Children of Paradise (37 page)

There were political overtones. The intelligence ministry, after Khatami’s 1999 housecleaning, allied itself with the elected reformist government and claimed to pride itself on abstaining from extrajudicial violence, while the judiciary, which included the prosecutor’s office, sustained links to the elements Khatami had purged from the intelligence apparatus. In depositions to the Article 90 commission, intelligence officials fumed about being dragged into Mortazavi’s unsavory mess. Their recommendation, they insisted, had been to free Zahra Kazemi on the grounds that no basis existed for charging her with spying; but if Mortazavi had meant to insist that she was a spy, he should have turned her over to them, as their ministry was the proper bureaucratic channel for counterespionage. The notion that she should have been kept at Evin under constant supervision and relentless, violent interrogation ran counter to the ministry’s advice. Complained one deputy intelligence minister, “
How could it be that the Ministry of Intelligence, which had suggested that the individual should be freed, would later go to the prison and kill her?”

Mortazavi disdained to meet with the Article 90 commission at all, and this inflamed its members against him.
He replied to the commission’s questions in a high-handed letter suggesting that the parliamentarians were ignorant of the law. In response, the commission members cited chapter and verse to argue that Kazemi’s detention had most likely been illegal; that Mortazavi had falsified the reports of prison guards on her medical condition and fabricated a story about her lacking clearance from the intelligence ministry to work as a journalist; and that prison record books had been tampered with and witnesses silenced. The scale of the cover-up, and the commission’s relentlessness in detailing it, were staggering. The prosecutor’s office was not solely at fault. Some twenty prison guards and sentries who had previously testified as witnesses, the commission noted, were later rounded up by the prison’s intelligence staff and instructed to deny their testimonies. But there could be little question of whom the parliamentarians held ultimately responsible for Kazemi’s murder, and even less so after one commission member
lambasted Mortazavi in a speech and in an open letter to the prosecutor.

By law, the Article 90 commission report was to be read publicly and released to the press. After an unexplained two-and-a-half-month delay, a deputy read the report in the parliament on October 28, and this session was broadcast on state-run radio. But something strange happened the night the print media was to finalize its account of the commission’s findings.

• • •

R
OOZBEH
M
IREBRAHIMI
, the twenty-four-year-old political editor of
Etemad
, thought the Zahra Kazemi affair was horrifying, but he also hoped it would galvanize the reformists. Their movement seemed nearly moribund, between the failure of the Tehran City Council, the crushing of the student movement, the ineffectuality of the parliament, and the impunity with which major reformist figures were shot, in the case of Saeed Hajjarian; jailed, like Akbar Ganji; or forced into exile, like Abdolkarim Soroush. The Kazemi affair, and the blatant abuse of power it suggested on the part of the judiciary, might light a fire under the reformists, Roozbeh imagined. Like the serial murders, it just might spur them to action to defend the rule of law. After all, what happened to Kazemi, Roozbeh knew, could happen to him or any of his colleagues at any time. By investigating it relentlessly and exposing the perpetrators, the reformists in the parliament and the media could ensure that journalists could not be abused and killed without consequence.

The Article 90 commission report supported Roozbeh’s optimism. Reformist members of the parliament had exposed the prosecutor’s apparent obstruction of justice. They did it in the interest not of activism but of the law. At its very best, a committed reformist faction was capable of this.
Etemad
dedicated a page to the Article 90 commission report. But sometime between 8:00 and 8:30 on the evening of October 28, 2003, Mortazavi called
Etemad
’s editor in chief and informed him that if the newspaper covered the Article 90 commission report at all, the prosecutor would reopen a pending case against
Etemad
, which would surely result in the paper’s closure. Roozbeh’s boss informed him that the paper had no choice but to withhold the page its young political editor had helped prepare.

The morning of October 29 was remarkable for its silence. The parliament had just released a scorching report on judicial involvement in a murder, and but for one paper,
Yas-e No
, which was already at the printer by the time Mortazavi called, the story had vanished without a trace. Newspapers
did not so much as summarize the commission’s findings. It was as though the report, aired on the radio and the floor of the parliament just the day before, had been scrubbed from the public record. A reporter from the American-run Persian-language radio station, Radio Farda, tried to get to the bottom of this. He interviewed Roozbeh, who bluntly informed him that Mortazavi had threatened
Etemad
with closure if it covered the parliamentary commission’s findings. The reporter asked if Roozbeh was willing to go on the record with this claim. He was. Mortazavi had acted illegally, Roozbeh added; the parliament had already read the report on live radio, indicating that it was not classified in any way.

He imagined that other editors would fall in behind him, disclosing that Mortazavi had pressured them, too. He would have opened the floodgate for their resistance to censorship by thuggery. Readers would know that their media had not conspired to fail them so much as it had been strong-armed against its will. But no one stepped forward to corroborate his story. Roozbeh, young and slight and refined beyond his years, stood alone. He did not know it yet, but he had just taken the last step off a precipice he had been approaching so slowly, he’d hardly noticed it was there.

• • •

F
ROM THE TIME
he was a boy, Roozbeh had been told to avert his eyes from crimes his elders did not wish to explain or describe. The crimes did not touch him; he would have known neither the perpetrators nor the victims. But his generation was steeped in their atmosphere, a sense of menace that lurked somewhere just beyond the frame of a child’s vision—the animal smell of one’s parents’ fears, the suspicion that one’s own security might have come at another’s cost. The truths one’s parents benevolently concealed seeped edgewise into consciousness. Guilt, like a shadow unmoored from the object that cast it, settled where it least belonged.

For Iranians of Roozbeh’s generation, violence and secrecy formed the boundaries of the knowable landscape, no less than the Alborz mountain range that separated Gilan province from the province of Tehran. As a boy
in the city of Rasht, Roozbeh would visit the graves of relatives with his family. But whenever he neared a particular unmarked tract of the cemetery, his mother watched him shrewdly, calling him back with a peculiar note of tension in her voice. The place took on a mystique for him. He went there on his own sometimes, peering at the unyielding ground as though if he looked hard enough, or stood long enough just breathing the air, he could discern what evil had rendered those plots off-limits to those who would comfort the dead. Much later he came to understand that this was where Rasht’s victims of the 1988 prison massacres lay buried—separated, as infidels, from the faithful.

Rasht was a languid, green city of just over half a million. The capital of Gilan, it hugged the Caspian coast and had once been a major silk-trading town. It was the first Iranian city to host a theater, a library, a bank branch; it was a center of liberal activism against the monarchy at the turn of the twentieth century, and it enjoyed a sometimes comical reputation for being temperate in its climate, its politics, even its relations between the sexes. The revolution itself, it was often said, came late to Rasht. Roozbeh was born a month afterward, on March 19, 1979.

His older sister, Rita, was six at the time of the revolution—old enough to form an indelible memory. She was in the town center the day revolutionary militants stormed the SAVAK headquarters, killing nine people. When they were older, passing through town, she would show Roozbeh where—by which tree—she’d seen a slain man’s hand, where legs. Later still, when Roozbeh’s more hotheaded peers urged revolt against the Islamic system, this recollection, not even his own, would stay him. Political violence had a physical shape, a psychic consequence.

Roozbeh’s mother, a seamstress with a high school education, carried herself with an air of refinement. She had married an unlettered taxi driver sixteen years her senior—a remote, dignified man, warm but inexpressive. Their three children all took nicknames beginning with
R
: Rita, Roozbeh, Rasool. For the first five years of Roozbeh’s life, the family lived in a single room of his grandmother’s home, a traditional courtyard dwelling in one of Rasht’s oldest neighborhoods. During the war years, the Mirebrahimis
moved into a house of their own in Shalekoo, a neighborhood of dirt roads, unfinished houses, and only the barest utilities.

Roozbeh was even-tempered and reserved, the sort of person who could sustain himself for long periods on scarce stimuli. He would grow into an affect not unlike his father’s: calm, abstracted, humane, undemonstrative. This demeanor would set him apart from others around him, he could never quite say whether for better or worse. It made him hard to read and easy to project upon.

His parents were not particularly religious, but Roozbeh was. He read the Quran on his own, observed his daily prayers, and spent the Shiite holy month of Muharram at mosque. Because his father could not read or write, Roozbeh read the sports pages aloud to him from the newspapers and magazines he brought home. Little by little, Roozbeh began to read the other pages of those publications, too, and to imagine that he might one day be a journalist.

Roozbeh lived, then and always, less in the physical world than in the world of books and ideas. In high school he fell in with a circle of older boys who started a sort of salon. They had weekly meetings at each of their homes in turn. There they would discuss religion, movies, novels, and eventually works of political philosophy. Through this group, Roozbeh took an interest in Descartes and then in Machiavelli. He compared the understanding of the West he gleaned from these thinkers with his own perceptions of Iran. He wrote essays on political philosophy for a local magazine. Two of the boys adored Shariati, but Roozbeh found Shariati’s Islam too rigid, too encompassing. He preferred Soroush and another, similar thinker, a former cleric named Mohammad Mojtahed Shabestari, who argued that religion was not a complete system and could be complemented by other sources of understanding. Roozbeh and his friends subscribed to
Kiyan
, where they read Soroush and Shabestari at the height of their novelty and influence.

Politics during those years remained distant and opaque to Roozbeh. There were no sympathetic actors. For most of Roozbeh’s young life, the
Islamic Left had been an object of fear. Members of that faction patrolled Rasht’s city center, making the environs dangerous for young people who ran afoul of stringent codes of behavior and dress. When prominent members of the Islamic Left peeled off into the reform movement, Roozbeh and his friends still feared the reformists’ past radicalism and suspected that their commitment to civil liberties would be instrumental and fleeting. But then Khatami ran for president in 1997. Roozbeh had never heard of this mild-mannered librarian. The opposing campaign portrayed him as a liberal who would blast Iran’s intellectual space wide open. This was meant to scare voters, but for Roozbeh, it was compelling. If the conservatives feared and hated Khatami this much, Roozbeh reasoned, maybe Khatami really was a force for good.

When Khatami was announced president-elect on the Second of Khordad, Roozbeh felt himself reeling. Anything, everything, good might happen now. He felt as he imagined the revolutionaries must have felt the year of his birth: he was lucky to be young at such a time.

• • •

L
IKE MANY
I
RANIAN PARENTS
who aspired for their children to enter the middle class, the Mirebrahimis wanted Roozbeh to be an engineer. Only the very best students were accepted into engineering programs at the university level. Roozbeh didn’t want to be an engineer. He weeded himself out by passivity and design: he didn’t study for the all-important university entry exam, and so he didn’t qualify. His parents were disappointed, but Roozbeh felt liberated. He registered instead for military service and shipped off for Iranian Kurdistan.

Sarbazi
, or mandatory military service, in Iran as everywhere, was something most young men simply endured if they could find no way to avoid it. But Roozbeh embraced it. He found a quality in himself that he would call on many times in the future: an acceptance of circumstance that made him oddly flexible if not impassive in the face of change, even as he also seemed untouched by experience. He would have been the same Roozbeh in a field
of battle as in a room full of books, in a prison cell as in a foreign country. As military service was mandatory, he reasoned, there was no benefit in ruining the experience by resisting it. He welcomed the independence, the novelty, the travel, the opportunity to build his strength. Every day of his conscription, he wrote in a diary. He called it “The Journey Called
Sarbazi
.” His fellow conscripts laughed at him.
Sarbazi
was not, to most of them, a journey of self-discovery but a detour, a period of grudging duty and a two-year wait for life to begin. But Roozbeh was proud of his diary. He kept it to give to his brother, Rasool, that he might be better prepared for his own
sarbazi
.

Roozbeh had been liberated—from the dependency of youth by
sarbazi
and from his parents’ expectations by his performance on the engineering exam. When he returned to Rasht, he registered to take a different university entrance exam, one considered lesser, in that time and place: the one for the humanities. He qualified to study social science at the public university in Rasht, or to study political science at a private university in Tehran. His family urged him to stay in Rasht, where tuition and housing were free. But by now Roozbeh knew what he wanted. He loved political science, and he would find a way to pay for Islamic Azad University and for housing in Tehran. He took his parents’ money only to register. After that he worked. He became a journalist even as a university student, and he got a job at
Etemad
, the newspaper licensed to the parliamentary deputy from Rasht.