One day a female guard came to her door with an old pair of her eyeglasses that Koob had kept in a drawer in her apartment. It upset Koob to be given such blatant evidence that they had broken into her home and rooted through her things.
“You asked for them,” the woman said.
“I did not,” said Koob. “I have my glasses. These are old ones for an emergency.” She knew full well that they had searched her apartment as a follow-up to her interrogation, and because that had violated their own rules—the imam had instructed the students not to break into any more buildings—she knew this supposed request for glasses was a pretext. If she played along, it would validate what they had done.
So she refused to play along. It was one more unprovoked outrage and indignity and she lost her temper. She vented her spleen on the young guard, who endured it silently and then left to fetch one of her older, male supervisors. He spoke to her with false politeness that masked insufferable condescension.
“Hahnum, you must not act like this. You are making the sister most uncomfortable.”
“You make me uncomfortable,” Koob told him. “I am a diplomat. You kidnapped me, brought me here, and now you break into my house.”
“You aren’t a diplomat and you know it,” he said.
“I am a diplomat and you know it. I’ve been accredited by several countries, including Iran, and you have broken all sorts of your own laws with this action. Now you’ve just broken another one, breaking into diplomatic property.”
“You asked for your glasses,” he said. “Besides, in some instances laws don’t matter. There are special cases.”
“‘Special cases’ if the laws don’t suit you.”
“We represent the people,” he said. “Besides, you sent for your glasses.”
“I most certainly did not. I have mine right here. These are old ones I keep for emergencies. You needed an excuse to break into my house and you used these,” she said, shaking the old glasses at him.
“The sister said you wanted them,” he said.
“Which sister? Bring her here.”
“I’ve told you, you asked for them,” he said.
“I didn’t! If I wanted something from my house, it wouldn’t be these. It would be a pair of shoes and a change of clothes. And books!”
The young man glared at her.
“I’ve told you three times that you asked for them.”
And that was that. He had said it three times. He was the captor, she was the prisoner. Unspoken but clear was the assertion: I am a man, you are a woman. End of discussion. It was so because he said it was so.
Not all of the interactions were hostile. Some of the Iranian students were genuinely well meaning and tried to find ways to ease their captives’ discomfort. Mahmoud, a small Turkish-Iranian guard with a boyish round face, announced that he had set up a barbershop in one of the rooms in the Mushroom Inn. Square-jawed Colonel Chuck Scott was one of the first to take advantage. A thoroughgoing army man, he was increasingly distressed with his shabby appearance; his hair was hanging in strings nearly to his shoulders and his beard had grown so long that the guards were teasing him that he was going to outdo the imam.
“I don’t have any money,” said Scott. “It was stolen by your friends.”
“You can pay me when you are free again,” said Mahmoud cheerfully.
When he was finished clipping Scott’s hair and trimming back his beard, Mahmoud handed his customer a cracked piece of mirror to admire the transformation.
“Now, if your people decide to shoot us, at least my corpse will look better,” said the colonel.
Mahmoud was distressed. He assured Scott that he and the others would not be shot, but then somewhat compromised that reassurance by adding, “If you are shot, it will not be our fault, it will be your government that should be blamed.”
Richard Queen decided to keep his beard, but he trimmed it and then sat for Mahmoud’s clippers. He emerged with a ridiculous bowl cut that made Queen look like Prince Valiant. To his chagrin, he was photographed not long afterward, and the pictures were published in Time and Newsweek. He felt not only abandoned, sick, and hopeless but silly. Mahmoud was disappointed that his clipwork had fallen short.
One day, when Bill Belk was standing at the broken window of his room in the chancery basement, looking up and watching snow fall, a young female guard with a G3 assault rifle stepped into his view. She smiled down to him.
“Hello, how are you?” she asked in English, as though they were meeting in a park. “It’s snowing!”
“It’s beautiful,” Belk said. “I wish I could be out in it.”
“Are you all right?”
“Yeah,” said Belk, but he didn’t sound convincing.
“Happy New Year,” she said and then rolled a small snowball and pushed it to him through the hole in the glass.
Even Hamid the Liar had his softer moments. One night he delivered a cassette tape with a message from Cheri Hall to her husband, Joe. She had called one of the lines at the embassy that no one answered anymore and left a message on its answering machine in the hope that it would somehow find him, a desperate, loving gesture akin to throwing a bottle with a note into the ocean.
Hall, Queen, and Hamid stood around the recorder and listened to her voice. She started off strong, saying that she wanted him to know she was coping well and that she loved him dearly, and that everyone they knew was missing him and praying for him…and then she began crying. She choked up and found it hard to continue speaking. All of them, hostages and guard, started crying. Hamid let Hall listen to the tape several times.
Queen’s mysterious condition was worsening. He was still bothered by bouts of wooziness and the strange numbness in his arm had spread.
One morning he was holding a plastic cup of tea in his left hand, waiting for it to cool, when, in the next moment, it was on the floor, hot liquid splashing everywhere.
“What the hell happened?” Hall asked, helping to sop up the spill.