Then They Came for Me_ A Family's Story of Love, Captivity, and Survival - Maziar Bahari [76]
“What is that?” she asked.
“I don’t know. Get it off, though.”
She smiled at me with a look of amusement and curiosity as she slid her hand under my sweater and pulled out the small jewelry box holding her engagement ring. When she looked back up at me, there were tears in her eyes. Before long, we sank onto the green carpet together, and though it took many hours of lying there, holding each other as tightly as we could, we finally fell asleep.
Chapter Eleven
I had come to find breakfast the best part of my day. Every sip of tea was like an escape, and I spent a lot of effort trying to make the cup last as long as possible, while also keeping it from becoming cold. It was a very delicate balance. That morning, as I sipped, I waited to see what would be served with the thin lavash bread given to me in a plastic bag: jam or cheese. The guard slipped the plastic bag through the lower slot. Today it was cheese.
I again read the handwritten notes Haj Agha had given me. He apparently had a lot to say about velvet revolutions. The gist of Haj Agha’s argument was that such changes of government could not happen without the help of the Western governments, especially that of the United States, and the financial help of rich Zionists. It seemed that Haj Agha didn’t understand that by comparing the green movement in Iran with the revolutions in Eastern Europe, he was essentially saying that the Islamic regime was a dictatorship like the former totalitarian socialist states. Though it’s true that the CIA and MI6 had been involved in changing regimes in a number of countries during the Cold War and it’s likely that they did whatever they could to help the dissidents in Iran, it was absurd to blame millions of people’s disenchantment with their government on foreign intelligence agencies. Demonstrations such as the ones I’d witnessed sprang from the people, not from outside. Anyone on the streets of Tehran after the election would have known just how spontaneous—even leaderless—the protests had been. But Khamenei claimed that they had been orchestrated by foreigners. He and his ministers wanted to maintain the fallacy that the people had reelected Ahmadinejad. The legitimacy of their government depended on it.
Haj Agha was quite sure that the Western media had been the main vehicle used to provoke the demonstrations, and that reformism, both before and after the election, had been fabricated by the West. To him, the green movement was driven by Westernized urbanites trying to bring decadence and moral corruption to Iran, and they couldn’t have done anything without the support of the West, especially Americans. Everything he said echoed a familiar fear of the regime. Khamenei liked to warn Iranians about a “cultural NATO” as threatening as the military one—a network of journalists, activists, scholars, and lawyers who supposedly sought to undermine the Islamic Republic from within.
Though I knew my testimony was intended to prop up a despised regime, I told myself that I could talk about Haj Agha’s idea of velvet revolutions generally, without hurting anyone. As I was taken outside for my hava khori, or a short walk in a courtyard between two high walls, which I was afforded for an hour each day, I thought that I could even embellish and exaggerate his concepts so that they would sound more ridiculous. That way, when people heard or saw the confession, they would know it was coerced.
When my hava khori was over, I was called inside to the communal guest bathroom for a haircut and shave. The man who cut my hair had a round face, thick glasses, and a short beard. His prison uniform was the same as mine.
“Why are you here?” he asked.
“I was arrested after the demonstrations,” I answered.
He told me that he had heard the news of the demonstrations and arrests on state television in his communal cell. The state TV called the demonstrators terrorists, and said that only those who caused death and destruction had been arrested. The barber seemed to believe everything that was said on television.
“You don’t look like a killer,