Letters to My Torturer: Love, Revolution, and Imprisonment in Iran (34 page)

“No.”

The court secretary and representative says: “This son of a bitch is a chief spy.”

Nayeri asks me: “How did you address Kianuri?”

“Haj Aqa, Father ...”

“You had no idea that you were calling this faithless old man Haj Aqa?”

He then opens the file and leafs through it. I see a large envelope inside the file. Nayeri pulls it out, emptying its contents. It’s the pages of the first stage of interrogation, which Brother Hamid had torn into pieces after I had repented so he could throw them away. This is just one example of the tricks of interrogation.

Nayeri puts the papers back on the desk.

“So you are not a spy?”

“No.”

As if he had just remembered something, Nayeri calls the guard. He gives him his car keys and says: “Put those sacks of rice on the backseat of my car.”

And asks me: “And the other confessions?”

I say: “I have never been an agent for the Soviets or the British.”

He says: “That you are a spy is clear from your crimes ...”

And he signals to the guard, who’s playing with the car keys, to take me away. Then he closes the file. His last sentence smells of death. I say: “Could you do me a favour, Haj Aqa? If the verdict is execution, could I call my wife?”

“It is not necessary at this time.”

On the way back, I am hearing the clock tick in my mind. It started at eight thirty and ended at eight thirty-six. My fate has been decided in six minutes.

The following day is visiting day. Telephone desk number fifteen. When I pick up the phone, I immediately tell my wife: “It’s over. Death sentence. I am innocent. I’ve not been a spy. I haven’t been a Savak spy. If they hang me, don’t let it destroy your life. But I am finished.”

I watch her black chador, which she’s been forced to put on for the visit, slip back as she sits down behind the glass screen, on the other side of the desk.

One evening, about a month later, they call me up. It’s neither visiting time nor the time to sort out administrative procedures. Foroud and the Party members gather round. They don’t say anything but I can see in their eyes that they are thinking of the hanging.

But how come they haven’t picked up my belongings?

That’s not unprecedented, though. Sometimes people are picked up to be “hit”, to use the prison term, and their belongings collected afterwards. I say my farewells to my fellow Party members and walk down the stairs. A very thin young man is already waiting outside. So there are two of us. We board the minibus. As usual, we prisoners have not been told where we are being taken or why. I sit next to the window and pull up my blindfold. On the last night there’s no longer any need for this constant tool of torture. The driver doesn’t make a fuss about my blindfold. He must know that I am being taken to be hanged. I put on my glasses and stare at the beautiful night. The prison courtyard is glittering in the moonlight. It is truly a reflection of paradise. Water flows in the streams. Birds sing. Flowers bloom. A pleasant breeze is blowing through the open window. It’s a beautiful night for dying. Against my will, I review my life. I tell myself: “Maybe they’ll let me phone my wife before they hang me.”

But what would be the point? We don’t have a phone at home. So I must go to my grave, without having heard my wife’s voice. My tears are flowing down my cheeks, drop by drop. I am not scared any more. I am totally numb.

The minibus stops. The dreamlike spring night is clear and bright. I can see both the city and the mountains at once. I ask the young man: “Why have they brought you here?”

His voice is shaking: “To hang me.”

He too has lifted his blindfold. He’s one of the Mujahedin. The bus driver leaves and a little later, there’s the sound of shuffling
slippers. I remember your words, Brother Hamid: “I would like to shoot the final bullet myself.”

But the slippers are not yours. I had no idea at the time that you had been appointed deputy in the Information Ministry’s security department, too important an official now to appear at the hanging ceremony in slippers. The slippers belong to a young guard, one of the regime’s young thugs who plays football in the prison courtyard and takes the prisoners to the gallows. He doesn’t tell us to put on our blindfolds either. He says: “Follow me.”

We set off. We turn. We enter a building where someone is throwing herself into my arms. It’s my wife. She says: “Fifteen years. They have given you fifteen years.”

Then she collapses, sobbing, wrapped up in her chador. I talk to her but she can’t hear me; she’s just crying. The young man’s mother has also embraced her son.

The guard says: “Ten minutes for you.”

And then he faces the Mujahed man: “You, twenty minutes.”

The young man looks at his watch and starts crying. My wife is also crying bitterly, endlessly. Much later, she told me that she had been waiting outside Evin’s walls since five in the morning. When I had told her the news of my death sentence, she had immediately gone to Khamenei’s office. She had already sent numerous letters to him without ever receiving an answer. This time she’d written that her husband was going to be hanged under the pretence of infiltration of Khamenei’s office and Khamenei certainly knew that this was not true.

The day before our reunion, a letter had arrived at our home from Khamenei’s office. My wife had opened the letter and seen a photocopy of the letter that I had sent to Khamenei from prison. She saw that Khamenei had written a single sentence on the back: “In the name of the Almighty, I was already familiar with his views.”

Just that. Early the next morning, my wife had arrived outside Evin with the letter, and together with some other individuals she had managed to get an appointment with Ali Razini, who had
replaced Asadollah Lajevardi. They had been taken to the Husseinieh in the evening, a Shia institution where religious and cultural events take place, such as prayers and sermons. Ali Razini was seated on a raised dais, receiving the family members of prisoners one by one. When my wife’s turn came, she handed him the copy of Khamenei’s letter. Razini opened the file, returned the copy and said: “There’s no need. The original letter is here. Fifteen years.”

With difficulty my wife stopped herself from crying out with joy and stood up to leave. But Razini pointed at her and an elderly woman and said: “Sit down.”

They waited until the sun went down. When all the other families had left, Razini called a guard and said: “Take these two people back with you.”

And gave him a piece of paper.

My wife panicked. Thugs like him terrify everybody. My wife thought the worst, and assumed that he intended to rape her. She said that as she walked out she was shaking with the fear of rape at the hands of this dirty monster. The guard put them into the minibus and as he stepped out of the bus he told them that they had been given permission for a visit.

I embrace my wife. She keeps crying.

The minibus takes us back to Evin. I am so happy that I can hardly stand on my own two feet. But I don’t want anyone to know. I tell the others: “I had a visitor.”

I fall into a deep, comfortable sleep.

A few days later, they call me up. I sign the fifteen-year prison term inside the administration office. The term becomes official on signing, and because the four years that have passed since my arrest do not count, my term altogether becomes nineteen years. I can no longer keep my joy to myself. By sheer chance that day sweets have been brought into the prison. I buy some and share them with the others in my block.

Ghezel Hesar is one of the largest prisons in the Middle East. It was built during the Shah’s time for regular prisoners. Like US prisons, this one has four towers, one at each of the four corners of its 1500-hectare grounds. During the Shah’s time no political prisoners were held here. But after the revolution, two units of the prison were allocated to political prisoners and Haj Davoud Rahmani, a criminal on a par with Asadollah Lajevardi, took charge of them. He tortured Armenian teenagers and young men into their graves and then he disappeared. He is one of the few torturers that no one has a single photograph of.

They are moving us away from Tehran, Brother Hamid, and I thought I would be moving away from you. So far away that your hands couldn’t reach me. But I was wrong.

Your hands, the bloodied fingers of your culture, were exerting control everywhere.

This is my twenty-second letter to you, and I am writing it from very far away. Very far away. I don’t know why I imagine that one day it will reach you.

It was autumn and a line of buses was taking us to another prison, travelling along the main motorway that leads from Tehran up to the
north-west of Iran. As we drove, memories of mountains and deserts came flooding back to me. The buses were filled from front to back with prisoners who had been sentenced and were now being taken to Ghezel Hesar Prison to serve their sentences.

It is evening when we alight in front of the steps of unit number three. They divide us into blocks. They send me to cell number eight, I am sharing the cell with three other leftists and eight Mujahedin. The person in charge of the cell is, of course, one of them. In Evin, renegade Mujahedin were put in charge of blocks and cells. Here, the people loyal to the Mujahedin are in charge: the two sides of the same coin.

A meeting is held that evening. It’s been arranged to cast votes for and against changing the bedsheets. The person in charge of the cell introduces the issue. Then he collects votes. He asks for the views of every single Mujahed. He bypasses me and the three other leftists who happen to sit beside me, and says: “Approved unanimously.”

We leftists do not exist for them. A while later things become clear to me. There are poles that are opposite each other: the oppressive prison guards and the innocent prisoners. Each side desires nothing less than the total annihilation of the other. If an individual fails to obey the prisoners’ own rules, he is counted as an enemy who is siding with the guards. If he doesn’t conduct himself as the guards wish him to behave, he is considered an enemy of the administration. There is no grey zone between the black and white frontlines. If you tried to move towards the grey zone so that you could be true to yourself, you would be condemned by both sides.

A few days after my arrival, I notice that the leader of the Iranian Trotskyists, Babak Zahraie, is also here. Completely isolated, he is held in the first cell on the right side of the block. The cell is small and has become known as the cell of the “directionless”, those with no political affiliations.

I seek him out and we immediately become friends. He’s a sweet man, literate and open. We discuss Stalin. He’s confident that Stalin
killed three million people, I argue that he killed only a few. Eventually, we agree on three hundred thousand people, laugh and shake hands.

That same night, Hussein Abi comes to find me. I used to truly love him. Now, he talks to me in a cautious manner. He says I shouldn’t speak to Babak, that he’s an enemy of the Party and a CIA spy. I tell him that the rest of the prisoners are also enemies of the Party, but there is no evidence that Babak is a CIA spy. Also, even if he were a spy, what secret do I have that might be useful to him?

Laughing, Hussein says: “Sod off. When you perform your prayers, I know that you’re faking it. And now you are hanging out with a CIA spy. Have you completely distanced yourself from us?”

I explained my position: “I have made up my mind. I don’t want to belong to any organization. I want to be independent.”

Our relationship becomes cold. I realize that after every meeting or conversation I have with Hussein, my relationship with most of the others becomes colder too. But a few of them remain friendly until the last day. Ismael is one of them; a tiny, military man, incredibly kind, he loves grapes. As at Evin, the Mujahedin have set up rules for this block. And, as at Evin, they have decided that eating fruit is a sign of greed. Hence, I am the only one that buys any of the fruit that is offered for sale. In the evening Ismael and I sit in the corridor, to chat and share my grapes.

In the middle of the night, the man in charge of the block wakes me up to take me out of the cell. He hands me over to Samad who resembles an Afghan bricklayer. He speaks quietly, muttering. After a few questions of a general nature, he starts asking about the Freemasons in Iran and their work, and the Intelligence Services’ operational methods. Alarm bells start ringing in my head. You have returned, Brother Hamid, dressed in a different set of clothing. I am overwhelmed by an intense feeling of danger.

A few days later, I am called up, and asked to pick up my belongings. I am taken to Evin in a private car and delivered to the
sanatorium. An official collects me and makes me stand outside a cell, and angrily tells me to take my clothes off. I take off my clothes. I take off everything apart from my underpants. He shouts: “Take them off!”

I can’t believe it. I have only seen scenes like this in films. I begin to take off my underpants a little hesitantly. He abruptly drags them down.

“Bend over, you piece of filth.”

A mixture of fear and embarrassment floods over me. I bend slightly.

“More.”

With great reluctance I bend over a little more, every instinct screaming at me to refuse. My face is burning in shame.

“Now open up.”

I grip the two sides of my buttocks and pull them apart. My heart and my hands are trembling. Suddenly, a hand is thrust into my anus. I cry out involuntarily. The gloved hand is twisting around inside my anus and I am choking with hatred and anger. He takes off his dirty glove and gives it to me: “Throw it into the toilet.” Then he pushes me, naked as I am, into one of those infamous Israeli-style cells with a sink and toilet. I want to throw the glove into the toilet, but the toilet is blocked and filled to overflowing with a stinking mess of water and excrement.