Letters to My Torturer: Love, Revolution, and Imprisonment in Iran (11 page)

I am feeling a terrible urge to urinate. I am about to explode. I say: “Bathroom ...”

He shakes his head with regret: “We are not allowed. Your interrogator has to be present.”

He departs, leaving the door open. A sharp pain is moving up and down my legs, shooting up to the roots of my teeth. My shoulders feel like they will break under the strain of the handcuffs and the
pressure on my bladder is driving me insane. Bladder pain is different from other types of pain. It’s yellow. I feel the urine move up and circulate in my veins in place of my blood. I decide to release myself. Reason tells me that as long as I am dressed, that’s just not going to be possible for me. It’s a lifelong habit. I brush my back against the floor. I put the foot with the thinner bandage into the other trouser leg and try to pull down my trousers. I am all ears for the door, for the shuffling sound of slippers. With great difficulty, I pull my trousers down a little. I try to relieve myself. It’s not working. It’s burning but not working. I increase the pressure, the pain moves to my shoulders and my teeth. I apply pressure again. There is no relief. My mind is telling me that it’s not possible to relieve myself, lying on the floor like this. The blanket will get wet and it will stink. Ah, human habits. The sickness that is called hygiene. My eyes fall on the food bowl on the floor. Stale noodle soup. So it must be night. Eternity, where are you? I have no idea. I push myself towards the bowl. I place my hips over the bowl, with difficulty. My hands, tied behind my back, cannot bear my weight. I try to focus. I apply pressure and imagine the sound of trickling water. I find myself in the same predicament twenty-five years later, in exile, after a heart operation. Doctors have a curious term for what we might simply call urinary retention –
ischuria
. In my case the result of extensive damage to my nervous system.

And suddenly, it’s as if I have been given the universe. It starts dribbling and then flows. No, it has just begun to trickle when the guard rushes in and then I hear your voice: “Useless wimp. God help you ...”

A hand grabs hold of my handcuffs and drags me up. Before I know it, my head is inside the soup mixed with urine. You shove my head back in a few times and then pull it out. Then you drag me along behind you. It must be the guard who is pulling up my trousers in the middle of the corridor. We cross the courtyard. We are not returning to the room downstairs. You are dragging me up the stairs.

I haven’t been able to stop myself along the way. When you throw me onto the chair, I realize that I am wet. You stand behind me. You pull up my blindfold. There’s something on the arm of the chair. I can’t see it. You say: “Glasses.”

You unlock my handcuffs. Pain mixes with pleasure. I try to clean my face on my sleeve. I take out my glasses and put them on. I hear your voice: “We know everything. I will return in exactly ten minutes.”

And you leave.

I look at the photographs. In 1977, the British government had invited a delegation of Iranian journalists to England. British artists were participating in an international festival, and the government had arranged to brief Iranian journalists in a face-to-face meeting.

One day, we were all invited to a lunch hosted by the British Culture Ministry in a beautiful pavilion. We talked about a wide range of subjects, including the changing political situation in Iran. The lunch was attended by British artists, journalists, staff from the ministry, and Sonia Zimmerman, “from the BBC World Service, Farsi”.

She took off her sunglasses, looked around the table, and almost imperceptibly raised one eyebrow at me. I stared at her soft brown eyes, shocked into silence. The last time I had seen her was just before my arrest, three years ago. She stood up before lunch had finished, gave a slight bow to everyone, and left.

After lunch, we all started joking. The Intelligence Service had set this up, right?

Curious about her, I telephoned the Farsi desk of the BBC World Service and asked for her. A voice said: “She’s not here. Can I take a message?”

“Yes. Will you please ask her to call me back?”

I gave my hotel number, but I didn’t hear from her.

And now, the photographs are here. On the arm of the chair in the interrogation room. The photographs that had been taken with
the press guys, which I have kept to this day. I didn’t have a picture of the table we all sat round, but you did, Brother Hamid. Where had it come from? Then and now, I have no answer.

There was also a picture of us entering the BBC building. Then a photograph inside Buckingham Palace with our young British guide.

What the pictures were telling me was that I had to confess to something. Just at that moment, the sound of shuffling slippers approached and you arrived, Brother Hamid.

“Right. Have you made up your mind?”

I said: “Yes. Yes.”

You said: “Have you forgotten? Woof, woof.”

I said: “Woof, woof.”

You said: “Don’t talk. Write.”

You put the sheaf of papers and the biro on the arm of the chair. The paper was spotlessly white, but within a few minutes it had turned into one of the foulest documents in history. My hands were swollen so I couldn’t hold the biro properly, with my thumb and two fingers. With difficulty I rearranged the biro, gripping it in my fist, and in an illegible handwriting that sprawled across the pages, I wrote: “I am a spy for the British.”

You picked up the paper. No, you lapped it up. You asked: “With whom did you arrange meetings in Tehran?”

My head was spinning with dizziness. What kind of British people could I have arranged a meeting with? I blurted out, against my will: “The British ambassador.”

“Where did you meet?”

This one was tougher than the first. I recalled the streets around the British winter residence in the centre of Tehran, and again I blurted out recklessly: “Naderi Cafe.”

From behind the chair, you hit my head hard with the pile of papers.

“You are a much more seasoned agent than we had anticipated.”

I now understand why you were so keen on foreign embassies. When I had my heart attack, I was near the British Embassy in Paris. I was on my way to the embassy to get a visa. I dragged myself forward, passing Madeleine Church, and then collapsed in front of the British Embassy. I couldn’t stop myself from laughing. If I’d had my file with me, I could have shown it to the British Embassy staff so they would realize that I had been their “spy” from some time way back before the glorious Islamic revolution. Maybe, knowing that, they wouldn’t have made me wait three years for my visa.

And this letter is about how I turned into a spy under the onslaught of your lashes. It’s about a group of young journalists pictured laughing in a photograph. And I have been singled out to be the spy.

My seventh letter to you, dear, lovely Brother Hamid, is full of love and heartfelt emotions. Do you remember? The day I became a British spy was wintry and romantic. Even the pigeons were cooing happily. We were on our way back from the treatment room when you started going on about poor Oriana Fallaci once again. This time you were talking about her love for a Greek guerrilla fighter. You didn’t even know his name. You had modified the love story of Alexandros Panagoulis and Oriana to suit your own purpose. You said that Oriana had been ordered to fall in love with him by the CIA. You were saying that true love is not like that. It’s about purity and kindness from the beginning to the end.

It’s a rare day of love mixed with interrogation. You ask me out of the blue: “Have you ever really fallen in love, Houshang?”

For the first time, you call me by my first name. Up until now I have been “useless wimp” or “little lion”. I have just finished writing, “voluntarily”, that I am a spy.

Fear is making me shiver in the wintry cold. This question hints at my wife. I am sure that you would like to leave the world of espionage and make enquiries about the people in my life. I prefer to be silent. As if reading my thoughts, you say: “By the way, good news. We have not brought in your wife. If you carry on being reasonable, there will be no need to bring her in. What would happen to her poor mother, right?”

You are telling me between the lines that you already know everything. Then you ask: “Your marriage wasn’t an arranged one, was it?”
³⁰

I answer: “No. My wife rejected me for years but, unfortunately, she said yes a year after the revolution.”

“Why unfortunately? Didn’t you two love each other?”

“Of course. But I am leaving and she will have to remain all by herself.”

“Leaving? Nah, not that quickly. To start with, the cells in here are full of spies and putchists. Do you want me to give you a tour?”

We pass the courtyard. You make me stand in the sun. A telephone is ringing in the distance. I can feel the sounds and warmth of life. You ask me: “Were you in love with someone else before you met your wife? Did you have a relationship with someone else?”

The questions have a sour taste. I am worried that I will also be expected to confess to sexual perversions.

I say: “I had normal friendships with people at university, but not the kind you are referring to. When I was very young, I was in love with my cousin but she got married.”

“What about the people at
Kayhan
?”

“Nothing. Only my wife.”

We walk up the stairs. Enter the room. You leave and return immediately. You put something on the table.

“Pull up your blindfold.”66

I pull it up. There is a recording device in front of me.

“Listen to some songs while I am away.”

And you leave. I put on my glasses. Astonished, I switch on the recording device. Initially there’s radio noise and then the BBC’s evening programme is announced and I hear the familiar voice of a woman. Yes. That’s Sonia’s voice.

And at exactly that moment you enter, as if you have been standing right behind me the whole time. You pick up the tape recorder and take me to the room downstairs. You put me on the bed. An ominous voice rises from the device and I don’t know whether this is a mistake or something that has been done intentionally: “Karbala, Karbala ... We are on our way ...”

I am made to bark: “Woof, woof.”

I bark. You laugh. You sit down beside me.

“Woof, woof, and fuck you. I want to remind you of a love story. Her brother was one of the Fedayeen
³¹
guys. He was arrested during a mission and later died under torture. He wasn’t the first Jewish communist. Your editor-in-chief, in his capacity as a CIA agent, brought her in to
Kayhan
. The chain’s links have yet to be connected. Your friendship became solid very quickly. There were even rumours that you were planning to get married. But then there was a change of plan. She moved to Her Majesty’s office and then joined the BBC. And you married someone else.”

You were talking about Sonia, Brother Hamid. You hand me a pile of papers.

“By the way, we might be old fashioned, yes, but we are not stupid. No spy would meet with the British ambassador at Naderi Cafe. There are quieter places. We know exactly where you were recruited.”

You stand up.

“Let’s see whether you can do this by the time I come back.”

Once again I hear the ominous voice coming from the recording device. Loud. Coarse. It is replacing the whip. My mind starts working. Well, she is not in Iran anyway, and there is no danger threatening her. And I? Well, I am supposed to be a British spy. The first line of the script is written: “She recruited me for MI6.”

When, in my messy handwriting, I confessed to being a British spy, I reassured myself that though I’d told a lie, my suffering would soon be over. I hadn’t realized that I’d just walked into a real intelligence trap. It’s an old saying in Iran that when the poisonous knife of the interrogator is on the prisoner’s throat, the lower the head falls, the deeper the cut.

The first confession is the most important one.

Incidentally, why does one assume that the interrogator has no sensitivity for the arts, no knowledge of literature, and doesn’t understand love? Does he hate humanity? Maybe he does and that’s because he is made to whip you, to handcuff you, to hang you from the ceiling, and make you eat your own shit, and in so doing he wipes from your brain the meaning of love, flowers, hope – the whole world. Once, during the Shah’s time, my interrogator was crying his heart out because his father had just died. He was in the same room where people were being beaten, and forced to repent, or in your words, where you break them and extract information from them. I couldn’t believe that an interrogator could have a father. That he could be capable of crying. That he could have a heart. Even now, I have no idea why your talk about the arts and defending the Persian script appears revolutionary to me. But it is true. The interrogator too is a human being, with a heart. He goes to a kebab shop after torturing someone and stuffs himself with kebab and onions. He burps. When he goes home at night, he hugs his children. If he is pious and holy like you, he says “Bismillah”
³²
before penetrating his wife.

I am reminded of the book
Death is my Trade
, by Robert Merle, in which the camp guard would hold a glass of red wine in his hand and stand by the window while listening to Mozart. And inhaling the smell of a thousand burning bodies that were being turned into ashes in the ovens of the Holocaust only a few metres away from him. What about you?

The first confession takes away your defence shield. You are standing naked, face to face with your interrogator, whom you can’t see. The interrogator in the employment of an atheist authoritarian regime is a bureaucrat. He has no personal issues with you. He is working for an administration that has employed him. He wants information. That’s all. Once you give him information, he leaves you in peace.