Et tu, Buster? I thought.
But this is exactly what I had expected; I’d been bracing myself for it for years.
I was staying with my mom at the rental, refusing to get out of bed for the first couple of days, not able to accept the prospect that I had to go do another rug shop closing sale.
I went to see the Armenian wholesalers whose father was my dad’s first local supplier. They gave me an updated list of the inventory my dad had consigned from them. About seventy pieces, a manageable number. They also presented me with a bill. I can’t remember how many zeroes it had, but they were some of the few people who were on Dad’s own list of actual debts.
Their head of merchandising, David, an Iranian Jew, was also on Dad’s list. I talked to him, too. He also had rugs consigned at the annex, which I promised to return.
And lastly I went to Issa, my dad’s best local rug-man friend, a Kurdish Sufi with crazy hair whom I trusted in every way. We cried together for a few minutes, because we each recognized the place the other had in my dad’s heart and he in ours.
His first bit of advice—more of a commandment, actually—was that I could not begin any kind of sale for forty days, the traditional Islamic mourning period. I knew that wasn’t going to fly. I needed to get back to my life, and in forty days anyone who might be convinced to buy a rug because a guy died would have forgotten he had ever lived in the first place.
I was in a tough spot. A real advertising campaign would cost serious money that I didn’t have. It was also the sort of time commitment that I wasn’t willing to make.
Plenty of rug men stepped forward wanting to run a sale for me. The last thing I was looking to do right then, though, was go into business with anyone. I thought of one of my favorite pieces of Iranian wisdom: “If a partner were such a good thing, God would have had one.”
I also knew from those initial debt inquiries that if I were to advertise a sale other imaginary creditors might step forward.
I sat down and thought about what I was going to do. It was April of 2011.
The first thing I did was take the large smiling framed portrait of my dad that we used at his memorial service and prop it up in the store’s front window. I took a copy of the obituary that ran in the Marin Independent Journal, which I’d written, and taped it to the window.
“Born in Mashhad, Iran, in 1939 he resided in Marin for 42 years. Rezaian is remembered for his generosity of spirit, willingness to help those in need, and a mischievous sense of humor. Rezaian was long involved in cultivating understanding between Americans and Iranians,” it said, concluding with the awful detail that he was preceded in death “on March 4th, 2011, by beloved grandson, Walker Rezaian, age 5.”
It was as much an announcement to the world as it was a reminder to myself of what we had just suffered.
I decided immediately that I was not going to do this in any typical way.
I put an ad on Craigslist that made it clear that this was a chance to get a rug, but that you had to make an appointment. Unexpectedly the first person that responded had known my mom in the 1980s. She was a woman who had interned with my mom when they were both beginning their careers as psychologists. She bought several rugs, but more importantly she told some friends.
One guy who walked by the shop, a musician in a kilt—a drummer, not a bagpiper—ended up buying twenty-four rugs. Unexpected, but very welcome.
I took photos of the rugs and posted them on a Facebook page I made, called “Rezaian Persian Rugs—The Ending of an Era.” I shared it with friends, who shared it on their pages. Soon I was getting orders for the rugs from that page from all over the country.
And I made deliveries throughout the Bay Area. I even started what I called the Rug Mobile service, throwing a bunch of rugs in my dad’s old 2000 Mercedes M-Class SUV. I’d post an ad on Craigslist, update the Facebook page I’d set up, and tweet a location for the day and then just show up in different neighborhoods and hope for the best.
I was a selling machine. No reasonable offer was refused, because I understood that my primary goal was not to get the most that I could for each rug, but to turn thousands of handmade treasures into as much cash as I could, as quickly as I could.
This was actually my second stint as a rug dealer. During the worst of the economic downturn in 2008, I’d tried out my own rug business. I called it Rug Jones. It was a disaster, to put it lightly, and I’d closed up shop after just one painful year.
Now I was suddenly the successful merchant that I never could become with Rug Jones. At no point, though, did I feel pulled to get back in permanently. It worked because I knew it wasn’t forever. During those months I took a deep breath and remembered that covering news from Iran was also not the only thing in the world. That line about “the best-laid plans” is a good one. My new mind-set was to roll with life’s twists and turns and to keep those I loved close.
So I offered my mom the option of coming to live with me in Iran, and she jumped at it. When she and I finally took off in August of 2011 our future was completely uncertain.
I no longer had an apartment in Tehran. Yegi had packed up my few belongings and vacated the old place soon after my dad died when the lease had ended. Mom and I couch-surfed on opposite ends of the city until I found a suitable home for us: a two-bedroom apartment in a small building close to Vanak Square in the heart of the capital, butting up against Hemmat Expressway, a couple of hundred steps from the city’s most essential bus line. In every way it was a step up from the old place.
This could work for a while, I convinced myself.
And it did.
My friends welcomed my mom into our social life. When I’d have people over she wouldn’t hide in her room, she would just hang out. Often she’d get invited to gatherings without me. We were an oddity, but one that people enjoyed being around. Against the tough odds of the circumstances, we had landed on our feet, she and I, right where we wanted to, far away from anything conventional and the pain of our American life.
I was proud of us for not folding. Especially her. But it was obvious from early on that the arrangement couldn’t last.
For one thing the toxic mix of low levels of oxygen and gasoline exhaust that passed as our air was a major health hazard. Tehran had been one of the world’s most polluted big cities already and that phenomenon had gotten dramatically worse in the year or so since sanctions over Iran’s nuclear program had blocked Iran from importing gasoline, forcing the country to rely on nonstandardized fuel produced in its petrochemical factories. Just breathing would eventually kill us.
But we weren’t worrying about the air just then. We were battered and licking our wounds. The fact that we were still standing and far from the many friends and relatives back in California who just wanted to hug away our pain—or was it theirs?—was a victory for both of us.
Besides, there wasn’t time to think about that. We had a home to create.
I had shipped a few antique rugs back to Iran that needed repair work best done in Tehran’s bazaar. Those were our first home furnishings. Yegi called her family’s longtime satellite man, Hooshie, to install a dish and receiver for us, so we could live like everyone else with a full range of forbidden channels beamed into our living room from around the world (except Tehran; we never watched local TV). I bought an old orange living room set from a friend whose dad had also just died and who was selling his belongings. I got a couple of other rugs from him, too. You can never have too many rugs, I thought.
During the first couple of years living in Tehran I had deprived myself in an effort to save. Now it was time to be comfortable.
The woman I hired to come two days a week to shop, cook, and clean, became an indispensable part of our existence and a trusted friend.
The autumn was a time of transition for my mom and me. Our rooms were next to each other, each with a small twin bed that had been handed down to us from one of my dad’s cousins who lived in Tehran. Sometimes I could hear her crying through t
he wall, and I’m sure she could hear me. We usually left each other alone, but if it went for what felt like too long there would be a knock and a “Hey, you okay?” followed by a knowing shrug and sometimes a hug. We were both just letting it out. It’s what had to happen. There wasn’t much else to be done. We had decided we weren’t just going to survive; we’d live.
I was getting back to work while trying to keep Mom occupied. Of all of the possible outcomes this was the one that suited us both.
YADOALLAH MOTIONED TO ME TO TAKE A WALK OUTSIDE SO THE BUGS IN THE ROOM WOULDN’T pick up what he wanted to say. I followed him into the chilly afternoon air.
“You need to stay strong. You’re getting out of here. I have no idea when, but America wants you out. They won’t leave you behind. These bastards, they want you to break. Don’t give them the satisfaction of seeing you suffer.”
I had heard this sort of thing from Iranians for years. The idea that America is all-powerful and its will hovers over everything in the world. I knew something else to be true. But I desperately hoped that he was right.
Two days later, I was told that Yegi would be paying me a visit.
“Your wife will come tomorrow,” Kazem reported, dejectedly. “And she will be allowed to come once a week to see you.”
This was a side of him I didn’t know: conciliatory, because he was told he had to be.
“Why now?” I knew the answer but wanted his version.
“It is a gift from the Great Judge, for twenty-two Bahman.” February 11, the anniversary of the founding of Iran’s Islamic Republic and the most important revolutionary holiday.
That night I walked around the yard, pacing in anticipation of reuniting with my wife. Iran celebrates on the eve of holidays and over the tall brick wall and cypress trees I could see the color of the horizon changing with bursts from the outer edges of a fireworks show for the Islamic Republic’s half-assed answer to the Fourth of July.
“Allahu akbar”—God is great—I heard people calling out from the public ward of the prison, physically only a few yards away from us, but another planet entirely. In between were several high brick walls, the prison’s execution square, and the imaginary force field erected by the Revolutionary Guard.
I went to bed feeling hopeful about my meeting with my wife. In fact it was the first contact Yegi and I had had in two months. A conjugal visit; one of the many hard-to-believe-it’s-on-the-books rights of an Iranian prisoner I had been denied in my first seven months in Evin.
But there are no coincidences or momentary reprieves in these cases. The pressure was working. The IRGC had possession of me, but suddenly, due to the growing attention, I seemed a lot more valuable. And a liability if anything were to happen to me.
Yegi and I met in a chilly room. We had four hours alone. It was the longest time we had spent together since our arrest six months earlier.
When I returned from my time with Yegi there was a lot of commotion. Yadoallah was frantically gathering his possessions.
“What’s happening?”
“They’re transferring me to the public ward. One step closer to freedom!” He was ecstatic. After two and a half years in isolated purgatory he was returning to the land of the semiliving. He knew he wouldn’t be free any time soon, but it was what he had most wanted for months.
I was happy for him. He needed to get out of there. But I was worried for myself. Who were they going to stick me with now?
By that night Mirsani was back with me in the cell.
See the camel. No you don’t.
On the one hand I was sad that Yadoallah was gone, but on the other I felt relieved that I wouldn’t have to get to know a new guy. The odds of a third consecutive cellmate being someone I could live with seemed incredibly low.
I kept my bed and he took Yadoallah’s. And that was that.
AS 2011 CAME TO A CLOSE, I HAD HEARD THAT CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS’S HEALTH WAS WORSENING. He had told me when we last met the year before that his odds of survival weren’t really odds at all, as the chances were so slim. On December 16 I read the news that he’d died the day before in America. There were a lot of obituaries already, because those things are prepared in advance. I knew what I thought about him and had stories to tell, but I was so far away.
I sat and cried one more time. My mom walked in wondering what was going on.
“Hitchens died,” I told her.
“Oh, honey.” She and my dad had met him, too, and she knew that without his influence we wouldn’t have been in Tehran.
I got a text message that day from my friend Marc, an Agence France-Presse journalist. “Sorry to hear about your pal Hitchens. You’ve had a lot of loss this year.” The understatement of the millennium, I thought.
Now it was time to get on with things.
Mom and I ended that year with a Tehran Christmas party. We didn’t have a tree or lights, but we found some festive napkins. Friends came through. Iranian and foreign ones. Mostly journalists, a few diplomats, and a handful of locals. It was fun.
The Iranian women among them, led by Yegi, wanted to dance. Mom and I weren’t going to get in their way. I can’t remember ever having dancing on Christmas. We didn’t have a speaker, but someone had a portable one in their bag.
We ate and drank, and at the end of the most calamitous year, we were calm.
10
Waiting to Go on Trial
Mirsani and I had both come a long way since solitary. We were in a better place now, able to at least have some contact with the outside world. The typical day started with the opening of the lock that had kept us indoors the night before. I imagine that all prison doors everywhere are the same: heavy and squeaky, because they’re in need of oiling. It didn’t matter what the weather was like, we always preferred to be outside.
I woke up earlier than Mirsani, usually by a couple of hours. I’d make a coffee, then I’d go out in the courtyard and do some hundreds.
We knew all too well that we were bargaining chips being held by reckless poker players who were overrepresenting what they had in their hands. They were like rug merchants trying to sell product at a thousand percent markup. I knew this game, and I just wondered if American negotiators did, too.
It was talked about openly. Zarif would say how offensive such references were to the art that he practiced, but the only art this guy knew was the fine art of bullshit.
But this reality, that we had value, manifested itself in one very important way. Food.
A hand-me-down from Yadoallah—an electric cooking pad—became an extra limb for us. And we got proficient with it.
Apparently in a lot of places, including Iran, if you’ve got money you can get stuff in prison, and I don’t mean smuggled in Shawshank style. There’s an actual system.
We didn’t have access to the prison’s commissary, but once a week we were given a form with six spaces and the amount of money we had to spend, based on what our families left with prison officials. Every week we were pushing the envelope when it came time to do our shopping lists and some weeks we failed, depending on who the guard was on the day to fill out our forms; neither one of us could write in Farsi so we always needed help. Three kilos of ground lamb, forty eggs, ten kilos of potatoes. Believe me when I tell you that not having the freedom to move is tough regardless of the circumstances, and for that reason you look for any way to make it easier on yourself. For Mirsani and me it was through our stomachs.
The fact that they were allowing us decent food further reinforced for us the idea that we weren’t regular prisoners.
As the months wore on we took this one right and turned it into something that no one at Evin had ever seen before.
We had another good thing going: visits from Mirsani’s mother, Elmira, and the home-cooked meals his wife would send. I learned more about Azerbaijan from those care packages than I ever could from any book.
At his home he must have had a lot of land, because every visit would bring fresh tomatoes, peppers,
and eggs, and twice they brought whole chickens, raised in his backyard.
They would send him baked bread and cookies and preserves that Mirsani’s wife prepared.
We figured out over time that sweets, for all their teeth-corroding and diabetes-inducing properties, are one of the keys to short-term bliss. Maybe you’re wondering, Wasn’t this guy ever a kid? I most certainly was and I loved candy, but not as much as I did while I was in prison.
Sugary treats were so important we began to plan around them. First it was our shopping lists that needed to take our sweet tooths into account. Then it was how we organized our days. Neither Mirsani nor I wanted to be the middle-aged guy eating chocolate for breakfast. That’s just not a good look.
Whenever Mirsani’s mom was arranging to visit we would do everything we could to figure out who would be the guard on duty that day and whether or not they would be complicit in getting the booty into the prison.
Sometimes we failed and boxes filled with delectable items—stuffed grape leaves; homegrown chickens; sugar cookies with a walnut filling; mille-feuille, the flaky layered pastry with vanilla custard known in that part of the world as a napoleon, which Mirsani’s wife made better than any other I’ve ever tasted—were blocked at the prison gate and sent home to rot with his mom. These were proud people and if the man of the house couldn’t have good things to eat while he was in prison, his family wouldn’t either, for a few days.
After a while he impressed upon the guards that, even if they wouldn’t let us have the food, at least they could tell his mom that it had been accepted. They agreed to that. They were all assholes, but they all had moms, too.
On those days we sulked, but only until Mirsani would make his short call back to Jolfa to his wife. He had to put on a good face. She would want to know how we liked what she had sent, because as Mirsani always told me, “She knows she’s cooking for two.”
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