Then They Came for Me_ A Family's Story of Love, Captivity, and Survival - Maziar Bahari [51]
Evin’s notoriety as a prison grew after the 1979 revolution, when thousands of political prisoners were detained there and a new warden, Assadollah Lajevardi, was put in charge. Lajevardi embodied the Islamic regime in its nascent stage: he was ideological and brutal. As a political prisoner under the shah, he had himself experienced torture and imprisonment. He knew when torture worked and when it failed to break people. I had once interviewed a former Islamic guerrilla who later became a government minister. The problem with the shah’s secret police, he’d said, was that they thought they could break a prisoner’s will through physical pressure. But that often just hardened the victim’s resolve. “What our brothers after the revolution have masterminded,” he said with a grin, “is how to break a man’s soul without using much violence against his body.”
Evin is officially run by the judicial branch of the Islamic government. Separate wards in the complex are reserved for different intelligence and security branches: the police, the Ministry of Intelligence, the Revolutionary Guards. I wondered if I would be taken to the ward for prisoners of the Guards.
“Where are we going?” I asked the man with the kind smile.
“Why do you ask?”
“No reason—I just like to know where I’m going. Are we going to Evin?”
“We may be going to Evin, we may not be.”
This was a typical response for an Iranian official: keep everything secret and make you insecure in every situation. A few minutes later, the driver looked into the rearview mirror and nodded to the man next to me. “Okay,” my captor said, handing me a blindfold. “Take your glasses off and put your head down.”
I did as I was told. I pulled the blindfold over my eyes and put my head in his bony lap. And with that, the sunshine disappeared.
· · ·
After about ten minutes, I heard the man in the driver’s seat speak to someone on his cell phone, laughing.
“You need to get yourself a better cell phone, so that my number appears. That way, you’ll stop asking me who I am every time I call, Seyyed.” Seyyed refers to descendants of the Prophet, but I would later realize that everyone who worked in Evin was called Seyyed, as a means of hiding their identity: Cook Seyyed, Fat Seyyed, Haircut Seyyed, and so on. I heard the sound of large gates creaking open, and the car moved forward again.
I was still wearing the blindfold when they led me out of the car. Someone guided me to a room and made me sit in a chair. I waited there for several minutes, until I was moved again to another room, where I was allowed to remove the blindfold. A man handed me a gray prison uniform and a pair of white plastic slippers.
“Put these on,” another man directed me.
I stood alone in the room, wondering if I needed to remove my T-shirt and underwear. I decided to keep them on—my familiar Sunspel T-shirt and boxer shorts reminded me of my time with Paola in London, and I felt safer in them.
I was led to another room, where a man stood behind a camera set atop a tripod.
“Look at the camera.”
The flash snapped, and the man’s face remained etched in my eyes for a few moments. I remembered being very young and playing badminton with my sister outside. I’d look too long at the sun and then at Maryam, and then close my eyes. The silhouette of Maryam’s face and her long, dark hair would appear behind my closed eyes, as if they had been branded there by a hot spit.
That photographer’s face would be the last face I would see for many days.
One man put my blindfold back on, and I was handed to another prison guard, a man with an Azerbaijani accent. “Welcome to Abu Ghraib, Guantánamo, or whatever you Americans build.”