Letters to My Torturer: Love, Revolution, and Imprisonment in Iran (25 page)

We pass by Under the Eight. We enter a triangular courtyard. The cold wind is making me shiver. The spring air comes from the snow-capped Alburz Mountains, bringing with it the sound of the water springs. You sit me down in a corner. There’s a prolonged silence.

“How are you? Fine?”

I answer: “Thank you.”

“Pain anywhere?”

I say: “From head to toe. I have asked the guard for a doctor a few times. He said that I would need your permission.”

You are saying: “No. What I mean is do you have any specific illness, like a heart condition or something to do with the lungs or whatever.”

“None.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yes.”

You say: “I have not yet had the chance to ask about your family. I only know that your father is very pious.”

“Yes, that’s correct.”

“Your mother?”

“She passed away.”

“May her soul rest in peace. How many brothers and sisters do you have?”

I answer.

“How many uncles?”

I answer.

“Aunts?”

I tell him.

“Their names?”

I tell him: “Simin Taj, Mahin Taj.”
⁷⁰

“Do you visit your aunts?”

I answer: “No, it’s been years since I last saw them.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yes.”

“You haven’t met any of them recently?”

“No.”

“Do you know their telephone numbers?”

“No.”

“Do you have any godmothers?”

“No.”

You say: “Right. Lift up your blindfold now and have a look at this.”

I do as he tells me and see a piece of paper.

“Put on your glasses and have a look.”

My wife’s familiar handwriting comes to life in the moonlight. There are no more than a few lines dancing about in front of me. They say:

My dear husband. I love you and am worried about you. I have sent you some pills with this letter. We were all in the garden, together, and thought of you. Give me a call if you can; you can find me through Aunt Pari.

I read the letter a few times. Later on I discovered that my wife, who had been trying everything to find me, had sent this letter together with the pills that I needed for an eye problem, to the address of the Revolutionary Guards’ headquarters.

“Now take off your glasses and put on the blindfold.”

You take the paper from me.

“Right? Did you get the secret code?”

“The secret code?”

“Yes. The secret code. Didn’t you say you do not have any serious illness? What are the pills for, then?”

“I had forgotten it, with all the pain that I am having. Besides, it’s not an illness. The pills are to improve ...”

“What about your aunt. Didn’t you say that you haven’t seen any of them recently?”

“Of course.”

“So who’s Aunt Pari?”

“We used to call our friend, Mrs Parvin, Aunt Pari. Since we didn’t have a telephone at home, we used to use hers in emergencies.”

This is what I explain to you, Brother Hamid.

You are saying: “Let’s see.”

“Let’s see” is a filler expression that smells of death. You take my hand to lead me down to the room downstairs and push me onto the metal bed. I bark automatically.

You say: “Shoo, shoo.”

Then you handcuff me. While hanging me up in the air, you whisper gently into my ear: “Things have remained untold. The important things have remained unsaid.”

And you leave. I am hanging in the air in the middle of a spring
night, and limitless pain, from my head to my toes, is joining up. I yell so much that you have to come back. I am both dreading the shuffling sound of slippers and am waiting for them. The hands that have tied me up are also the ones that can untie me. As soon as you arrive, I say: “Woof, woof.”

“Right. Speak up.”

No, there was nothing. From the moment I was strung up, my mind had been focusing on the meeting between Foroughian and the Afghan ambassador. I say: “I forgot a very important spying matter.”

By now you have noticed that I am blowing matters of little significance out of all proportion. You say: “Okay?”

“I arranged the meeting between Foroughian and the Afghan ambassador.”

You reply in a mocking tone: “What an important story. Wait a moment.”

You leave and I don’t know how long it takes before you return. Judging by what you say, you must be reading through the confession of someone who had already explained the whole story. Then you say: “Don’t bother wasting your time, Mr Asadi. We know everything. We even know about the main purpose of that meeting. But you don’t happen to know the purpose, right?”

I say: “No ...”

You laugh. You whisper in my ear: “Do you remember the first night and your first slap? We have returned to that moment: coup d’etat!”

And then you leave, again.

Coup d’etat? Coup d’etat? Coup d’etat?

That phrase completely threw me. I still couldn’t work out who might be planning to stage a coup d’etat. The Party? Nothing could be more ridiculous. Even if I had known about the Party’s secret network at the time, I wouldn’t have believed this story. I now realize that extracting coup d’etat confessions was just another stage in the Islamic Republic’s metamorphosis. With the clamping down on the
Tudeh Party, the regime had begun to eliminate all the forces that were defending the revolution but had a non-Taliban outlook. It was the same conspiracy theory that you used to remove Khomeini’s designated successor Ayatollah Montazeri.

My memory is not helping me in concocting a lie that will get me released. I just keep yelling. You come back a few times. You untie my hands. You make me shake them. If I don’t do this myself, you grab my hands and pull them hard. Every time I ask for the bathroom, you ignore me. The walk to and from the bathroom is the biggest chance for relaxation, it is the path from hell to heaven. Eventually, you let me: “Hey, go to the bathroom. At the end of the day, I’ll give you your own crap to eat.”

The guard, who’s a bathroom specialist, accompanies me. He tells me to leave the toilet door open. He’s standing and watching me. He immediately starts shouting: “Finish and come out!”

I finish. Even now when I remember that guard my bowels give up. He’s taking me back, quickly. This time we pass through the courtyard and walk up the stairs. I take a breath. I am feeling relieved.

It turns out the coup d’etat story is a lie. Or at least, I don’t know about it.

We are not going back to the interrogation room. We are two floors above that room. Again, I can see from under my blindfold a group of people dressed in military uniform, sitting down and reading some papers. Someone grabs me under my arms and takes me to a room, which seems to be large hall.

“Lift your blindfold. Open those blind eyes of yours.”

It’s you, Brother Hamid. I do as I’m told. You hand me two pages of interrogation results.

“Read.”

One of the main Party leaders has confessed that the Party had intended to stage a coup d’etat.

Then you show me a video clip. Another Party leader is saying the same thing.

You pick up the papers and take me downstairs. We walk slowly and again you have become gentle: “We know everything. The military wing. The weapons. Everything. Everything. We are finding out all about the ins and outs of the coup. You bastards assumed that Iran is like Afghanistan ...”

We go to the room downstairs. You string me up and then leave. The blow is sudden and incapacitating. The words on the paper run before my eyes. I see images of the Party leaders, hanging from the ceiling, and confessing to a coup d’etat. My mind refuses to cooperate and fails to come up with any lies. The thought of the Party launching a coup is as ridiculous as saying that Lenin is going to enter the room to untie me. Our Party’s strategy has been to maintain the policy of “unity and criticism”, even if we find ourselves facing the noose. Besides, even if there were plans for a coup, what have I got to do with it? They have arrested the main leaders of the Party, and they even have the intelligence guys. Compared to them, who am I to know anything about the coup? These thoughts are meandering through my mind and I just keep yelling, and am now shouting “O Master of the Age!”
⁷¹
Maybe it’s my father’s voice, reaching me through the years and resonating through my mouth. I keep yelling until I faint. Then they bring me back to my senses. They forcefully shake my hands and then hang me up again. The only solution left to me is suicide. As I am hanging between the ground and the air, I think that I should save myself in any possible way. First, I try to push myself towards the wall so I can hit my head. The rope is too short for this and the increased pressure adds to the unbearable pain.

You keep coming, Brother Hamid. Following the strict rules of interrogation, you are obliged to untie my hands at specific intervals. You make sure I shake my hands, and as soon as the muscles come back to life, you tie me up again and leave.

“Your comrades started talking after the first threat. The more resistance you put up, the more obvious it is that you are keeping an important secret.”

I don’t know whether it’s day or night when you come back and untie me, and leave me unhandcuffed. I assume from the smell of kebab that you have ordered something special for me to prevent my body from collapsing. The prisoner has to be kept alive, he must have enough energy to talk. This is the best time for me to put my thoughts into practice. I say my goodbyes to life, to my wife and to the spring. I break the lens of my glasses. The same glasses that were trampled under the feet of the crowds inside the police station’s weapons arsenal on 11 February, the day of the revolution’s victory. First, I cut the veins in my wrist. Then I swallow the bloodied bits of glass and calmly stretch myself out on the floor. I feel the blood oozing out of me. Now, when I look at the scars on my wrist, I am reminded of that time when I found death to be so much sweeter than life. I wet my hand with my blood and drag myself close to the wall and write: “I am neither a Savak agent nor a spy. The confessions were taken from me under torture.”

I imagine they’ll publish my photograph along with my confession of being a Savak agent and a spy, and that this nightmare will follow me into death.

When I regain consciousness, I find myself unable to move. At first I assume I have been buried. But no, I can hear a familiar voice. People seem to be talking in whispers. I open my eyes. Next to me there is a thin, white curtain, and behind the curtain are two people, talking. You are one of them, Brother Hamid, and my whole body shakes in terror.

Then I realize that an intravenous drip is going into my hand. My wrists have been bandaged and tied to the bed. The guard/doctor sticks his head round the curtain and smiles. Then he comes to take my blood pressure, checks my heartbeat, and unties me: “Put on your blindfold ...”

I stand up with difficulty. I put on my blindfold and am being handed over to you on the other side of the curtain. “Woohoo, Mr Hero.”

You take my arm and help me walk into the prison courtyard. I can feel the sun. I smell the scent of spring and hear the sound of a bird singing somewhere. Then it gets dark and we walk down the stairs.

“Obviously you are hiding a serious secret if you are even prepared to die for it.”

In a voice sounding as if it is coming from deep inside a well, I say: “I don’t know anything. My previous confessions were all fabrication ...”

You are laughing: “We shall see ...”

When we reach the Under the Eight, I hear a cry from the courtyard: “Bring in Mrs Amiri.”

Amiri is my wife’s surname. Initially, I don’t understand the meaning of these words. Then, the words connect to each other one by one in my brain and I see my wife being dragged along, her hands handcuffed.

We enter the room downstairs. You make me sit on the edge of the bed. The unfinished death has given me new courage. I am not barking.

You hand me a tall white bottle.

“Drink this.”

Inside the bottle is a thick, tasteless white liquid. You force me to drink it. Then you put a plate next to me. You pick something up from it and give it to me.

“Eat all these potatoes. Wash them down with the water.”

I touch the potato. It’s large, unpeeled, and covered in mud. With my fingers I touch the plate. It’s full of raw potatoes. You hand me a jug: “Go, fill this up with water and come back. Whatever shit you need to do, get it over with. You’ll be here for quite a while ...”

I drag myself along, the jug in my hand, and enter the block. The left side has been all but emptied of people; apart from a figure wrapped in a black chador, sleeping on a blanket. My legs are shaking. So far I have not seen women in this block. I drag myself to the
bathroom. I fill the jug with water and return. I stand over the woman and look at her from underneath my blindfold. There is no one in the corridor. I whisper my wife’s name: “Nooshabeh?”

The woman, who’s been lying on the blanket, collects herself upon hearing my voice, but she’s not speaking. Again, I say: “Nooshabeh?”

I hear the guard’s voice: “Why have you stopped?”

I start moving again, and go to the Under the Eight. My hands are shaking and the water is spilling. The guard is taking me into the room downstairs and we sit down on the edge of the bed. You say: “Start eating.”

I pick up one of the raw potatoes and bring it towards my mouth. I can’t bring myself to bite into it. You say: “If you wish, I could call your wife to clean them for you.”

And you cram the potato into my mouth. I take my first bite and taste the mingled flavours of mud and raw potato. I chew with my broken teeth and force myself to wash the potato down with the water.

Later I find out that they had realized from the wounds on my lips that I had swallowed the broken glass from my lenses and were trying to clear my stomach. The white liquid was a laxative. I don’t know how many potatoes I have swallowed when a woman’s piercing screams make a shiver go down my spine. I can hear the sound of whipping from somewhere, and the woman screaming. You say casually: “I don’t think your wife is going to put up as much resistance as you.”