Zendegi

by Greg Egan

  At the entrance to the ward, Omar spoke with the nurse on duty; she glanced inquiringly at Martin, and Omar said something that sounded like dayeam: my uncle. The nurse summoned someone else to organise the visit; fifteen minutes later the two of them were led into a small, curtained-off space, where a figure dressed in a baggy grey manteau and a black shawl and head-scarf sat in a wheelchair, one foot bandaged and elevated. For a moment Martin thought there’d been a mistake, but the hospital must have supplied the modest clothing. The angular face beneath the scarf was the face from the emailed image of the crash site.

  The three of them were left alone.

  ‘Salaam khanom,’ Omar greeted Shokouh nervously. ‘Chetorin?’

  ‘Bad nistam,’ Shokouh replied. ‘Shoma chetorin?’ Martin found it hard to judge how her voice would sound to a native speaker; she spoke quietly in a slightly reedy falsetto, but it was not forced or uneven.

  ‘Tell her we’re her friends,’ Martin said, ‘or she’ll think Jabari sent us.’ Shokouh looked up at him, startled, and he realised he’d just managed to put that idea right out of her head. ‘Ruznaame negaaram,’ he explained. I’m a journalist.

  Omar spoke in a low voice; Martin could follow only a small part of what he was saying. Shokouh replied, heatedly, at length.

  ‘She wants to go to Europe,’ Omar announced, dismayed. ‘She’ll only come with us if we es-wear to get her to la France.’ On their drive into the city Omar had mentioned safe houses, but his plans clearly hadn’t stretched as far as Paris.

  Martin said nothing. He still had the phone numbers of some people-smugglers in Quetta he’d interviewed for a story a few years before, but he decided against offering Omar an introduction; the smugglers had sometimes dealt with Iranian clients, but he doubted that Shokouh would be safe travelling through Baluchistan, even fully veiled in a burqa. In any case, he was meant to be covering this story, not orchestrating it.

  ‘Maybe there’s a way,’ Omar mused. He sounded doubtful, but then he added decisively, ‘If we do it, we should do it quickly. Before everyone wakes up and knows what they’re missing.’ He spoke with Shokouh again, and they seemed to reach an agreement. He told Martin, ‘I get the—’ He mimed crutches, and disappeared in search of a nurse.

  ‘Ingilisi baladin?’ Martin asked Shokouh.

  ‘Very less,’ she replied. ‘Parlez-vous français?’

  ‘Une petite peu.’ He’d studied it in high school, but by now his French was probably worse than his Farsi.

  Shokouh lowered her gaze to the floor. Martin set his frustration aside; if Omar could pull off this miracle, Sandra Knight in the Paris bureau could interview her face-to-face in a language they both spoke fluently. Even if he’d had Behrouz beside him it would have made little difference; whatever promises of discretion he’d offered, Shokouh would have to be crazy to disclose a long list of potentially suicidal details while she was still in the country.

  Omar returned with a pair of crutches and together they helped Shokouh to her feet. There was some paperwork to complete, but Shokouh had already been medically cleared to be discharged.

  As they were leaving the ward, the nurse stopped them. There was a brief exchange before they moved off down the corridor. Once the nurse was out of sight, Omar’s forced smile evaporated, and he urged them forward.

  ‘What was that about?’ Martin asked.

  ‘She said Khanom Jabari’s cousin has arrived at reception, wanting to make a visit. I said tell him we’ll meet him there. But maybe he doesn’t want to wait.’

  ‘Okay.’ Martin digested the news. ‘At least it wasn’t another husband; that would have been awkward.’

  They reached an intersection with a side corridor; Omar tilted his head and Martin took Shokouh’s arm and helped her to make a sharp right turn.

  They should have borrowed the wheelchair, Martin realised belatedly. This was hopeless; the ‘cousin’ would reach the ward and double back to find them before they could get even halfway to the car park, and if he had colleagues covering the exits—

  ‘We’re screwed,’ he said.

  ‘Not yet,’ Omar declared.

  Martin glanced at Shokouh. She was hobbling as quickly as she could, but her face was tensed against the pain. They’d moved away from the wards into some kind of service area, and only every third of the ceiling bulbs were lit.

  Omar tried a series of doors in succession until he found one that opened into a tiny utilities room. There was a mop, bucket, cleaning products, and a small sink. Omar and Shokouh had a terse exchange.

  Martin said, ‘What’s the plan? We can’t hide in here all night.’

  ‘You hide. I’ll send someone to get you.’

  ‘Me? It’s not me they’re looking for.’

  ‘We need your ca-lothes,’ Omar explained. ‘For disguise.’

  Martin’s stomach clenched painfully. ‘No, no, no!’ He gestured at Shokouh. ‘It won’t work! Look at her eyebrows!’

  Omar addressed her in Farsi. Shokouh took off her scarf and shawl; the earrings from the crash were long gone. She went to the sink and, with the aid of a few drops of floor-cleaner, washed off every trace of make-up. Then she ran wet fingers through her thick black hair, quickly reshaping it. The end result was a slightly dated male Persian pop-star look, the fringe flopping down to all but conceal her forehead. With no pencil darkening her plucked eyebrows, close up she looked more like a burn victim than anything else.

  Martin said, ‘Whoever’s looking for her, they’ll know she can pass as a man.’

  ‘But if we’re quick,’ Omar countered, ‘they won’t expect it. The nurse will tell them one woman, two men.’

  There was no denying that a rapid switch could improve the odds. Tehran had dozens of crashes every night; the injured would be coming and going until morning. So long as they could sneak out of the wing unseen, a young man on crutches crossing the car park with a male friend would not be an obvious target - and anyone trying to maintain a low profile for Jabari could hardly throw a cordon around the hospital and check everyone’s sex before letting them pass.

  Martin steeled himself. He couldn’t tell Omar to do the swap himself; it was clear which one of them was the better fit. Lurking half-naked in the women’s wing of an Iranian hospital was not a risk-free proposition, but the truth was, he was more afraid of humiliation than any actual physical harm.

  ‘Okay,’ he said.

  Omar left them. Martin turned his back on Shokouh as they undressed. When he handed her his clothes it was impossible not to notice her breasts, but the sweater he’d worn was loose, and would be looser still on her; this was not a lost cause, not yet. She handed him her own trousers and manteau, and after a moment’s hesitation he put them on; it was worth it for the warmth alone, and there was nothing blatantly effeminate about the garments to creep him out. In fact, he could have walked down any street in Pakistan dressed like this; it was almost the same as a unisex shalwar kameez.

  Martin opened the door. Omar saw him and pressed his fist into his mouth, stifling a guffaw, but he regained his composure rapidly.

  ‘Car keys,’ he demanded. Martin handed them over.

  ‘My fe-riend will be-ring you ca-lothes,’ Omar stuttered, battling his way through the English tongue-twisters.

  Shokouh picked up the crutches that were leaning against the sink. ‘Merci,’ she whispered.

  ‘Bonne chance,’ Martin replied.

  He closed the door and stood in the dark, listening to the sound of the crutches as she moved down the corridor, hoping the hospital’s cleaners wouldn’t start their shift before dawn.

  3

  ‘Guardian Council member Mr Hassan Jabari,’ Behrouz translated, ‘left hospital today after recovering from injuries sustained in a car accident three nights ago. Police have interviewed the driver of the other vehicle, but found that nobody was at fault.’ He turned away from his computer screen to see how Martin was taking the press release.

  ‘No appeal for wit
nesses?’ Martin replied, struggling to concentrate. Their cramped office in the outskirts of Tehran sat directly over a bakery; three or four times a day the aroma wafting up from the ovens became impossible to ignore.

  ‘Apparently not. I expect they got everything they needed from YouTube.’

  Martin smiled. YouTube was blocked in Iran, but Shokouh’s Paris interview, along with the anonymous bystander’s movie of the crash scene, had been posted on dozens of other websites. Each time the official blacklist was updated to screen them out, the files turned up somewhere else. Internet download speeds in Iran were severely limited - by law, not by infrastructure - but in the past twenty-four hours Martin hadn’t met a single adult Tehrani who had not seen both movies.

  So far, though, the government hadn’t blinked. Martin had phoned three different ministries seeking a comment, but nobody was willing to go on the record, not even to denounce Shokouh’s words as slander. ‘Do you seriously expect an official statement every time a prostitute claims to have a politician as a client?’ one bureaucrat had demanded incredulously.

  ‘What about the movie of the crash site?’ Martin had pressed him. ‘Doesn’t that support her version of events?’ Martin had briefly contemplated trying to track down the paramedics - whose faces were pixellated-out in the public version - but he’d decided he had no right to compound the dangers they already faced.

  ‘If such a movie exists, it’s a Zionist forgery.’

  ‘Can I quote you on that?’ Martin had warmed to this conspiracy theory, but it needed a bit more work. Maybe Shokouh could be portrayed as a Mossad agent who had made the ultimate sacrifice, purely for the sake of embarrassing the Iranian regime. Or, as it turned out, not quite the ultimate sacrifice, which only compounded the embarrassment.

  In the absence of a black ops extraction team with helicopters and night-vision goggles, Omar had managed to get Shokouh a doctored passport and a second fake husband - this one to escort her from the country and take the focus off her own documents. That she’d made it through the airport at all suggested that the ‘cousin’ at the hospital had been acting for Jabari alone; VEVAK, mercifully, appeared to have dozed through the whole thing.

  Martin’s phone chimed. There was a message from Kambiz, a student he’d met in the run-up to the election; it read ‘Please go to Ferdowsi Square.’

  Downstairs, people were lined up outside the bakery for the lunchtime rush, men and women in separate queues. Some carried their stacks of flatbread from the serving window to a cooling table, compounding the olfactory lure. When Martin slowed down to savour the smell, Behrouz grabbed his elbow and tugged him through the crowd towards the alley where their car was parked.

  They reached Ferdowsi Square just as the demonstration was getting underway. About thirty young men and women had gathered on a grassy traffic island around a statue of the famous poet. They were holding up signs, all bearing the same slogan: haalaa entekhaab-e-taazeh! Martin had no trouble reading Persian script when the calligraphy wasn’t overly ornate - the alphabet was almost the same as Urdu - and in this case the individual words could not have been more familiar: New Election Now!

  The signs themselves offered no English translation; though that might have made for wider coverage in the Western media, it would have opened up the protesters to accusations that they were British or American stooges. Nor was there any reference to Jabari to attract charges of defamation. But the slogan appeared to have hit the right note; Ferdowsi Square was one of the busiest roundabouts in the city, and most of the passing drivers were honking and cheering over the roar of the traffic.

  Martin spotted Kambiz, but when their eyes met the young man looked right through him; Martin respected his wish not to be singled out as the reason a foreign journalist was here. There were no police yet, and only one other reporter - Zahra Amin, from the reformist weekly Emkaanha - but Kambiz wouldn’t need to be paranoid to worry that there might be informers among the demonstrators themselves. Martin headed for the opposite side of the group to Zahra, to avoid having to compete with her for interviews. He and Behrouz approached a young, plainly dressed woman and introduced themselves. Her name was Fariba; she was studying engineering at Tehran University. Martin asked her permission to record the interview on his phone; he no longer carried a separate audio recorder. She baulked at first, until he showed her the controls and satisfied her that he would not be recording vision.

  ‘You’re calling for a new election,’ Martin began. ‘What was wrong with the one you’ve just had?’

  ‘Two thousand candidates were banned from taking part,’ Behrouz translated. ‘That’s not a fair election. People wanted to vote for many of those candidates, but they didn’t have a chance.’

  ‘But isn’t it too late to complain now? Wouldn’t it have been better to protest before the election?’

  ‘We did protest! We were ignored. The government didn’t listen at all.’ As she spoke, Martin kept his eyes on Fariba’s face and paid close attention to her tone of voice, letting Behrouz’s unimpassioned words seep into his mind through a separate channel.

  ‘So what conditions are you calling for, if a new election is held?’

  ‘It must be open to anyone who wishes to stand. The approval of the Guardian Council should not be required.’

  ‘But isn’t that role written into the Constitution?’ Martin asked. ‘It can’t be discarded overnight.’

  Fariba hesitated. ‘That’s true, but the Guardian Council should make a commitment to do their job impartially and only disqualify real criminals, instead of everyone with different political ideas. That would be a gesture of good faith, a way of showing that they trust their own people. We’re not children. They’ve put themselves above us, but they are not above us. They’re ordinary people, no better than anyone else.’

  Martin knew better than to press her to comment directly on the Jabari scandal; that last oblique sentence would have to suffice. And while the Western media were, predictably, chortling over Jabari’s indiscretion - Omar’s fondest wish having been granted by everyone from CNN to Saturday Night Live - the political ramifications of the phrase they are not above us had a potential life that stretched far beyond Jabari’s fifteen minutes of fame.

  Martin thanked her, and went on to seek comments from some more of the demonstrators. He was halfway through his third interview, with a goateed accounting student named Majid, when Behrouz broke off in mid-sentence. A green police car had pulled up on the island, one side of the vehicle still protruding into the road, and three uniformed officers disembarked.

  The senior officer was carrying a megaphone; he raised it to his lips. ‘You are instructed by the Chief of Police to move on,’ Behrouz translated. ‘This gathering is a distraction for drivers and a threat to public safety.’

  ‘We’re big fans of public safety!’ one demonstrator shouted in reply. ‘Drivers should keep their eyes on the road and their hands on the wheel at all times!’ Majid and the others laughed, and Martin saw the two junior officers struggling to keep themselves from cracking up.

  ‘You are instructed to disperse,’ the senior officer persisted. ‘This is a reasonable and lawful request.’ He didn’t sound particularly vehement, or particularly confident that anyone would obey him.

  ‘People like our signs!’ Majid called back. ‘We’re not distracting anyone.’ One of the cops came over and asked to check Martin’s papers, but he wasn’t belligerent about it, chatting matter-of-factly with Behrouz and trying out his English.

  ‘I like Australia,’ he said, returning Martin’s passport. ‘We beat you at football last year.’

  ‘Mubaarak,’ Martin replied. Congratulations. He’d long ago given up hope of finding a country anywhere in the world where it was safe to tell total strangers that he had no interest in sport whatsoever.

  A small motorbike with a pillion passenger drove up onto the grass, closely followed by three more. The young men on the bikes wore dark glasses, army boots and green-and-
brown camouflage trousers; some had full beards, but most were clean-shaven. Martin couldn’t see any firearms, but at least two of the men were carrying batons.

  ‘Basij or Ansar-e-Hezbollah?’ he wondered aloud; both paramilitary groups had a habit of showing up at demonstrations. Martin was expecting Behrouz to answer, but it was the cop who replied, ‘Basij.’

  Two of the Basijis strode to the front of the assembly. The policemen did nothing, but Majid went to join the ranks of his companions. Martin couldn’t see Zahra any more; there were too many people crowding the island. He switched his phone to video mode, hoping the battery would hold out.

  ‘Put down the signs, you traitors!’ one Basiji began. ‘We’ve had the election! The honest Iranian people have spoken. We don’t need you parasites to tell us what to think.’ Martin heard the buzz of small engines yet again; more Basijis were arriving.

  Some of the demonstrators began jeering angrily. There was too much for Behrouz to translate at once, and most of the fragments he offered sounded so idiomatic or obscure that they added nothing to the obvious body language. Martin tensed; he knew what was coming next. In Pakistan he’d covered protests that ended in gunfire, in bomb blasts, in visits to the morgue, but he hadn’t become desensitised; none of that had inured him to lesser acts of violence. Before the first blow had even been struck a voice inside him was already screaming at the Basijis to stop.