Then They Came for Me_ A Family's Story of Love, Captivity, and Survival - Maziar Bahari [67]
The Revolutionary Guards who were in control of the prison ordered the prisoners to face the wall. And then the shots were fired. But Maryam felt nothing. It took her a few seconds to understand what had happened: this was a mock execution, and the guards had fired blanks. She felt confused by the fact that she was still alive.
Maryam’s whole body shook as she told me about the mock execution. It was 1996 as we spoke, seven years after the fall of the Berlin Wall and five after the defeat of the Soviet Union. In those years Maryam had learned about the atrocities committed by the Soviet Union. She felt used by the Tudeh Party and the Soviets, and brutalized by Khomeini’s regime.
“Why did I join that party? I hate that party,” she told me in our hotel in Istanbul. “Nothing is worth dying for, Mazi. Nothing is worth what I went through.”
It was November 2008, nineteen years after she was released from prison, that Maryam called to tell me she had been diagnosed with leukemia. After we hung up, I felt shattered and hopeless. I left the small Soho editing room where I’d been working on a film for the BBC and called Paola. When she answered the phone, I could barely get the words out. “Why?” I kept asking her, as if she could give me an answer. That night we went to an Indian restaurant. I ordered the spiciest thing on the menu, hoping to feel something besides numbness.
Over dinner I told Paola I had to go to Iran to be with Maryam. “You should do whatever you think is best, Mazi,” Paola said, holding my hands. My napkin was soaked in tears.
The next morning I called Maryam and told her I was coming back to Iran. She immediately said no. She insisted that she was doing fine, that the worst was over.
Three months later, I was in Washington interviewing former U.S. hostages held in Iran when my phone rang. I took the call outside. It was a friend of mine, calling to say that Maryam had died earlier that morning.
My life had not been the same since then. I’d been shattered, constantly needing to escape from the memories and emotions. Every now and then, I would blame everything on the Islamic government, which had separated Maryam and me for such a long time. But that was an easy way out. The Islamic government had been brought to power by the people—people like Maryam. I also thought there was no point in blaming everything on the government; instead I should remain the person Maryam wanted me to be: a good journalist.
I could do that outside, but now I was trapped in Evin, in the same situation that Maryam had been in for six years, and all I could do was think of Maryam. I picked at the fraying green carpet on the floor of my cell. Maryam had always loved to draw. In prison she hadn’t had a pencil or paper to draw with, so, she had told me, she’d drawn landscapes in her imagination. “I could see the sky even though my cell didn’t have a window,” Maryam said. “I looked at the wall and tried to talk to it. I thought I was going crazy, but it helped me to survive the confinement.”
I slowly chewed my bread, wondering how my sister would draw my cell, what she would say to these walls.
· · ·
Later that day, Rosewater took me to the office of Evin’s resident prosecutor, Judge Mohammadzadeh. Above the chair where Mohammadzadeh sat was a large portrait of Khamenei, smiling. He certainly looked satisfied with himself.
The guard sat me on a chair a few feet in front of Judge Mohammadzadeh, who was talking on a landline phone while continually silencing his cell phone, which kept ringing. The person on the other end of the landline seemed to be important.
“Yes, sir, I shall do that, sir, of course, sir,” Judge Mohammadzadeh said, with machine-gun speed. A man walked in and tried to get the judge’s attention. Mohammadzadeh put the phone between his shoulder and cheek and took a file from a stack of papers. He handed it to the man, then shooed him away. I became engrossed in watching the judge. He was in his