A Sliver of Light

by Shane Bauer

  “That makes sense,” she replies with a nod.

  “Madame Secretary,” I say, “I know we don’t have much time. I want to be direct.”

  “Sarah, feel free to say anything.”

  “The Iranian government considers releasing me to be a gesture of goodwill. If our government doesn’t give anything back, they’ll take Shane and Josh to trial. I don’t have to tell you that espionage carries the death penalty in Iran. Their lives are at risk.”

  “Yes, I know, but we don’t believe Iran will ever do that. The consequences would be too great.”

  “How can we be sure of that? The Iranian government is totally unpredictable. We want you to consider releasing this woman, Shahrazad. Or the ex–Iranian ambassador to Jordan, Nosratollah Tajik, who’s been under house arrest in London since 2006. We’ve heard directly from representatives at the British embassy that the British government feels no need to extradite him—they’ll let him go if the U.S. drops the request. Both of these cases are low-profile and neither committed a serious crime, if any at all. In Shahrazad’s case, it was her husband who was the mastermind, not her. Tajik is a sick, old man. These people are not dangerous.”

  “Sarah, I understand the situation and I appreciate its gravity. We’re looking at this from every angle. I can’t tell you what we will do at this point, but I can promise you it’s being treated as a top priority. We are going to do our very best to come up with something that will work.”

  As we get up to leave, I realize that, though my criticism about her approach to foreign policy hasn’t changed, there’s something about Hillary Clinton that I can’t help but like. At least she heard me out, and my gut tells me she’s being straight with us.

  Outside, we pile into two separate taxis. “Take us to the White House, please,” Josh’s mom, Laura, says to the driver.

  The office they lead us to is filled with dark, heavy wood furniture and oil paintings. We’ve been sitting here less than ten minutes when the door opens and we’re told the president will meet with us. This is a complete surprise—we were told we’d meet with Dennis Ross, one of Obama’s chief advisors on Iran. Instead, they lead us down the hall, onto an elevator, up two floors, then up a small spiral staircase into the Oval Office.

  The president gives me a warm hug. We sit down and begin to exchange pleasantries, but I can feel the minutes ticking away. This meeting means everything, and there’s something I have to say.

  “Mr. President,” I say, “after we were captured, in the early terrifying days, my one consolation was the fact that you were in office. As unlucky as we were, we knew we were at least lucky on that count.”

  I’m sort of bullshitting—but a part of me means it. I definitely felt hopeful that Obama could sweet-talk us out of prison in the early weeks of our detention, but after a year in prison, I wasn’t so sure. The fact that the Iranian government freed the 1979 hostages to President Reagan is often cited to support the claim that Iranian leaders have historically favored Republican presidents over Democrats. Others argue that the Iranian government is simply good at playing one party against the other—citing the fact that the Islamic Republic waited until just hours after Carter was out of office to release the hostages in 1979. This calculated move ended the hostage crisis with a bang, and showed the world that Iran was pretty powerful—maybe even powerful enough to influence the outcome of a U.S. election.

  Even if Republicans have at times gotten results from a more aggressive approach to Iran, at what cost? Diplomacy between our countries definitely didn’t improve under Reagan or the Bushes. Iran’s nuclear program has continued to develop and today we’re just as close, maybe closer than ever, to all-out war. The Obama administration has been far from soft on Iran—it has slammed them with the toughest sanctions in Iran’s history, thereby hurting the Iranian people and arguably leaving their government unscathed. Perhaps an even more aggressive stance could have gotten Josh, Shane, and me out of prison sooner, but it also could have done the opposite. Either way, any strategy that means inching closer to war would never be worth it.

  The president’s face looks slightly dismayed, almost as if he’s read my thoughts and is privately agreeing with my logic. “Thank you, Sarah,” he says. “I can tell you this much. Your case has been a priority in this office. We discuss it daily.”

  “Sir, I’m in close contact with the Omani envoy who negotiated my release, Salem al-Ismaily. He said that Ahmadinejad is ready to do for Shane and Josh what he did for me—he just needs a gesture of goodwill from you. In Iran, I met with the daughters of a woman who’s being imprisoned here in the U.S. Her name is Shahrazad.” I realize I don’t have the letter they gave me—I left it with Salem. “It looks like she’s doing time for assisting her husband, who tried to smuggle night-vision goggles into Iran. If she could just be shown leniency, released early, she’s already done three years and deserves to go home to her family. This kind of thing could be done quietly, and it would work.”

  “I’m sorry, I can’t discuss the specifics with you of what I will or won’t do,” the president says, standing up and buttoning his jacket. “If you’ll excuse me, I have another meeting. Just know we will do absolutely everything we can until Shane and Josh are home.”

  The president puts out his hand for us to walk out first, and Cindy, Laura, and Alex stand up. When we reach the door, he stops and shakes each of our hands a second time.

  “Can I ask you a question?” Obama asks, cocking his head and giving me a warm smile. I get the feeling he’s busy but doesn’t want to end our meeting too abruptly. “What did you miss the most? Was there a certain food you really wanted, something like that?”

  “Wide open spaces,” I say, without hesitation. “Like the sky and the ocean. I always dreamed about the ocean.” The president nods.

  As I walk out of the White House, I think about what I came out of a few weeks ago. My world was so small. The shape of the plaster on the wall of my cell—in one spot it looked like a woman lying prone, in another like asparagus—mattered to me. The sound that another prisoner’s footsteps made as she passed my cell had an emotional impact. All those details became the stars in my sky, the only meaningful backdrop to my life. Now, my world is bigger than ever. I’ve gone from seeing the world through the eye of a needle to standing on the steps of the White House.

  I have to be careful, I think. I can’t let all this attention affect me. In less than a week I’ve met with the presidents of Iran and the United States, the secretary of state, countless diplomats, foreign ministers, and gone on Oprah. I have to tease out what’s meaningful here and what isn’t. I feel a pang of longing for Shane and Josh, and immediately I’m grateful for that feeling; my love for them will continue to orient me, to guide me on the right path.

  72. Sarah

  I’m about to step into a hot shower in my hotel room when the phone rings. “There’s been a complication with your mom’s surgery,” a friend tells me. “It only happens in two percent of gallbladder removals. Her pancreas was triggered and now it’s blown up like a balloon. They say she’ll be okay in a week or two, but in the meantime there’s not much they can do and the pain is severe.”

  My mom never mentioned she was sick in any of her letters to me in prison. She put off her surgery until I got home—partly out of fear that something might happen to her while under anesthesia. In the last eight months she’s had to go to the emergency room several times after being immobilized by attacks. I witnessed one in the airport on the way to Chicago for Oprah. My mom was in the restroom stall for twenty minutes, gasping and crying as she tried to breathe through the pain.

  I rush to the airport. I step up to the porter and hand him my passport. He looks at me strangely. I feel ashamed to be clear across the country right now. Even though the doctor had said she was in the clear, I shouldn’t have left her.

  “That will be twenty-five dollars for your bag check,” the porter says in a slow, Jamaican drawl.

  “What
?” I ask, giving him an irritated look.

  “To check your bag you have to pay twenty-five dollars,” he repeats, smiling.

  “Since when?” I ask indignantly.

  “For a long time now.” He pauses and his smile gets even bigger. “I know you. You’re Sarah—you’ve been in Iran.”

  His sweetness disarms me. “Sorry,” I say, “I guess things really have changed.” I take out my wallet and hand him my credit card.

  “Don’t worry,” the porter says, reaching out to take my card, “I know your boyfriend will be back soon. You’re famous!”

  I smile and thank him. I’ve been out only three weeks, but this is already the fourteenth time I’ve boarded a plane. I went to Georgia to see my sister and her family, to Oakland to be reunited with my friends, to Minnesota so I could wrap my arms around Shane’s sisters and his sweet, teddy bear of a dad, to L.A. to be filmed for a documentary, back and forth to DC and New York several times—and now I’m on my way back to Oakland.

  This time must feel like an eternity for Shane and Josh. I wonder what books they’re reading now. When I left, Josh was about to tackle Ulysses. I suddenly get a pang of sadness when I realize I didn’t ask Shane what he was going to read next the last time I saw him. If I knew what book Shane was reading, I could imagine him sitting with his back to the cell wall, the book perched on his bent knees, slowly and carefully turning each page, coaxing minutes into hours, hours into days, days into weeks. How long before they let me hear his voice?

  My friend Bessa is waiting for me at the airport in Oakland. She’s one of the few people I know who can roll with me in my hypervigilant and wildly unpredictable emotional state. I get into her car, and Bessa listens without comment as I vent for ten minutes. Then she smiles and asks if I’ve eaten. She’s a nurse, and she tells me that in most cases like my mom’s, the pancreas will eventually return to normal.

  “Most cases?” I ask, looking at her intensely, almost accusingly.

  “It’s gonna be okay,” she says. “Just breathe.”

  I rush into my mom’s hospital room and find her doubled over in pain, small and weak and barely able to talk. For the first time since I was released into her arms, I feel the incredible satisfaction of knowing that I’m exactly where I need to be.

  Over the next few weeks, a constant stream of friends stops by the hospital with food, money, and clothes for me and flowers for my mom. This tight-knit community has been holding my mom up for more than a year, and I know they’ll do the same for me as long as this takes. The nurses set up a cot for me in the room and my friends take shifts running my errands, taking dictation, and filling me in on what I’ve missed. Prison has reduced my skill at dealing with the basic details of life—like remembering to sleep and exercise. I can’t imagine how impossible this would be without all these people taking care of me.

  Sitting next to my mom, I arrange and rearrange her pillows in a futile attempt to find a position that lessens her pain. I’m amazed at the incredible work that’s been done on our behalf. Our families and friends have been able to shape the narrative around our story. Though the title “American hikers” grates on me every time I hear it, I have to admit it was a media-savvy compromise, considering that journalists and activists were both volatile categories in post–Green Movement Iran. It also made us famous. When you type “hiker” into Google, we’re the first thing that comes up. Very few prisoners in history have had that kind of branding.

  In the hospital—with my BlackBerry pressed to my ear and my other hand constantly jotting down notes—I learn that Nicole, Shane’s sister, has a room in her house where she sorts Free the Hikers mail, copying every letter of support, sending them to Evin Prison, and filing away the originals for when we return. She also forwards books to the State Department to be delivered to the Swiss embassy in Tehran by diplomatic pouch. Shane’s father, Al, is a mechanic who rarely touched a computer before our capture. Now he boasts about having accumulated six thousand e-mails over the last year. Alex, Josh’s brother, has become fluent in diplomatic double-speak, and Shannon, Shane’s sister, regularly talks with an anonymous caller who offered to pay our bail. Our families have become well-oiled machines.

  Still, trying to make strategic decisions on conference calls is like herding a gang of angry, traumatized cats. Josh’s parents are not at all afraid to express their distaste and discomfort on the calls—which often rubs Shane’s family of quiet, stalwart Minnesotans the wrong way. My unruly family members constitute the wildcards—no one ever knows what they’re going to do or say. Our politics are as different as our personalities, and the calls are usually a mixture of tears, awkward silences, rants, and interminable monologues. At times it feels like ten egos competing for space, and I have to constantly remind myself that we’re all doing our best and we’re doing this for love.

  I’ve spent the better part of a week combing through e-mails, digging up old pictures, and collecting various testimonies to support the veracity of our story. The result is a thirty-five-page document written for our lawyer, Masoud Shafii, that he can use if and when Shane and Josh are brought to court. I’ve tried to address any suspicions that came up during our interrogation—trips to Israel and Palestine, my employment at a language school in Syria, and, of course, the details of our visit to Iraqi Kurdistan. Sitting in an empty hospital room the nurses let me borrow so as not to wake my Mom from a rare nap, I get on a conference call with our families so I can answer any questions they might have about the contents of my research.

  “I read the document,” Jacob, Josh’s dad, begins in a serious voice. “What is this about ‘occupied Palestine’? Are you an idiot?”

  “Did Jacob just call me an idiot?” I ask coldly to no one in particular.

  “Jacob, calm down and ask your question,” Cindy breaks in.

  “Jews founded Tel Aviv in 1909—it was sand dunes before that. How can you say it’s occupied?”

  “Dad, calm down,” Alex says. “Listen to Sarah before you assume anything.”

  “Jacob, I’m not about to have an argument with you about Israel and Palestine. This document was written for our lawyer, to be used in Iran’s courts,” I retort, starting to lose my cool. “The Iranian government refers to all of Israel as ‘occupied territory.’ This document is not for the media—it’s for the Revolutionary Court!”

  We all take turns losing our cool on these calls—and I don’t think there’s one of us who hasn’t said things we regret. None of us were prepared to have our lives taken over by an international crisis. Yet, despite the volatile, high-stress nature of our campaign, incredible things have been accomplished. Over the course of a year and a half, our friends and families have managed to turn an avalanche of criticism, blame, and misinformation into a campaign that boasts thirty thousand Facebook followers and high-level support from countries such as Brazil, Turkey, Oman, and Senegal—as well as figures like Noam Chomsky, Muhammad Ali, Ban Ki-moon, and Desmond Tutu. On the one-year mark of our detention, with vigils being held for us in thirty-five countries around the world, President Obama made a statement in which he referred to Shane, Josh, and me as the “best of the American spirit,” a clear indication of the positive shift in public opinion that had taken place during that time.

  As I sit at my mom’s bedside, combing her long, silver hair, I’m overwhelmed by how it feels to know that our lives mean this much to so many people. Shane’s and Josh’s families are fighting like lions, just like my mom did for fourteen months. Now that her fight is finally done, she has collapsed like a tent in a storm. This is the same woman who worked the night shift at a local restaurant to put herself through nursing school and raised me without help from anyone. I take her hand and press it to my lips, promising myself she’ll never have to fight like that again.

  If my mom and the families hadn’t managed to draw so much attention to my health concerns and solitary confinement, I wouldn’t be here right now. We have to figure out how to do the same for J
osh and Shane. It should be easier to get them out now that Iran’s admitted I’m not a spy—but they still need to save face. Shane has stomach problems, but Josh doesn’t—we can’t play up a health issue and risk having only one of them released. The only way is for the United States to give something, but will it be possible to get these two governments to agree on anything?

  73. Shane

  The interrogators came and gave us pictures. There is Sarah standing in the woods with my mom and sisters; Sarah with Josh’s brother, Alex, in a parking lot; Sarah in a beautiful, busty orange dress at some kind of restaurant. She looks so strong and healthy. There is freedom on her skin and conviction in her eyes. Her smile is stunning. I don’t think she ever smiled that way in here.

  These images bring a flicker of life and happiness to me—a spark in my chest that makes my breath lighter for a while. It opens my imagination and makes conversation flow between Josh and me for hours. We walk briskly at hava khori and try to picture her life. Is she living in Minnesota with my family or is she in California? Is she recording her songs? Is she on the news a lot? Does she go to the beach? Has she met with Obama? She must be telling our families every detail about prison. They must call her whenever they have a question about what life is like for us. Having that link between us and them must put them so much more at ease. I wonder if she talks to me at night before falling asleep in the same way that I whisper under my breath to her. I wonder if she rolls up a blanket and cuddles up to it like I do. What does she have that connects her to us? I wonder if she feels alone out there, where no one understands what she’s been through. I wonder if she talks to anyone about it. I wonder if she rests. How is she surviving? People need money out there, jobs.