Then They Came for Me_ A Family's Story of Love, Captivity, and Survival - Maziar Bahari [49]
“Who is Soheila?” he asked me. He was holding a DVD marked “Soheila” that I had left in my DVD player. It was a recording of an eight-hour interview I had conducted with an Iranian madam. I said Soheila was a cousin of mine and it was the video of her wedding.
“So, it’s a family video?” he asked. He put the DVD back where he’d found it and moved to another corner of the room.
“What are these?”
“Old French books.” My father’s uncle had studied in France in the 1930s, and I had been given a lot of his books.
“What about this?”
“Let me see,” I said. He showed me a book called Lancer du Javelot; the cover showed an Olympic athlete throwing a javelin. I explained to him that it was a book about the sport.
“I don’t think so,” said Rosewater, coming back to the room. “Confiscate them!”
They were suspicious of anything they didn’t know, and they didn’t know much about most of the things they found in my room. Khamenei’s paranoia, and his belief that everyone was conspiring against him, had permeated his system, including the men who were willing to risk their lives for him. I could see it in Rosewater’s eyes. I’d always thought that there was nothing more frightening in someone in charge of your life than paranoia, and as I watched Rosewater clumsily rifle through my belongings, I understood that I could be one of the countless innocent people I’d known or heard about who’d suddenly disappeared, their bodies later found in a ditch. Drops of sweat slid down my sides.
I sat in silence watching him, and slowly realized that just as I was not prepared for him, he was not prepared for me, or for what he was finding here. This would become very symbolic of the whole ordeal I would go through. The Revolutionary Guards mainly arrested religious reformists—people who practiced Islam but also believed in democracy, and who challenged Khamenei’s authoritarian interpretation of Islam. The Guards knew how to make sense of those people. But now, here I was, with my copy of the Koran next to a statue of Min, the Egyptian god of fertility, with his erect penis and flail, next to French books from the 1930s, a Vietnamese musical instrument, and box sets of an HBO series.
He found my passport and turned to a page stamped with a Cambodian visa. Paola and I had vacationed there a few months earlier. It was there that she’d found out she was pregnant.
“Where is this from? Is this Hebrew?”
“It’s from Cambodia.”
“Are you sure? I think it’s Israeli.”
“No, sir,” I said, doing my best to sound as respectful as possible, hoping that this would help the whole ordeal end more quickly. “It says ‘Cambodia’ on it, so yes, I am sure.”
He dropped the passport on the floor and took a step closer to me. “Don’t answer me like that ever again. Just say yes or no.”
“Well, I’m just telling you: it says ‘Cambodia.’ ”
“Just say yes or no,” he repeated angrily. I noticed the sweat on his forehead.
As much as I was trying to act as if I were not worried, inside, I was growing increasingly anxious. I wanted to have a conversation with these men: to tell them that whatever it was they were looking for, they had the wrong person. In my conversations with Iranian officials, I always tried to help them understand that the Iranian government was, in fact, lucky that I was working for the Western media. I knew my job. I knew my country. And I was a patriot. If they stopped me, I could be replaced by someone with an ax to grind against the regime. But as I watched Rosewater leafing angrily through my father’s medical records, I knew there was no point in trying to reason with him. How can you reason with a man who sees the word “Cambodia” and thinks it’s Hebrew?
“We should have brought a van,” the clean-shaven man said. “We’ll need to get all of this stuff back.” He motioned to the growing pile beside him: all the things they were confiscating from me. DVDs. VHS tapes. Laptop computers. Several video and still cameras.
I had to go to the bathroom. When I asked Rosewater