Then They Came For Me (20 page)

Her worst experience in prison happened not long after the massacre, when she had gone on a hunger strike in protest of abuse by the prison guards. One night, Maryam and several other prisoners were summoned to an area outside of the cells. They were then marched to a field and lined up against a wall. Maryam had no idea what was happening, and was too afraid to ask. Prison guards began to hand out blindfolds and asked the prisoners to repent. This was when she knew: it was an execution ceremony.

“I thought I was going to die, Mazi,” she said, her eyes brimming with tears. “All I could feel was guilt. I felt guilty for putting our parents through this, and I felt responsible for what could happen to Khaled. I was a bad parent. A bad daughter.”

The Revolutionary Guards who were in control of the prison ordered the prisoners to face the wall. And then the shots were fired. But Maryam felt nothing. It took her a few seconds to understand what had happened: this was a mock execution, and the guards had fired blanks. She felt confused by the fact that she was still alive.

Maryam’s whole body shook as she told me about the mock execution. It was 1996 as we spoke, seven years after the fall of the Berlin Wall and five after the defeat of the Soviet Union. In those years Maryam had learned about the atrocities committed by the Soviet Union. She felt used by the Tudeh Party and the Soviets, and brutalized by Khomeini’s regime.

“Why did I join that party? I hate that party,” she told me in our hotel in Istanbul. “Nothing is worth dying for, Mazi. Nothing is worth what I went through.”

It was November 2008, nineteen years after she was released
from prison, that Maryam called to tell me she had been diagnosed with leukemia. After we hung up, I felt shattered and hopeless. I left the small Soho editing room where I’d been working on a film for the BBC and called Paola. When she answered the phone, I could barely get the words out. “Why?” I kept asking her, as if she could give me an answer. That night we went to an Indian restaurant. I ordered the spiciest thing on the menu, hoping to feel something besides numbness.

Over dinner I told Paola I had to go to Iran to be with Maryam. “You should do whatever you think is best, Mazi,” Paola said, holding my hands. My napkin was soaked in tears.

The next morning I called Maryam and told her I was coming back to Iran. She immediately said no. She insisted that she was doing fine, that the worst was over.

Three months later, I was in Washington interviewing former U.S. hostages held in Iran when my phone rang. I took the call outside. It was a friend of mine, calling to say that Maryam had died earlier that morning.

My life had not been the same since then. I’d been shattered, constantly needing to escape from the memories and emotions. Every now and then, I would blame everything on the Islamic government, which had separated Maryam and me for such a long time. But that was an easy way out. The Islamic government had been brought to power by the people—people like Maryam. I also thought there was no point in blaming everything on the government; instead I should remain the person Maryam wanted me to be: a good journalist.

I could do that outside, but now I was trapped in Evin, in the same situation that Maryam had been in for six years, and all I could do was think of Maryam. I picked at the fraying green carpet on the floor of my cell. Maryam had always loved to draw. In prison she hadn’t had a pencil or paper to draw with, so, she had told me, she’d drawn landscapes in her imagination. “I could see the sky even though my cell didn’t have a window,”
Maryam said. “I looked at the wall and tried to talk to it. I thought I was going crazy, but it helped me to survive the confinement.”

I slowly chewed my bread, wondering how my sister would draw my cell, what she would say to these walls.

·   ·   ·

Later that day, Rosewater took me to the office of Evin’s resident prosecutor, Judge Mohammadzadeh. Above the chair where Mohammadzadeh sat was a large portrait of Khamenei, smiling. He certainly looked satisfied with himself.

The guard sat me on a chair a few feet in front of Judge Mohammadzadeh, who was talking on a landline phone while continually silencing his cell phone, which kept ringing. The person on the other end of the landline seemed to be important.

“Yes, sir, I shall do that, sir, of course, sir,” Judge Mohammadzadeh said, with machine-gun speed. A man walked in and tried to get the judge’s attention. Mohammadzadeh put the phone between his shoulder and cheek and took a file from a stack of papers. He handed it to the man, then shooed him away. I became engrossed in watching the judge. He was in his mid-forties, and his beard was short but very thick and as black as a crow’s wings.

Finally, Mohammadzadeh put the phone down. He looked at me, and I noticed that under his very thick glasses, his eyes were crossed.

“And you are Mr.—?” he said, with a disingenuous smile.

“Bahari, sir.”

A man I didn’t know piped up from behind me. “The spy!” he said.

The judge looked at me again, more closely this time. “Interesting.” He then read aloud from a paper in front of him, listing the countries I had visited and the names of my friends.

The man behind me spoke while the judge read. “He is a real
spy, Mr. Mohammadzadeh. He is the one who wrote all that crap about the supreme leader and the Revolutionary Guards. He is the one who filmed the attack against the Basij.”

Mohammadzadeh didn’t pay much attention to him. He was looking at the paper, shaking his head. “There is not even a single person among your friends whose name is Ghazanfar.” He burst into laughter, and the guy behind me started to laugh as well. Ghazanfar is an old-fashioned name specific to peasants.

“His punishment should be death,” the man said.

Judge Mohammadzadeh seemed to agree. “Here we sentence anyone who doesn’t have a friend named Ghazanfar to death!” he said firmly.

I knew they were trying to scare me, to make me feel threatened, but what I mostly felt was annoyed. How sad that these people held positions of power in my country while hundreds, if not thousands, of educated, innocent people were locked behind bars. It was shameful. They were both waiting for my response to the unfunny Ghazanfar joke, but I said nothing.

“Okay,” the judge said, sounding suddenly serious. “His punishment shouldn’t be death. It should be life in prison.” He looked at me and spoke. “I’ve seen the list of countries you’ve visited, Mr. Bahari. Seventy-six countries! You’ve had enough fun in your life, it seems. I think it will do you good to spend the rest of it in prison. What do you think?”

I thought of Maryam, who’d once stood in a similar courtroom, in front of a similar judge. “I don’t know what to say to that, sir.”

“Good. You have so much to answer for. You should save your breath.” He flipped through another stack of papers before looking me straight in the eye. “What would they do if someone did this in America?” Mohammadzadeh asked, showing me a photograph someone had tagged on my Facebook page. In the picture, a young follower was kissing Ahmadinejad. I had seen the picture before but hadn’t thought much of it,
and I hadn’t untagged it. “Through this picture you’re suggesting that our beloved elected president is a homosexual.”

That comment almost threw me off my chair. “Sir, but someone else tagged me in the photo,” I said.

“So?” He obviously thought that by having the photo on my Facebook wall I had insulted Ahmadinejad.

“I didn’t put the photo there. It’s like if someone throws a gun into your house, are you culpable for having the gun in your house?”

From the blank look on Mohammadzadeh’s face, I could tell he didn’t know how Facebook worked and was not interested in listening to my answer. He leaned back in his chair. “You’ve been to America a lot. Where do you stay in America?” he asked me with a mischievous smile.

“It depends, sir.”

“On what?”

“Why I’m there. Sometimes I stay with friends. Other times I stay in a hotel.”

He regarded me over the papers. A slow smile crept across his face. “During these trips to America, do you have illicit sexual relationships with women?”

This question surprised and embarrassed me. “What do you mean?”

“You know. Do you? Do you have
that
?” He winked at me, lifted an eyebrow, then mimed grabbing a woman’s breasts. And then made a motion simulating sex. “Do you do
that
?”

I didn’t say anything. I just shook my head.

“Oh, come on, look at you. I’m sure you do something like that.” He continued to make sexual gestures. The man behind me, lost in a fit of laughter, kept kicking my chair.

My face burned with shame for this man and this farce of a system: a Muslim judge presiding over the case of an innocent man in an Islamic country, asking me about my private life. “Sir, I’m a married man.” The judge seemed disappointed—even
angered—by my answer. He wanted to hear my salacious stories, perhaps. So he could attack me for them, all the while enjoying what he was hearing. It was beyond hypocritical. It was sadistic.

Mohammadzadeh became serious again. “What does being married have to do with it? You look like someone who would do anything.”

“I’m sorry about that, but I’m not who you think I am.” I paused, then asked Mohammadzadeh, “Was I arrested for my work as a journalist or for having illicit affairs?”

Mohammadzadeh didn’t answer me, but the guy behind me kicked my chair with all his force, startling me. “Look at you!” he said. “Even execution isn’t enough for you. You should be more than executed. Guys like you deserve to be put in a hot tar bath by Saddam Hussein.”

“Okay, okay,” said the judge. “That’s enough. Mr. Bahari, here are your charges: undermining the security of the nation; propagating dissent against the holy government of the Islamic Republic; insulting the supreme leader; and taking part in illegal demonstrations. Write down on this paper if you don’t accept them.”

The man behind me got up to pass a sheet of paper to me. I just stared at it. The charges listed there didn’t register. I couldn’t think of anything but the sexual masquerade I had just witnessed.
How can you call yourselves Muslims?
I thought.
How can you justify what you’re doing?
I was burning with anger. I felt so sad for my country and terrified for myself.

“Hey!” the judge said. “Why don’t you sign?”

“I’m reading the charges, sir. Just give me a second.”

“What?! Give you a second?!” he howled. “May God be my witness, if you don’t sign this paper now, I’ll kick and punch you so hard that your mother will mourn you.”

I wrote that I didn’t accept the charges and stood up to hand him back the piece of paper.

“Get him out of here,” Judge Mohammadzadeh said. “Give him back to his owner.”

Outside, Rosewater was waiting for me. He was a proud owner. “This is just the beginning, Mr. Bahari,” he said. “In fact, Mr. Mohammadzadeh is one of our kindest judges. The one who will be issuing a sentence for you will not be as nice. Do you have anything to say?”

“May God help me,” I said. But only to myself.

·   ·   ·

In the interrogation room that night, Rosewater was not alone. The man he was with—a man whose voice I had not heard before—complained about my
tak nevisi
, the answers I’d written about my friends and acquaintances. When he came closer, I saw through the crease in the blindfold that he wore shiny, polished black shoes. His trousers were neatly ironed and creased. “Mr. Bahari, your answers are very general. We hope that you can give us more details,” he said. He sounded more mild-mannered than Rosewater.

“I just write what I know, sir. If I were to give you more details, that would mean I’d be lying.”

“Well,” said Rosewater, who had been fairly quiet up to this point, “we have some interesting video footage of you. We think it may persuade you to be more cooperative.”

I could not imagine what he meant. They had confiscated many videos from my house, as well as external hard drives with the unused footage of two of my films: one about AIDS in Iran and another about an Iranian serial killer who had murdered sixteen prostitutes. Although both films were banned in Iran, there was nothing in them that would incriminate me in any way.

I saw the flicker of a laptop screen through my blindfold. Then I heard someone speaking. It was a recording of another
prisoner’s confession. “It’s not that one,” said the new interrogator. “It’s the one marked ‘Spy in coffee shop.’ ”

Before the elections, Tehran had had a vibrant café society. Young men and women got together, their green bands fastened around their wrists, talking about the campaign and what they planned to do after Mousavi was elected president. I spent a lot of time in different coffee shops in Tehran, conducting interviews, in order to get a sense of what young people were thinking. Perhaps they had filmed me at the time, speaking to friends. This worried me. I was coming to understand just how ruthless these people were—how willing they were to believe their own lies, to construct their own version of the truth. I worried about who else might be imprisoned somewhere in this building, behind these impenetrable walls, because of my reporting.

I was immersed in these thoughts when I heard the voice of Jon Stewart from Comedy Central’s
The Daily Show
, and then that of Jason Jones, a
Daily Show
correspondent. “What is it that makes these people evil?” Jones was saying. “I hadn’t signed up for Twitter, so the only way to find out was to go and see for myself.”

No, no, NO!
I thought.
They can’t be that stupid
.

Among the hundreds of journalists from news organizations around the world who had come to Iran to report on the election was a team from Jon Stewart’s satirical news show. I’d met Jason; his producer, Tim Greenberg; and their translator, Mahmoud, about three weeks before the election. Over a few cups of Turkish coffee, we discussed the situation in Iran and Jason asked if he could interview me on camera in a coffee shop. Jason was going to pretend to be a thick-skulled American, and their goal was to present an image of Iran different from the one typically shown on American television. I agreed, and for the interview, Jason wore a checkered Palestinian kaffiyeh around his neck and dark sunglasses. He pretended to be completely
ignorant about Iran and eager to find out just how evil Iran was. Introducing me, he joked, “He goes by the code name Pistachio.”