Then They Came for Me_ A Family's Story of Love, Captivity, and Survival - Maziar Bahari [47]
At home, I turned on my computer and checked my emails, only to find dozens of reports about a killing that had happened earlier that day. An innocent bystander, a woman named Neda Agha-Soltan, had been killed by a Basij member. It was not clear whether Neda had been killed intentionally or if her death was a tragic accident; Neda could have been any one of the thousands of Iranians who’d tried to peacefully express their anger at Ahmadinejad’s false reelection. Neda’s innocent face bloodied by a thug became the iconic image of the brutal suppression of the Iranian people by their own government.
Watching her dying in front of a video camera reminded me of all the tragic scenes I had witnessed during the past few days. I couldn’t take it anymore. I yelled, “KHODAA, CHERAA?” Why, God? I grabbed the bottle of Johnnie Walker and poured a glass for myself—then another glass and another one, until I was nearly drunk. I went to see my mother in her room, thinking she might be awake. Ever since Maryam’s death, she’d had trouble sleeping. I found her crying in silence, hiding her face in her hands. I held her in my arms. I didn’t want to calm her. I wanted to understand what we had been going through and why. But I didn’t speak. I knew there was no answer. As my mother quietly hummed Maryam’s name, I saw the images of all the women whose abuse I had witnessed that day. I held my mother tighter in my arms, her heart beating like a captured bird.
The tragedy that was engulfing our lives was unbearable. I kissed Moloojoon good night and sat in front of my laptop, looking at Facebook, hoping to distract myself, and saw that someone had posted a link from the Time magazine website, showing a series of photographs of pregnant women who’d painted their bellies. There was one with a teddy bear on it and another one with an underwater scene and an octopus. The photographs made me smile. I had to share them with Paola. I had to see her.
I called her to tell her that I’d made a decision: I’d come home in a day or two, be with her for a week, and then possibly return to Tehran for a few more days to follow the news. She didn’t answer the phone. Instead of leaving a message, I emailed her the link to the photographs. “I’ll see you very soon,” I wrote.
The Johnnie Walker had gone to my head. I walked quietly to my room, lay down on my bed, and before I knew it, I was fast asleep.
PART TWO
Neither Departed
Nor Gone
Chapter Seven
SUNDAY, JUNE 21, 2009
Rosewater’s knock came before eight the next morning.
When he and the three other men arrived, they told my mother that they had a letter for me. She went to open the door, and they pushed their way in.
As they stood over me while I lay in bed, trying to cover myself with the sheets, I felt confused but was somehow able to pull my thoughts together enough to ask them if they had an arrest warrant. Rosewater fished some papers from the jacket pocket of his cheap brown suit, which seemed to be a size too small for him. He kept his fat thumb covering the information on the bottom of the page, where the reason for the arrest was written, but I could see that the warrant was signed by Tehran’s prosecutor general, Judge Saeed Mortazavi.
This was terrible news. Mortazavi was notorious for arresting people first and coming up with ridiculous, trumped-up charges afterward. Having single-handedly shut down more than sixty newspapers, Mortazavi was called the “executioner of the press” in Iran. He’d even once closed down a newspaper for promoting moral corruption after it had published a photograph of an old man dancing in a park. My father used to say that the most dangerous animal was the donkey,