Then They Came for Me_ A Family's Story of Love, Captivity, and Survival - Maziar Bahari [68]
Finally, Mohammadzadeh put the phone down. He looked at me, and I noticed that under his very thick glasses, his eyes were crossed.
“And you are Mr.—?” he said, with a disingenuous smile.
“Bahari, sir.”
A man I didn’t know piped up from behind me. “The spy!” he said.
The judge looked at me again, more closely this time. “Interesting.” He then read aloud from a paper in front of him, listing the countries I had visited and the names of my friends.
The man behind me spoke while the judge read. “He is a real spy, Mr. Mohammadzadeh. He is the one who wrote all that crap about the supreme leader and the Revolutionary Guards. He is the one who filmed the attack against the Basij.”
Mohammadzadeh didn’t pay much attention to him. He was looking at the paper, shaking his head. “There is not even a single person among your friends whose name is Ghazanfar.” He burst into laughter, and the guy behind me started to laugh as well. Ghazanfar is an old-fashioned name specific to peasants.
“His punishment should be death,” the man said.
Judge Mohammadzadeh seemed to agree. “Here we sentence anyone who doesn’t have a friend named Ghazanfar to death!” he said firmly.
I knew they were trying to scare me, to make me feel threatened, but what I mostly felt was annoyed. How sad that these people held positions of power in my country while hundreds, if not thousands, of educated, innocent people were locked behind bars. It was shameful. They were both waiting for my response to the unfunny Ghazanfar joke, but I said nothing.
“Okay,” the judge said, sounding suddenly serious. “His punishment shouldn’t be death. It should be life in prison.” He looked at me and spoke. “I’ve seen the list of countries you’ve visited, Mr. Bahari. Seventy-six countries! You’ve had enough fun in your life, it seems. I think it will do you good to spend the rest of it in prison. What do you think?”
I thought of Maryam, who’d once stood in a similar courtroom, in front of a similar judge. “I don’t know what to say to that, sir.”
“Good. You have so much to answer for. You should save your breath.” He flipped through another stack of papers before looking me straight in the eye. “What would they do if someone did this in America?” Mohammadzadeh asked, showing me a photograph someone had tagged on my Facebook page. In the picture, a young follower was kissing Ahmadinejad. I had seen the picture before but hadn’t thought much of it, and I hadn’t untagged it. “Through this picture you’re suggesting that our beloved elected president is a homosexual.”
That comment almost threw me off my chair. “Sir, but someone else tagged me in the photo,” I said.
“So?” He obviously thought that by having the photo on my Facebook wall I had insulted Ahmadinejad.
“I didn’t put the photo there. It’s like if someone throws a gun into your house, are you culpable for having the gun in your house?”
From the blank look on Mohammadzadeh’s face, I could tell he didn’t know how Facebook worked and was not interested in listening to my answer. He leaned back in his chair. “You’ve been to America a lot. Where do you stay in America?” he asked me with a mischievous smile.
“It depends, sir.”
“On what?”
“Why I’m there. Sometimes I stay with friends. Other times I stay in a hotel.”
He regarded me over the papers. A slow smile crept across his face. “During these trips to America, do you have illicit sexual relationships with women?”
This question surprised and embarrassed me. “What do you mean?”
“You know. Do you? Do you have that?” He winked at me, lifted an eyebrow, then mimed grabbing a woman’s breasts. And then made a motion simulating sex. “Do you do that?”
I didn’t say anything. I just shook my head.
“Oh, come on, look at you. I’m sure you do something like that.” He continued to make sexual gestures. The man behind me, lost in a fit of laughter, kept kicking my chair.
My face burned with shame for this man and this farce of a system: a Muslim judge presiding over the case of an innocent man