A Sliver of Light

by Shane Bauer

  We’ve been in this cell for eight months now. In that time, it’s become oddly homey. We have a bright shawl hung on the wall as a tapestry. Pictures of Sarah and family are speckled across its pale green walls. So are other pieces of artwork we’ve collected over the past year: an old photo of Damascus, my brother-in-law’s photo of slabs of ice jutting out of Lake Superior. The wall next to the door has become largely concealed by our fridge, television, and bookshelves made out of cardboard boxes and stolen dinner trays. The cell contains only one bed frame and we use the space underneath it to store our books, clothes, and dry food. There is also a mattress on the floor, which we stack on top of the other bed when we need room to exercise.

  We recently started taking potting soil from the big plants in the main hall and planting vegetables in milk cartons. Green onion shoots soak up the sun on the sill of our window, ten feet off the ground. We can reach it because we have a white plastic chair, which the interrogators gave us when I complained of back pain. The chair also allows us to unscrew our light bulbs at night. Our little three-by-five-foot bathroom, where we shower while straddling the squat toilet, has become the lab of our alcohol experiments—various bottles full of liquid test different theories of how to make it work.

  No one bothers to search our cell anymore. Guards don’t even come down to this hall very often—since there are toilets in the cells, they don’t need to let people out like they do in the rest of the ward. I used to like this kind of isolation, but ever since Sarah left three months ago, it’s been different. I feel like we are being warehoused in this dark corner of the prison. We’ve gotten almost no word from the outside. The interrogators have come only twice since Sarah left and they haven’t brought us any letters from her—just a few short missives from our moms. The stillness is starting to grate on me.

  Lately, it’s been hard to ignore prisoners’ conversations on the pay phones at the end of the hall. Some people are there every week, calling home. Some of them break down as soon as they hear their loved ones’ voices. Most lie to their relatives, telling them that things are great, that they are happy and content and that everything will be cleared up soon. Some of them talk baby talk to their children. I can’t help but feel jealous. Why can they call their families, and we can’t even get letters?

  It’s almost Christmas, which I find one of the most depressing times of year to be in prison. Only the beginning of spring is worse. I imagine my family struggling to stifle tears as they sit around a tree at my mom’s house. Or maybe they are each alone, walking forlornly on snowy streets, lost in their own private sadness and yearning. Or worse, maybe they are caught in a tightly woven story of hope where they tell themselves we will be released in time for the holiday.

  It is getting harder to access them in my mind without letters. And when weeks pass with no word from anyone outside our grimy hallway, Josh and I get depressed. Sometimes, I just stare at the numbers I scratched into the heater months ago, hoping one day to call Sarah. We start to wonder out loud whether anything is happening out there. The outside world becomes hazy and we imagine reasons for a stalemate in our situation. We start to wonder if people are giving up. There can only be so long an absent person can stay alive in people’s psyches before that person starts to fade. Has anyone, in a slip of the tongue, yet referred to us in the past tense?

  We need letters to survive mentally. We need them to give us that little boost—that little shot of love and hope—that helps us hang on for a few more weeks. But Josh and I both know the letters won’t come unless we do something. It’s easier for them not to bring us letters. It’s also better for them if we lose touch with the outside. Forlorn, depressed prisoners are easier to handle.

  We really only have one weapon—hunger-striking. They don’t want us to be harmed, because we are valuable to them. We need to hurt ourselves to make them treat us humanely.

  One day, when Ehsan comes by our cell, we tell him about our plan to stop eating in one week. He looks shocked, but he seems to think it’s a good idea. He has been sending messages to our interrogators for weeks now, telling them we need to see them. They have never responded to him. When we tell him about the hunger strike, he says, “They will come, I’m sure. If you stop eating, they will come. Write a letter to them. I will give it to my boss and make a copy for them right away. I promise.”

  In our letter, we are amicable, diplomatic. “We hope we don’t have to resort to this,” we say. “We want to have a relationship of trust with you. We don’t want to cause problems.”

  They don’t come. They are testing us. They know this is a larger fight than just one about letters. They know we are rebelling against the feeling of being warehoused and forgotten. They know we want to keep them aware that they can’t neglect us now that Sarah is gone. They want to win this. Their first move is to act completely indifferent. We understand that—it would be foolish of them to respond to a threat before we have even done anything.

  So we strike. It’s been over a year since we’ve done this. When Sarah was here, we were always too afraid of being separated to hunger-strike. We’re still afraid of that, but Josh and I prepare by deciding who’ll take which books if we’re sent off to solitary. We reason that whoever has to leave the cell should take the biggest, most difficult ones. If they pull us apart, we will go ten days with no food before we give in.

  For three days, we lie in our beds. I drink water compulsively, keeping my belly always full. At mealtimes, we carry our water bottles to each other’s beds to sit and talk. Being hungry with Josh is far easier than being hungry alone. Our first hunger strike, during our first week in prison, felt like a fight. It empowered me. But in every strike after that, I felt that I was watching the life slowly drain out of me. It seemed like I was withering away for nothing. I was alone, no one seemed to care, and it was hard to convince myself that it meant anything. With Josh here, I don’t feel lost. Time slows and my body empties, but our solidarity keeps me afloat.

  On the third day, Josh’s interrogator comes. He takes Josh out of the cell. I don’t know what’s going on. I pass the minutes by pacing, trying not to think about Josh not coming back. Then the interrogator returns and takes me to the padded interrogation room. There is a note of concern in his tone. “What’s wrong?” he asks. “Are you feeling okay?” Then he lays an envelope in front of me. I open it and find letters from Sarah. My hunger disappears. Words jump off the page.

  We had no idea what a big deal we are . . . So many expensive gifts from Oman . . . Tons of media . . . preparing for Oprah . . . We never imagined one-fiftieth of what our friends were doing . . . family members feel guilt . . . I’m so emotionally exhausted . . . Alex and I cried in the car and held each other . . . I’m going to throw some petals in the Hudson for you guys . . . You’re my favorite place in the world.

  I flip through the stack excitedly. Sarah’s words connect me to the world in a way no others could. I understand where she is coming from. She understands where I am going. Suddenly I feel loved and supported, not empty and lost.

  Then my heart starts to sink.

  “This isn’t everything,” I say to the interrogator. “You have hardly given us anything in three months. There are only twenty letters here. There is nothing from my sisters. Hardly anything from my parents. This isn’t enough.”

  “Not enough?” he says. “Shane, I told you you are not allowed letters from your sisters. It’s against the rules.” He did tell us that last summer, when he arbitrarily cut letters from our siblings.

  “If you don’t give me letters from my sisters, I can’t start eating again. You have to give us all the letters from our families.”

  He takes the letters from my hand. “If you eat, you can have these letters. If you don’t, then nothing. It’s your choice. It doesn’t matter to me.” The stack of papers, my connection to Sarah, the taste of her first moments of freedom, the reassurance that she is okay, the sight of the world through her eyes, the end to this hunger infus
ing my entire body—all of these things dangle before me, free to take if only I will back down.

  “I can’t,” I say to him. It takes every nerve in my body to stand and walk back to my cell, empty-handed. When I open the door, Josh looks at me, smiling, with a stack of letters in his hands. For some reason, they gave him all of his, including the ones from his brother. Is this another way to keep us off-balance, divided? As soon as I start to explain what happened, I hear the distinct, hard-soled footsteps of an interrogator approach. I assume he is coming to strip Josh of his letters.

  The door opens a crack and from behind it, the interrogator’s voice says, “Step outside.” After all this time, this man still never shows his face. I put my blindfold on and we step around the corner. In a near whisper, he says, “If you eat today, we will bring you the rest of your letters in two days.”

  “From my sisters and—”

  “You will get them all,” he says.

  “If you don’t bring them, we will hunger-strike again,” I say.

  “That is okay. They will come.”

  I take the envelope of letters and go back into the cell. When the footsteps fade away, Josh and I shout, jump, and laugh. We give each other big, tight hugs. Out here in our dark, dusty hall, in the wilderness of Section 209, we feel like we’ve just slain Goliath.

  On Christmas Eve, Dumb Guy comes with a box of books and a stack of letters. In the interrogation room, we look through the letters and books, and we are satisfied. As promised, I get letters from my sisters and more from my parents. Josh and I decided that we should ride the wave of our victory and use it as a precedent. We tell Dumb Guy that from now on, we will hunger-strike whenever thirty days pass without them bringing us all of our letters from family.

  Dumb Guy seems unconcerned. He has something else on his mind. He leans back in his chair, smiling, practically begging us to ask him what he is hiding. We can see him clearly—unlike Josh’s interrogator, Dumb Guy doesn’t make us wear our blindfolds around him anymore. “Put your letters away,” he says. He hands us two envelopes. Each one has a blank card inside with a Christmas tree on it. This is it? He wants us to be grateful to him for bringing us Christmas cards? It feels like a sick joke.

  “Write a message to your family,” he says. Josh and I look at each other, asking with our eyes what we should say. “Tell them your wishes,” Dumb Guy says. “We will send it to them.” I am skeptical. We have written letters to our families before, on our own accord, and asked our interrogators to deliver them. They told us they did, but our families received nothing.

  “My family doesn’t celebrate Christmas,” Josh says. “We are Jewish.”

  “Don’t Jews celebrate Christmas?” Dumb Guy asks. “Do you celebrate New Year’s? You can write the card or you cannot,” he says, acting hurt. “It’s up to you.”

  We start to write. “Just a few sentences!” he says. He grabs Josh’s card and looks it over. In the tiny writing we use out of habit to conserve our contraband ink in the cell, Josh has written a list of wishes: books he wants, being more connected to family and friends through letters and phone calls, freedom.

  “You cannot ask them for things,” Dumb Guy snaps. “You can wish them good health, a happy Christmas, things like that. You have lost your chance, Josh. You broke the rules. You are done.” It’s always like this with him and Josh. Dumb Guy always wants to string Josh along a little bit. Make things just a little harder for him in these meetings. By telling him he can’t write a card, he is really just telling Josh to start begging. Josh never begs. He will ask for another chance, but that’s it.

  I write my message carefully, so as not to have it taken away. I tell them I miss them. I say that I am strong and healthy. I thank them for everything they’ve done. And I tell them we are getting letters from our siblings and Sarah “after time for our tears,” our Bob Dylan code for “hunger-striking.”

  After trying to convince us that Josh doesn’t get to send a card home, Dumb Guy relents and gives him a piece of paper to write on. Josh, being Josh, starts his new card, trying to make his Jewish family laugh at the absurdity of sending a Christmas card from Iranian prison. “Ho! Ho! Ho!” he writes.

  In our cell that night, we take chicken we’ve saved out of the fridge. We make stuffing with old bread and chicken broth we kept in the freezer from a lunch weeks ago. We thaw to room temperature about ten green beans we’ve culled from various stews. We rehydrate some dried cranberries we’ve had for months and add orange zest. We put some apple slices, butter, sugar, cinnamon, and crumbled whole wheat cookies in a plastic bag and steep it in our thermos until it becomes hot apple pie. We talk about the letters so much that it almost feels like our loved ones are present. Josh, being Jewish, doesn’t normally celebrate this day. It kind of feels like he is giving me a gift, celebrating Christmas in Iranian prison.

  78. Sarah

  I write them every day. Sometimes—after a sixteen-hour-day has left me limp and exhausted—the last thing I do before I let myself sleep is call up a friend and ask her if she’ll take dictation. I lie down with the phone pressed to my cheek, close my eyes, and talk to Shane and Josh about my day as my friend types. No matter what, I’ll always write.

  Today is different though. For the first time since I left Iran I’m not just sending my thoughts into a void—never knowing if or when my letters will reach them. For once, instead of the one-sided conversation I’ve been struggling to keep up these last four months, I can respond to their actual words.

  I just got your Christmas cards from the Swiss. I can’t believe it! I called your mom and sisters right away. I read what you wrote to your dad over the phone and we both started crying. What you wrote me—along with the messages I’ve gotten from the Swiss and Salem—touched me to the very core. No one knows as well as I do how hard you guys are fighting in there. Please know that we’re fighting just as hard out here.

  As I write, I can’t help but think about all the hands my letters will pass through before they get to them. The State Department, the Swiss . . . The thought of Father Guy and Dumb Guy reading my letters makes me livid, but there’s also the small hope in the back of my mind that our interrogators will communicate what I write to their superiors—even that it could make some sort of difference.

  We were recently notified through the Swiss that Shane, Josh, and I will be tried in about a month, February 6. Even though I’m on the official papers from the Revolutionary Court, there’s been no talk from the Iranian government about my returning. The last proposed trial date, November 6, was canceled—the official reason being that Josh and Shane “didn’t show up” in court. We realize this one could be canceled as well. Anything could happen.

  This month of pretrial limbo is frustrating, but I am not letting it discourage me. I hold out faith that the judge will show compassion in line with Islamic values and release you guys before the trial. If they don’t, I maintain hope that the trial will lead to you and Josh being released.

  The fact that I can now have confidence that you will receive my letters makes it much easier and more joyful to write. Please tell Josh that I can’t wait to spend time with him. I have his voice with me all the time, same as yours, telling me that I can overcome even the largest obstacles with grace and dignity—just like we did inside—telling me to breathe deeply, stretch, love myself.

  I address my letters to Shane—I can’t imagine the interrogators will give Josh letters from me since I’m not family—but I feel confident Josh knows I have them both equally in mind. I try to pass on as much information as I can without risking censorship and at the same time be honest. I know Shane and Josh will want the bad news as well as the good, so I pass it on faithfully. Still, I think about how carefully they used to speak to me in hava khori, storing up soothing words for our visits, holding back words that might scrape or burn. No matter how badly I want them to stay connected to what’s happening out here, I don’t feel comfortable burdening them with my problems.


  Later in the evening, Josh’s brother, Alex, stops by the apartment where I’m staying in DC. We read the cards again, laughing about Josh’s writing “Ho! Ho! Ho!” These sparse, heavily censored lines have given us far more information than we’ve had in months. Josh is still being playful. Shane is worried about me. The two of them were desperate but also strong enough to go on hunger strike for more letters. They are still Shane and Josh.

  79. Josh

  My insomnia came back after the hunger strike. I think that’s because I’ve allowed myself to feel too strongly. The struggle of the hunger strike made me come alive. Then came the exuberance of winning and the joy of reading all the letters.

  At this point, I just want a magic pill for all the pain that floods in when I allow myself to feel. I want this onrush of anxiety to go away. And I want to be able to sleep at night. I’ve tried everything: I don’t drink tea after 2 p.m.; I exercise until exhaustion; I don’t read nonfiction at night; I don’t eat snacks at night; I meditate at night. Nothing consistently counteracts the insomnia. Showers sometimes help, but sometimes they awaken me. Even masturbation doesn’t help, though I do it late at night after Shane falls asleep.