by Shane Bauer
How will I know when I’ve left sane thought and behavior behind? When there’s no turning back? Perhaps the biggest loss is my confidence. I’ve always clung to the certainty that I can emerge from this place unbroken and unchanged, but I’m not sure I believe that anymore.
I stare at the door, at its white, seamless face. I picture myself standing up, walking across the room, and ringing the bell. As soon as it opens a crack, I will throw my body against it. I will run down the hallway into the main corridor. I will run up to the first man in a suit that I see and I will wrap my hands around his neck and I will squeeze. I will squeeze his neck and look into his eyes as he tries to scream.
The fact that they put Shane and Josh together points toward hopelessness—it means we’re not going anywhere any time soon. For months I have begged; I have pleaded. I’ve been kind and forgiving, but they’ve given me nothing. No phone call. No lawyer. No trial. Nowhere near enough books. No cellmate. I have been given nothing.
I take my beautiful, purple scarf and wrap it around my eyes. I wrap it around my mouth, gagging myself. I may be lost, I think, rocking back and forth with my eyes closed. I may be truly lost. Stay with me, I say to myself. You’re all I have. Don’t leave me.
The interrogators are fucking cowards. They know what they’re doing to me, but they are too cowardly to come in here, to face me. Why am I being singled out for this torture? How can they leave me in here to go crazy alone?
Suddenly I’m on my feet, running to the door. I start banging on it with my fists, kicking it again and again. The guard opens the door and I stare at her, breathless and angry, my hands balled into fists. She forms her own face into a mask of steel.
“I want hava khori,” I demand, my voice trembling, my face locked.
“No, Sarah!” she yells at me. “No hava khori today!” I hear the door slam. I hear her footsteps running down the hall. I don’t hear anything else. I want to die. I want to disappear. I want to kill.
I hear a scream. It’s far away, maybe in the courtyard or the next row of cells. There’s something familiar, almost beautiful about it. The scream connects me to myself, roaring through my body and hollowing me out. Suddenly the door opens and a guard is in my cell. She looks at me with horror and through her eyes I see myself. The scream I heard wasn’t coming from down the hall; it wasn’t another prisoner in another cell. That horrible sound came from my own throat. It was me screaming.
The guard comes up behind me, grabs my shoulders, and begins to shake me. “Sarah, no! Sarah, no!” We fall to the floor, and I can feel her hands on my face, trying to get me to come back to my senses. I open my eyes and follow the guard’s gaze behind me—where I see streaks of my own blood against the mottled white. I look down at my hands and begin to wail like a child. My knuckles are scraped from where I’d been beating them against the wall of my cell.
“I can’t!” I yell at her. “I can’t do this.” Her arms encircle me now. “I can’t!” I sob again, my voice quieter now.
My fists don’t bring down the walls of Evin Prison, but they do cause a commotion. One guard after another comes to my cell, first cleaning the blood off the wall, then placing extra food beside me on the floor. When I’m still balled up and weeping hysterically after several hours, Leila comes in and helps me clean my face and get dressed.
Later that night, stern, beautiful-eyed Nargess comes to my cell door. “Telephone,” she says, and rolls her eyes. She leads me to the pay phone mounted at the end of the next hall. I pass it every day, sometimes listening to other prisoners talk to their loved ones, but I have never been allowed to use it. I grab the receiver and press it to my ear, expecting to hear the soft, sweet voice of my mother.
“Sarah, we hear that today you are having a bad day,” a man says in a smug, nasal voice that I instantly recognize as Shane’s interrogator, Weasel, who told me he was assigned to Shane but had also come in to grill me from time to time.
“You can’t just put Shane and Josh together and leave me alone,” I yell at him. “I’m going crazy in here.”
“Sarah, I’m calling because we are worried about your health. We do not want you to hurt yourself again, okay?”
“If you are worried about my health, then give me a cellmate.”
“Sarah, you must understand, there are no suitable roommates for you here. None of the women speak English.”
“I’ll teach them,” I say. “I’m an English teacher!”
I wish I could tell him about the clandestine conversations I’d had in English with other women in my corridor, about the prisoners who shout, “I love you, Sarah” down the hallway, whisper to me at night, or reach out to touch my hands through the bars as they pass by my cell. But I can’t, so I say nothing.
“We think it may be dangerous for you, Sarah, to be with an Iranian. You are safer alone.”
“I am not safe! You heard what I did to myself today. What if I get worse? Let me be with Shane and Josh during the day and then I’ll go back to my cell to sleep at night.” The real reason they don’t want me to have a cellmate is probably because they are ashamed of what I’ll learn about what they do to people here, the torture and rape; they know when I get out of here I’ll have a huge platform from which to tell the world.
“Sarah, this is against the prison rules. Men and women must be separate. We gave you a TV—doesn’t that help? Do you want Shane and Josh to be alone too? Why aren’t you happy for them?”
“Don’t you understand? I can’t do this. I can’t be alone any longer! I hurt myself today and I’ll do it again. You have to help me.”
As the words leave my lips, I realize how pointless they are. I’ve been begging and pleading and yelling for months and they’ve given me nothing. Nothing. The high-profile nature of our case protects us from being physically tortured, but the slow violence being done to my soul will leave no visible scars. They don’t care, I tell myself. Accept that. Something inside me has snapped. I realize that I belong to this place—they own my time, my body, my future. No one is going to help me but me. I have to find a way to do this. I listen to Weasel’s empty promises and hang up the phone. It’s up to me, I think. I have to survive.
The next morning, Leila comes to my cell with a piece of equipment under her arm. She walks over to the TV on my floor and plugs it in.
“This is your new friend,” she says to me in Arabic with a slight tone of sarcasm. I look down at the strange gray box. It’s a DVD player.
37. Sarah
TV has become my world. Starved for every scrap of news I can get, I watch the English ticker on the Iranian state-run news channel as if it were a crystal ball. It was almost two weeks ago that Leila gave me a DVD player, and since then I’ve watched the one film I have, Vantage Point, seventeen times.
“Marg bar Amreeka! Marg bar Israel!” a crowd of angry, black-clad worshipers chants on the morning news.
The first time I saw footage of small crowds of conservatively dressed Iranians raising their fists in the air and chanting “Death to America,” I freaked out. Now, these scenes don’t bother me much. I’ve learned to twist and turn each headline in my mind like a Rubik’s Cube, considering it from various angles in hopes of teasing out a kernel of truth. One day, I see a ticker that encapsulates all my deepest fears.
Sitting alone with my thoughts takes incredible discipline. Sometimes, I spend every waking hour between visits with Shane and Josh working through my rage. I know it’s not Shane and Josh’s fault I’m being kept alone, but sometimes it feels like they are flaunting what they have. An evil voice in my head tells me they don’t really care about my suffering—that all human beings are essentially selfish and even the man I love is putting his sanity before mine. The rational part of me knows this isn’t true, but at times my anger is all-encompassing and there is simply nowhere else to direct it. I pace my cell for hours, arguing with the walls. “They do care—shut up! I know Shane and Josh love me.” I meditate, I pray, I focus all my energy on eradi
cating blame and jealousy from my heart.
Some days, it works. More and more often, I manage to walk out into the courtyard with a smile on my face. I spend our thirty minutes sharing my thoughts and small victories with them, and, since I’m the only one with a TV, I deliver daily updates on how quickly the world is going to hell.
“You guys, I have to say it: If the U.S. or Israel attacks Iran while we’re in here, the most obvious way to retaliate is to kill us. They will kill us.”
Josh lets out a slow, histrionic breath. “Sarah, I just can’t believe that’s a possibility,” he says. “A big part of Obama’s platform was that he was going to change his policy with Iran. An attack would make him look like such a hypocrite. And Israel won’t act without the U.S.’s consent.”
“Yeah, but Obama also said he was going to close Guantánamo,” Shane retorts, “and that hasn’t happened.”
“The ticker said the U.S. is ‘Amassing Warships in Iranian Water.’ Warships? It doesn’t get much more explicit than that.”
Shane sighs. “Baby, let’s not talk about this anymore—there’s no point. Let’s try to enjoy our time together.” I let Shane put his arms around me and try to sink into his touch. These hypothetical conversations have become all too common. I know there’s no point in thinking about the worst-case scenario, but that doesn’t mean I have the power to stop either. For a few seconds, the three of us sit in silence.
“Sarah, for whatever it’s worth, this is probably just a routine military drill,” Josh says, taking my other hand in both of his and trying to comfort me. “Try not to take it too seriously, okay?”
One night about a week later, while arranging my blankets and getting ready to sleep, another ticker catches my attention: “Iranian in the U.S. Sentenced to Five Years in Prison.” I do the math. I’ve already been here seven months. Five years would be sixty months. That means, if we’re here for five years, for every day I’ve already spent here, there would be almost nine more like it. By the time I get out of this cage, I will no longer be me. I’ll be a stranger.
The news didn’t say his name or what he was convicted of, but what did that matter? Tit for tat, an eye for an eye. He gets five years; we get five years. Nationality apparently trumps guilt or innocence. Iran gets its revenge against the Great Satan, and the United States gets help discrediting the regime over its horrendous human rights record. Everybody’s happy. Everybody wins.
38. Sarah
The guards in the hall are frantic. We’re being led back to our cells from hava khori. I peek under my blindfold as we pass five or six young women lined up facing the wall. It’s evident by their fitted jeans, long black jackets, and platform shoes that they’ve just been brought in straight from the streets. I sense their fear as I’m led past. “What’s happening?” I ask the guards loudly. “Chi shode?” The women keep their heads down and say nothing.
Nargess presses her fingertips against my lower back, urging me to walk faster. I reflexively slow my pace, partially to piss her off but also to absorb as much as I can before I’m locked in my cell. When we arrive, she snaps at me angrily, slams the door, and stomps away. I quickly crouch down by the food slot on my hands and knees and listen to shouts and screams resounding off the walls.
It’s December 27. I had a hunch something like this might be coming. I first got wind of it days ago on the news ticker at the bottom of my TV screen: “All Iranians Should Be United on Ashura.” This relatively benign statement was followed by a thinly veiled threat: “Disruption by Hooligans Will Not Be Tolerated.” The following day, I noticed two new cardboard boxes had arrived at the end of our hallway. After my shower that night, I hastily peeked inside and found dozens of light blue plastic sandals, the ones prisoners have to wear. The guards, I thought, are preparing for an influx.
Now, crouched by the slot in my cell door, I watch a procession of new inmates being led past my cell. One woman has a bandage wrapped around her head, caked in blood. Another limps past, her bright red hair streaming out of her torn headscarf, her head hanging low like a wilting flower. All day I’ve been desperate to know what’s happening beyond these prison walls. Now the streets of Tehran are being brought to me.
The first ten days of the Muslim month of Muharram are a time of mourning for Shia Muslims. The last day, Ashura, is a major holiday—the day that Imam Hussein, the Prophet Muhammad’s grandson, was killed at the Battle of Karbala in AD 680. Shia Muslims align themselves with Hussein, the brave underdog who stood up against the Umayyads, a much larger oppressor.
All month I’ve watched with fascination as crowds of men and women dressed in black ritualistically beat their chests on TV. Some use their hands; others use chains to self-flagellate. Neighborhoods organize crying circles, rooms full of grown men with fat tears wetting their thick beards, sobs escaping from their chests. After all these months of crying alone in my cell, public grieving seems cathartic to me. I watch the mourners and mimic their movements, genuflecting and gently beating my own chest.
I remember following Iran’s post-elections protests on Al Jazeera back in our apartment in Damascus last June. Millions of people filled the streets of every major city, stretching beautiful green banners across city blocks. Then, when the government responded with violence, the color of hope and rebirth was stained with blood. By the time we were captured about six weeks later, it seemed like the worst was over. Maybe we were wrong.
After hours of commotion, the cells in my hallway are filled to capacity. Based on the number of women I’ve seen pass by, I estimate they have ten or twelve people packed tightly into each cell. I decide to ring for the guard and ask for my nightly shower. “Nah,” she says, exasperated, “kaar daaram.” I’m busy. I begin to pantomime, performing like a trained monkey, smelling my armpits and crinkling up my nose. “Okay, enough, Sarah, quickly!” I grab my towel, hastily tie my blindfold around my head, and charge down the hall toward the showers.
I slam the bathroom door behind me and quickly begin undressing. I crank the hot-water knob as high as it will go, steaming up the room like a sauna. Is it really a revolution this time? If this government’s overthrown, what will happen to us? Things could get really ugly before the opposition assumes power. We could get hurt, separated, or killed in the interim. I feel an affinity with these women—if I were Iranian, I have no doubt I would have been out in the streets today and I might have even ended up in here alongside them. But first and foremost I need to get home. I support this revolution—but there’s no way I’m ready to die for it.
I suddenly hear the door open in the small room next to the showers. I hear voices—then the door shuts. Is someone out there? A barred window is usually kept unlocked so we can vent excess steam. I quietly unlatch it, peering into the small courtyard. A young woman stares back at me.
Think fast, I tell myself. It’s been several months since one of the guards has made such a slip. I grab the bars between us, bringing my face as close to hers as I can, and begin to speak. “I Sarah. American. Long time here, no freedom,” I whisper in my ridiculous, infantile Farsi. “You please phone mother Sarah. Sarah no spy, Sarah love Iran people, Sarah teacher, Damascus. Please you freedom phone mother Sarah, okay?”
The woman looks straight at me. “I know you, Sarah,” she says in awkward but good English. “I am sorry, but I am not free, so I cannot help you.” At that moment the door opens and Nargess starts yelling at both of us. She hands the prisoner a stack of navy blue clothes and ushers her away from me down the hallway.
As soon as I’m back in my cell, I hear a new prisoner in the solitary cell next to mine knocking on our shared wall. Show some restraint, I tell myself—mentally gluing myself to the floor. I want to shout words of comfort down the hall, but I have to be careful. I’ve already been caught twice—if I get caught a third time, there will be consequences. I can’t risk losing my visits with Shane and Josh—I can’t go back to twenty-four hours a day alone.
39. Shane
Litt
le cakes and candies wrapped in cellophane dash across the cell floor. The disruption stuns and freezes me momentarily as I kneel over tiny flash cards, each displaying a name, arrayed in a large network on the carpet. I was in the middle of something important: constructing an elaborate Greek family tree of gods and mortals. I’d been frustrated because I couldn’t remember which marriages connected the House of Atreus to the House of Thebes. How many days must I study this before it finally sticks?
It takes me a moment to realize that the sweets were tossed in through the window in the door. Josh and I lunge to the floor, rip open some cakes, and assume the position that new food always demands. We sit on the floor and each put a morsel into our mouths, chewing it slowly with our eyes closed. It’s spongy, like a Twinkie. The concentrated blast of sugar is like an injection of well-being. I never knew such a thing could make it through the walls of this prison.
After we finish, we set to work gently splitting open some dates, removing the pit, and pressing some dark chocolate and a glob of butter into each of them. This is our usual delicacy. We put six of these in a small plastic bag that I then put in my pocket. Later, a guard comes to take us to hava khori. Josh goes first, following the guard. I trail in the rear and as soon as I get to the neighboring cell, I extend my arm and jam the plastic bag through the little bars in one smooth motion. Behind the door, I hear people scramble.
The cakes landed in our cell because of my curiosity about a question: