Then They Came For Me (24 page)

“Do you think we’re stupid?” I bit my tongue. Of course I could not answer that honestly. I sensed him quickly crossing the room. His face was near mine. “Are you deaf? I’m asking you a question!” he screamed into my ear.

This wasn’t the scenario I had been picturing. I felt a trickle of sweat slide down my side, and I tried to steady my voice. “I’m sorry. I don’t understand.”
Had they just used me to get the confession and now they want more?
I pushed away that thought. Rosewater moved away from me but remained in the room. I could smell his stench. “I don’t understand,” I whispered.

“You know what we do with people who think we’re stupid?” He came near me again, and then he began slapping my thighs with all of his might. Over and over again, until the skin on my legs began to sting.

“You little man, you think you’re dealing with a bunch of villagers? Do you think you’re smarter than us? You don’t know who you’re dealing with.” His blows came quicker, and my legs stung so badly it felt as if he had stuck them with needles. Finally, he left the room. I curled over my legs, wanting to protect them. I tried to ease the pain by rubbing my legs, but even the slightest touch through my uniform hurt.

Rosewater came back into the room in a rush, bounding
toward me, and I sat bolt upright. “You either cooperate with us or every day will be like this,” he said. With that, I felt the crack of a belt on my legs—so hard that I cried out in pain. “Shut up, little man!” he screamed as he hit me again. “Why’ve you gone mute all of a sudden? You spouted all that nonsense in front of the television cameras. Why are you deaf and dumb now?”

“But, sir, Haj Agha instructed me to say those things,” I stammered through the pain.

“I told you to name names, didn’t I? Didn’t I?!” He began punching me on my shoulders, so hard that I could feel his wedding ring press into my skin. Rosewater was a big man with strong arms, and I braced myself for each blow. But I was glad that for a moment he had stopped slapping my legs. I had been doing push-ups on a regular basis since my teenage years, and my shoulders have always been strong. The punches to them hurt less than the slaps to my legs.

I started to moan. “Please, please, sir. That hurts,” I said. My trick worked. He punched my shoulders even harder, forgetting about my legs.

“The whole country is in a turmoil because of you,” he said. Drops of his sweat fell onto my neck. “How can you answer all of the mothers who’ve lost their children because of you? How can you answer for all the blood you’ve shed since the election?”

The pain in my shoulders began to crawl toward my neck and into my head. I’ve suffered from migraines since 1994, and they were often made worse by any physical suffering and stress. Feeling the beginnings of a migraine now and wanting to protect my shoulders, I turned my face toward him, trying to block his punches with my cheek. “Turn your face away, you little spy,” he yelled and began to slap my thighs again.

I closed my eyes under the blindfold.

“But, sir, please tell me, what have I done wrong? I said what you asked me to say.”

“I’m the one who asks the questions,” he yelled, beating my legs with the belt.

Rosewater grabbed my hair, jerking my neck violently. “Get up,” he ordered. But I couldn’t. My legs were numb and my shoulders were throbbing. He practically had to pull me from the chair by my hair. “Go back to your cell and think about what happened tonight,” Rosewater told me. He punched the back of my head, and I winced. “I haven’t even started yet. This will happen to you every day if you don’t cooperate with us.”

As a guard led me back to my cell, I tried to figure out what had happened. This wasn’t the plan. This wasn’t what we had agreed to. I had said what Haj Agha had told me to say. Why weren’t they letting me go?

“It’s time for morning prayers,” said the guard, whose shoes I did not recognize. “Do you want to use the restroom and do your ablution?”

Of course
, I thought.
The only reason Rosewater stopped beating me was because he had to prepare to pray
. The rage I felt at his hypocrisy frightened me.

“No, I don’t,” I said. “But I need two migraine pills. I need them right away.”

The guard locked me in my cell and went to get the painkillers. I pulled down my trousers and looked at my legs. They were so bruised, they looked nearly black.

·   ·   ·

A few hours later, I paced the cell—back and forth, as quickly as I could—waiting for what was going to happen next. Rosewater wanted names, but what names? Reporters? Politicians? Friends? The noise of the air-conditioning unit was so loud, I had trouble staying focused on my thoughts.

I remembered Maryam telling me about the time they took her to the torture room and beat her without reason. “It was toward the end of my sentence,” she said. “I think they just wanted to teach me a lesson before releasing me so I would never forget what prison was like.” I tried to convince myself that Rosewater was doing the same.

But a voice inside me suspected otherwise: that they’d never had any intention of keeping to our agreement. What had happened last night was, I somehow knew, just the beginning. But how far would they go? I’d heard too many stories, and I couldn’t block the horrifying thoughts from my mind: Fingernails pulled out. Electric shocks to the testicles. “The first thing he did with the pliers was squeeze my earlobe,” my father would say. “If you think that’s painful, just wait. Nothing hurts more than when they use those pliers to pull out your nails. The man who tortured me pulled out each of the nails on my right hand slowly, one by one. He told me that he had all the time in the world.” My father related this story many times throughout my life. As a child, I would study his hand, trying to picture it disfigured. I was in awe of him. How could he resist such pain? I didn’t know if I had his strength, but remembering my father’s words gave me hope: “They thought that by exerting maximum pressure, they could force me to reveal all the information I had about my comrades. But I never did.”

The metal slots of the other cell doors started to open and close, startling me. It was time for breakfast. I had always looked forward to the click-clack sound of the slots opening and closing. This meant it was time to eat and, especially, for tea. But that morning, the sounds of metal against metal made the panic I felt more intense. I waited for the lower slot to open and my breakfast to appear, but it didn’t. Instead, Blue-Eyed Seyyed opened the door. For some reason, he was the only guard who didn’t mind showing his face to the prisoners. He placed a blindfold on the floor along with my food and poured me a cup
of tea. “Have your breakfast as soon as you can. Your specialist wants to see you right away,” he said as he closed the door. “I’ll be back in ten minutes.”

I stared at my nails as I held the cup of tea. Would I still have them at the end of the day? I felt Maryam sitting in the corner of my cell, watching me. Dropping to the floor, I started to do push-ups.
What if they pull my nails and lash my feet, how many push-ups will I be able to do then?
I thought.

“None,” Maryam answered. She had told me about a friend of hers in prison who’d lost her toe after a bad beating. “She had lied to them about her husband’s whereabouts, and when the prison guards found out, they punished her by lashing her feet for almost an hour,” Maryam had related with tears in her eyes. She’d said that when they brought the woman back to their shared cell, the soles of her feet were so badly damaged that she couldn’t walk for days.

The thought of Maryam getting knocked around by an animal like Rosewater brought forth the tears that I’d been holding back since the beating. As I did my push-ups, I watched the carpet under my face grow dark with my tears. “Maryam
joon
, I will be strong,” I said. “But how will I survive this? How much worse will it get?”

“Who are you talking to?” Blue-Eyed Seyyed was standing at the door to my cell. I ignored him, sat up, and took a sip of tea. “Come on, it’s time to go,” he ordered.

Rosewater didn’t say anything when Blue-Eyed Seyyed handed me to him. He silently took my arm, as if leading a lamb to the slaughter. I could sense his anger in the force of his breaths and his grip on my flesh. He sat me in the chair in the interrogation room and removed my blindfold. From this corner of the room, all I could see was the badly painted white cement wall in front of me. Rosewater tapped me gently on the shoulder. “Maziar, you have a choice here. You can be my friend or my prisoner,” he said. His tone had changed. It was as if we had
entered a new phase of our relationship and now that he had beaten me, he felt more comfortable with me. “Do you understand me, Maziar?” Rosewater asked as he circled around me, marking his territory, dragging his slippers on the floor like a common thug.

I hope he’s not going to urinate on me
, I thought. “Yes, sir,” I said.

“Friend or prisoner?” he repeated.

“I’m sorry,” I said quietly. “Maybe I don’t understand.”

As he placed a blank piece of paper on the chair’s writing arm, he said: “This is friend.” He then moved back and suddenly slapped my right cheek with all his might. It sent a shock down my spine, and I felt dizzy. “And that is prisoner,” he added calmly. “Mr. Maziar, you can choose to rot here by repeating your
koseh she’r
, your bullshit.” He took a deep breath, as if to calm himself. “Write your answers clearly and honestly. Did my slap hurt you?” he asked gently.

I didn’t reply. I sat in the chair with my legs crossed, trying to think of a way to reason with him, to ask him what had changed. Rosewater kicked my feet. One of my slippers flew across the room. “Never cross your legs in front of me, you little spy.” He then grabbed my hair and forced me out of the chair. “Go pick up your slipper,” he yelled, making me crawl across the floor to retrieve it.

After I took my seat again, he sat in a chair behind me. I could hear him writing something. For several minutes, he sat silently, writing. As much as his beatings and screaming were upsetting, this erratic behavior worried me even more.

I finally heard him pull his chair closer to mine. He then calmly placed a few pieces of paper in front of me. On them, he had written the names of six prominent pro-reform politicians—Mehdi Hashemi, Mohammad Khatami, Mehdi Karroubi, Mir Hossein Mousavi, Grand Ayatollah Hossein Ali Montazeri, and Grand Ayatollah Youssef Sanei—and the same question next to
each of them:
Explain the nature of your relationship with this person
.

As on the first day of interrogations, I could see that the questions were supposed to place me in a certain scenario. I took the top off the ballpoint pen and had started to write when Rosewater hit me in the neck. “Give me the papers,” he said. “Before you start to write
koseh she’r
, Maziar, I have to make one thing clear.” He slapped the back of my head. “We know that you’re working for an enemy agency and that your job is to connect various reformist politicians with the Western powers.” He spoke with more confidence than I had heard from him before. “We know that you’ve been working as an agent of a foreign intelligence agency since you arrived in Iran and have had, at least, two missions: to put the reformist elements in Iran in touch with foreign embassies and to incite a velvet revolution in Iran.”

I was dumbfounded. He’d delivered these ideas the same way a narrator might recount the plot of a film or a play. The leaders of the Islamic regime had clearly already written their story about their opponents, and somehow I had been named as a major character.

“We know that you’ve been in touch with each of these elements, and have been a conduit between them and foreigners. If you’re honest with us and tell us the truth, we will let you go tomorrow. I personally guarantee that, Maziar.” He breathed into my ear. “But if you think we’re a bunch of idiots and believe you can fool us, I personally guarantee that I will stand you on a chair, put a noose around your neck, and kick the chair from under your feet. I will make sure that your body rots while it hangs, and I will put your remains in a garbage bag and throw it at your mother.”

I raised my head and looked him in the eye. For the first time since I’d seen him, I didn’t feel anger toward him. Instead, I felt pity. Rosewater was simply a foot soldier for Khamenei, there
to help back up his story: that, as Khamenei had said repeatedly after the election, the green movement was not a popular uprising but a foreign plot concocted by the enemies of Islam. Rosewater was not important to the regime. He was simply a man whose ideology had led him to become the person who met my stare: a vicious ideologue who believed his path to heaven was lined with all the innocent people he’d beaten.

He punched my forehead, bringing stars to my eyes. “Put your head down!” he bellowed, punching my head again. “Didn’t I tell you that while you’re here you should always keep your head down?” He stepped away for a second and then said, “You’re very lucky, Maziar.” As a migraine began building, I found it hard to make sense of his words. It felt as if the pain were dripping down the inside of my body from my head.

“Can I have some water, please?” I asked him.

“Of course,” he said and poured me a paper cup of water. “Do you think we’re like you Americans in Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo who torture people by keeping them thirsty? We have something called
ra’fateh Islami
”—Islamic kindness—“in this prison. Something you Americans have never heard of.” He genuinely believed that calling someone an American was an insult, and always said the word with a sneer.

Rosewater sat down on the chair behind me again. When he stood up and placed another sheet of paper on my chair’s writing arm, he was breathing very heavily.

He’d made a diagram, a big circle with a smaller circle inside it. The names of the six people he had mentioned were on the periphery of the inner circle. Rosewater explained that the circle as a whole represented the Islamic system. The smaller circle indicated the minority of people who’d been fooled into supporting the reformists, thereby interfering with the wishes of the majority of the people who supported the system. “This line that creates this little circle in the middle of the big ocean of the Islamic system is the dust and dirt that eventually will be thrown
out of the ocean by the big waves of people,” Rosewater explained with the pride of a bad junior poet who thought his idiotic metaphor made sense.