Allowed only three twenty-minute stints outside each week, Floderus organized his life in his cell. When out of solitary confinement (Floderus spent a total of eight months alone), he became the undisputed boss of his cell. Fluent in Farsi, he set co-living rules to keep the cramped space clean, taught English and fashioned chess sets and playing cards out of cardboard. He filled his time by making decks of cards, playing poker sometimes (“That’s super illegal, according to Islamic law,” he added.) On Iranian State TV, Floderus watched the film Papillon about a wrongfully convicted man who escapes his imprisonment.
For two weeks he shared his cell with the Belgian aid worker Olivier Vandecasteele until they were split up into separate cells for reasons unknown to Floderus.
“I think I spent months, half a year maybe more, between hope and despair, sort of as a pendulum,” he said. “I just tried to break out of that really destructive and horrible pattern and tried to reach a place of just acceptance, some people call it radical acceptance, acceptance of the here and now.”
After ten months, prison officials allowed him to make a three-minute call to his partner of four years — now fiancé — Johnathan von Fürstenmühl, 31. Despite their inability to speak regularly or for more than a handful of minutes, a similar realization was also dawning on von Fürstenmühl back in Brussels, who was reading about other cases of Swedish nationals held hostage abroad.
Iranian officials who arrested Floderus knew he had a boyfriend because they had looked through his phone, Floderus said. Still, the Swede — whose hundreds of cellmates included dissidents, killers and members of Islamist terror group, ISIS — kept his sexuality secret.
Freedom Party
The only point of regular contact with the outside world Floderus had was with a consul from the Swedish embassy. Once, that person passed on a copy of Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace via Floderus’ interrogator.
