Letters to My Torturer: Love, Revolution, and Imprisonment in Iran (7 page)

I was feeling a strange emotion, triggered by the coolness of the night air mixed with romantic revolutionary fervour. I saw myself as Steve McQueen, while in fact I was Dustin Hoffman. I was already in the path of a terrifying tidal wave, rolling inexorably towards me and my homeland, but at the time, I had no idea.

This is my fourth letter to you. Do you remember that night? You said you were going to return in a second but you left and never came back. Later, I would come to understand that this sort of thing is part and parcel of the craft of interrogation. Prior to this, I had not understood the full meaning of the word “interrogation”. During my several arrests in the Shah’s time, all I was given was a slap. Compared to the way you hit me, that slap now feels like a gentle caress.

No matter how long I wait, you are not coming back. Silence occupies every corner of the room. The cold is such that even the pigeons have been forced to go into hiding. I stand up and walk towards the door, hesitantly. I knock on the door. First softly, then hard. Harder. Nothing. I wait for a while. I knock on the door again. No use. I hear the sound of footsteps. It’s not the sound of slippers. I set off in the direction of the chair and sit down. I put on my blindfold. Someone opens the door: “What are you doing in here?”

“I am waiting for Brother Hamid.”

“Come on, stand up. Take your papers with you.”

I walk towards the door. The man grabs the sleeve of my jumper.

“Where is your room?”

“Block number two, cell number fifteen.”

The light has been turned off in the cell. I realize that it’s after eleven o’clock. A bowl of food has been left behind in the middle of the floor. I have two blankets. I put my jumper under my head and fall asleep. I wake up with a jump at the sound of the door opening. It’s the guard. He makes me hold one end of a stick and we set off in the usual direction. Now I am seated, desperate for sleep and waiting for you, Brother Hamid. First there is the shuffling sound of slippers, then, you arrive.

“Hello.”

“Hello and fuck you.”

You pick up the papers. You make a new pile. “Write down the rest while I am away.”

I take off the blindfold. I put on my glasses, and start writing.

I had made up my mind to focus my energies on my career and my personal life. I was still doing a double shift as the weekend nightshift editor-in-chief of
Kayhan
while completing my national service, but I was determined to get married, and to become a writer. However, destiny had chosen a different path for me.

Sonia turned up one day, out of the blue. She was tall. Bespectacled. She had a crazy way of doing her hair. Her shirt couldn’t handle the pressure of her breasts and a button would often pop open. I would stare at her bra, which was always visible, and I’d see a fleeting smile on her lips. She worked on
Kayhan
’s English-language edition, but kept coming into the main editorial office. She was always looking for someone or something. There was a lot of talk about her. One day, I was eating by myself at the self-service canteen when she turned up, looking happy. She picked up her plate and walked in my direction in full view of my colleagues’ heavy stares. She sat down opposite me and said: “I hope I’m not disturbing you.”

I forced my eyes to look away from her bra. I didn’t say a word.

She toyed with the food on her plate and then abruptly said: “You are travelling to the Emirates. Can I ask you to prepare a report for me?”

I burst out: “Your name is on the list of people banned from entering Arab countries, right?”

She lifted her head: “Does it bother you?”

“Not really, but there are lots of issues to consider ...”

“Do you want to discuss them?”

“Of course, Miss Sonia Zimmermann.”

She laughed. I don’t know why, but she suddenly reminded me of Angie, who I hadn’t seen for many years.

I dived deep into the water. I swam with the fish and came up to the surface of the water. I said “But I don’t think I can come to your home.”

She said: “But I can come to yours. I know your address. At exactly ten minutes to ten tonight.”

It rained that night. I was rushing to get home. I had bought a basketful of food and couldn’t get the thought of spending the whole night next to those breasts out of my head. When I reached my front door, I looked at my watch. I turned round, and saw someone coming towards me. I shouted through the dark and the rain: “You’re early, Sonia!”

But coming towards me were two men dressed in raincoats. And that was my third arrest.

When we reached Moshtarek Prison, the rain had stopped. They put a jacket over my head. They took away my clothes and gave me the prison uniform. I hadn’t finished dressing when I heard a voice: “Is that Asadi?”

Someone must have said yes, because I suddenly received a hard slap on my ear. That was my first and last slap in Savak
²²
confinement. Someone shouted loudly: “I’ll take the penis of Saint Abbas’s horse, double it up, and ram it straight up your mother’s cunt.”

That phrase was my then interrogator’s favourite linguistic fallback. He was much ruder than you, but his hand was less heavy. I was immediately taken to the interrogation room on the third floor, where they removed the jacket. Back then, you were allowed to see
the face of your interrogator. The blindfold came into use during your time, Brother Hamid. The interrogator placed a sheet of paper in front of me. Unlike your sheets, that paper had an official heading. It had the Iran Police Department logo at the top, and written on the first page, in coarse and untidy handwriting, was the eternal phrase: “We know everything about you.”

And he said: “After the first slap, your heroic friend even told us about the colour of his aunt’s panties, so you’d better watch out.”

On the way to Moshtarek Prison, the thought that kept going round and round in my head was that Sonia must have grassed on me, and that was why I had been picked up. I had no idea why that would be the case, but it didn’t upset me particularly. I had no real relationship with her. Now I realized that one of my work colleagues, who had worried that he was being watched and had recently given me a parcel for safekeeping, must have been the one to grass on me. During interrogations after his arrest, he had given the names of several of his Marxist and communist friends, and as a result we had all been arrested. I wrote down what had happened. I explained that I had reluctantly accepted the package out of politeness, and that it was still in my drawer, unopened. The interrogator read it and said: “This had better not be a lie.”

He called for the guard: “Take him to his cell and bring in that hooker.”

The guard said: “Put your jacket over your head and follow me.”

I did as I was told. The guard took me with him. He opened the door to a cell and threw me in. The door closed behind me. I made myself stand up, removed the jacket from my head and put on my glasses. And I saw a man, extremely thin, bespectacled, with a long black beard. He was seated on a pile of black blankets. I realized that he was a cleric because he was wearing a cloak, which he had made out of his prison uniform. He stood up, he smiled a pleasant smile, he stretched out his hand and introduced himself: “Sayyed Ali Khamenei. Welcome!”

For the first time in my life, I found myself in close contact with a cleric. Up until then, I had only known the Sayyed from back home who had spent his days begging in the nearby Armenian fort and come the mourning season, would go up the minaret and make people cry with his sermons. He was always happy to receive an envelope filled with money from my father and would kiss my father’s hand in return. The clerics were about a thousand light years from me. I have no idea at what point in my life the stubborn infidel had taken root in me or which ancestor I had to thank this trait for. I held out my hand and burst out: “I am a leftist. My name is ...”

My cell companion laughed a sweet laugh and invited me to sit beside him on the pile of blankets. Since then I have read the story of his life on the internet, so I know that he is exactly a decade older than me. At the time I was twenty-six and he had just turned thirtyseven years of age.

We divided the blankets between us. Usually, prisoners had no more than two blankets, one to put underneath them and one to go on top. I have no idea why so many blankets had ended up in our cell, but to Khamenei, each one of the blankets represented an unexpected treasure, though we ended up losing them almost immediately. One day, when we went to the bathroom one of the guards took away all the spare blankets.

Khamenei, always cheerful and up for a joke, had given each of the guards a nickname.

Dog Fart Number One.

Dog Fart Number Two.

The guards regarded us as political detainees, meaning we were considered dangerous but respectable. Those old guards have now been replaced by guards who work for the government under my former cellmate Ayatollah Khamenei’s leadership – these guards regard us as traitors, spies and polluted untouchables. I keep asking myself: had Khamenei been in this cell, what kind of nickname would he have given these brothers?

He used to perform his ablution in the bathroom, in a very serious, solemn manner. But most of his time, and particularly around sunset, was spent standing by the window. He would recite the Qur’an quietly, he would pray, and then he would weep, sobbing loudly. He would lose himself completely in God. There was something about this type of spirituality that appealed to the heart.

Whenever I felt overwhelmed by misery, he would call to me and say: “Houshang, stand up, let’s go for a stroll.”

During those daily strolls we walked up and down the tiny cell to the point of exhaustion. Sometimes, the stroll took place along the great Tehran Boulevard, sometimes we set off towards Mashhad. We spent those long, cold hours conversing with each other. I talked about my childhood, my family and my work as a journalist. He mostly spoke about his family.

Khamenei told me about the adventure of meeting and falling in love with his wife. He talked about the day when, seated under a tree beside a stream, he had revealed his intention of marriage to his future wife. A large cloth had been spread on the ground, which was covered with salads and bread. A few years later, in the middle of a summer night in 1981, I was running up the stairs of his house on Iran Street to deliver an important piece of information, when I saw his wife for a second on the landing. She was dashing away, her head uncovered. It was then that I understood the meaning of their love. At the time of our imprisonment he had two sons, one called Mustafa and the other Ahmad. Very quickly, a peculiar affection developed between this naïve leftist youngster and that intelligent, pious man in that tiny cell, and it had political consequences.

Even though many years have passed since those days, and I am now locked in exile while Khamenei remains in our homeland, the successor to Ayatollah Khomeini as Iran’s supreme leader, that affection has not yet left my heart. My head accepts what is being said about his role in politics, but my heart rejects the accusations.

My love for and familiarity with literature, and poetry in particular, paved the way for lengthy conversations, and I quickly realized that he had a unique mastery of contemporary literature, especially poetry. Even though I was disappointed that he was not fond of Farrokhzad and Ahmad Shamlou, the two famous, contemporary poets of Iran, I joined him in his passionate love for Mehdi Akhavan Saless and Houshang Ebtehaj, two semi-classical poets. He also disliked Sadeq Hedayat, one of the early proponents of the Iranian novel, and I, who loved Hedayat, tried to persuade him otherwise. He wanted me to recount stories that I had read which were unknown to him, or to recite poems I knew by heart. He himself had memorized many poems.

Sometimes I’d sing the revolutionary songs that I had learned in Ahvaz prison and he would listen to them with pleasure. My fellow prisoners had come up with revolutionary words to Vigen’s
Once Again Companion to Drunkards
– Vigen was the founder of modern Iranian pop music – and I would sing the song in my terrible voice and Khamenei would listen. When I sang the original song, which talked about drunkards in a bar, he laughed but asked me to stop singing it.

Occasionally I gave him lessons in journalism, and explained whatever I knew in the shape of a theory. He listened with interest and asked precise questions. One of the things I taught him was: “Do not pay attention to the headlines. Look at the main content, search for those words that are repeated, though in various ways. Read between the lines.”

He listened carefully, learning how to interpret newspaper content. He was very attached to smoking. Each prisoner was allocated one cigarette per day. I was a non-smoker so I gave him my share. He would carefully divide the two cigarettes into six sections and light up each section with great pleasure.

Sometimes we exchanged jokes. He liked inoffensive jokes; they made him burst out laughing. One time, Dog Fart Number Two
overheard us laughing. He rushed into the cell and slapped us both. But Khamenei didn’t like even slightly dirty jokes, sexuality being the frontier that divided innocent jokes from dirty ones.

I also told him the story of my first love: the night on the rooftop when I watched Angie swim with the fish.

Khamenei laughed loudly.

“Stop, what was the girl’s religion?”

“What do you mean?”

Khamenei shook his head. He said: “But you are a Muslim. I can see God in your heart. Even when you talk about atheism, your breath smells of God.”

When the time arrived for our weekly bath, the guards banged on the cell door with their fists: “Bath time!”

The door opened and fresh shirts and trousers were thrown into the cell. We picked them up, never knowing if they would fit us, and got ourselves ready. That meant standing behind the door and throwing our prison shirt over our heads and leaving the cell as soon as the door opened. The people who shared a cell were not supposed to lose sight of each other. So we placed our hands on each other’s shoulders, formed a line, and were led to the bathroom enclosure. We were separated cell by cell. We would stand in front of a black curtain that enclosed the shower area and as soon as the guard shouted go, we would run into the shower. We had two minutes to take off our clothes and get under the shower. There was no showerhead, so the water gushed out as if from a hosepipe. A piece of coarse soap made in Qazvin would be placed in the middle of the shower floor. We were supposed to pick it up and wash ourselves and our underwear with it and as soon as we heard the guard’s signal, run out of the shower and get dressed again. Any dawdling would be punished with a whipping on bare flesh or a blast of freezing water straight into one’s face.