Zendegi

by Greg Egan

  Martin tried seeding counter-hallucinations, mentally dredging up a few bars of songs that he actually wanted to hear and hoping that whatever bizarre neural process was turning the noise into music would take the hint. ‘Infected’ by The The should have been perfect, with a pounding rhythm that he could usually summon at will, but the compressor took it and mangled it into the Phil Collins version of ‘You Can’t Hurry Love’. Hunters and Collectors’ ‘Run Run Run’ morphed into Abba’s ‘Dancing Queen’. When The Smiths’ ‘Rusholme Ruffians’ became Elvis’s ‘Teddy Bear’, Martin decided to quit while he was ahead, but then the King himself devolved into a dire rockabilly act called the Stray Cats.

  With no hope of an entertaining soundtrack, Martin was at a loss as to how to fill the hours. He didn’t want to dwell on Omar - on what it meant, after a fortnight, that no authority would even acknowledge taking him into custody - so he devoted all his effort to not thinking about Mahnoosh. His brain fell for the ruse, and her face kept floating out of the darkness in defiance of his sham attempts to banish it. He’d seen her on that one day only, at the march, but whether through memory or imagination he had a vast library of snapshots of her in his head, already catalogued by mood: calm and reflective; mischievous; implacable - a thousand micro-expressions framed and accentuated by her no-nonsense olive headscarf.

  The truck came to a halt and the driver shut off the engine. Refuelling, or yet another checkpoint? Under the emergency decrees all Iranians now required a permit to travel between cities; that had always been the case for foreign journalists, but Martin had never felt compelled to break the rules before, back in the days when it would have been easy. He checked his watch and guessed they were somewhere close to Ahvaz, which would put them within a hundred kilometres of their destination, but his phone hadn’t been able to get a GPS signal since he’d crawled into the hiding place.

  He heard the rear door open and someone heavy climb into the truck. A stack of crates was scraped across the uneven metal floor, as if unloading had begun, but the driver had assured them that there were no deliveries to be made along the way. Martin felt the floor vibrating under approaching footsteps; one instinct commanded him to move as far away from the intruder as he could, but instead he used his millimetres of freedom to slide his body in the other direction and brace himself against the thin sheet of rigid plastic that separated him from the cargo area. Something hard struck the partition: a baton, or maybe a rifle butt. There was a pause, then two more blows in rapid succession. Martin didn’t flinch; his weight against the plastic kept it from buckling, absorbing the energy and deadening the sound of the impact. The cavity was meant to be packed with insulating foam; without his intervention it would have sounded hollow as a drum.

  But did it sound like foam, or did it sound like flesh? He waited for an angry shout, an imperious command; a blade thrust through the plastic, or a bullet.

  The floor vibrated again, the intruder retreated. The door swung closed.

  After the truck had been unloaded in a noisy warehouse, the driver parked nearby and unscrewed the panels that concealed his extra cargo. Behrouz was released first, but he was still bent double and massaging his legs when Martin emerged, hobbling and squinting. He’d grown used to the smell of machine oil from the compressor, but it had been masking the cargo area’s own distinctive scent of unwashed refrigerator. He glanced over at Behrouz. ‘I’ll give you a hundred dollars if you can find me a hot bath in the next fifteen minutes.’

  Behrouz snorted. ‘What am I now, a tour guide? Don’t be such a wimp, we’ve got work to do.’

  ‘That would sound much more convincing if you showed signs of being able to walk.’

  The nervous driver hurried them out of the truck onto a dark side-street, then took off with a deafening squeal of rubber. They were both wearing heavy coats and woollen hats, but away from the freezer they were overdressed for a summer evening this far south. Abadan was on an island bounded by rivers, fifty kilometres inland from the Persian Gulf. To the west, across the Arvand River - renamed Shatt al-Arab once crossed - was southern Iraq; Basra wasn’t far upstream.

  Behrouz had brought a map of the city; he led the way to a truck-stop offering fast food and, most urgently, a toilet. In the restaurant, Martin slung his coat over his shoulder but kept the woollen hat on; in spite of the balmy weather many of the customers were wearing them, and though he’d always look foreign close up in good light, he still hoped that out on the street the right cues would prevent too many second glances.

  The oil refinery was visible for miles, the vast complex lit up like a NASA launch site. Though it had been bombed into the ground by Saddam Hussein in 1980, it had been built up again after the war until it was once again the most productive in Iran, churning out nearly half a million barrels a day - when it was operating.

  As they drew nearer to the complex, the streets became crowded; the picket line itself was still not in sight, but there were so many people coming and going - supporters bringing food and supplies to the striking workers, or people just wanting to witness the spectacle - that street vendors had set up half-a-dozen stalls. Martin saw a group of soldiers lined up in front of a government building, but they looked more uncomfortable than threatening.

  Dariush Ansari had been born in Abadan, the son of an oil worker, and he’d worked in the same plant himself, briefly, as an engineer. His father had since retired, but his former colleagues had shut down the refinery for the funeral ten days before and they had not returned to work since. Ordinarily, Tehran would have sent in the army to deal with the pickets and bussed in workers from across the country, but someone in the regime must have grasped the fact that if they did that, it would end with the city in flames.

  Half the people in the crowd were speaking Arabic; Martin’s vocabulary was negligible, but he could easily distinguish it from Farsi. Many of the refinery workers were Arabic-speaking Iranians; whilst Ansari had not belonged to that ethnic group, he had been a local, and fluent in the local dialect - quite different from the Arabic studied in Iranian high schools - and his willingness to use it in speeches here had helped attract supporters. But rather than trying to inflame ethnic tensions, or demanding special treatment for the region, he’d focused on the benefits of a determined, nationwide assault on corruption and nepotism. People here knew that their wealth was being pilfered and wasted, but Ansari’s answer had been transparency and equity, not separatism.

  When they came within sight of the picket line, Martin saw that the usual Referendum! signs had been supplemented with photographs of Ansari and a new slogan that Behrouz translated as ‘Murderers, get lost!’ That soldiers weren’t tearing the signs from people’s hands was no less amazing than if they’d borne the strongest profanities, given that this accusation and advice was meant for the government.

  Martin took out his new phone and snapped some pictures of the pickets, trying to balance a fervent wish to avoid being seen by the soldiers with a fear that if he looked too furtive the people around him would take him for an informer. One young man did move towards him, scowling, but Behrouz stepped in and whispered an explanation that seemed to satisfy him.

  He checked the pictures and queued them up for their long, tortuous journey to Sydney. Even back in his office in Tehran he was no longer able to use the internet; he had to print out his copy and fax it. He’d tried uploading files direct to the newspaper’s computer using a dial-up modem, but the government was degrading international phone lines to the point where the modems just kept hanging up; even the faxes he sent arrived peppered with static and were only legible if he used an absurdly large font. The conventional mobile service was now disabled across the country, and every major city had installed transmitters to jam the frequencies that had enabled the mesh network Mahnoosh had showed him at the demonstration in Tehran.

  Slightly Smart Systems, though, had left one last option open: infrared. Their phones could pass data to each other by IR along a line-of-sight path, and
whilst the government could interfere with the system in a limited space, such as a stadium or public square, in principle, they could no more jam it everywhere than they could flood the whole country with strobing blue disco lights.

  The point-to-point bursts of IR carried email and news in much the same way as those services had worked in the days before the internet proper, when university computers had been linked up only sporadically via brief late-night phone calls but, in lieu of fixed landlines, the modern incarnation involved ‘polling’ phones in the vicinity to discover which ones were in a position to exchange data. Before the restrictions on intercity travel had come in, Slightly Smart email had diffused across the country and over the borders in a matter of days; from Tehran, Martin had sent a test message to his editor and received a reply in four days, probably via Turkey. No doubt there would soon be government programmers working on ways to clog the whole system with spam - and plainclothes police strolling around arresting anyone who responded to their polling signal - but for now the benefits were worth the risk, and a crowd of Ansari supporters was a good place to start. Martin switched his phone to polling mode and parked it in his shirt pocket with the tiny lens of the IR transceiver exposed, leaving it to try its secret handshake on as many passing strangers as it liked.

  As he looked around at the crowd, trying to judge whether it would be wise to attempt some interviews, Martin spotted the young man whom Behrouz had deflected earlier, returning with four physically imposing friends.

  ‘You think we’re in trouble?’ he asked Behrouz.

  ‘Who’s this “we”, beegaané?’ Behrouz replied.

  The first man ignored Martin and went straight to Behrouz, while the wrestling team hung back, looking stern and inscrutable.

  ‘They’d like us to go with them,’ Behrouz announced.

  ‘Is that an invitation to tea, or should I phone my embassy?’

  Behrouz smiled. ‘It’s up to you, but if you’d like to interview Ansari’s brother, they can take you to him.’

  They walked for more than half an hour, heading into a maze of small, quiet streets far from the refinery. It was a poor neighbourhood, but not an especially rough-looking one, full of car work-shops, grocery stores and spice vendors. There were young children playing on the streets, and strolling teenagers who looked neither fierce nor fearful. Martin gave up feeling nervous; while it wasn’t inconceivable that he was being set up, foreign journalists from obscure countries would have no value as bargaining chips in this purely Iranian game. He suddenly recalled the time a friend of Liz’s had thoughtfully mailed her a DVD of A Mighty Heart, and he’d had to sit beside her in their apartment in Islamabad, watching Angelina Jolie convulsing with grief over the death of her journalist husband. Martin had given the movie four stars, and sent Liz’s friend an email that won him a place on her no-Christmas-cards-ever list.

  They arrived at a slightly shabby terraced house and were admitted by a wary doorkeeper who insisted on patting them down and examining their phones and wallets. There were other men lurking inside the house, but, encouragingly, Martin had yet to see a single weapon.

  Karim, the young man who’d spotted Martin taking pictures, handed the two guests over to a middle-aged man who introduced himself as Mehdi and offered them tea and halvaa; it would have been rude to refuse, and Martin was grateful for the sugar rush. They sat on the carpet, shoeless and cross-legged, while Mehdi chatted volubly with Behrouz and politely enquired about Martin’s health and family.

  ‘Hich zan nadaaram, hich baché nadaaram,’ Martin confessed: I have no wife, I have no children. Mehdi regarded him with a mixture of astonishment and pity.

  ‘Your parents?’ he asked in English.

  ‘They both died a few years ago.’ Mehdi couldn’t quite parse that, so Behrouz translated. Mehdi tssked and shook his head forlornly, momentarily as anxious and perplexed as if an orphaned child had turned up on his doorstep. But then he shifted his attention back to Behrouz and they started discussing football scores. There was a TV switched on in a corner of the room, tuned to IRIB’s Channel One, which was screening reruns of a popular historical miniseries, No Room to Turn. Martin had heard claims that the show - which featured a love story between an Iranian student and a Jewish woman in Nazi-occupied Europe - was mere propaganda, portraying the endangered Jewish heroine sympathetically while caricaturing her Zionist relatives, but he’d yet to see enough of it to form his own opinion. In any case, it was a more enjoyable way to improve his Farsi than listening to Mehdi’s match post-mortems.

  After almost an hour there was a flurry of activity in the adjoining room; Martin hadn’t heard the front door open, but apparently a small entourage had arrived, maybe through another entrance. Mehdi picked up the remote and turned down the volume on the TV. Martin managed to rise to his feet before Kourosh Ansari entered the room, alone.

  Kourosh greeted Martin in English and Behrouz and Mehdi in Farsi. Martin said, ‘Please accept my condolences on your brother’s death.’

  ‘Thank you.’ Kourosh had deep hollows under his eyes, and a few days’ growth of beard set against a much longer moustache. ‘I heard him speak on a few occasions,’ Martin added. ‘He was impressive.’

  Kourosh murmured agreement.

  There was an awkward pause; Martin wasn’t sure whether it would be rude to get down to business immediately. He had never managed to get an interview with Dariush, and though that had rankled slightly, he’d understood why; the elder Ansari really hadn’t had any reason to court a foreign audience. All Martin knew about Kourosh was that he, too, had studied chemical engineering. He looked to be in his late thirties.

  Mehdi invited everyone to sit, then went to fetch more tea. ‘Do you work in Abadan?’ Martin asked.

  ‘No, in Esfahan,’ Kourosh replied, ‘but my job there is finished. I will work for Hezb-e-Haalaa now.’

  ‘In what role?’

  ‘I have been chosen as provisional leader by the party’s executive council. At present, we face some logistical problems with holding an election for the position.’

  ‘I can appreciate that.’ It was a minor, and possibly short-lived miracle that mere membership of Hezb-e-Haalaa was not yet illegal. ‘So where do you see things going from here? The strike won’t be tolerated indefinitely.’

  ‘Of course not.’ Kourosh hesitated. ‘But I’m still hopeful that the government will give some ground. They want to look reasonable; they want to be seen to be reacting to the people’s anger. That’s why they had Jabari resign.’

  ‘But how much more ground can they give? What are you hoping for?’

  ‘A referendum within a year, to end the Guardian Council veto in time for the next presidential election.’

  Martin said, ‘Is that realistic?’

  Kourosh ran a hand over his eyes. ‘I don’t know. But I think it’s the smallest thing that the people would treat as anything but an insult. How much Iranian history do you know?’

  ‘A little.’ Martin fervently hoped that he wasn’t about to be tested on the names of the Safavid kings.

  ‘Abadan was once controlled by the British, by the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company. They refused to share their profits fairly - they wouldn’t even give Iran the same deal as the Saudis received - but it was only a strike by the workers that gave the Majlis the courage it needed to nationalise the industry.’

  ‘A move that ultimately cost Mossadegh his job.’

  ‘Of course,’ Kourosh agreed. ‘Mr Churchill persuaded Mr Eisenhower that our Prime Minister was a dangerous socialist, and the CIA engineered their very first coup. But if they’d left him in place to rein in the Shah, we would not have had the mullahs taking power twenty-six years later.’

  ‘Perhaps,’ Martin replied. Mossadegh himself had been a far-from-perfect democrat, and the clerics of the time had had their own problems with him.

  ‘Now I’m afraid we’re facing the risk of more American meddling, ’ Kourosh said.

  ‘Really? Have they ap
proached Hezb-e-Haalaa?’

  Kourosh scowled. ‘Yes, but that’s old news; my brother told them to keep their distance a long time ago. But now they’re trying to start a new game. My friends in Iraq tell me there are plans to unleash the MEK and send them across the border.’

  The MEK - the Mujahedin-e-Khalq, the People’s Army of Iran - was a nationalist group formed in opposition to the Shah. Its members had been pushed aside by Islamists in the 1979 revolution and ended up in exile in Iraq. Accepting the hospitality of Saddam Hussein while he’d engaged in a long and bloody war against their homeland had not been the best PR move in history. Though they claimed to answer to a kind of parliament-in-exile, they now had very little support within Iran, and since the 2003 invasion most of them lived in Iraq, in a strange twilight state, somewhere between refugees and prisoners-of-war.

  ‘You think Washington would actually do that? Re-arm them and let them loose, just to make trouble?’ The Bush administration had funded several armed Iranian opposition groups - including the MEK, and a Baluchi terrorist group called Jondollah - in the hope of eliciting a bloody crackdown from the regime that would serve as the pretext for an all-out war, but Martin thought those programs had been flushed down the chute with the change of administration. ‘You must have heard Obama acknowledge the CIA’s role in the Mossadegh coup, in that speech in Cairo not long after he came to power? Reaching out to the Islamic world and announcing an end to American interventionism?’