Rosewater (Movie Tie-in Edition)

by Maziar Bahari

  “Everyone you know seems to be a comedian,” Rosewater said. “We’ll investigate this Pauly Shore.” I wondered which lucky fellow in the Revolutionary Guards would be assigned that crucial task.

  Rosewater wasn’t finished. “What is your connection to Anton Chekhov?” Despite its absurdity, I’d sort of expected this question. I was a member of two fan clubs on Facebook: Pauly Shore’s and Anton Chekhov’s. My inquisitors were really grasping at straws here.

  “Anton Chekhov is dead, sir,” I answered. “He was a Russian playwright who lived in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.”

  “Was he a Jew?” Rosewater asked angrily.

  “I don’t know. I don’t think so.”

  “He sounds like a Jew to me,” he said impatiently.

  “Well, in Russian, ov denotes belonging to a place. It is similar to zadeh in Persian.”

  Rosewater was silent.

  “But I don’t know. He could be Jewish. Many Russian writers and intellectuals, as well as revolutionaries, were Jewish at that time.”

  “And many of them were Zionists. Herzl was a Russian,” Rosewater said, referring to Theodor Herzl, the founder of the Zionist movement.

  “He was Hungarian,” I replied and immediately regretted it. I didn’t want to sound defiant, but sometimes his idiocy was too much to bear. And anyway, at this point, what did I have to lose?

  “Oh, really?” He grabbed my neck from behind and squeezed with all his might. “You know so much about the Jews, don’t you?”

  He put a blank piece of paper on my chair and slapped the back of my head. “Write down everything you know about Anton Chekhov and don’t write koseh she’r, bullshit!” Rosewater exclaimed. “We’re going to investigate every Zionist you know, Mr. Maziar. We’re going to show you that despite what you may think, we are not stupid. We know that your Chekhov was Jewish and that you are a Zionist.”

  After, presumably, Rosewater found out that Chekhov was not Jewish, he did not bother with any more questions about people with surnames ending with ov. That included my Israeli friend David Shem-tov. I don’t think you can find a more Israeli name than Shem-tov, but I could just imagine the Revolutionary Guards researchers saying to each other, “Chekhov, Molotov, Shem-tov, they are all the same!”

  I had grown up listening to anti-Israeli propaganda on Iranian television, but it was only in Evin that I discovered the real depth of the Islamic government’s hatred, paranoia, and lack of understanding of Israel, and of Jewish people in general. The Iranian government claims Israel is its main nemesis. If the United States is the Great Satan, Israel is the “Even More Devious Satan.” I was coming to understand that Rosewater, who was likely being fed anti-Israeli propaganda on an hourly basis, believed every conspiracy theory pertaining to the Jewish people. To Rosewater, a Jew could not be an ordinary person. To him a Jew meant a Zionist, a spy—someone who has no other occupation than conspiring against Islam and Muslims. I don’t think he had ever met a Jewish person in his life. But he thought that he knew everything about the Jews and Israelis.

  “Write down the name of every Jewish element you’ve ever met in your life!” he demanded one day.

  I took the pen. In the West it is not customary to ask about people’s religious affiliations. It will be very difficult for me to answer your question because I cannot guess the religious background of every person I’ve ever met in my life.

  He tore my answer into pieces and threw them in my face. Grabbing my hair from behind, he forced me to pick them up from the floor. “Do as I ask! Tell me the names of the most evil, irreligious bastards you have ever met. They were all Jews!”

  In order to satisfy him, I wrote down a list that included journalists, university students, and teachers and former neighbors of mine in Canada and the United Kingdom.

  “I thought you said you’ve never met any Jews in your life,” he declared proudly. “But there are ten names here. You have to detail all the information you have about these elements.”

  I knew that Rosewater would be well rewarded by his bosses if he could connect me to shady dealings with Israel, but there was nothing to be found. Ever since I had returned to Iran, in 1997, I had made sure to keep my distance from any association with Israel. I knew that being connected to Israel could easily put me in jail or, at the very least, end my career in Iran. I even refused to cover the Palestinian-Israeli conflict—the most pressing issue in the Middle East—in order to avoid having to travel to Israel.

  Rosewater’s ideas about the Jews and Israel came directly from Khomeini’s writings and speeches. After seizing power, like all Middle Eastern tyrants, Khomeini had sought legitimacy through demonizing the Jewish state. In turn, Israel—by committing atrocities against the Palestinians and setting up illegal settlements—kept providing Khomeini and other Middle Eastern dictators with ample reason to condemn it.

  Despite Rosewater’s hatred of the Jews, his attitude to Israel was one of awe and envy. While he clearly had contempt for anything to do with Israel, he frequently demonstrated his admiration for the methods Israel used to defeat its enemies. He once told me that all my friends in the West who have criticized the Islamic government or have acted against it would someday be brought back in a bag “just like that Nazi guy in Argentina, what’s his name?”

  “Adolf Eichmann,” I said.

  “Yes, Eichmann. The Nazi leader,” he said. “If the Israelis can kidnap one of their enemies, don’t you think we can do the same thing?” He took my right earlobe and pulled it as hard as he could. “We are much stronger than Israel. The Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps has networks all around the world. Hezbollah and Hamas are only two of them. Nobody should think they’re safe anywhere in the world.”

  · · ·

  I’m sure that the irony of comparing his government’s ability to hunt its opponents with the Israelis’ pursuit of a Nazi criminal was lost on Rosewater. Unlike Rosewater, most Iranians aren’t anti-Semitic.

  I, for one, had been fascinated by Jewish history and culture all my life. When I was between the ages of five and ten, my family lived in a neighborhood that had many Jewish people. One of Tehran’s two largest synagogues, some Jewish butchers, and the main Jewish school were very close to our house. As old communists, my parents didn’t have any predilection for or prejudice against the Jews. But other kids in the neighborhood would tell me that Jews were different from us. We didn’t know how they were different, exactly, but we always knew who the Jewish kid in the class was. That didn’t stop us from being friends with them. When I later moved to Canada, many of my Jewish friends told me that they had been taunted at school for being Jewish. I couldn’t remember that ever happening in Iran.

  Jews settled in the Persian Empire more than two millennia ago. Many Iranian Jews trace their roots in the country to 2500 B.C., when the Persian king Cyrus the Great provided refuge for Hebrew people fleeing from Babylon. The Jewish prophets Ezra and Isaiah called Cyrus “the one to whom God has given all the kingdoms of the earth.” Cyrus’s name is repeated twenty-three times in the Old Testament, and he is the only Gentile to be designated as a messiah—a divinely appointed leader—in the Torah. Outside of Israel, Iran still has the largest Jewish community in the Middle East. Even though many Iranian Jews migrated to Israel and other countries after the revolution, there are still twenty-five thousand Jews in Iran.

  As a child, being told that Jews were different made me think about my own identity. Why did they buy their meat from a different butcher? Why did the men and boys wear yarmulkes? I remember being fascinated by the word “Jewish,” especially when I understood that many of the people my parents, my siblings, and I admired—Karl Marx, Bob Dylan, Paul Newman—were Jewish, and that my hero, Charlie Chaplin, sympathized with the plight of the Jews. Chaplin’s The Great Dictator is still one of my favorite films.

  In 1993, I decided to make a film about Jewish immigration to North America as my senior-year project. I chose the story of the SS
Saint Louis, a ship of Jewish immigrants who left Germany in May 1939. I found a number of the ship’s survivors in different countries around the world, and interviewed them for the film. After The Voyage of the Saint Louis became quite successful in festival circuits, and was shown on television in many countries, I was interviewed several times about why I, a Shia Muslim, had made a film about a group of Jewish refugees. I always emphasized that one of my main reasons was to show that many Iranians care about the plight of other peoples. In October 2005, many Iranians were surprised and disgusted when Ahmadinejad called the Holocaust a myth and questioned the number of Jews killed during the Second World War.

  I was always very proud that I was possibly the only Muslim filmmaker who had ever made a film about the Holocaust. In fact, in 2008, when the International Documentary Festival Amsterdam organized a retrospective of my work, I insisted that they show The Voyage of the Saint Louis in order to prove that not all Iranians are as ignorant as our president.

  My words came back to haunt me as I sat blindfolded in my chair in front of Rosewater. Before he started asking questions, his cell phone rang. It was his wife again. He squeezed my right ear with his free hand as he answered the phone.

  “Hello, dear, how are you?” He sounded relaxed as he spoke. “I’m so sorry, azizam, my dear, you know that I’ve been busy.… I know it’s the anniversary of our marriage.” Rosewater squeezed my ear harder. I started to moan. “Shut up!” he yelled at me and then calmly told his wife, “I’m sorry I won’t be able to make it tonight, but I’m going to be finished with this guy very soon.” He let go of my ear and punched me in the head. “And I will make sure we have a nice celebration together. Now I have to go.”

  After he hung up, he slapped me on the back of my head a few times. “Zendegi baraam nazashti,” he screamed. “You’ve ruined my personal life. You little Jew lover! Why didn’t you tell me that you made films about the Jews?!” Rosewater roared as he repeatedly punched me in the head. He placed a printout of my interview with the International Documentary Festival Amsterdam on my chair. “Why didn’t you tell us that you’ve cooperated with the Jews? Who gave you the money?! Tell me!”

  Rosewater continued to slap and punch my head. It was as if by doing that he could rid me of my sympathies for Jewish people. He finally pushed me to the floor and kicked my back and legs.

  “Tell me which agency you work for! If you don’t tell me, I will let you rot here. I will put your bones in a bag and throw it at your mother’s doorstep. You Zionist spy!”

  · · ·

  In my cell that night, I woke up with my head pounding. I reached for the three sleeping pills and four migraine tablets I’d hidden under the green carpet. We could see the prison doctor twice a week. He had allowed me to take a migraine pill only when I was in pain, but sometimes I pretended to be suffering so that I would have enough pills for when I needed them. I knew it was dangerous to take them all at the same time, but the pain was so bad it felt like my head was going to explode. So what if it was dangerous? I wanted to end the pain. I’d do anything to end the pain.

  I went to sleep immediately, but within minutes a prison guard woke me up so I could use the toilet before morning prayers. After he led me back to my cell, I lay down and tried to go back to sleep. I pushed the carpet aside and put my throbbing temple on the cold tiles. I fell asleep within a few seconds.

  Two women approached me. Their skin was tanned and smooth, their faces kind and beautiful. They were smiling at me the same way Maryam often had. They came to me from an endless white background. We were in an open space with no horizon. I watched their long dark hair blowing around their faces. I could feel the cool breeze on my skin. I was floating just above the ground, still suffering from my migraine, but their smiles soothed my anguish and pain.

  Then they were at my side, lovingly touching my forehead with their cool, soft hands. After months with no human contact other than Rosewater’s beatings, their touch felt like balm on my skin. They helped me stand and led me gently toward a white bed in the endless white background. I was floating in the air. Their hands remained on my forehead and soothed my pain. I felt safe on the bed because I had them at my side.

  “Who are you?” I asked the women.

  “Sisters of mercy,” they answered.

  “Like Leonard Cohen’s ‘Sisters of Mercy’?” I asked with a smile.

  As I said those words, I heard a voice. It was Leonard Cohen singing one of the most beautiful songs ever written.

  Oh the sisters of mercy, they are not departed or gone.

  They were waiting for me when I thought that I just can’t go on.

  And they brought me their comfort and later they brought me this song.

  I don’t know how long the dream lasted, but I didn’t want it to end. I knew what emotions awaited me when I woke up—the fear, the shame, the hatred—and I wanted this feeling to last forever. I felt better. I felt safe. And, though only in my dream, I once again felt free.

  · · ·

  One day, I overheard a conversation between a female guard and a woman who sounded American.

  “Roosari, roosari,” the guard kept telling the prisoner. “Head scarf, head scarf.”

  Later on, I heard a male American voice in the hallway. “Can I use the bathroom?” the American prisoner asked in English.

  “Yes, yes, yes,” the guard answered, clearly not understanding what the prisoner was saying.

  “Sir, I need to use the bathroom,” the prisoner repeated desperately.

  “Yes, yes,” the guard said.

  I wanted to help.

  “He needs to use the mostarah—the toilet,” I told the guard. “I can translate for you two, if you’d like.”

  “I can’t let you do that,” the guard answered. “He and two others are the directors of the CIA in Iran.”

  I knew that this couldn’t be true, and it was only after I was released that I found out that the American voices belonged to two of the three young American hikers who were arrested in late July 2009 on the border between Iran and Iraq. But the experience really shook me. Other than the few conversations I’d had with my mother, I hadn’t heard a female voice in what felt like ages, and it made me think of Maryam more than ever.

  I also began to think that the Iranian government had started a new stage in its war against opposition activists and their foreign supporters—possibly arresting some foreigners in the country, simply for being foreign. Having no contact with the outside world, I fought not to imagine the worst.

  At times, alone in my cell for days, I became terrified that I was going crazy. My conversations with Maryam and my father were becoming more frequent and made less sense. I started to have nightmares about the bruised soles of Maryam’s feet after her lashings and my father’s broken, bloodied nails.

  It was the pen that saved me. I had stolen it during an interrogation session. When Rosewater had briefly left the room, I’d slipped the pen into the waistband of my uniform. I had heard that if you had a pen in your cell, you would be punished, but I didn’t know what the punishment was, and I didn’t care.

  A day or two after I stole the pen, Rosewater suspended my hava khori privileges in order to punish me for my refusal to name names. For almost a month, I was allowed to leave the cell only three times a day, during the times of prayer, to go to the bathroom. The pen became my closest, and only, friend. At night, when I knew the guards were asleep, I would design crossword puzzles on the wall and on the floor under the carpet; I had first developed the skill while sitting through boring classes in high school. It surprised me that I could still do it, and, desperate for some diversion from my loneliness, I would create puzzles for hours—first in Persian, then in English. I further challenged myself by making the puzzles more difficult, designing them around certain themes and subjects: politics, history, pop music, and geography. I couldn’t believe my good fortune when one day the plastic cups we had previously been given with our meals were replaced
by paper ones. I’d drain the water from each cup, then carefully unglue it and lay it out to dry. At the end of the day, after the paper was covered in crossword puzzles, I would shred it into small pieces, form tiny balls, and play a solitary game of basketball. I’d designate one of the tiles of the faux marble wall as the net, and try to hit that tile with the paper balls. I was so distracted by my puzzles and basketball games that I hardly noticed that Ramadan had begun and I had not seen Rosewater for two weeks.

  I had survived. At least for now.

  · · ·

  On the second day of Ramadan, I was transferred again, to a smaller, windowless cell. Eventually they reinstated my hava khori sessions, and I was able to walk in the courtyard for fifteen minutes every three or four days. Twice I was allowed to call my mother. Before the guard grabbed the phone from my hand each time, she told me that Nikbakht, the lawyer she had hired, was still trying to see me. I prayed that this was true, and during the day, as I exercised on the floor and jogged around Regent’s Park with Paola, I attempted to convince myself that they wouldn’t really execute me. The Islamic government was irresponsible and stubborn, but it was not yet lawless. For a high-profile case like mine, the judges would at least pretend to observe legal procedures. If they were going to kill me, they would at least allow me to see my lawyer before passing a sentence.

  “I hope you’re right,” my father said to me that night, as I tried to stretch the ache from my legs and back. “Time will tell.”

  · · ·

  From the day I’d arrived in Evin, I’d feared spending the month of Ramadan there. As a nonreligious person, I didn’t know how I’d withstand the experience of not being able to eat all day. Maryam had told me about prisoners being punished for eating during Ramadan while she was in jail, but to my surprise, on the first day of Ramadan, Brown Sandals came to ask me my plans: Would I be fasting or did I have a medical excuse to exempt me?

  “I’ve had ulcers in the past,” I quickly replied. “I’d like to fast, but doing so usually makes them worse.”