Then They Came For Me (30 page)

I realized that I was not going to be tried on that day. I was part of the post-trial show. The Revolutionary Guards had decided to stage a press conference with four supposed leaders of the velvet revolution: Mohammad Atrianfar, a former security official and deputy minister of interior who had also been in charge of a number of reformist newspapers that had been shut down; Mohammad Ali Abtahi; Kian Tajbakhsh; and me. Tajbakhsh and I were told to sit in the courtroom as Abtahi and Atrianfar were taken behind a podium for the press conference.

It was difficult for me to watch Abtahi and Atrianfar during their press conference. I had interviewed each of them several times. Once jovial and chubby, Abtahi looked defeated and broken. He was less than half of his previous size. With a lifeless expression in his eyes, he made scathing comments about Mousavi and Khatami, and explained why the reformists had
failed to gain widespread popular support and so had had to stage a velvet revolution. Abtahi’s basic point was that the reformists did not understand how much Iranians admired Khamenei and, as a result of this miscalculation, devised misguided strategies to gain people’s votes before the election or overturn the results after the election.

Atrianfar took a different approach: he spent a significant amount of time praising Khamenei’s greatness. A clever type who knew how to switch sides, Atrianfar understood that all tyrants are susceptible to flattery, and so he compared Khamenei to Imam Hossein, the grandson of the Prophet Mohammad and one of the most revered figures of Shia Islam. Atrianfar then likened himself to an enemy of the imam who later joined Imam Hossein’s army.

My turn was to come after lunch. We ate chicken kebabs and drank
doogh
, a salty yogurt drink similar to lassi, inside the courtroom. Rosewater told me to look down during lunch. He then gave me his drink, saying he had to watch his blood pressure. “Names, Mazi, names,” he reminded me. Before the interview, Tajbakhsh and I were given dress shirts to change into.

I knew what I had to do. Watching Atrianfar’s shameless praise of Khamenei had convinced me that I should follow him, and instead of naming names, as Rosewater wanted me to, I would offer my apologies to the supreme leader and repeat the paranoid but general theories Haj Agha, Rosewater’s boss, had outlined about the evil Western media.

When at last we were up in front of the cameras, I remained as quiet as possible throughout the press conference and allowed Tajbakhsh to do most of the talking. We both concluded by saying how sorry we were to have made mistakes and asked Khamenei to forgive us. Afterward, Tajbakhsh and I gave our shirts back and put on our prison uniforms. We exchanged sorry looks. We were two broken men.

I was separated from Tajbakhsh and led back to the car that would take me back to prison. I hadn’t named any names. I knew what awaited me.

·   ·   ·

A short time later, I sat quietly in my chair in the interrogation room. Rosewater walked over to me. From beneath my blindfold, I could see that he still had his formal shoes on. He stood in front of me for a while, then walked away. Then I could feel him standing behind me. He punched my shoulder so hard that I immediately felt my right hand go numb.

“You will be executed within the next twenty-one days,” he said. I knew that twenty-one days from now was the start of the holy month of Ramadan, during which Muslims fast and no execution can be carried out.

Rosewater punched my shoulder again. I could feel the impact of his ring on my bone. “I will make sure you die before Ramadan, Mazi,” he said. He stood in front of me and grabbed my nose with his fingers. “But I will also make sure that I smash your handsome face first.”

It was a hot early August day, and we were in one of the interrogation rooms where there was no air-conditioning. That always put Rosewater in a bad mood.

His first question surprised me: “Who is Pauly Shore?”

Those unfamiliar with Mr. Shore are not missing much. He’s a B-list actor who played a high school outcast, a college party animal, and an unemployed male stripper in a series of comedies in the 1990s. I, along with ten other pathetic souls, was a member of the Pauly Shore Alliance on Facebook. I had joined the group with a friend, as part of an inside joke.

“Why?” I replied.

Up to that day, except for the
Daily Show
interrogation, Rosewater had asked me only about politicians and journalists. He placed a piece of paper in front of me. At the top he had written
Describe your connection to Pauly Shore
. “I want to know everything there is to know about him.”

Where does one start? I wrote down that Shore is a comedian and was in a series of comedies I had watched while at university. I named a few of his films:
Encino Man, Son-in-Law
, and
Jury Duty
.

“Everyone you know seems to be a comedian,” Rosewater said. “We’ll investigate this Pauly Shore.” I wondered which
lucky fellow in the Revolutionary Guards would be assigned that crucial task.

Rosewater wasn’t finished. “What is your connection to Anton Chekhov?” Despite its absurdity, I’d sort of expected this question. I was a member of two fan clubs on Facebook: Pauly Shore’s and Anton Chekhov’s. My inquisitors were really grasping at straws here.

“Anton Chekhov is dead, sir,” I answered. “He was a Russian playwright who lived in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.”

“Was he a Jew?” Rosewater asked angrily.

“I don’t know. I don’t think so.”

“He sounds like a Jew to me,” he said impatiently.

“Well, in Russian,
ov
denotes belonging to a place. It is similar to
zadeh
in Persian.”

Rosewater was silent.

“But I don’t know. He could be Jewish. Many Russian writers and intellectuals, as well as revolutionaries, were Jewish at that time.”

“And many of them were Zionists. Herzl was a Russian,” Rosewater said, referring to Theodor Herzl, the founder of the Zionist movement.

“He was Hungarian,” I replied and immediately regretted it. I didn’t want to sound defiant, but sometimes his idiocy was too much to bear. And anyway, at this point, what did I have to lose?

“Oh, really?” He grabbed my neck from behind and squeezed with all his might. “You know so much about the Jews, don’t you?”

He put a blank piece of paper on my chair and slapped the back of my head. “Write down everything you know about Anton Chekhov and don’t write
koseh she’r
, bullshit!” Rosewater exclaimed. “We’re going to investigate every Zionist you know, Mr. Maziar. We’re going to show you that despite what
you may think, we are not stupid. We know that your Chekhov was Jewish and that you are a Zionist.”

After, presumably, Rosewater found out that Chekhov was not Jewish, he did not bother with any more questions about people with surnames ending with
ov
. That included my Israeli friend David Shem-tov. I don’t think you can find a more Israeli name than Shem-tov, but I could just imagine the Revolutionary Guards researchers saying to each other, “Chekhov, Molotov, Shem-tov, they are all the same!”

I had grown up listening to anti-Israeli propaganda on Iranian television, but it was only in Evin that I discovered the real depth of the Islamic government’s hatred, paranoia, and lack of understanding of Israel, and of Jewish people in general. The Iranian government claims Israel is its main nemesis. If the United States is the Great Satan, Israel is the “Even More Devious Satan.” I was coming to understand that Rosewater, who was likely being fed anti-Israeli propaganda on an hourly basis, believed every conspiracy theory pertaining to the Jewish people. To Rosewater, a Jew could not be an ordinary person. To him a Jew meant a Zionist, a spy—someone who has no other occupation than conspiring against Islam and Muslims. I don’t think he had ever met a Jewish person in his life. But he thought that he knew everything about the Jews and Israelis.

“Write down the name of every Jewish element you’ve ever met in your life!” he demanded one day.

I took the pen.
In the West it is not customary to ask about people’s religious affiliations. It will be very difficult for me to answer your question because I cannot guess the religious background of every person I’ve ever met in my life
.

He tore my answer into pieces and threw them in my face. Grabbing my hair from behind, he forced me to pick them up from the floor. “Do as I ask! Tell me the names of the most evil, irreligious bastards you have ever met. They were all Jews!”

In order to satisfy him, I wrote down a list that included
journalists, university students, and teachers and former neighbors of mine in Canada and the United Kingdom.

“I thought you said you’ve never met any Jews in your life,” he declared proudly. “But there are ten names here. You have to detail all the information you have about these elements.”

I knew that Rosewater would be well rewarded by his bosses if he could connect me to shady dealings with Israel, but there was nothing to be found. Ever since I had returned to Iran, in 1997, I had made sure to keep my distance from any association with Israel. I knew that being connected to Israel could easily put me in jail or, at the very least, end my career in Iran. I even refused to cover the Palestinian-Israeli conflict—the most pressing issue in the Middle East—in order to avoid having to travel to Israel.

Rosewater’s ideas about the Jews and Israel came directly from Khomeini’s writings and speeches. After seizing power, like all Middle Eastern tyrants, Khomeini had sought legitimacy through demonizing the Jewish state. In turn, Israel—by committing atrocities against the Palestinians and setting up illegal settlements—kept providing Khomeini and other Middle Eastern dictators with ample reason to condemn it.

Despite Rosewater’s hatred of the Jews, his attitude to Israel was one of awe and envy. While he clearly had contempt for anything to do with Israel, he frequently demonstrated his admiration for the methods Israel used to defeat its enemies. He once told me that all my friends in the West who have criticized the Islamic government or have acted against it would someday be brought back in a bag “just like that Nazi guy in Argentina, what’s his name?”

“Adolf Eichmann,” I said.

“Yes, Eichmann. The Nazi leader,” he said. “If the Israelis can kidnap one of their enemies, don’t you think we can do the same thing?” He took my right earlobe and pulled it as hard as he could. “We are much stronger than Israel. The Islamic Revolutionary
Guards Corps has networks all around the world. Hezbollah and Hamas are only two of them. Nobody should think they’re safe anywhere in the world.”

·   ·   ·

I’m sure that the irony of comparing his government’s ability to hunt its opponents with the Israelis’ pursuit of a Nazi criminal was lost on Rosewater. Unlike Rosewater, most Iranians aren’t anti-Semitic.

I, for one, had been fascinated by Jewish history and culture all my life. When I was between the ages of five and ten, my family lived in a neighborhood that had many Jewish people. One of Tehran’s two largest synagogues, some Jewish butchers, and the main Jewish school were very close to our house. As old communists, my parents didn’t have any predilection for or prejudice against the Jews. But other kids in the neighborhood would tell me that Jews were different from us. We didn’t know how they were different, exactly, but we always knew who the Jewish kid in the class was. That didn’t stop us from being friends with them. When I later moved to Canada, many of my Jewish friends told me that they had been taunted at school for being Jewish. I couldn’t remember that ever happening in Iran.

Jews settled in the Persian Empire more than two millennia ago. Many Iranian Jews trace their roots in the country to 2500
B.C.
, when the Persian king Cyrus the Great provided refuge for Hebrew people fleeing from Babylon. The Jewish prophets Ezra and Isaiah called Cyrus “the one to whom God has given all the kingdoms of the earth.” Cyrus’s name is repeated twenty-three times in the Old Testament, and he is the only Gentile to be designated as a messiah—a divinely appointed leader—in the Torah. Outside of Israel, Iran still has the largest Jewish community in the Middle East. Even though many Iranian Jews migrated to Israel and other countries after the revolution, there are still twenty-five thousand Jews in Iran.

As a child, being told that Jews were different made me think about my own identity. Why did they buy their meat from a different butcher? Why did the men and boys wear yarmulkes? I remember being fascinated by the word “Jewish,” especially when I understood that many of the people my parents, my siblings, and I admired—Karl Marx, Bob Dylan, Paul Newman—were Jewish, and that my hero, Charlie Chaplin, sympathized with the plight of the Jews. Chaplin’s
The Great Dictator
is still one of my favorite films.

In 1993, I decided to make a film about Jewish immigration to North America as my senior-year project. I chose the story of the SS
Saint Louis
, a ship of Jewish immigrants who left Germany in May 1939. I found a number of the ship’s survivors in different countries around the world, and interviewed them for the film. After
The Voyage of the
Saint Louis became quite successful in festival circuits, and was shown on television in many countries, I was interviewed several times about why I, a Shia Muslim, had made a film about a group of Jewish refugees. I always emphasized that one of my main reasons was to show that many Iranians care about the plight of other peoples. In October 2005, many Iranians were surprised and disgusted when Ahmadinejad called the Holocaust a myth and questioned the number of Jews killed during the Second World War.

I was always very proud that I was possibly the only Muslim filmmaker who had ever made a film about the Holocaust. In fact, in 2008, when the International Documentary Festival Amsterdam organized a retrospective of my work, I insisted that they show
The Voyage of the
Saint Louis in order to prove that not all Iranians are as ignorant as our president.

My words came back to haunt me as I sat blindfolded in my chair in front of Rosewater. Before he started asking questions, his cell phone rang. It was his wife again. He squeezed my right ear with his free hand as he answered the phone.