Then They Came For Me (38 page)

After Jon and the crew left the flat, Paola went into the bedroom to rest. As she lay back against the pillows, she took in a sharp breath: she could feel that she’d begun bleeding heavily. She rushed to the phone and called an ambulance. A couple of minutes later, as she ran out the front door, grabbing on the way the hospital bag she had prepared for emergencies, she saw Barbara walking up the front steps. “I’m bleeding,” she said, with tears streaming down her face. “This time it’s really serious. I think I’m going to lose the baby!”

At the hospital, the doctors told Paola that she should be prepared for an emergency cesarean. Thankfully, this was not necessary. They released her after a few days, with the warning that should she start to bleed again, they would keep her in the hospital until the baby’s birth.

I was grateful to learn about the campaign, and I knew I could never thank everyone enough for what they had done for me. My family and I talked until three in the morning. During our conversation, I went to the kitchen several times and looked at the bottle of Johnnie Walker in the cabinet, but I didn’t dare pour a drink. I couldn’t help the paranoid thoughts that kept creeping into my mind, and I was worried that the Guards would raid the house and arrest me for drinking alcohol. During those 118 days, Rosewater had managed to instill in me such paralyzing paranoia that I couldn’t even act freely in my own mother’s house.

Before going to bed, I took a shower. I hadn’t looked at my body in a mirror since the day I’d been arrested. I knew that I had lost a lot of weight, but I had seen only faint reflections of my naked form on the metal door of the shower cubicles in
Evin. Confronted with the mirror now, I drew back in shock. I didn’t recognize myself. My rib cage protruded under my skin, and my shoulders looked like a clothes hanger.

When I saw my backside, I gasped. “I have no ass!” I said aloud. “They have left me no ass!” For some strange reason, the reality of what had happened to me in Evin fully hit me only in the familiar setting of my mother’s bathroom, when I noticed that my buttocks had shrunk to one-third of their former size.

·   ·   ·

The next morning, I booked a ticket for the first direct flight from Tehran to London; I would leave Tehran in two days. I immediately started the countdown, but at the same time, I felt guilty for doing so. I didn’t want to look forward to leaving my country. I didn’t want to go into exile. I didn’t want to leave Moloojoon. But I couldn’t stay in Iran.

Dozens of relatives, friends, and colleagues came to see me during my short stay in Tehran. I tried to keep a calm face, but the fear that our house would be raided again was suffocating. It wasn’t just a worry born out of more than one hundred days of interrogation and torture; there were numerous precedents for the Islamic government’s security forces bursting into the homes of recently freed prisoners and arresting them and their guests. I was constantly on edge and avoided any real conversation by cracking jokes and answering questions with questions. When a friend asked me about life in prison, I smiled and told him that I’d lost thirty-three pounds. “The Evin diet is better than any other,” I laughed. “Even better than Atkins!”

The subject I most wanted to avoid was my televised “confession.” Many of my friends and relatives had spent time in prison. They recognized that I was uncomfortable talking about it and wanted to let me know that I hadn’t done anything I should be ashamed of. “We’re all proud of you, Maziar,” they told me. But their words never gave me comfort. Sitting in the
living room, I often stared at the chair where my father used to sit. I could feel my father’s gaze on me until the moment when I left the house for the airport. He wanted to know what my plans for the future were. “What are you going to do now, Maziar?” he asked me. “Just sit on your hands and do nothing? Or will you speak out against the injustices committed against your people?”

Before I left, I held my mother in my arms for a long time. I felt her tears seeping through my shirt, and onto my skin. We both knew that I would not be back in Iran for a long time, if ever. I kissed her cheeks several times and told her repeatedly,
“Dorost misheh, dorost misheh”:
It will be fine. But even as I held her, I was also talking to my father. I was promising him that I would not be silent—that I would make the world aware of the injustices suffered by the people of Iran. I would never forget my people, or my duty to help my friends and colleagues languishing behind bars. I would do my best to defeat Rosewater and his masters, in any way I could.

The hours between five
A.M.
, when I left the house, and eight
A.M.
, when the British Midland flight took off, were the longest of my life. As I showed my passport and passed through the two security checkpoints, I fully expected to be prevented from boarding the plane. A few days earlier, three of my friends—fellow filmmakers—had had their passports confiscated just as they were about to board a plane, and a few months before that, another friend and his wife had been arrested and escorted off a plane.

Even after the plane took off, I still did not feel safe. In fact, I would not feel safe until we had crossed out of Iranian airspace. I switched on my TV screen and selected the funniest movie I could find:
The Hangover
. I then leaned over to the empty seat next to mine and selected the channel displaying the route map. I tried to concentrate on the movie—as the various characters stole Mike Tyson’s tiger, married a lap dancer, and fathered a baby—but my attention kept straying to the other screen. It seemed as though the plane were edging forward tentatively. Every time I stole a glance at the map, the plane seemed to be standing still. When I saw that we were over Tabriz, in the western part of the country, I closed my eyes and waited for as long as I could. When I looked up, it had happened: we had crossed into Turkey.

I took a deep breath; it felt like the first breath I’d taken in
months. I was a free man. The flight attendant appeared beside me.

“Is there anything you need?” she asked.

I knew the exact answer. “Yes,” I said. “A whiskey.”

Within a few minutes, seven or eight passengers—total strangers to me—were standing beside me congratulating me on my freedom and, to my surprise, on the impending birth of my child. Even though I had, by this time, learned about the efforts to release me, and read the reports of my ordeal that had appeared in media outlets around the world, it was only on the flight that I fully realized that my imprisonment had not been a private matter. I had become a public figure. I was surprised by how much people knew about me. I hadn’t expected anything like this.

“How’s your mother?” asked a middle-aged woman, who told me that she was living in Sweden, and like me, had lost her father.

“Is it a boy or a girl?” her husband asked, holding their son in his arms.

“Whatever it is, a child is a blessing,” the woman said.

Many people also asked me about the conditions inside Evin and wanted to know the details of my experience. Before long, I realized how eager these people were to express themselves, especially about human-rights abuses in Iran. The questions went on. Did they beat you a lot? Who did you see inside? Were you in solitary confinement or a communal cell? Were you able to talk to your wife? Where is your wife from? As I answered their questions and sipped my whiskey, I hoped these well-wishing strangers would sense my unease and allow me some space to be alone. Because even though I smiled and chatted amiably with them, deep down, I still feared that at any moment the plane would reverse course and return me to Iran.

·   ·   ·

At Heathrow, Chris Dickey was waiting for me with a security officer. In order to avoid reporters and any unforeseen problems,
Newsweek
had organized my exit through a private corridor. Even though Chris knew that I had left Tehran, he still couldn’t believe that I was free until he saw me with his own eyes. “There he is!” he said with a broad smile.

I was finally in London. I’d never thought that I would love so much the sight of yellow-suited maintenance workers strolling across the gray tarmac under a light drizzle and a dull London sky.
Soon I’ll be on the M4, Euston Road, and with Paola at University College Hospital
. I was finally free to go where I pleased; to go to see Paola. There were so many things I wanted to tell Chris.

Barbara was waiting for us in the VIP lounge. Since I’d met Paola, in 2007, Barbara had become like my own sister. She was all smiles when she saw me. “Talk to Paola, talk to Paola, she’s waiting,” Barbara said, a cell phone in her hand.

I took the phone and excitedly told Paola that I was going directly from the airport to the hospital to see her. In the car, Chris and Barbara peppered me with questions about what had happened and how I felt. My mind was elsewhere. I knew there was something I needed to do. I asked the driver to stop by our flat on the way to the hospital.

When I walked inside, I felt as if I had stepped into one of the drawings I’d left behind on the floor of my cell. Everything I had experienced since leaving Evin still didn’t seem real. It felt more like the way I had imagined things when dreaming in my prison cell. I felt Rosewater’s ghost following me everywhere. I needed to get rid of him.

I took my laptop to our bedroom and typed the email I had been composing in my mind for the last several hours:

“Baa man tamas nagirid. Man ta beh hal barayeh hitch kas jasoosi nakardam va barayeh shoma ham nakhaham kard.”

Don’t contact me anymore. I’ve never spied for anyone and I’m not going to start by spying for you.

I couldn’t stop myself from adding one more sentence:
“Gooreh pedaretoon!”
Fuck you!

I breathed a deep sigh of relief. At last, I was free. I turned off the light and walked downstairs, ready, finally, to see Paola, prepare for Marianna, and take back my life.

·   ·   ·

I was on the fourth floor of the hospital, outside Paola’s room. I opened the door slowly. On hearing me, Paola, who had been lying down in bed, pulled herself up into a sitting position. As I walked into the room, my eyes immediately met hers. For a moment we stared at each other like shy strangers. Then tears overwhelmed us both. We smiled at each other weakly, with an unparalleled relief and a look that seemed to say, “We’ve both changed, haven’t we?” She was shocked by how thin I was, and I, by how beautiful she was. I felt overwhelmed by sadness. I had missed most of Paola’s pregnancy.

I crossed the room and sat down beside her. Taking her in my arms, I leaned over and kissed her belly for a long time. I put my head on her bump and talked to our daughter inside her belly: “Hello, honey bunny, hello, darling, Mummy and Daddy are waiting for you.” I had been imagining this moment for months.

I could feel Paola’s tears on the nape of my neck. I was assaulted by so many thoughts and emotions that I felt numb. I didn’t want this moment to end. All I could do was tell Paola how much I’d missed her and ask her questions. The last thing I wanted to do was to speak of my experience.

As Paola ran her fingers through my hair, I was transported to the time before my ordeal. Her touch felt unnaturally normal. I held Paola’s beautiful face in my palms and looked into
her wide blue eyes. I almost felt normal. I had defeated my captors. I hadn’t turned into what they wanted me to be.

·   ·   ·

I decided that I was not going to do any interviews for the time being. Instead, I spent almost all my time with Paola. We asked for an extra bed in the hospital room so that I could stay overnight with her. I also threw myself into the many practical tasks—rearranging the spare room for the baby, and buying clothes and other necessary items for the nursery—so that I didn’t have much time to think of anything else. And thanks to the fact that
Newsweek
had continued to deposit my monthly retainer into Paola’s account, I didn’t have to worry about my finances.

But at night, as soon as I shut my eyes, I was back in Evin, back beside Rosewater. His face hovered in my dreams, turning them into nightmares. In a recurring nightmare, I was sitting in the school chair in the interrogation room while Rosewater walked around me, kicking and punching me intermittently.

In my waking hours, I forced the images of him—his stubble, his glasses, his stench—out of my head and strove to replace them with images of Marianna growing up. I would often think about the “Sisters of Mercy” dream I’d had in prison. When I played the Leonard Cohen song for Paola in the hospital room, she understood that I was still grieving over the death of my sister, Maryam. I knew that one of the sisters in my dream was Maryam, but I wondered who the other one was.

The next day I listened to the Cohen song over and over again. In the afternoon, Paola hummed the song in her hospital bed while reading a book. I watched her without saying anything. Knowing that I was sitting only a few feet from her, Paola looked peaceful and relaxed. I was fascinated with her belly and the angel resting inside it. At that moment I knew who the other woman in my “Sisters of Mercy” dream was: Marianna Maryam Bahari.

·   ·   ·

The night before Marianna’s birth was the night Rosewater vanished from my dreams. I was sitting with Paola and Marianna—who was a beautiful precocious teenage girl, with long, curly brown hair—at my family dining room table in Tehran. Opposite were my mother, my father, and Maryam. I was telling my family about my prison experiences. My father was angry: “Those sisterfuckers who work for this regime are as stupid as those who worked for the shah.” There was a large bottle of Johnnie Walker Black Label in front of him. As I poured him a glass of whiskey, my father gazed at me with a chastising expression. He seemed to still be mad at me for making the false confessions and apologizing to Khamenei. Marianna grabbed my father’s hand and pointed toward the television. There I was, revealing what was happening in Iranian jails and campaigning for the release of other prisoners. Marianna leaned forward to my father and smiled at him. My father looked at me and nodded. His eyes were much softer.