Then They Came For Me (17 page)

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My father always hated
ghaymeh
, not so much because of the taste but for what he thought it represented.
Ghaymeh
is typically served to the poor during religious ceremonies, and my father hated organized religion and all its rituals. I sat down on the dirty green carpet and thought of him.

My father, Akbar Bahari, was born in 1927 in Bahar, a small town in a mountainous part of western Iran—that is how we got our surname. At the time of my father’s birth, the majority of Iranians either were nomads or lived in villages. Most people in Bahar made their living by farming wheat or poppies or harvesting fruit. But my father’s family was not like most others. My father’s grandfather, Samad Roghani, whose surname means “oil seller,” was a cooking oil merchant and, according to legend, one of the richest men in the region. Unlike most men of his generation, Samad had only one child, and when he died, in the late nineteenth century, he passed on his fortune to this child: Hossein Bahari, my grandfather.

Hossein Bahari was tall and handsome, with a thin mustache. In the photos I have of my grandfather, he looks like a Hollywood star of the silent era. Thanks to the cooking oil money, Hossein enjoyed the better things in life. He held big parties in his house, where people gathered to enjoy the local vodka and opium. In addition to the family fortune, he had also inherited his father’s religious devotion and tried to be a good
Shia Muslim. He spent freely on religious ceremonies during Shia holy days, and did almost everything by the book during Ramadan. He fasted and woke up before the sunrise to pray, while his servants prepared a big breakfast with eggs, milk, and honey for the poor. In the evening, when it came time to break his fast, he did it with vodka. Drinking vodka is, of course, forbidden in Islam, but I guess my grandfather thought that Allah would pay more attention to his charitable contributions than to his having a few drops—or bottles—of alcohol.

To add to these contradictions, my grandfather became a communist during the Second World War. In 1941, the Allied forces overthrew Reza Shah, the despotic but nationalist king of Iran. They claimed that Reza Shah had gotten too close to Nazi Germany, and they wanted to use Iran to provide help to the eastern front. They replaced Reza Shah with his twenty-two-year-old son, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, who came to be known as simply the shah, and who took control of the nation. The Soviets and the Americans controlled the northern half of the country, and the British occupied the oil-rich south. My father, who was fourteen at the time, often spoke of the humiliation and anger people felt as they watched soldiers from the British Army marching through the streets of Bahar. “It was as if the British owned our country,” he’d say, recalling with obvious pleasure how he gathered his schoolmates to throw stones at the foreign troops.

The fall of Reza Shah in 1941 took the lid off Iranians’ historic frustration with despotic rulers and foreign intervention. Amid the postinvasion chaos, political parties mushroomed in Iran, as prominent politicians started their own parties, promising freedom and independence. With the help of the Soviet Union, which had long had designs on Iran’s rich natural resources, the Tudeh Party of Iran was established. The Soviets financed it heavily and aided its members with their organizational and intelligence skills, and the Tudeh customized its message
for different groups in Iranian society with great success. It also developed official and underground networks all over the country. By the mid-1940s many prominent intellectuals, artists, and authors were members of the Tudeh. As the sole voice of the proletariat, the party also attracted many workers and the unemployed.

Like many communists at the time, my grandfather, I believe, was not drawn to communism by stringent ideological beliefs. In fact, I doubt that he ever read Marx and Engels’s
Communist Manifesto
or Lenin’s
What Is to Be Done?
Rather, he deplored the widespread corruption of his government, hated to see his country occupied, and sympathized with the poor. In the face of these problems, he believed that the Communist Party presented the quickest way out of misery. At the time, the Tudeh Party shrewdly did not present itself as an atheist organization, and, in fact, a number of its leaders were practicing Muslims.

But perhaps my grandfather was just looking for a way out of his own misery. At the time, he had almost depleted his inheritance. My father’s mother, Hossein’s first wife, died when my father was only five years old, and soon after Hossein remarried. Hossein was not a very good husband to his second wife, or father to his four children. According to my father, he had a habit of coming home very late from political meetings, beating his wife and children on his way to bed, and sleeping until noon the next day. I think this is partly why my father spoke so often about him—he was adamant that his children not become anything like his father. “What kind of man mistreats his family?” my father would ask. “What kind of man doesn’t take responsibility for his actions?”

My father loved my mother’s cooking, and during meals that went particularly well with a drink—such as fried whitefish with rice, accompanied by yogurt with garlic and marinated vegetables—his grandiloquence could become overwhelming.
“You have to fulfill your responsibilities no matter how difficult it is,” he’d tell us. And always, just to spice it up a little, he would add, “Otherwise you’re worth less than shit!”

After my grandfather joined the Tudeh Party, his life gained a third ingredient, beyond the debauchery and the religious sessions: discussions about equality and independence. My father was forced to attend these party meetings and serve tea to the guests. “They were like religious ceremonies,” my father would tell us over family meals. “In a religious ceremony, a mullah would talk about religious figures and battles at the time of the Prophet. In a Communist Party meeting, we would listen to the stories of the Great October Revolution of 1917, and the heroism of Soviet troops fighting the Nazis.”

Following in his father’s footsteps, my father became a Tudeh member in 1945, when he was seventeen. Joining the party gave him a means of satisfying a need of his own: getting into street fights as often as possible. My father was by all accounts a very talented young man, but he didn’t like to study nearly as much as he liked to fight. After joining the party, he would organize the young Tudeh members and attack the members of other political parties. “If I had not become a communist, I would’ve become a thug,” my father used to say.

After the war ended, my father decided that he’d had enough of Bahar. He worked for a few months in a mechanic’s shop in order to save money and move to the capital, Tehran. There, his very first stop was the local branch of the Tudeh. Through the party, he found a job in a small factory. Soon he became a skilled metalworker. By 1949, his readiness to get into fights and his writing skills had helped him become one of the leaders of the Union of Metal Workers of Iran. The union was famous for its ability to organize strikes and for its members’ ability to beat opposition groups to a pulp with metal rods.

My father was fanatical about communism. Most religious people I know follow the teachings of their religion (or what
they think are the teachings of their religion) without putting that much thought into it. They attend services and join religious groups because they feel more comfortable surrounded by like-minded people. Many communists joined the Tudeh Party for the same reason. My father never denied that this was the case for him; he always said that the party was like a family to him. When he came to Tehran he did not have a penny in his pocket and spoke Persian with a villager’s accent. The party gave him an identity, educated him, and provided emotional and intellectual support in a way his father never had.

Because of this devotion, my father never questioned any of the wrong or treasonous policies of the Tudeh Party. To this day, I cannot understand how he and many other Iranian communists supported the Soviet occupation of parts of Iran in 1945, when the American and British forces left after the end of the war. The Soviets took over the Iranian province of Azerbaijan, in the northwest, where they established the proxy People’s Republic of Azerbaijan. To my father and many of his friends, the fact that the Soviets had shamelessly taken over a part of Iran was not important. After all, the Tudeh Party was part of international communism, and the Soviet Union was the big brother who knew better. It was only in 1946, after the Iranian prime minister’s clever negotiations with the Soviets and threats made by American president Harry S. Truman, that Stalin ordered the Red Army to evacuate Azerbaijan. My father and his friends mourned the death of the thousands of communists who were massacred by the shah’s army, including many of their close friends.

Things continued to get worse for Iranian communists. In 1949, there was an assassination attempt against Mohammad Reza Shah. The shah’s bodyguards killed the would-be assassin immediately. There are still debates about the would-be assassin’s political affiliation, but the attempt against the life of the monarch was blamed squarely on the communists, and the
Tudeh Party was outlawed. Many leaders of the party were arrested; others fled to the Soviet Union. Even so, the party’s rank and file continued to hold public meetings under different pseudonyms, especially under the banner of the unions. The communist workers’ unions held illegal meetings all over the city and prepared for an attack by the police and the army. “We all had a piece of wood with us, and as soon as the police arrived we would start beating them,” a friend of my father’s remembered, smiling affectionately at my father. “And your dad was always in the first row of any fight with the police.” My father was arrested several times between 1949 and 1953, mostly during clashes with the police.

My father’s time in prison seemed to have worked much like Mafia initiation rituals. Inside, he met Tudeh leaders who would indoctrinate him further in party politics, and he would leave jail with more responsibility than before. The Tudeh Party had a vast underground military network whose members even included bodyguards of the shah. “Some of the prisons were practically run by our comrades,” my father said. “We could mingle freely with other party members; we had classes about the history of communism and poetry-reading sessions.”

My father was not accustomed to being surrounded by such educated people, and he absorbed what they told him like a sponge. In prison, he forged many friendships that would last throughout his life. These men were like uncles to me. It was not unusual for me to come home from school and find a famous Iranian singer or writer sitting at our dining table. There was Mr. Hosseinpour, a poet whose long hair and thick mustache reminded me of a Soviet intellectual; he and my father had shared a cell for many months. My father and Mr. Banki, an engineer whose big cheeks shook whenever he remembered his torturers, recited poetry together during their daily walks in prison. Mr. Abdollah, an industrialist, shared a room with my
father, once they were both out of prison, in an apartment given to them by the party.

Whenever three or four of them got together, they would tell stories. These aging men looked at their time in prison with pride and would talk about the torture they endured, and their near-death situations, the way some people talk about a culinary tour of France or a hiking trip in Peru. To a stranger—or to a son—the stories could be both fascinating and horrifying. As a young boy, I was also enthralled by the language my father and his friends used to describe their prison experiences. It was as if talking about a painful past gave them permission to use obscenities. “The motherfuckers punched my head as if it were a boxing bag,” Mr. Banki would say.

“The bastards had no mercy,” Mr. Abdollah would add.

“The prison was a shithole and stank like a pigsty,” Mr. Hosseinpour would interject.

Eventually my father would conclude, “Those thugs tried to break us, but what they did just made us stronger.”

These men, and many others who were not lucky enough to survive, endured imprisonment and torture because they stood for freedom. What was happening in Iran in June 2009 was a continuation of the same struggle. My father and his friends loved to recite the poem “The End of the Game,” by Ahmad Shamlou, which Shamlou wrote about the shah.

As the Islamic regime consolidated its power after the revolution, the poem became not only about the shah anymore; it referred to all despots who have ruled my country. As I sat in Khamenei’s prison, I thought of him while I recited the poem.

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I had been reporting on the Islamic Republic for twelve years. I knew how irrational and dangerous the regime could be. The longer I sat in my cell waiting for someone to explain to me what was happening, the more concerned I became. In my better moments, the journalist in me found the experience, even the interrogations, fascinating. Not many journalists had gotten so close to the inner workings and secrets of this notorious prison.

I concentrated on remembering every detail for an article I imagined I’d eventually write: “Seventy-two Hours in Evin Prison.”

That first night, I shut my eyes and tried to sleep. Immediately,
I started to dream. I was with Paola in Hampstead Heath on a foggy London morning. We were lying on top of a hill. Paola was wearing her white pajamas and a white tank top. I was kissing her pregnant stomach and rubbing baby oil on it. In my dream, I did not miss any opportunity to kiss Paola. I told her about the absurdity of my seventy-two hours in Evin, and we laughed about Rosewater’s absurd allegations. Then we were back in our flat in London, her dark blond hair spread across the pillow beside me. Then, suddenly, someone was banging on our door.