrance examination and had a letter of recommendation from their high school principal approving their “moral qualification.” Given the fact that I had been expelled from eight high schools because of misconduct, I knew that I would never be admitted into any university, and my plan, from a young age, had always been to leave Iran as soon as I finished high school. My father had been reluctant to allow me to go—wanting me to remain with my family in Tehran—but soon after I was released from Qasr, everyone agreed that keeping me safe was all that mattered.

I left about fourteen months later, going first to Pakistan, then to Canada, to attend university in Montreal.

“This is good,” my mother whispered into my hair as we hugged good-bye at the front door the morning I left for Pakistan. “It will be good for you to spend a little time outside of Iran. And then you can come back.” She kissed my cheek and waved to me as I got inside a cab. I knew she would cry, but she hid her tears until I was gone.

·   ·   ·

As I pulled the blindfold back over my eyes, I hoped that this brief, odd experience of prison would be as short and uneventful as my first. Surely the meeting with my “specialist” would give me the opportunity to understand the accusations against me, and to explain my innocence. The blue-eyed guard led me through a courtyard, and I caught a glimpse of red paving tiles
through a crease in the blindfold. At the entrance to another building, my specialist was waiting for me. I realized that “specialist” is just a euphemism for interrogator, the same way pimps are called procurers.

“Thank you, Seyyed,” the specialist said to the guard.

I could tell by his scent and voice as he greeted the guard that it was Rosewater. He took my arm and gently led me down several hallways; we entered and exited, I thought, a few different buildings. Eventually, he brought me into a room. He shut the door behind us and sat me down in a chair. It was the kind with a writing arm, like I’d used back in school. The air-conditioning was on full blast, and the room was freezing.

I could feel him close behind me.

“Mr. Bahari,” he said, his voice in my ear. “This is the end of the line for you. There is nothing beyond here. You have to reveal everything you know.”

It felt strange to be speaking to another person under the darkness of the blindfold. “Can you tell me why I’m here, please?”

“You know why. Because you are an agent of foreign intelligence organizations,” he began.

I was completely caught off guard.
Of what?
“Could you let me know which ones?” I managed to say.

“Speak louder!” he shouted. He bent closer toward me, his face an inch away from mine. “What did you say?”

“I was wondering if you could be kind enough to let me know which organizations,” I repeated.

“CIA, MI6, Mossad, and
Newsweek.
”

I thought at first that he was joking.

“Do you mean
Newsweek
magazine?”

“Yes. Your ‘magazine’ is part of the American intelligence apparatus.”

I wondered if someone else was in the room—someone in charge of this incredibly ignorant man. “Let me explain,” I
said. “I’m a journalist for
Newsweek
magazine, which is almost eighty years old. It’s not part of the American intelligence network. If it were, people would know that. Other magazines in the United States would report this. I can assure you of this because the media organizations in the West are very competitive and ruthless.”

“Don’t try to teach me a lesson about the media, Mr. Bahari. We know everything. We know what you did.” Rosewater walked around me. The smell of his sweat overpowered the scent of his perfume.

“I’m sure this is all a misunderstanding. I’m an accredited journalist. I have been accredited by the Islamic Republic government for the past twelve years.”

“So?”

“Well, that means that the government of the Islamic Republic has known what I’ve been doing for twelve years and that they haven’t had any problems with my reporting. If they did, they would have revoked my press card.”

Rosewater walked around me for a while, silently. When he stopped behind me, he flicked his fingers gently on my shoulder. “The very same people who gave you that press card will end up in a chair similar to this one,” he said. “They committed an even more serious crime, by accrediting people like you.” Every sentence was marked by a touch on my shoulder. “We have all of your colleagues here now, as well. All of your agents in Iran. They are all in this prison. Don’t think you can cheat us or misguide us. We know everything about you. We know you are the mastermind of the Western media in Iran.”

This was so unexpected that I had trouble following him. “Masterminding the foreign media?” I asked. “Me?”

“No, not you. My aunt!” he said sarcastically. “She is the mastermind of the foreign media in Iran.”

I sat quietly in the chair, unable to speak. I wouldn’t allow myself to entertain the idea that my stay at Evin might be less
temporary than I had hoped. But the thought kept finding its way to the surface nonetheless.

No
, I thought,
this man is just trying to scare me—so that when they release me a few days from now, I’ll stop writing stories about the demonstrations
. I tried to convince myself that they would find out that I had done nothing wrong and would let me go before too long.

Eventually, Rosewater left the room and a guard came in. Through the crease in the blindfold I could see that he wore brown sandals.

“You can go to the bathroom now,” he said.

Brown Sandals led me to a restroom. He closed the door behind me and told me that I could take my blindfold off. There were five stalls in a row. Three of them had signs saying, “Guest Toilet.” The other two had big “No Entry” signs with the warning “Guests will be punished if they use these toilets!” I obediently used a “Guest” toilet.

It took Rosewater quite some time to return to the interrogation room. As much as I wanted to remove my blindfold and look around while I waited, I didn’t dare take the risk. I could see writing on the arm of the desk under the blindfold. It was covered in graffiti. Some of it had been written by former prisoners; some of it was in a child’s hand.

Hassan is a horse
. This was next to a blurry image of a smiley face.

God have mercy on me
. This was written in Arabic instead of Persian.

Iran’s judiciary, which is in charge of Evin, buys secondhand chairs from the Ministry of Education. At the beginning of the 1979 revolution, Khomeini declared that prisons would be transformed into schools in the Islamic government, that all of the anti-Islamic activists who entered prison would leave as supporters of the regime. The authorities in Evin seemed to take their leader’s advice quite literally.

Eventually, Rosewater came back into the room. His steps were quieter than before. I saw, as he walked closer to my chair, that he was no longer wearing shoes, but black leather slippers with light gray socks. This worried me. I guessed it meant that he was settling in for the long haul. He paced the room, and each time he passed by, I tried to catch a better glimpse of his slippers. In Iran, low-ranking functionaries often wear shabby plastic sandals, and they usually have holes in their socks. I was hoping to find a hole in Rosewater’s socks, indicating that the authorities were not taking my case too seriously, and had assigned it to someone with very little power. But there weren’t any holes in his socks. In fact, his slippers looked as if they had been polished.

I heard someone else enter the room, and hoped that it was his boss, or someone I could try to reason with. The new man spoke to me, asking me questions I’d already been asked, but he was more mild-mannered and patient than Rosewater.
Good cop, bad cop
, I thought.

“Mr. Bahari, you know that the editors of most American newspapers and magazines are assigned directly by the CIA,” the new man said.

Dumb and dumber
, I thought to myself.

At this point, I had to accept that Rosewater was, in fact, in charge. I was playing chess with a gorilla. He could swallow my pieces at any point during the game. But I had to keep on playing.

“I’m sorry, gentlemen—the situation is much more complex than you think. I don’t think the CIA would want to assign editors.” I waited for a response, but none came. “If they were hoping to influence different media organizations, my guess is that they would attempt to do it through an orchestrated public relations campaign.”

Rosewater left the room without reacting. When he came back, he put both hands on the back of my chair. “I don’t trust
anything you say, Mr. Bahari,” he whispered into my ear. “From now on, most of our communication will be in writing. I am going to write down questions, and you will write your answers. Do you understand me?”

“Yes.”

I considered this good news. New instructions meant that someone else—hopefully someone less ignorant than he—was supervising the whole thing.

“Face the wall and remove your blindfold,” he said. He stood me up and moved my chair. “And keep your head down for as long as you are here.” Then, as if sensing my question, he added, “However long that will be is up to you. People who have not cooperated have grown old, very old, here.”

The thought of spending even one night in Evin frightened me.
He’s bluffing
, I told myself, trying to concentrate on answering his questions. They were very general and simple: where I had lived, where I had studied, the names of people in my family. I finished and handed the paper back to him without moving my gaze from the wall.

“I cannot read this!” I heard the sound of paper being torn into pieces behind me. He threw the shreds over my head, like confetti. “Write in better handwriting!”

“I’m sorry, I cannot help it. I’ve always had bad handwriting.”

“But you write so well for
Newsweek.
” He said the name as if it were a curse.

“Yes, but I use a computer to write. I rarely use a pen these days.”

He ignored what I’d said and gave me another piece of paper. I sat in that chair for hours, answering his questions. I marked the passage of time by the call to prayer. Shia Muslims pray three times daily: morning, noon, and evening. Brown Sandals came to bring me back to my cell just before the evening prayer.

I had had nothing to eat except for the breakfast at my
mother’s house. When I took off the blindfold inside the cell, my lunch and dinner were both there. The lunch was bread and
ghaymeh
, a Persian stew with lamb, split peas, dried lemon, and rice. I’ve always loved the taste of
ghaymeh
, especially the way my mother made it, with eggplant. I missed the bitter, sour taste of dried lemon. I grabbed the plate of
ghaymeh
, eager to devour it, until I saw that it had been there so long, it had almost congealed. Its smell nauseated me.