Then They Came for Me_ A Family's Story of Love, Captivity, and Survival - Maziar Bahari [131]
Before going to bed, I took a shower. I hadn’t looked at my body in a mirror since the day I’d been arrested. I knew that I had lost a lot of weight, but I had seen only faint reflections of my naked form on the metal door of the shower cubicles in Evin. Confronted with the mirror now, I drew back in shock. I didn’t recognize myself. My rib cage protruded under my skin, and my shoulders looked like a clothes hanger.
When I saw my backside, I gasped. “I have no ass!” I said aloud. “They have left me no ass!” For some strange reason, the reality of what had happened to me in Evin fully hit me only in the familiar setting of my mother’s bathroom, when I noticed that my buttocks had shrunk to one-third of their former size.
· · ·
The next morning, I booked a ticket for the first direct flight from Tehran to London; I would leave Tehran in two days. I immediately started the countdown, but at the same time, I felt guilty for doing so. I didn’t want to look forward to leaving my country. I didn’t want to go into exile. I didn’t want to leave Moloojoon. But I couldn’t stay in Iran.
Dozens of relatives, friends, and colleagues came to see me during my short stay in Tehran. I tried to keep a calm face, but the fear that our house would be raided again was suffocating. It wasn’t just a worry born out of more than one hundred days of interrogation and torture; there were numerous precedents for the Islamic government’s security forces bursting into the homes of recently freed prisoners and arresting them and their guests. I was constantly on edge and avoided any real conversation by cracking jokes and answering questions with questions. When a friend asked me about life in prison, I smiled and told him that I’d lost thirty-three pounds. “The Evin diet is better than any other,” I laughed. “Even better than Atkins!”
The subject I most wanted to avoid was my televised “confession.” Many of my friends and relatives had spent time in prison. They recognized that I was uncomfortable talking about it and wanted to let me know that I hadn’t done anything I should be ashamed of. “We’re all proud of you, Maziar,” they told me. But their words never gave me comfort. Sitting in the living room, I often stared at the chair where my father used to sit. I could feel my father’s gaze on me until the moment when I left the house for the airport. He wanted to know what my plans for the future were. “What are you going to do now, Maziar?” he asked me. “Just sit on your hands and do nothing? Or will you speak out against the injustices committed against your people?”
Before I left, I held my mother in my arms for a long time. I felt her tears seeping through my shirt, and onto my skin. We both knew that I would not be back in Iran for a long time, if ever. I kissed her cheeks several times and told her repeatedly, “Dorost misheh, dorost misheh”: It will be fine. But even as I held her, I was also talking to my father. I was promising him that I would not be silent—that I would make the world aware of the injustices suffered by the people of Iran. I would never forget my people, or my duty to help my friends and colleagues languishing behind bars. I would do my best to defeat Rosewater and his masters, in any way I could.
Chapter Nineteen
The hours between five A.M., when I left the house, and eight A.M., when the British Midland flight took off, were the longest of my life. As I showed my passport and passed through the two security checkpoints, I fully expected to be prevented from boarding the plane. A few days earlier, three of my friends—fellow filmmakers