A Sliver of Light

by Shane Bauer

  Sometimes, the smallest change in one of their facial expressions or tone of voice can deeply upset the other. Other times, they’ll get frustrated because they expect the other to heal the pain of incarceration. Then they look to me when they think the other is being unreasonable.

  When Shane and Sarah polarize, I sit in the middle, encouraging them to actually listen to each other. The conflicts can be about anything. Shane wants to share meals at hava khori; Sarah doesn’t want food to distract us during these precious times together. Sarah and I want us three to read the same books at the same time; Shane doesn’t. Sarah wants us to appeal for clemency and apologize, but Shane and I don’t want anything that hints at admitting guilt. Sarah wants to live in a house in Oakland; Shane would prefer living in the nearby countryside. The content of the arguments vary, but the dynamic repeats.

  In private, they both tell me what they think is wrong with the other person. Though they try hard to accept the other’s “flaws,” again and again, the bickering loops: “She’s not acknowledging my pain.” “He can’t put himself aside for a moment, even while I’m alone in solitary confinement.” “Why can’t you just listen to me without letting your issues get in the way?” My father always told me that the first year after making a lifelong commitment is the toughest, and I’m sure incarceration doesn’t help.

  It reminds me of trying to solve conflicts between my parents as a boy. Whenever I bring Shane and Sarah together and they let down their defenses, I feel triumphant. When my efforts fail and a guard comes to take us back to our cell in the midst of an argument, I feel personally defeated. I know Sarah appreciates my contribution to our triad, and Shane has told me so much in our cell, but sometimes when I sit next to them as they argue, I’m amazed at how stuck they are in their own little dyad—it’s as if they don’t see me, another person, sitting beside them. They take my support for granted and are lost in themselves.

  I wrack my brain for an escape from our routine. I propose that we celebrate as many holidays as we can think of—as creatively as we possibly can, even disregarding the actual calendar if we feel like it. The night before Palm Sunday, each of us creates a personal system for palm reading. On Sunday, we sit extra close and have a half-hour of levity reading one another’s palms under the open sky. We laugh at our glorious futures and the imminent triumphs fated for each of us.

  A few days later we decide it’s Ash Wednesday. We smear our faces with the chalky, ashen turbah. Then we sit in our triangle and enjoy one another’s company, frequently laughing at how ridiculous we look.

  On Friday, we celebrate Passover—a story of liberation and justice. I arrange a makeshift Seder plate: a hard-boiled egg, salt water, a fish bone as a lamb shank, lettuce as a bitter herb, and dried, flat Persian bread for matzo. Halfway through the Passover story, unaccountably, Sarah gets the giggles and can’t stop. She curls into Shane’s arms, uncontrollably laughing and embarrassed by her girlishness. Shane looks at me, clearly uncomfortable and frustrated by Sarah. I call off the meal, a little ticked. I put effort into making the Seder special, and I refreshed my memory by reading the story of Moses in the Quran. Passover is my favorite Jewish holiday.

  I peer down at my pathetic Seder plate, then over at Shane and Sarah balled together, and then I look over the walls to the cloudy spring sky. I quickly let it go. It was a nice week, but these distractions couldn’t last forever. I realize that our holiday season is over. I had hoped for an Easter egg hunt on Sunday and was brainstorming how to celebrate May Day. But we could barely live in our bubble of distraction a whole week. Gravity pulls us down. “Prison”—as Shane exclaims grumpily in the mornings—tears us apart.

  50. Sarah

  Out of the corner of my eye I see a flash of a pink pant leg through the slot at the bottom of my door. A prisoner is on her way to the shower. She’s only been in our hallway a few days, but it wasn’t hard to come up with a name for her. She’s the only prisoner I’ve ever seen wearing a bright pink jumpsuit, so I call her Pink Lady.

  I’m sitting on the floor with my supplies for prison pie spread out around me. I have a plastic bag filled with digestive biscuits, which I am methodically crushing with my metal spoon. I add five or six squares of butter to the bag of crumbs and squeeze it in my hands until it forms a thick paste. Then, I shape the paste into a crust on my metal dinner plate.

  Next, I place chunks of chocolate on the rim of my heater to melt. I use a spoon to mix the melted chocolate with dates, sugar, and butter into a thick, brown paste that I then spread on top of the crust. The first time I made prison pie for Shane and Josh, the three of us sat in a circle shoving huge spoonfuls into our mouths, almost unable to process how good it was. “Sarah,” Shane finally said, “you could sell this. I mean, it’s not just us—anyone would think this was delicious!” The last step requires help from the guards. I ring the bell and Maryam agrees to bring me a plastic knife. She stands and watches me while I cut the apple into fine slices, arranging them like a fan on the pie’s surface.

  A few minutes later, I hear Pink Lady’s shower turn off. A guard walks past my cell to let her out, walking a few steps in front of her as they pass my cell. At the last minute, I decide to crouch down and peer through the slot in my cell door. Her appearance is even more surprising than the color of her clothes. She’s a tall woman in her late thirties with bleach blond hair and tattooed eyebrows (which must be popular in Iran; even some of the guards have them). From my position at her feet, she looks statuesque, powerful, almost regal. I quickly make a noise—“Psssst”—and her eyes dart down under her blindfold to the slot I’m peering through. For a split second our eyes meet, she slows her gait, and her lip twitches almost indiscernibly. It’s a smile.

  The next day I’m in the middle of my exercise routine, doing jumping jacks and pushups, when I see a flurry of motion outside the slot on my door. I look down to find a tight ball of tissue paper on my floor. I grab it and immediately sit down with my back to the door. If the guards catch whoever threw this on the video camera, my door will burst open any second and I will eat the note before they can take it. But the guards don’t come. Carefully smoothing out the crumpled note, I read:

  Dearest Sarah, I am Zahra. Do you remember me? I have been very worried about you, my dear Sarah. They took me to a different section for talking with you, but now they have brought me back. Are you okay? Do you need help? I will talk to you tonight when the guards are sleeping.

  I can’t believe it’s her! Pink Lady is Zahra, the prisoner that Leila caught me talking to through the vent a few days after the prison was flooded with Ashura protesters. We’ve been in prison what, nine months now? That was almost four months ago that they moved Zahra. I’ve often wondered what happened to her, but I never expected to see her again.

  Later that night, I wake to the sound of loud knocking on my wall. I hear my name being whispered in the hallway and crawl toward my cell door.

  “Hello,” I whisper timidly through the slot.

  “Sarah,” the voice replies, “I am Zahra. Do you remember me? I’ve missed you. Are you okay? Are you still alone? I’ve been very worried about you.”

  That night we devise a method of communicating with each other through notes written on scraps of cardboard. She will write with a pen she stole from her interrogators and I will use a small piece of metal I’ve fashioned from a tube of Vaseline that leaves a mark like a pencil. Josh, Shane, and I were actually allowed pens and paper for a short, blissful period a few months ago—but they were taken away after I was caught passing a note to my neighbor, a young woman named Hengame, who always sang to me and seemed to know a lot about our case. Shortly after I was caught, the guards raided my cell, taking my extra DVDs, all the study aids I’d painstakingly devised, and even some of my books and extra clothes. I knew we’d never be allowed pens again.

  Zahra and I decide to hide our notes in the trash can in the bathroom at the end of the hall. She balls hers up in toilet paper and I stuff mine
inside soiled-looking maxi-pads—places the guards will never look. When one of us has a new note waiting, we will let the other one know by three hard knocks on our common wall.

  In prison you develop revolutionary patience—you wait for something that you know may or may not happen—with unshakable resolve. I sometimes wait for days or weeks for the right opportunity to pass a note or exchange a few words with Zahra. I wait till the right guard is working—the one who never bothers to check on me through my peephole—so I won’t get caught writing. I memorize the guards’ footsteps and the patterns they walk in through the halls. I save a small portion of beef stew in which I carefully soak a maxi-pad overnight, then let it dry for a day or two until it authentically looks like menstrual blood. If anything feels off, even the smallest detail, I abort the project. I know what I’m doing is risky, but I’m determined to outsmart them. I’ll never let them catch me again.

  These are the best days I’ve had in prison. For months the silence in my corridor has been broken only by the sounds of prisoners weeping. Zahra and her cellmates laugh and sing, choosing American songs like Michael Jackson’s “You Are Not Alone” for my benefit. I sing back to them, feeling joy and connection. Zahra’s also bold with the guards, sometimes making jokes, sometimes yelling at them. “I will not cry for these bastards,” she writes me. “I will not show them my tears.”

  “We have to stop,” I write to her one morning. “I’m afraid we’ll get caught and they’ll move you. Zahra, when we are both free, I’ll come to see you in the Netherlands. We’ll spend days together dancing and talking. We will be friends forever.”

  A few days later Zahra passes by my cell in a flurry and leaves another present balled up on my carpet.

  They are moving me again—don’t cry, Sarah! I don’t know what will happen to us, but remember you are never alone here. Sarah, please remember that Iranians are not bad people. We love the American people. I love you. No matter where they take me now, I will try to find you. Remember to listen for me—I will call out your name at night.

  I know Zahra’s still nearby because, from time to time, I see her clothes hanging on the prison clothesline when I go out to hang up my own uniform to dry. My face lights up when I see her lovely pink jumpsuit. I run my hands across the pretty color and I sneak a few nuts or a piece of candy into her back pocket. It may not be much, but it’s the closest I can get to her, and I want her to know I’m still here.

  51. Shane and Sarah

  Shane

  Dumb Guy is at our door. He hands us a bag of brand-new jeans, shirts, socks, and sneakers with shoelaces. “Put these on, quickly,” he says, and leaves. We’ve been planning for this moment. Our moms have told us in letters they were trying to come and visit us.

  They recently put Josh and me in a new cell. This one is smaller, but it has a little three-by-five-foot bathroom in it. After Dumb Guy is gone, I go to the bathroom, where a tiny note, covered in microscopic writing, is wrapped tightly in plastic and stuck inside the outer lip of the sink. The little bundle is small enough to fit discreetly between my middle and ring finger and can be passed off in a handshake. Josh and I have practiced this many times. I tape the note to my penis.

  They took Sarah’s pen before ours, so we knew to hide one of ours before they raided our cell. I scribed this letter with our secret pen over several days while Josh stood watch for guards. It describes in detail what happened when we were captured and lays out a schedule of all of the events of our detainment, including prison transfers, hunger strikes, the arrival of books, and the changing schedule of meetings between Sarah, Josh, and me. About four months ago, the interrogators started giving us books sent by our families, so in the note, we make clear what we want to read and hope to receive. It describes our daily routine and lists our e-mail passwords in the hopes that someone will change them to prevent the interrogators from reading about our personal lives. It has a list of songs we sing that we want our friends and family to listen to.

  We are transported in a van with fogged windows to a hotel in another part of the city. Large, unsmiling men with radios and bellhop uniforms take us to the fifteenth floor. I ask to use the restroom, where I untape the note from myself and put it in the coin pocket of my jeans. I scan the room for anything I can take—an impulse that has now become second nature—and find a comb in the toiletry pouch. On it is printed “Esteghlal Hotel.” I pocket it and exit the restroom.

  They line us up in front of a set of double doors, where we stand on red carpet, the kind movie stars walk down. No one has told us what is on the other side.

  As soon as they open, I see our mothers standing before us like ghosts, shrouded in black and bearing flowers. Their faces show an admixture of sorrow and gripping relief. Like the female guards at the prison, only their faces and hands are exposed.

  Lights and cameras are blazing everywhere. The next thing I know, my mom is in my arms. Suddenly, it feels like everything is okay. The smiles on Josh’s and Sarah’s faces disarm me even further. Our moms are suddenly real to us and we to them. I feel a warmth so pure that it awakens an old, lost part of me. I become loose in a way I haven’t been since we were hiking up that mountain ten months ago. I pull the note out of my pocket and squeeze it into my mom’s hand. As I hug her, I tell her to hide it. She tucks it into her bra. Then, she whispers into my ear, “I love you, Shane. I can’t wait to have you home.” In this moment, I feel halfway there.

  Before we get to talk, men in suits sit us all down on a couch in front of a wall of cameras. Livia Leu Agosti, the Swiss ambassador, sits with us. Suddenly, we are in front of the world, a blazing spectacle. I don’t understand how this is happening. After all those months of not letting us have pens in order to prevent any chance of communication to the outside world, why are they putting us in front of cameras, giving us a chance to say anything we want?

  Our mothers stare into the cameras and thank the Iranian government for the “humanitarian gesture” of letting them come see us. Then Sarah, Josh, and I take turns answering the reporters’ questions. What is the food like? Do you have any indication that you might be released? What do you want your government to do for you? Have you learned Farsi? How are you treated?

  “We have a decent relationship with the guards,” I say. “It’s been civil.” As soon as those words come out of my mouth, I regret it. People are tortured there. The guards beat people. Sarah has been in solitary for almost a year.

  “What happened at the border?” a reporter asks.

  “We never walked into Iran,” I say, then stop myself. I know our interrogators wouldn’t want us to answer that question. I feel an overwhelming need to self-censor. “We can’t really talk about that,” I say.

  Suddenly, I realize why they put us in front of all these cameras—they aren’t afraid of us saying anything they don’t want us to. They control us. They didn’t tell us what to say, but I have been afraid that if I say anything even slightly offensive, any plans they might have to release us could be canceled. They exercise the same power over our mothers. Their reach is long and deep. I stifle my anger at them and at myself.

  When the interview ends, the reporters file out. My mom clings to me and smiles in a way she only could on seeing that her child was safe. It feels so good, but it also hurts. I don’t know how much time we will have—one hour?—and my joy is mixed with a preemptive sense of loss. Too soon, we will be torn apart once again. This visit is a cruel gift.

  Something is different about my mom. When I was growing up, she was a disciplinarian, a don’t-make-my-mistakes kind of parent. She has always been a tough, no-nonsense kind of woman. Now she won’t let go of me. Worry is deep-set in her eyes. At the same time, there is an out-of-place happiness there. It is the kind of sudden joy that could exist only for someone who has suffered enormously, boundless yet backed by a pain that keeps her eyes teary and quivering. “I hope they let you come home with us,” she says. Her words make my heart drop into my stomach. She really thinks
this is the end. I can see it in her eyes.

  “I don’t think that’s going to happen, Mom,” I say gently, squeezing her hand. Ever since we heard they might come visit, I have never even considered that possibility. The three of us believe we’ll get out eventually, but we know the Iranians arranged this visit in order to hold us longer. By allowing us to see our mothers, they can claim they are making “humanitarian gestures.” They can temporarily subdue international pressure and put the focus back on the United States to reciprocate.

  The suits tell our moms they can remove their hijabs and be comfortable. They leave the room. At last, we are alone.

  When Sarah takes off her hijab, I am stunned by how beautiful she looks. I haven’t seen her bare head since I snuck into her cell that first month. Her hair is so long. I hold her hand and don’t want to let go. Already, this has been the most time we’ve spent together since our capture.

  Livia jumps up and walks around the room, lifting up garbage cans and carpets to check for recording bugs. “This hotel is very famous,” she whispers. “This is where they bring prisoners to do videotaped confessions.”

  We ask her about the nuclear negotiations. We figure that our freedom is impossible if the nuclear talks aren’t going well. Every time Hillary Clinton snubs Iran for its nuclear program, I mentally settle into the idea of at least another two months in prison. We hear about the nuclear issue every day on TV, but it is impossible to know what is going on by watching state television. Livia says she doesn’t believe that our detainment is directly tied to the nuclear issue, but “it doesn’t help.” She is clearly frustrated at the way the U.S. government is dealing with Iran. “You can’t just make demands to Iran,” she says. “They will never respond to your government demanding they release you. It only makes things worse. They need to talk to the Iranians.”