Letters to My Torturer: Love, Revolution, and Imprisonment in Iran (27 page)

“Lift up your blindfold.”

It’s your voice, Brother Hamid.

I take off my blindfold.

In front of me, I see Ali Shamkhani, dressed in the Revolutionary Guard uniform. He’s the one who’s been doing the slapping. He asks in a thick, southern Iranian accent: “Do you recognize me?”

“I don’t have my glasses.”

He moves his head forward.

“Now?”

I nod my head.

“Who am I?”

“Mr Shamkhani.”

“I have only one question. The coup story, is it true?”

I say: “No. It’s a lie.”

The blow descends hard.

“It’s a lie?”

“Yes.”

Another slap: “It’s a lie?”

“Yes.”

Then I hear your voice, behind my back, Brother Hamid: “He’s playing games again. He’s one of the seasoned ones.”

Shamkhani is standing up. But it is you, Brother Hamid, who says: “Put on your blindfold, useless wimp.”

I put it on. You pull me up and drag me along. You are dragging me to the room downstairs. I have found strength for a moment. I tell myself: “I’d rather die than accept this.”

As if you have read my mind, you say: “Let’s see whether it’s a lie, Mr Hero ...”

And I am not a hero. When I am hanging from my feet, a bowl of shit placed under my mouth, I yell: “Woof, woof. It’s true.”

You untie me and take me upstairs. Again, I sit on a chair and take off my blindfold at your request. Ali Shamkhani is standing in exactly that same spot. He says: “Tomorrow’s coup, is it the truth or a lie?”

I pause. A hand grabs my hair from behind and Ali Shamkhani’s slaps hit my face, right and left.

“It’s true.”

Shamkhani stands up and says: “Take him upstairs.”

And leaves.

We set off. This upstairs is different from the usual upstairs. It’s so far away. Eventually we arrive. I sense I have entered a large hall. You, Brother Hamid, push me down onto a chair. I hear a whisper from somewhere. I lift my head slightly. I use my eyebrows to push the blindfold up as much as I can. It’s a large hall. That’s all I can see. The sound of shuffling slippers arrives. You grab my sleeve and drag me along. We walk up two or three carpeted stairs. I see a number of black chairs. You, Brother Hamid, are putting me on one of them.

“Pull up your blindfold.”

I lift it up.

The room lights up. I don’t turn round. I am on a raised dais, three steps above the ground. I’m sitting behind a wooden table. In front of me are television cameras and next to them some people wearing the Revolutionary Guard trousers with their faces covered. Just like the Ku Klux Klan. I hear your voice, Brother Hamid, from behind me: “When I lift my hand, you’ll start. Just the same things you have
already confessed to. Introduce yourself, briefly. If you feel like it, ask for forgiveness at the end.”

You move your head close to my ear: “Or else, we will have to go downstairs.”

The sound of slippers walking away. I see a thin, masked man walking down the steps and joining the rest. A few words are exchanged. A hand is raised. The lights are turned on and the cameras are running. I can see myself on the monitor screen next to me. My beard has grown bushy, it’s reddish. It has not yet turned white. I stroke my beard. Later I find out that in the first sample recording the look and dress of the confessor does not matter. You, Brother Hamid, lift your hand. And I begin: “In the name of God, the Compassionate, the Merciful ...”

I first introduce myself and then explain the film script. My hands are shaking. Below, the Ku Klux Klan crowd is watching me, with their black masks on. Shamkhani is in the middle of them. I don’t know why my voice is shaking. My wife’s image appears in front of me and she’s crying. I see Rahman, whose face has gone red up to his ears. And suddenly, a terrible weeping causes me to break down. The lights are snapped off. You, Brother Hamid, pick me up and throw me down the steps. Then you kick me in the stomach. I crumple.

In the corridor, I huddle under my blanket, sobbing. I hear voices. Shouts. I later learn that that night all the Party leaders, except for Kianuri, confessed to a coup. I don’t know what time it is when the guard arrives, grabs my sleeve, and drags me after him. We walk down the stairs. We pass through the courtyard. But we are not going to Under the Eight. I don’t know where we are. The guard makes me sit down in a corner and says: “Pull the blanket over your head and don’t move.”

I am shivering in the cold. I push the blindfold up on my forehead. Slowly, slowly, I lift my head over the blanket. I am leaning against a wall along with two other people, each of us covered with a blanket. The distance between us makes it impossible to talk or identify one
another. I pull the blanket back over my head and try to sleep for a few minutes. My mind has closed down, completely overwhelmed by events. I guess that they want to take us to the garden. Brother Hamid has repeatedly questioned me about it, and in the end this is where the imaginary coup was designated to take place. Except for one occasion, I have only been to the garden in times of danger. If Rahman were to find out that I had been to the garden accompanied by the Revolutionary Guards, he’d do something about my predicament. But how? Myself, the self that I used to be, is pushing aside all the torture, the prayers, the shit-eating, and is grasping at flimsy straws of hope. Eventually someone arrives and grabs my sleeve. I am handcuffed and forced into a car. A voice says: “Put your head down.” I do as I’m told and a blanket is dragged roughly over my head. A while later, the car starts moving. I am trying to figure out where we are going when a voice says: “Lift your head.”

I lift my head. The street lamps have not yet been turned off and there is a faint glow on the horizon. The car moves through the traffic on a rainy spring morning, joining other cars, taxis, and trucks in lots of different colours. Since I can’t see without my glasses, I am forced to squint to see better.

On the way, Brother Sedaghat, who is in charge of the operation, says something in code language into a walkie-talkie. The Hillmans all pull over to the side of the road, and a large number of people, dressed in both Revolutionary Guard uniforms and civilian clothing, get out, place their weapons on the ground beside them, and start performing the dawn prayer in the rain.

When the prayer is finished, the cars all move off towards the garden. The Hillmans come to a stop, a short distance apart. Mine is right in front of the gate.

Brother Sedaghat announces: “Get ready. We have been ordered to shoot you all right here, in front of the gate.”

He leaves, his walkie-talkie in his hand. I have pressed my head against the window and am watching this unbelievable scene. A large
number of guards are running towards the ruins to the north of the garden, their guns at the ready. Gradually, it dawns on me that there must be a coup underway, and that the garden is its centre. The one who is me and who has raised his head from deep inside me, is tempting me: “Get out ...”

I am scared. The me that is me is saying they’ll hang you without hesitation. Sooner or later. Maybe your wife will be rescued. Maybe Rahman. I pull the door handle with the handcuffed hand. It opens. I put my feet outside. I hesitate, but the me who is me makes me get out. As soon as I reach the gate, it opens. Brother Sedaghat is dragging along Mash
⁷⁴
Akbar, the gardener. Poor Mash Akbar, fear has made his eyes pop out. Brother Sedaghat asks me: “Who told you to get out of the car?”

“I am sorry, urine ...”

“Is this the gardener?”

I say: “Yes. That’s Mash Akbar.”

Brother Sedaghat asks him: “Do you know this man?”

He says: “No.”

“Tell Mash Akbar your name.”

It is clear that he doesn’t recognize me. I don’t have my glasses on, I have a long beard, and I’m wrapped in a blanket. The me that is me is saying:

“Mash Akbar. I am Houshang Asadi.”

Mash Akbar shakes his head. They take him back into the garden, and tell him there has been a theft, and they need to search the place. They set about searching the whole garden, even digging up the floor of the little pool, looking for the weapons they believe must be hidden there in readiness for the coup. The driver walks back towards the Hillman. First he sits on the back seat and closes the door. Then he gets behind the wheel and calls me over. I walk back and get into the car. They close the doors. It is now light. Brother Sedaghat returns with Mash Akbar. He puts him into the car too and tells the driver to drive. We set off, passing through back roads before
reaching a surfaced road. Brother Sedaghat is saying: “Why did you lie? We kept telling your interrogator that it was a lie but he insisted that it was not.”

I say: “I told Mr Shamkhani that it was a lie.”

Brother Sedaghat replies: “We are going to take you on a picnic so you can learn to stop telling lies.”

Then, laughingly, he turns to Mash Akbar: “We’ve got just the place for a picnic; Mr Asadi knows the place very well.”

Mash Akbar, who is shaking in fear, is looking at me. I say: “It’s me alright. It’s just that I’ve grown a beard.”

I am sure that even if he hasn’t recognized my face, he will definitely remember my name. I am confident that he will phone Rahman’s sister-in-law, who in turn will get in touch with Rahman. My heart fills with joy. Brother Hamid’s ridiculous game is now working against him.

Years later, I discover that Rahman, accompanied by my wife and the poet Siavash Kasrai, had gone to the garden for the thirteenthday picnic following the New Year. Mash Akbar had in fact told Rahman’s sister-in-law that day, and she had passed on the news to Rahman. Rahman and Ali Reza Khodayee had analysed the information and had come to two conclusions:

the story of the theft could be true, and this was why the guards had searched the garden;

it was a sign that the situation in the prison was very bad, and that forced confessions had been taken from the Party members.

Even though his Russian contacts had informed Rahman on 1 April that confessions had been extracted from the prisoners, unfortunately they failed to read the situation correctly. That information, coupled with the raid on the garden, if accurately interpreted, could have alerted the remaining Party leaders, including Rahman, of the great danger they were in. Rahman sought out Farajullah Mizani, known as Javanshir, who was the Party’s second-incommand and had not yet been arrested. Whatever the outcome of
their discussions, no action was taken. Just twenty-three days later, the Revolutionary Guards, having extracted confessions from the political prisoners, launched their final assault on the Party and rounded up all the remaining key members in the early hours of 26 April 1983.

Why did they just sit there, twiddling their thumbs and doing nothing? I don’t know, but it seems that Mash Akbar never told Rahman and my wife that I had been taken to the garden on the day of the raid.

The Hillman is moving fast. Once again I decide to end my ordeal. I inch my way very slowly towards the door. I grasp the door handle and glance at the horizon. I say my farewell to life. I see my wife’s eyes; I see her running across the pedestrian crossing in the middle of the road, and pull the door handle. The door will open and I’ll be cut into pieces on the asphalt road, turned wet by the rain. I may even go under the tyres of the two Hillmans that are following us, carrying two other people wrapped in blankets. The door won’t open. I pull harder. It’s not opening. I hear the sound of the driver’s laughter: “That door is locked, Mr Asadi. Now lower your head.”

I lower my head. The wet blanket is pulled over me. An hour later, I am thrown into a corner of the room upstairs. I know what is coming. The old caretaker doesn’t know what picnic means, but I do. I rub my head against the wall and pull off my blindfold. I catch sight of an electrical socket. I move towards it. I hit the corner of the handcuffs against the socket frame and pull it off. I pull out the two cables, the red and the blue. Once again I say my farewells to my wife and life, and stick the sides of the handcuffs against the cables. I have had two full months of being tortured by you, if we add the nights of torture, I guess it might even add up to more than two months.

When I come back to my senses, I am all but a corpse, stinking from head to toe. First of all, I see a cockroach, high up on the wall. I guess he’s frozen in that position. It’s a large, brown cockroach. I am shivering with repulsion. I take off my prison shirt and fold it into a
ball. With all the force of my broken body, I throw it up so it hits the cockroach, but the cockroach doesn’t fall. It is holding onto life with all six legs. I throw my shirt again and again, until eventually it falls off. Steve McQueen ate his cockroach. I put a glass over it. I cover the glass with my clothes. I wait until it’s time for the bathroom visit and I throw it out of my cell. It sticks to the ground. I lift my foot. I cannot kill it. I cannot kill you either, Brother Hamid. I cannot kill anything. The cockroach flees, running up the wall. I have had a terror of cockroaches ever since that night.

When the door opens, I assume it is you, Brother Hamid. But it’s a man asking me whether I need some tidying up. I leave the cell and sit down on a wooden chair. The barber is a middle-aged man who does his work in absolute silence. I tell him to cut my hair and my beard very short. He does just that and a huge pile of hair falls onto the floor. I want to free myself from all the filth and the shit. When the barber finishes, he asks for money. I say I have none. He grunts and says he’ll pick it up next time. As chance would have it, my turn for the shower room is the next day. I scrub myself in that brief spell of time. I would have pulled off my skin, had it been possible. But filth has reached the depths of my soul, the veins of my heart. I cannot eat. I am throwing up. I have to force myself to swallow water.

There is not a single healthy part of my mind left. I have gone crazy. I keep praying, from morning ’til night. I pick up Khamenei’s book and perform prayers from it. I consult the Qur’an to tell my fortune. All I get is bad news. Whichever bit I look at, there’s talk of killing. Kill them. Kill them. I cannot find in the Qur’an the compassion that Khamenei mentions in his book. I am all ears, waiting for the shuffling sound of slippers. I realize that I should be preparing myself. I plan story after story. I invent crimes that the Soviet Union intended to commit. I recall Tabari’s words about Soviet plans and their power, and turn each one into an incident. I am working on the stories and am ready to bark when you arrive. To hand them over to you. For you to read them and not hang me from the ceiling again.
To read them and not whip me again. To read them and not feed me shit again.