Then They Came for Me_ A Family's Story of Love, Captivity, and Survival - Maziar Bahari [53]
“Put this on,” he said. “Your specialist wants to see you now.”
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Strangely, my main worry at that moment was the thought of getting an eye infection. What if others have worn this blindfold? I thought as I fingered the threadbare black velvet. I wanted to wash it, but there wasn’t a sink in my room.
“What are you waiting for?” the guard asked impatiently. I could see part of his face through the slot. His eyes were a deep blue. “Put it on.”
I slipped it over my head.
“No, no. It’s upside down. Put it on the other way.” I began to pull it off. “Do not look at me! Turn around and face the wall. Face the wall! Don’t you know how to put on a blindfold?”
“No, I don’t,” I said. “I don’t have a lot of experience with them. This is my first time in prison.”
That wasn’t entirely true. In 1984, when I was seventeen, I was arrested and imprisoned for the crime of disturbing the public morality. My girlfriend, Anita, and I were in a café, drinking tea together. It is, of course, illegal in the Islamic Republic for a man to be alone with a namahram woman—a woman other than his wife, mother, or sister. The police who stormed the café that day let Anita go after some questioning, but I was taken to Qasr Prison. Being taken to the same prison where my father had been held for three years, three decades earlier, was exciting. I wanted to tell my own stories to my family and my friends. Soon after I arrived at Qasr, I was put in line to be interviewed by a social worker. There were two men in front of me. One of them had robbed a bank, and the other had raped a pregnant woman.
“And what did you do?” they asked me.
“I had tea with my girlfriend.”
For four nights, I was kept in a communal cell with about forty other men: purse snatchers, drug smugglers, and—I remember this clearly—eight men accused of committing sodomy on a single young boy, whom they called “the peach.” After my father used all the connections he had in the judiciary, the judge eventually gave me a suspended sentence of seventy-four lashes and let me go. My mother was waiting for me at the front door when I returned home, fresh lines of worry around her eyes.
“Seventy-four suspended lashes for having tea with your friend!” she said, with as much hatred as I’d ever heard in her voice. “What do they expect young people to do? Pray and say ‘Death to America’ all day?” She looked at my father. “Mazi should really leave this country next year.”
By then, the Iran-Iraq War was in its fourth year. All high school graduates had to serve in the military, unless they performed very well on the universities’ national entrance examination and had a letter of recommendation from their high school principal approving their “moral qualification.” Given the fact that I had been expelled from eight high schools because of misconduct, I knew that I would never be admitted into any university, and my plan, from a young age, had always been to leave Iran as soon as I finished high school. My father had been reluctant to allow me to go—wanting me to remain with my family in Tehran—but soon after I was released from Qasr, everyone agreed that keeping me safe was all that mattered.
I left about fourteen months later, going first to Pakistan, then to Canada, to attend university in Montreal.
“This is good,” my mother whispered into my hair as we hugged good-bye at the front door the morning I left for Pakistan. “It will be good for you to spend a little time outside of Iran. And then you can come back.” She kissed my cheek and waved to me as I got inside a cab. I knew she would cry, but she hid her tears until I was gone.
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As I pulled the blindfold back over my eyes, I hoped that this brief, odd experience of prison would be as short and uneventful as my first. Surely the meeting with my “specialist” would give me the