A Sliver of Light Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Table of Contents

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Summer 2009

  Autumn 2009

  Winter 2009/2010

  Spring 2010

  Summer 2010

  Autumn 2010

  Winter 2010/2011

  Spring 2011

  Summer 2011

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  About the Authors

  Footnotes

  Copyright © 2014 by Shane Bauer, Joshua Fattal, and Sarah Shourd

  ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

  For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 215 Park Avenue South, New York, New York 10003.

  www.hmhco.com

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Bauer, Shane.

  A sliver of light : three Americans imprisoned in Iran / Shane Bauer, Joshua Fattal and Sarah Shourd.

  pages cm

  “An Eamon Dolan book.”

  ISBN 978-0-547-98553-4 (hardback)

  1. Bauer, Shane—Imprisonment. 2. Fattal, Joshua—Imprisonment. 3. Shourd, Sarah—Imprisonment. 4. Political prisoners—Iran—Biography. 5. Ivin (Prison) 6. Americans—Iran—Biography. 7. Hikers—Iraq—Kurdistan—Biography. 8. Iran—History—1997– —Biography. I. Fattal, Joshua. II. Shourd, Sarah. III. Title.

  DS318.9.B38 2014

  365'.45092313055—dc23 2013049037

  eISBN 978-0-547-98564-0

  v1.0314

  For those who are not free

  The grief you cry out from draws you toward freedom.

  —Rumi

  Summer 2009

  1. Shane

  I stir out of sleep. The air is so fresh and cool, it’s almost minty. Distantly, I hear a stream purl. Sarah and Josh are lying on either side of me, unmoving. A deep predawn glow infuses everything. A bat cuts jaggedly through the air. I sit up and stretch my arms and back, which sends bursts of energy through my body. Today, we are going to hike. There are few things I love more than this.

  Brown mountains jut up around us, mottled with specks of green bushes and patches of yellow grass that looks like lion’s fur. The trail we started on last night snakes upward, weaving a thin little thread through the valley. We wash our faces in a nearby stream. We fill up our many little water bottles, eat some bread and cheese, and walk.

  Josh is light spirited and contemplative, jumping from one rock to the next as we set off up the valley. He’s so good at shaking off weariness, putting that wholesome smile back on his face. Sarah and I trail behind him, holding hands and weaving our way between the rocks. None of us speaks, except to point out the occasional curiosity, like empty goat pastures hemmed in by short walls of piled-up rocks or the occasional cement prayer niches with arrows that point the pious toward Mecca.

  Hours pass as we walk. Porcupine quills, cat feces, and perfectly round spiky purple flowers appear sporadically on the slowly thinning trail. Josh is a hundred feet ahead. A cloud of yellow dust is pluming behind him, rising above the dry grass and hanging in the hazy air. Are we on a human-made trail, or did some goat slice through this endless meadow, creating this tiny track we are trudging on? The heat is growing and I am easing into that state where my body is tiring, but I just march on autopilot, pulled by something toward the top of the mountain. It must be 11 a.m. How long have we been walking? Five hours?

  At some point, we stop to drink from our water bottles, which are starting to run low, and Josh mentions that we’re heading east. “We could just keep going and go to Iran,” he jokes. I remark that Iran must be at least a hundred miles away. We keep walking.

  We reach what looks like an old, disused road, clogged with large rocks. We decide to temporarily jettison some of our things, cramming blankets and books under a bush and building a little cairn on the side of the road to remind us where the stash is. Then we plod upward, winding up the switchbacks. The ridge has to be close. The horizon—saddled between two peaks—has seemed directly in front of us for a while now. At the top, we’ll turn back. We’ll have to, or we’ll miss Shon. He, the fourth of our group, stayed back in Sulaimaniya to rest up and is going to meet us back where we started this morning. We’ll have a night around the fire before we catch a bus back up through Iraqi Kurdistan to Turkey, through the flat expanse of the Syrian Desert, and back to Sarah’s and my little home, tucked into the beautiful sprawl and bustle of Damascus.

  As we walk, I notice a cigarette pack on the ground. There must be people nearby. Maybe we’ll find a village, have some tea, chat with the locals.

  We pass an ancient-looking, broken-down stone shack on the side of the road. Sarah wants to turn back; I can feel it. Her energy is nervous, but she is trying to hide it. I’m used to this. She is strong and brave, but she’s often a bit anxious when we leave cities, even when we’re in the United States. She fears things like mountain lions and lone men. But she doesn’t like to let the fear dictate her actions. She also doesn’t like to be coddled, so I let her deal with it herself. Anyway, I want to get to the top.

  “Would you rather . . . ,” she starts to ask Josh and me, before trailing off momentarily. She likes to play this game when we walk and, I think, when she’s uncomfortable with the silence. I love how she always starts it the same way, stating the first clause, then deciding on the second clause while the listener waits. Now she asks, “Would you rather get surrounded by five mountain lions right now, or five members of al-Qaeda?”

  I think for a few seconds. “Probably mountain lions,” I say. “We could probably scare them off. I think if we were grabbed by al-Qaeda, we wouldn’t have much of a chance.”

  “Don’t you think you could reason with al-Qaeda, though?” Josh says. “Speak to them in Arabic? Tell them you don’t hate Muslims? Tell them you’re critical of our government?”

  “I don’t think it would matter,” I say. “But okay. I’ll go for al-Qaeda. Maybe you’re right. Maybe we could try to reason with al-Qaeda. There would be no reasoning with five mountain lions.”

  Sarah chimes in. “I would definitely choose al-Qaeda . . .” She pauses. “You guys, I think we should turn back. It’s getting hot and we’re almost out of water.”

  Then, as if on cue, a tiny runnel trickles across the road. We don’t have to go back just yet. The water is coming from a little spring, dribbling into a small, cement, human-made basin. I pour the water over my head by the bottleful and laugh as it runs down my skin. I can’t remember the last time I felt so free. Free of time. Free of worry. Free of the heat.

  Could I be more content, more happy? We take a break, our insides cooled after five hours of walking, and fall asleep in the shade. I wake to the phone ringing. It’s Shon. He is on a bus and getting ready to come to meet us. How could the phone get coverage way up here? “Just go to the waterfall,” I tell him. “It’s right past the big campground with hundreds of people camped out. There are a bunch of tea vendors and stands selling souvenirs and stuff. From the waterfall, walk straight up the trail and up the valley. We’ll be coming down soon. There is no way we can miss each other.” I hang up as Sarah and Josh stir out of sleep.

  2. Josh

  I could hike all day like this.

  “You guys,” Sarah says with hesitancy in her voice. “I think we should head back.”

  “Really?” Shane sounds surprised. “How could we not pop up to the ridge? We’re so close.”

  I turn to Sarah, thinking of her question about al-Qaeda and the mountain lions. I think of another discussion we had, wondering if Kurdis
h rebels would be in these mountains of northern Iraq and how nervous she was when we were hiking last night. It seems like she’s wanted to turn back for a while but kept quiet. Then I look at Shane and say, “Sarah feels strongly about this. I think we should talk it through.”

  I’m being sensitive to Sarah, but Shane knows me well—he knows I want to reach the top, and he asks, “Josh, what do you want to do?”

  “Well,” I say, “I think we should just go to the ridge—it’s only a couple minutes away. Let’s take a quick peek, then come right back down.” Sarah agrees.

  Just as we’re setting out, Sarah stops in her tracks. She looks concerned.

  “There’s a soldier on the ridge. He’s got a gun,” she says. “He’s waving us up the trail.” I pause for a second and look at my friends. They seem worried but not alarmed. Maybe it’s an Iraqi army outpost.

  We stride silently uphill. I can feel my heart pounding against my ribs, but I want to look cool and confident. A different soldier with a green uniform and a rifle waits for us where our road meets the ridge. He’s standing in front of a round, stone building that we had previously looked at and decided would be our destination. He’s young and nonchalant, and he beckons us to him with a wave. He doesn’t seem hostile. When we finally approach him, he asks, “Farsi?”

  “Faransi?” Shane asks, then continues in Arabic. “I don’t speak French. Do you speak Arabic?”

  “Shane!” I whisper urgently. “He didn’t ask if we speak French. He asked if we speak Farsi!”

  As I speak, I notice the red, white, and green flag on the soldier’s lapel. These aren’t Iraqi soldiers, Kurdish rebels, al-Qaeda, or mountain lions. We’re in Iran.

  We follow the Iranian soldier along the other side of the ridge to a small, unmarked building. Around us, mountains unfold in all directions. There is no flag, nothing marking the building as Iranian, only a dozen soldiers in uniform milling around the building.

  A portly man in a pink shirt starts barking orders. He’s scruffy and he looks like he just woke up. This man in pink must be the commander. His men take our stuff. He stays with us as his soldiers dig through our bags.

  He doesn’t take his eyes off Sarah. He gets on his radio and communicates something incomprehensible, but still, he keeps his eyes on Sarah’s body—scanning up and down. I can feel Sarah tensing up between Shane and me, and I’m getting worried.

  He watches us scoot closer together. He puts down the radio and laughs at our fear. Then he walks away.

  His soldiers jockey for position to examine our belongings: cameras, an iPod, wallets, a compass, a cucumber, hummus, baklava, and two books. One book is about the history of the Crusades; the other about the struggle of Iraqi Kurds for independence. They flip through our passports, talking among themselves. The only word I understand is “Amreekaaii,” American.

  I keep asking, “Iran? Iraq?” trying to figure out where the border lies and pleading with them to let us go. Shane and Sarah do the same, talking to different men and hearing different answers. Some point to the ridge; others point to the road we walked on. Some evade the question. I scrutinize each soldier, trying to discern: How much hope should I have? How scared should I be? Most of the soldiers act reassuringly. “No worry,” one of them repeats in English, “no worry.”

  Sarah finds a guy who speaks a little English and seems trustworthy. He points down to the ground under his feet and says, “Iran.” Then he points to the road we came on and says, “Iraq.” He is saying we were in Iraq when they called us over. We start making a fuss, insisting we should be allowed to leave because they called us over their border. He agrees and says in awkward English, “You are true.”

  It’s a remote outpost and our arrival is probably the most interesting thing that has happened out here for years, but eventually the excitement dies down and the innate banality of the place returns. They feed us pasta and give us tea. Some soldiers laugh among themselves. Others try out English words on us. Shane, Sarah, and I don’t have any strategy. We’ll cooperate, reason with them, or argue with them, but we don’t want to go any deeper into Iran than this. We want to walk down the mountain, meet up with Shon, and make our way back to Syria.

  The English speaker approaches us again after having talked to the commander and says, “You. Go. Iran. You. Go. Mariwan.” He says it’s not up to him; these are the boss’s orders. Shane and Sarah recognize the Farsi word for boss, ra’is, because it’s an Arabic cognate.

  Nothing we say matters. The wheels are already turning. Shane asks the commander if he can make a phone call. To my surprise, he actually points Shane toward cell phone reception, though he threatens to shoot him if he tries to run away.

  A few minutes later Shane returns to where we’ve been sitting. “Shon was getting on the bus for Ahmed Awa when I called,” Shane says quickly. “I told him to contact the U.S. embassy and I made sure that he knew that they’d waved us across the border. Shon got off the bus immediately. He sounded panicky.”

  Shon’s often panicky. Nonetheless, it was his anxiety that forced us to buy Iraqi SIM cards for our cell phones so the four of us could call one another. Now, at least someone knows what’s happening to us.

  An SUV rattles up Iran’s side of the mountain.

  Sarah turns to me and Shane. “Quick, guys, what should we do?”

  “Fuck,” I say. “We don’t have much of a choice.”

  “I don’t think we should go in the vehicles,” Shane says.

  “Me neither! But what else can we do?” I say.

  “We could go limp, like at a protest,” Sarah suggests.

  The SUV pulls up in front of us, and the soldiers start to yell at us. We don’t budge.

  “What should we do?” Sarah repeats hurriedly.

  The soldiers close in. I say, “Let’s go limp. At least, we can say that they dragged us in.”

  The soldiers carry Shane and me into the SUV. They don’t touch Sarah, but they bark at her. She hesitates briefly, then gets in the car of her own accord.

  3. Sarah

  The SUV kicks up clouds of dust as the soldiers drive us down a dirt road flanked by low shrubs. For five minutes we skirt the mountain ridge; then we ease into a web of rolling hills and begin to descend. I peer out the front window, but as we jerk over the rocky terrain, I can only catch a few glimpses through the shrubs of what lies ahead.

  When we take a sharp turn onto a paved road, a startling view opens up before us. The wide, open valley is dressed in its summer skin, with swaths of pale green peppered with bald areas where dry, orange soil peeks through. In contrast to the muted colors of the earth, the sky is shockingly blue.

  My brain feels divided, my thoughts bubbling over with fear and curiosity. What do I know about this country I’m being driven into? I know our governments have hated each other for decades, but part of Obama’s platform was a promise to open dialogue with Iran. Last month, when it was announced that President Ahmadinejad would be reelected, huge protests erupted all over the country. Until recently, international news on Iran was dominated by footage of demonstrators, the “Green Movement,” being gunned down and arrested in the streets, as well as allegations of others in custody being tortured and raped by the Revolutionary Guard.

  What does any of that have to do with us? A few minutes ago, all of it was irrelevant to my life. Now, I’m being forcibly driven into a country I know little about and never intended to visit.

  Still, we’re nowhere near Tehran—we must be in the Kurdish part of Iran. I wonder if the Kurds are treated like second-class citizens in Iran as they are in Turkey and Syria, or if they’ve won a degree of autonomy as in Iraq. As my eyes scan the horizon out my window, I have an impulse to take out my notebook and write down my first impressions of the Islamic Republic of Iran. Despite my fear, it’s still oddly exciting to be here.

  “Sarah,” the soldier in the front seat says as we drive, making eye contact with me in the rearview mirror. He motions for me to put something ov
er my arms. Iran is the only Middle Eastern country other than Saudi Arabia and Qatar where the law requires women to dress modestly. I also know that Iranian women are known for boldly resisting this mandate. I nod at the soldier, hastily untie a long-sleeved shirt from around my waist, and put it on.

  We enter a small, dusty town. When I see a few women covered in black from head to toe, I feel even more conspicuous. Suddenly, our car pulls over and stops. I glance in the rearview mirror and realize that again the driver is looking straight at me. “Sarah,” he says, and points to the street. I look in the direction he’s pointing but see nothing. He points again. I grab Josh’s arm and lean over him to look at Shane.

  “What the fuck,” I say. “Is he telling me to get out?”

  “I don’t know,” Shane says. “Just stay there. Don’t move.” Suddenly, my door opens and another soldier gestures for me to get out.

  “No!” I shout. I grab the handle and slam the door. The soldiers in the front seat begin talking heatedly. I give Josh an exasperated look and squeeze his arm tighter. Then I reach my other arm across him to grab Shane’s hand.

  We watch the driver get out of the SUV and stroll across the street into a small shop. Why are they singling me out? I feel my body tensing up, ready to fight if I have to. A few minutes later, the soldier emerges from the shop. On his arm he has draped several pieces of patterned fabric. He knocks on my window and I slowly roll it down.

  “I think he wants you to choose one, to cover your hair,” Shane says.

  Shane’s right. My fear is instantly replaced by indignation as I think how unnecessary all this is. I imagine myself back in Sulaimaniya later tonight, waving the headscarf at Shon as we retell the details of our harrowing day in Iranian custody. Reluctantly, I choose a red one with green and orange flowers, turn to the driver’s mirror, and carefully wrap it around my head.