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“Yes, yes,” the guard said.

I wanted to help.

“He needs to use the mostarah—the toilet,” I told the guard. “I can translate for you two, if you’d like.”

“I can’t let you do that,” the guard answered. “He and two others are the directors of the CIA in Iran.”

I knew that this couldn’t be true, and it was only after I was released that I found out that the American voices belonged to two of the three young American hikers who were arrested in late July 2009 on the border between Iran and Iraq. But the experience really shook me. Other than the few conversations I’d had with my mother, I hadn’t heard a female voice in what felt like ages, and it made me think of Maryam more than ever.

I also began to think that the Iranian government had started a new stage in its war against opposition activists and their foreign supporters—possibly arresting some foreigners in the country, simply for being foreign. Having no contact with the outside world, I fought not to imagine the worst.

At times, alone in my cell for days, I became terrified that I was going crazy. My conversations with Maryam and my father were becoming more frequent and made less sense. I started to have nightmares about the bruised soles of Maryam’s feet after her lashings and my father’s broken, bloodied nails.

It was the pen that saved me. I had stolen it during an interrogation session. When Rosewater had briefly left the room, I’d slipped the pen into the waistband of my uniform. I had heard that if you had a pen in your cell, you would be punished, but I didn’t know what the punishment was, and I didn’t care.

A day or two after I stole the pen, Rosewater suspended my hava khori privileges in order to punish me for my refusal to name names. For almost a month, I was allowed to leave the cell only three times a day, during the times of prayer, to go to the bathroom. The pen became my closest, and only, friend. At night, when I knew the guards were asleep, I would design crossword puzzles on the wall and on the floor under the carpet; I had first developed the skill while sitting through boring classes in high school. It surprised me that I could still do it, and, desperate for some diversion from my loneliness, I would create puzzles for hours—first in Persian, then in English. I further challenged myself by making the puzzles more difficult, designing them around certain themes and subjects: politics, history, pop music, and geography. I couldn’t believe my good fortune when one day the plastic cups we had previously been given with our meals were replaced by paper ones. I’d drain the water from each cup, then carefully unglue it and lay it out to dry. At the end of the day, after the paper was covered in crossword puzzles, I would shred it into small pieces, form tiny balls, and play a solitary game of basketball. I’d designate one of the tiles of the faux marble wall as the net, and try to hit that tile with the paper balls. I was so distracted by my puzzles and basketball games that I hardly noticed that Ramadan had begun and I had not seen Rosewater for two weeks.

I had survived. At least for now.

· · ·

On the second day of Ramadan, I was transferred again, to a smaller, windowless cell. Eventually they reinstated my hava khori sessions, and I was able to walk in the courtyard for fifteen minutes every three or four days. Twice I was allowed to call my mother. Before the guard grabbed the phone from my hand each time, she told me that Nikbakht, the lawyer she had hired, was still trying to see me. I prayed that this was true, and during the day, as I exercised on the floor and jogged around Regent’s Park with Paola, I attempted to convince myself that they wouldn’t really execute me. The Islamic government was irresponsible and stubborn, but it was not yet lawless. For a high-profile case like mine, the judges would at least pretend to observe legal procedures. If they were going to kill me, they would at least allow me to see my lawyer before passing a sentence.

“I hope you’re right,” my father said to me that night, as I tried to stretch the ache