Then They Came For Me (26 page)

I saw my family sitting together. In this mixture of memory and fantasy, it was lunchtime, and my father had taken his usual seat at the table, a glass of illegally produced vodka in one hand. My mother was in the kitchen, and the smell of simmering herbs from the north of Iran filled the large apartment. She was making
ghormeh sabzi
, a lamb stew with kidney beans and vegetables. As I drew my mother in the kitchen, standing by the stove, I could smell the simmering dill, parsley, leeks, and spinach and taste the tender pieces of lamb steeped in the herbs.

In the living room, Maryam was sitting to my father’s left, watching the news on the television that was in a corner on her right. Next to Maryam was her husband, Mohammad. Unlike Maryam and me, Mohammad is a great listener. My father had loved telling his life stories to Mohammad, time and time again. I was across from Maryam. I played with my food as I told my family about the forced confessions of a friend on television. “I don’t see anything wrong with making televised confessions,” I said. “No one believes his words anyway. So I think he made the right decision in order to be released.” I tried to avoid my father’s stare.

My father looked at me as he squeezed the juice from a grapefruit into his glass of vodka. My father suffered from hyperuricemia, a high level of uric acid in his blood. The doctor
had told him to eat grapefruit and stop drinking. He’d chosen to follow only one recommendation.

“You may think it’s normal to give in and do what they ask you to in order to avoid torture,” he said, pausing to take a sip of his drink, “but you’re just setting yourself up to be fucked.”

He had such a way with words. Thinking of Baba Akbar, I felt the familiar mix of anxiety and admiration. I’d never known if his next sentence would hit me below the belt or not. My mother always came to my rescue. She would change the subject so radically that my father would be forced to stop his condescending comments. “I didn’t know that the life expectancy in Burundi is only fifty-one years old,” my mother told me. “You’ve been to Burundi several times—are they really poor?” But this time, Baba Akbar didn’t want to change the subject.

The sound of steps coming down the hall pulled me out of my fantasy. I covered my drawing with the carpet and waited. The steps continued past my cell.

In my fantasy, my father continued to lash out at me as my mother cleared the dishes from the table. This time, Maryam defended me. “Each person is different, Baba Akbar,” she said. “What did your generation achieve, anyway, that you’re so proud of it? You thought of dying as a value. Young people these days appreciate being alive. They don’t believe in martyrdom and stupid concepts like that. I think it’s about time you should change as well.” In my fantasy, Maryam stood up and left the room.

I returned to my drawing under the carpet, and when I had finished with the apartment in Tehran, I moved on to our flat in London. I drew each room, each piece of furniture. Paola and I had just renovated the apartment and had added an extra bathroom. I made sure to draw the new bathroom in detail. Even though the new bathroom was smaller than the old one, Paola and I liked it much better. I missed the new bathroom. I missed Paola. When I was done, I drew her. I laughed out loud at the
image—knowing she’d be mortified by my amateurish depiction. I took my time drawing her body, imagining the shape of her belly at this moment. How big had she gotten? She’d barely been showing when I’d left London a few weeks earlier. I wished I had read those books before I left—then I would know more about what was happening to her.

I started to hum songs as I drew more things—maps and images of every house I ever lived in, schools I’d attended, cities I had visited. I couldn’t believe how much I was enjoying myself. Suddenly, I panicked. What if they found me drawing my houses and accused me of practicing drawing the map of Evin for an intelligence agency? Who knew what they would accuse me of, if they found the drawings. I spat on the maps and frantically tried to wipe them away, but this only made a big blue ink mess on the tiles. My fingers were dark blue with ink, which I tried to wipe on my prison uniform. What had I done? What if they opened the door and found this mess? I rubbed my fingers against the tiles to get rid of the ink. Despite the blasting air-conditioning, sweat dripped down my back.

“What are you doing, Mazi
jaan
?” I heard my father ask in my head, in his usual sarcastic tone. “What is this mess you’ve made here?” He smiled.

“What if they find the drawings?”

“Maybe they will. Maybe they won’t,” I heard him say calmly. “Remember that for these hypocrite bastards, instilling in you the idea that they control your life is much more important than what they can actually do. They want you to be afraid of them even in your dreams. What if they find the maps? They are already accusing you of espionage. What more can they do? Screw them. Relax and be yourself.”

I pulled the carpet back over the drawings and stared at the sliver of blue sky and the slice of a tree I could see through my tiny window. Sunshine was reflecting off the leaves. There was
a slight summer breeze outside, and the leaves moved in a gentle rhythm. I was lucky to be alive. I was lucky to be able to enjoy the blue sky, the breeze, the summer. I played Miles Davis’s rendition of Gershwin’s “Summertime” in my head.

I closed my eyes, and I slept.

·   ·   ·

“Do you have your papers ready?” A guard was standing over me, nudging me awake.

I felt panic rising inside me, until I remembered that I had covered the drawings with the carpet. I hadn’t even begun to answer Rosewater’s questions. “Almost. I need just half an hour to finish,” I said.

“Hurry up—your specialist wants them back.”

I set about answering the questions as quickly as I could, writing just the truth and no more: I had no personal relationship with any of the people he’d named and knew them only in my capacity as a reporter. I gave the answers back to the guard and prepared myself to be called to the interrogation room and, I was sure, receive another brutal beating. But I didn’t hear back from Rosewater that day at all. The next morning, a guard came to my cell to tell me that I was being moved. When I walked into the new cell, my heart sank. It was just three doors down from my old one, but less than half the size: maybe twenty square feet. It had no window and was much dirtier than the first. One of its two light bulbs was broken.

Rosewater did not call for me that day, or the next day, either. Losing the sunlight meant that I had no idea of the passage of time except for when they sounded the call to prayers at different times of the day. I knew that the smaller cell and the solitary confinement were part of my punishment, but I somehow found a renewed sense of strength. I spent hours exercising. I knew I was losing weight. My stomach had become flat, and my
ribs were more prominent. I started a rigid yoga, stretching, and strengthening program to help me pass the time. I lay on my back with my eyes closed, kicked the air with my legs, and pretended that I was jogging with Paola along the route we usually ran back in London: past houses and stores on the way from our flat in Belsize Park to Primrose Hill, into Regent’s Park, around the lake, and back to Primrose Hill. In my head, as in the past, we always ended our jog in a coffee shop around the corner from Primrose Hill. I took my time as I mentally followed the path.

Two days after I had moved to the new cell, I was doing my bicycle moves when the guard finally opened a slot in my cell door and said that my specialist wanted to see me.

Rosewater sat me in the chair. He left my blindfold on.

“What do you think this country is, you little spy? A stable full of animals and whores, like Europe? We have a master in this country. Do you think of anything except yourself and your carnal desires, you little man?” He began to kick my feet. “You know what you are, Maziar? You are a
mohareb
,” he said, “you are at war with Allah. And you know what the sentence for a
mohareb
is, Maziar, don’t you?” I did know. It was death by execution. I said nothing. “I’m sure you know that, you little spy.”

He then grabbed my hair and pulled me from the chair, and out of the interrogation room. “I can’t look at your face anymore,” he sneered. He led me to the courtyard that separated the interrogation rooms from the cells. “Face the wall! Think about those six godless anti-revolutionary elements when you’re back in your cell,” he said. “Don’t let yourself rot here while they’re having fun outside, Maziar. They don’t care about a worthless spy like you. You shouldn’t care about them, either.”

For the next week I was beaten by Rosewater on a daily basis, and despite his endless questions about my relationships
with the six reformist politicians, I never answered them again. As I sat silently in the chair day after day, I wondered if he honestly believed the words he was saying or was simply acting on orders to break me through torture and threat of execution. Because he was always careful to avoid injuring my face, I also guessed that they planned to parade me on television and force me to repeat my statements about the Western media’s animosity toward the Islamic Republic.

After a while, his behavior became more erratic. In the beginning, other interrogators had periodically joined Rosewater in the room, but since the day he had started to beat me, he was always alone. He had to play the bad cop and the good cop at the same time. After hours of kicking, slapping, and punching me, he would bring me fresh apricots and tea and sit beside me, asking about my family and my personal life.

“You know, Maziar, I like you,” he’d say. “I think you’re a good person but you were tricked by the agency to act against our holy system of the Islamic Republic.”

“But which agency, sir?”

“Don’t worry about these things right now. We’re having a friendly conversation. You know better than me which agency you’re working for, so don’t make me use my hands again.”

“But, sir, please show any evidence you may have and I can prove that it’s a misunderstanding.”

“Maziar, please, relax. Stop worrying. Have an apricot. Tell me about your life. How many brothers and sisters do you have?”

I was aware that he already knew the answers to these questions, and it pained me more than his punches to have to speak to him about the people I loved. On his lips, the mention of their names was even more obscene than his physical torture. Rosewater sighed melodramatically. “So sad, Maziar. I really don’t want you to join your father and your siblings in the hereafter.
Think about how much your mother needs you. Who is going to take care of your mother if you rot in prison or, God forbid, get executed?”

I did everything I could to keep Rosewater from seeing how effective this psychological manipulation was. During our conversations, I would sit calmly and say as little as possible. This just enraged him further, and he’d respond with some of his hardest punches. Most of the time, I was able to keep it together. But sometimes, in the coldness of that interrogation room, under the darkness of the blindfold, all of the emotions I had been holding back in the five months since Maryam had died spilled forth, and with each blow to my body, I cried harder than I ever had in my life. I did not want my mother to go through yet another loss. At times, I thought of confessing to his ridiculous accusations just to stop him from speaking about my family and to put an end to the hurt I must be causing my mother and Paola.

Back in my cell, I punched the walls until my hands were bruised and cried Maryam’s name out, asking for her help. My pleas were lost in the noise of the air-conditioning, so the prison guards couldn’t hear me. “Maryam
joon
, why don’t you help me?” I screamed. “Is this the way they treated you? These bastards, these sisterfuckers, these animals!”

·   ·   ·

One morning, Rosewater was in a particularly foul mood. He had brought the Persian translations of many of my articles. Though I rarely use exclamation points in my writing, the translations included dozens of them, one after almost every sentence. For a reason I couldn’t fathom, Rosewater hated exclamation marks, and seeing them in the articles enraged him. “Why do you use so many exclamation marks?” he screamed at me.

“Sir, the translator added them. They are not in my original, English version.”

“You’re lying,” he said. “Why would someone put in exclamation marks if you didn’t use them originally?” He grabbed the belt and swung it across my thighs and back; then his voice took on a different tone. “
Agha joon
, you know that I’m doing this for you,” he whispered, addressing Khamenei. “
Agha joon
, I’m your servant, I sacrifice my life for you. You know that I’m only thinking about your happiness and your satisfaction.” He grabbed my hair and started slapping the back of my head.

I heard a ringing that I thought was only in my ears, but it continued even after Rosewater stopped hitting me.

“Hi, sweetheart,” I heard him say. “I can’t talk right now. Is it urgent?”

I couldn’t make sense of the change in his tone of voice. Was what urgent? Who was he calling sweetheart?

“No, I’m not sure when I’ll be home, love. Is everything okay?” Only then did I realize that he had answered his cell phone. He must have been speaking to his wife.

“Oh,” he asked gently, “is she all right?” With that, he left the room and closed the door.

I buried my throbbing head in my hands. Who was this man? How could anyone beat another person the way he was beating me, then speak so lovingly to his wife? I remained as still as I could, trying to overhear his conversation. And then it struck me: Rosewater was just a man. Despite the power he had over me, he was just a man with a job. Like most people, his main priority was to keep his job and provide for his family.