Then They Came for Me_ A Family's Story of Love, Captivity, and Survival - Maziar Bahari [112]
“I didn’t want to tell you this, Maziar,” he said, “but my father was a political prisoner in the shah’s time. He was so severely tortured by SAVAK”—the shah’s secret police—“that he has a difficult time walking now. They pulled out his toenails and damaged his feet so badly that even now, thirty years later, he has to use a cane to walk. I never did that to you, did I?”
I was surprised to hear this. How could a man whose father had endured such torture now administer torture himself? What a senseless, absurd cycle of violence this was. “Why was your father in prison?” I asked.
“He was a follower of Imam Khomeini. In fact, he was willing to sacrifice his life for the imam.” By this point, I’d spent enough time with Rosewater under the darkness of my blindfold to be able to understand the meaning behind every noise he made, and now I could hear the tears in his voice. He walked closer to me—I could see his black slippers beneath the crease in the blindfold—and put his hand gently on my shoulder. “I asked you a question, Maziar. Answer me,” Rosewater said quietly. “Have I ever tortured you?”
I didn’t know how to answer. I was the prisoner of a manic-depressive man, someone with a huge ego and yet highly insecure, constantly seeking other people’s approval. A wrong answer could lead to more punching and slapping, and, frankly, I was tired of that. And the more I thought about Paola’s efforts to get me released, which I trusted were ongoing, given the small hints my mother was able to make on the phone, and the attention my case may have been getting around the world, the more powerful I was coming to feel in his presence.
I heard my father’s voice: “Go with it, Mazi. He’s losing strength. You can manipulate him. You may even come to control him.”
I paused for a few seconds, then said, “I think you have shown me your strength.” I paused again, melodramatically. “I think you had to carry out your duty by exerting maximum pressure on me to find the truth.”
Rosewater inhaled heavily and chuckled, but his voice remained distant. “It’s not been maximum pressure, Mazi. You still don’t know what I’m capable of.”
“What’s interesting is that you are sometimes soft and kind like a brother, and sometimes as harsh as a disciplinarian father,” I said. “I think that is an amazing achievement.”
Rosewater laughed. “It’s my art,” he said, with obvious pride. “Your art is making films and writing. My art is being a proficient interrogator. The only difference is that I use my art to help our holy system and you use it against God and the supreme leader.” I sensed him settling into the chair. He went on for a while in this vein, and when he finished speaking, he instructed me to get up, turn my chair to the wall, and remove my blindfold. I sensed that he was preparing to beat me again.
“I know that on a personal level, I have a lot of shortcomings,” I said. “I know about the weaknesses and faults in my character and behavior.”
“Example?” He couldn’t hide the anticipation in his voice, and we both knew where this was going. He was dying to hear more about Thai women and oil massages. He was hooked. I spoke without interruption for hours about how shameless it was of me to receive massages by naked Thai women. How depraved I believed myself to be when I felt a pair of perfumed, perfectly shaped breasts on my back.
Of course, I’d never actually had a sexual Thai massage. My improvised monologues were based, instead, on years of watching pornography on illegally imported Betamax and VHS tapes in the 1980s and reading and rereading Persian translations of Lady Chatterley’s Lover, La Ronde, Madame Bovary, and dozens of other romantic and erotic novels as a teenager. In that school chair in an Evin interrogation room, I felt that I was back in high school telling my classmates intertwined stories of Arthur Schnitzler’s