Until 1991—twelve years after the rise of Ayatollah Khomeini —the Iranian opposition in Berlin had, despite all the rifts within it, spoken with one voice against the regime in Tehran. But that year, the sudden appearance of two men tore the community apart. Just as Germany’s foreign minister had returned from his visit to Tehran vowing to mend the relations between Europe and Iran, Nejati and Sedighi, using the disarming pseudonyms of “the savior” and “the virtuous” in Persian, had been assigned as envoys of the Iranian president to mend the relations between the expatriates and their homeland. From the Center for Strategic Studies at the president’s office, the two senior officials were to deliver President Rafsanjani’s message of reconciliation to the diaspora.
Berlin had been their first stop. They had contacted several leading members of the opposition and invited them to a “dialogue.” What the subject of that dialogue would be, or how it would come about, was unclear. Yet the proposal had excited most exiles. Noori had called it the historic opening everyone had been waiting for, and gathered friends every Wednesday night at Mykonos to decide the terms of that dialogue. Some had already talked to the envoys on the telephone and believed meeting them privately was harmless, but others believed the meetings had to be held in public.
But a few thought this was the regime’s latest scheme to infiltrate the ranks of the opposition and destroy them from within. Whether that was the intention of the envoys or not, their appearance did, indeed, bitterly divide the opposition. Because both men had vanished after September 1992, rumors that they had merely been the first pieces in the premeditated assassination plot had spread. Few remembered feeling optimistic about them, and fewer still would admit to having met them.
Given this history, the testimony of the several exiles who took to the stand was a blur of incoherent statements.
Exile witness 1 said, “Yes, your honor. I’ve heard of them. I know many people received phone calls from them, and a few met them.”
“Who did they call?”
“I know one person they called, because he told me himself that they did.”
“Is this man a politician in the opposition against the regime?”
“He’s, er, an activist.”
They chafed at the word politician. They were not politicians in the same way the judges knew politicians to be. They were disenchanted citizens, paid by no one, seeking neither fame nor glory, hoping to rid themselves of their tyrants. Politics, as they knew, was nothing but penance.
“What was the subject of these meetings and phone calls?”
Exile witness 2 said, “They said they wanted to negotiate a solution to bring the educated back to Iran.”
“What was the subject of the conversations with the particular friend who you said told you that he had been contacted by them?”
“Well, I suppose Nejati wanted to show he meant well. He knew every last detail of all our backgrounds. He knew that this guy and his wife had fled Iran on foot years ago without their baby girl. He knew the child was still with her grandparents in Iran, and he offered to reunite them.”
“Did he reunite them?”
The witness, seeming ashamed, nodded.
“Where is the child now?”
“Nejati made arrangements and, in a few days, the kid flew to Berlin. She’s here now.”
“What did the father have to do to return the favor?”
“Nothing, your honor, as far as I know.”
“Nothing? Do you mean to say the highest officials of the regime you call evil were simply acting charitably?”
“I, I suppose . . . I don’t . . . can’t say, your honor.”
The next witness took the stand and was asked: “Did you meet with them alone or was this an open meeting with others?”
Exile witness 3 said, “Er . . . I met with them alone, in a hotel.”
“What did they want from you?”
“They wanted me to return to Iran to help rebuild the country after the war.”
“What is your profession?”
“I’m a veterinarian.”
“Was the health of your nation’s pets and livestock such a pressing priority to force you to meet with your sworn enemy in secret?”
“Er . . . I thought . . . Well, in my analysis . . .”
“Please, no analysis! Just state the facts.”
Only the rambunctious Yousef’s interruptions gave these witnesses a reprieve.
“Ah! What is this? They all say ‘I can’t say.’ Why don’t we just close it all up and be off to Lebanon already?”
The exiles appeared composed. They were dressed in suits, silk scarves tied around their necks, their temples aglow with silvery sideburns. But the trial exposed their inner disarray. It brought them face to face with the errors they had hoped to keep from the court. They had to admit they were accusing the very regime they, themselves, had helped bring to power. At times, the scrutiny felt so harsh it was as if they were being tried for the parts they had played in a revolution some thirteen years earlier. Only on the witness stand, when they failed to convince the judges of the nobility of their reasons in meeting the envoys, did they begin to see their own gullibility in having met them at all. And when they did, they realized they could no longer expect the judges to believe in their wisdom, or hope to convince them of what they knew. Once they had portrayed their rulers in the dark light where those rulers belonged, they had inevitably painted the landscape of their own failings.
By the year’s end, the excitement of the opening days had waned. The tedium of the day-to-day proceedings brought boredom and the benches emptied. Inside the courtroom, everyone settled into a routine. Of all the attorneys representing the victims, Ehrig was the only one in court every day. In their own separate cage, Rhayel and Darabi had grown accustomed to their own silence, as had others in the courtroom. They sat through the long hours keeping themselves from dozing off by doodling, or carving letters and shapes with their pens into their wooden benches.
Bruno Jost, however, was listening. No matter how stellar the quality of his investigation or the evidence on his side, he knew the case would be lost if the argument in the courtroom was lost. He watched the proceedings intently. He had mastered all the documents contained in the 187 binders on the shelves behind him. By 1994 he knew every detail and pronounced all the Persian and Arab names with a native’s ease.
Listen fiercely was, for the most part, all he could do once the trial started. Bruno Jost, the federal prosecutor, the impartial investigator, had done his work. His indictment was in. The rest was for the judges to decide. In the courtroom, it was for the judges to ask the questions, for the judges to measure the strength of his argument, the soundness of his logic. He could, and did, rise from time to time to question a witness or make a statement. But they were detours along the road the judges were paving on their own, albeit using the map of his indictment. Jost, the leading man, had yielded the spotlight to the chief judge.
Judge Kubsch’s authority was absolute but somehow also gentle. His subtlety had cast him in a paternal light. Everyone sought his approval. Even at the peak of their exasperation with his scrutiny, witnesses never doubted his fairness. When his wife, fearing retribution, suggested that they unlist their address from the phone book he, knowing his own reputation, dismissed the idea.
“If the terrorists are truly looking for me, they won’t need the phone book to find me. All we’d get by unlisting ourselves is to lose the friends who are hoping to find us.”
The bench brought out the best in the quiet man who was always lost in thought at home behind his desk or tending to the flower beds, speaking only when addressed. His own son, a law student clerking in the same court, often snuck into the audience section at lunch breaks to watch his reclusive father come to life. Kubsch’s bottomless patience drove casual viewers and reporters away. His serenity suffused the courtroom, which, for all the hostility inside, might have otherwise been mayhem. He never raised his voice and was sparing
with his words. The expressions of his eyes, enlarged by his spectacles, instructed the witnesses more often than his orders. One day, when a witness kept rambling, he waited till the witness had paused to catch his breath, then he simply pressed his hands down into the air and closed his fists, like a conductor ending a symphony, and the witness plopped to his seat. Even the defiant Rhayel and Darabi showed their regard in their own muted fashion by keeping a lamblike demeanor in his presence.
Yet no one revealed Judge Kubsch’s mastery better than Yousef, who sought chaos as his only salvation. Using his full repertoire of physical and verbal stunts, Yousef disrupted the proceedings, hoping to win the forgiveness of his former allies. Sometimes he lay his head on the bench, appearing to nap. At other times, he showed up to court in his underwear only to be sent back to dress himself. He broke into song or complained—of prison food or the clamor in his ward. On a few occasions, he feigned insanity and spoke of stray spirits swinging from the courtroom chandeliers, or whispered to the specks of dandruff on his collar. The room burst into laughter at Yousef’s antics, but the chief judge, with a nod or the wave of a hand, pacified him each time.
But even under the reign of Judge Kubsch’s civility, the old enmities were hard to contain. Darabi lost a grip on himself from time to time. One morning, when the judges were in their chamber, he finally returned the gaze of an old foe in the audience, someone he had faced off against at numerous rallies over the years. From the first day of the trial, the sight of the spectator had rattled him. Once the crowds began to thin, Darabi had expected to be rid of him. But even when endless legal arguments chased the reporters away, and frost brushed the panes of the stained-glass wall in white, that spectator always showed. Coming in from the cold, he and his two friends huddled against the heater, their gaze fixed on Darabi, who was helpless in his glass cage. Being a prisoner on trial had to be punishing. Being a prisoner on trial under the glare of a longtime enemy accented that punishment with torment.
“You’re a dead man, Hamid Nowzari,” Darabi hissed from his perch.
“Shut up!” was all the shy, amiable community organizer would say in return.
After leading the demonstration outside the courtroom on the opening day of the trial, Hamid had expected to resume his daily routine. Yet the pleasure of watching Darabi in captivity had drawn him in. The novelty soon wore off, and still he found himself returning day after day. There was something irresistible about Hall 700, though even he did not know what it was. He ran through the heady explanations at first. The trial was historic and he was there to affirm the work of the court through his presence. Or the trial was proving him in the right, so he came to revel in his own good judgment. Hamid and his small band of friends thought President Rafsanjani’s promise of reform was nothing but a sham. They had been dismissed by other exiles as idealists who were unable to see a political opportunity—a handful of dinosaurs charging headlong toward extinction. Then the murders had occurred. The champions of reform and reconciliation vanished and the dinosaurs, albeit too desolate to gloat, lived on. But, at thirty-six and after ten years in exile, gloating was not as sweet as it had once been.
For a while he thought he was there for friendship’s sake. Together with Shohreh, he had founded the refugee organization that, over the years, had become their home away from home. He figured he was there so Shohreh would not be alone. Yet he knew himself well enough to know that loyalty could have carried him only as far as November, with luck through the early days of December. When 1994 began to loom and he was still returning to the benches, he realized there was no point asking why he was there. He quit his day job and took on a night shift so he would never have to miss a day of court. Going to court was what he had to do; the reason would reveal itself to him some day.
Thus began the monastic life of Hamid Nowzari, who never set foot in a temple except in foreign lands and not without a camera dangling from his shoulder. He was vigorous. Organizing protests, leading demonstrations, stamping his restless feet to the beat of slogans at rallies suited him. But being useful in a courtroom was something he had to learn. It would be years before he would realize that the trial, indeed justice, was what he had been demanding at all the marches throughout his life. A trial never lasted longer than an hour, as so many who had been political prisoners in Iran had described to him. And a judge was a turbaned cleric in the image of Minister Fallahian to whom their guilt was usually a foregone conclusion. In Hall 700, he watched Judge Kubsch and his team, looked at Bruno Jost, listened to Ehrig’s every statement, thinking all the while, This is the shape of a court, the look of a judge, the sound of a real hearing.
For the time being, he would be the trial’s self-appointed ombudsman, there to monitor the proceedings. No one in the room knew Darabi or Iran as well as he did. An expatriate publication gave him permission to be their representative. The court granted him a press pass with which one of his two other companions entered the reporters’ booth and took notes. He and a third listened. Sometimes the band of three drafted an ad hoc press release. Hamid’s name always appeared at the bottom after the words, “For more information, please contact.” In the evening, they brought the scrawled pages home, typed them up, wrote a summary of the day’s events, suggested the next day’s highlights, and distributed the report to diaspora publications before heading to work. None of them complained of their drudgeries. The ritual was a labor of love, strangely healing.
As the judges were returning to the bench, Darabi glared and shouted at Hamid once again.
“Your wife’s a whore.”
This expletive particularly amused Hamid, the bachelor. But the fuming Darabi sounded off again.
“Motherfucker! Your mother’s a whore, too.”
At those words, Hamid shrank. His lifelong orphanhood, beginning at age five with the loss of his mother and father to cancer within months of each other, made him vulnerable against any allusion to his lineage. He said nothing more, only pushed his hand into the air, as if pushing him away. Darabi sneered, undulating his shoulders, dabbing his forehead with the back of his wrist, striking his best homosexual pose then repeating in a high-pitched voice, “Oh, shut up!”
As the lone woman in the courtroom, Shohreh often wondered what it would be like to be left alone in that room without a single compatriot: Who would ever know her experience—not in its docile German translation, but in its feral Persian original? Who would help her if there was no one present but Germans, especially now that Salomeh’s condition was keeping Parviz away?
But this never happened because Hamid was always present. In the early days of the trial, Hamid had gone unnoticed. With his slim frame and deep olive complexion, he was easily overlooked amid the many faces. Then one morning, the attorneys for the accused surprised the court by introducing two new witnesses they wished to present the next day. The move upset Ehrig, who asked to postpone the new testimonies so he could study the witnesses. His request was denied. That evening, the spectator became a volunteer researcher. The names of the witnesses had sounded vaguely familiar to him. He spent the night reading through old magazines, and calling other exiles in Berlin to unearth information about them. In the morning, Ehrig’s aides had come up empty. Hamid, however, handed a file to Shohreh with the detailed profiles of the new witnesses. The file elated Ehrig, who waved it in the air beaming at the benches.
From that day forward, Hamid’s presence seemed as natural, even as essential, as anyone else’s in the room. The translators began to greet him. The courtroom guards looked to him as the master of the audience section. If there was a row, they did not move from their posts. They left it to Hamid to restore order to his own domain.
One afternoon Ehrig finally broke the silence between Hamid and himself. In the courthouse’s basement canteen, where the attorneys, witnesses, and reporters ate, he spotted Hamid at his usual table. The silent courtroom visitor was perfectly animated in the canteen. The waiters, overjoyed whenever he entered, ushered him to t
he “Mykonos corner.” The canteen staff who had secretly sworn allegiance to him made the witnesses for the accused suffer for service. They huddled around him to hear the latest installment of the trial’s drama, which he had learned to tell with enough suspense to last through dessert—always a bowl of Jell-O.
Ehrig picked up his tray, walked to the Mykonos table, and asked if he could join him. Hamid lifted his head from his newspaper, rested his glasses on his forehead, beamed his winsome smile, and said, “With pleasure!”
He had long wished to reach out to Ehrig but feared he might think him another anti-Tehran proselytizer.
Ehrig quickly got to the point. “Who are you?”
Hamid offered a bite-size autobiography. To Ehrig, who had been in college in the late 1960s when German universities were abuzz with Iranian student activists, Hamid’s history rang familiar.
“Tell me, how much longer will you keep at this? How long will you keep coming?” Ehrig asked, gently provoking his new acquaintance.
“Not long. Because it won’t go on much longer.”
Ehrig, surprised by the response, asked why.
“Iran will buy someone powerful enough and that will be the end,” Hamid answered confidently.
Ehrig had little patience for cynicism. There were many corrupt officials for sale, he consented—his tone suddenly declarative—but not everyone in Germany was for sale, certainly he, himself, was not for sale.
“You!” Hamid paused and patted the attorney tenderly on the back. Perhaps ingratiating himself was an art he had been born with, or had mastered years ago as a small orphan at the mercy of adults. Whatever its origins, Hamid disarmed everyone with geniality.
“It’s not you, Mr. Ehrig. You’re as noble as they come,” he reassured the attorney. But Hamid felt certain there were greater political motives, trade interests, that would put an end to the trial. Iran would present an offer Germany could not refuse, something that would make sacrificing justice small in exchange.
Assassins of the Turquoise Palace Page 15
