Then They Came For Me

I could smell him before I saw him. His scent was a mixture of sweat and rosewater, and it reminded me of my youth.

When I was six years old, I would often accompany my aunts to a shrine in the holy city of Qom. It was customary to remove your shoes before entering the shrine, and the caretakers of the shrine would sprinkle rosewater everywhere, to mask the odor of perspiration and leather.

That morning in June 2009, when they came for me, I was in the delicate space between sleep and wakefulness, taking in his scent. I didn’t realize that I was a man of forty-two in my bedroom in Tehran; I thought, instead, that I was six years old again, and back in that shrine with my aunts.

“Mazi
jaan
, wake up,” my mother said. “There are four gentlemen here. They say they are from the prosecutor’s office. They want to take you away.” I opened my eyes. It was a few minutes before eight, and my mother was standing beside my bed—her small eighty-three-year-old frame protecting me from the four men behind her. I sleep without clothes, and in my half-awake state, my first thought wasn’t that I was in danger, but that I was naked in a shrine. I felt ashamed and reached down to make sure the sheets were covering my body.

Mr. Rosewater was standing directly behind my mother. I would later come to learn a lot about him.

He was thirty-one years old and had earned a master’s degree in political science from Tehran University. While at university, he had joined the Revolutionary Guards, a vast and increasingly powerful fundamentalist military conglomerate formed in the wake of the 1979 Iranian revolution. I would come to know that his punches were the hardest when he felt stupid. But when he appeared in my bedroom early that morning, the only things I understood about him were that he was in charge, and that he had a very large head. It was alarmingly big, like the rest of his body. He was at least six foot two and fat, with thick glasses. Later, his glasses would confuse me. I had associated glasses with professors, intellectuals. Not torturers.

I wrapped the sheet tightly around my body and sat up. “Put some clothes on,” Rosewater said, motioning to the three men behind him to leave the room so that I could get dressed. I found comfort in this: whatever their reason was for barging into my house, he was still respectful, still behaving with a modicum of courtesy.

They kept the door slightly ajar, and I walked to my closet. Things were beginning to come into clearer focus, but his rosewater scent lingered and my thoughts, still confused, remained back in the past, at the shrine. What does one wear in a shrine? What’s the best way to present oneself? I had just finished putting on a blue collared shirt and a pair of jeans when the men pushed their way back into my room: Rosewater and another man, who wore a shiny silver sports jacket and a cap.

They circled the room, surveying everything. I had been spending most of my time over the last two years with my fiancée, Paola, in London. We had gotten engaged six months earlier, and had been preparing for the birth of our child in four months’ time, and I had never really settled in at my mother’s house. I could sense their frustration as they took stock of the mess in my small room. Heaps of books sat on the floor beside
stacks of videotapes and DVDs and an untidy pile of laundry. I had not organized my desk for months, and it was covered with old newspapers and notebooks. All journalists working in Iran have to be accredited by Ershad—the name is shorthand for the Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance—and I had given my mother’s address as my place of work. They’d thought they were going to find an office at my mother’s house. Instead, they were picking through piles of underwear.

“If you want, I can organize things and you can come back tomorrow,” I said with an apologetic smile.

“Zerto pert nakon,”
Rosewater said sharply. “Stop talking shit. Sit down and shut up. One more word, and I’ll beat you so badly, I’ll make your mother mourn for you.” He scratched his side under his jacket, revealing the gun strapped to his body. I sat down, feeling my body grow heavy with fear. I, like most Iranians, knew of far too many people—writers, artists, activists—who had been woken up like this, then taken somewhere and murdered. I thought of my father and my sister, each arrested and imprisoned by previous regimes; I thought of my mother, who had been forced to live through all this twice before. I could hear my mother’s voice in the kitchen, and my fear was joined by an overwhelming sense of guilt. How could my mother go through this again? Why hadn’t I been more careful? Why hadn’t I left Iran sooner?

“Would you like some tea?” I heard her ask one of the men in the kitchen.

“No, thank you.”

“Why not? It seems that you are going to be here for a while. You should have some tea,” she said.

“No, really. I don’t want to impose.”

I heard my mother laugh. “You arrived at my house at eight
A.M.
You are going through my son’s personal belongings. I am going to have to put everything back in order after you leave. What do you mean you do not want to impose?”

The man ignored the question. “Madam, please put on your scarf,” he said.

Though I could not see my mother’s face, I could imagine the condescending look she was giving him at that moment.

My mother’s unveiled hair was illegal under Islamic law. I knew that her halfhearted obeying of the Revolutionary Guards’ order was her attempt at defiance. She was telling them that while they might be able to control her body, they could never control her mind. The Guards rightly thought of my mother and me as parts of the “other Iran,” those citizens who did not want to be the subjects of an Islamic ruler and would have preferred to determine our own destinies.

“I am eighty-three years old. Why should I put on my scarf?”

My mother’s name is Molook. Growing up, we called her Molook
joon
, which in Persian means “dear Molook.” Because my older brother, Babak, couldn’t pronounce the
k
, he called her Moloojoon. The name stuck, and it was this name I used as I called out to her, doing my best to keep my voice from trembling: “Please, Moloojoon. Don’t argue with them.”

I heard her quick steps, and a few moments later she walked past my room, a blue floral scarf covering just half of her hair.

“Fine,” I heard her say with polite disdain.

My room had a large bookshelf full of Western novels and music, with volumes signed by prominent Iranian reformists on one side and HBO DVD box sets and copies of
Vanity Fair, The New Yorker
, and
Newsweek
stacked sloppily on the other. It was surely foreign territory to Rosewater. He continued to thumb through my papers and books, despite the look of obvious bewilderment on his face.

I sat on the bed watching him until, a while later, he told me I could go to the kitchen and eat breakfast while they continued to search my room. In the kitchen, my mother poured me a cup of tea and placed a few dates on a small china saucer. She then took a seat across from me at the breakfast table and silently
pushed the dates toward me.
“Bokhor,”
she said with a smile—“Have some”—hoping, I knew, to assure me that I would find the strength to survive this ordeal, whatever was to come.

I was humbled by her courage, though it didn’t surprise me. My mother’s strength has been a source of inspiration throughout my life. But I felt guilty as I thought about how painful it would be for her to watch yet another member of her family being carted off to prison for defying an Iranian regime.

·   ·   ·

It had been December 1954 when they came for my father. At the time, Iran was ruled by the shah, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, a pro-Western autocrat. Of course, my mother didn’t like to speak of the experience—of what it was like for her on that cold winter night when the shah’s secret police and soldiers of the Royal Iranian Army raided their house. She was twenty-nine and my father twenty-seven, and they had been married for just two years. They lived in my mother’s family home in the Sangalaj neighborhood of south Tehran with their first child, my older brother, Babak, who was then only ten months old, and two of my aunts. I was told that while my father’s future interrogator, a thuggish man named Rezvani, insulted my father in front of his wife, child, and sisters-in-law, the soldiers ransacked the house, taking whatever they wanted for themselves. “They even went through your father’s clothes,” my mother remembered with her unfaltering sense of humor. “I caught one of them stealing some of his underwear.”

For many years, my father had been a member of the Tudeh Party, the communist party of Iran. The party had been banned a few years earlier, after one of its members had been accused of an assassination attempt against the shah. But my father had continued his party work, organizing strikes and demonstrations against the government on behalf of the Union of Metal Workers of Iran, and finding hideouts for persecuted party leaders.
After being held for many months, during which he endured solitary confinement and torture, he was charged with belonging to a treasonous organization and sentenced to fifteen years in prison.