Then They Came for Me_ A Family's Story of Love, Captivity, and Survival - Maziar Bahari [109]
“Who is this, then?” Rosewater asked as he started playing a video behind me.
I heard Paola’s voice. “No, no,” she was saying.
I realized what the video was. I’d recently bought a cheap laptop in London and had wanted to test the camera. I’d filmed Paola, who was having a bad-hair day, without her knowledge. When she realized I was filming her, she covered her face with her hands. “No, no,” she said, trying to duck behind me and out of view of the camera. The sight of Paola in our flat in London nearly brought me to my knees. I missed her so much. I held back my tears, as well as my anger at Rosewater for even looking at Paola.
“That’s my wife, sir,” I managed to say. “I would appreciate it if you didn’t look at my private videos.”
I felt his knee hit me hard in the small of my back. “I do whatever I want. Don’t ever raise your voice again.” He sat heavily on a chair and played the video of Paola again, from the beginning. When it finished, he replayed it once more. I could tell by the tone of his voice, and his slow, steady breath, that he was enjoying watching my unveiled beautiful blond wife in a private moment.
“This is not your wife,” he kept saying. “I’m going to watch it again. You take a look at that list of names in the folder.” I breathed as slowly as I could, trying to fight the nausea settling in my throat, as Rosewater slid his chair closer to the video.
“Now, as I said. We are going to go through the names one by one. Begin by telling me how and where you met each woman,” Rosewater said. Of course, I didn’t even recognize many of the names on the list, but Rosewater wasn’t buying that. Every time I wrote next to a name that I didn’t know a particular woman, he responded by slapping me.
“Mazi, bacheh khoshgel, pretty boy. We both understand that the best way to get close to your female sources for espionage and other purposes is through sexual intercourse,” he said knowingly. “Stop wasting our time. Stop trying to fool me. Here—” He placed a clean sheet of paper on the writing arm of the desk. “I want you to put down the names of your ‘special’ friends.” He picked up the list of names. “Let’s start here. Shirin Ebadi. You have four phone numbers for her. When and where was the first time you had sex with her?”
Shirin Ebadi was a Nobel Prize laureate, and one of the most prominent human-rights lawyers in Iran. “I’ve never worked on any project with Mrs. Ebadi,” I said.
“Sheytoon, naughty boy, I’m not asking about ‘projects.’ ”
“Sorry, I don’t understand your question.”
“Don’t just sit there!” I heard my father whisper. “Find an answer to this moron’s question.”
“Sir, I think Mrs. Ebadi is a respectable married woman,” I said. “If I remember, I interviewed her for—”
He didn’t let me finish. He raised his right leg and kicked me hard in the right shoulder from behind. “You’ve never fucked her?” he yelled. “So why do you have four numbers for her? Why don’t you have four numbers for my aunt?” I began to feel sorry for the poor woman. I wondered what she would do if she knew that her nephew was using her name so gratuitously.
“Sir, I have ten numbers for Mr. Ahmadinejad’s office,” I replied sarcastically.
As I expected, this brought another blow to my body. He continued to beat me, and each kick came with greater force, sending waves of pain so bad I felt nauseous all over again. He yelled at me all the while, but he no longer seemed to make any sense at all. I thought of Zahra Kazemi, the Iranian-Canadian photojournalist murdered in Evin. I had to find a way to appease him and stop the beatings.
Rosewater’s attitude about sex revealed more information about him than he was ever able to extract from me. As he went through my list of friends and colleagues, it seemed genuinely inconceivable to him that a man and a woman could be friends or work together without having a sexual relationship. The scenarios he made up became ever more