“You don’t know what it’s like to be a mother! What would your mother do if you—you can’t be any older than my son is! And you’ve got a mother someplace. Underneath all that shit that you are wearing there’s got to be a human being someplace. You’ve got a mother. How would she feel if you were locked up in a strange country someplace?”
She called Ebtekar cold and heartless.
“You don’t even behave like you’re human,” she said. “Even these guards with their guns talk to us like real people.”
Timm was so furious that she started to turn away. She didn’t even know where she was going, she just had to get away from Ebtekar. She made it partway down the sidewalk before her husband caught up to her.
“She wants to talk to you,” he said.
When she came back, tears still running down her cheeks, Ebtekar had dropped the hectoring tone. She spoke quietly and soothingly.
“If you want to see your boy we’ll have to get a permit,” she said. She said that if they met with Sadegh Ghotbzadeh, the foreign minister, and with the president, Abolhassan Bani-Sadr, and got permission, then they could come back and meet with her son. Despite the hour they drove immediately to the foreign ministry, and while the Timms waited in the car McAfee went inside. He returned a short while later with a piece of paper that he said would be all the permission they needed. They drove back to the embassy, where Ebtekar examined the paper and told them to return the next day.
Timm hardly slept that night. The following morning, Monday, April 21, they received a phone call in their hotel room. Several students from the “den of spies” were going to collect them from the hotel, she was told, and McAfee was not allowed to accompany them. This frightened Timm. Ever since she had arrived in Tehran she felt the lawyer was her shield. But she wasn’t going to turn back now. At the appointed hour three young Iranians knocked on their door: Ebtekar and two men. Timm begged them to let McAfee come along and cried when they said no.
They were driven to Behest-e-Zahra cemetery, where Timm was instructed to walk among the graves before a battery of TV cameras. There were Iranian women in chadors waiting by some of the graves, and as she approached with the cameras behind her they would drop to their knees and begin to wail. It all appeared to be theater, orchestrated and narrated by Ebtekar, who explained that these were some of the many victims of the Great Satan and the shah, martyred in their revolution.
“We are friends of the American people,” Ebtekar told her before the cameras, “but the American people must ask their government to return this criminal to Iran so he can be tried.”
Timm got the impression that she was being sized up. They still had not promised to let her see her son. She sat with them for a long time, mostly listening and promising to take their comments and ideas home with her. They told her that they believed Congress ought to investigate and expose the years of American meddling in Iran, and she said that she would advocate that on her return. Finally, driving away from the cemetery, they told her that they had decided to let her see her son for thirty minutes. Timm was told that she and Kevin were not allowed to discuss “politics,” and she readily agreed. She was driven to a rear gate of the compound at midafternoon.
She and her husband were left in a littered, dusty room somewhere on the compound, into which came a young bearded man who questioned them at length. He wanted to know where they were born, where they had grown up and gone to school, what jobs they had…it went on and on. Whom had they met with in Washington before coming? Did they have any special instructions? Had either ever worked for the United States government? Timm was petrified and answered as best she could. When the man urged her to make statements critical of her country on camera, angry as she was at the government, she refused.
Hermening was blindfolded and led out of the chancery to a car. He was driven in what appeared to be circles around the city for about fifteen minutes before steering back into what he felt certain was the embassy compound. He was taken into a building and up a flight of stairs. When they removed the blindfold he was seated at a dining room table with a flowerpot at the center filled with red flowers around a big microphone.
At the last minute, the man questioning Barbara Timm had refused to let her husband come along. Protesting that decision, she had been escorted down a long, scummy, trash-strewn corridor accompanied by Ebtekar and two young men walking on either side of her so closely that she could feel their breath on her arms. She was more frightened than she had ever been in her life. Then, as they mounted a flight of stairs and went down another long corridor, with Ebtekar reminding her that there was to be no conversation about politics, nothing about the hostage situation, that she could discuss only family matters, Timm suddenly doubted that she was being taken to see her son at all. What if Ebtekar were just humoring her with these instructions, leading her along to a place where they would shoot her? She started to cry.
They stopped before a door. Ebtekar opened it and there was her Kevin, sitting on a couch, tall, thin, mop-haired, and amazed.
He stood and embraced her. She was weeping and still trembling, with happiness now, and the two just held each other for a long time. Kevin started to cry with her. Eventually they noticed that they were not alone. There were several guards in the room with rifles, as well as Ebtekar, standing before big posters of Khomeini and some with anti-American propaganda.
“Be careful,” Hermening whispered to his mother. “There are bugs everywhere.”
They sat on the couch next to each other and sipped tea and talked about their family and about sports. Barbara told her son about his younger brothers and sisters and some of his old high school friends. She said Bud Selig, owner of the Milwaukee Brewers, had said that as soon as he got home he could throw out the first ball for a game. Hermening wanted to know more about what was happening in the States regarding their situation, but every time he approached a banned subject Ebtekar would interject to his mother, “You cannot answer that.” She was not allowed to tell him about her trip or where she had been in Tehran that day. Seeing that his questions were making his mother nervous, Hermening asked if he could tell her who his roommate was. Ebtekar said no.
Timm didn’t let on, but she was shocked at how bad her son looked. He had never suffered acne, or any other skin problem, and now his face had completely erupted in what looked like some kind of rash. He looked pale and sickly.
Hermening was thrilled to see his mother but couldn’t get over a feeling of awkwardness about it. Why him? Why was he getting a chance to visit his mom? Did it have to do with his having read that statement on TV at Christmas? What would the Americans who saw this and read about it think? Would he be seen as collaborating with his captors? What would his fellow hostages think? As they talked—Hermening had to keep looking at his mother and holding her hand to assure himself she was really there—he found himself wishing almost in spite of himself that she had not come. He was worried about her safety, too. What if they didn’t let her go?