Rosewater (Movie Tie-in Edition) by Maziar Bahari

Author:Maziar Bahari [Bahari, Maziar]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-679-60419-8
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2014-09-16T04:00:00+00:00

Chapter Twelve

Bang.

Bang.

Bang.

I hit my head hard against the faux marble wall, again and again, ignoring the pain that crept up my neck. I deserved the pain. I had betrayed my family, my colleagues, myself. My father.

What had I admitted to? What had I told them? I stood up and paced through the silence of my cell, and tried to speak to Maryam. After the confession, they had forgotten to take my glasses away from me again, and for the first time since I’d arrived, I could see every detail of the cell. In focus, it seemed less clinical—less impenetrable. The walls were covered in tiny, spidery cracks I had missed before, as well as dozens of scribbles: Your interrogator is more afraid of you than you are of him, that is why he forces you to wear a blindfold. This too will pass. Moghavem bash.” Be strong.

Near where the wall met the floor, I found dozens of straight lines, marking the number of days different prisoners had spent in my cell: Twenty-two days. Ninety days. It had already been ten days, and I couldn’t begin to imagine spending even another night in this place. But, I thought with relief, I didn’t have to. The confession was worth it, even if I felt I’d let everyone down. Now I could go back to London, and be with Paola, and nothing was more important to me than that.

It was hard to gauge how much time I spent pacing the small cell—maybe several minutes, maybe hours—but eventually, I fell to the floor again and curled the blanket around myself. I needed to sleep so that I’d be as alert as possible when the prison guard came the next morning to take me back down the same steps I’d climbed that first day in Evin. I pictured it all as I drifted toward sleep—getting my clothes back, seeing the fullness of the sky, finally calling Paola from my cell phone—and even in my dreams, I expected to hear a knock on my cell door signaling that the process had begun, and I could go home.

· · ·

But that knock on the door didn’t come.

For several days, they ignored me. Why don’t they interrogate me anymore? I thought. Have they forgotten about me? The only human contact I had was with the prison guards who silently slid my food through the slot in my cell door or led me out for my daily walk and to use the toilet. Gradually I even came to miss Rosewater and his idiotic questions. Every day, I waited for him to call for me. I sat on the floor, listening for footsteps, and passed the time by counting things in my head. How many schools had I attended? How many houses had I lived in? How many women had I dated? How many cities had I visited?

The knock finally came on the fourth night, well past midnight.

“Specialist time,” I heard a guard say from outside my cell, in a sleepy voice.

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