Then They Came for Me_ A Family's Story of Love, Captivity, and Survival - Maziar Bahari [72]
On this day, over lunch, Reza’s father had been telling me and some other kids about a recent trip to the zoo, imitating different animal sounds. The man was treating us like children. Even though I was a child, that didn’t mean I appreciated being treated like one. In our house, children would listen in on adults’ conversations. I never thought that a conversation about politics, business, or prison was beyond my understanding. Reza’s father’s story bored me. “Is it right that animals choose their mates in the spring?” I interrupted. “Choosing mates” is a semipolite way of referring to sex in Persian. “Did you see them doing it?”
I’ll never forget the look on his face. He dropped the spoon onto his plate. “Tsk, tsk, tsk, it seems that we have an impolite boy in the group,” he said, shaking his head and looking me in the eye. My friends started to laugh. They were used to my wisecracks at school, where more often than not the teacher asked me to stand in the corner as punishment. Reza’s father immediately took me home. When we got to my house, he asked if my mother would come to the door, and then sent me inside.
My mother came up to my room a few minutes later, where I was reading a book. “Where did you learn that term?” she asked me.
I told her that I had heard my father say “Fuck you” to someone and then I’d asked Maryam what “fuck” meant. She said it meant choosing mates. My mother gave me a bewildered—although not wholly disapproving—look. “Well, you shouldn’t repeat what you hear at home to other people. Our house is different from others. Some of your friends’ parents will not like to hear you repeat the things we speak about in this house.” She then lovingly grabbed my ear. “Okay?”
It is not unusual for Iranian parents to tell their children to lie to strangers, especially in a political family like ours. From an early age, I had learned to live a double life. There was my life in the house, where I was exposed to ideas about the corrupt system that was ruling the country, and another life in which I was supposed to conform to what Iranian society expected of me. Sitting in my cell, I realized that this education had prepared me well for my current experience. From the moment I’d first smelled Rosewater, I’d known that I had to conceal my true self and my feelings toward him and his regime. Now I would have to pretend that the arrest had changed me and that I would become a supporter of the regime, a hypocrite like most of its supporters. I would have to go along with his paranoia that the whole world has only one objective and that is to bring down the Islamic Republic, because trying to convince him otherwise was hopeless. Agreeing with what he said and somehow giving him enough to make him feel he’d achieved something in his interrogation with me was my only chance of getting out of this mess and joining Paola in London in time for the birth of our child. The difficult part would be doing all that while keeping my dignity and without naming names. As I struggled to fall asleep in my tiny cell, I wondered if that was possible.
Chapter Ten
It was the middle of the ninth night when Blue-Eyed Seyyed opened the door to my cell. “Get up! Specialist time!” he barked. I had had trouble falling asleep the previous night and as I fumbled with the blindfold, my body felt heavy and exhausted. Rosewater was waiting for me at a different door than usual, and did not offer his typical hello. Instead, he grabbed my arm and yanked me brusquely away from the prison guard. With his hand firmly on my arm, he pulled me down what seemed to be a path, with trees on both sides. Evin is near the mountains and so the nights there are