Rosewater (Movie Tie-in Edition)

by Maziar Bahari

Over dinner I told Paola I had to go to Iran to be with Maryam. “You should do whatever you think is best, Mazi,” Paola said, holding my hands. My napkin was soaked in tears.

  The next morning I called Maryam and told her I was coming back to Iran. She immediately said no. She insisted that she was doing fine, that the worst was over.

  Three months later, I was in Washington interviewing former U.S. hostages held in Iran when my phone rang. I took the call outside. It was a friend of mine, calling to say that Maryam had died earlier that morning.

  My life had not been the same since then. I’d been shattered, constantly needing to escape from the memories and emotions. Every now and then, I would blame everything on the Islamic government, which had separated Maryam and me for such a long time. But that was an easy way out. The Islamic government had been brought to power by the people—people like Maryam. I also thought there was no point in blaming everything on the government; instead I should remain the person Maryam wanted me to be: a good journalist.

  I could do that outside, but now I was trapped in Evin, in the same situation that Maryam had been in for six years, and all I could do was think of Maryam. I picked at the fraying green carpet on the floor of my cell. Maryam had always loved to draw. In prison she hadn’t had a pencil or paper to draw with, so, she had told me, she’d drawn landscapes in her imagination. “I could see the sky even though my cell didn’t have a window,” Maryam said. “I looked at the wall and tried to talk to it. I thought I was going crazy, but it helped me to survive the confinement.”

  I slowly chewed my bread, wondering how my sister would draw my cell, what she would say to these walls.

  · · ·

  Later that day, Rosewater took me to the office of Evin’s resident prosecutor, Judge Mohammadzadeh. Above the chair where Mohammadzadeh sat was a large portrait of Khamenei, smiling. He certainly looked satisfied with himself.

  The guard sat me on a chair a few feet in front of Judge Mohammadzadeh, who was talking on a landline phone while continually silencing his cell phone, which kept ringing. The person on the other end of the landline seemed to be important.

  “Yes, sir, I shall do that, sir, of course, sir,” Judge Mohammadzadeh said, with machine-gun speed. A man walked in and tried to get the judge’s attention. Mohammadzadeh put the phone between his shoulder and cheek and took a file from a stack of papers. He handed it to the man, then shooed him away. I became engrossed in watching the judge. He was in his mid-forties, and his beard was short but very thick and as black as a crow’s wings.

  Finally, Mohammadzadeh put the phone down. He looked at me, and I noticed that under his very thick glasses, his eyes were crossed.

  “And you are Mr.—?” he said, with a disingenuous smile.

  “Bahari, sir.”

  A man I didn’t know piped up from behind me. “The spy!” he said.

  The judge looked at me again, more closely this time. “Interesting.” He then read aloud from a paper in front of him, listing the countries I had visited and the names of my friends.

  The man behind me spoke while the judge read. “He is a real spy, Mr. Mohammadzadeh. He is the one who wrote all that crap about the supreme leader and the Revolutionary Guards. He is the one who filmed the attack against the Basij.”

  Mohammadzadeh didn’t pay much attention to him. He was looking at the paper, shaking his head. “There is not even a single person among your friends whose name is Ghazanfar.” He burst into laughter, and the guy behind me started to laugh as well. Ghazanfar is an old-fashioned name specific to peasants.

  “His punishment should be death,” the man said.

  Judge Mohammadzadeh seemed to agree. “Here we sentence anyone who doesn’t have a friend named Ghazanfar to death!” he said firmly.

  I knew they were trying to scare me, to make me feel threatened, but what I mostly felt was annoyed. How sad that these people held positions of power in my country while hundreds, if not thousands, of educated, innocent people were locked behind bars. It was shameful. They were both waiting for my response to the unfunny Ghazanfar joke, but I said nothing.

  “Okay,” the judge said, sounding suddenly serious. “His punishment shouldn’t be death. It should be life in prison.” He looked at me and spoke. “I’ve seen the list of countries you’ve visited, Mr. Bahari. Seventy-six countries! You’ve had enough fun in your life, it seems. I think it will do you good to spend the rest of it in prison. What do you think?”

  I thought of Maryam, who’d once stood in a similar courtroom, in front of a similar judge. “I don’t know what to say to that, sir.”

  “Good. You have so much to answer for. You should save your breath.” He flipped through another stack of papers before looking me straight in the eye. “What would they do if someone did this in America?” Mohammadzadeh asked, showing me a photograph someone had tagged on my Facebook page. In the picture, a young follower was kissing Ahmadinejad. I had seen the picture before but hadn’t thought much of it, and I hadn’t untagged it. “Through this picture you’re suggesting that our beloved elected president is a homosexual.”

  That comment almost threw me off my chair. “Sir, but someone else tagged me in the photo,” I said.

  “So?” He obviously thought that by having the photo on my Facebook wall I had insulted Ahmadinejad.

  “I didn’t put the photo there. It’s like if someone throws a gun into your house, are you culpable for having the gun in your house?”

  From the blank look on Mohammadzadeh’s face, I could tell he didn’t know how Facebook worked and was not interested in listening to my answer. He leaned back in his chair. “You’ve been to America a lot. Where do you stay in America?” he asked me with a mischievous smile.

  “It depends, sir.”

  “On what?”

  “Why I’m there. Sometimes I stay with friends. Other times I stay in a hotel.”

  He regarded me over the papers. A slow smile crept across his face. “During these trips to America, do you have illicit sexual relationships with women?”

  This question surprised and embarrassed me. “What do you mean?”

  “You know. Do you? Do you have that?” He winked at me, lifted an eyebrow, then mimed grabbing a woman’s breasts. And then made a motion simulating sex. “Do you do that?”

  I didn’t say anything. I just shook my head.

  “Oh, come on, look at you. I’m sure you do something like that.” He continued to make sexual gestures. The man behind me, lost in a fit of laughter, kept kicking my chair.

  My face burned with shame for this man and this farce of a system: a Muslim judge presiding over the case of an innocent man in an Islamic country, asking me about my private life. “Sir, I’m a married man.” The judge seemed disappointed—even angered—by my answer. He wanted to hear my salacious stories, perhaps. So he could attack me for them, all the while enjoying what he was hearing. It was beyond hypocritical. It was sadistic.

  Mohammadzadeh became serious again. “What does being married have to do with it? You look like someone who would do anything.”

  “I’m sorry about that, but I’m not who you think I am.” I paused, then asked Mohammadzadeh, “Was I arrested for my work as a journalist or for having illicit affairs?”

  Mohammadzadeh didn’t answer me, but the guy behind me kicked my chair with all his force, startling me. “Look at you!” he said. “Even execution isn’t enough for you. You should be more than executed. Guys like you deserve to be put in a hot tar bath by Saddam Hussein.”

  “Okay, okay,” said the judge. “That’s enough. Mr. Bahari, here are your charges: undermining the security of the nation; propagating dissent against the holy government of the Islamic Republic; insulting the supreme leader; and taking part in illegal demonstrations. Write down on this paper if you don’t accept them.”

  The man behind me got up to pass a sheet of paper to me. I just stared at it. The charges listed there didn’t register. I couldn’t think of anything but the se
xual masquerade I had just witnessed. How can you call yourselves Muslims? I thought. How can you justify what you’re doing? I was burning with anger. I felt so sad for my country and terrified for myself.

  “Hey!” the judge said. “Why don’t you sign?”

  “I’m reading the charges, sir. Just give me a second.”

  “What?! Give you a second?!” he howled. “May God be my witness, if you don’t sign this paper now, I’ll kick and punch you so hard that your mother will mourn you.”

  I wrote that I didn’t accept the charges and stood up to hand him back the piece of paper.

  “Get him out of here,” Judge Mohammadzadeh said. “Give him back to his owner.”

  Outside, Rosewater was waiting for me. He was a proud owner. “This is just the beginning, Mr. Bahari,” he said. “In fact, Mr. Mohammadzadeh is one of our kindest judges. The one who will be issuing a sentence for you will not be as nice. Do you have anything to say?”

  “May God help me,” I said. But only to myself.

  · · ·

  In the interrogation room that night, Rosewater was not alone. The man he was with—a man whose voice I had not heard before—complained about my tak nevisi, the answers I’d written about my friends and acquaintances. When he came closer, I saw through the crease in the blindfold that he wore shiny, polished black shoes. His trousers were neatly ironed and creased. “Mr. Bahari, your answers are very general. We hope that you can give us more details,” he said. He sounded more mild-mannered than Rosewater.

  “I just write what I know, sir. If I were to give you more details, that would mean I’d be lying.”

  “Well,” said Rosewater, who had been fairly quiet up to this point, “we have some interesting video footage of you. We think it may persuade you to be more cooperative.”

  I could not imagine what he meant. They had confiscated many videos from my house, as well as external hard drives with the unused footage of two of my films: one about AIDS in Iran and another about an Iranian serial killer who had murdered sixteen prostitutes. Although both films were banned in Iran, there was nothing in them that would incriminate me in any way.

  I saw the flicker of a laptop screen through my blindfold. Then I heard someone speaking. It was a recording of another prisoner’s confession. “It’s not that one,” said the new interrogator. “It’s the one marked ‘Spy in coffee shop.’ ”

  Before the elections, Tehran had had a vibrant café society. Young men and women got together, their green bands fastened around their wrists, talking about the campaign and what they planned to do after Mousavi was elected president. I spent a lot of time in different coffee shops in Tehran, conducting interviews, in order to get a sense of what young people were thinking. Perhaps they had filmed me at the time, speaking to friends. This worried me. I was coming to understand just how ruthless these people were—how willing they were to believe their own lies, to construct their own version of the truth. I worried about who else might be imprisoned somewhere in this building, behind these impenetrable walls, because of my reporting.

  I was immersed in these thoughts when I heard the voice of Jon Stewart from Comedy Central’s The Daily Show, and then that of Jason Jones, a Daily Show correspondent. “What is it that makes these people evil?” Jones was saying. “I hadn’t signed up for Twitter, so the only way to find out was to go and see for myself.”

  No, no, NO! I thought. They can’t be that stupid.

  Among the hundreds of journalists from news organizations around the world who had come to Iran to report on the election was a team from Jon Stewart’s satirical news show. I’d met Jason; his producer, Tim Greenberg; and their translator, Mahmoud, about three weeks before the election. Over a few cups of Turkish coffee, we discussed the situation in Iran and Jason asked if he could interview me on camera in a coffee shop. Jason was going to pretend to be a thick-skulled American, and their goal was to present an image of Iran different from the one typically shown on American television. I agreed, and for the interview, Jason wore a checkered Palestinian kaffiyeh around his neck and dark sunglasses. He pretended to be completely ignorant about Iran and eager to find out just how evil Iran was. Introducing me, he joked, “He goes by the code name Pistachio.”

  “Why is this American dressed like a spy, Mr. Bahari?” asked the new interrogator.

  “He is pretending to be a spy. It’s part of a comedy show,” I answered.

  “Tell the truth!” Rosewater shouted. I couldn’t believe it. He honestly seemed to believe what he was saying: that a spy had come to Iran and filmed me for a segment that had appeared on television. From the way he was speaking to me, I drew the conclusion that he was acting tough to impress the other man, who I assumed was his boss. “What is so funny about sitting in a coffee shop with a kaffiyeh and sunglasses?” he demanded.

  “It’s just a joke. Nothing serious. It’s stupid.” I was getting worried. “I hope you are not suggesting that he is a real spy.”

  “Can you tell us why an American journalist pretending to be a spy chose to interview you?” asked the other man. “We know that you told them who to interview for their program.” I had given Jason and Tim a number of names of people I thought they’d be interested in. Others Jason had interviewed—a former vice president and a former foreign minister—had been arrested a week before me as part of the Revolutionary Guards’ sweeping crackdown.

  “It’s just comedy,” I said, feeling weak. I asked them to listen to the content of the interview. In it, I said that Iran and America had many things in common, like fighting drug trafficking and Al Qaeda. At the end of the interview, I concluded that George W. Bush’s infamous statement about Iraq, North Korea, and Iran being the “axis of evil” was as idiotic as Iranians going around and burning the American flag.

  Rosewater pulled a chair over and sat in front of me. “Keep your head down,” he said. “Do you think it’s also funny that you say Iran and America have a lot in common?”

  I had to give a careful answer. “Sir, all I’m saying is that Iran needs America for its security as much as America needs Iran for the security of its troops and its interest in the region. We are living in a world where nations cannot live in isolation and prosper. Aren’t we all interested in the prosperity of our country?”

  “Why do you care about U.S. interests?” asked the new man.

  “Don’t you know,” added Rosewater, “that Imam Khomeini called America the Great Satan?”

  They didn’t let me answer.

  “The imam also asked, ‘Why do we need to have a relationship with America?’ ” Rosewater’s boss said.

  “America cannot do a damn thing!” Rosewater said, repeating one of Ruhollah Khomeini’s favorite phrases.

  It was as if the two of them had been rehearsing this anti-American rant for months. They seemed to be enjoying it.

  “Do you know why you told that spy about common interests between Iran and America?” asked Rosewater’s superior.

  He seemed to have an answer ready, but I had to defend myself. I thought of my father, who could communicate with anyone. “These men are weak, Maziar,” I heard him say. “Appeal to their emotions. Gain their sympathy.”

  “Sir,” I began, “many people die in plane crashes in Iran because the Americans do not sell spare parts from old Boeings to Iran, and Iran has to buy worthless defunct Russian planes. It saddens me to see so many of our compatriots die every year. We are an independent nation. Having relations with America doesn’t mean that we must be American slaves. Venezuela, Syria, Russia, and China do not agree with the U.S., yet they maintain diplomatic relations. And sometimes they even cooperate with America. I advocate an equal relationship between Iran and the United States. A relationship based on mutual respect.”

  “And you want us to believe you?” the boss said.

  “Mutual respect!” Rosewater mocked me.

  “Mr. Bahari, the only reason you are searching for a common ground between Iran and America is that you w
ant to find a way for them to infiltrate our country,” the boss concluded.

  “We have kicked them out through the door and you want to bring them back through the window,” Rosewater added, finishing his thought.

  “Ahsant! Bravo! Well said,” Rosewater’s boss declared.

  Bravo for what? I thought. For being a brainwashed moron?

  Rosewater finally said, “ ‘Tell America to be angry with us and die of that anger!’ Do you know who said that?”

  “Yes, Martyr Beheshti,” I said. Mohammad Hossein Beheshti was the first head of Iran’s judiciary after the revolution. Anti-regime terrorists killed him and several other officials in a bombing in 1981. I knew Beheshti’s family. His son, Alireza Beheshti, had been a Mousavi adviser for years, and I had met with him a few times during the campaign. He’d been arrested a few days before I had.

  “I find it ironic,” I added, “that you quote a statement from the heyday of the revolution while you have arrested the son of the man who said it.” The ridiculousness of using The Daily Show as evidence against me gave me enough courage to argue with my interrogators. “With all due respect, revolutions, like people, have to grow up, gentlemen,” I said.

  Rosewater was taken by surprise. He grasped my left ear in his hand and started to squeeze it as if he were wringing out a lemon. As the cartilage tore, I could feel the pain, like a slow fever, inside my brain. Rosewater let go of my ear and then whispered into it, breathing heavily. “Didn’t you hear what the judge said?” It felt like my ear was broken. “I am your owner. This kind of behavior will not help you. Many people have rotted in this prison. You can be one of them.”

  “Mr. Bahari is wise,” the other man said. “He will soon realize it’s in his own interest to cooperate with us.”

  The man with the creased pants said something else to me as he left the room, but I didn’t hear him. My ear was ringing with pain.

  · · ·

  A few minutes later, as I walked once again under the darkness of the blindfold from the interrogation room to my cell, I was hit hard by the thought that I might not be leaving anytime soon. How will I survive here? I asked myself. As my father used to say: “You can prepare yourself to go to prison, but when you get there, all you can think about is How can I keep from shitting in my pants?”