Among the Ruins

by Ausma Zehanat Khan

  * * *

  Esa was disingenuous with Nasih. He didn’t regret it. It would protect Nasih, if he was asked to account for Esa’s activities in Esfahan. And if Nasih was involved with the Ministry of Intelligence, the less he guessed about Esa’s activities, the better.

  He asked Nasih if he could borrow a copy of the Turkish drama The Magnificent Century that was currently the rage in Iran. To watch it, Nasih would have to loan him a laptop, as Esa had chosen not to travel with his own. His host was happy enough to do so. He suggested Khattak watch the program in the privacy of his room, out of the sunlight in the courtyard.

  Esa wondered if Nasih had seen through his ruse, if Nasih was involved with the letters in some way or was connected to Taraneh and Nasreen. But he was finding it more and more unlikely. Another letter had come for Esa during his visit to the square, printed in the same hand as the others. Nasih told him a young man had left a box of melons at the door. The letter had been stapled to the underside of the paper that lined the box—the paper hadn’t been disturbed.

  Looking at Nasih’s open and trusting face, Khattak had beseeched him to accept the gift of fruit. The polite demurrals had gone back and forth in the rituals of taruf—something Khattak’s parents would have called thakaluf, based on the same principle of hospitality—Khattak’s request for the Turkish drama had settled the issue. Nasih could accept the gift because it was in his power to bestow another.

  Khattak retreated to his room with the laptop.

  He attached the flash drive, conscious he was holding his breath.

  Without warning, a series of black-and-white images appeared on the screen. There was no menu or introduction. At first, he wasn’t sure what he was seeing. Then the angle of the camera shifted to reveal a concrete barrier topped by spikes that stretched beyond the lens. At the foot of the barrier, a few men and a group of women in black chadors milled against the barrier. Beyond them, on a rugged mound, several women were seated together, their hands fastened about picture frames, their faces turned to the wall.

  The camera focused on a gatehouse.

  Yazdashtagah Evin, Khattak read.

  Evin House of Detention.

  A car pulled up to the group of women, disgorging another woman in a black chador. The camera zoomed in on the woman’s face, and Khattak recognized her as Zahra Sobhani.

  He could just make out the canvas strap that cut across her chador. It looked like Taraneh’s messenger bag. When she moved away from the car, he saw the professional camera slung around her neck. She lifted it with both hands and pointed it in a rapid-fire barrage of photography—at the women near the gatehouse, the women at the barrier. When she tilted the camera up, he realized she had aimed it at the watchtower.

  The contraband nature of the footage became clear.

  He was watching the security feed from the watchtower of Evin prison.

  A throng of women began to gather round, crowding Zahra, importuning her with pleas, having guessed she was a person of importance, someone who could challenge the authorities.

  Then others came. Men from the crowd, other men with guns. There was a shout from the watchtower, movement along the perimeter. The camera bounced from Zahra’s hands, the strap yanked from her neck. She put a hand to her neck, testing the abrasion, panic shadowing her face. The security feed stayed focused on her.

  The car that had driven her to the gates honked its horn, six staccato bursts.

  Zahra tried to break away. She was reaching for someone, her hands stretched out, her lips whispering. More noise. Cries of dismay, orders shouted from the gates.

  The entrance to the gatehouse opened, dislodging four guards with guns and a tall man in a suit that fit him like a glove. They began to push through the crush of people, the camera panning over them. Veils flapped in the wind like spiraling shrouds. Some of the women fell, others beat at their breasts, sending up a lamentation. In seconds, Zahra was surrounded. Hands that struggled to free her were beaten back.

  Zahra stood her ground, gesticulating with her hands. One hand pointed to the watchtower. She shouted indistinctly at the camera. An arm snaked around her throat, pressing back. She was handcuffed, a hood thrown over her head.

  Two of the guards turned on the group of women, beating them back with sticks.

  One woman held up the picture of a boy, sixteen or seventeen years old. She cried out when the guards ripped the photograph from her hands. The woman collapsed in the midst of the others. Arms reached out to catch her.

  In the noise and confusion, Zahra disappeared. Esa skipped the footage back and checked the picture again. The camera hadn’t shifted, Zahra was no longer there.

  Its tires screaming, the car in the background reversed and sped away.

  The driver had never gotten out.

  * * *

  Esa watched the footage a dozen times over. He knew now it was footage of Zahra’s last day of freedom, the last time anyone outside Evin had seen her alive. He couldn’t decipher the sound on the drive, intuiting the course of events from the crowd’s increasing clamor.

  The guards had moved swiftly, well versed in the transitioning of prisoners from the space outside the prison to the other side of the gatehouse. They must have taken Zahra to Ward 209, to run the gauntlet of Evin’s interrogators.

  He wondered if Zahra had made demands. Or if her interrogators had considered her formidable reputation before setting in motion the chain of events that had led to her death.

  One week ago, Zahra had been pursuing the question of Evin’s political detainees, arguing for Roxana’s release. Now Zahra was dead, and Roxana’s fate was unknown.

  If the regime had murdered Zahra, whose international renown and dual citizenship should have kept her safe, what hope was there for Roxana? Political detainees were powerless, buried behind the walls of prisons like Evin.

  In Esfahan, Esa had been at peace as the days passed like a dream, while in a prison on a hill, others were subjected to incalculable cruelty, sealed off in the muffled places of the world, forgotten by all save those who loved them. Though he’d worked as a police officer nearly all his adult life, it seemed remote from Esa’s experience, incomprehensible and opaque. He felt a sickness in his stomach at the thought of what Zahra had endured, what so many prisoners endured at the hands of men trained to break and kill.

  He wondered if Zahra had ever asked herself the question he found himself facing now.

  What do strangers owe each other in this life?

  He had a laptop and an Internet connection, but he knew better than to search for information on Zahra or the prison. The connection could be traced, the host at his guesthouse endangered. The footage on the drive hadn’t been doctored, he’d studied it closely, analyzed the movement of the images, the sound.

  There were men in the video—guards, but also participants in the crowd, some of whose faces he couldn’t see. From Zahra’s documentary, he knew the people gathered outside the prison would be petitioners whose loved ones had been detained. Originally built to house a few hundred prisoners, Evin now detained close to fifteen thousand inmates: those convicted of crimes such as theft, rape, or murder, along with high-profile political detainees.

  Evin has been used to break the back of the Green Movement, to silence criticism of an election the government denied had been stolen, despite announcing Ahmadinejad’s victory before the polls had closed. However broken the system, Iranians had prized their right to vote, expecting their ballots to count. But even with a hastily conducted recount, widely favored reformist candidates had failed to win their ridings. If nothing else was understood about the election, this much was clear: the votes of the Iranian people had been dismissed, the result foreordained.

  And the storm that had swept the country in the election’s aftermath had galvanized the Green Movement. Popular candidates like Mir Hossein Mousavi and Mehdi Karroubi—who had been leading figures of the 1979 revolution—became closely aligned in the aftermath of the election.
Mousavi had used the color green as his emblem: it signified democratic change within an Islamic framework. The use of the color green had been a carefully calibrated strategy. As the color of Islam, the regime had been challenged where it was most vulnerable: in its claim to embody Islamic authenticity.

  Mousavi’s message had resonated with nearly every segment of Iranian society. And for six months after the election, Iranians had come together to protest the theft of their votes, cohering into a national movement. One year later, Mousavi and Karroubi had published a charter for the movement.

  The Green Movement’s charter stated its foremost goals as freedom, social justice, and the formation of a legitimate national government that represented the will of the people. It referenced Iran’s earliest constitutional iterations, dating back to 1906. It called for the rejection of totalitarian rule, and the strengthening of civil society. Its chief values were human dignity and the advocacy of change through non-violence.

  It referred to itself as the Green Path of Hope.

  And as such, it was an existential threat to the regime.

  Zahra had worked tirelessly for the release of members of the Green Movement from Evin. But she’d been defeated by Iran’s Orwellian judicial system, where attorneys were not permitted to meet with their clients, and the charges brought against protesters allowed scant opportunity for defense. These charges included insulting the holy sanctities, colluding to harm national security, and spreading propaganda against the system. Any activity could fall within these parameters, while for the prosecutor’s office, the accusation alone was enough—there was no demonstrable standard of proof required, leaving protesters’ families without recourse.

  Zahra must have known she wouldn’t have been allowed to record Evin’s notorious abuses. Had she been hoping to find a friend among the stone-faced men at the prison? Or had she been promised a meeting with Roxana? Why, then, had she taken her camera?

  The one thing Esa knew was the drive couldn’t stay in his possession. Nor could he leave it at the guesthouse, Touka had confirmed he was being watched. And since it was too dangerous to keep, he would need to send the footage to Rachel: she might find something he’d missed.

  Barsam Radan is implicated, Touka had said. We just need proof.

  He didn’t know what Radan looked like, but there was no such proof on the drive. His presence on the footage wouldn’t establish a clear link to Zahra’s murder, it wasn’t a smoking gun, it had no power to change the status quo.

  There was the most recent letter to consider as well.

  This is a path of long and grave suffering.

  He recognized the line from a famous ruling of Ayatollah Montazeri’s, a reformist cleric who’d lived long enough to witness the total failure of the 1979 revolution he’d once championed. After the election, Montazeri had issued a groundbreaking fatwa: he’d argued that a political system was automatically annulled the moment it lost the people’s trust. Nor was it the people’s burden to establish the misconduct of their leaders, as they lacked the power and resources of the state. Rather, it was the ruling regime that was faced with the burden of demonstrating its legitimacy.

  Ayatollah Montazeri was the Green Movement’s conscience.

  Khattak considered what it meant that his correspondent had referenced Montazeri’s ruling. This most recent letter and the others as well, he presumed, were encoded. There were clues for him to pick out, clues that would point him to a revelation.

  He pondered the mention of letters that threatened the government.

  Were they connected to Zahra’s murder?

  The recent string of events that had interrupted his stay in Esfahan were probably connected. Zahra Sobhani’s death. Touka Swan. The appearance of Taraneh and Nasreen, the two women from Varzaneh. The mysterious letters and the young man who delivered them. And the security footage from Evin.

  He watched it again, this time focused on Zahra. And this time, he caught it. A hurried movement, a sleight of hand just before the camera was yanked from her neck.

  She had pressed her hand to her neck for a reason.

  But he couldn’t quite see what had happened next.

  He debated what step to take.

  He would have to call Rachel, this was too much to put in an e-mail. And he needed to hear from her in turn, but there was also more. If he was going to trust Touka Swan, he would need to show up at the dovecote. Taraneh was the key to a much larger puzzle.

  Or the young woman was an agent of the regime.

  13

  The Cell

  We’re packed together in the cell. We sleep standing up, warming each other’s bodies. We whisper to each other, we make promises. We assure each other our families are strong, no one is wailing at a grave site, beating at his chest. We say our families are searching for us, the guards won’t dare to beat us. Someone says his father took him to the police to demonstrate his innocence. The Green Movement knows—they’re working on our behalf. There are lawyers at the prosecutor’s office, Karroubi has written to the judges, Mousavi is convening a press conference, and so on. The innocent boy starts sobbing. He’s the one who pissed himself, the youngest in the cell. I tell him, he’s the first who’ll go home. “But remember, you don’t know me, you’ve never met me—it’s what’s keeping you alive.”

  14

  Following Nasih’s instructions, Khattak purchased a phone at a corner market four blocks from the guesthouse. It was late evening, and the temperature had dropped. He was grateful he’d worn his coat, not least for its many pockets. A pretty girl at the counter smiled at him. When he smiled back, she blushed ruby red, startled into dropping his change on the counter. A wave of his hand indicated she should keep it.

  He turned south, away from the store, walking several more blocks from his usual haunts. He crossed the magnificent square again, this time ducking into a restaurant in the shadow of the Masjid-e Shah. It was noisy and boisterous, packed with tour groups drawn to its traditional courtyard and gorgeous ornamentation—a fountain at play, a painted ceiling with a mirrored inlay, a wall of breathtakingly blue kashani tiles under a vaulted roof.

  Khattak welcomed the noise. It would drown out his conversation with Rachel. He ordered khoresht-e alu, chicken stewed with plums, and waited for Rachel to answer her phone. She sounded groggy when she did. It was 3:30 in the morning in Toronto. When she recognized Esa, her voice warmed up.

  “Are you all right, sir?”

  He took a sip of mint tea, bringing her up to date on recent events without mentioning names. Her voice dropped when she heard about the women in Varzaneh, and his encounter with Taraneh at the bazaar.

  “Normally, you being stalked by attractive women wouldn’t surprise me, sir, but this is Iran. They’re hardly going to hand you a phone number on a napkin.”

  Esa was both warmed and embarrassed by the compliment.

  “Iran is no different from anywhere else, except that young people have to be more creative when it comes to expressing their interest.”

  “You don’t say, sir. What form does that interest take, then?”

  He caught the sardonic note in Rachel’s voice and chuckled.

  “I’m afraid to ask what you’re imagining, Rachel. What about rose petals pressed between the pages of a book?”

  He thought of them not just because of the secret letters. Taraneh had also used them as a cover. But he was reminded of his favorite film, Mohsen Makhmalbaf’s A Moment of Innocence, where a similar courtship had taken place. The director favored a neo-realist style of filmmaking, and he’d instructed his amateur actors to re-create an incident from his personal history.

  As a young man, Makhmalbaf had tried to steal a policeman’s gun at a protest against the Shah of Iran, using his female cousin to distract the policeman’s attention. Makhmalbaf had ended up stabbing the policeman and spending six years in jail for the crime. Asked to reprise that moment of violence, the actors had made a stunning artistic choice.

  The
final frame of the movie was considered one of the most moving in modern cinema.

  He told Rachel none of this, there would be time enough later. He wanted to keep the call short. As he’d known she would, she cautioned against him accepting the invitation to the meeting at the pigeon towers in Mardavij Square. Rachel thought it was a trap.

  “You’ve got to get rid of everything, sir, and I do mean everything.”

  But he caught her hesitation. It was difficult for a police officer to contemplate destroying evidence. And they agreed the security footage could serve as valuable leverage in the hands of the Canadian government, perhaps going some way to fulfilling Touka’s goals. He tried to disregard her accompanying threat: do this or your difficulties will get worse.

  Listening to Rachel, Khattak no longer believed his little nook in the courtyard wall behind a loose brick was a safe hiding place. He’d dug a hole for the flash drive at the opposite end of the courtyard and placed a planter pot on top of it, though there was no reason to believe the new hiding place was any safer.

  “Any way you could get me that footage?” Rachel asked.

  Khattak waited a beat as his food was served. He’d ordered only stew. The server had brought him four or five more dishes besides, a beatific smile upon his face.

  When he’d left, Khattak answered, “I’ve been thinking about that. Let’s see if my new friends have any answers. What did you find out about the letters?”

  “The person in question was looking for letters—a very old correspondence between friends. But I’ve been told they didn’t matter.”

  They would matter like hell if they possessed the power to earn Zahra a meeting with the Supreme Leader, he thought. He wanted to know the names, and he knew Rachel would have to send them through one of her anonymous accounts.

  “Dig deeper. Let me know what you turn up.”

  “Sir,” she said. “There’s something else. The person who told me about the letters also told me our friend was searching for footage of a coronation. Quite a glamorous one.”