Then They Came For Me (18 page)

“Prepare yourself. You’ll be going back to your specialist soon!”

In my dream state, I couldn’t make sense of those words.

“Get up! You leave in five minutes.”

“What time is it?” I asked, aware only of the throbbing ache in my lower back and the stiffness in my legs.

“If you were supposed to know the time, we would have put a clock in your cell,” said the guard. I recognized the voice: it was Blue-Eyed Seyyed. “Now hurry up!”

I was led blindfolded through the courtyard again, and guessed it to be around four
A.M.
When Rosewater came into the interrogation room, I could hear him yawning. He once again told me to remove my blindfold and sit facing the wall. He then took a bite of something and chewed loudly.

“Would you care for some of this?” he asked me.

“What is it?”

“A salted cucumber.”

“No, thank you.”

He sounded insulted. “What? Do you think that interrogators don’t wash their hands?”

I accepted the cucumber and took a bite of it. Rosewater placed another sheet of paper in front of me.

“I want you to write down the names of all of your friends and the countries you have been to.”

I took my time listing all the countries I had visited. When I was nine years old, I spent a month touring Europe with Maryam and my mother. Because of the oil boom of the 1970s, Iran’s economy was doing well, and the currency was strong. We visited twelve cities in nine countries. The trip opened my eyes to other cultures and people, and instilled in me a love of travel that persists to this day. As Rosewater hovered around me in the interrogation room, I remembered visiting the Houses of Parliament in London with Maryam and my mother. It was that day when I first learned of a concept called “democracy,” and I fell in love with London because of it. As a child growing up in the shah’s Iran, all I knew about politics in Iran was that the shah—or, as they called him on state television, His Royal Majesty the Shah of the Shahs—had all the power in the country and the people had none.

“So what do they do here?” I asked Maryam. “Why don’t we have a parliament in Iran?” To my surprise, Maryam told me that we did.

“So why don’t we hear about them?” I asked. Maryam and my mother exchanged an exasperated look. They didn’t know how to explain to a child my age that the Iranian parliament in the time of the shah was just a charade, and that no one who was even remotely critical of the shah would ever be allowed to run for office.

“Well, it’s different in Iran,” Maryam said. “The parliament is not that active.”

“Why?”

My mother was growing impatient. “Mazi
jaan
,” she said, “don’t repeat this to any of your friends or at school. We have a shah in Iran and everyone has to listen to him. Everyone—cabinet ministers, members of parliament, and all other people.”

“And how’s it here?”

“People vote for people they trust, their representatives, and
they are the ones who select the prime minister,” my mother said, obviously hoping that I would drop the issue. “In England, the queen has no power; she has to listen to the people. It’s called democracy. In Iran, people have no power; they have to listen to the shah.”

“But why?” I wanted to know, but my mother’s patience had run out.

She smiled at Maryam and me. “Shall we go to Madame Tussauds?”

Now, as I wrote down the names of all the countries I had visited, I smiled at the memory. When I finished, I slowly listed the names of my friends, leaving out the Iranians. I wanted to avoid answering any questions about anybody the Guards might be able to locate and arrest.

“Mr. Bahari,” Rosewater said after I’d handed him the paper. “Why is it that you do not write down the names of your Iranian friends?”

“I don’t have that many Iranian friends, sir,” I answered. “I spend most of my time outside Iran. I only come to Iran to work, and don’t socialize much while I’m here.”

He knew I was lying. I heard him take a piece of paper in his hands, and he began to read off a list of names of my friends, foreign and Iranian. I realized he must have gotten the names from my emails and phone. When I’d first arrived at Evin, the guards had requested that I give them the passwords to my email and Facebook accounts. They had also confiscated my London and Tehran cell phones. I hadn’t resisted—I had nothing to hide. “I want an entire
tak nevisi
on these people,” Rosewater said now, meaning an explanation of how I knew each individual and the nature of my relationship with that person. As with his previous interrogations, he didn’t seem interested in finding new information. He’d already made up his mind about me and what I’d done. He just wanted to prove a point.

“The more you tell us about the anti-revolutionary and seditious
activities of each person, the more we can have an understanding,” said Rosewater. “And a better understanding means that you can have an easier time in prison.”

He interrupted me as I wrote, asking me questions about why I’d been to certain countries, how I’d met certain people. Rosewater was particularly interested in anyone named Jonathan and Mary. He gave me a list of all the people I knew with these names.

“Write down where you have met each one of them and how you know them,” he said.

I stared at the list. The Jonathans I knew included three broadcasters and a cameraman. I knew more than a dozen Marys from different periods in my life. I couldn’t imagine why he had singled out these people; there were no connections between them. I started with my friend Jonathan Miller, a correspondent for Channel 4 News in England. I explained that we’d worked together on several programs about Iran and Iraq.

“Good,” Rosewater said from behind me. “Now write down which spy agency he works for.”

“I beg your pardon, sir?”

“Am I talking Turkish here?” he asked brusquely. “Tell me which intelligence agency this Jonathan works for.”

“Sorry, sir,” I said desperately. “He’s not a spy. He’s a filmmaker.”

“You are lying, Mr. Bahari.”

“No, really. I don’t think he’s a spy.” I paused for a few seconds, then continued. “Even if he were, he probably wouldn’t tell me that.” I explained that we had worked on a series of programs about human-rights abuses in Iraq after the American invasion, as well as on a few films shot in Iran. Rosewater seemed to know all of this already. He mentioned a program we had collaborated on about Hossein Ali Montazeri, an ayatollah who was a vociferous critic of the Islamic regime. The film
showed footage of Montazeri questioning the legitimacy of the government.

“It’s so interesting,” Rosewater said. “You’ve worked on anti-revolutionary television programs together. His name is Jonathan. Yet you say he’s not a spy.”

“I don’t understand the connection,” I said. In high school, one of my favorite subjects had been logic. I’d always thought I could follow people’s reasoning, even if it was riddled with non sequiturs. But I had no idea what Rosewater was talking about.

“With friends like that and making films like that, how can you tell me that you are not a ringleader of the foreign media in Iran?” he asked.

Years of covering Iranian politics and trying to draw conclusions about the irrational behavior of the Iranian government had not prepared me for understanding Rosewater. All I could do was follow out a logical sequence of my own:

·   ·   ·

Back in my cell afterward, I lay down again on the green carpet and talked to my father. “Mazi
jaan
, whatever you do, just don’t name names,” I heard him say in my head. My father had always told us about how prisoners who revealed information about one comrade would only be pushed to reveal more information about others. “Be careful, Mazi. You name one name, and the list of questions will go on forever.”

Over the next two days, between interrogations, I did my best to remember the kinds of conversations I had had with my father, and I concocted further dialogues with him in my head. Meanwhile, Rosewater made sure that I understood that he was going
out of his way to be polite and patient with me. “Please answer these as well,” he would say sarcastically as he handed me page after page of questions about different Iranian journalists working for the foreign media. It was clear that the aim of the questions was to connect me to a vast array of journalists from different Western news organizations, in order to prove that I was the mastermind of the Western media in Iran. In response, I wrote out long, general answers that revealed very little.

After writing down everything I knew about the paper, I would then add pages and pages of general ideas about the history of the media in the West, things I had learned in my journalism courses at Concordia University. On the second day, Rosewater began to take the pages away and provide me with new ones before even reading my answers. At first I still hoped that he was communicating with someone above him—someone who was, I prayed, supervising this charade; but I soon realized he was just busy interrogating another person in the room next to me.

“Mardak!”
I heard him yell through the wall, calling the prisoner “little man.” “I’ll finish your life here. Do you think you can fool me?! Stop writing this bullshit and answer me.” These words were followed by the sound of a man being slapped repeatedly.

Hearing this, I felt the sweat collect in the small of my back. I tried to keep my writing hand steady. Then Rosewater was back in the room, offering me a snack.

“Please, have some nuts, Mr. Bahari,” he said, placing a plate of cashews and pistachios on the writing arm of my chair.

“Thank you very much, sir,” I said.

“You are most welcome.” He was breathing heavily. “Would you Americans treat your prisoners like this in Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo?”

I didn’t reply.

“You know something, Mr. Bahari? It would be in your interest to just end this all and confess to masterminding the Western media in Iran. That’s all you have to do. Tell us about it. Tell us your methods for directing the media.” He picked a cashew from the plate. “To be honest, we’re really quite amazed by you. We know that you operate in a certain way. Quite mysterious. Almost invisible.” His tone was uncharacteristically controlled. I was not sure whether he really believed what he was saying or was trying to frame me. “We’ve been living with you for months. You didn’t know that, did you? Well, it’s true, so you better not deny anything. We know the answer to most of the questions we’re asking. We just want to know how willing you are to tell us the truth.”

I tried to keep my voice calm. “I think you have the wrong person here, sir,” I said. “None of the attributes you mentioned fit my character. You make me sound like James Bond!”

Rosewater laughed heartily. “James Bond should take lessons from you, Mr. Bahari. The devil himself should learn playing mischief from you.” He seemed to be enjoying this. “Surprise me, Mr. Bahari. Tell me something I don’t know.”

“I have nothing to hide,” I said. “And I’m glad to hear that you know everything about me, because then you must know that I’m innocent.”

“Oh, really?” growled Rosewater. “So why did you use a motorcycle to travel around Tehran?”

So Davood was right
, I thought.
We were being followed
. “You know about the traffic in Tehran, sir. I always use motorcycle cabs.”

“And you always use the same person?” Rosewater said sarcastically. “Mr. Bahari, we’ve arrested your personal biker. Or shall I call him a courier? He’s told us everything about you.”

I wasn’t concerned about what Davood could tell his interrogators, because there was nothing to tell, of course. But I was worried about Davood. What had I gotten him into? He had moved to Tehran to support his family with his motorcycle, and now … a chance encounter with me may have ruined his life. I tried not to imagine what Davood might be suffering at that moment.

“Sir, that poor man is just a motorcycle cabbie,” I said. “All he did was take me from one place to another, and I paid him at the end of each day.”

“I’ll keep you posted about him, Mr. Bahari. We know that he’s part of your vast network. He seems to have a lot to say about you.” He tapped my chair with his fingers. “So tell us about the dinner at Nazila Fathi’s house on the twenty-eighth of April.”

The pen shook in my hand. For the first time, he was asking me about something that had actually happened. He was referring to a dinner I’d attended with eight other journalists and photographers at my friend Nazila’s house in Tehran several weeks before the election.

It had just been a friendly get-together, and it surprised me that Rosewater knew about it. Nazila had been the Tehran correspondent for
The New York Times
for years. She and her husband, Babak, had told me that they thought that their house was under surveillance but that they didn’t know which branch of the government was staking them out.

“It was just a dinner. It wasn’t anything special,” I said as dismissively as I could.

“Who were the other guests?” he asked.

I told him the names of each of the guests except for two. One was a Spanish journalist whose presence there I had genuinely forgotten. The other was my
Newsweek
colleague Babak Dehghanpisheh. I didn’t mention Babak’s name in order to test Rosewater—I wanted to see if he knew as much as he claimed to. I was also worried about Babak and wanted to know whether they had arrested him.

“And?” he asked.

“That’s it,” I answered.

“This is a very dangerous game you’re playing, Mr. Bahari,” Rosewater murmured into my ear. “Very dangerous.” He paused and then put a piece of paper in front of me. “You forgot your dear friend Babak Dehghanpisheh and a mysterious foreign woman.”