Zendegi

by Greg Egan

  Kourosh said, ‘I’m in no position to know if this plan has the President’s blessing, or if some other arm of government has taken the initiative without his knowledge. But I can tell you exactly what would happen if the MEK came across the border: first, the Iranian Army would wipe them out with very little trouble, and second, the Iranian people would unite under the present regime and the reformist movement would be back in the wilderness for another twenty years at least. Not Hezb-e-Haalaa, nor anybody else, would try to exploit the situation for their own benefit. We are not traitors, and we are not idiots.’

  ‘Isn’t the MEK still classified as a terrorist organisation by the Americans?’

  ‘Yes,’ Kourosh replied. ‘So of course they would do this quietly. That’s why I prefer not to be so quiet.’

  Martin finally understood why he’d been plucked out of the crowd so eagerly; Kourosh wasn’t interested in raising his celebrity profile; what he needed was a story that would embarrass the Americans into thinking twice - or dragging their rogue elements back into line, if none of this was actually coming from the top. Brother of Slain Reformist Condemns US Backing for Terrorists would get picked up immediately from his own paper’s website and splashed all over the American broadsheets.

  He said, ‘I can write part of this story, but I’ll need to get messages to my colleagues in Washington and Baghdad to follow up on your claims.’

  ‘How long are you staying in Abadan?’

  Martin glanced at Mehdi, who said, ‘You are my guest here tonight.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  Kourosh said, ‘When you’ve written whatever you need to send, pass it to Karim. We can get your email on a boat to Kuwait within a couple of hours.’

  ‘Okay.’ Email on a boat no longer sounded strange; at this point, Martin would not have been fazed by pigeons carrying flash drives.

  Behrouz glanced at the TV, and Martin followed his gaze; the Supreme Leader was making an address to the nation. Mehdi turned up the volume and the four of them sat and watched the grandfatherly man with his black turban, white beard and round glasses.

  Behrouz didn’t bother translating; it had been a long day and Martin suspected there was nothing in the speech they hadn’t all heard before. He managed to pick up the usual admonitions: do not take part in strikes or demonstrations, work hard to show your love for God and the nation, don’t be fooled by the lies of the traitors and foreign enemies.

  Just as Martin was tuning out, something in the speech caused Kourosh to stiffen with revulsion, then Martin heard jeers erupting from neighbouring houses all down the street. He turned to Behrouz.

  ‘He just thanked his beloved children, the Basijis, for showing restraint and keeping order across the country,’ Behrouz explained. Dariush Ansari had been shot in a motorcycle drive-by; if the killer had not actually been a Basiji, he’d been doing his best to imitate one. The police were investigating the murder, but so far nobody had been charged.

  Kourosh left and Martin sat writing up the interview on his phone; the tiny virtual keyboard on the touch-screen drove him crazy, but it was still faster than using voice recognition then correcting all the errors. It was almost one o’clock when he finished; he realised he didn’t have PGP encryption keys for anyone but his editor, but she’d pass the story on to his colleagues almost as quickly as if he’d CC’d it to them himself.

  He found Karim in the next room; the data jumped between their phones, then the young man went out into the night. Mehdi showed Martin to the guest room; as he lay down on a mat a couple of metres from where Behrouz was already sleeping he suddenly realised that he’d left his stupid woollen hat on all this time, even through the interview.

  The next thing he knew, Behrouz was shaking him awake. Martin squinted at his watch, his eyes narrowed against the glare of the ceiling light. ‘If that’s not four-thirty in the afternoon, I’m going to have to kill you.’ He had a pounding headache and a lump of undigested food in his gut; as he sat up he discovered all the places he was aching from being confined in the freezer-truck the day before.

  Behrouz handed Martin his phone, which was showing an image of a very large crowd at the entrance to a building. The picture had been taken at night, and Martin didn’t recognise the location. ‘What’s happening?’

  ‘That’s the Ministry of the Interior,’ Behrouz replied, ‘just before midnight.’

  ‘Did they trash it?’

  ‘I don’t know; at the time this was sent it was surrounded, but not actually occupied. Three people had been shot, but the crowd still hadn’t dispersed.’

  ‘News travels fast.’ This wasn’t random hitchhiking; Hezb-e-Haalaa must have set up some kind of data relay, stretching between the cities. ‘Thanks for waking me.’

  ‘I’ve organised a ride back.’

  ‘Can we get coffee on the way?’ Martin begged.

  Behrouz looked dubious. ‘I said we’d be there by five.’

  As they hurried through the dark streets, it struck Martin that the only thing preventing Behrouz from doing both of their jobs was the fact that, as an Iranian citizen, he’d face much harsher penalties for writing a story that crossed the line. Behrouz’s written English wasn’t perfect, but a subeditor could easily deal with the occasional minor blemish. And as for the supposedly greater journalistic impartiality of a foreigner, Martin had to admit that ever since he’d swapped clothes with Shokouh in the hospital his own claim on that virtue had been tenuous.

  And Omar? What had Shokouh’s rescue cost him?

  Martin finally realised that they were heading back to the place where they’d been dropped off the night before. When they arrived, the same freezer-truck was parked there, waiting for them.

  He turned to Behrouz. ‘Have you got any decent music on your phone?’

  ‘Define decent.’

  ‘Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan?’ Martin suggested hopefully. They’d never talked about music before.

  Behrouz grimaced. ‘Do I look like a Sufi?’

  ‘Do I? I can still appreciate qawwali.’

  ‘The Sufi-est thing I’ve got is Metallica,’ Behrouz replied pityingly. ‘The rest is hardcore.’

  ‘So after twenty-five hundred years of Persian culture—’

  ‘Yeah, yeah. I already had that lecture from my grandmother.’

  Martin slipped the driver a hundred US dollars and they followed him into the back of the truck. He tried to get ‘Mast Qalandar’ running through his brain, but by the time he’d been sealed in beside the compressor, ‘Enter Sandman’ was already rising up from the noise.

  8

  Nasim had stayed late in the lab, running simulations for the finch paper she was co-writing with Redland, so it was almost ten o’clock when she arrived home. Her mother was in the living room, watching the BBC World News channel.

  Nasim kissed her on the cheek. ‘Anything I should know about?’

  ‘Did you eat?’ her mother replied.

  ‘Not really.’

  ‘I made khoresht sabzi.’

  ‘Oh, yum.’ Nasim could smell the delicate fragrance of the herbs; she went into the kitchen and opened the pot. ‘Khoresht sabzi?’ she wailed. ‘When did chicken become a vegetable?’

  ‘You should be happy,’ her mother protested. ‘I didn’t use beef.’

  ‘I’m a vegetarian! I told you that! Have you ever seen a chicken photosynthesise?’ Luckily there was a pot of rice, too; careful examination with a fork revealed sultanas, but no fleshy surprises. The rice was still warm; Nasim spooned a small hillock of it - along with what remained of the crisp tadigh where it had browned on the bottom - onto a plate and carried it to the living room.

  ‘One of my Ph.D. students is a vegetarian,’ her mother said. ‘He eats chicken all the time. Or maybe it’s fish.’

  ‘If he eats chicken or fish he’s not a vegetarian.’

  Her mother sighed. ‘You should be eating beef. Women need iron. You talk to biologists all day, you should know that.’

&nbs
p; ‘And you’re an economist, so you should know that meat production wastes land, water and energy.’ She had given up meat only three months ago, but Nasim was already disgusted by the thought of eating flesh. ‘Anyway, it’s a personal choice. Imagine how you’d feel if someone tried feeding you pork.’

  ‘I ate bacon once,’ her mother confessed. ‘Accidentally, at a faculty party; it just tasted like fat drowned in salt. But the rule against pork is completely rational; the diseases of pigs are more communicable to humans. What diseases can you catch from cows or chickens?’

  Nasim opened her mouth, then closed it again. She’d simply have to accept that she’d need to cook for herself from now on. ‘What’s happening in Iran?’

  ‘They’ve arrested someone for shooting Ansari.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘I recorded it.’ Her mother picked up the remote and hit a few buttons; the DVR began replaying the IRIB report.

  The police had arrested a Palestinian immigrant, who had already confessed to the murder. His taped confession was played on air; he repeated no less than five times that he’d been acting alone, without assistance or encouragement from anyone. He’d been angry about Ansari’s policy on Israel, so he’d bought an AK-47 from a drug dealer and ridden his motorbike to Ansari’s house to make his opinion known. The police had also arrested the drug dealer, and were parading him as a kind of confirmatory witness.

  Nasim didn’t believe a word of it. If it had happened six months ago it might have been just barely plausible, but this was far too convenient.

  It looked like no one in Iran had been appeased either; when Nasim switched back to the BBC, they were showing smuggled images of huge crowds outside half-a-dozen government buildings. If Jabari’s hypocrisy had acted as a tiny seed for the superheated national psyche, just enough to make the simmering frustration visible, the murder of Ansari had brought everything to the boil. Ansari had not been a beloved national hero, just a calm, decent man with some modest ideas - but everyone in the country knew someone who had paid a high price for the crime of decency.

  ‘Too many to kill,’ her mother mused, with a chilling tone of detachment. ‘If there were a tenth the number, they’d just mow them down and say they were all in the pay of foreign governments.’

  ‘However,’ the BBC announcer interrupted her, ‘this reformist sentiment is far from unanimous. Government employees bussed into Tehran from the countryside have been seen brawling with the protesters and disrupting their vigils. Commentators say that this is likely to be a more effective tactic than armed confrontation, whether by the security forces or the conservative militias.’

  Nasim felt her chest tightening with a familiar ache of helplessness. ‘Anything new about the MEK?’ she asked; the last she’d heard on the subject had come from the White House that morning.

  ‘The State Department, the Pentagon and the Iraqis have all chimed in with their own denials,’ her mother replied. ‘They insist that nobody in the MEK will be getting access to weapons, or a chance to cross the border.’

  ‘Do you believe that?’

  Her mother frowned. ‘Now that it’s been denounced by Ansari’s brother and plastered all over the New York Times, I can’t see them going through with it. But maybe the publicity will do some good: the UN should be resettling these people somewhere else, because they’re never going to be safe in Iraq or Iran.’

  ‘Yeah.’ The MEK’s base in Iraq, known as Camp Ashraf, held thousands of Iranian exiles, including women and children - not just would-be soldiers. Until 2009 it had been guarded by coalition troops, but since Iraq had assumed responsibility for the camp the situation there had become far more precarious. Pro-Tehran factions in Baghdad were constantly trying to deport the occupants back to Iran - and if international pressure precluded shipping people straight into Iranian prisons, the same factions could still do their best to make the camp’s continued existence untenable. The MEK leadership certainly had a bloody history, and it was hard to know whether their renunciation of their old methods was sincere, but the whole community deserved something better than this desert limbo.

  Nasim put her plate aside and curled up on the sofa beside her mother. It had been hard enough for the two of them, living illegally in Syria for three years, waiting for the UN to classify them as refugees and find a country willing to take them. They’d been cooped up in Damascus, in verminous apartments in the poorest neighbourhoods, sweltering in summer, freezing in winter. Their lives had revolved around evading the authorities, always having to move, or having to find the money to pay bribes to avoid being imprisoned or deported. Some schools had been willing to turn a blind eye to Nasim’s status, but that had generally proved both risky and expensive, so most of her lessons had been at home. Sometimes her mother had found back-alley jobs sewing clothes, and Nasim had stood beside her sewing machine, passing her pieces of material; at the end of the shift their ears would be ringing so loudly that they couldn’t hear each other speak. But she still met people who assumed that they’d simply jumped on a plane from Tehran to New York, where the mere mention of her dissident father had seen them naturalised on the spot, complete with bouquets and brass bands.

  On the day they’d left Tehran, she’d wept twice as hard as on the day they’d hanged her father - because even after his death, she had felt she was abandoning him. She’d wanted to stay and fight, wanted to spit in the faces of his killers. That had been a meaningless, childish vision - and she would never forgive herself for the brutal accusations of cowardice she’d flung at her mother as she’d packed their suitcases - but even now, she couldn’t simply cast those emotions aside.

  She knew that above all else, her father would have wanted the two of them to escape the shadow of the ayatollahs, to find a safe home, to flourish. But she doubted that she’d ever stop feeling that she owed him something more.

  9

  On the fifth day of the siege of Evin Prison, just before dawn, saboteurs got in among the protesters long enough to burn down the chemical toilets. Surveying the resulting black-edged sculptures in melted plastic, Martin wondered if the end had finally come. People couldn’t live like animals.

  Within hours, though, shovels had been smuggled in from the surrounding suburbs and deep pits had been dug. Tents were commandeered, privacy was secured. By the time Martin confronted the inevitable and entered one of the reeking enclosures himself, the facilities were not just well-tested but adorned with graffiti, including some slyly vernacular English: ‘We honour Hassan Jabari for proving that a cock-up is better than a conspiracy.’

  Evin Prison sat on the line where the northern suburbs of Tehran gave way, abruptly, to the Alborz Mountains, some twelve kilometres from the city centre. One minute there were crowded expressways, upmarket shopping malls and tiered apartment blocks in glittering white, the next there was barren rock sloping up into the mountains. Popular hiking trails began nearby, and a ski-lift wasn’t far away, though it was definitely not the skiing season. At the bottom of the rocky slope sat the prison, its high grey walls topped with razor-wire, watchtowers rising from the cell blocks. To the west lay a shady green park with a teahouse and restaurant; those facilities were closed now, but the park itself had proved invaluable, with the trees offering shelter from the sun, and now the soft, excavatable ground saving the assembled masses from complete indignity.

  Protesters surrounded the prison on all sides, but the bare rock behind it had proved the hardest to defend. For three nights running, the police had used water-cannon to force a retreat back down the slopes. But they always ran out of water eventually, or their pumps ran out of fuel, and during the day the protesters rebuilt their barricades of metal drums and barbed-wire, and by sheer force of numbers pushed them up the mountain, driving back the police lines. Martin had watched from below as tear-gas grenades were smothered in drums of water or wrapped in fire-blankets, but never lobbed back to their senders. Apart from the sheer frustration of not prevailing, the police were offere
d no provocation: no stone-throwing, no swearing, no taunts.

  The battles being waged in the suburbs around the prison were more complex, and it was hard to catch more than a few glimpses of the ebb and flow of territory, but the fact that supplies were still getting through demonstrated that the police had yet to form an impenetrable cordon between the protesters and their supporters. The authorities had cut off water to the drinking fountains in the park, but bottled water and a remarkable variety of home-cooked food were still finding their way in.