He was desperate to get a message to her, but couldn’t justify an attempt for hollow assurances that would terrify her when she learned where they originated. His adversaries were aware of every one of his plans. Was the new spy in Homicide that good, a high-tech antenna beaming word even of his thoughts? Or had his work habits deteriorated into inexcusable sloppiness that would have gotten him killed had not room in Evin Prison been found for him?
When a guard came for the trays Darius asked to be taken to the toilet. The guard considered a plot before unlocking the cell. The toilet was far along the corridor, past the “one-way” stairs to the basement torture rooms. Well before he was there he was met by the smell, and no longer of the opinion that Rajab had been cruelly abused when he was made to use a can as a slop bucket. As he stepped inside, a surprise punch to the back of the head sent him reeling into the wall.
“Bloody infidel,” the guard said, “don’t you know the Imam has stated that upon entering a toilet the believer must set down his left foot first?”
His wrists were shackled as the corridor filled with guards. He took a tentative step wondering if the Imam used a right or left foot lead after finishing with the toilet hose. A looping punch delivered to the point of the jaw buckled his knees. He put a foot back to steady himself, and was shoved forward through a gauntlet of fists. Heavy hands pummeled his midsection. When he had wearied them he was given to others for kidney punches, passed on again and kneed in the groin, beaten with a stick. The game was “Evin soccer,” and he was the ball, to be batted around until the air had hissed out of him, and he was too senseless for them to hurt anymore.
Rajab said, “Welcome home,” and gave up the bunk for him. He examined Darius’s bruises and said, “You’re not too bad off. While you were gone, I saw something you would never believe. A boy thirteen years old was locked up in a cell for three weeks by himself. They brought him out, and he went up and down the corridor like a rabid fox, pounding on the walls, yelling gibberish at the top of his lungs. The guards could not catch him, he was so wild. They let him run till he was breathless, and then they cornered him and beat him unconscious, and threw him back in the same cell.” Rajab pointed through the barred door. “That one there.”
Darius shut his eyes as Rajab went on as loud and excited as the boy must have been. This time sleep didn’t come, nor respite from his pain. He used his saliva to wash the blood from his face. A tooth was loose in the back of his mouth. When he wiggled it, it came off on his tongue.
Sabbagh was waiting for him reading the Imam’s treatise on
The Determination of the Hour of Dawn During Moonlight
—
The True and False Dawns.
Although he almost never smoked, Darius accepted a cigarette. His puffy lips had no feeling, and the cigarette fell onto the table when Sabbagh gave him a light.
“Have you been to our mosque yet?” Sabbagh asked.
“No.”
“It is a mistake not to go. The mosque is the wellspring of life at Evin, as it is for society as a whole. The reeducation of the miscreant begins in the mosque, because more than any other aspect of human endeavor, prayer opens the mind.”
“My mind is already open,” Darius said.
Sabbagh regarded him disdainfully. “Your mind is as closed as any man’s that ever lived. It is just your head that is open.”
And still spinning, thought Darius. He had practiced answers for anything Sabbagh might say to him. Trying to remember them made the pain that much worse, and he fell back on tired legalisms.
“I am a political prisoner,” he said, “not a criminal, and must be accorded proper standards of treatment. These are not being met in Block 209.”
“You are overly impressed with your own importance. You are no different than other inmates. We will do with you as we see fit.”
“I don’t see any purpose in further interviews. It’s too much to expect we’ll find common ground.”
“Perhaps, but there is no pressure on our side to revise our attitude, while you will be given incentive to reconsider your stubborn silence.”
Sabbagh glanced in his book. Darius anticipated more sparring, maybe a discussion of the true and false dawns, but the session was over. He was brought to a distant wing of the block where the cell doors were solid steel, without bars, and narrower than his shoulders. He had to duck his head as he was made to enter a pitch black opening; one step inside he was as lost as if he had stumbled into a subterranean cavern. Groping about with his hands in front of his face, he determined that he was alone in a space smaller than the cell he had shared with the other men. There was no bunk on the wall. He tipped over an object that rolled around the floor distributing the stench of human waste. His feet tangled in a stiff, dusty blanket. He balled it up in a corner and used it as a pillow. When he closed his eyes, the blackness seemed to lessen. Every punch he had taken from the guards, every kick, came back to him with renewed intensity. He amused himself by counting individual sites of pain, curious if each was matched by a dormant pleasure receptor. Past sixty he gave up and fell asleep.
He was awakened by a crawling sensation on his throat. A dream, he thought, until he felt it lingering against his cheek, and his hand closed on something that bled between his fingers. A two-day stubble had sprouted on his face. In the absence of more accurate means of measuring the passage of time, his beard would be his calendar.
Despite his protest to Sabbagh, he realized that he had been treated up to now with deferential tenderness. Soccer, while not his favorite game, was nothing he could not endure. Nor did a solitary cell hold any terror for him. The fact was that he did not mind his own company, and preferred it in extended periods to the bickering of Rajab and Anvari.
The quiet was broken by wailing that he assumed to be the pathetic residue of torture. After several minutes he proclaimed himself an expert on it, and that it was made by a woman. The women’s wing of Evin was far away from the men’s, and he could not figure out how the sound reached all the way to Block 209. Possibly he was imagining things. Not the crying—that was real enough. But its source. He would not be the first man obsessed with the events that brought him to Evin Prison who turned his thoughts to women, seeking reason to survive.
For three days (or four, or five—his calendar had thickened till it was too fuzzy to read) he was left alone in the cell but for the brief times he was dragged into the corridor for prayer. One day, expecting a meal tray when the door was opened, another man was pushed into his arms. They disengaged awkwardly, and sought out opposite corners.
“Who are you?” the newcomer asked.
“Call me Darius. And you?”
“Habibi. Have you been here long?”
“I don’t know,” Darius said. “It’s a question of taste.”
“It is not to my taste. Do they beat you?”
“No.”
“Where I came from they whipped me every day on the soles of my feet till I was unable to walk. I wore the skin from my knees crawling. I am here to recuperate, so they can start on me again.”
Darius wanted to ask what offense had brought Habibi to Evin, but this was a breach of prison etiquette.
“My crime was a terrible one …” Evidently, Habibi was a mind reader. “I murdered the Imam.”
Darius pulled back his legs, which were tangled in the other man’s. “The Imam died of old age. He was eighty-nine, and had been sick with cancer for a long time.”
“So people believe,” Habibi said. “But I had wished him dead every day, until it came to pass.”
Darius heard the slop can scrape against the floor, and Habibi relieve himself in it.
“It is enough that I can kill by thought. But I can also project my body outside the walls. Would you like me to show you?”
“It’s not necessary.” For imagining what he had, Habibi was treated like a murderer and had no reason to doubt his fantasies. Though delusional, he still could be an antenna. Darius had never heard of prisoners doubling up in the solitary cells.
“My trial was three months ago. I was sentenced to die, but received a postponement until they finished questioning me.”
This, at least, was not as crazy as it sounded. Interrogation continued throughout the legal process. Before arrest, during trial, or after sentence was pronounced a prisoner was grilled until prosecutors were satisfied they had every last bit of information out of him.
At the end of a week (Darius guessed it was a week—his new calendar was the arrival of his meal tray; but this was sporadic, and for long stretches he received no food) he had a cold that the Imam’s confessed assassin had brought into the cell, and his head lice as well. His mental illness was contagious, too. If Habibi didn’t shut up soon, Darius would declare himself a plotter in his infamous crime, and demand his help in escaping by being taught to walk through walls.
In what he believed to be his eighth day there Darius was taken from the cell. The weak light at the end of the corridor blinded him. A blanket was tossed over his head and he was marched out of the block while Habibi called after him, “You can’t believe anyone, anyone but me.”
He was left inside an interrogation room where a prisoner who would not speak to him used electric clippers to cut off his hair. He ran his hand over his scalp feeling the small, still painful bumps where his stitches had been. He was eager for the questioning to start. Sabbagh’s studied formalities would be a relief from the raving of his cellmate. But the interrogator who arrived toting a fat leather briefcase was Bijan.
“You are to be congratulated,” Bijan said as he spread papers over the desktop. “Your warders say you are a model prisoner, a marja among the inmates, to be emulated if not admired.”
Darius held himself still. “I would rather be set free.”
Had he faltered? To his own ears he seemed to be pleading. He did not see how he could keep from showing cracks in his demeanor that Bijan would widen until he was destroyed. Since being brought to Evin, he had been led constantly to expect torture, but the limits of his fear had not allowed for Bijan to be the arbiter of his fate. Better to have been thrown alive to the wolves.
Bijan, for his part, was as ever, but for a smile that blossomed as he sensed Darius’s quandary.
“Virtue’s reward must be its hunger for more of the same.” The Komitehman riffled the papers, but did not consult them. “You are charged with the murder of Ibrahim Farmayan in the year 1979, a crime for which you have already been convicted once and sentenced to death.”
“You are disqualified from these proceedings,” Darius said, “as you cannot pretend to be impartial. The man I’m accused of killing was your blood relative. It’s too much to expect justice under these circumstances.”
“Too much to expect of me?” Bijan glowered at him. “What kind of justice are you asking for? Western justice—which is no justice at all, but the juridical whims of a society that has turned its back on God? Who is acquainted better than I with the consequences of your crimes, and can express grievance with them?”
“I insist that you remove yourself from the case.”
“Justice is what you want? Then justice is what you will receive.” Bijan paused for Darius to signal consent to the rules. “Since your guilt is not at issue, we will confine the questioning to your motivation.”
“The
only
issue is guilt. I was convicted unjustly. The evidence was heard by a SAVAK court-martial. Has the government revised its opinion of SAVAK’s commitment to fair trial?”
“There is no record of the murdered man’s illegalities having been directed at you,” Bijan bore on. “He was one of the rare officers in SAVAK whose patriotism cannot be called into question. What excesses he may have been responsible for fell on the deserving heads of the Tudeh Party cadres rather than the Muslim faithful.”
“He was a sadist who raped and killed prisoners of both sexes. In the week before he was slain he tortured to death a girl not yet sixteen years old, but would not be prosecuted for it. These are crimes under Islamic law, no matter who the victims may be.”
“The country was not governed by Shari’a at the time. Now that it is, why has your commendable ardor to see justice done faded?”
“What do you mean?”
“When it suited your ends, you took it upon yourself to do away with your superior in SAVAK. Yet, as a leading investigator for the National Police you were not nearly so aggressive in rooting out the enemies of society.”
“Are we discussing the people who stole Ayatollah Golabi’s rugs?” Darius asked.
“Zaid Rahgozar.”
“I found him as you asked. He was in my custody when the Komiteh executed him.”
“You were engaged in a vast ongoing conspiracy with him. When our men entered his hotel room, you were assisting his flight.”
“This is pure fabrication,” Darius said. “Where do you get your information?”
“In the future you may be allowed to confront your accusers. Do you dispute that upon returning from Mashad you went to the home of another conspirator, a woman you advised also to flee before the Revolutionary Guards located her?”
Using the tip of his toe Darius swept his hair into a lusterless pile. He was going gray faster than Ghaffari.
“With you, there is always another innocent victim who must be saved from the legally constituted authorities. Always a young and beautiful woman.”
“No one was saved.”
“Not even your soul. The persistent pattern of antistate activity stretching across three decades cannot be misread. We want to know who you are working for. For what foreign power? With which subversive elements inside Iran?”
“This kind of questioning is outside the scope of your lawful mandate. It has nothing to do with the Farmayan case.”
“Everything is connected,” Bijan said. “The links that are not obvious will be examined in a fresh light until they are brought out clearly.”
“There are no links.”
“That will not be determined by you.”
He was dismissed with the flick of a finger. Resigned to another confinement with Habibi, he wanted to shout that a terrible mistake was being made when he was brought to the one-way stairs. As he descended the steep flight, his legs were kicked out from under him, and he skidded to the landing on his chest. His arrival was hailed by a cry of pain from a dark basement passage, another inside his head.