Letters to My Torturer Page 6

  He called for the guard: “Take him to his cell and bring in that hooker.”

  The guard said: “Put your jacket over your head and follow me.”

  I did as I was told. The guard took me with him. He opened the door to a cell and threw me in. The door closed behind me. I made myself stand up, removed the jacket from my head and put on my glasses. And I saw a man, extremely thin, bespectacled, with a long black beard. He was seated on a pile of black blankets. I realized that he was a cleric because he was wearing a cloak, which he had made out of his prison uniform. He stood up, he smiled a pleasant smile, he stretched out his hand and introduced himself: “Sayyed Ali Khamenei. Welcome!”

  For the first time in my life, I found myself in close contact with a cleric. Up until then, I had only known the Sayyed from back home who had spent his days begging in the nearby Armenian fort and come the mourning season, would go up the minaret and make people cry with his sermons. He was always happy to receive an envelope filled with money from my father and would kiss my father’s hand in return. The clerics were about a thousand light years from me. I have no idea at what point in my life the stubborn infidel had taken root in me or which ancestor I had to thank this trait for. I held out my hand and burst out: “I am a leftist. My name is ...”

  My cell companion laughed a sweet laugh and invited me to sit beside him on the pile of blankets. Since then I have read the story of his life on the internet, so I know that he is exactly a decade older than me. At the time I was twenty-six and he had just turned thirtyseven years of age.

  We divided the blankets between us. Usually, prisoners had no more than two blankets, one to put underneath them and one to go on top. I have no idea why so many blankets had ended up in our cell, but to Khamenei, each one of the blankets represented an unexpected treasure, though we ended up losing them almost immediately. One day, when we went to the bathroom one of the guards took away all the spare blankets.

  Khamenei, always cheerful and up for a joke, had given each of the guards a nickname.

  Dog Fart Number One.

  Dog Fart Number Two.

  The guards regarded us as political detainees, meaning we were considered dangerous but respectable. Those old guards have now been replaced by guards who work for the government under my former cellmate Ayatollah Khamenei’s leadership – these guards regard us as traitors, spies and polluted untouchables. I keep asking myself: had Khamenei been in this cell, what kind of nickname would he have given these brothers?

  He used to perform his ablution in the bathroom, in a very serious, solemn manner. But most of his time, and particularly around sunset, was spent standing by the window. He would recite the Qur’an quietly, he would pray, and then he would weep, sobbing loudly. He would lose himself completely in God. There was something about this type of spirituality that appealed to the heart.

  Whenever I felt overwhelmed by misery, he would call to me and say: “Houshang, stand up, let’s go for a stroll.”

  During those daily strolls we walked up and down the tiny cell to the point of exhaustion. Sometimes, the stroll took place along the great Tehran Boulevard, sometimes we set off towards Mashhad. We spent those long, cold hours conversing with each other. I talked about my childhood, my family and my work as a journalist. He mostly spoke about his family.

  Khamenei told me about the adventure of meeting and falling in love with his wife. He talked about the day when, seated under a tree beside a stream, he had revealed his intention of marriage to his future wife. A large cloth had been spread on the ground, which was covered with salads and bread. A few years later, in the middle of a summer night in 1981, I was running up the stairs of his house on Iran Street to deliver an important piece of information, when I saw his wife for a second on the landing. She was dashing away, her head uncovered. It was then that I understood the meaning of their love. At the time of our imprisonment he had two sons, one called Mustafa and the other Ahmad. Very quickly, a peculiar affection developed between this naïve leftist youngster and that intelligent, pious man in that tiny cell, and it had political consequences.

  Even though many years have passed since those days, and I am now locked in exile while Khamenei remains in our homeland, the successor to Ayatollah Khomeini as Iran’s supreme leader, that affection has not yet left my heart. My head accepts what is being said about his role in politics, but my heart rejects the accusations.

  My love for and familiarity with literature, and poetry in particular, paved the way for lengthy conversations, and I quickly realized that he had a unique mastery of contemporary literature, especially poetry. Even though I was disappointed that he was not fond of Farrokhzad and Ahmad Shamlou, the two famous, contemporary poets of Iran, I joined him in his passionate love for Mehdi Akhavan Saless and Houshang Ebtehaj, two semi-classical poets. He also disliked Sadeq Hedayat, one of the early proponents of the Iranian novel, and I, who loved Hedayat, tried to persuade him otherwise. He wanted me to recount stories that I had read which were unknown to him, or to recite poems I knew by heart. He himself had memorized many poems.

  Sometimes I’d sing the revolutionary songs that I had learned in Ahvaz prison and he would listen to them with pleasure. My fellow prisoners had come up with revolutionary words to Vigen’s Once Again Companion to Drunkards – Vigen was the founder of modern Iranian pop music – and I would sing the song in my terrible voice and Khamenei would listen. When I sang the original song, which talked about drunkards in a bar, he laughed but asked me to stop singing it.

  Occasionally I gave him lessons in journalism, and explained whatever I knew in the shape of a theory. He listened with interest and asked precise questions. One of the things I taught him was: “Do not pay attention to the headlines. Look at the main content, search for those words that are repeated, though in various ways. Read between the lines.”

  He listened carefully, learning how to interpret newspaper content. He was very attached to smoking. Each prisoner was allocated one cigarette per day. I was a non-smoker so I gave him my share. He would carefully divide the two cigarettes into six sections and light up each section with great pleasure.

  Sometimes we exchanged jokes. He liked inoffensive jokes; they made him burst out laughing. One time, Dog Fart Number Two overheard us laughing. He rushed into the cell and slapped us both. But Khamenei didn’t like even slightly dirty jokes, sexuality being the frontier that divided innocent jokes from dirty ones.

  I also told him the story of my first love: the night on the rooftop when I watched Angie swim with the fish.

  Khamenei laughed loudly.

  “Stop, what was the girl’s religion?”

  “What do you mean?”

  Khamenei shook his head. He said: “But you are a Muslim. I can see God in your heart. Even when you talk about atheism, your breath smells of God.”

  When the time arrived for our weekly bath, the guards banged on the cell door with their fists: “Bath time!”

  The door opened and fresh shirts and trousers were thrown into the cell. We picked them up, never knowing if they would fit us, and got ourselves ready. That meant standing behind the door and throwing our prison shirt over our heads and leaving the cell as soon as the door opened. The people who shared a cell were not supposed to lose sight of each other. So we placed our hands on each other’s shoulders, formed a line, and were led to the bathroom enclosure. We were separated cell by cell. We would stand in front of a black curtain that enclosed the shower area and as soon as the guard shouted go, we would run into the shower. We had two minutes to take off our clothes and get under the shower. There was no showerhead, so the water gushed out as if from a hosepipe. A piece of coarse soap made in Qazvin would be placed in the middle of the shower floor. We were supposed to pick it up and wash ourselves and our underwear with it and as soon as we heard the guard’s signal, run out of the shower and get dressed again. Any dawdling would be punished with a whipping on bare flesh or a blast of freezing water straight into one’s face
.

  The two minutes were allocated to solitary confinement cells, but in reality it didn’t make any difference whether you were alone or four of you shared a cell. Prisoners were expected to manage whatever time was allocated to them. We were supposed to undress quickly, nip in and out in no time, get dressed and dash back out. There was no time or inclination to look at others.

  But the situation was more complicated with my new cellmate. They made us run almost all the way to the showers. We stood in front of the black curtain. We ran when the guards shouted. I undressed quickly, and went under the shower. I picked up the soap and rapidly rubbed my head with it and when I passed it on to Khamenei, I saw that he was showering, dressed in his underpants. Then our time was up. We ran out of the shower; got dressed and returned. When we reached the cell, I saw that my cell companion’s trousers were wet. I turned to face the wall so he could undress. But he had no trousers left. Forced by necessity, he wrapped himself up in a blanket. I kept joking, and while drying myself with my prison shirt, I kept repeating: “Hey, I am not looking. Seriously ...”

  The following week, the incident was repeated and this time round, we were given even less time. We both returned to our cell, having barely managed to wash ourselves, Khamenei still dripping in his wet underwear. My cellmate insisted that it was a sin for a man to see the private parts of another man. Having showered many times in male-only bathrooms with fellow footballers or prison inmates without thinking twice about it, I used to tease him. I finally joked: “Sir. It’s not like it’s a special gift, all wrapped up, that one isn’t supposed to open. After all, I myself possess a specimen – a superior specimen.”

  Eventually the predicament was resolved with me promising to turn my back to him as soon as we entered the shower and for us not to look at each other until we were fully dressed. The following time, we did just that but for a second, when I turned to hand him the soap I saw that for the first time Khamenei had taken off his underwear. He quickly covered his private parts with his hand, using the free hand to wash his hair. I didn’t know whether to laugh or to carry on washing myself.

  When I look back at that scene, which took place several decades ago, I realize that behind what I saw as a joke, a subject of youthful mockery, lay two separate worldviews, two separate cultures. Two separate worlds that an oppressive regime had brought together under the same roof. Apparently, of the two worlds, one was supposed to leave and the other to stay. One world was to return home, the other to be sent into exile. Maybe if someone from my world was in power, many in my cellmate’s world would have ended up in exile. I am glad that my world failed to come to power, so that the lovers were not transformed into torturers. I know that until the two worlds find some sort of compromise, my life is not going to change.

  A month passed in this manner inside the tiny cell intended for solitary confinement, where the two of us were kept. Khamenei was called up for interrogation once or twice and I too was called up once more. The questions, written in illegible handwriting on a piece of paper, were a repetition of the ones I had been asked on my arrest. They focused on my earlier arrest in Ahvaz, and the way my father had handled the court procedures. And I wrote down the beliefs that I used to hold in those days and mixed them with the scenario dictated to me by Rahman. I wrote: “I have lost interest in politics. I just want to get on with my life.”

  I was in a constant state of anxiety that they might ask me to cooperate with them. I was prepared to refuse, no matter what the consequences. At that time I still had no idea what it meant to find oneself caught in a trap set by a security agency.

  One night, around midnight, the cell door opened and someone was thrown in. He was a slight teenager, with badly beaten feet. We sorted out a corner for him. We kept asking him questions but he wouldn’t reply. He just kept crying. We stayed up the whole night and asked the first guard that took us to the bathroom for help. The guard ignored us. We dragged the teenager to the bathroom and brought him back. We kept banging on the cell door, requesting a guard, but nothing happened until the evening. Eventually, a guard turned up and opened the door. Khamenei said: “This boy is dying!”

  The guard glanced down at the youngster and said: “So what?” and left. I don’t remember how much time passed before they finally came back, to take him away and then return him with bandaged feet. Later, when he started to say a word or two, we found out that his name was Sasan and that he had been a supporter of a guerrilla group called Fedayeen-e Khalq, a Marxist guerrilla organization. He had been beaten severely and had suffered a nervous breakdown. He couldn’t speak, couldn’t sleep and worst of all, he couldn’t eat. We began to try out different ways of getting food into his body. We finally figured out that he reacted to the threat of physical violence, jolting back to himself momentarily and allowing his otherwise perpetually sealed teeth to open a bit. Once we discovered this solution, when the food arrived I would play the role of the interrogator while Khamenei dipped his hand into the bowl, pulling out small pieces of meat. The food was always a piece of meat, always served in a metal bowl filled with water, and we were forced to eat with our hands.

  I would threaten Sasan with physical violence and as soon as his mouth opened a bit, Khamenei would pop the meat into his mouth. That is how we kept him alive. I recently traced Sasan, who is now living in exile in Germany.

  Another night, the cell door opened around midnight and this time a tall young man was thrown into the cell. He had been arrested in a town near Tehran when he had turned up in the main square carrying a bag of explosives, intending to blow up the Shah’s statue. He had already been interrogated on his arrest and had been transferred to Tehran for further questioning. He was convinced he was going to be hanged. When he noticed Khamenei, his manners became very respectful. We soon knew everything about him. His name was Ali Husseini, and years later, while in exile, I was to see a photograph of him with some reformists during the sixth parliamentary elections. The court of the Islamic Republic had summoned him on charges of opposition to the administration. The tall eighteen-year-old that I had met in 1975 had, by 2002, turned into a bald man, who spoke with sorrow about his memories of imprisonment, and about his release following the revolution. He had immediately signed up to fight in the war with Iraq, where he had been captured and spent a few years in an Iraqi prison. Now he was talking of “reform” and of “soft revolution”, but that wintry night long ago, he had one answer to every single question I posed: “Revolution means bang, bang!”

  And he would hold an imaginary pistol in his hand. We would laugh, Khamenei laughing harder than the rest of us. We were now four people in a solitary confinement cell. There was just enough space to allow us, the two leftists and the two religious people, to squat around the food bowl or to sleep side by side. Today the four of us are on opposing sides, but I sometimes wish I was back in that cold winter of 1975 and we were still together.

  First they took Ali away, and then Sasan. Both were given jail sentences and were still in prison when the revolution began and they were freed. Once again, Khamenei and I were left alone together. Just like before, we went for walks around the cell and talked about the past. We spent the long, freezing winter nights shivering under thin blankets. We heard the never-ending sound of crying and moaning from the corridor. Days turned into weeks and we always ended up laughing under the shower, with me repeating my joke: “I can boast a superior specimen.”

  And we would return to our cell. My cellmate occasionally talked about an Islamic project without mentioning any specific names or plans. I would listen to him and quickly change the topic with a joke. In my intellectually oversimplified world, there was no room for religion.

  Three months, more or less, had passed; three months that had more depth than three years. Never again was I to become so attached to someone in such a short time or to become as close to someone else. One day, the door opened and the guard called out my name: “Pick up your blanket and get ready.”

  This
meant that I was being allocated to a different cell. We had often discussed how and where we might meet on our release. We embraced each other and wept. I felt that my cellmate was shaking. I assumed that it was the winter cold that was making him shiver so I took off my jumper and insisted he should take it. He refused. I don’t know what made me say: “I think I am going to be released.”

  He took the jumper and put it on. We embraced each other. I felt the warm tears that were running down his face and his voice, still ringing in my ears, said: “Under an Islamic government, not a single tear would be shed by the innocent.”

  The guard said: “Come on, get out.”

  I placed my jacket over my head and walked out. We walked down the corridor and up the stairs. I was telling myself: “I am going to be released.”

  I saw Khamenei again two years later when Rahman and I made a trip to the east of Iran on a story assignment. Together we went to Khamenei’s house. Khamenei was waiting for us in a sparsely decorated room. We hugged and kissed each other on the cheeks and reminisced a little about our time in prison, and I introduced Rahman. The conversation turned to politics and went on for three hours. Rahman and Khamenei debated while I listened to them. Rahman was his usual self, assertive but speaking softly and repeatedly flicking his hair. Khamenei spoke firmly and kept smiling. Tea was served.

  When the debate ended, we stood up to say goodbye. Just as we were about to leave Khamenei put his hand on my arm and asked me to stay behind. Once Rahman had left, he asked me: “This friend of yours, who is he?”

  I said: “The deputy editor-in-chief of Kayhan. He is a close friend.”

  He pressed my arm and asked again: “I really would like to know who he is.”

  I repeated my answer. Khamenei laughed and with his arm through mine, he walked me to the door. He said quietly: “He is one of the communists’ most important leaders.”