Letters to My Torturer: Love, Revolution, and Imprisonment in Iran (37 page)

On 25 July, the Mujahedin-e Khalq had entered Iran via Iraq, launching a new offensive called Forough Javidan (Eternal Light). The Mujahedin leadership had called up thousands of men and women from across the world to quickly come together in Iraq. They were given a few days’ military training and had been told that upon their arrival in Iran, the Iranian people would join them and help to bring down the Islamic Republic. The operation lasted three days and the Mujahedin, who had entered Iranian territory, were all killed.

The Islamic Republic was thus given an excuse to organize and launch the biggest mass murder campaign in Iran’s history. The order to kill comes from Ayatollah Khomeini and so Iranian prisons are turned into institutions of mass murder.

This is Ayatollah Khomeini’s ruling on the massacre:

Since the treacherous Mujahedin do not truly believe in Islam and whatever they are saying is to deceive and create disunion and because their leaders have recanted Islam and also bearing in mind that they have waged war against God in the northwest and south of the country in cooperation with the Iraqi Ba’ath party and also
because their spies are working for Saddam against our Muslim nation, and in view of their cooperation with the World Arrogance and their dishonourable damages from the beginning of the Islamic Republic until now, all those prisoners, throughout the country, who persist in their hypocrisy are considered Moharebs
¹⁰⁰
and must be sentenced to hanging. This issue will be decided in Tehran by a majority vote of Hujjatul Islam Nayeri, Mr Ishraqi (Tehran’s Prosecutor) and a representative of the Ministry of Intelligence. Needless to say, caution is required, and consensus is preferred. As regards provincial prisons, even though a majority vote of Shari’a judges, Revoutionary Court prosecutors, and representatives of the Ministry of Intelligence is needed, showing mercy to those who have waged war against God is simple-mindedness. Islam’s decisiveness against God’s enemies is one of the overarching principles of the Islamic regime. I hope that by showing revolutionary anger and hatred towards God’s enemies, you will be able to attain God’s consent. The gentlemen who have been put in charge of this task should not doubt or hesitate. They should seek to strive hard against the unbelievers and hypocrites.
¹⁰¹
To doubt the legal rulings of Islam amounts to dismissing the pure and immaculate blood of the martyrs. May peace be upon you.

Following this, Evin Prison’s legal representative told the family of one of the prisoners: “Everyone’s fate is going to be settled soon.”

First the prisoners are reassigned to different blocks in the prisons, and contact between the blocks is cut off. Political prisoners are no longer allowed to move freely between the blocks and the kitchen to carry the large pots of tea. Ordinary prisoners are put in charge of this task.

Next they start to round up and take away the Mujahedin prisoners. Two of them, a pair of very young brothers, are on our block. One of them has been sentenced to ten years; the other has been sentenced to hang. Like a pair of swans, they always sit in a corner, heads on one another’s shoulders. They come for the one with the death
sentence first. I will never forget the brothers’ farewell, that silence that was only broken by their sobs. Then they come for the one who has been sentenced to ten years. We can all sense that something is about to happen, but so far no one knows what, and there is no way we can find out.

Then it is the turn of the man who’s in charge of making the dinner arrangements. He was a Mujahed, with a very big belly, very young, very mischievous. He liked preparing dinner. He would throw down the tablecloth with a flourish and say: “Tonight we are serving a stew. A unique occasion, not a night like any other night.” I have forgotten his name, but I’ll never forget his sweet smile and his light-hearted words.

And then they begin to round up the leftists. The first one to be called up from our hall is Hussein Abi. He puts on his blindfold and leaves. I wait and wait, he doesn’t come back. The evening arrives, it becomes night. I am unable to sleep. What’s happening? Why hasn’t he come back? My mind is busy with these thoughts but just as my eyes become tired, Hussein Abi crawls into his bed.

I ask him: “Where have you been?”

He says: “Shush. They are killing. Watch out.”

I say: “What do you mean?”

“The court ...”

His teeth chatter as he talks. They had asked him: Do you believe in your party? He had answered that his party were Fatimeh, Rana and Ziba. He was in love with them. They had asked him: Are you a Muslim? He had answered that yes he was, but not the way they were Muslims. They had told him that they meant whether he said his prayers. He had replied that he had been praying since he was a child, but not their kind of prayer. The court judges had whispered to each other. Then they had signalled to Haj Mojtaba Halwai, the deputy prison security chief and the man in charge of carrying out the executions. Haj Mojtaba had told him by the door: “You’ll be quiet
and not say a word to anyone or else I will stick your tongue into your arse.”

Hussein Abi tells me all this and then turns his back to me. The next morning, Hussein Abi is behind me as we queue for the bathrooms, ready to perform our ablution for the morning prayers. He quietly tells me the rest of the story. We have not even reached the bathroom when they come for him and take him away.

There’s no news for a few days. We walk up and down the corridors like caged chickens waiting for a brutal hand to pull us out of the cage. We talk about everything except the thing we should talk about. Our eyes are fixed on the door and our ears alert for sounds.

There is a gang of thieves in charge of bringing round tea and food to the prisoners, who are patients of Dr Fariborz Baghai, who is in a cell upstairs. This excellent gynaecologist, who used to be the deputy head of a large hospital in Frankfurt, had come back to Iran to help the revolution and ended up in jail for twelve years. The thieves warned the doctor what was happening, and what sort of questions were being asked in court, and that after the Mujahedin, they had started to round up the leftists. Dr Baghai made sure that everyone on the block also heard about this, passing on the information through the same group of ordinary prisoners and hence, clarifying the situation for us.

The next one to be called up is Rahim Araqi. He had been a prisoner during the Shah’s time. One of Iran’s best architects, we used to call him Rahim the Bear due to the fat he was carrying on his body. Rahim kisses us on our cheeks and says: “Keep an eye on my children if you happen to live through this.”

He loved his daughter, Nazli, who had developed into a tall and slender woman who loved her father dearly. I kept imagining the Gentle Bear standing in front of a firing squad. I was not yet aware that they had started hanging people.

These thoughts make me anxious. I keep pacing up and down,
and looking at his empty bed. His book of architecture, which he managed to get hold of with great difficulty, still lying open on his blanket.

Rahim doesn’t return. The following day they fold up his blanket and collect his belongings. I saw him again years later in the outside world, when he explained the miracle of his rescue, but I have not been able to get in touch with him to ask his permission to tell his story here.

I am walking up and down the corridor, deep in thought, when Bahram Danesh grabs hold of my arm: “Are you scared of being seen with me?”

I laugh. I give him a kiss on his cheek and together we start walking again. He tells me for the umpteenth time the story of his escape following the defeat of the Khorasani troops’ uprising. How he had crossed the arid desert and then thrown himself into a river and got himself to the Soviet Union.

It’s as if he knows that his turn has arrived today. They come for him. He kisses me on my cheeks and says: “I am not coming back. One sparrow less is not going to affect the world.”

And that old man, his body bent by lengthy episodes of torture with a head that is always about to explode from a migraine, went away. I always recall his words: “We are tiny sparrows, twittering on a branch in the middle of a wild jungle full of predators.”

The twittering of a sparrow called Bahram will echo in my mind as long as I live, and I see in my mind’s eye the head of an ancientlooking man, moving like a pendulum in a clock, tick-tock.

They keep coming for people.

My turn arrives. They come for me on 1 August 1988. I look around, but I can’t see a familiar face to say goodbye to. I put the letter I have written for my wife on top of my belongings and leave the cell. The minibus that picks me up is full. I try to look from underneath my blindfold but I don’t know anyone in the bus. I feel numb. As if I have died even before being killed.

They make us get out of the bus and take us to the interrogation office. I join a long blindfolded queue, facing the wall. The death calls come at short intervals. We are approaching the doorway to hell. When I reach the door, I can hear a voice on the other side. It’s Mehrdad Farjad. After spending many years in Europe, he had returned to Iran to serve the revolution. He is yelling. It seems as if someone is trying to shut him up by placing a hand over his mouth. The voice is muffled and quietens. Suddenly Mehrdad cries out again. His voice is silenced once and for all. I found out later that they had cut off his tongue and taken him to the gallows with his mouth streaming with blood.

Someone grabs me and drags me upright. It’s Haj Mojtaba. He opens the door and pushes me inside. “Take off your blindfold.”

I recognize the voice of Haj Nasser, the man in charge of the interrogation office, and one of the prosecutors. He calls out my name and asks: “Do you believe in the Tudeh Party?”

I answer: “I hate politics and the Tudeh Party.”

Nayeri, the court judge, glances down at the paper on his desk. I suspect he’s about to say: “But your file is still open ...”

But he asks: “Do you pray?”

His voice sounds tired. He has already handed down the hanging sentence for thousands of people. I answer: “Yes, Haj Aqa.”

“Do you believe in the Islamic Republic?”

“I believed in it before my arrest and I still believe in it now.”

Haj Nasser says in a mocking voice: “I bet, like the rest of them, you also claim to have personally served the Islamic Republic.”

I say: “I don’t know about the others. But my intention was to help the anti-imperialist Islamic Republic.”

Nayeri whispers something into Haj Nasser’s ear. The whispering seems to take ages. Haj Nasser answers him. Then Nayeri writes something down on a piece of paper and hands it over to Haj Mojtaba. He takes the paper. He tells me: “Put on your blindfold.”

I put on my blindfold. Haj Mojtaba takes me out. I feel as if ashes have been thrown over me. I walk down a corridor. A door opens and I find myself in an open space. I take off my blindfold. I am in the sanatorium. Three old men from Moshtarek Prison are standing in front of me, talking. Two of them are over the age of eighty, one of them is even older. We greet each other and kiss each other’s cheeks. The three have already been to the court. They are being called for, one at a time. They assume they are about to be freed, but in fact they are on their way to the gallows.

I don’t know how much time passes before they come back for me. Once again I enter the block with my eyes blindfolded. A door opens in the corridor and I find myself inside a small solitary confinement cell. I am ready to collapse. I stretch myself out on the floor. Just like during the long days of interrogation and torture, I have gone numb. For only the second time in my life, a light has started to shine in my heart. I tell myself: “God does exist.” I remember Khamenei’s words back in the cell at Moshtarek Prison: “In your heart of hearts you are a believer, even though you are not aware of it.” After a while the door opens. Someone says: “Put on your blindfold.”

I put it on. Whoever this is, he enters the cell. He sits down and starts asking questions. The questions are all about my file. I answer him, but I can hear your voice in my head, Brother Hamid: “When the sentence is passed, I would like to shoot the final bullet myself.”

The questions finally reach the point I have been waiting for. The part of the file that is still open: England. The questions are all indirect. I answer all of them. Eventually, he asks: “Do you pray?”

“Yes, and I’ve just missed my prayers. I couldn’t go to the bathroom for my ablution.”

This is a deliberate tactic on my part. I am holding death at bay by performing my prayers. The divine light that shone in my heart that day actually has nothing to do with prayers.

The man, whoever he might be, takes me to the bathroom. I sense his eyes on me. I give a solid performance of ablution. He takes me
back to my cell. He offers me a prayer stone. I ask which way is Mecca. He turns me towards Mecca. He locks the door behind him. I take off the blindfold. I start praying. I imagine he’s watching me through the door opening. Then I become tired and collapse. I drank as much water as I could in the bathroom, but I am very hungry. I am glad that my stomach is empty. I have heard that one tends to shit oneself before being hanged. I’d hate that to happen. I picture my corpse hanging and my mouth being pushed into a pile of my own shit. It’s making me feel sick. Then I seem to fall into a black hole. I don’t know whether it’s sleep, or waiting, or the last moments of life before death. The sound of a door opening brings me back to my senses. Again they take me and make me stand at the back of a queue. Again, a thousand years pass before I enter the court. This time there’s no Haj Nasser. A tall young man has replaced him. They say he was Evin’s Intelligence Director at some point.

The same questions. I give the same answers. Nayeri asks: “Did you have a leadership position in the Party?”

I say: “I have never been in a leadership position. I was just an ordinary member.”

Even then I had no idea that what they meant by leading member was someone who was in the pay of the Party. I later discover that the Party had two layers of leadership. Leadership number one and leadership number two, and I had been part of number two. Later, Kianuri explained to me that Haj Nasser had insisted that I had been in the first group and Kianuri had repeatedly denied this and explained that I belonged to the second category. And much later still it dawned on me that the numbers one and two had represented the distance between life and death. Ayatollah Khomeini’s death verdict for the Mujahedin has been published. But it is said that one of his unpublished rulings called for the mass murder of all Marxists on the basis of his belief that the leadership of the leftist groups were all supporters of the infidels and hence should be hanged. Decisions about the members of the second layer were left to the courts.