“Oh well,” said Montazari, “I stayed in one of the shah’s prisons for two years and I came out alive, and so will you.”
It was meant to be encouraging, but all Hall could think about when he left was, two years?
To butter them up for the ayatollah’s visit, most of the hostages were given mail. Limbert got a letter from his sister and her family, but most of the others weren’t so lucky; they were handed mail addressed to them from perfect strangers who had responded to the plight of their countrymen by writing in a show of support. The embassy was inundated with them. “Dear hostage,” these letters typically began. It was a sweet gesture, and the TV networks at home enjoyed airing pictures of schoolchildren all over America leaning over their desks, pencils working away, sending love and good cheer to their captive countrymen. They arrived at the embassy in sacks piled on pallets, another picture the American TV cameras loved. The gesture created such a flood of mail, however, that real letters from the hostages’ loved ones got lost. Golacinski was somewhat luckier; he received a letter from a young woman he had helped in Morocco, thanking him, but it had been written and mailed before the takeover. It was nice, but in the present circumstances, when he longed desperately to hear some news from home, he was crushed.
Michael Metrinko spent the holiday as he had spent all of his days since the first week of the takeover, locked in a windowless basement storage room by himself. He had been invited to the Christmas party but he wanted no part of a propaganda show. His guards brought him a gift from the ceremony, a plate of turkey and stuffing, cookies, and decorated marshmallows. Metrinko was hungry, and the food was tempting, but he was galled by how self-congratulatory his captors seemed, how generous and noble and proudly Islamic. He accepted the plate, and when they left him alone to eat it he sat staring at it for a long moment.
Then he knocked on the door and said he needed to go to the bathroom. When the door opened, holding the gift plate before him, Metrinko marched down the hall and dumped the contents into the toilet. He made sure the guards saw him do it.
They were furious with him. The gesture prompted a fit of screaming. He had insulted their hospitality and kind intentions. He was crazy! When they shoved him back in his room and slammed the door behind him, Metrinko felt a momentary pang about losing the meal. What a glorious pleasure he had denied himself! But the remorse was nothing next to the pleasure he took in delivering the insult. It had hit home and wounded them and that was something he could take pleasure in for far longer than the food.
Metrinko fed off his anger. It kept him going. Ever since he refused a cigarette on the day of the takeover, the pattern of his captivity was set. He would not accept any rationale for the way he and the others were being treated. It was wrong by every measure, by the standards of international diplomacy, by the cultural standards of Iran, and by common decency. Going cold turkey on his two-pack-a-day cigarette addiction helped, in a perverse way. It fed his irritability and rage. He worked up a whole philosophy of anger. His sense of outrage was his last connection to dignity. A man had to hang on to his capacity to protest, to express his anger, to move up a few steps into the faces of his oppressors. It made him feel better about himself. In time, it was the only thing that did.
As Ebtekar, the hostages’ spokesman, would later put it, Metrinko “hated everyone and was hated in return.” And what he got in return was continued isolation. Metrinko spent hour after hour, day after day, month after month, locked in his tiny storage room with the fluorescent light buzzing overhead through day and night, with no fresh air and no companionship. Boredom was no longer an occasional state of mind; it defined him. He often had books, but one could read for only so long. He fought to find something to do to pass the time and frequently lost. He spent hours sitting and staring at the walls, brooding, lost in fantasy.
Now and then, one of his captors would come into his cell just to talk. They were convinced, of course, that Metrinko was evil. He was a foreigner, an infidel, an American, and they were certain he was “See-ah.” So the conversations were one-sided. They avoided listening to him in the way one would avoid listening to the devil himself. They were there to enlighten him about the evils of the United States and the shah, the terrors of SAVAK, and the virtues of their own revolution—to which Metrinko was in sympathy although they would never believe it. Since he had known many of the leaders of the revolution personally, and knew how many had used the tumult simply to enrich themselves and exact revenge on their enemies or rivals, his sympathy for the ideals of the revolution was laced with cynicism.
For a man who lived to collect information, analyze it, and report it to others, solitude was a particular torment. He began doing calisthenics to fill the time and to wear himself out enough to sleep. He lost all sense of day and night. He would sleep for an hour or so, wake up, prop the big air mattress against the wall, and run in place and do sit-ups for an hour or so—he was doing hundreds of sit-ups a day. His time was spent alternately sleeping, running in place, doing push-ups and sit-ups, reading, brooding, going to the toilet, and waiting for food. He seized on any opportunity to break the tedium. Given some colored pencils, he began drawing on the walls. Using his food bowl, a glass, or a dish, he would trace interlocking circles, forming elaborate patterns, and then carefully color them in. He began a mental project. At home in Olyphant, Pennsylvania, his family owned a huge building, a onetime inn, with more than fifty rooms. He loved the place, and decided to completely renovate and decorate it, room by room. He remembered every corner of it vividly from his childhood. He tore wings off the building, stripping it down in his imagination to its original structure, then rebuilt the wings from scratch. He picked out colors for the walls, furniture, and rugs, redesigned the kitchens…
Books were the only consistent diversion from his own thoughts, and he devoured them. He read Herman Wouk’s The Winds of War, a massive nine-hundred-page volume, in two days, then opened the first page and began again. He read the Bible and reread the New Testament several times. He pored over the Psalms, committing certain favorites to memory. Poetry was a source of great pleasure, because he could read and reread it with increased enjoyment. In a pile of books he was shown, he found The Book of Living Verse and A Little Treasure of American Poetry and never returned them. He practically wore them out. He read Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago and found its myriad accounts of men coping with captivity very useful in dealing with his own. He was pleased to read, for instance, that in captivity Solzhenitsyn thought mostly about his stomach. A myth about imprisonment is that isolation and deprivation incline men to great spiritual and philosophical insights, that in solitude the mind settles into great thoughts. Metrinko obsessed about food. He would think about lunch for three hours before it came: What will they bring for lunch? How long until they do? Will it be hot or cold? Then he would savor the memory of the meal for two hours after it was eaten, at which point it was time to start thinking about dinner. He felt guilty about the smallness of his thoughts and was relieved to read that he was not alone. The food was not bad, lots of rice and bread, occasionally a stew, but Metrinko’s weight plummeted. He dropped thirty pounds in the first month of captivity. His jeans drooped badly and his captors had taken away his belt. He bunched up the waist in front and fastened it with a paper clip.