Letters to My Torturer: Love, Revolution, and Imprisonment in Iran by Houshang Asadi Read Free Book Online

too.”
    I started crying again and said: “I wrote it myself.”
    He said: “If you’re not lying, then write it again ... ”
    This time I wrote the essay in the classical style of Sa’di’s
Gulestan.
Although at that stage I didn’t really know much about the different prose styles, I had an instinctive feel for them. Mr Ismaili read it. His eyes filled with tears and he asked me to stay behind after school. I did and he came with me to our house. My mother, seeing the red finger marks on my face, became an angry tiger. Mr Ismaili started by apologizing and finished by saying: “Your son will be a great writer.”
    And that’s all I wanted to be. I wanted to become a writer, nothing else. I also wrote poems in those days, in the traditional classical style my mother was so fond of. I had several notebooks filled with these poems, which were thrown into a sack and taken away when my house was ransacked in 2003 by the public prosecutor on the grounds that I was a master spy.

Chapter 3
     

Kissing the Hand of Khomeini
     
One day they came to collect Khomeini from the house of a wealthy businessman in the north of Tehran to send him into exile. I, who ended up becoming a prisoner of his regime and was subjected to the worst kinds of torture at the hands of his supporters, set off to his house and kissed his hand, without knowing who he was.
And I am in the process of writing my third letter to you.
Tehran, winter 1983
     
    The sound of shuffling slippers approaches. It’s you, Brother Hamid. It has taken me very little time to learn to identify which one of the shuffling sounds is yours. I’ve put on my blindfold. I see your hand picking up the papers.
    “Go for lunch while I read these. You better not have written dirty cunt limericks.”
    You have a peculiar way of saying “dirty cunt limericks”; it’s a new addition to your vocabulary. So far, I have picked up two phrases from you: “useless wimp” and “dirty cunt limericks”.
    You leave. Immediately after you leave, someone else comes in and takes me away. Stairs. Door. Courtyard. Two stairs. Watch out. Eight. The block. The blanket. No, this time the guard is making me enter one of the lower section blocks that have been separated from the main corridor by a wall. Each part of the lower section consists of three or four cells. He opens the door to a cell and throws me in. Cellnumber fifteen, block number two. I turn around. It’s a familiar Moshtarek prison cell, around 2.5 metres long and 1.5 metres wide. The ceiling is very high, with a bare light bulb hanging from it. Triple glazed window, barbed wired, and divided in the middle to make two panels. I put on my glasses and look around. I see the light and the snow that has settled behind the window and the loudspeaker on the cell wall opposite. High up. Out of reach.
    The door suddenly opens.
    “Put on your blindfold. Come on.”
    I put on the blindfold. We set off. No, he has grabbed my sleeve and is dragging me behind him. When we emerge from the Eight into the courtyard, you are already there, standing in the open space and suddenly hitting me around my head with something heavy. It’s the thick pile of paper. You are saying: “Useless wimp. What are these dirty limericks? You have one more chance before I crack open your mouth. Spy!”
    There’s silence. The sound of shuffling fades. The guard takes me back. I tell him I need the bathroom. We walk between the blankets. We go to the toilet. I wash my face. I put on my glasses. A newspaper has been left abandoned in a corner of the room. I pick it up. My eyes fall on a section of the arrest report:
Our reporter has discovered that the spies who have been arrested by the Revolutionary Guards Corps had links with the KGB espionage network. According to this report, a well-known figure by the name of Nurrudin Kianuri, who was the First Secretary of the Tudeh Party, is among the individuals who have been spying on behalf of foreigners.
     
    The