by Shane Bauer
I’m anxious about nothing in particular. My eyes close and my body relaxes as I lie in bed. I sense sleep nearby, but there is one final layer of tension that I can’t shed. I don’t know where it is. I swear it is not in my body; otherwise, I’d massage it. I swear it’s not in my mind; otherwise, I’d think it through. I just need to touch the bottom of the well and let the tension go.
A psychiatrist came a few weeks ago and prescribed a barbiturate for me, but a nurse cut me off when he realized I was just hoarding them. I took the barbiturate once and slept like a rock. I hated being sedated though. I couldn’t focus on anything for two days. I don’t really know why I’m hoarding them. Shane doesn’t want them either.
A different nurse is looser with the pills, and he hands me Xanax whenever I ask. As the pile grows, the prospect of a deep sleep and a break from routine tempt me.
On New Year’s Eve, Shane takes the bottle of fermenting dates that we hoped would turn to alcohol by now out from its spot in the bathroom. After months of experimentation, we’ve yet to successfully arrest the fermentation at alcohol; the liquid always ferments a second time, turning to vinegar. I taste the water mixed with rotting dates and cringe in a way that makes Shane laugh.
When night comes around, I hand Shane three of the large blue barbiturates, and I swallow a blue one and a Xanax. We play a movie about capoeira called Only the Strong and lie back in our beds. The performers combine martial arts with music into a subversive dance. I’d love to be able to combine playfulness and rebellion, openness and defiance, like they do. I’d love to be able to sing at sunrise on the beach and escape my enemy with a backflip.
I lean with my back against the wall. Woolen blankets cover my body up to my neck. Right now, I feel neither playful nor rebellious—just focused on living vicariously through these fighters/dancers. Shane and I watch bleary-eyed, sedated in the present moment. My world is going blank. My mental vacancy is filled with the lights and sounds of a television screen. Shane is on his bed, and I’m on mine. Our beds rest on the prison floor and somewhere below this concrete, the prison rests on Planet Earth. The earth spins and cycles around the sun, and we drift off to sleep—nodding off to the year’s end.
80. Sarah
Our campaign runs on East Coast time, so when I’m in California, no matter how early I wake up, I’m already far behind. I jump out of bed at 7 a.m. I’ve only gotten a third of the way through my e-mails when I see one from Chris Crowstaff, one of the directors of a UK-based human rights organization called Safe World for Women. They’ve been advocating for us since the beginning. They helped our moms appeal to the United Nations Special Rapporteur on Torture about my prolonged solitary confinement. Dr. Manfred Nowak of Austria responded by sending an official letter to the Iranian government on my behalf, and my mom used the word torture in the media for the first time. “It is widely recognized that protracted solitary confinement constitutes ‘invisible’ psychological torture,” she said, “especially in a case like Sarah’s when the detainee does not know why she is being held or what will happen to her.”
I recently asked Safe World for Women if they would start a campaign for Zahra Bahrami, the Dutch-Iranian woman I used to call Pink Lady, whom I secretly talked to in prison. During insomniac nights, I sometimes search for information about Zahra and other prisoners who helped me at Evin. I find lovely pictures of her, with bleached blond hair, glamorous Cleopatra eyes, and a pink hijab, but what I read about her case is conflicting and inconclusive. Now, I’m standing in front of the bathroom mirror, brushing my teeth with my right hand and scrolling through e-mails on my phone with my left. When I open Chris’s e-mail, it’s as if time stops. I suddenly feel cold, exposed, and acutely aware of my bare feet on the tile floor.
“No!” I yell. The icy feeling turns into a hot, naked rage.
I’m back in cell 25 sitting on the floor with my back to the wall I share with Zahra. I sit with my knees drawn up to my chest and my eyes closed, feeling her presence, the warmth of her proximity. Somewhere in the distance I can hear someone crying. I know that voice.
My phone crashes on the linoleum as I fall to the floor, gasping and sobbing. I feel arms around me and think of my favorite guard, tough, stubborn Leila. I can hear Zahra’s laugh in the background, her husky voice speaking to me through the vent. “Sarah, I know your mother. I’m a mother too. I’m so sorry for you.”
The e-mail from Chris tells me that Zahra was hanged early that morning. Neither her family nor her lawyer was informed that her execution would take place. All we know is that agents of the Ministry of Intelligence secretly ferried her body to Semnan, a city four and a half hours outside of Tehran. They didn’t tell her family until the last minute, so they wouldn’t have enough time to get to the funeral or be able to see her body before she was buried. No one knows what happened to Zahra, what they might have done to her, in the last days and hours of her life.
“Don’t forget I love you, Sarah,” Zahra wrote in her last note before she was transferred. “No matter where they take me, I will look for you. Remember to listen for me. I will call out your name at night.”
Zahra loved me. In a time and place where it should have been impossible, she brought joy into my life and reminded me that our joy was defiance. She never gave up. I often heard her yelling and arguing with the guards, fiercely defending her dignity in an inhuman place. She sang to me at night, Michael Jackson’s “You Are Not Alone,” and passed me notes in the bathroom trash. She spent the end of her life, not just concerned about her own pain, but trying to help me.
Immediately after I read Zahra’s last note, out of sheer paranoia I ate it. Maybe a part of me knew that she was truly gone. Perhaps I wanted to be sure that the life of this fearless woman would forever be a part of me.
I spend the rest of the day scouring the web for more information about Zahra. I find out she was forty-six years old when she was murdered. She was the mother of two daughters and a son. She was born in Iran in 1965 and, after a difficult divorce in her early twenties, she moved to the Netherlands. There, she worked as a professional belly dancer, traveling back to Tehran frequently to visit her children.
Articles say she was picked up shortly after the Ashura protests in late December 2009, just like she told me during our first conversation through the vent between our cells. Instead of being charged with political crimes like other protesters, Zahra was convicted of smuggling drugs from the Netherlands into Iran.
Perhaps the most shocking thing I learn about Zahra’s execution is how fast they did it. A death sentence in Iran can take years to carry out, and many are reversed on appeal. Zahra was executed less than a month after her sentence was announced, catching her friends, family, and even the Dutch government by surprise. Hers is the sixty-sixth hanging this month, a huge spike even in a country that has the highest per capita execution rate in the world. The Iranian government is on a killing spree, terrified that its people will be emboldened by the Arab Spring, the powerful popular uprisings across the Middle East. The Tunisian government has already fallen; the fear is that Iran may be next.
Clearly, the Revolutionary Guard is cracking down on dissidents, but what does that mean for Shane and Josh? As usual, it seems impossible to know. I find a radio interview attributed to Zahra, recorded just days before her arrest. In the interview, she speaks indignantly, testifying that she saw three young people run over and crushed to death by security trucks at the Ashura protests. She goes on to brazenly advocate violence as self-defense against government security forces. “Yes, we will get beaten, but we will beat them up too,” she says. “I was one of the ones on the day of Ashura standing in the front lines yelling at people to attack! Do not run away! I was the one who stomped on one of the motorcycles of the Special Forces. And I was beaten as a result. I am proud of every bruise on my body. I am proud of my legs and arms that are now blue-black. I am proud of my torn-up vocal cords because chants of freedom came out of this throat!”
&nbs
p; A few days after that interview, Zahra was dragged out of a car by her hair and taken to Evin Prison. She was charged, like many others, with “taking part in a banned protest,” but these charges were never brought to court. A few weeks after her arrest, security forces searched Zahra’s family’s apartment and allegedly found stashes of cocaine and opium. She was subsequently charged with “possession of drugs,” which was later changed to “trafficking of narcotics,” which carries the death penalty; the charges related to her participation in the Ashura protests were never addressed.
Were the drugs planted? Would anyone bring drugs into Iran from Europe, especially at such a volatile time? The international outcry after her execution, including the Dutch government severing all ties with the Islamic Republic days after her execution, forced the Iranian government to respond. They point a finger at her former drug charges in the Netherlands, for which Zahra served two years for possession in 2003. As soon as this information from her past surfaces, outrage at her death deflates, but the Iranian government’s message is still clear—Zahra’s death is a warning. If this regime is bold enough to kill a protester, especially a woman and dual citizen, it will kill whomever it likes.
Zahra was held near me in Section 209, a ward reserved solely for political prisoners, not drug-related crimes. She was interrogated in the same rooms I was, and she told me herself that she was tortured, barely able to stand on the sink and talk to me through our common vent. The Iranian government denied her the legal right to an appeal, an opportunity for the Dutch government to intervene on her behalf since she was a dual citizen, and forced her to confess in a television interview, a confession she later recanted. Zahra’s lawyer, Ms. Jinoos Sharif, stated that Zahra had been deceived, as is common for political cases in Iran. “The interrogators had promised her that if she admitted to the crimes, they would release her.”
One day in hava khori I reached down to cup my hands around a small gray moth almost camouflaged on the dusty floor. Its wings began to flutter, and from the tattered folds emerged the most vibrant colors, bright pinks and deep greens in a pattern I’d never seen before, as intricate as a Persian rug. Zahra was like that for me. Like the moth’s wings, she was a window into an Iran as beautiful, warm, and complex as my experience was cold, cruel, and barren.
I want to speak out for Zahra. I want to tell the world just how beautiful and strong she was. I want to tell them not to believe the lies told about her in court. But I know I can’t. I can’t risk angering the Iranian government with Shane and Josh still there. This must be how so many Iranians feel, inside and outside their country; if they fight back, they might be next, or worse, the government might retaliate on someone they love.
81. Josh
Our television turns on automatically at 10:59 p.m. We programmed it for that time because the IRIB airs English news from 11:00 to 11:15 p.m. On the screen, a swastika transfigures into a blue, six-pointed Star of David. Barbed wire then chokes the star, which oozes blood. The graphic always comes on before and after a particular talk show.
I see this gruesome graphic on TV every week. I normally just ignore it. My Judaism was only an issue during interrogation. Since then, many guards go out of their way to remind me that Moses, Jesus, and Muhammad all reference the same singular God. But this time I keep stewing over that bleeding Star of David. A masochistic part of me wants to understand what those idiots are saying on their talk show. When I see such demonizing images, I’m reminded that I’m vulnerable to being singled out. I have no idea if sacrificing me is even on the negotiation table, but they have tried to separate Shane, Sarah, and me in different ways. I fear what’s next. Maybe they’ll let the couple reunite and leave the Jew behind.
I turn to Shane for reassurance. “They better not free just one of us.”
Shane doesn’t hesitate. “I told you, Josh, I’d never leave without you.”
He did tell me, but that was a while ago. I need to hear it again. I change the channel and zone out to images of Ahmadinejad cutting the ribbon for the opening ceremony of another cement plant and of Khamenei condemning the conspiring forces of America and Zionism.
I’ve repressed this fear of being left behind for so long, I almost forgot about it. But it creeps back with the same potency it once had in solitary. I imagine the room without Shane, like the times when he visits the doctor. At first, I enjoy the privacy for several hours, but when he’s gone longer, my dread of solitary confinement creeps in.
Shane’s freedom would be my misery. If they released him, God knows how long they’d keep me—totally alone.
“Josh.” Shane looks at me squarely and repeats, “I would never leave you.”
“But if they try to separate us,” I urge, “we should refuse to go.”
I look at him intently. I know I’m being paranoid, but I can’t help it.
“Honestly, Josh, I’ll grab the bedpost. I’ll fight to stay in the cell with you.” I take a deep breath. Shane adds, “But you know, we won’t have a choice of whether to be released or not.”
I start to get angry at Shane. I’d be alone, like during the first month when he and Sarah spoke to each other through the vent and I suffered by myself. I’ve tried to forget that month, but I can’t.
Shane’s right though. I don’t know why I’m getting mad at him. He has reassured me as best he possibly can. He even offered his body to get pummeled by AK for me. I know he wouldn’t choose to leave me and that they won’t give us a choice. They never give us choices. I look away from Shane, trying to disguise that I’m mad at him for telling me the truth.
82. Shane
We have been preparing for our trial for two weeks, ever since we learned from our families’ letters that we were going to court. Today is the day, February 6. As we walk out of Section 209, the janitor wishes us good luck. “Inshallah azadi,” he says. Freedom, God willing. Outside, three young, fit guards are waiting for us. Each of them is holstering a pistol. We know only one of them and he hasn’t shown his face in Section 209 for a while. He carries himself with authority now—he must be moving up in Evin’s bureaucracy. As soon as Josh sees him, he tells him he took the neck-exercise advice he gave him a while ago. Now, Josh lies on his side in bed with water bottles strapped to his head with a towel, and lifts the bottles up and down. I do it too. We’ve been doing it more than usual in anticipation for court. Neck muscles are the only muscles the cameras will see.
As we drive to the courthouse, the guards talk about cars—which are the best, how much they cost, and which one a friend of theirs just bought. Josh teases the red-headed guard sitting next to him, who is constantly texting on a cell phone, the screen of which is filled with Ayatollah Khamenei’s half-smiling face. Josh asks him if he is chatting with his girlfriend. The guard shoots him a stern look, then goes back to texting. Josh pretends to fall asleep and lays his head on the guard’s shoulder, which makes him jolt. Josh laughs, the guard cracks a smile, and the tension lightens.
There is no one outside the courthouse when we pull up. I have been expecting a throng of media, but the only person there is the lone guard who opens the gate. When we get out of the car, a guard unlocks the handcuff that has my wrist linked to Josh’s. They take us inside and down the big echoing hall of the courthouse. After we enter, I see our lawyer, Masoud Shafii, sitting all alone in a row of seats against the wall. We haven’t seen him since the day before Sarah was released. He is wearing a suit and has a briefcase on his lap, but he is slouched a little, looking at the floor like the kid in school everyone picks on. As soon as he sees us, he suddenly becomes animated. He stands, his chest inflates, and he takes a bold step forward, reaching to shake our hands. Immediately, one of the guards gets between Shafii and us, and orders him to step back.
“These are my clients!” Shafii protests in Farsi, looking outraged. His indignation seems slightly put on. He is going through the motions, acting as though justice were a thing he actually expected, even though it isn’t.
Our guards brush him aside and sweep us into a medium-sized, brightly lit courtroom. The few people sitting in the gallery, separated from one another at irregular intervals, don’t look at us as we enter. No one is speaking. Everyone faces the empty bench blankly. I know that this is probably the most decisive moment in our case, but when we sit, it feels like we are anonymous spectators awaiting some kind of mundane spectacle, like a man coming to announce the scores on our driving exams or read us a report on trends in the real estate market.
A translator sits with us. He is a friendly forty-something man, sharply dressed in a suit jacket and a burgundy turtleneck. He has a quiet demeanor, sharpened by his round spectacles and trimmed goatee. “I have seen you on TV,” he says with a bashful smile. “I also saw Sarah. Is it true that you were just hiking in Iraq?”
“Yes,” I say with a huff. “Where is our lawyer?” The defense table is empty. Are they going to let him in? Did he just come to the courthouse like a beggar? Our interrogators promised us we would be able to meet with him before our trial, but he isn’t even here. There is a man behind the prosecutor’s podium to our left—short, gray-haired, bespectacled, and wearing a suit jacket and a maroon scarf hanging over his neck. He appears to be sifting through notes, diligently looking away from us.
The only person in the room who seems alive is a young Press TV photographer I remember from our moms’ visit—who unsuccessfully tried to get us to smile then by saying we were more famous than President Bush. He is buzzing around snapping photos, beaming like usual. Whenever Josh or I make an expression that suggests frustration or distress, the shutter snaps in a flurry. Two videographers have their cameras trained on us.
Eventually, our lawyer enters. He walks directly to the defense table ten feet to our right, sits down, and arranges his papers. Why isn’t he looking at us? I try to grab his attention. “Mr. Shafii,” I say in a loud whispering voice. “Can we speak?” I move to get up, but he motions for me to sit.