Then They Came for Me: A Family’s Story of Love, Captivity, and Survival

by Maziar Bahari

  “But Mr. Khatami says in the interview the votes will not be rigged,” I pointed out. Khatami had told me it was impossible, given the system of checks and balances in place. I braced myself for another blow to my head, but it didn’t come.

  “I know that,” Rosewater replied. “But he let you ask that question and allowed you to publish it. We both know that in a Q&A, the question is often more important than the answer. Now, we’re just getting started. Let’s talk about Mehdi Karroubi.” He let out an exaggerated laugh. “Karroubi is a joke. A moron!”

  Look who’s talking, I thought.

  Karroubi was known as the old man of reformism. While Mousavi was regarded as the gentle face of reformism, Karroubi was famous for his bluntness. After Ahmadinejad’s first victory in 2005, in an open letter published in the reformist press, Karroubi accused the supreme leader’s son Mojtaba Khamenei of vote rigging. In the letter, addressed to Ali Khamenei, Karroubi wrote that Khamenei’s son worked with the Basij and the Revolutionary Guards to tamper with the ballot boxes and raise the number of votes for Ahmadinejad. At the time, all my sources in different government ministries told me that Karroubi was right on target, but they also told me that this could not happen again. I did one of the first foreign press interviews with Karroubi in March 2008, for Newsweek. During the interview, he openly talked about his plans to topple Ahmadinejad in 2009.

  “And you, Maziar, made Karroubi look like an intellectual by calling him ‘Iran’s organized reformer’!” Rosewater punctuated each word in the phrase I’d used as the title of my interview with a blow to my head. My migraine pain was so intense, I felt nearly ready to vomit. “You then went on to ask him, ‘Don’t you think those who rigged the last vote can do it again?’ ”

  He took a deep breath. “La elaha ella Allah. There is no God but Allah. The things you’ve written make my blood boil. Why? Why did you want to corrupt our youth by instilling the idea of vote rigging in their heads? Why, Maziar?”

  Before I could answer, Rosewater began to rail against certain clerics, those he believed were agents of the West. Chief among them were Grand Ayatollahs Hossein Ali Montazeri and Youssef Sanei, whose names he’d written on the paper. In 1988, after Khomeini ordered the massacre of thousands of members of the MKO and other groups, Ayatollah Montazeri spoke out against the summary trials and executions. Prior to this, Montazeri had been regarded as Khomeini’s successor, but his criticisms of Khomeini cost him that position. In a rare interview I’d done with Montazeri for Channel 4 News, he’d expressed his doubts about the legality and the Islamic pretenses of the Islamic Republic.

  Youssef Sanei was regarded as the most media friendly of the grand ayatollahs in Iran. While other grand ayatollahs rarely gave interviews, Sanei was regularly quoted by the foreign media and even had an album in his office where, after interviewing him, journalists wrote down their impressions of the ayatollah’s views. I was given unprecedented access to Sanei when I was allowed to film him in the privacy of his home for my documentary The Online Ayatollah.

  The films I’d made about Montazeri and Sanei were among the DVDs the arrest team had confiscated from my house. “These films are evidence that you have been in touch with the spiritual leader of these hypocrites, who pretend to be Muslim clerics but are acting against the supreme leader of the Muslim world,” Rosewater said.

  The call to evening prayer sounded outside. Rosewater had to pray. He marked the end of the session with a sharp slap on my neck. I breathed a sigh of relief, anticipating a break from this madness.

  Back in my cell, my lunch was waiting for me on the floor, covered with ants. I tried to sleep, but was soon called back to the interrogation room. Rosewater once again made me sit facing the wall, and slowly removed my blindfold.

  “Maziar, you may think I’m a violent person, but please understand my position here,” he told me. “We have a divine government in our country. We have a leader whose wish is our desire. If he tells us to die, we die. If he tells us to kill, we kill. And you worked with people who want to annihilate our leader and destroy our holy system of government. How can I forgive you? You know, Maziar,” he continued, “many of my colleagues wouldn’t let you live for a second in this place, but I believe in remorse. I think you can repent, and I saw how you went halfway toward remorse when you confessed in front of the cameras a few days ago. But then you got cold feet and didn’t want to continue. My punches are meant to motivate you to move on the path of the righteous, on the path that our master, Grand Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, has determined for us.”

  Rosewater put a thick green folder on the arm of my chair; it had my name on it. “This is what we have against you, Maziar. We have pictures and evidence of you working with foreign embassies, my friend. My mohareb”—anti-Allah—“friend. But I promise, if you collaborate with us and give us information about these men, I will throw away this file and we can forget about everything.” Rosewater put his hands on my shoulders and started to gently massage them.

  “We need you to go on television again. We need you to clearly explain how you put anti-revolutionary elements with foreign agents.” Rosewater then handed me his drawing with the two circles. “Friend or prisoner? It’s your choice, Maziar. You can be out of here in a week’s time or you can rot here. Now go back to your cell and think about it.”

  Chapter Thirteen

  The next morning, Brown Sandals came to my cell early, and with my breakfast, he gave me a pen and six pieces of paper with the names of the reformist leaders on them. “These are for tak nevisi, writing information about individuals,” the guard said.

  “Tak nevisi can save you, Mr. Bahari,” Rosewater had told me repeatedly.

  I looked at the pen and the papers. I had no inner conflict about what to write. Despite the ache in my body and the bruises that now covered my skin, I was not going to follow Rosewater’s orders and lie about my connection with the reformists, or say that I had put them in touch with foreigners. I threw the papers into a corner and stroked the pen in my hand. It was the first time I’d been alone with a pen in the twenty days I’d been in Evin. What a tremendous gift.

  Then I moved to a corner of the cell and pulled back the green carpeting, exposing the gray tile floor underneath.

  The living room of my parents’ house was in the shape of a square, which I now drew clumsily. The dining table was at the upper left, with eight chairs around it. The table was wooden and round, the kind you find in elegant Chinese restaurants. A buffet was next to the table, and a large silk carpet was hung on the right side of the buffet. It depicted the eleventh-century Persian poet Omar Khayyám being handed a glass of wine by a beautiful woman. The silk carpet had a golden frame. Maryam and I had always hated that tacky silk carpet, but my father had loved it. I loved it too right now, and I wrote out the words of one of Khayyám’s poems:

  Ah, my Belovéd, fill the Cup that clears

  TO-DAY of past Regrets and future Fears—

  To-morrow?—Why, To-morrow I may be

  Myself with Yesterday’s Sev’n Thousand Years.

  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 se
e 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?”