Then They Came for Me_ A Family's Story of Love, Captivity, and Survival - Maziar Bahari [42]
On the morning of Tuesday, June 16, I received a fax from Ershad, the Ministry of Culture; it had been sent to all Iranian and foreign reporters. Ershad asked all of us to stop reporting on the demonstrations and warned that continuing to do so would result in punishment. The fax didn’t specify the kind of punishment, but we all guessed that it could be annulment of our press cards or temporary detention. I immediately went to a friend’s office to make backups of my tapes.
A few minutes after I started to digitize the tapes, an Ershad official I was friendly with called and asked me to visit him. At our meeting, he told me that I should be careful about what I was reporting. Apparently, the day after the election, the Revolutionary Guards had summoned Ershad officials and told them “to put a leash on foreign media” or they would be fired from their jobs and arrested. Knowing that I was the one who’d filmed it, the Ershad official told me that the Guards had complained about the footage of the attack against the Basij base. A chill went down my spine. As my friend spoke, he paced restlessly around his office. I’d never seen him so worried.
In order to calm him, I read him a few passages from my latest Newsweek article, “Who’s Behind Tehran’s Violence?,” which had been posted on the magazine’s website the night before. In the article I blamed terrorist groups for using people’s peaceful demonstrations to incite violence. I’d quoted one of the demonstrators as saying, “I think some small terrorist groups and criminal gangs are taking advantage of the situation. Thirty years after the revolution and twenty years after the war, the majority of Iranians despise violence and terror. My worry is that if the government doesn’t allow reforms to take place, we will fall into a terrorism abyss like the years after the revolution.”
My friend played with his green worry beads as I translated the article for him. I told him that I had nothing to hide and that I had even mentioned that I’d filmed the attack in the article. I assured him that by this time in my career, I’d grown accustomed to criticism from all sides. Usually, the Islamic government and different opposition groups criticized my films and articles for remaining neutral; they would prefer that I take sides.
My friend stared at a heap of foreign magazines and newspapers. “Maziar jaan, we all know that you are fair in your reporting,” he told me. “That is why the extremists don’t like you.”
· · ·
Listen!
The shadows are stepping by …
We must flee.
These lines from the poem “The Wind Will Carry Us,” by the modern Persian poet Forough Farrokhzad, ran through my mind again and again as I lay in bed that night. Since my father’s death, I had been using his study as my bedroom, and I could hear his voice each time I entered his room. I was surrounded by my father’s books and his souvenirs from countries around the world. But that night it wasn’t my father’s voice I was hearing. It was my sister’s, Maryam’s.
Don’t you see?
Our roof is shaking in fear of collapse,
and over this roof, an immense dark cloud,
like a dull, grieving crowd,
is expecting the moment of cry.
On Thursday, I woke at four A.M. and decided to go back to the mountains, to clear my head. Before I left, I sent an email to Maryam’s son, Khaled, who had been living in Australia since 2008, to tell him about the news I had received from Ershad and the Revolutionary Guards’ displeasure with the footage I had shot. A few years ago, I had given Khaled a list of friends to contact in case anything happened to me, thinking it best to take some precautions, and I wanted to update it.
When I arrived at the base of the mountain, I called Paola in London. She was surprised by my poetic mood when I recited the original Persian