Rosewater (Movie Tie-in Edition)

by Maziar Bahari

  He accepted my excuse without asking questions, and I felt an enormous sense of relief when breakfast, lunch, and dinner were delivered to my cell that day at the normal hours.

  Ramadan is the month when Allah gives his servants the opportunity to repent and carry out good deeds, for which he bestows multiple rewards. As Muslim scholars explain, fasting during Ramadan doesn’t only mean not eating; it also includes refraining from anything that is not in line with praising Allah. Muslims are expected to have only clean thoughts and engage only in chaste deeds during Ramadan. They should also avoid using profanities and obscene gestures, which is why I was partly confused—and wholly horrified—by the turn of events that occurred on the third day of Ramadan, when Rosewater finally called me back to his interrogation room. After his failure to connect me with the reformists, foreign intelligence agencies, or the Jews, I was not sure what Rosewater’s modus operandi would be the next time I saw him. He greeted me by placing a thick pink folder on my chair.

  “Chetori, gherti?” he said, asking me how I was doing while also referring to me with a derogatory term for a superficial person who thinks only about fashion and his or her appearance. “Do you know what’s in this folder?” he asked, slapping the back of my head. Since it is also a rule that during Ramadan Muslims must refrain from fighting, I’d been hoping that these sessions would take place without their typical violence. I was wrong. “This is the documentation of all your dirty, improper conducts.”

  He opened the folder and showed me its contents. There were printouts of hundreds of my email messages and the Facebook pages of different friends, as well as a long list of the names of people I knew, in messy handwriting. They were all women.

  “Do you think you can get away with kardan”—with fucking—“any woman you want, gherti?” He sat on the table in front of me. “I want you to go through this list of women and point out to me which ones you screwed. Then you will tell me how much you paid each woman for doing her.”

  If he hadn’t been hitting the back of my head, I wouldn’t have been sure whether or not he was serious. “No, sir. You have it wrong. These are not girlfriends. These are just women I know professionally, and some who have added me on Facebook, some of whom I’ve never even met.”

  “Oh, really?” Rosewater said. “Why don’t you have the name of my aunt here?”

  “I’m really not sure what you’re getting at, sir,” I somehow found the courage to say. “Did you arrest me for improper relationships or the other charges you’ve brought against me?”

  “What did you say?” He kicked my leg. “We’re getting really cheeky here, aren’t we? Do you think that because you haven’t been executed yet, our plans are to leave you alone? Well, my friend, let me explain. This is what we’ve decided: you’re not only a spy but also a mofsed fel arz.”

  I had always dreaded that expression, which means “someone who corrupts the earth.” Corruption can be by means of actions or thoughts, and can include anything the Islamic regime deems unsavory. Thousands of people have been executed for this charge since the establishment of the Islamic Republic.

  The surprise I’d felt at Rosewater’s stupidity turned to fear. While I knew he didn’t have any evidence that I had engaged in espionage or acted against national security, I had had premarital relationships, and it wouldn’t have been too difficult to find the names of my previous girlfriends. I decided to answer absurdity with absurdity. “Sir, I’ve only had a relationship with one woman in my whole life,” I said. “And that is my wife.”

  “Who is this, then?” Rosewater asked as he started playing a video behind me.

  I heard Paola’s voice. “No, no,” she was saying.

  I realized what the video was. I’d recently bought a cheap laptop in London and had wanted to test the camera. I’d filmed Paola, who was having a bad-hair day, without her knowledge. When she realized I was filming her, she covered her face with her hands. “No, no,” she said, trying to duck behind me and out of view of the camera. The sight of Paola in our flat in London nearly brought me to my knees. I missed her so much. I held back my tears, as well as my anger at Rosewater for even looking at Paola.

  “That’s my wife, sir,” I managed to say. “I would appreciate it if you didn’t look at my private videos.”

  I felt his knee hit me hard in the small of my back. “I do whatever I want. Don’t ever raise your voice again.” He sat heavily on a chair and played the video of Paola again, from the beginning. When it finished, he replayed it once more. I could tell by the tone of his voice, and his slow, steady breath, that he was enjoying watching my unveiled beautiful blond wife in a private moment.

  “This is not your wife,” he kept saying. “I’m going to watch it again. You take a look at that list of names in the folder.” I breathed as slowly as I could, trying to fight the nausea settling in my throat, as Rosewater slid his chair closer to the video.

  “Now, as I said. We are going to go through the names one by one. Begin by telling me how and where you met each woman,” Rosewater said. Of course, I didn’t even recognize many of the names on the list, but Rosewater wasn’t buying that. Every time I wrote next to a name that I didn’t know a particular woman, he responded by slapping me.

  “Mazi, bacheh khoshgel, pretty boy. We both understand that the best way to get close to your female sources for espionage and other purposes is through sexual intercourse,” he said knowingly. “Stop wasting our time. Stop trying to fool me. Here—” He placed a clean sheet of paper on the writing arm of the desk. “I want you to put down the names of your ‘special’ friends.” He picked up the list of names. “Let’s start here. Shirin Ebadi. You have four phone numbers for her. When and where was the first time you had sex with her?”

  Shirin Ebadi was a Nobel Prize laureate, and one of the most prominent human-rights lawyers in Iran. “I’ve never worked on any project with Mrs. Ebadi,” I said.

  “Sheytoon, naughty boy, I’m not asking about ‘projects.’ ”

  “Sorry, I don’t understand your question.”

  “Don’t just sit there!” I heard my father whisper. “Find an answer to this moron’s question.”

  “Sir, I think Mrs. Ebadi is a respectable married woman,” I said. “If I remember, I interviewed her for—”

  He didn’t let me finish. He raised his right leg and kicked me hard in the right shoulder from behind. “You’ve never fucked her?” he yelled. “So why do you have four numbers for her? Why don’t you have four numbers for my aunt?” I began to feel sorry for the poor woman. I wondered what she would do if she knew that her nephew was using her name so gratuitously.

  “Sir, I have ten numbers for Mr. Ahmadinejad’s office,” I replied sarcastically.

  As I expected, this brought another blow to my body. He continued to beat me, and each kick came with greater force, sending waves of pain so bad I felt nauseous all over again. He yelled at me all the while, but he no longer seemed to make any sense at all. I thought of Zahra Kazemi, the Iranian-Canadian photojournalist murdered in Evin. I had to find a way to appease him and stop the beatings.

  Rosewater’s attitude about sex revealed more information about him than he was ever able to extract from me. As he went through my list of friends and colleagues, it seemed genuinely inconceivable to him that a man and a woman could be friends or work together without having a sexual relationship. The scenarios he made up became ever more grotesque, and he seemed to believe in the truth of his own inventions.

  On the sixth day of Ramadan, he arrived in the interrogation room particularly interested in how I’d met Malu Halasa; we had worked together to coedit Transit Tehran, a compilation of the work of Iranian writers and photographers. I told him we had met at a party.

  “A sex party?” Rosewater asked.

  This was the umpteenth time he had referred to sex parties, but he seemed to be in a gentler mood that day. I knew I needed to take advantage of this. “I’ve never been to a sex party,” I said. “I d
on’t know what one is exactly.”

  “Tsk, tsk, tsk, Maziar,” he said sarcastically. “Don’t play games with me, or you will make me angry again. Don’t tell me that you don’t know about these parties where men and women start with dinner and drinking alcohol and then go to the swimming pool, where they eat chocolate off each other’s bodies.”

  I sat silently, trying to picture it. How on earth does one eat chocolate off another person’s body in a swimming pool? I had a picture in my mind of chocolate floating on the surface of the water, and then I began to imagine the mixed taste of chlorine and chocolate.

  I realized what he was doing. Most of the people he interrogated were no doubt devout religious men. For these people, sex is a highly taboo subject, and this line of questioning would likely make them feel very uncomfortable. In fact, I later learned that many reformist leaders who broke in prison and confessed to treason did so as a result of the constant psychological pressure from sexual innuendo. In some cases, Revolutionary Guards had genuine pictures of reformists having extramarital affairs. In others, interrogators fabricated documents and used them to force witnesses to lie about illicit affairs.

  While this constant psychological pressure about sex proved effective against religious men, it was going to be quite useless in breaking me. Although Rosewater threatened several times to send explicit details of my sexual relationships with Shirin Ebadi and other Iranian female activists to Paola, I wasn’t nervous in the slightest. Paola knew all about my previous relationships, and I didn’t have any affairs to be worried about.

  The longer this line of questioning went on, the more I began to realize that something else was at play. Rosewater wasn’t only hoping to break me psychologically; he was also aroused by thoughts of my sex life. He was asking me about pool parties where men lick imaginary chocolate off Barbie-like blond Western women because he couldn’t be there himself. And he ached to be there. His religion had promised him that he could do all that, and much more, when he got to paradise, but he had to control himself until then. He hated me for being able to enjoy on earth things that were, for him, reserved only for a time after death.

  I knew dozens of men like him. He reminded me of kids from traditional backgrounds in my high schools who’d thought that people in north Tehran, families who led more Westernized lives, acted out pornographic movies daily. Much of their information about sex and the West came from porn magazines and movies they watched again and again, illegal videotapes they’d bought on the black market. From Rosewater’s line of questioning, I could see that much of his knowledge about the rest of the world also came from porn. In fact, I was coming to suspect that Rosewater mistook porn films for documentaries and, as such, honestly believed that most women in the West were sex therapists, horny secretaries, or naughty cheerleaders and that mailmen, milkmen, and plumbers had sex with their willing clients after each delivery or repair job.

  · · ·

  “Who is Debbie?” he asked me one day.

  “Debbie?”

  “Yes, Debbie the Cleaner?” He nearly purred the last word.

  Debbie was a housekeeper Paola and I had hired in London. I didn’t know her surname, so in order to remember who she was in my cell phone I’d saved her name as Debbie the Cleaner. “She cleans our house,” I answered. “Why?”

  “Are you going to tell me that you didn’t have sex with her?” Rosewater asked.

  “Sir, she’s an older married woman from the Philippines,” I answered.

  “Filipino?!” he asked with interest. “So you’re telling me that all the news about women from Thailand doing those dirty things is false?”

  “I said the Philippines, not Thailand,” I corrected.

  “Same thing,” he sneered. “I’m sure you know all about Thailand as well. I know your kind.”

  Paola and I had spent three weeks in Thailand and Cambodia in March 2009, and I had a number of photographs of us there together, which by now he’d surely seen. There seemed to be no doubt in Rosewater’s mind that we had traveled to Southeast Asia for perverse sexual pleasures. “Why did you go to Thailand?” he asked.

  I was going to explain that Thailand was a transit stop to Cambodia, but I had been through days of beatings, and my body ached. I was also tired of these very personal questions. At that moment, I had an idea: maybe it was time to give him what he wanted, in a tactical move to distract him from my personal life.

  “I’m ashamed to say why, sir,” I answered quietly.

  “What do you mean?”

  “It’s a really personal and shameful thing to say.”

  Rosewater’s interest was clearly aroused. He came closer to me and put his hand on my shoulder. “You can tell me anything you want, Maziar,” he said, his voice soft and gentle. “This is just between us.” He took the paper from my desk and crumpled it into a ball. “You don’t even have to write it down.”

  I bowed my head and, somehow, found the ability to cry on cue. “But, sir, it’s a shameful thing to say.”

  “What is?”

  “I like sexual massages.”

  He was quiet for a few moments, but I could hear him breathing heavily. “What do you mean?” he asked, his voice faint.

  “Well, sir. As you know, I suffer from terrible migraines. Often, when I reach orgasm, my head throbs. So while in Thailand, I would get an Asian …” I paused. “Masseuse …”—I drew it out—“… to relax me.”

  “Go on.”

  I went into the lurid imaginary details. Of how the young, toned Thai masseuse would take off my shirt. Of how she would put oil on my body and start rubbing me, beginning at my shoulders. Of how she would move her way down.

  “Without her clothes on?” he interrupted.

  I hadn’t thought of that detail. “Yes, sir, it’s shameful. They always begin the session by removing their clothes. First her top. Then her panties. When she is totally naked, she rubs her body with herbal oil. It smells so good.”

  “Like what?”

  “It’s hard to explain. You’d have to be there in the room to understand it. The smell I like best reminds me of tropical forests in the morning after a long rainy night. You can just forget all your problems by inhaling the fresh air.” Rosewater was hooked. He wasn’t saying a word. I have to admit, I was enjoying my made-up story as well. “Before she climbs on top of you to begin the massage, you can smell the herbs. The smell relaxes you right away.”

  Rosewater sighed quietly. I knew that with my story, I was torturing this miserable man, who spent all his time in dark cells beating and torturing innocent people. That gave me such pleasure.

  Chapter Sixteen

  “What do you think of my performance, Mazi?” Rosewater asked a few days later. From the sound of his voice I could sense that he was sitting in front of me. He had done this only a handful of times, and always when he had questions that contained at least a trace of truth. I guessed that he wanted to study my reactions in order to find out whether or not I was lying.

  “I’m sorry sir, I don’t understand. What do you mean by ‘performance’?”

  “I mean, do you think I’m a good interrogator?”

  You’re a bloody psychopath, I thought. “Well, you certainly have made me confess things that I have never confessed to anyone in my life,” I answered.

  “Example?”

  “My shameful acts in Thailand, which I had to explain the other day.”

  “But there are many things that you haven’t confessed, Mazi.”

  “Sir, if I haven’t confessed things, it means that I didn’t want to lie to you,” I said. “I think your beatings extract the truth from me. The beatings hurt, but I feel better because of them. They are like a hard, long exercise session or, rather, like chemotherapy. Making me honest with myself has made me feel much better.” Somehow, he took me at my word, though I’d never confessed to anything during a beating.

  “I didn’t want to tell you this, Maziar,” he said, “but my father was a political
prisoner in the shah’s time. He was so severely tortured by SAVAK”—the shah’s secret police—“that he has a difficult time walking now. They pulled out his toenails and damaged his feet so badly that even now, thirty years later, he has to use a cane to walk. I never did that to you, did I?”

  I was surprised to hear this. How could a man whose father had endured such torture now administer torture himself? What a senseless, absurd cycle of violence this was. “Why was your father in prison?” I asked.

  “He was a follower of Imam Khomeini. In fact, he was willing to sacrifice his life for the imam.” By this point, I’d spent enough time with Rosewater under the darkness of my blindfold to be able to understand the meaning behind every noise he made, and now I could hear the tears in his voice. He walked closer to me—I could see his black slippers beneath the crease in the blindfold—and put his hand gently on my shoulder. “I asked you a question, Maziar. Answer me,” Rosewater said quietly. “Have I ever tortured you?”

  I didn’t know how to answer. I was the prisoner of a manic-depressive man, someone with a huge ego and yet highly insecure, constantly seeking other people’s approval. A wrong answer could lead to more punching and slapping, and, frankly, I was tired of that. And the more I thought about Paola’s efforts to get me released, which I trusted were ongoing, given the small hints my mother was able to make on the phone, and the attention my case may have been getting around the world, the more powerful I was coming to feel in his presence.

  I heard my father’s voice: “Go with it, Mazi. He’s losing strength. You can manipulate him. You may even come to control him.”

  I paused for a few seconds, then said, “I think you have shown me your strength.” I paused again, melodramatically. “I think you had to carry out your duty by exerting maximum pressure on me to find the truth.”

  Rosewater inhaled heavily and chuckled, but his voice remained distant. “It’s not been maximum pressure, Mazi. You still don’t know what I’m capable of.”