A Sliver of Light

by Shane Bauer

  “I’m fine, Shon. You and our other good friends have been working closely with the families, right?”

  “Yeah, it’s been amazing. Your mom, Cindy, and I are so close. But there’s division around strategy, and sometimes it gets personal. People don’t agree on what should be done.”

  “Well, it should be a lot more clear now that I’m out. We can find out what worked in my case. Or didn’t work,” I say.

  I hang up with Shon and start to jog down the beach. Before I can do anything or decide anything, I need to feel like myself again. Shon’s words have shaken me up a bit. I’m worried about the conflict he referred to around the campaign’s strategy, but I know some exercise and a good breakfast will help me stay grounded. I’ll eat eggs. Eggs! Then, I’ll find someone to cut my hair short, something I was never allowed to do in prison. I’ll talk to Shane’s and Josh’s family members, one by one, and then I’ll talk to my own. Later, I’ll meet with Salem, and we’ll begin to devise a plan.

  A few hours later I’m back on the beach. I’m spending as much time as possible outside, since feeling the fresh breeze and sun on my skin makes me feel one thousand times more alive. Salem is walking beside me, wearing a long white robe and carrying a thin, ornate cane. I’m wearing new clothes that I bought today at a local mall, black cotton slacks and a long, white V-neck.

  “Your haircut looks lovely, Sarah, but where are your shoes?” Salem asks.

  “I’m sorry,” I say, suddenly embarrassed. “I like to walk barefoot on the beach.”

  “Sarah, are you a hippie?” Salem asks with a sparkle in his eyes.

  I laugh. “If walking barefoot on the beach makes me a hippie, then I guess I am.” I turn serious. “Salem, I have so many questions to ask you.”

  “Ask me anything you like, my dear.”

  “Who paid my bail? Was it you?”

  “Sarah, Omanis are not in the habit of asking for credit for what we do—it’s not our culture.”

  “That’s incredibly generous of you, Salem, but the media is going to ask me who provided half a million dollars in cash—what should I tell them?”

  “Tell them the truth, that all you know is that you were brought out of Iran in an Omani plane, that we led the negotiations and will continue to do so for Shane and Josh until they are freed.”

  “You led them?”

  “Yes, of course. Do you think I could leave Iran without you? But you must remember that everything I do is for His Majesty Sultan Qaboos bin Said.”

  “How are we going to get them out, Salem?”

  “You and I are going to work side by side. You must show Iran’s president and Supreme Leader that they didn’t make a mistake releasing you. You must show them that you are fair, that the boys will also be fair.”

  “Okay, I can do that. We’re going to have a press conference in New York in three days. Then next week I go on Oprah.”

  “Perfect, Sarah, everyone loves Oprah. My wife and daughter will be very happy.”

  I explain that we chose Oprah because it’s the most watched American show in the Middle East. I ask Salem how he got involved in our case and he tells me he was first approached by an Iranian family residing in the United States. From the start, this family knew we were innocent and that our detention would only serve to worsen the animosity between the countries. Three months into our captivity, they decided to approach His Majesty Sultan Qaboos, with whom this family has old ties, to serve as a behind-the-scenes intermediary with the goal of quickly resolving our case. The sultan agreed, appointing Salem al-Ismaily as his envoy.

  “Do the families know about this Iranian family?” I ask.

  “No, no one knows about this.”

  “I heard that several members of our families approached the Omani embassy early on, asking for your government to mediate.”

  “Yes, that’s true,” Salem answers. “That was very helpful. It encouraged your government to officially ask His Majesty to get involved—from that point on we made your case a priority.”

  “So, what happened next?”

  “The tricky part was to get to the Supreme Leader,” Salem goes on to tell me. He says that with the help of friends, he was granted a meeting. He brought something special to this meeting, a Quran that he made for his daughter after she lost her sight. On every page there is a button to press, and a recorded voice reads the Surahs aloud. Salem showed this to the Supreme Leader and apparently he was very impressed. “Then,” Salem continues, “I mentioned your case was a special consideration for the sultan. It made an impression.”

  “But why did the Supreme Leader agree to my release but not Josh’s and Shane’s?”

  “It wasn’t the Supreme Leader—it was the judiciary. There are disputes between the judiciary and the president’s office. The Supreme Leader has already approved their release, but he says the president and the judiciary must sort this out among themselves for the good of Iran. Ahmadinejad was going to pardon you all, perhaps even bring you to New York on his own private plane, but the judiciary managed to stop him.”

  “So, the Supreme Leader has agreed to release Shane and Josh?”

  “In principle, yes, but all sides must agree. The judiciary, the parliament . . . We cannot risk another mess like what just happened.”

  “How are we going to do that?” I ask.

  “I will meet you in DC and tell you more soon. For now, focus on your speech, Sarah. Focus on Oprah and, please, buy yourself some shoes.”

  “Okay, I will, Salem.” I smile and reach out to shake his hand. I’m reassured by Salem’s brilliant diplomacy—his capacity for truly understanding the frustration on both sides. After walking along the beach for hours, we’ve made our way back to the embassy. “Salem, I am really going to enjoy working with you. I can never repay you for what you’ve done for me and my family.”

  “Sarah, you can repay me by helping me finish this job. Then, we can plan your wedding.”

  Back upstairs, I climb a small ladder onto the roof of this mansion, needing to see the ocean one more time before I go downstairs for dinner. I’ve spent the whole day talking, but I feel like I’ve only scratched the surface of what I need to know. I take a deep breath, close my eyes, and open them again. The palm trees are swaying with the breeze and the setting sun is reflecting off the waves like a million bright sparks, as if a giant blaze were hidden right below the horizon. The sight brings the familiar sting of tears behind my eyes. I truly forgot the world was this beautiful.

  66. Sarah

  When I step off the plane in Dubai to catch my connecting flight from Oman, there are FBI agents waiting for me. They ask me to follow them into a backroom to answer some questions, and then start showing me pictures of Iranian men, asking if any of them looks familiar. They ask me if I know anything about Peter Levinson, the missing ex–FBI agent. I tell them, politely, that I’m not ready to talk to them, but that they should contact me in a few weeks when I’ve had time to gather my thoughts.

  As soon as my mom and I step on the plane to the United States, a flight attendant informs us that we’ve been bumped up from first class to luxury class. They bring me a vegetarian meal and warn me that there are people on the plane, most likely journalists, who know who I am and are trying to talk to me. A few minutes later a man I don’t know walks up to me, smiles, and hands me a small box. There’s a note on the top: “From a fellow American citizen with love.”

  Inside the box is a duty-free watch. I try to imagine what I symbolize for this man. American resilience? National pride? I’m not sure that I’ve ever felt anything akin to nationalism in my life—my core identity has largely been shaped in response to (and rebellion against) what I dislike about my culture . . . greed, selfish individualism, a sense of superiority and entitlement over others—but the connection I feel to this man is undeniable. Thanks to the Iranian government, I’ve never felt so American in my life.

  The flight attendant apologizes—she tells me they’re trying to keep pas
sengers away, but it’s difficult. I turn on my personal TV and flip through the channels until I find the news. After a few minutes, an interview with ABC’s Christiane Amanpour and Ahmadinejad comes on.

  “We let Sarah go,” he tells her, referring to me by my first name, as if we’re old friends. “You may be aware that eight Iranians are being illegally detained in the United States, so I believe it would not be misplaced to ask that the U.S. government should make a humanitarian gesture to release Iranians who were illegally arrested and detained here.”

  “Are you saying you’re holding the two Americans as hostages for the release of Iranians here?” Amanpour asks. Asking for a prisoner swap when they know we’re innocent, before Shane and Josh have been tried or convicted, is hostage taking in no uncertain terms. Still, the president demurs.

  “No, but how would you know that those Iranians are criminals?” the president retorts, raising his eyebrows and tilting his head. “Are you a judge?”

  Disgusted, I turn the TV off. At least they are calling us hostages on mainstream TV, I think. It’s much more accurate than “hikers.” Being called a hiker is kind of like being called an omelet maker—it’s something I enjoy doing, but by no means is it a core part of my identity. It also doesn’t offer any explanation as to what brought us to the part of the world where we were captured. I press a button and my seat transforms into a small private pod. I lie down, drape a blanket over its sides, and take out the speech I’ve written for the press conference I’ll give in New York a few hours after we land.

  As I fall asleep, I think about talking to my sister, Martha, on the phone that morning. “Sar,” she said, “I’ve been worrying about you every second of every day.” The interrogators never allowed me one letter from my sister, telling me that because we don’t share the same father, she is not considered to be immediate family. As much as I tried to resist it, not hearing from her for over a year had forced me to stop thinking about her, and a part of me had even begun to believe that she didn’t care. “You are so important to me, Sar. You’re my only sister and I need you.” Her words were like balm; they found a way through the hard shell I had around me, and my first free tears began to flow.

  I hear the flight attendant calling my name. I open my eyes and she tells me that the pilot has announced our descent. I’m finally back in the United States, but I feel like I’m leaving a big part of who I am behind me—and right now Shane and Josh are the only people in the world who understand me; even my own country feels foreign.

  When we get off the plane, Josh’s brother, Alex, is standing in the lobby along with a few people from the State Department. I’d seen pictures of him in prison, but it’s not until this moment that I realize just how much he looks like Josh. I can’t look away.

  “The room will be full of cameras,” Alex says as he, my mom, and I get into a private car bound for New York. “The best advice I’ve heard is to focus on a point on the wall above and behind them.”

  I interrupt him. “Alex, I’m really sorry that Josh is still there. We had no idea this would happen. You can ask me anything, anything at all.”

  “Have they hurt him”—his upper lip twitches—“physically?”

  “No,” I say, “it’s all psychological, but we both know how resilient Josh is. He’s going to come out okay.”

  The only time I saw Josh cry in prison, his tears were in sympathy with my tears. I never saw him cry for himself. Now, with my arms wrapped around Alex’s shoulders, it’s as though I’m with Josh again, finally seeing his tears, as if I’d never left him at all.

  Autumn 2010

  67. Josh

  Dumb Guy shows up at hava khori. He makes sure we’ve received all the books from Sarah’s cell. Then he makes it clear he won’t come back for at least two months, and I get peeved. That means no letters, no phone calls, no nothing for two months.

  “We can’t go that long without contact,” I tell Dumb Guy. “Is this how it’s going to change without Sarah? Why won’t you come sooner? What’s wrong? Do you miss Sarah already?”

  Dumb Guy stares at me blankly, then makes his way to the door. Before leaving, he says dryly, “I think you miss Sarah.” I don’t argue.

  Back in the cell, I stare up at the window and think about her. I think about all the freedom dreams we hatched together. The three of us will hike in the woods, we’ll go whale watching. We’ll gather at a rustic cabin and get drunk. And we’ll listen to a full album of music with our eyes closed.

  When I’m eighty years old, what difference will it make whether this ordeal takes one, two, or even three years? For me, the most difficult part about imagining a longer detention was the prospect of Sarah struggling through it in solitary confinement. With her free, I feel more relaxed.

  I notice the moon at night signaling the approaching Jewish New Year. But I’m not motivated to celebrate Rosh Hashanah without Sarah. I won’t celebrate the holidays anymore. I realize how much she encouraged me. For her, I strived to honestly say, “I’m doing fine,” and to be able to be there for her. I didn’t realize that her simple “How are you?”—so full of empathy—meant so much to me. I didn’t realize that I gained a sense of purpose from caring for Sarah.

  It’s 11 p.m., and Shane and I are watching the nightly English news, waiting for a story about Sarah. For the past few nights, we’ve watched attentively and haven’t seen anything. There has to be a story about her.

  All I see is the back of her head, but I recognize her purple hijab immediately. She walks slowly toward an airplane. Then the screen cuts to her at a press conference speaking to the cameras.

  “I want to thank Ayatollah Sayyid Ali Khamenei for his compassion.” Her voice goes silent.

  “Bullshit!” Shane blurts out. “Of course, they’d only let us hear that one line.”

  The canned audio cuts to the commentators who laud the Iranian government’s mercy. They cite “medical considerations” for her release.

  “Salem’s making her play that diplomatic game,” I point out to calm him. Then I interject, “She looks great!”

  The coverage is agonizingly short. The news turns to Ahmadinejad at the United Nations, and my heart sinks.

  I worry about her. I know that leaving solitary is a huge adjustment—even within prison. I worry she’ll have a hard time shedding the anxiety and anger that prisons breed. But hearing her talk at hava khori about Salem and the speech she memorized last week made me glad that she’s the one they released. If I had to choose one advocate out of the three of us, it’d be her.

  In that short glance at her face on TV, like in those first glances when she used to enter hava khori, I can read her emotional state. I can see her poise in public and her clarity of purpose. For the Iranian government, Sarah’s freedom perhaps lessens the urgency to release Shane and me. But don’t they realize how effectively she’ll advocate for our release?

  As long as I think about Sarah uncaged, I feel more free myself.

  68. Sarah

  “I feel bruised but unbroken,” I say, standing behind a podium in a room filled with cameras at my press conference in New York City. Immediately after, I’m ushered out of the building, past flashing cameras to a cab waiting outside.

  “Sarah,” Paul Holmes says as I’m about to step into the cab, “you know, there’s no reason to go straight back to the hotel . . .” He adds with a lilting British accent, “Perhaps you’d like to walk back?”

  Paul was referred to our families by a friend. He helped them write their first press release less than a week after we were captured—weaving together three entirely different texts into a version everyone was comfortable with. Paul currently works as a communications professional—before which he was an international journalist who worked on and off in the Middle East for almost two decades. He told me he thought that editing that initial press release would be the end of his involvement. I’m glad it wasn’t. Since then, there have been dozens more press releases, letters, and carefully written medi
a talking points. Paul’s become far more than the campaign’s pro bono communications professional; he’s the glue that holds our campaign together—actually, the families together. From what I gather, without Paul’s calm demeanor and reasonable facilitation, internal disputes might have torn our families apart months ago.

  “So, how do you feel, Sarah?” Paul asks. It’s the day after the press conference. Paul and I are sitting in his cozy apartment on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. He’s been gently quizzing me for the last fifteen minutes in preparation for Oprah.

  “I feel determined,” I say with hesitation. For some reason, this is the hardest question I’ve been asked. “Yes, determined.”

  “Okay, I don’t doubt that. But ‘determined’ is one step removed. What do you feel under that?”

  “Um, devastated?” I offer. “No, that’s not quite it. Sad?”

  “Something’s missing, Sarah. If I don’t believe you, the audience won’t either.”

  “The truth is, I feel numb, Paul. I’m trying to find the rawest emotion, but I just don’t feel anything.”

  “That’s okay, Sarah. That’s exactly what you should say. If she asks you how you feel, tell her you feel numb.”