by Ramita Navai
‘You haven’t given me a chance…to explain…to try…’ The shaky voice was barely audible above Amir’s.
‘What the hell’s going on out there?’ a neighbour yelled, ‘he’s an old man, show some respect! And keep it down!’ Amir raced down the stairs, fists clenched. Threw open the front door. The old man hardly flinched. Sad and tired and ashen from guilt and age. Again Amir’s rage receded, leaving a burning resentment in its place, that this old man was denying him his hate.
Ghassem was holding a gift-wrapped box. On the ground by his side, an enormous tin of oil and a sack of rice. ‘I’ve got a gold watch for you and some essentials you may need, I know you live alone.’
‘I’m not a fucking earthquake victim!’ Amir hissed, trying to keep his voice low.
From his inside suit pocket the old man produced a chequebook. ‘I just want to help. You’ve struggled enough in life because of what I did. Here’s twenty million tomans, it’s nothing.’
‘I would never take your blood money for as long as I live. You think you can buy me with a cheque and a tin of oil? Is that what it costs to assuage your guilt? Is that what my parents are worth?’
‘I’m sorry, I didn’t meant it that way, I just want to do the right thing.’
‘Can you bring my parents back? If you can bring my parents back, then I’ll consider forgiving you.’ He slammed the door in the old man’s face.
Back in his apartment, he turned off the lights and edged towards the window. The old man had left his gifts by the door and was now walking up the alley, towards the main road, unsteady on his legs.
Amir did not hear from Ghassem again that week, and life resumed as normal. Bahar was getting ready for her trip. Amir threw himself back into his work. He updated his blog, with renewed energy.
Evin prison, Tehran, August 1988
Shahla and Amir have still not seen Manuchehr, not even when the three of them are transferred to Evin. A few days after they arrive, the initial shock thaws, exposing Shahla’s anger. But she is certain they will be released soon. Theirs is not a serious case. They are not official members of any party, something she reminds her interrogators at every opportunity. ‘If your intelligence is so great, then surely you know that!’
Amir misses his father and does not like this new world full of women squashed together, the heat intensifying the smell of sweat, cheap soap and milky breasts. He has made a friend, Maryam, but she is older and does not always want to play. He has a tantrum. Manuchehr had promised him a toy truck. He stamps his little foot on the ground and shouts louder and louder. The women stare in silence. Maryam watches him from the bunk bed with her mother, both looking at him with their sad eyes. His mother pleads with a guard through a tiny hatch in the door.
‘He misses his father, that’s all – please let him see his father, little boys can’t be without their daddies.’ At the word ‘daddy’, Amir starts to wail, throwing himself on the floor with drama and flourish. And then everyone looks up as they hear the jangle of keys working its way down, until the door is opened.
‘Just. This. Once.’ says the woman in the green uniform, her unsmiling face hidden by her cap. Amir wipes his wet eyes, embarrassed at the scene he has caused. Shahla hugs him and whispers in his ear before taking him to the threshold. And then Amir is on the other side, his wet face blasted dry by an icy airstream. He is led along endless corridors of sparkling white tiles under flickering yellow strip lights. He can hear the squeak of rubber soles on the floor above the hum of the air conditioning. Then more keys jangle, more banging on doors. He is led into a room full of men, they shout his father’s name and nudge him towards the back where he is wrapped up in his father’s hot, familiar arms. Giggling together, Amir nuzzles his face in his father’s neck, breathing in his musky smell. They play, father and son, for what seems like hours.
‘As soon as we’re out, the first thing I’m going to do is to buy you that truck.’
Jomhouri Street, Tehran, April 2013
Amir had spent most of his life avoiding subversion and staying away from anything vaguely political. But moving to Tehran for university changed that. He was drawn to the buzz of the underground student movement. It was barely organized, and mostly consisted of a handful of dissidents giving impassioned speeches in their bedrooms to a rapt audience of less than five.
In the run-up to the presidential elections in 2009, he had joined his university friends at their old haunt, Café Prague, west of Vali Asr. The café was close to the campus and a popular meeting place for students, activists, artists, intellectuals and hipsters. Here couples would date, friends would gossip, poets would read their work and everyone else discussed politics over endless teas, coffees and cheese sandwiches. Conversations were often heated. To vote or not to vote, that was always the question. The Boycotters would fail to convince the Voters that their votes gave the regime legitimacy. The Voters said change was possible; it was in their hands. They would discuss the lost years of reform under the old President, Mohammad Khatami, who had served from 1997 to 2005 and was a hero to so many. Amir and his friends would noisily argue that they had all been blinded by Khatami’s petty reforms: headscarves slipped back and a few more films were made, but they all seemed to forget this man was a coward. They reminded anyone who cared to listen that Khatami had condemned the anti-government protesters in 1999, denouncing the protesters and accusing them of being led by ‘evil elements’; and he was decidedly quiet whenever students and dissidents were rounded up and arrested. Not forgetting that Khatami was ungracious and bitter to boot: when the human rights lawyer Shirin Ebadi won the Nobel Peace Prize he sniped that it was not a very important award. As for the reforms, Amir would say, everyone in Iran knows where the real power lies, and that is in the hands of one man alone, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the Supreme Leader. Talk would then turn to Mir Hossein Mousavi, the man whom Khatami made way for, the new great prospect of the reformists. Amir hated him and was unexpectedly mute on the subject. He’s our only hope! his friends would cry, and his face would go blank with a look that he had honed over years – dead eyes that gave nothing away.
Amir and his friends finally got the chance to go public with their politics when mass protests erupted after the contested result. The mood in the streets was euphoric. Standing in an ocean of hope and joy, Amir was overwhelmed with a happiness that he had not known since before his parents’ death. He started filming everything on his mobile phone, as so many others did. Footage from the first few days showed Tehranis of all hues, of all classes and ages standing side by side. You could see thousands chanting, demanding a re-election; none of them believed Ahmadinejad had won again. They flashed peace signs and smiled for the cameras; families were there too and some had brought their children to join the crowds. At times it looked more like a celebration than a protest. You could see the excitement; kids were laughing and running and holding each other, ordinary human expressions of exuberance that are not often glimpsed on the streets of Tehran. People charged down Vali Asr; a river of bodies beneath the trees. Amir was ecstatic at being part of the collective consciousness. But as the days wore on, the looks on people’s faces started to change. Fear crept in. So did the riot police and the Basij militia. Amir began wearing a bandanna tied in front of his face and dark glasses to conceal his identity; the mass protests gave way to mass arrests. These ordinary young Iranians scared the regime.
Amir had gathered with his friends where Vali Asr Street meets Beheshti Street. The crowd was huge. A young woman had brought her wheelchair-bound mother; there were labourers, rich kids, students, housewives. And they were all shouting, ‘REFERENDUM! REFERENDUM!’
Amir held up his little camera and captured girls blowing kisses. Then the shouts turned to their saviour, the man they wanted in power, Mir Hossein Mousavi. ‘MOUSAVI – MOUSAVI!’ The crowd was roaring.
No one knew where the shots came from, and at first no one was even sure they were shots. Suddenly everyone was running and screaming
. More shots. Amir started to run. He almost stumbled; at his feet was a young man, blood trickling out of his ear and oozing out of his head. His friends were trying to pick him up and drag him away.
That was the moment when Amir felt the need to honour his parents’ courage with his own. Writing a blog and attending activist meetings was the first step.
The group consisted of journalists, bloggers, human rights lawyers, film directors and members of the women’s rights movement. Tonight they had arranged to meet at Amir’s house, as he had the lowest profile. Some of them were convinced their houses were bugged. They all whispered in their cars, and only if there was music blasting. Not long ago, they used to meet in cafés where the owners often joined in. But the café owners had been ordered to install cameras, the contents of which would be available to the police – or any other authority – if they so requested. Café Prague, their old haunt, had refused to install them and instead shut down.
The 2013 presidential elections were only a couple of months away and there had been the expected crackdown. In the last few months, more than a dozen journalists had been imprisoned in Evin, accused of having ‘foreign contacts’ who were friends and colleagues who had left for London, to work at BBC Persian.
As his friends began to arrive, Amir opened a plastic petrol can filled with aragh sagee, vodka moonshine that he had bought from his black-market booze seller Edvin, a ponytailed Armenian with muscly arms from years of lugging around boxes of bottles. Edvin did excellent business. He sold to everyone from civil servants to rich kids, and sales of wine in north Tehran had rocketed; most of it was the ubiquitous François Dulac plonk, but once a year he would sell some of his uncle’s delicious home-made wine. Making it was not risky for them, as being Armenian they are Christians, and so are allowed to produce alcohol for their own consumption.
Amir poured the drinks and they all started taking out the batteries of their mobile phones, having heard that their conversations can be tapped even when phones are turned off. Fereshteh, one of the journalists, read a text message she had been sent by Ershad, the Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance: WE REMIND ALL JOURNALISTS THAT SPIES ARE IN OUR MIDST, AND THOSE FRATERNIZING WITH THE BRITISH WILL BE CONSIDERED SPIES.
‘They’ve been going into overdrive with their messages recently. Our editor gets a phone call every day, either from intelligence or from the Ministry,’ said Bita, who worked as a reporter on a reformist newspaper that had been shut down countless times over the years. Recently, the papers had been receiving faxes and phone calls almost nightly with instructions on what was to be censored. Bita said intelligence was checking the entire contents of the paper before it was published.
‘Nourizad’s written another letter. Here we go again. When is he going to give up, they don’t even care about his letters any more,’ said Behzad, a civil engineer by day, blogger by night and Amir’s closest friend.
Mohammad Nourizad, an established film-maker and former journalist for the staunchly conservative regime mouthpiece, the Kayhan newspaper (whose director is appointed by Khamenei, the Supreme Leader), was once a favoured lackey of the Supreme Leader, his unctuous fawning causing some dissidents to snigger that he was a member of the Leader’s inner harem. But the protests changed everything; he wrote an outrageously brave, scathing letter to Khamenei, daring to criticize him and urging him to apologize to his people. Seventy days in solitary confinement did not manage to shut him up. Neither did interrogations and abuse. After 170 days in prison, he came out fighting, the only way he knew how: writing letters. No matter how much pressure the government put on him, he kept bouncing back. The letters never stopped, despite death threats. So the regime had taken to ignoring him. It was a good tactic, even if it was not meant as one, for soon people lost interest in his letters, frustrated at their lack of reaction. It was just another letter that would not change a thing.
‘And Khazali’s on another hunger strike, we’ve had a really hard time getting to him,’ said Mana, the human rights lawyer, who had seen several of her colleagues imprisoned in the last two years.
Mehdi Khazali was one of the government’s most ardent critics. A mild-mannered ophthalmologist who attended writing clubs and poetry readings, he was also an Islamic scholar and a committed blogger. Most controversially, he happened to be the son of one of the most right-wing, powerful and faithful clerics of the regime. Ayatollah Khazali had the exalted honour of being a member of the Assembly of Experts, a group of clerics charged with monitoring the Supreme Leader, and with the authority to dismiss him. The Ayatollah publicly denounced his son, who was sucked into a cycle of beatings and imprisonment. Meanwhile the Ayatollah’s younger son released a pop video. Such is life in Tehran.
Mana updated the group on another round of arrests of Baha’is, a religious minority in Iran that the state considers heretics. Despite the government declaring that Baha’is are not discriminated against, they are excluded from much of public life, including not being able to go to university, to have government jobs or be involved in politics.
The friends drank and talked and shared information until the early hours. Bahar arrived halfway through. She was not political, but she loved the idea of resistance, and always wanted to hear the group’s news. She had noticed that meetings were different now. More serious and contained, not like the ones they had at university when they would finish their sessions with riotous parties dancing to techno and popping ecstasy pills into their mouths.
Evin prison, Tehran, August 1988
Amir squeezes his little nose under the crack of the door, pressing his cheek down hard on the dirty tiled floor. Maryam is next to him, doing the same, their foreheads touching as they wriggle their bodies into place. A rush of ice-cold air tingles Amir’s skin. Bliss. He closes his eyes and sticks out his tongue, trying to reach into the jet stream of air conditioning that shoots along the corridor outside. It is the height of a scorching summer and the overcrowded cell heats up like a kiln. The hot, sticky air in the room fuses Amir’s clothes to his skin and he is covered with big, fat droplets of sweat, making the sensation of cool air on his face all the more delicious. This is his favourite thing to do here. He and Maryam lie in silence, fingers and faces wedged under the door, panting softly, until one of the women spots them.
‘If they open the door, they won’t see you and you’ll get hurt! They’ll tread all over you and you’ll break your necks and never be able to walk again!’ is the usual cry, expressed with the exaggerated alarm employed by Iranian mothers. But Shahla never exaggerates anything. Amir has noticed she is not as strict in here. She is softer, more forgiving. When he and Maryam are told off, he runs into Shahla’s outstretched arms and she smiles. ‘My love, my beautiful boy. Did you feel the cold air? Are you cooler now my angel?’
Amir still dreams of those moments crammed in the gap under the door, stealing slivers of chill from the slipstream of cold air outside. In moments of panic and stress, he shuts his eyes and transports himself back there, marvelling at the irony that a memory from Evin prison is what pacifies him.
Jomhouri Street, Tehran, April 2013
Amir had just returned from work when the old man called. It was the day after the meeting.
‘You should be more careful. Inviting a lawyer round who is being followed twenty-four hours a day, with a load of journalists and a known blogger. It isn’t the brightest thing to do. People will start to wonder what you are up to. What with the elections coming up, you know it’s a sensitive time. Not forgetting your parents’ record, it doesn’t look good. And then not even I will be able to help you.’ The voice sounded stronger than before, more authoritative. Amir had no words left for the old man.
‘Are you still there?’
‘Who are you? How do you know these things?’ This was the first time Amir had not shouted.
‘I’m an old man who wants to explain.’
Amir put the phone down. But the old man had finally got the boy’s attention, as he suspect
ed he would.
Ghassem Namazi had the blood of quite a few of his people on his hands and it needed washing off. The onset of guilt had coincided with his decrepitude. There were few signs from Ghassem’s outward appearance that this was a man made of flesh and blood. His skin was tinged grey, his eyes were unflinching. His pursed mouth barely moved when he spoke in his quiet monotone voice, carefully crafted to conceal any show of emotion. This immutability was to be expected of a man of Ghassem’s standing, of a man who spent years working as a judge in the Revolutionary Court of the Islamic Republic of Iran. Ghassem and his colleagues were man-made myrmidons of the machine; dispassion was lauded by the regime.
But somewhere along the line there was a shift. Many of the judges changed, as Ghassem had changed. At the beginning they had believed in their work, dispensing God’s justice. They were serving their country and standing up for the dispossessed. But it was no longer about Islamic Revolutionary principles. It was now about money and power.
Ghassem had worked hard to cultivate his urbane exterior, for he was from peasant stock. For generations they had ploughed the land in the fertile plains of Varamin, south of Tehran. The Shah had overlooked these peasants and that was one of his greatest mistakes. The villagers did not complain when plunged into darkness in the winter, nor did they complain when their precious supply of fresh water ran out during the torpid summer months. They had lived more or less the same way for centuries. While the world around them was changing their belief in God was inflexible, and so when an uprising began in the name of God and the poor, they dutifully followed. Generations of monarchs had kept them alive but had not given them much more than a hand-to-mouth existence. They glimpsed new possibilities.
Ghassem was the youngest son, and by the time he was born his mother had already given birth to all the farmhands that her husband would need. Ghassem’s father wanted more for his youngest than a life of subsistence. The decision was made to send him to a religious seminary in Tehran. He studied under the tutelage of a well-known, firebrand cleric who was impressed by this sharp peasant boy who had witnessed the drudgery of village life and had realized God and the Koran were his only chances to step up the ladder. The cleric made sure that by the time the revolution happened, Ghassem was ready.
