A Sliver of Light

by Shane Bauer

  When we get back to the cell, he holds the bottle up casually. “Got another bottle,” he says.

  “I think we have enough,” I say too quickly. I’m trying to be casual about this, not give away the fact that I am overly concerned, but I just blew it. I know he sees what just happened. He sees everything.

  He looks at me with that look of feigned confusion that drives me crazy. “Enough?” he says. “But I thought you wanted more so we could exercise at the same time?”

  “Where do you want to put it?” I ask him.

  “Oh, I don’t know,” he says as if considering it for the first time. “Under the bed?”

  “I don’t want more stuff under the bed,” I say, again a little more insistently than I’d like. “It’s too crammed. I’d be okay with keeping it if we put it in the bathroom.”

  He goes into the bathroom as if to mull it over and comes back out thirty seconds later. Now he has a face I know well, one he cannot control. His lips are pressed together and he is frowning. His jaw is clenching slightly. His eyes are downcast and glassy. This is the look Josh has when he believes he is hiding his anger. “I don’t want to put it in the bathroom,” he says blankly. We stare at each other.

  “Well,” I say, letting a pause linger, “I don’t want it under the bed. I don’t even think we should have another bottle. But I’ll compromise and take another one if you agree to put it in the bathroom.” Checkmate. Actually, I don’t really like having the bottles in the bathroom either. The array of them has become a sanctuary for cockroaches. But I will never admit this to Josh. It would only strengthen his position.

  He is silent, still staring at me. “There is no room under the bed,” I say. “And actually, I’ve been noticing that your stuff under the bed has been sliding over to my side.” His face flashes something intense, as if I used a weapon he himself was about to unleash.

  “Well, I’ve been noticing that I have a lot of common stuff over on my side!” he says.

  I get on my hands and knees and look under the bed. “I don’t see it,” I say, “but if you look at the center bar here, your stuff is over the line.”

  “You know that bar slides around,” Josh counters. He pulls the blankets off the bed, throws them aside, and lifts off the mattress. We both pull away the metal plates that hold up the mattress, revealing a rectangular section of floor packed with stuff. There are about sixty books stacked along the back, all sent from home. Since so many have been coming in lately, we usually give books we are finished with to Ehsan to donate to the prison library, in the hope that the next English-speaking prisoner will have something to read. Most of these books under the bed are those only one of us has read. We each tend to lose interest in a book once the other has read it. It’s all part of the little ego game we play. If one of us shows interest in something, the other disparages it subtly, often by not deigning to read it. Our reading choices are one of the only ways we have of distinguishing ourselves. In other ways, we are becoming one person, and I hate it. The only intellectual input we have is books, so I read different books than he does.

  We aren’t even planning to read all these books under the bed. It’s just that we each have different ones we are not willing to give up. For me they are the dense works of philosophers like Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty. I don’t intend to read these—I’ve tried and given up several times—but I want to keep them in case the censors cut off our book supply for some reason. If we run out of books, it is good to have something to grapple with, something that will take a long time to understand. Then there are the books that are our favorites. Of the two hundred fifty or so we’ve read, these are ones we might reread in a year or two if we are still here, books like The Grapes of Wrath, The Brothers Karamazov, War and Peace, and The Waves. And there are also the biographies we want to hang on to for reference, such as Martin Luther King Jr., Stalin, Mao, Gandhi. We never look at these books after reading them, but we keep them anyway. They provide some sense of security. The ones we actually do reference—mostly poetry or history—are spread around the cell on our food-tray bookshelves.

  There are almost one hundred fifty volumes in the cell. Ridiculous.

  As Josh lifts the mattress off the bed frame, he points out that there is one more stack of books on his side than there is on mine. He also has our extra bottle of ketchup and the antenna we’ve been stashing in case they ever decide to disconnect the cable from our TV. I counter that I have the cardboard chessboard we never use and the tahini container filled with chess pieces made out of tinfoil yogurt tops. I also have the extra bags of spices, spillover from the spice rack—a “shelf” made of plastic spoons stuck into the grating of the heater side by side in a row, holding up quarter-liter bottles filled with salt, pepper, sugar, cardamom pods, ginger, curry, cumin, and cinnamon.

  Most food is now divided into private property, since we save and gorge on different items at different rates. The longer we’ve been celled together, the less we’ve shared. The items now divided between our two sides under the bed include two fresh boxes of dates; about three hundred letters from home; four containers of Jif peanut butter—two regular and two with honey; three tahini containers; a kilo each of walnuts and almonds; two bars of chocolate; four little squeeze bottles of honey; two plastic containers of halva; and forty packets of digestive biscuits, each containing twenty biscuits. Then there are our separate stacks of clothes and two pairs of long johns and two sweatshirts rolled up and stuffed in the back for wintertime.

  Somehow, as we look over all of this stuff, we both feel like we are being cheated by the other. The only solution, we decide, is to take everything out that we share and divide it up. We forge ahead, forgetting that not too long ago, we didn’t care about these square inches of space. We used to be generous, each offering to take on little burdens just to relieve the other. Now, we are tearing the cell up over a water bottle.

  From under the bed, we take out the box filled with about forty of the little jams and honey we get for breakfast. We pull out the two boxes of cookies that look unopened—they are still carefully wrapped in cellophane—but in fact contain our secret prison diaries. There are the two boxes of fermenting dates we hope someday to make pruno with, a little bag containing five bars of halva, another bag of year-old pistachios with shells that can’t be opened, and a little bag of ancient candies that Sarah kept from our first month in Section 209 and passed on to us before she left. There are the juice bottles, our bread bag, and a little box of GRE vocabulary flashcards. We combine these items in several little piles that seem about equal in size; then we take turns picking one pile after the next. Josh measures the length of the bed to find the exact middle and we scratch a mark there into the paint.

  None of this has an impact on the decision over what we will do with the new water bottle. Neither of us budges on where we think it should go, so we throw it away. If we ever find any one-and-a-half-liter bottles, we decide, we will trade those out for our one-liter bottles under the sink. That is our compromise.

  Things have never been this bad between us. After we put our cell back together, we retreat silently to our respective sides of the cell. We don’t acknowledge that we have both been wracking our brains with escape plots and court scenarios for weeks. We only acknowledge the bottle.

  100. Sarah

  It’s July 30, 2011. I’ve come to notice how much the Iranian government loves to choose these special dates as a passive-aggressive way of sending messages. The day I was meant to be pardoned was September 11. Shane and Josh’s first trial session was the anniversary of Iran’s revolution. In Iran it’s already July 31, the two-year anniversary of the day we were captured in 2009. Today, a representative of the Revolutionary Court has stated, the second and final session of Shane and Josh’s trial will be completed. Then, a decision will be made.

  The Islamic Republic of Iran is not allowed an embassy in the United States. They do have a small office in a high rise in downtown New York where their UN ambassa
dor, Mohammad Khazaee, presides. Yesterday, we held a protest at the base of this building. More than a hundred people showed up, bearing signs and banners that read TIME FOR COMPASSION and SHAME ON YOU, IRAN. A row of news cameras flanked the stage as family members, Muslim leaders, and human rights speakers took turns addressing their grievances, hoping to make the men sitting behind tinted glass, thirty-four stories above us, a little uncomfortable.

  The protest was the culmination of a week of action dubbed “Two Years Is Too Long!” leading up to the trial. Yusuf Islam (formerly known as Cat Stevens) published an open letter to religious leaders in Iran asking for a compassionate, Ramadan release. Our friends in the San Francisco Bay Area organized a call-in blitz they called “A Million Voices,” mobilizing thousands of callers to jam the phone lines of the Iranian Interests Section’s pseudo-consulate in Washington, DC, every day of the week. Noam Chomsky released one of his many statements in which he called on the Iranian government to show that it makes a distinction between the American government’s policies and its people. Tom Morello, formerly of the rock band Rage Against the Machine, posted a YouTube video of himself calling in. “Hi. I’m a supporter of Shane Bauer and Josh Fattal. I urge you to release them immediately . . .” By the fifth day of “A Million Voices,” the operators at the Interests Section began to beg people to stop calling. “We’re sorry,” the receptionist told the callers, “but there’s nothing we can do about this.”

  Over the last month, we’ve helped raise a storm. All of our intermediaries have gotten hopeful, if inconclusive, indications. Now, all we can do is wait.

  After the protest, my mom, a handful of friends, and I take the train to a small town an hour north of New York City. The house we’ve been lent is like something from a Victorian novel. It stretches out room after room, seemingly without end. At first, the four of us spread out, occupying different wings, but by midnight we’re all back in the kitchen, working on our computers, drinking tea, and looking out the tall windows at our own reflections framed by the blackness outside. A part of me knows that we won’t hear anything tonight, but none of us wants to sleep. As the sun rises over empty streets, I wonder if that really was my last, long sleepless night. It’s the first day of Ramadan.

  101. Shane

  It’s July 31, exactly two years since we were captured, and we are back at court. It has been almost six months since our last hearing. This time, they keep us in our prison slacks, rather than have us change into street clothes. There are no cameras in the courtroom. According to the news ticker we saw weeks ago, this will be our last hearing. Josh and I have decided to answer all of their questions as briefly as possible. We want to make sure they don’t drag this out any longer. We just want our guilty verdict and our sentence today.

  Josh has our secret note in his pocket. This one contains an extensive key to a code language our family can use to tell us things they have been afraid to say in letters. According to the code, if they refer to a fictitious name, we will understand the first initial of the first name to represent a continent and the first initial of the last name to represent a country on that continent. Sam Victor would mean “Venezuela” and Adam Sawyer, Syria. And if the two went clothes shopping together, that meant they were negotiating. Sporting events refer to nuclear talks. William Shakespeare means freedom. The note also contains a list of sixty book requests. I want Middle East history. Josh wants economics. If we are going to be stuck here, we want to study.

  The judge enters and opens court. The same interpreter from the last session translates for us. This time, the judge doesn’t ask to see Sarah—he says she will be tried at a “later date.”

  The judge says the prosecutor has more questions for us, but our lawyer is first allowed to stand and present his opening statement.

  “Your Honor,” Shafii says, “tomorrow marks the first day of Ramadan, the holy month of compassion and forgiveness. There is no evidence that my clients are spies. In fact there is plenty of evidence that they are not. On the issue of the border, I cannot say definitively whether they crossed or not. But I can say this: if they strayed across our border and entered our great country, it was not intentional. This is a small transgression. In the spirit of this most holy of months, I ask you to pardon them.”

  It feels like a helpless argument from a powerless man. But he is right. The timing is auspicious. Today is the two-year anniversary of our imprisonment. Josh and I have become almost certain that they are rushing to give us a guilty sentence so as to release us during Ramadan and boast about Islamic compassion. We are both hoping that when we leave here today, we can forget about escaping.

  The prosecutor stands up behind his podium and responds to Shafii. “When we last held court, these two said they were not spies, but they should not forget that there is evidence. The court has evidence! Think for a minute,” he continues. “If these people were not important, if they were not spies, why would the United States government be trying to help them?” What is he talking about? Does he know about some kind of “help” that we don’t? “These people say they are journalists, but this is typical. It is nothing more than a disguise. They collect pictures and write reports of the region to send to their government!” He is starting to whip himself into a frenzy. “They use the disguise as reporters to get close to Palestinian communities and Hamas to gather information!

  “When they were stopped by our border police, they were on a mission given to them by the CIA at the U.S. embassy in Baghdad to meet with PJAK,” he says, his face now red and his hand constantly pumping into the air, as if he has tapped into some reservoir of national rage. I see where this is going. For the first six months of our detainment, we always thought we would be linked somehow to the Green Movement, but for the last couple weeks, the government has been fighting Kurdish guerillas—PJAK—in the country’s west. So they connect our case to this—the issue of the moment.

  “And Joshua Fattal! Mr. Fattal is a Jew from Israel! Under the guise of students and journalists, these two carry out missions around the region for the intelligence of the U.S. and Israel. These two deserve the maximum penalty for threatening the Islamic Republic of Iran.”

  He sits. I feel a pinch of fear. I bury it. This is a show, remember. Stay cool.

  The questions begin. All of them come from the judge, not the prosecutor.

  Q: After you were arrested, the FBI instructed your families not to speak to the media. Why did they do this?

  This is idiotic.

  A: I was in prison after I was arrested. There is no way for me to know what did or did not happen, or why.

  Q: You have a counterfeit passport that you have used to travel to Syria, Yemen, Iraq, Lebanon, Sudan, and Israel.

  A: I don’t have a counterfeit passport, but I do have a second passport. This is so I can apply for visas, which sometimes takes a long time, and still be able to travel. This is common for journalists working abroad. Any U.S. citizen can do it. And I didn’t use it to travel to most of the countries you mentioned. You can look in it yourself to see what stamps are in it.

  The prosecutor cuts in. “You see the way he answers these questions? His methods show clear CIA training! He is denying things we have evidence of. There are other indications of CIA training too—in their interrogations, their answers were nearly identical.” What? I look at Josh sharply. In the last hearing, the prosecutor said the opposite: that our answers were inconsistent, which showed that our stories were spy covers. Are both consistency and inconsistency evidence of espionage? Josh is rubbing his forehead.

  The judge hands over a piece of paper and tells me to write my response.

  A: Our answers were so similar because we were telling the truth.

  It is hard for me to understand the meaning of all this. I get why a government would go through the motions of a trial even when the outcome is decided in advance. They’re called show trials. But why have a trial when you don’t show it to the public? They don’t even have any cameras here. M
aybe my thinking about the purpose of our trial has been wrong all along. Maybe we are on trial just because everyone needs to believe they are acting within the law. Politicians, judges, and prison guards don’t want to feel like rogues.

  They turn to Josh and question him on being Jewish. While he explains that he’s visited his family only a handful of times and doesn’t even speak Hebrew, the prosecutor cuts in. “You lived in Israel until you were two years old!” he shouts.

  Josh throws his hands up as if to say, “What’s the fucking point? You want me to argue where I was born?”

  “Stay cool,” I whisper.

  “I was born in Boston,” Josh repeats. “I have only visited Israel a few times.”

  Shafii objects. “What is this?” he asks the judge. “What does his religion have to do with this? Even if his father is from Israel, even if Josh was born in Israel, which he was not, that would not be evidence of espionage.”

  The prosecutor retorts, “How can you say this is irrelevant? Israel is our greatest enemy! His connection to Israel is something we cannot ignore!”

  The judge turns his attention back to me:

  Q: You receive money from America and Israel to travel around the Middle East as a student and set up operations in different countries. You establish yourself in Kurdistan because it is a good place to attack Iran from. You learn Arabic because it helps you establish yourself in conflict areas. You carry a sophisticated camera.

  I am getting exasperated, but I stay composed. “I don’t understand what you are asking me,” I say.