Then They Came for Me_ A Family's Story of Love, Captivity, and Survival - Maziar Bahari [84]
He punched my forehead, bringing stars to my eyes. “Put your head down!” he bellowed, punching my head again. “Didn’t I tell you that while you’re here you should always keep your head down?” He stepped away for a second and then said, “You’re very lucky, Maziar.” As a migraine began building, I found it hard to make sense of his words. It felt as if the pain were dripping down the inside of my body from my head.
“Can I have some water, please?” I asked him.
“Of course,” he said and poured me a paper cup of water. “Do you think we’re like you Americans in Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo who torture people by keeping them thirsty? We have something called ra’fateh Islami”—Islamic kindness—“in this prison. Something you Americans have never heard of.” He genuinely believed that calling someone an American was an insult, and always said the word with a sneer.
Rosewater sat down on the chair behind me again. When he stood up and placed another sheet of paper on my chair’s writing arm, he was breathing very heavily.
He’d made a diagram, a big circle with a smaller circle inside it. The names of the six people he had mentioned were on the periphery of the inner circle. Rosewater explained that the circle as a whole represented the Islamic system. The smaller circle indicated the minority of people who’d been fooled into supporting the reformists, thereby interfering with the wishes of the majority of the people who supported the system. “This line that creates this little circle in the middle of the big ocean of the Islamic system is the dust and dirt that eventually will be thrown out of the ocean by the big waves of people,” Rosewater explained with the pride of a bad junior poet who thought his idiotic metaphor made sense.
“Do you mean the six people you mentioned are the obstacles between the Islamic system and the people?” I asked, trying to make his point clear.
“Ahsant. Bravo! So you are not as stupid as I thought. That is why I said you’re lucky. Our system has chosen to bestow its kindness upon you.”
“The problem, sir, is that I really don’t know any of these men that well, and I haven’t put any of them in touch with anyone.” My voice was faint with the pain of my migraine. I cleared my throat and tried again, hoping to hide from him how much I was suffering. “In fact, I’ve always avoided foreign embassies in order to avoid getting myself into situations such as this. I know the rules, sir, and I’ve always obeyed them—”
Rosewater didn’t let me finish. Instead, he began to slap me once again on my legs. “Nemidooni? Na? You don’t know anything? Is that right?” As quickly as he’d started beating my legs, he stopped. “Well, listen,” he said abruptly. “How about I get you some tea and dates so we can have a friendly conversation.”
It was hard to make sense of his actions, but when he left the room, I savored the few minutes I had alone. When he returned, I could smell the fresh tea.
“Mr. Bahari, you’re an intellectual and knowledgeable person, so surely you know who the dirtiest family in this country is, correct?” I knew he meant the family of former president Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, whose name had become synonymous with financial corruption since the beginning of the revolution. There were rumors that the family had a monopoly on everything from oil tankers to pistachios to shrimp.
Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani and Ali Khamenei had been friends since 1957, when they were young clerics in Qom. Both joined Khomeini’s movement in the early 1960s. Rafsanjani was always known as one of the smartest and most diplomatic of Khomeini’s acolytes. When Khomeini died in 1989, Rafsanjani lobbied for Ali Khamenei to become the supreme leader. Rafsanjani became