A Sliver of Light

by Shane Bauer

  An attack on Iran by the United States or Israel would be a human rights disaster. It would embolden Iran’s corrupt leaders to ramp up homegrown repression even more, forcing Iranian citizens to rally behind a government the majority of them despise. The Iranian people are centuries ahead of their leaders, politically and culturally, and their progress, which, like that of many other peoples that have recently sparked revolutions against brutal dictatorships in the Middle East, should happen on its own trajectory.

  It’s also important to understand that the inhumane conditions we’ve described in this book are far from unique to Iran. The year that I spent in solitary confinement was not living—it was a space between life and death, and it threatened to erase me. When I found out that the United States holds more people in solitary—up to eighty thousand on any given day—than any other country in the world, I was shocked and outraged. The UN has confirmed that such confinement for any period over two weeks can constitute torture. Yet we routinely hold people in isolation for months, years, even decades, often as punishment for nonviolent infractions. This draconian practice benefits no one—quite the opposite. Studies have shown that it increases violence in prisons as a whole and increases recidivism. Less than 5 percent of all prisoners are in solitary in the United States; yet as many as 50 percent of all suicides happen there. After being subjected to this cruel, inhumane treatment, many people are released directly into our streets—traumatized and completely ill-equipped to make better choices in the free world. Even if you wish to put aside a moral argument in favor of a purely pragmatic one, the widespread use of psychological torture hasn’t proven effective for rehabilitation or made our streets any safer, so why are we allowing our prisons to use it?

  Though it can be difficult for me to engage with the cruelty and inhumanity in my own backyard—sometimes triggering my own memories—it would be much more difficult not to. It’s an important part of my healing, and it reminds me that this story isn’t just about Shane, Josh, and me. It’s about everyone whose lives we’ve touched, continue to touch, and those who’ve touched ours. A woman named Zahra Bahrami—who showed me love and kindness months before she was executed for a drug-related crime, one she most likely didn’t commit and one that should never warrant the death penalty in the first place—changed my life. A man named Jafar Saidi—a former Black Panther who wrote the Supreme Leader of Iran a letter advocating for our release and miraculously got a response—is sitting in a prison somewhere in Pennsylvania that he will likely never leave. Our friends in Syria—now living as refugees scattered around the globe, many of their homes destroyed, people they love murdered by Assad’s regime—showed me just how beautiful, open, and welcoming the Middle East can be. Lastly, I will always be grateful to the countless people around the world who believed in us, fought for us, and gave us our lives back.

  Watching the sunrise will always remind me of the morning on the roof in Oman when my life began again. Sometimes even the simplest acts, like walking out the front door of my apartment into my bustling neighborhood, will remind me forcefully of what we’ve all been through over the last four years. In those moments of transition—from night to day, from restriction to openness—I recall what they took from me, what they could never take, and ultimately just how lucky I am.

  Josh

  “Do you speak English?” I asked. The soldier nodded. I continued. “When will I get out of here?”

  “Soon,” he answered grumpily.

  “You told me that hours ago.”

  “Be patient! The interrogator will call you when he’s ready,” the soldier responded.

  I sat down and wondered what returning to an interrogation room would feel like. Would it feel familiar? Would it trigger a traumatic reaction?

  I had yet to understand how I’d been affected by my time in prison. Within six months after my return to civilian life I came to believe myself fully acclimated. I stopped hoarding pens, collecting used Scotch tape, and marveling at the comfort of sheets. I stopped routinely losing my keys and locking myself out of my apartment. I stopped expecting the call to prayer at dusk; I broke my habit of greeting waiters with “Salaam aleikum” as I would prison guards when they brought me food. Yet, still, more than a year later, I often got nervous talking about my time in prison. Mental health professionals warned me that acclimation would take time. One professional advised me to avoid the Middle East, confined spaces, and armed guards. But here I was, back in the Middle East, talking to a soldier, and confined in a twenty-five-by-fifteen-foot holding pen.

  I had just arrived at Ben Gurion Airport in Tel Aviv. The Israeli customs officer had scanned my passport and sent me to this nearby detention room. A soccer match flickered on a TV in the corner of the cell. Without phone coverage or Wi-Fi, I was unable to contact my father and my extended family waiting for me in baggage claim. Eight other travelers sat along the perimeter of the cell, staring in silence at the white walls. I felt like I knew a secret they weren’t privy to: we weren’t in solitary confinement—at least we had one another. I made a point to talk to each of them.

  Three hours later, the grumpy soldier escorted me to the interrogation room. On the short walk there, I assured myself I’d be safe. After all, I had proper documentation to enter their country; the U.S. and Israeli governments were friends; and as added security, the news media expected me to arrive.

  “Why am I being detained?” I asked.

  The interrogator swiveled in his office chair and typed loudly on his computer keys. He continued to ignore me as he flipped the pages of my passport. Eventually he turned back toward me and asked in accented English, “What is your purpose for entering our country? Are you Jewish?”

  This again.

  I smiled to myself. I thought about how his mannerisms, his tone, and even his questions sounded like my Iranian interrogator. I explained that I was traveling with my sweetheart, Jenny, and my father for ten days. We planned to visit my extended family. They are all Jewish, and all are Israeli residents and citizens.

  He eventually found the Iranian stamp on the last page of my passport. When I explained why I had an Iranian stamp, he asked, “Do you have any contacts in Tehran?”

  “No,” I replied evenly.

  The interrogator spent another few minutes on his computer. Then he made a couple phone calls in Hebrew. Eventually, he continued to question me. “Did the Iranian government ask you to gather intelligence for them?”

  “That’s funny,” I said with a forced laugh. “When I was interrogated in Iran, they accused me of spying for you.”

  Thirty minutes later he let me go. I walked off with the slight discomfort that a sailor feels upon being sprayed with water from the sea. The wetness was annoying, but it was far from a shipwreck. My family had left the airport confused about why I didn’t arrive on the plane I had boarded. Before Jenny and I hailed a taxi to my family’s home in the suburbs of Tel Aviv, she spotted breaking news on TV: Israel had just started a war with Gaza.

  Five days later, I was with my father and I was shouting, “Run! Come on, Dad! Run!”

  The air raid sirens blared through the Old City of Jerusalem. We had about sixty seconds to take cover before expecting an explosion. My father alternated between speed-walking and jogging, and he needed my encouragement. Jenny, my aunt, my father, and I were the only ones left in the open plaza one hundred yards from the Western Wall. I kept scanning the sky for a bomb to drop on us any second. With the sirens ringing, we tucked into a nearby stone tunnel where scores of other tourists and pilgrims were already holed up. In the relative safety of that tunnel, there was nothing to do but wait.

  Until this trip to Jerusalem, I had bowed to my family’s pressure to stay in their suburban enclave while the war on Gaza raged on. My cousins and uncles and aunts worried for my safety and wanted me to take extra precaution. One cousin thought I should just be grateful the Iranians didn’t kill me and stay put. My mother was anxious. She had even feared I would get abducted
by Iranian agents at the Newark airport before flying to Israel. And my father insisted that if I visited Jerusalem, he’d accompany Jenny and me—as if my dad’s presence would stave off a (potentially Iranian-made) bomb from Gaza.

  By my calculations, we’d be safe traveling within Israel, and I told them so. After all, of the approximate 180 deaths by rocket fire, over 95 percent of them were of Palestinians inside the Gaza Strip. For my family, it wasn’t about statistics; it was about precaution. Moreover, I was in no position to convince them I’d be safe. It must have seemed to them like I hadn’t learned anything. First I hiked in Iraq, and then I wanted to leave their suburb during the war. One family member told me that being an antiwar, pro-Palestinian leftist blinded me to life’s dangers. Though I knew Kurdistan was safe and that the sirens in Jerusalem were a statistical improbability, I started to doubt myself.

  Suddenly the sirens stopped. Relieved, we followed a Japanese tour group out of the archeological site to the Western Wall. I saw no trace of a bomb blast. At the wall, I inserted my prayers into one of its many cracks. I thanked God for keeping me safe, and then I lingered a bit. I stood there thinking about walls, barriers, and borders, and I wondered why an ancient wall is the central landmark of Judaism. I thought about fear and how hard I’d fought it in prison and how I still need to guard against a culture of fear.

  Two days later, Egypt brokered a truce between Hamas and the Israeli government, which put an end to the war. The following day, Jenny and I drove to the Palestinian city of Bethlehem to meet up with a university professor who was a friend of a friend. To my family, I was willfully entering enemy territory. They thought I’d be treated as an enemy because of my heritage.

  I rolled down the car window at an Israeli military checkpoint outside of Bethlehem. The soldier looked at me and asked, “Yahudi?”

  This question reminded me again of my Iranian interrogations, just as it had at the airport. The lingering fear that I’d be treated differently than Shane and Sarah had scarred me—even though the interrogators, the guards, and the judge never treated me any differently on account of my religion.

  My mind then flashed to Salem and the night Shane and I were released. On the flight from Tehran to Oman, he told me that an official in Iran suggested negotiating for Shane and me separately. Salem told me that he had immediately rejected the idea. “It would be nearly impossible to get the last one out,” he explained. Salem then looked at me gently and said, “And we know who that would have been.” I assumed it’d be me because of my heritage.

  The nightmare of still being in Evin Prison gnawed at me. So, one day, many months after my release, I called Salem. He told me that Shane was the obvious candidate for release, but not because I was Jewish. Rather, Shane’s reunion with Sarah would look beautiful in the media and make Iran seem compassionate.

  Now, at the checkpoint, Jenny nudged me. I turned to the Israeli soldier waiting at my car’s window. “Yes, I’m Jewish,” I said, and he let us pass.

  I drove ahead, partly relieved that I gave the soldier the answer he wanted. I was also embarrassed that I was awarded such privilege for my religion. Locked behind the wall that surrounds Palestinian territory, the professor offered me generous hospitality and showed me around his city. He patiently explained how his people struggle with the injustices of a forty-five-year military occupation. I understood the injustice in front of me, but—as I never had before my imprisonment—I felt it viscerally.

  My trip with Jenny lasted ten days. We had been sharing our lives together since I moved from Oakland to live with her in West Virginia, and I wanted her to meet my Israeli family.

  I first fell in love with her in the seventh grade. I remember playing Ouija and hide-and-seek in the dark on weekends with her. During the school day, we’d talk about life. We decided it wasn’t nice to hate people whom we didn’t like, so we’d only “highly dislike” them. We thought our names worked better mixed together: I became Josh-ifer and she became Jenny-ua. For the first time, I fell in love. I eventually asked her to go out with me. Our “romance” lasted a few months and we rarely even held hands. We liked being friends better.

  I recalled the details of our relationship in prison. We regularly jogged together before high school, we partnered together for after-school dance lessons, and I distinctly remembered burning a huge vat of couscous that we brought to social studies class for a presentation on Middle Eastern culture.

  We grew up. I went to the West Coast for college and she went to the South. One night in the summer when we were twenty-three and both happened to be in our hometown, I called Jenny to hang out. We went to a bar, shared a beer, and danced to salsa music. Everyone else left the dance floor, but we danced until they closed down. Jenny agreed to come back to my place. We dipped pretzels in chocolate and snuggled on the couch. “I’ve been wanting to kiss you for a long time,” I told her. We laughed about how nervous we were in seventh grade. Then Jenny smiled at me and we kissed. That night, I confessed to her that I had told my best friend in high school that I couldn’t imagine marrying anyone but her.

  When I saw Jenny at my welcome home party after my release from prison, her joy on the dance floor drew me to her as it did years before. I watched her radiant eyes look at me throughout the night, and I knew that after all these years we were finally ready for each other.

  After the party, we sat on a swing in my parents’ backyard and talked for hours. I found out that I was in her thoughts just like she was in mine. She had been hunger-striking and sending letters and books that I never received. In those first months of freedom, I saw her whenever I could, and when I traveled around the country, we sent each other handwritten letters.

  With Jenny, civilian life started making sense, and I felt more comfortable being myself. She encouraged me to follow my heart and my interest in history, law, yoga, and qigong.

  A month after our trip to the Middle East, Jenny and I went for an ultrasound to confirm that she was pregnant. The doctor called me into the exam room. Jenny lay on her back, and the doctor showed me the monitor. The fetus’s heart beat at a healthy 171 beats per minute. I looked into Jenny’s beaming eyes and clutched her hand. We smiled.

  Isaiah Azad Fattal was born the day before the four-year anniversary of my detention. As I watch him grow before my eyes, I’m heartened to witness life start anew. While wars, incarceration, and trauma cycle again and again, Isaiah Azad reminds me that there is always hope for a new world to be born: it is still possible that “nation shall not lift up sword against nation”; it is still possible to end the mutual hostility that led to our detention; and it is possible to find an old love that feels brand-new.

  Shane

  The second night of freedom in Oman felt like the opposite of the first. I was in bed with Sarah and I couldn’t sleep. My mind was moving fast, but erratically. Suddenly, it hit me: I was free, but I was not well. I broke down. Had I lost a part of myself, irrevocably? I felt mentally handicapped, as if my mind were enshrouded in a cloud. In prison, my mind was clear and sharp, but now it was an ice block melting in the sun. “It’s okay, I’ll take care of you,” Sarah told me in the darkness, rubbing my chest. “It’s just going to take a little time.”

  My brain couldn’t handle all the input. I’d become accustomed to dealing with only one stimulus at a time—talking with Josh, the sound of footsteps, the book I was reading. Now I felt like an infant—simple, vulnerable, and lost to the complexities of the world. When taken to a restaurant and given a menu, I couldn’t choose what to eat. I was also unable to read many of the subtleties of anyone’s body language except Josh’s, and to a lesser extent Sarah’s. I began instructing people to tell me what they meant in precise words. Freedom was a foreign country to me.

  A couple days after we gave a press conference in New York, our lawyer, Masoud Shafii, set out to visit his daughter and son-in-law in the United States. As he was about to board the plane in Tehran, the authorities pulled him aside, took his passport
, and told him he couldn’t have it back. He wasn’t allowed to travel. A wall was erected between him and his family. He left the airport and went home. The next day, he was arrested.

  When I first heard about this, I pressed my head into my knees and wept with a force I hadn’t experienced since our early days in prison. I felt as though my freedom had been revoked, as though Josh and I had merely traded positions with someone else. It felt like the Iranian government was punishing us with someone else’s captivity because we hadn’t praised them in the media.

  Shafii was released after a day of interrogation. His life has not been the same since. The court refuses to take any of his cases. Intelligence agents told him they had a case open on him, a thinly veiled threat to punish him should he step out of line.

  As his life became rapidly worse, TV news shows played portions of our New York press conference along with footage of Josh and me coming off the plane and into the arms of our families. The coverage was selective. The major networks aired our most graphic descriptions of the conditions of Evin Prison, but they left out the parts where we said that when we complained about those conditions, guards reminded us of comparable conditions in Guantánamo Bay and CIA black sites around the world. The human rights violations on the part of our government in no way justified what was done to us, we said, but they provided governments like Iran an excuse to act in kind. No major network aired any of that.