Then They Came for Me_ A Family's Story of Love, Captivity, and Survival - Maziar Bahari [56]
“I cannot read this!” I heard the sound of paper being torn into pieces behind me. He threw the shreds over my head, like confetti. “Write in better handwriting!”
“I’m sorry, I cannot help it. I’ve always had bad handwriting.”
“But you write so well for Newsweek.” He said the name as if it were a curse.
“Yes, but I use a computer to write. I rarely use a pen these days.”
He ignored what I’d said and gave me another piece of paper. I sat in that chair for hours, answering his questions. I marked the passage of time by the call to prayer. Shia Muslims pray three times daily: morning, noon, and evening. Brown Sandals came to bring me back to my cell just before the evening prayer.
I had had nothing to eat except for the breakfast at my mother’s house. When I took off the blindfold inside the cell, my lunch and dinner were both there. The lunch was bread and ghaymeh, a Persian stew with lamb, split peas, dried lemon, and rice. I’ve always loved the taste of ghaymeh, especially the way my mother made it, with eggplant. I missed the bitter, sour taste of dried lemon. I grabbed the plate of ghaymeh, eager to devour it, until I saw that it had been there so long, it had almost congealed. Its smell nauseated me.
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My father always hated ghaymeh, not so much because of the taste but for what he thought it represented. Ghaymeh is typically served to the poor during religious ceremonies, and my father hated organized religion and all its rituals. I sat down on the dirty green carpet and thought of him.
My father, Akbar Bahari, was born in 1927 in Bahar, a small town in a mountainous part of western Iran—that is how we got our surname. At the time of my father’s birth, the majority of Iranians either were nomads or lived in villages. Most people in Bahar made their living by farming wheat or poppies or harvesting fruit. But my father’s family was not like most others. My father’s grandfather, Samad Roghani, whose surname means “oil seller,” was a cooking oil merchant and, according to legend, one of the richest men in the region. Unlike most men of his generation, Samad had only one child, and when he died, in the late nineteenth century, he passed on his fortune to this child: Hossein Bahari, my grandfather.
Hossein Bahari was tall and handsome, with a thin mustache. In the photos I have of my grandfather, he looks like a Hollywood star of the silent era. Thanks to the cooking oil money, Hossein enjoyed the better things in life. He held big parties in his house, where people gathered to enjoy the local vodka and opium. In addition to the family fortune, he had also inherited his father’s religious devotion and tried to be a good Shia Muslim. He spent freely on religious ceremonies during Shia holy days, and did almost everything by the book during Ramadan. He fasted and woke up before the sunrise to pray, while his servants prepared a big breakfast with eggs, milk, and honey for the poor. In the evening, when it came time to break his fast, he did it with vodka. Drinking vodka is, of course, forbidden in Islam, but I guess my grandfather thought that Allah would pay more attention to his charitable contributions than to his having a few drops—or bottles—of alcohol.
To add to these contradictions, my grandfather became a communist during the Second World War. In 1941, the Allied forces overthrew Reza Shah, the despotic but nationalist king of Iran. They claimed that Reza Shah had gotten too close to Nazi Germany, and they wanted to use Iran to provide help to the eastern front. They replaced Reza Shah with his twenty-two-year-old son, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, who came to be known as simply the shah, and who took control of the nation. The Soviets and the Americans controlled the northern half of the country, and the British occupied the oil-rich south. My father, who was fourteen at the time, often spoke of the humiliation and anger people felt as they watched