Rosewater (Movie Tie-in Edition)

by Maziar Bahari

  As we talked on the sidewalk, I noticed that convoys of armored riot-control trucks with water cannons and crowd-control barriers were moving toward us, headed for the intersection of Revolution and Freedom Avenues, where the day’s demonstration was scheduled to take place. The convoy of vehicles was followed by thousands of guardsmen and anti-riot police wearing black helmets and riding black motorcycles. Everyone on the sidewalks stopped and stared at this menacing scene.

  “I hope they suffocate in those helmets,” my friend said.

  After lunch with my mother, I prepared to leave for the demonstration. I could see the worry in my mother’s eyes, and knew that she didn’t want me to go out. But we both understood that nothing could stop me from witnessing and reporting the events that could determine the future of the country. A few minutes before I left, Davood called me.

  “I imagine you’ll be going to the demonstration. Do you want a ride?”

  I hadn’t heard from Davood since reprimanding him a few days earlier. I asked him if he was sober, and he said that ever since I had gotten angry with him, he’d been channeling his anger at Ahmadinejad’s reelection into playing soccer. “I’ll bring my ball with me so you know that I’m not lying!” he said.

  When I went out to meet Davood, he had, in fact, brought his soccer ball. “See, I’m an athlete. Not a drunk anymore,” he announced proudly before hugging me. “I told myself hell’s going to break loose today and I want to be with Mr. Maziar before he gets arrested.”

  “Well, thanks for your kindness,” I said. “Now stop horsing around with that ball and get your ass on the motorcycle.”

  Davood gave me an army salute. “At your service, sir!”

  Along Freedom and Revolution Avenues, we saw Basij members posted on every street corner. Many of them were government employees who didn’t look that enthusiastic about their current posts. Most Basijis are essentially reservists; not much is asked of them, and they enjoy little perks for being in the force, such as extra rations for essential goods. The Basij members of every government office were told by the commander of the Basij that they had to guard a designated corner or they would be fired from their jobs. Revolution Square, the supposed center of the protest, was saturated with guardsmen and their water cannons. Still, their show of force was not keeping people away. Unlike on the previous days, demonstrators didn’t assemble in the main streets; rather, they gathered in the side streets off Revolution and Freedom Avenues. The side streets became so full that people gradually started to walk around Revolution Square. As the crowd around the square grew from dozens to hundreds, the presence of so many citizens seemed to surprise the military forces. They had underestimated people’s resolve to fight for their rights.

  Even though the demonstrators were just walking around without chanting or carrying signs, the guardsmen looked intimidated and soon started to beat and arrest whoever had a green scarf or wristband. Soon after, the police started to fire tear-gas canisters into the crowds in the side streets, and motorcycle convoys of guardsmen dressed fully in black barged into the crowds, wielding black electric batons. People knew that if they stayed together in large groups, the guardsmen would not be able to arrest all of them. The guardsmen also stayed together, attacking and retreating as quickly as they could in order not to get overwhelmed by the crowd. I saw a boy caught on his own by guardsmen. They immediately ganged up on him, cuffed him, and took him away. There were hundreds of black prison trucks along the main roads.

  Given the warnings I’d received from Ershad, I knew it was too risky to write anything about the demonstration or film it with my camera. However, I could always film with my cell phone and send the images to media outlets, with instructions not to use my byline. I got off Davood’s motorcycle near Freedom Avenue and started to record scenes of the police trying to disperse the crowd with tear gas, and people burning garbage cans.

  I stayed with a group of protestors, filming them chanting, “Death to Khamenei”—a crime that in theory can put someone on death row. A tear-gas container hit the ground right next to Davood and me. My eyes immediately began to burn with pain, and I shook my face, trying to wave air toward my eyes. I had learned, during the 1979 revolution, that rinsing your eyes with water makes the tear gas sting even more, but before I had a chance to tell this to Davood, he poured bottled water onto his eyes. He screamed in pain, and as I tried to calm him down, I knew that I had to drag him away from this scene immediately. Guardsmen were beginning to charge on the crowd, swinging their clubs.

  I jumped on the front of Davood’s motorcycle. I’d driven a motorcycle through the streets of Tehran many times when I was a kid, but it had been a long time ago. I drove away from the demonstration as fast as I could, until I reached Islamic Republic Avenue. Behind me, Davood was still wailing. I pulled up at the office of a friend. He agreed to send my footage to Channel 4 News in London as soon as he could.

  After Davood’s eyes felt better, we returned to the area near Freedom Avenue. There were no longer many protestors, just swarms of police officers. The protestors hadn’t gone home, however—they had dispersed throughout the city. Groups of young people were hiding in side streets, looking for any opportunity to attack the military. Afraid of getting into one-on-one fights with the youths, the guardsmen and the police stuck together, and attacked isolated protestors in groups.

  When we turned from Freedom Street onto Imam’s Legacy Highway, neither of us was ready for what we saw. About thirty guardsmen were being off-loaded from five armored vehicles. They blocked the traffic and cornered a group of men and women of different ages who were chanting “Mijangim, mimirim, zellat nemipazirim”: We fight, we die, but we don’t accept humiliation. The guardsmen took out their electric batons and started to beat the demonstrators viciously. I had never seen anything even close to the anger the Guards displayed at that moment. Everyone who was stuck in traffic at the intersection was clearly disturbed by the violence. People started to voice their objections quietly to one another; then they began to shout in protest. They cursed the guardsmen and the government and honked their horns. The guardsmen turned toward the stalled traffic, and a few of them fired their guns in the air to disperse the crowd. They yelled at the drivers to turn around, but police officers had put up barriers blocking the surrounding streets. There was nowhere to go.

  Next to us, a man in a white hatchback honked his horn. In the seat beside him, his wife gestured toward a guardsman standing nearby.

  “Agha mariz darim,” she told him. “We have a patient in here, sir.” I didn’t get a chance to see if there was anyone in the backseat before three guardsmen surrounded the car and began to attack it with their clubs. Two of them beat on the hood of the car while the other broke the windshield, then jumped onto the hood and, through the broken windshield, kicked the man’s face with his military boot. He then cleared the shards from the frame with his club and yanked the unconscious driver out through the open frame. Still holding the man’s hair in his hand, the guardsman jumped off the hood. As he was dragging the driver’s bent and bloodied body out of the car, another guardsman jumped onto the hood and started to kick the man’s wife through the windshield.

  “Khafeh sho zanikeh!” he yelled repeatedly. “Shut up, you woman!”

  When the traffic started to move again, we were forced to drive away. Still the guardsman continued to kick the woman. The last sentence I heard from him was “Daseto bendaz!” These were the words that would stay with me for months afterward. The guardsman was demanding that the woman put down her hands—that she not touch him because it was un-Islamic for a woman to touch a man who was not her husband, father, or brother. As he beat this helpless, innocent woman, he was careful to adhere to the rules of his religion.

  Witnessing the beating of the couple was the last straw. I felt dizzy and couldn’t even stand on my feet. I asked Davood to take me home. The voice of the guardsman beating up the woman, telling her, “Put down your hands,” echoed in my head. In t
he past few days I had learned that nothing can tire you out more than helplessness. There was nothing I could have done to help the woman getting beaten by the guardsman, but I couldn’t stop remembering her screams, and it drained the energy from my body. I had to get rid of the voices.

  At home, I turned on my computer and checked my emails, only to find dozens of reports about a killing that had happened earlier that day. An innocent bystander, a woman named Neda Agha-Soltan, had been killed by a Basij member. It was not clear whether Neda had been killed intentionally or if her death was a tragic accident; Neda could have been any one of the thousands of Iranians who’d tried to peacefully express their anger at Ahmadinejad’s false reelection. Neda’s innocent face bloodied by a thug became the iconic image of the brutal suppression of the Iranian people by their own government.

  Watching her dying in front of a video camera reminded me of all the tragic scenes I had witnessed during the past few days. I couldn’t take it anymore. I yelled, “KHODAA, CHERAA?” Why, God? I grabbed the bottle of Johnnie Walker and poured a glass for myself—then another glass and another one, until I was nearly drunk. I went to see my mother in her room, thinking she might be awake. Ever since Maryam’s death, she’d had trouble sleeping. I found her crying in silence, hiding her face in her hands. I held her in my arms. I didn’t want to calm her. I wanted to understand what we had been going through and why. But I didn’t speak. I knew there was no answer. As my mother quietly hummed Maryam’s name, I saw the images of all the women whose abuse I had witnessed that day. I held my mother tighter in my arms, her heart beating like a captured bird.

  The tragedy that was engulfing our lives was unbearable. I kissed Moloojoon good night and sat in front of my laptop, looking at Facebook, hoping to distract myself, and saw that someone had posted a link from the Time magazine website, showing a series of photographs of pregnant women who’d painted their bellies. There was one with a teddy bear on it and another one with an underwater scene and an octopus. The photographs made me smile. I had to share them with Paola. I had to see her.

  I called her to tell her that I’d made a decision: I’d come home in a day or two, be with her for a week, and then possibly return to Tehran for a few more days to follow the news. She didn’t answer the phone. Instead of leaving a message, I emailed her the link to the photographs. “I’ll see you very soon,” I wrote.

  The Johnnie Walker had gone to my head. I walked quietly to my room, lay down on my bed, and before I knew it, I was fast asleep.

  PART TWO

  Neither Departed

  Nor Gone

  Chapter Seven

  SUNDAY, JUNE 21, 2009

  Rosewater’s knock came before eight the next morning.

  When he and the three other men arrived, they told my mother that they had a letter for me. She went to open the door, and they pushed their way in.

  As they stood over me while I lay in bed, trying to cover myself with the sheets, I felt confused but was somehow able to pull my thoughts together enough to ask them if they had an arrest warrant. Rosewater fished some papers from the jacket pocket of his cheap brown suit, which seemed to be a size too small for him. He kept his fat thumb covering the information on the bottom of the page, where the reason for the arrest was written, but I could see that the warrant was signed by Tehran’s prosecutor general, Judge Saeed Mortazavi.

  This was terrible news. Mortazavi was notorious for arresting people first and coming up with ridiculous, trumped-up charges afterward. Having single-handedly shut down more than sixty newspapers, Mortazavi was called the “executioner of the press” in Iran. He’d even once closed down a newspaper for promoting moral corruption after it had published a photograph of an old man dancing in a park. My father used to say that the most dangerous animal was the donkey, because of its stupidity and unpredictability. “The only thing more dangerous than a donkey is a donkey with a grudge against you,” he’d add. “That makes him even more unpredictable. You never know when he’s going to start kicking you.” Mortazavi’s unpredictability instilled fear in me. I always tried to keep away from him.

  After they allowed me to dress, the men were back in my room: Rosewater and a man who was clean-shaven, which was surprising. Many Muslim scholars dictate that men shouldn’t shave their beards, and most Iranian agents have beards, or at least stubble. I sat on the bed, watching them. I could sense their frustration as they took stock of everything. They went through the boxes of my books and films, thinking, I supposed, that I might have hidden something illegal in them. Maybe an AK-47 assault rifle, maybe eavesdropping equipment. Unfortunately for them, I had nothing incriminating in my mother’s house. Rosewater pulled a DVD—Pier Paolo Pasolini’s 1968 film Teorema—from the pile. On its cover was a profile of the actress Silvana Mangano, naked and covering her right breast with one hand.

  “Is this porno?” Rosewater asked.

  “No, it’s an Italian art film.”

  “Confiscate it,” he said to the clean-shaven man, who placed it in a separate pile on the floor. A lanky man with a long face and a beard made a list of everything in that pile.

  “Why do you have so many films?” Rosewater asked, with what seemed like, for at least a moment, genuine curiosity.

  “I’ve had a great interest in films since childhood,” I answered. He gave me a harsh look and continued to search the closets. He didn’t know it, but he was also looking through my father’s belongings. One of the closets in the room was full of my father’s files, books, and photographs. In the mid-1970s, my father had collapsed in Vienna, during a business trip, and been hospitalized for two weeks. He had kept all of his medical files, which were written in German. Rosewater was leafing through a box of them. He held up a letter dated 1976. “What is this?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “This is your room. How come you don’t know what it is?”

  “It is my late father’s.”

  “God bless him,” Rosewater and the clean-shaven man solemnly said at the same time. They put their heads down as if they were going to recite a fatiha, the Muslim prayer for the dead. When he looked up, he examined the paper again. “Tell me, what does it say?”

  “I don’t read German, so I don’t know what it is.”

  “This is not German!” he said. “It is English! Take this,” he instructed his partner. The search of my room continued like this for a long time.

  “What is this?” He was holding a Sopranos box set. “Are these pornos?”

  I remembered my father telling me about a prison guard he’d encountered who thought every foreign word with the “sh” sound meant hashish, including “Chicago” and “champagne.” Maybe Rosewater believed anything that included the letters p, o, and r meant pornography.

  “No, not porno,” I said. “Sopranos—it’s a television series about the Mafia.”

  The arrest crew seemed to be obsessed with pornography. They would ask me many times over the next three hours if I had porn. If nothing else, I thought, they were looking to charge me with possessing pornography, a crime for which you can serve a prison sentence or be flogged seventy-four times. I didn’t have any pornography, but, I realized, I did have a few bottles of vodka in the refrigerator.

  In 1983, not long after Maryam was arrested for her membership in the Tudeh Party, the Revolutionary Guards had raided our home and arrested my parents. The Guards had become suspicious of some friends of theirs who were members of the Tudeh Party, so they were arresting and questioning people close to them. I hid in my bedroom while they searched our house. When I finally found the courage to walk into the living room, I saw several bottles of my father’s vodka lined up along one wall. They did not charge my father for political activities, but he was fined for having alcohol in the house.

  Rosewater stepped out of the room for a few minutes. I was silently hoping they would not look in our refrigerator when the clean-shaven man interrupted my thoughts.

  “Who is Soheila?” he asked me.
He was holding a DVD marked “Soheila” that I had left in my DVD player. It was a recording of an eight-hour interview I had conducted with an Iranian madam. I said Soheila was a cousin of mine and it was the video of her wedding.

  “So, it’s a family video?” he asked. He put the DVD back where he’d found it and moved to another corner of the room.

  “What are these?”

  “Old French books.” My father’s uncle had studied in France in the 1930s, and I had been given a lot of his books.

  “What about this?”

  “Let me see,” I said. He showed me a book called Lancer du Javelot; the cover showed an Olympic athlete throwing a javelin. I explained to him that it was a book about the sport.

  “I don’t think so,” said Rosewater, coming back to the room. “Confiscate them!”

  They were suspicious of anything they didn’t know, and they didn’t know much about most of the things they found in my room. Khamenei’s paranoia, and his belief that everyone was conspiring against him, had permeated his system, including the men who were willing to risk their lives for him. I could see it in Rosewater’s eyes. I’d always thought that there was nothing more frightening in someone in charge of your life than paranoia, and as I watched Rosewater clumsily rifle through my belongings, I understood that I could be one of the countless innocent people I’d known or heard about who’d suddenly disappeared, their bodies later found in a ditch. Drops of sweat slid down my sides.