Then They Came for Me_ A Family's Story of Love, Captivity, and Survival - Maziar Bahari [48]
After they allowed me to dress, the men were back in my room: Rosewater and a man who was clean-shaven, which was surprising. Many Muslim scholars dictate that men shouldn’t shave their beards, and most Iranian agents have beards, or at least stubble. I sat on the bed, watching them. I could sense their frustration as they took stock of everything. They went through the boxes of my books and films, thinking, I supposed, that I might have hidden something illegal in them. Maybe an AK-47 assault rifle, maybe eavesdropping equipment. Unfortunately for them, I had nothing incriminating in my mother’s house. Rosewater pulled a DVD—Pier Paolo Pasolini’s 1968 film Teorema—from the pile. On its cover was a profile of the actress Silvana Mangano, naked and covering her right breast with one hand.
“Is this porno?” Rosewater asked.
“No, it’s an Italian art film.”
“Confiscate it,” he said to the clean-shaven man, who placed it in a separate pile on the floor. A lanky man with a long face and a beard made a list of everything in that pile.
“Why do you have so many films?” Rosewater asked, with what seemed like, for at least a moment, genuine curiosity.
“I’ve had a great interest in films since childhood,” I answered. He gave me a harsh look and continued to search the closets. He didn’t know it, but he was also looking through my father’s belongings. One of the closets in the room was full of my father’s files, books, and photographs. In the mid-1970s, my father had collapsed in Vienna, during a business trip, and been hospitalized for two weeks. He had kept all of his medical files, which were written in German. Rosewater was leafing through a box of them. He held up a letter dated 1976. “What is this?”
“I don’t know.”
“This is your room. How come you don’t know what it is?”
“It is my late father’s.”
“God bless him,” Rosewater and the clean-shaven man solemnly said at the same time. They put their heads down as if they were going to recite a fatiha, the Muslim prayer for the dead. When he looked up, he examined the paper again. “Tell me, what does it say?”
“I don’t read German, so I don’t know what it is.”
“This is not German!” he said. “It is English! Take this,” he instructed his partner. The search of my room continued like this for a long time.
“What is this?” He was holding a Sopranos box set. “Are these pornos?”
I remembered my father telling me about a prison guard he’d encountered who thought every foreign word with the “sh” sound meant hashish, including “Chicago” and “champagne.” Maybe Rosewater believed anything that included the letters p, o, and r meant pornography.
“No, not porno,” I said. “Sopranos—it’s a television series about the Mafia.”
The arrest crew seemed to be obsessed with pornography. They would ask me many times over the next three hours if I had porn. If nothing else, I thought, they were looking to charge me with possessing pornography, a crime for which you can serve a prison sentence or be flogged seventy-four times. I didn’t have any pornography, but, I realized, I did have a few bottles of vodka in the refrigerator.
In 1983, not long after Maryam was arrested for her membership in the Tudeh Party, the Revolutionary Guards had raided our home and arrested my parents. The Guards had become suspicious of some friends of theirs who were members of the Tudeh Party, so they were arresting and questioning people close to them. I hid in my bedroom while they searched our house. When I finally found the courage to walk into the living room, I saw several bottles of my father’s vodka lined up along one wall. They did not charge my father for political activities, but he was fined for having alcohol in the house.
Rosewater stepped out of the room for a few minutes. I was silently