Then They Came for Me_ A Family's Story of Love, Captivity, and Survival - Maziar Bahari [134]
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The night before Marianna’s birth was the night Rosewater vanished from my dreams. I was sitting with Paola and Marianna—who was a beautiful precocious teenage girl, with long, curly brown hair—at my family dining room table in Tehran. Opposite were my mother, my father, and Maryam. I was telling my family about my prison experiences. My father was angry: “Those sisterfuckers who work for this regime are as stupid as those who worked for the shah.” There was a large bottle of Johnnie Walker Black Label in front of him. As I poured him a glass of whiskey, my father gazed at me with a chastising expression. He seemed to still be mad at me for making the false confessions and apologizing to Khamenei. Marianna grabbed my father’s hand and pointed toward the television. There I was, revealing what was happening in Iranian jails and campaigning for the release of other prisoners. Marianna leaned forward to my father and smiled at him. My father looked at me and nodded. His eyes were much softer.
The next morning, as I sat beside Paola, just hours before Marianna’s birth, I slowly tried to absorb the idea that a difficult period of my life was over and a new, more gratifying period was about to start, but I couldn’t stop worrying about what might happen. I slipped out of the room for a moment and called my mother.
“I hope Paola and the baby will be okay,” I told her. “Paola’s been through a lot.”
My mother had no time for my unnecessary worries. She spoke to me with her usual strength and directness: “Mazi jaan, you shouldn’t worry about Paola or the baby’s health. They will be fine. All you have to worry about now is how well you can raise the baby. And I know you won’t have any problem doing that. Now go back to Paola.”
We were called to the operating room soon after. Given the difficulties Paola had experienced, the doctors planned to deliver Marianna through cesarean surgery, and the room was filled with nurses and the doctors’ assistants. Even though we’d been told that Marianna’s birth had a higher than normal risk for complications, the mood in the room was jovial and Paola and I were full of excitement.
Within minutes, Marianna was born into the world, in even better health than we had dreamt of. A nurse placed Marianna in Paola’s arms. We were both mesmerized by her beauty. We looked at each other but didn’t say anything. As Marianna let out a tiny, perfect cry, I could have sworn I heard someone singing a familiar song:
They were waiting for me when I thought that I just can’t go on.
And they brought me their comfort and later they brought me this song.
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We were able to bring Marianna home within a few days. She slept like an angel. Paola soon recovered from her surgery. At night, as I watched Paola sleeping with the baby beside her, a voice inside me, perhaps my father’s, urged me on: “Okay, that’s done. What now? Are you going to rest on your laurels and let those bastards get away with murder?”
Chapter Twenty
It didn’t take very long for the Revolutionary Guards to contact me. “Mr. Bahari, we’re waiting to see you,” said Rosewater’s boss in a message left on my cell phone one day. “We’re sure that we’re going to see you very soon.”
Many of my friends and colleagues who had spent time in prison in Iran had remained silent about what happened to them. They feared that their comments about their experiences in prison would incense the regime, and that their families would have to suffer the consequences. But their silence gnawed at them from inside. Like me, many of them had been forced to make confessions. They felt guilty and angry about what the regime had put them through, and their anguish swelled because of the fear they suffered, even in freedom.
I couldn’t allow that to happen to me. Instead, I knew that I had a responsibility to campaign on behalf of the hundreds of people who remained in prison. But I had to consult