Then They Came for Me_ A Family's Story of Love, Captivity, and Survival - Maziar Bahari [100]
“I heard you’re going to be tried with them,” he said. “And they said that you need to get a haircut.”
Outside the bathroom, a few other prisoners were waiting for a haircut. When it was my turn, a prison guard sat me down, kept my blindfold on, and, in a matter of seconds, trimmed my hair and beard.
“Do you use gel?” he asked.
This is amazing, I thought. They deny you your basic rights and then, when they want to put you on trial, they offer you hair gel.
“Sure, I’ll have some,” I said.
After my haircut, I was taken outside. I could hear dozens of other men being moved around as well. There was a cacophony of guards shouting orders, wardens looking for keys, and people asking where they should stand or sit down.
I was eventually separated from the group and taken to a dark room; there I was asked to remove my blindfold. Before me was a breakfast of flat bread and cheese, and a small cup of tea. I was starving, but I could barely chew the food. Was it true that I was going to be tried today? Was I about to be killed? I felt the bread lodge in my dry throat.
Suddenly, Rosewater was behind me, his hand on my shoulder. “You thought I was joking about your trial?”
I couldn’t answer him.
“You’ll have a trial today and then an interview,” Rosewater said. “Then I’ll suggest a sentence to your judge, based wholly on your performance. We need names today, Maziar. We need a lot of names.”
I was left alone in the dark room for hours after that. I heard the call for morning prayers, but no one came to take me to the bathroom. I’d had two cups of tea and really needed to use the toilet, but I’d been told to sit in my chair and not move.
After what felt like an eternity, a guard finally came for me. He put handcuffs on me and sat me in the back of a car, blindfolded. I was allowed to remove the blindfold only when we reached Chamran Expressway, about a mile south of Evin. There were three armed guards wearing civilian clothes in the car.
“Where are we going?” I asked.
“Sshhh,” one guard said. “You’ll find out soon.”
It was the first time I had been out of Evin since my arrest six weeks earlier. I tried to absorb every scene and face I was seeing. I knew that I’d be back in my cell soon enough, and I was desperate to keep as many fresh images of the outside world as possible in the depository of my memory. Everything looked so bright: the colors were more vivid than I’d remembered, and I felt that even the wind was a colorful shade of blue. One of the guards’ cell phones rang.
“No. Tajbakhsh is not with us,” the guard said. “We have Bahari.”
Hearing the name Tajbakhsh felt like one of Rosewater’s slaps on the back of my head. What the hell?! I thought. Is Tajbakhsh still in Iran?
Between 2003 and 2007, the Iranian-American scholar Kian Tajbakhsh had worked for the Open Society Institute (OSI), an organization run by the billionaire George Soros that promotes democratic values in former communist countries and many other nations. Tajbakhsh had held this position with the official permission of Iran’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs until, in 2007, he was arrested by Iran’s Ministry of Intelligence and held for four months in Evin. His arrest and that of two other scholars were part of the first wave of incarcerations of those accused of fomenting a velvet revolution in Iran.
The OSI’s role in the soft revolutions in Georgia, in 2003, and Ukraine, in 2004, was not a secret. The organization had offices in both countries, and in both had openly endorsed a move to a more democratic state. But OSI had never received official permission to open offices in Iran, and Tajbakhsh worked only within the framework set for him by the Iranian government. Nonetheless, at the time, Tajbakhsh was forced to make a television appearance in which he admitted to being guilty of working with Soros to undermine the regime. The other two scholars left Iran immediately after their release, but Tajbakhsh stayed in Iran. He loved his country and wanted to raise a family there, and he believed the assurances of the Ministry of Intelligence