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On the sixth day of Ramadan, he arrived in the interrogation room particularly interested in how I’d met Malu Halasa; we had worked together to coedit Transit Tehran, a compilation of the work of Iranian writers and photographers. I told him we had met at a party.

“A sex party?” Rosewater asked.

This was the umpteenth time he had referred to sex parties, but he seemed to be in a gentler mood that day. I knew I needed to take advantage of this. “I’ve never been to a sex party,” I said. “I don’t know what one is exactly.”

“Tsk, tsk, tsk, Maziar,” he said sarcastically. “Don’t play games with me, or you will make me angry again. Don’t tell me that you don’t know about these parties where men and women start with dinner and drinking alcohol and then go to the swimming pool, where they eat chocolate off each other’s bodies.”

I sat silently, trying to picture it. How on earth does one eat chocolate off another person’s body in a swimming pool? I had a picture in my mind of chocolate floating on the surface of the water, and then I began to imagine the mixed taste of chlorine and chocolate.

I realized what he was doing. Most of the people he interrogated were no doubt devout religious men. For these people, sex is a highly taboo subject, and this line of questioning would likely make them feel very uncomfortable. In fact, I later learned that many reformist leaders who broke in prison and confessed to treason did so as a result of the constant psychological pressure from sexual innuendo. In some cases, Revolutionary Guards had genuine pictures of reformists having extramarital affairs. In others, interrogators fabricated documents and used them to force witnesses to lie about illicit affairs.

While this constant psychological pressure about sex proved effective against religious men, it was going to be quite useless in breaking me. Although Rosewater threatened several times to send explicit details of my sexual relationships with Shirin Ebadi and other Iranian female activists to Paola, I wasn’t nervous in the slightest. Paola knew all about my previous relationships, and I didn’t have any affairs to be worried about.

The longer this line of questioning went on, the more I began to realize that something else was at play. Rosewater wasn’t only hoping to break me psychologically; he was also aroused by thoughts of my sex life. He was asking me about pool parties where men lick imaginary chocolate off Barbie-like blond Western women because he couldn’t be there himself. And he ached to be there. His religion had promised him that he could do all that, and much more, when he got to paradise, but he had to control himself until then. He hated me for being able to enjoy on earth things that were, for him, reserved only for a time after death.

I knew dozens of men like him. He reminded me of kids from traditional backgrounds in my high schools who’d thought that people in north Tehran, families who led more Westernized lives, acted out pornographic movies daily. Much of their information about sex and the West came from porn magazines and movies they watched again and again, illegal videotapes they’d bought on the black market. From Rosewater’s line of questioning, I could see that much of his knowledge about the rest of the world also came from porn. In fact, I was coming to suspect that Rosewater mistook porn films for documentaries and, as such, honestly believed that most women in the West were sex therapists, horny secretaries, or naughty cheerleaders and that mailmen, milkmen, and plumbers had sex with their willing clients after each delivery or repair job.

· · ·

“Who is Debbie?” he asked me one day.

“Debbie?”

“Yes, Debbie the Cleaner?” He nearly purred the last word.

Debbie was a housekeeper Paola and I had hired in London. I didn’t know her surname, so in order to remember who she was in my cell phone I’d saved her name as Debbie the Cleaner. “She cleans our house,” I answered. “Why?”

“Are you going to tell me that you didn’t have sex with