Guests of the Ayatollah

“In the warehouse there’s lots of paint and brushes,” said Queen. “Could you bring us some?”

They were given buckets of white paint and they went to work. They applied several coats, and before long the room looked clean and bright. The guards gave them a vacuum cleaner. They were given back the big leather chairs and a desk with a glass top with some shelving on it. Guards got into the spirit of the redecoration and supplied a few paintings they had earlier taken off the walls. Queen asked for a poster of Alaska he had hung in his office months earlier and they even found and delivered that. A table lamp provided soft light in the evenings. They had windows to let in sunlight and fresh air. They could hear birds outside. When spring came they left the window open to let in cool air at night but discovered that Tehran bred swarms of nasty mosquitoes. Killing them became a nightly competition.

The only downside was the protesters. All light and sound had been shut out of the Mushroom Inn, but now, restored to the surface world, the protesters, somewhat less in number but with no noticeable diminution of zeal, remained outside. It was as if the students needed to have a massive audience at all times. The demonstrations were supplemented by audio-tapes of earlier gatherings, and sometimes the tape would get stuck and the sound level would drop, revealing the relatively small size of the crowd. The guards hustled to fix it as though they were all living in a balloon that had just sprung a leak.

Hall and Queen were at last allowed to speak. They spent days going over everything that had happened since the takeover and every scrap of information they had about what was happening in Iran and the world. They reviewed all the things they and the others had done, or hadn’t done, and critiqued everything and everyone, including themselves.

With the holidays gone, there was nothing tangible to look forward to. The holidays had carried the hope of release, and once they were over their captivity stretched open-ended into the future. The change of scenery and the freedom to converse helped Queen rally from his post-Christmas depression, even with the worsening numbness of his left arm and side. He started an exercise program, walking around the room and doing calisthenics as well as he could, taking a cold shower afterward, and then plunging into his books.

Hall and Queen argued—no two men locked in the same room for months together could be entirely free of discord—but their disagreements never ran deep enough to last. With some of the hostages the arguments got ugly and occasionally turned into out-and-out fights and deep-rooted bitterness. Given the cramped and overall unsettling circumstances, and the constant discomfort, Hall and the gangly, bearded, ailing consular officer got along famously. After dinner each evening was the smoking hour. Hall had never been a pipe smoker, but Queen gave him one of the pipes Akbar had brought from his apartment and now Hall was hooked. When the lights went out they would switch on a soft lamp on their table and sit smoking and sipping tea and talking into the night.

Their pleasant routine was haunted, however, by Queen’s mysterious illness. Ever since the day when he dropped the tea, his symptoms had gradually worsened. He lost sensation in his left hand completely, and then his legs grew weak. They would wobble when he walked. Hall had to help him button his shirt. Then his vision began to go. He was so dizzy that whenever he stood it would make him nauseous.

Queen felt himself slipping further and further into a kind of dream world. At the Christmas party he had been given a songbook, and on the back was stamped “The Brooklyn Savings Bank”—he guessed the books had once been a bank giveaway. His father had been born in Brooklyn and he had fond memories of the place. Inside the book was the hymn “We Three Kings,” which he set about memorizing. He would sing the song to himself, realizing that this was not behavior he would consider normal under other circumstances. But he found himself increasingly, and with increasing comfort, retreating from the basement room, from the discomfort and uncertainty of his illness, into his own rich inner world. He stopped straining to overhear conversations and the radio. He felt better off for it. He felt calmer and more accepting, even more charitable toward the guards. He knew the situation wasn’t improving; in a letter home in late January he told his parents he was living “in a timeless void of a world,” but he was coping better.

He brushed aside Hall’s concern for his worsening physical symptoms.

“I’ll get over it,” he said. “It’ll go away. At least I’m still alive.”

Hall thought Queen was remarkable, and was increasingly influenced by him. Queen was quietly but devoutly religious, and that, too, began to rub off on his roommate. Hall’s parents had not raised him to be a regular churchgoer and he had grown up considering himself agnostic, at least as he understood the term; he did not believe in a God who listened to men’s prayers or in divine justice being meted out in an afterlife. But in this open-ended confinement, with the threat of execution lurking offstage, he began trying to pray. He read two or three chapters of the Bible each morning. He went through the entire book once, then started a second time. He had some bad feelings about it. He knew he was only flirting with religion as a way of covering all bets—hey, if there is a God, maybe He could get him out of Iran. He assumed the traditional posture, down on his knees, and clasped his hands together as he saw Queen and the others do. He knew it would greatly please his wife, who was devout and distressed that he was not. If only for her sake, he wished he could believe. But Hall never felt anything or any closer to God. At night he would sometimes pull the blanket over his head and “talk” to his wife, whom he missed terribly, and there were times when he felt that he had actually made a connection with her. He definitely felt closer to her in those moments than he’d ever felt to God.

Hall was also hesitant about any visible display of religious interest because his captors were so obnoxious about their own faith. The guards would routinely call him and the others infidels, and note that America was doomed to fail in the long run because Americans did not pray to Allah and live according to the dictates of the Koran. Most of them liked to have an audience for their prayers. Hall didn’t want to give them the satisfaction of seeing him undergo a foxhole conversion.

Hall ended his effort at finding God with one last prayer: “God, if you exist I will make a deal with you. You take care of my wife and family, and I will take care of myself, and won’t ask anything for me. You take care of them because they are true believers.”

He knew his wife would be praying for him. It seemed to him a better avenue of approach.

* * *

John Limbert was moved in Iran’s New Year, March 21, to a room on the top floor of the chancery. The move came after Hohman and Belk had slipped a note into Limbert’s room when he was taking a shower. Not realizing a guard had stayed in his room, they knocked on the wall to get his attention and the guard had found the note, which asked for news about Waldheim’s visit. If the guards were surprised at how much they seemed to know about what was going on they never said a word. They simply moved Limbert. Again the embassy’s political officer experienced the trauma of being torn from the relative security of his routines and colleagues and forced to face a new and uncertain situation. They would not let him take his pillow with him and so he lost his radio. He tried hard to keep it.

“Can’t I take my mattress and pillow?” Limbert pleaded. “I’ve gotten used to them.”

The new room had a window that had been bricked up, and the walls were thick and solid. This time he really was alone.

He fell back on his routines, eating, exercising, reading, sleeping, talking to the guards. He sorely missed the radio. He stretched out his meals as long as he could, reading old magazines, trying to savor each mouthful slowly enough to make the food last through an entire magazine. At one point he managed to accumulate a stack of old Fortune magazines and read one with each meal.

He made himself a deck of cards, and when he was playing solitaire with it one day the guard took pity on him and brought him a real deck. Over the next ten months he wore out six or seven packs. He used pistachio shells to re-create football and soccer plays, and then acted out whole games, and he worked on translating some of the works of Shariati into English. The guards were pleased enough about this to bring him a typewriter. When he was finished with one set of essays he gave it to the guard.

“If anybody is interested, they can have them printed,” he said. “If they make any money, just give it to charity.”

He translated some of C. S. Lewis’s Screwtape Letters into Persian.

One Monday afternoon, a TV crew swept unannounced into his room with Red Cross representatives and Ali Khamenei, the powerful cleric who had been named chief of Friday prayers in Tehran, a very prestigious position. With the cameras rolling, Limbert talked briefly to Khamenei, telling him that his own living conditions were passable and complaining jokingly that Persian hospitality was so aggressive that “they refuse to let the guests go.”