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

also read my words with fascination and attention.
    “Your handwriting is so unintelligible that we couldn’t decipher it. And you call yourself educated?”
    “My handwriting is bad, has always been bad.”
    I have not yet begun to address you by name. Later on, I get used to calling you Brother Hamid. By the way, do they still call you Brother Hamid or have you got a new name these days? Are they calling you Your Excellency, the Ambassador? Or Respected Brother Sarmadi? I have no idea.
    You ask me questions about each and every word that has been underlined in red and I answer. Then you say: “Pay attention.”
    You are standing behind me. You must be watching me, I who am seated, blindfolded, and rubbing my feet to warm them up.
    “Start with the really important information.”
    Your breath reeks of onion. I remember the lunch: spinach stew. You suddenly kick the back of my ankle sharply with the tip of your foot. You enjoy this. Slowly, gradually, you are getting yourself warmed up for the beating session to come. The palms of your hands must be twitching. You leave, and I pick up the papers and quickly look over what I have written. I pick up the pen and carry on.
    I was attending secondary school. It was 1962, during the summer holidays. We were playing football on the dusty grounds of the neighbourhood when one of the local boys turned up, dressed in a bloodstained cloak, his clothes torn to shreds. He told us that the people downtown had rebelled against the Shah and the police had attacked them. I still vividly remember the boy’s account, like the memory of a film. We gathered around him and begged him to give us all the gory details.
    He was older than us and we looked up to him, so we all wanted to go with him when he offered to take us to see what was happening. He took us to a house, and we went into a large room, with aspiritual atmosphere. Clerics were leaning against the wall and one was seated in the middle of the room. Other people entered the room and kissed the hand of the one sitting in the middle. We proceeded to do that too. Years later I would realize that the cleric’s name was Ayatollah Khomeini, and that he had been exiled shortly after that day.
    And now, the same Ayatollah whose hand I had kissed all those years ago had become the leader of the revolution and I, his prisoner, was laboriously writing out my answers in an interrogation conducted by one of his many anonymous soldiers.
    This was not my first arrest. My first arrest took place when I refused to stand up when the royal anthem 21 was being played in the cinema. A famous Buñuel film was showing. I was arrested that night but released the following day.
    I was twenty-four when I was arrested for the second time. As in many parts of the world, developed and developing, Iran in the 1970s was burning with the fever of freedom struggles, of counterculture and social revolution. Two armed factions, one Marxist and the other Muslim, took to the streets, engaging the Shah’s police and secret service in sporadic gun battles.
    I had recently left university and gone straight to work at
Kayhan
, then one of Iran’s largest circulation newspapers. Along with a small group of university friends, intellectuals, idealists, and many of my colleagues at
Kayhan
, I supported the Marxists with their dreams of social justice.
    My call-up papers for national service had come not long after I had started working at the paper, and I carried on working as the weekend night-shift editor-in-chief while doing my military service. As a graduate, I served as a duty officer with the navy in the north of Iran, based in the Caspian Sea. This is a lake, but it is so large they call it a sea. Sea, rain and marshland. When the boats set off on the water, they slipped past the waterlilies before stopping beside the littlewooden bars on the beach. The sharp alcohol would burn the throat; fish with garlic would be served on little, brightly decorated plates, and