Rosewater (Movie Tie-in Edition)

by Maziar Bahari

  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?”

  I did everything I could to keep Rosewater from seeing how effective this psychological manipulation was. During our conversations, I would sit calmly and say as little as possible. This just enraged him further, and he’d respond with some of his hardest punches. Most of the time, I was able to keep it together. But sometimes, in the coldness of that interrogation room, under the darkness of the blindfold, all of the emotions I had been holding back in the five months since Maryam had died spilled forth, and with each blow to my body, I cried harder than I ever had in my life. I did not want my mother to go through yet another loss. At times, I thought of confessing to his ridiculous accusations just to stop him from speaking about my family and to put an end to the hurt I must be causing my mother and Paola.

  Back in my cell, I punched the walls until my hands were bruised and cried Maryam’s name out, asking for her help. My pleas were lost in the noise of the air-conditioning, so the prison guards couldn’t hear me. “Maryam joon, why don’t you help me?” I screamed. “Is this the way they treated you? These bastards, these sisterfuckers, these animals!”

  · · ·

  One morning, Rosewater was in a particularly foul mood. He had brought the Persian translations of many of my articles. Though I rarely use exclamation points in my writing, the translations included dozens of them, one after almost every sentence. For a reason I couldn’t fathom, Rosewater hated exclamation marks, and seeing them in the articles enraged him. “Why do you use so many exclamation marks?” he screamed at me.

  “Sir, the translator added them. They are not in my original, English version.”

  “You’re lying,” he said. “Why would someone put in exclamation marks if you didn’t use them originally?” He grabbed the belt and swung it across my thighs and back; then his voice took on a different tone. “Agha joon, you know that I’m doing this for you,” he whispered, addressing Khamenei. “Agha joon, I’m your servant, I sacrifice my life for you. You know that I’m only thinking about your happiness and your satisfaction.” He grabbed my hair and started slapping the back of my head.

  I heard a ringing that I thought was only in my ears, but it continued even after Rosewater stopped hitting me.

  “Hi, sweetheart,” I heard him say. “I can’t talk right now. Is it urgent?”

  I couldn’t make sense of the change in his tone of voice. Was what urgent? Who was he calling sweetheart?

  “No, I’m not sure when I’ll be home, love. Is everything okay?” Only then did I realize that he had answered his cell phone. He must have been speaking to his wife.

  “Oh,” he asked gently, “is she all right?” With that, he left the room and closed the door.

  I buried my throbbing head in my hands. Who was this man? How could anyone beat another person the way he was beating me, then speak so lovingly to his wife? I remained as still as I could, trying to overhear his conversation. And then it struck me: Rosewater was just a man. Despite the power he had over me, he was just a man with a job. Like most people, his main priority was to keep his job and provide for his family.

  As the air-conditioning clicked off and I heard Rosewater’s laughter from the hallway, I knew what I had to do. I had to allow him to be successful in that job: I had to give him enough information so that he could prove to his bosses that he was making progress, but not so much information that I would harm my contacts or the people close to me.

  It all seemed so simple, suddenly. While I could not admit to what they were asking from me, I did have something they wanted: a connection with the international media. I would vow to work with them and help spread their propaganda.

  Despite the pain everywhere he had punched me, I felt a smile creeping across my face. Finally, I had a job to do.

  Chapter Fourteen

  Over the next few days, Rosewater’s telephone conversations with his wife became more frequent. From what I could understand, his wife’s mother was ill. Different doctors had made different recommendations, and Rosewater’s wife had become desperate. He always tried his best to calm her, but he often didn’t succeed.

  “You know I would be there if I could, azizam, my dear,” Rosewater told her once. “But I have so much to do here. They’ve given me all the difficult cases.”

  His wife was not happy with his excuse and wanted to know when he was coming home. “I said, I don’t know!” he exclaimed abruptly before hanging up on her.

  “Are all women as demanding or is it just Iranian women?” Rosewater asked me before slapping my head one more time.

  I came to the slow realization that devising the plan had been the easy part. Enduring the pain that went with executing it was not nearly as simple. Rosewater’s moods were becoming more unpredictable, his outbursts more vicious. But
he seemed to have realized that beating me was not enough. He had to take his psychological torture to the next level.

  One day he asked me, “Don’t you have any friends or relatives?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “There are campaigns for everyone in this prison—even the most unknown of the prisoners—but nothing for you,” he laughed. “It seems that people have forgotten about you, Maziar.”

  A former guerrilla fighter who became an interrogator after the revolution once told me about the effectiveness of white torture. In white torture, the interrogator uses only psychological menace, refraining from physical contact. According to him, Assadollah Lajevardi, the man responsible for managing Evin Prison in the 1980s, realized, after a few years of experimenting with different methods of physical torture, that making threats against a man’s life or against his family was much more effective than pulling out his nails or lashing him. Lajevardi had spent many years in the shah’s jails and knew about the value of solitary confinement; among all the methods of white torture, keeping a prisoner in a cell by himself, without any access to the outside world, was the most effective.

  I could testify to the validity of their argument when Rosewater left me in my cell for days at a time. As I sat in my new cell, surrounded by gray-and-white marble walls, with no window to the outside world and nothing to read except for the Koran and a book of prayers, I sometimes felt that I was in a grave. I continued to exercise for many hours each day, but no amount of exertion could help me from feeling abandoned.

  I knew Rosewater was lying when he told me that everyone had forgotten about me, but as I stared into the abyss of my small cell I sometimes thought the worst. What if Paola is not campaigning for me? What if Newsweek doesn’t care about me? How about my friends at Channel 4, the BBC, and other media organizations? I thought about my nephew, Khaled, who now lived in Australia, and the list of people I’d given him. Had he contacted all of them? Was he making as much noise as possible to bring attention to my case? If he had, why hadn’t any news of their efforts reached me? I wondered what Paola and Khaled were doing as I did hours of sit-ups and push-ups in my tiny cell.

  I couldn’t escape from the loneliness of solitary confinement, not even in sleep. I would dream about sitting in my cell alone for days, forgotten and abandoned. I would cry for help and try to open the door, but no one could hear me. My cries often woke me up, and seeing the locked metal door, I didn’t know if I was awake or still trapped in the dream. This went on for days, and I prayed for Rosewater to call me, even to beat me. At least it was human contact. At least that meant that someone cared where I was.

  One morning, I woke up and stared at my eyeglasses, lying beside me on the blanket I used as a pillow. This is not a life, I thought as I rubbed the glass. I’d rather kill myself and disgrace these bastards than waste away alone here, eventually dying in anonymity.

  I looked at my glasses for a long time, examining the frame and the lenses. I wondered if I could remove the frame carefully, so as not to shatter the lenses. I could then break one lens and slide the broken glass deeply, but gently, into my wrist. The thought was so vivid that I could clearly see the blood dripping slowly from my body until it covered the green carpet, turning it dark brown.

  Then I heard Baba Akbar’s voice in my head. “Don’t be silly,” he said. “You shouldn’t do their jobs for them. If they want to kill you, they can easily do it themselves.”

  My father’s authoritative voice snapped me out of my reverie, just as it had when I was in high school and he would catch me daydreaming when I was supposed to be studying. “Back to the books,” he would say. “You can always daydream, but you have an exam tomorrow.”

  I abandoned my suicidal thoughts and remembered what my father had told me about his torturer, a savage named Zibaei. It took Zibaei a while to understand that physical torture was not effective. “I kept on passing out while I was being tortured,” my father used to tell me. “And when I didn’t pass out because of the pain, I pretended that I’d passed out so that the torture would stop. I just couldn’t live with myself if I revealed any information about my comrades.”

  Even though my father and his comrades were all atheists, most of them came from religious families where sex was taboo. Their interrogators knew this, and used it against them. Two of the main methods of torture favored by the shah’s henchmen after the 1953 coup d’état were rape and touching the prisoners’ genitals. It took the shah’s intelligence almost two years to realize that threats of execution and denying prisoners the chance to see their families were far more effective.

  “The interrogator pretended to be my friend, and asked about my family,” my father told me. “He asked if I missed my wife and child. I didn’t answer at first, because I knew he was going to use it against me, but when I finally said yes, he allowed Moloojoon to bring Babak to see me.” My father always had to hold back his tears when he remembered these meetings with my mother and my older brother, who was a toddler at the time. “Then the next week he told me that if I didn’t name my comrades and tell him where they could be hiding, I would never be able to see Babak and Moloojoon again.” At that point my father’s large eyes would well up with tears. “Bi sharaf ha,” he’d say. “They had no dignity.”

  I grew up hearing my father’s friends praising his strength in prison, maintaining that the only reason he managed to escape execution was that he’d had a cousin in the army. But many other Tudeh Party members broke under physical and psychological torture. Between 1954 and 1956, the shah’s intelligence found the coded list of Tudeh Party members and its underground military network, and eventually deciphered the codes. By 1957, when the last execution of a Tudeh Party member under the shah took place, most leaders of the party had either been killed, imprisoned, or lived in exile.

  As much as remembering my father’s courage gave me strength, I knew that what I was facing in Evin was very different from my father’s experience in the 1950s. My father had had concrete information about a number of individuals and their whereabouts. The torturers wanted him to tell the truth in order to save himself. I was being tortured to lie about myself and others to preserve the regime’s and Khamenei’s narrative about the election. My father used to say that he felt sorry for the shah: “He is a pathetic man who believes in his own lies and the lies others tell about him.” In that moment, as I remembered my father’s struggle, I was sorry for Khamenei, another pitiable despot.

  · · ·

  I’d been in prison for a month when one night, after evening prayers, Rosewater took me to a new interrogation room.

  “How are you, my friend?” he asked in a tone that reminded me of the one he’d used during the first days after my arrest. “Maziar, I have to tell you something that may make my bosses really upset.” He paused for a few seconds. “But I have to reveal it anyway.”

  The dishonesty in his voice betrayed the fact that he was trying to manipulate me, but I wanted to hear what he had to say. “My bosses are not happy with your performance and want to make an example of you.” He then brought his head forward and whispered in my ear. “I’m not supposed to tell you this, but they think that by executing you they can teach others an important lesson.”

  I felt a chill in my spine as Rosewater asked me to remove my blindfold. There was a basket of fruit and vegetables on the table. He pulled three small cucumbers from it and peeled them slowly. He then placed them on a small plate with a few apricots and slid it to me, along with a plastic salt shaker decorated with red dots.

  “Would you like a Nescafé?” he asked. “I know you foreigners like coffee. I’ll make you a Nescafé,” he said as he left the room.

  A Nescafé?! I thought. What the hell is he up to? The word “executing” hung in the air, and I felt weak and nauseous. I took a cucumber from the plate and sprinkled salt on it, but I tasted nothing. Rosewater came back into the room and put a cup of hot water and a packet of Nescafé on the table.

 
“Milk and sugar?” he asked.

  “No, thank you,” I said. I don’t like instant coffee.

  “I can’t believe you don’t put milk and sugar in coffee,” Rosewater noted with genuine surprise.

  I couldn’t help myself from asking him: “Why do they want to kill me?”

  “Don’t worry about that, Maziar,” he said. “Why don’t you put milk and sugar in your coffee?”

  “I can’t drink Nescafé, sir,” I lied, not knowing how to tell him that I found its taste revolting. “I’m allergic to Nescafé. What can they achieve by killing—”

  Rosewater slapped me in the head. “What do you mean you’re allergic to coffee? You speak constantly of meeting people for coffee in your emails! What, my coffee isn’t good enough for you?!” He seemed genuinely insulted. He slapped my head again, the way Iranian potmakers slap the clay before they shape and glaze it.

  “All right, I’ll have a Nescafé,” I said. My head was bursting with migraine pain. “And I’ll have milk and sugar.”

  He prepared the cup of Nescafé and eventually regained his composure as he stood behind me. “My superiors have decided to sentence you to death this week, so that the other people involved in sedition can learn a lesson from it,” he said as he took more fruit from the basket on the table. “In an emergency situation like this, it takes only a few days from trial to execution. It will be very similar to a court-martial. Because of what you’ve done to provoke the public against the holy Islamic Republic, the supreme leader, and Allah, you’re considered a mohareb and will be sentenced to death by hanging.” He put both of his hands on my shoulders. “Don’t be mad at me, Maziar. I’m just the messenger. I really don’t want it to happen. I’m doing my best to prevent it.” He walked behind me for a few minutes and then placed an apricot on my plate. “Maziar, I really think there’s a chance for you to repent.”