by Greg Egan
Other people expressed similar views. They were tired of the stale, self-perpetuating clique that clung to power by wrapping itself in claims of piety. If throwing out the veto powers of the Guardian Council - or abolishing the Council entirely - was the only route to change, so be it. The voters themselves were perfectly capable of rejecting candidates who would harm the nation; as one woman put it, ‘We aren’t infants who need the bones picked out of our food.’
‘Rast! Injaa rast!’ Mahnoosh shouted urgently, raising her arms and gesturing. Right, here! She was steering the march off Jomhuri-ye-Eslami, into a side-street. She was not especially tall, but her voice carried, and her instructions were heeded and echoed back through the ranks. As the crowd squeezed into the narrower road Martin approached her.
‘What’s happening? I thought we were going straight to Ferdowsi Street.’
Mahnoosh held up her phone, displaying an image of a train-carriage packed with militia, some of them carrying guns. A sign on the platform beside the carriage said Imam Khomeini Station - one stop south of Sa’di Station. If the marchers stuck to their original route, they would be approaching Sa’di Station just as the armed Basijis emerged from the Metro.
Martin exchanged a glance with Behrouz; did they want to break from the march and check out Sa’di? Martin was tempted, but then decided it was better to stay with the crowd and see how they fared.
He said, ‘So you’ve got a network of people with these phones . . . in all the Metro stations, on street corners?’ Mahnoosh responded with an irritated scowl, as if to say: Of course, but don’t expect me to spell it out.
She said, ‘Excuse me, I have work to do.’ She stepped out of the flow and stood at the roadside, shouting instructions, ensuring that nobody in her charge got confused and failed to take the detour. Martin made a mental note to try to get a copy of the picture of the carriage from her later. This wasn’t the time to beg for it, but his editor would kill him if he didn’t get that image eventually.
The detour, Saf Street, was reserved for pedestrians, so the marchers had no cars or motorbikes to contend with, just groups of startled shoppers and a couple of vendors selling balloon animals. After the run of men’s shoe shops opposite the Majlis, this whole street seemed to be dedicated to women’s shoes and handbags; the advancing crowd drove many of the leisurely window-shoppers through the doors of these establishments, possibly doubling the day’s sales.
When they’d gone a few hundred metres Behrouz looked back and said nervously, ‘I hope there won’t be people coming round that corner for another half-hour.’ The whole march would take a long time to flow through, and the Basijis could be at the intersection in as little as ten minutes.
Martin squeezed his way to the side of the road and climbed onto an electricity junction box. From this vantage he could see the crowd stretching all the way back to Jomhuri-ye-Eslami Avenue, but as he watched, the tail of the procession came into sight. He said, ‘Looks like the organisers have split up the march. They haven’t just put a kink in the route; the people behind us must have been sent south.’ The Basijis would find no easy targets ahead of them, just a long deserted avenue.
‘There’ll be cops and informers tracking every move,’ Behrouz reminded him. ‘They won’t make it obvious with helicopters, but they’re still watching.’
‘Yeah.’ The cops had their radios; they didn’t need Slightly Smart phones. Still, splitting up was better than everyone marching blindly into an ambush, and at least the Basijis had lost the advantage of surprise.
‘Chap, chap!’ Mahnoosh commanded them. Pedestrian-friendly Saf Street was coming to an end and the street ahead was narrow and full of cars. Martin tensed, expecting a heated confrontation between marchers and drivers, but after a short battle of wills, accompanied by a lot of honking and shouting, the crowd prevailed. A few drivers managed to reverse out of the way; others just stopped where they were and allowed the protesters to squeeze around them.
Martin stayed within sight of Mahnoosh, trying to pick a good time to ask her for an update on the militias. After a couple of minutes she motioned to him to approach again.
‘We chained the gates at Sa’di Station,’ she confided, ‘but we didn’t succeed to close Darvazeh Dowlat, and now half the Basijis are headed there.’ Darvazeh Dowlat was the next station up the line. If the marchers had kept going north they would have been heading into danger again.
‘We couldn’t go back to the Majlis?’ Martin wondered.
‘There’s another group headed for Baharestan Station.’
The street they were on ended at a T-junction with Sa’di Street, which ran between the two Metro stations; here, they were about the same distance from both. Mahnoosh called a halt, then instructed the marchers to leave their banners on the ground, cease all chants and disperse in groups of no more than three.
A young man behind Martin began objecting loudly, shouting that he hadn’t come onto the streets just to surrender, but nobody else spoke up in his support, and his friends did their best to calm him down. It looked like most people felt they’d achieved a reasonable trade-off: having shown their numbers outside the Majlis and marched in defiance of the President’s orders, they had not been cowed, but nor would they be reckless.
As the protest broke up, Behrouz said, ‘I want to find a pay phone and see if I can call my wife.’
‘Okay.’ Martin could imagine how she’d be feeling, with fresh denouncements of the protesters all over the TV and the mobile network disabled. He remembered when the army had opened fire on a demonstration in Peshawar and he’d left Liz wondering for hours if he was dead or alive. He said, ‘I’ll meet you at the car in an hour.’ They were parked about three kilometres away, and Martin wanted to hang around a little longer and try to get that photo and some more background information from Mahnoosh.
Behrouz headed off. Martin looked around; Mahnoosh was nowhere in sight. He stood at the corner for a while, scanning the street, swearing under his breath. He’d lost her.
He decided to head south towards Sa’di Station; if he couldn’t show his readers a train packed with Basijis, he might yet get a snap of them emerging from the Metro en masse. As he walked past shops and teahouses he could still see people around him that he recognised from the march; most had heeded the suggestion to break up into small groups, but there were also visible packs of young men - some of them dressed in heavy metal T-shirts, the uniform most despised by the regime - walking together, talking and laughing. It was easy to sympathise; there was something undignified about being asked to disown your comrades and slink away into the crowd.
Martin heard angry shouting from further down the street; he couldn’t make out the words, but he had no doubt what was happening. A group of women with shopping bags walking ahead of him turned around and hurried away; at the same time he could see people running to join the fray. Part of him wanted to slip into the safety of a shop or an alleyway - nobody would know, nobody would reproach him - but he forced himself to keep walking. It suddenly struck him that he’d been far less timid in Pakistan, when it should have been the other way around: back then, he should have been thinking about Liz. But back then, whatever insanity he’d been swept up in, he’d always pictured himself telling her about it. Just having her to share his stories with had made him feel bulletproof; if nothing was quite real until he’d recounted it to her, how could the world ever intervene and break that narrative thread?
The source of the shouting came into sight: on the opposite side of the street, five Basijis were fighting with three young men, relentlessly swinging batons into flesh. One Basiji was brandishing an automatic pistol, ranting about traitors and pointing the weapon at anyone who came near, keeping a larger group of angry civilians at bay.
One of the youths in the centre of the mêlée was swaying drunkenly, bleeding from a head wound, clearly in bad shape. Martin checked his phone, but there was still no signal. He looked around; a shopkeeper was standing in a doorway watchin
g nervously. Martin mimed holding a handset and asked ‘Ambulance?’
‘Kardam,’ the man replied tersely: he’d already called. The landlines must be working.
Martin turned back to the fight and took some pictures. As he pocketed his phone he saw another, larger group of Basijis in the distance, coming north from Sa’di Station along his own side of the street. He was about to turn and begin his retreat when something else caught his eye: a green sash draped across the shoulder of a brown manteau. Mahnoosh was about fifteen metres from him, walking south.
Martin was baffled; he hadn’t taken her for a martyr, deliberately putting herself in harm’s way. Then he understood: she hadn’t chosen to keep the sash on as a mark of defiance; she’d simply forgotten she was wearing it. She’d done her best to shepherd her section of the march to safety, then she’d walked away, alone, imagining that she’d become invisible, no more a target than any other woman in hejab.
Martin started walking towards her, trying to judge his pace so he’d reach her in time without drawing attention to either of them. The second group of Basijis were shouting slogans at the people they passed, but they were yet to start bashing anyone; Martin doused a shameful hope that they’d find some guy in a Rammstein T-shirt to keep them occupied.
Some of the people ahead of him were turning back, but Mahnoosh continued, undeterred. Why had she headed south at all, when she’d known what was coming? Maybe she’d wanted to see how things unfolded here - to bear witness to any violence, even if there was nothing more she could do to prevent it.
It could not have been more than thirty seconds before Martin was finally walking a pace behind her, but his heart was pounding as if he’d sprinted all the way. He spoke quietly in English without wasting time giving his name, trusting her to recognise his voice. ‘Please don’t turn around. You’re still wearing the sash.’
For a second he wondered if his voice had been too soft - he hadn’t wanted to attract curious stares from the shoppers around them - but then Mahnoosh reached to her left side and unclipped the sash, where it was fastened together near her waist. In a sequence of quick movements, she gathered up the swathe of material, sliding it lengthways across her shoulder until it was entirely in her hands.
When she’d stuffed the sash into a pocket of her manteau, Martin finally dared to look up to see if any of the Basijis were watching, but her deft manoeuvre seemed to have gone unnoticed. Then, just as he was contemplating turning around and heading north, one of the men met his gaze for a second, and he realised that he was too close now to flee without attracting attention. He was middle-aged, conservatively dressed, and even if his features marked him as a likely foreigner at least he wasn’t toting a video camera. Far better to brazen it out than to act suspiciously.
He walked on briskly past Mahnoosh and into the oncoming Basijis, trying to prove his clear conscience by giving them no wider berth than he would have offered any other pedestrians, trying to channel the persona of a distracted foreign businessman who’d simply wandered out of his hotel at a bad time. There were ten of them, all with identical green batons, three with pistols. He could smell their acrid sweat. They’d been outmanoeuvred and humiliated, and even if they had no hope now of reliably picking protesters out of the crowd, it would not take much to be judged worthy of helping them work off their frustration.
One of them brushed against his shoulder. Martin said, ‘Bebakhshid, ’ and kept walking. He continued to the next street corner, then looked back. Mahnoosh had passed them too, unmolested. For a moment he considered approaching her, but with the streets full of Basijis it was still too dangerous; she was no longer marked as a protester, but she had no right to be talking to an unrelated, foreign man.
As Martin began climbing the stairs to his apartment, Omar’s wife Rana appeared at her door. She greeted him politely, but it was clear that something was wrong.
‘Have you heard from Omar?’ she asked.
‘No. Why, was he at the march?’ Martin would not have expected to see him there; waving placards wasn’t his style.
Rana shook her head. ‘But he didn’t come home from the shop, and he’s not answering the phone there.’
‘Maybe his car broke down?’ The mobile phone service was still disabled; Martin was about to mention the mesh network he’d seen Mahnoosh using, but Rana would have tried that already if it had been an option. Perhaps the devices weren’t thick enough on the ground to provide a connection out here in the suburbs.
He said, ‘Would you like me to drive to the shop and take a look?’
‘Please, if you could. We’ll come with you, bizahmat.’
‘Of course.’
Martin waited in the open doorway while she fetched her father-in-law, Mohsen, to accompany them; the whole family treated Martin warmly, but there was no question of him going anywhere with Rana alone. He felt a tug on his trousers; Omar’s three-year-old son had grabbed hold of his knee.
Martin squatted down to greet him. ‘Salaam, Farshid jan.’
Farshid frowned. ‘Baba kojast?’
‘Namidunam,’ Martin confessed. ‘Zud be khane miayad.’ He’ll be home soon.
Mohsen and Rana appeared and the three of them headed for the car, leaving Farshid with his grandmother. Mohsen’s English was as patchy as Martin’s Farsi, but Martin worked out that he wasn’t too worried yet: Omar had probably just been called away on business, somewhere with no access to a phone.
As they drove towards the city Martin scanned the radio stations for news. The official news agency had already announced that twenty-seven people had been hospitalised after the march; the hospitals themselves refused to give out figures, and he could no longer guess whether casualties were being downplayed to exculpate the militias, or inflated in order to warn people off.
When they reached the shop it was locked and dark; Omar’s car was still parked in the rear. Rana went inside to look around; Mohsen waited outside with Martin, leaning against the car, smoking. He had lost both legs in the war with Iraq; he had prosthetics, but he needed crutches to get around. After a couple of minutes Rana emerged, distraught. She spoke to her father-in-law, showing him a scrap of paper, then she explained to Martin, ‘He left a note inside the cash register. Someone arrested him, took him away.’
‘Who arrested him?’
Rana shook her head. ‘He didn’t know who they were. Or he didn’t have time to write it.’
Martin didn’t want to dwell on what would happen if VEVAK had uncovered Omar’s role in getting Shokouh out of the country. ‘We could go to the police station, ask there,’ he suggested. He couldn’t think of anything else to try; they’d be hard-pressed to find a lawyer at this hour. Rana repeated this to Mohsen, and he agreed.
The central police station was more crowded than Martin had seen it before, with a queue of anxious relatives spilling out onto the street and halfway down the block. There’d been no mass arrests at the march itself, and the brawls with the Basijis had not been widespread - the only explanation Martin could think of was that there’d been some kind of crackdown in the hours after the march, with hundreds of minor dissidents rounded up. He tried to find a positive spin on that: if Omar had been arrested for nothing more than a few indiscreet comments overheard by informers, the chances were he’d be released within a day or two, uncharged.
When they joined the queue the first half-dozen people ahead of them offered to cede their place to Mohsen; he politely declined, but they kept insisting until he accepted. Martin couldn’t entirely fathom why he wasn’t simply admitted to the head of the queue; it wasn’t as if the dozens of people who were now content to remain in front of him were any less respectful of his status as a veteran. Perhaps it was a kind of trade-off, a gesture that showed respect without overstepping the mark into condescension.
Rana wouldn’t lift her gaze from the ground, and she resisted Martin’s attempts to distract her with small-talk and optimistic prognoses. He was trying to keep his own imagination in
check; he knew what went on in Evin Prison, but nobody was going to round up and torture every last Iranian who’d ever stocked contraband action movies. Only if they’d traced Shokouh’s false passport back to Omar would he be in real danger.
Martin spotted a woman further along the queue speaking on a phone, though she was doing her best to hide it in her sleeve. As far as he knew the Slightly Smart phones weren’t illegal, though perhaps they soon would be.
When she hung up the call, she turned and spoke agitatedly with her neighbour. Whatever the subject, it was not a private matter; within minutes Martin could see the news being spread up and down the line. Maybe the authorities had decided to charge Jabari after all; if his resignation hadn’t been enough to win back conservative support, why not pull out all the stops and have a show trial, to prove that nobody was above the law?
But any mention of Jabari always conjured up at least a few wry smiles. Nobody was smiling as they heard this news.
The rumour finally reached Mohsen and Rana; Martin’s Farsi had largely deserted him, but once he had heard Ansari’s name mentioned he could think of only two possibilities.
