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

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.”
    We shook hands and bid each other a lengthy farewell. I took Khamenei’s phone number. He waved to me and shut the door with a smile. We were walking out of the drive into the main road when Rahman asked me: “This friend of yours, who is he?”
    I said: “He’s a cleric, of course. We were in prison together.”
    Rahman said: “He is one of the most important leaders supporting Ayatollah Khomeini.”
    These two men of politics had summed each other up very astutely.

Chapter 5
     

Playing “Full or Empty” with Mehdi Karroubi
     
Greetings, Brother Hamid. As I write, Sheikh Mehdi Karroubi is courageously standing up to the oppressive regime for which you have been both torturer and ambassador. When he ran for the presidency in 2009, you were probably in charge of security for the administration. But you probably weren’t even born when we used to play Full or Empty
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with Mehdi Karroubi
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in a prison cell during the Shah’s regime. This is a very straightforward children’s game. Sheikh Mehdi, who, to be fair to him, was a kind man, never managed to learn how to play it. But later, he proved that he was a master of the political games, and now he’s leading one of the main opposition parties in the country.
You are now reading my fifth letter, Brother Hamid. That day, when you took me out of the cell and straight into the room downstairs and with absolutely no warning launched into administering a “punishment”, gave you such pleasure. And just think how much more pleasure it’ll give you later on, in the afterlife, when in return for doing your religious duty you will be rewarded with a thousand houris 25 and dare I say, a thousand male slaves.
I am in the room upstairs at the moment. I am lifting my blindfold and putting on my glasses. My feet are hurting. I look at them; they are only slightly swollen, but they’re excruciatingly painful. There are a few spots that have turned red and are throbbing, like a red light that keeps going on and off. Two of the spots are on my calf, one on the
medial cuneiform bone of the foot. Even now, on this cold summer morning in Paris, when I recall those days, the three spots begin to throb again. The paper is on the table, and I carry on writing.
Tehran, April 1975
     
    We left the tiny cell where I had been locked up with Khamenei, and walked down the corridor, up the stairs, and through Under the Eight. We went through the door and immediately, another door opened. Cell number nine, block number five. They threw me in. I removed my jacket from my head. A number of people were standing around in a spacious cell, looking at me. We shook hands and sat down. An hour later, we had already become acquainted with each other. To begin with, there were seven of us.
    Sheikh Karroubi, now a key figure in the Islamic Republic, had the same personality then that he has now. Sometimes it seems to me that he hasn’t changed a bit. Hot tempered and outspoken, but very straightforward and incredibly kind. He had been prescribed a small bottle of milk every day because of his stomach ulcer. Initially, he would insist everyone took a sip of the milk before he gulped it down. “Everyone” even included the leftist inmates.
    Karroubi spoke in a very simple way, typical of rural Iran, and said that this was not the real Islam. One had to look to Mr Khomeini in order to understand true Islam. Everyone called him Mr Khomeini in those days; it wasn’t until much later that he gained the title of Imam. Karroubi spoke with such passion that his mouth started foaming. He said that Islam was capable of creating the true Plato’s Republic. Recently, he has said in interviews that when he was young, he wanted to recreate Plato’s Republic. Everyone would