Letters to My Torturer: Love, Revolution, and Imprisonment in Iran (28 page)

But you do not come. Apparently you no longer have time. In your own words, you were busy rounding up the others. You are spreading your net to trap the military wing, the secret network, the leadership.

Once a week they bring in the nail clippers. They hand them out and collect them up afterwards. One of the guards usually asks: “Do you have any nail clippers?” If you say no, he moves on. A thought goes through my mind. When he comes back to collect the nail clippers from me I will say no to him, I will tell him that I do not have them. Then I will try to separate the sharp bit from the rest of the clippers. I’ll put it under my prison clothes and sharpen it with the clipper’s file. After all, I can’t eat anything. I can only walk with difficulty. My thought is that when I get to the point of total weakness, I will cut my wrists at night, under the blanket, and in the morning, when they arrive to unlock the door, the deed would be done. And this idea becomes the comfort of my life. I have no doubt that they’ll present me as a spy, and will publish it in their newspapers and stick it to the walls. My only wish is to somehow make my voice heard in the outside world. To somehow manage to tell my wife that I have not been a spy. To tell her that I am who she knew me to be. In love with Iran. I don’t want to leave anything to chance. So I set to work writing on the door and walls of the cell. I am writing to my wife. When they come to take away my corpse, they’ll put someone else into the cell who will read these words, and that way they will reach my wife.

I sharpen the knife at night. Then I put it under the mat they have placed in front of the door. I hide the rest of the nail clipper somewhere else. I fall asleep, in love with death. Sometimes I hear the sound of shuffling slippers and feel that something is crawling over my hand. I jump. It’s a nightmare.

I wake up in the morning to the sound of an Arab, Abdul Basit.
⁷⁵
I go to the bathroom, doing my ablution with pomp and noise. I
perform my prayers. I have learned them. Khamenei had told me inside one of these cells: “Under an Islamic government, not a single tear would be shed by the innocent.”

And now I have learned to pray through reading his book, he who is now Iran’s president. And I am not crying. The tears come later. I pray. The bits that I cannot remember, I count instead. Then I read the Qur’an like a book of fortune telling. I go to sleep. I write on the walls: “I am not a spy. I am not a spy. I am not a Savak agent. I had no idea about anything. I, I, I have gone crazy. I am trying to sleep. I can’t. The cockroach is waking me up.”

In the daytime, when they bring in the food, the smell makes me sick. I eat a little bit of sauce. I make a promise to myself to stay in control up to the last moment. A mixture of madness and reason.

The official in charge of the shop arrives once and knocks on the door. He is selling soap, toothpaste, dried figs and underwear. I have no money to buy anything. I wash my hair in the bathroom with the dishwashing detergent. I dry my hair with my blue prison shirt. I wash my underwear under the tap with the same detergent and then wait until it dries so I can wear it.

Once, I find some used dental floss in the bathroom. Somebody must have dropped it. I, who used to floss my teeth three times a day, am in my third month of not having flossed. I pick it up. From the depths of my heart, I revolt at the thought of putting someone else’s floss into my mouth. My reason is telling me that I have no other option. I place the floss under the running water and wash it with detergent about ten times. Then I bring it to my mouth. I can’t do it. I wash it again. I close my eyes and press it into my mouth.

Days pass but you no longer come for me. I have scratched one line per day on the wall, and am counting the days and months. My feet are slowly getting better. My headache has become chronic and will accompany me for many long years. My broken teeth are also still with me. I am not eating and I am getting weaker by the day. I can hardly stand.

There’s no longer any sign of your love for me, Brother Hamid. You have forgotten me. The film script that you forced on me has turned out to be meaningless, and you are holding me accountable for it. You and the rest of the interrogators hate me. What great luck. You don’t trust me a bit, an even greater piece of luck. Both times you called me up to ask about my brother, you didn’t believe a single word I said. You arrested him on the same day as me. My brother, who has absolutely nothing to do with politics. He is kept in prison for three years, until it eventually becomes clear that he is just my brother, and that is his only offence.

I spent the whole of last night walking around inside a castle with white walls and muddied corridors with no roof. You were wearing a tie, Brother Hamid, and were laughing and guiding me. Paul Auster’s words come to my mind; I was reading him before I fell asleep: “I am a dead man who’s writing the memoirs of a dead man.”

His dead man is Chateaubriand who wishes he could get out of his grave in the middle of the night to correct his memoirs.

I picked the book from the shelf by sheer chance. I needed a powerful place to lose myself in. I, who am but an ordinary man exiled to the land of Chateaubriand, spent the whole night escaping from the grave of sleep, just like him, and corrected my memoirs in my sleep. I retrieved forgotten senses. The tooth that was pulled out was aching. My heart was burning, again.

I got up to write my eighteenth letter to your Eminence.

The Qur’an recitations stopped three days ago. In the morning, when I go to the bathroom, the corridor is empty. I return to my cell and go back to sleep, but am soon jolted awake by the sound of crying; there is pandemonium outside. The window of my cell overlooks a small, brick-paved courtyard, the same courtyard where members of the Revolutionary Guards Corps play football in the summer. They have opened the doors of several large lorries, and
simply emptied their human cargo into the courtyard. Underneath my window, a girl keeps crying and saying: “I am innocent.”

In the afternoon when I go to the bathroom, the corridor is jam-packed. They have arrested the rest of the Party’s leadership.

I realize that this could be a good day for dying. After all, I have become so weak that I can hardly get up, and I can’t walk without leaning against the wall. I have filled the walls of my cell with as much writing as I can muster. Someone is going to read it all eventually and ensure that my wife hears my words. I decide to do it tonight, when the lights go off. But when dinner comes, so does another prisoner, dressed in blue.

As soon as he enters, he says: “They have betrayed us!”

His name is Reza. He explains that the Party had a mole inside the Revolutionary Guards Corps and they arrested him early that morning. They confronted the traitor informant with their evidence and he had admitted to it. Then he walks around the tiny cell, looking into every nook and cranny, and finds the little razor hidden underneath the mat. He asks: “Do you want to kill yourself?”

I don’t reply.

He says: “They’ll do it anyway, with a bullet.”

With great enthusiasm he eats my dinner, which I haven’t touched. He puts some leftover uncooked pieces of bread inside a cup and places the cup inside the jug.

When the door is opened for the nightly bathroom visit, he exchanges greetings with the guard. (Over the next few days I notice that he knows most of the guards.) I go to the bathroom. I perform my ablution out of sheer angst. He stands and mocks me. Suddenly, the door opens while he is throwing the leftover bread into the rubbish bin. The guard rushes in and hits us both hard on the head. He says in a thick, Turkish accent: “You bastards are throwing away God’s blessing?”

In accordance with I don’t know whose fatwa,
⁷⁶
throwing away the inedible raw dough from the bread had been classified as a sin,
and in the prison the raw dough has to be eaten along with the bread. One of the guards has a curious sensitivity about this particular Islamic rule and he watches to make sure no one is throwing away any bread.

The lights go off and we go to sleep. I am jolted awake, my body in the grip of violent convulsions. I’m shivering uncontrollably. I feel my joints disconnecting. I think my knees are coming apart. I was right. This is the night of death. Had Reza not arrived, I’d have used the little knife and they would have found my body at dawn. Reza takes my pulse. He leaps up and bangs loudly on the door: “He’s dying!”

Sobbing, I say: “Leave me alone. Let me die.”

He answers: “We must be killed with a bullet, like true soldiers.”

He bangs and bangs on the door until they open it and two guards come in. They want me to put on my blindfold and stand up. I’m desperately weak. I have absolutely no energy. My muscles won’t obey me. In the end, they grab me under my arms and half carry, half drag me upstairs. I find myself on a hospital bed, semi-conscious, hovering between life and death. I see the face of the guard/doctor. My vision blurs. It seems he’s treating someone else as well. I can hear another voice:

“He must be given this injection, and he needs to swallow the pills. But most important of all is his blood sugar. He must be given compote for some days.”

The guard/doctor asks me: “How many compotes should I get you?”

I have no idea how many. Feebly I shake my head. He asks: “Do you have money in your cell?”

I open my eyes with difficulty.

“I don’t have any money.”

Brother Heydari puts his hand into his own pocket, pulls out some money and gives it to the guard. I think to myself that it is very late to have to go out and buy compote. I wonder where the nearest
shop is. The guard leaves and a little later, returns with apple compote.

The next day, first thing in the morning, they take Reza for interrogation. When he returns, he is laughing. He’s got a strong physique. He hits his chest with his strong fists and says: “They have betrayed us; they have told them everything.”

Towards the afternoon, Brother Davoud arrives. He’s brought me a shirt and a singlet and some cans of compote. He says: “They cost 90 Tumans [about $2 at that time], but they are a gift from your interrogator.”

You are embarrassing me, Brother Hamid. I’ve got to see you some day so I can repay you the 90 Tumans. If you read these memoirs, feel free to go and see my father and ask him for the money. In fact, come to Paris and let’s have a beer. My treat.

Reza buys me oranges and dried figs. The figs and the compote are bringing me back to life. As usual, when I’m angry I start bingeing on food. Or maybe this is my body’s natural reaction to the period of starvation. We eat so many figs that it is becoming a fulltime occupation.

A few nights later, they give us rice and chicken for dinner. It’s very tasty and I, who have now started demolishing my food in a rage, wolf everything down. When the lights go off and I get under the blanket, I feel my stomach churning. I sit up. I hear the sound of frantic banging on one of the cell doors. Then another door. Knocking on doors at this time of the night is unprecedented. Just then I feel my stomach spasm, and as a wave of discharge threatens, I rush to knock on my cell door too. A little later, a guard opens the door. He is supporting his back with his hand and yelling: “Run!”

I stagger to the bathroom. The chicken we had been given that night had gone off and the whole block was suffering from a serious case of diarrhoea.

I get up. I take my little dog out. There is frost everywhere. We walk
to a lake. The elegant swans seem to rise up from the surface of the frozen water. The pillars, domes and minaret of a newly built mosque have surfaced. It’s still just concrete and resembles Moshtarek Prison. I imagine Brother Hamid, dressed in buttoned-up diplomatic attire, standing on the top of the minaret and inviting the infidel world to share in Islamic fairness and compassion.

We walk across frost-covered grass. We reach a little wall that slips down towards the water like a white snake. My boy and I step over it. I want to get to a place where I can yell forever. A flock of white birds are seated on the railings. I stand still and facing the sun, I start screaming. Screaming.

My little boy is scratching my legs. I look at him. His father’s cries have astounded him. He’s looking at a sobbing, old man. A man with unkempt hair and a beard streaked with white.

Yes, Brother Hamid, you had gone. You had caught a lot of prey in your net, and finally you left me alone. I must confess that from this point on you stopped tormenting me. Later on, you just swore at me a few times.

I was left alone. I had no idea that this loneliness would last for two years, and that cell number fifteen would become one of my homes.

My headache has become chronic. I tear off a strip of my shirt and tie it around my head like a bandana. I wet it under the tap every time I go to the bathroom. Little by little, the headache becomes part of me, like the toothache, like the shoulder ache, and the piercing pain in my feet, my feet on which the lashes have left their marks, which are slowly getting better. I can now move my hands almost comfortably and have started doing some gentle exercise. The pain is lessening, but you can still see the bruises on my wrists from the handcuffs. I’ll be keeping your souvenirs for the rest of my life. The handcuffs’ mark on my right wrist. The trace of the cut that I made with the lenses of my glasses on the left one. The marks of the rope
you tied my feet with. The burning pain in the soles of my feet. My wounded heart. The smell of excrement in my nose. The marks of the whip all over my back. Doctors always ask me: “Were you born with these marks?”

I answer: “No, but I’ll take them to the grave with me.”

That night, when I go to the bathroom, I fill up my jug as usual and am on my way back to my cell when I hear the voice of one of the main Party leaders being broadcast over the loudspeakers, announcing the Party’s dissolution. I stop automatically. My knees are shaking and suddenly I collapse. I manage to get back on my feet, and drag myself to my cell. The Party leader’s confessions
⁷⁷
are being broadcast and a deathly silence fills the block. When the loudspeaker is turned off, there is absolute silence for a few minutes and then someone, somewhere, starts crying and suddenly, the whole block is shaking with the sound of weeping. The prisoners are crying in their cells. They are crying in the corridors. There is no other sound, apart from the sound of weeping. I lean against the wall of my cell and my whole body is shaking. Someone is shouting: “Look what we wanted to achieve, and look what has happened ...”