Children of Paradise (42 page)

Don’t talk to the international media,
the man had said. But media attention was the only thing that ever helped. And she was a journalist. All her resources lay there. But then, she told herself, he’d said the international media. He hadn’t mentioned the domestic media at all.

She pulled herself together and went to
Etemad
. Her mood was heavy, which puzzled her colleagues on the sports desk, but she didn’t say a word to them. She picked up the phone and dialed an editor she knew at ILNA, a news agency close to the reformist government. The line was busy. It took her half an hour to reach the editor. “They took Roozbeh today,” she told him when she got through. She felt the room around her go silent.

The minute the news went up online, her phone began to ring. Reporters were calling her for comment. She told a Radio Farda reporter she could not talk to the international media but to track the national news and follow its coverage.

She didn’t go back to the apartment. It felt menacing now, claustrophobic and lonely. The first night she stayed with Roozbeh’s uncle, who was often by her side; from the second night until she couldn’t stand it any longer, she lived with her mother, whose apartment near Mehrabad Airport became a headquarters of sorts for the two families brought together by marriage just five months before and now stewing in a shared anxiety and helplessness that came to separate them more than it bonded them.

Solmaz understood from Shahram’s family that the men had been taken to a police outpost on Motahari Street. For the first three days after Roozbeh’s abduction, she reported there, demanding to see her husband. She planted herself near the entrance for hours on end so that no one coming or going could escape the sight of her. But no one seemed to know where
Roozbeh was. In the middle of the third day, whether out of pity or annoyance, a man finally spoke to her.

“Your husband isn’t here,” he said. “Go see the deputy prosecutor for Branch 9, in Mehrabad Airport.” And so she did.

“You started very quickly,” the deputy prosecutor remarked when Solmaz introduced herself.

She had—quickly and intensely. She’d done at least one interview a day, generating at least one news story with each call. She was determined to keep Roozbeh’s name in the papers, to make it clear that he could not be made to quietly disappear. She’d gone to see Mohsen Rezaie, the former head of the Revolutionary Guard; Mehdi Karroubi, until recently the speaker of the parliament; and two reformist political parties. Nobody knew where Roozbeh was or how to shake him loose.

Nothing came of her first meeting with the deputy prosecutor, either. But at the end of the week she got a phone call. She’d relinquished her phone into the care of Roozbeh’s uncle, and now he came charging up the stairs at
Etemad
, shouting for her. Roozbeh was on the line.

“Solmaz,” Roozbeh told his wife, “you have to stop giving interviews.”

Solmaz tried to hold him on the line. “Why do you say that?” she asked.

“I’m coming out soon,” he replied blandly. “Don’t worry.”

“Okay,” she said. She tried to keep it noncommittal. She would not say yes, she would not say no. His interrogators, she suspected then and would later learn for sure, were in the room with him, listening on the speakerphone.

For the next week she didn’t give any interviews. But every day she compiled news items about Roozbeh, Shahram, and other bloggers who had by now been taken into custody, and she asked her colleagues at every newspaper she could think of to slip those paragraphs into stories that were related in any way at all. She placed three that week. And then she gave an interview.

“Roozbeh called a week ago,” she told reporters. “He told me not to give interviews because he was going to be released soon. But he hasn’t been released and he hasn’t called. I’m worried about his health.”

She’d vowed to make a nuisance of herself. She was surprisingly good at it. She had no political background, but some combination of ingenuity and obstinacy matched her to this fight. Still, when she consulted Shirin Ebadi, the human rights lawyer urged her to be cautious. Solmaz was a young journalist herself and could easily become a target. She’d be no good to Roozbeh in prison. Ebadi advised her to lower her profile and put Roozbeh’s mother out front instead.

When the Mirebrahimis came down from Rasht, Solmaz brought them to the deputy prosecutor’s office at the airport.

“Roozbeh is confessing,” the deputy prosecutor informed them.

Roozbeh’s parents looked shattered. Everything in Solmaz clenched. They sat before people who would only take pleasure in their pain.

“In that case,” she broke in coldly, “you’re done with Roozbeh. When will he be released?”

Mr. Mirebrahimi did not last long after that. Like Roozbeh, he was exquisitely sensitive but inexpressive, and he nourished himself on solitude. Solmaz could see from his face that he had withdrawn into a private world of pain. Solmaz and Mrs. Mirebrahimi bade him return to Rasht. He had never been away from home for so long. And so it was with Roozbeh’s mother and his brother, Rasool, that Solmaz returned to the deputy prosecutor’s office the day they were told they could have a meeting with Roozbeh.

They stood waiting a long time in the yard of the building in the airport complex before a car approached. Men dragged Roozbeh from the backseat with his hands cuffed. He had a full beard and he was very thin. He was wearing his wedding suit—the change of clothes the men who’d arrested him had yanked from his closet—which had been a size too big in the first place. Now he swam in it. Roozbeh’s mother gasped.

Solmaz squeezed Mrs. Mirebrahimi’s hand. “Don’t,” she said sharply. “Get ahold of yourself.”

For a long moment they all stood awkwardly. Solmaz realized that everyone was waiting for her to embrace her husband. She did, and they sat down in the small room the deputy prosecutor’s office reserved for prayer.

Mrs. Mirebrahimi broke the silence. “They say you are confessing,” she said.

In an instant Solmaz understood the cruel efficacy of the forced confession. Roozbeh’s mother was ashamed. Mortazavi’s men wanted it that way. Moreover, the confession was sexual in nature, and Solmaz understood that everyone was worried about how she would take it. But Solmaz didn’t care if Roozbeh had had relationships before her. She’d had boyfriends, too.

Roozbeh turned to Solmaz. “Don’t pay attention to anything you hear until I come out,” he told her.

Her composure was a ferocious thing.

“Do whatever it takes,” she replied. “Do what you need to do.”

• • •

T
HE INTERROGATOR GAVE HIS NAME
as Keshavarz, but Roozbeh also once heard someone call him by another name: Fallah. Both words meant “farmer.” He was one of those purged from the intelligence ministry. Now, Roozbeh believed, he was in almost daily communication with Mortazavi. Although he was not much taller than Roozbeh, he was thicker, with heavy, meaty hands. His face, when Roozbeh finally saw it, was unforgettable precisely because it was so ordinary.

All his life, Roozbeh had believed in a benevolent God who would guide him in times of darkness. But he felt no such presence in prison. Here there was only Keshavarz, or Fallah. This man held Roozbeh’s very life in his unyielding grip. He could withhold or administer pain, connect or sever Roozbeh from the outside world, grant or deny him food, dignity, even air. He owned the truth and could deliver, extract, distort, or refuse it. He knew everything about Roozbeh, and Roozbeh could not escape his will. The interrogator was God. Roozbeh had come to prison a practicing Muslim. Now that he had seen this God, he resolved never to pray again.

Keshavarz wanted personal information about Roozbeh’s friends and colleagues. Under the Islamic Republic’s draconian moral code, nearly every Iranian was guilty of something that could carry a prison sentence: extramarital sex, drinking, even shaking hands with members of the
opposite sex. What had begun as a religious imperative had become little more than a system of universal blackmail. The right information could afford an interrogator a good deal of leverage over a political prisoner. The interrogator would show it to the person confessed against, in the handwriting of the person from whom it had been obtained. Roozbeh knew because this had happened to him. It had the effect of making the prisoner feel trapped and alone, like there was no point in resisting and no one he could trust. And then, once he had confessed against his own friends and lovers, colleagues and employers, he would have nowhere to turn but to God.

Once he had broken, Roozbeh felt, for a time, at peace. He was doing the only thing there was to do. To relax was to survive, just as it was for a person falling from a great height: the tenser the body, the more likely it would shatter. He cooperated. He would hold the interrogator’s trust until he didn’t have to anymore, maybe when he went to trial. He gave away secrets he knew, and some he didn’t. There were some small dignities he kept in reserve. He never cried. He was always calm. And he would not ask for anything. He would not ask to use the bathroom or to walk in the cramped prison yard. He did not ask to speak to his family. He tried to forget his wife.

Keshavarz put Roozbeh’s sexual confession aside. The beatings stopped. But business had only just begun. The interrogator informed Roozbeh that he was likely to spend the next twenty years in prison, given the seriousness of his charges. Roozbeh believed him.

When the interrogators wanted more information about another prisoner, they put him in Roozbeh’s cell for the night and questioned Roozbeh in the morning. Roozbeh told them the prisoner was not an important person. When the interrogators had a warrant for the arrest of someone new, they brought the warrant to Roozbeh and asked him: What did he know about, say, Omid Memarian? As it happened, Roozbeh knew very little. But when they came for information about a former colleague named Javad Gholam-Tamimi, and Roozbeh offered an account of Javad’s work history, Keshavarz was impatient. He wanted to link Javad to Reza Pahlavi, the
exiled son of the deposed shah. When Roozbeh demurred, the interrogator showed him a warrant for Solmaz’s arrest. Roozbeh could send either his colleague or his wife to prison. Javad Gholam-Tamimi emerged from his first interrogation screaming curses at Roozbeh.

One day Keshavarz presented Roozbeh with something to read. It was an editorial called “The Spider’s House,” published in the newspaper
Kayhan
, which was associated with the Supreme Leader. In it, Hossein Shariatmadari, the paper’s ultra-hardline managing editor, claimed to have uncovered a network of Iranians working for the CIA. Some twenty-three Iranian expatriates in Europe and North America were in league with the American spy agency, Shariatmadari alleged, naming names. He linked these expats with seven prominent reformists inside Iran, among them Khatami’s vice president Mohammad Ali Abtahi; the parliamentary deputy Behzad Nabavi; deputy interior minister Mostafa Tajzadeh; and former hostage taker Mohsen Mirdamadi. But the crucial node connecting the seven to the twenty-three was a web of thirteen young, little-known Internet journalists who were charged with spreading propaganda inside Iran and to the West. Among these pawns of international intrigue were “Roozbeh M.,” “Shahram R.,” and “Omid M.” Shariatmadari recommended rolling up the network by arresting all thirteen of the young people he named.

For days, Roozbeh was instructed to write confessions addressing all the charges against him, but to do so in a manner that would confirm the hypothesis of “The Spider’s House.” Apart from his nonpolitical charges (engaging in an illicit affair, drinking alcohol, and shaking hands with women), he stood accused of acting against national security, participating in illegal demonstrations, belonging to illegal organizations, insulting the Supreme Leader, disturbing the public mind by conducting interviews with the antirevolutionary media, and disseminating propaganda against the regime. His interrogator supplied him with notes to prompt his writings. One piece of evidence used against him was the call Payam Fazlinejad had made from Darband to the defector in Turkey.

Roozbeh told himself that he would cooperate in prison and then renounce his confessions when he got out, as Ali Afshari had done. Many
of the charges were wildly improbable to anyone who knew him. Roozbeh had never attended a demonstration, legal or illegal; he belonged to no organizations; and his published work located him within the reformist camp, which was after all the governing faction. But Roozbeh confessed not only to attending demonstrations but to being their primary organizer.

One day Roozbeh learned, to his pleasure, that Shirin Ebadi had agreed to take his case. But when the retainer agreement arrived in prison for Roozbeh’s signature, it came with a note from Mortazavi: Roozbeh was to refuse to sign the agreement, Mortazavi instructed, or five years would be added to his sentence. Ebadi, according to the prosecutor, was an agent of Israel. Roozbeh should declare that he considered her incompetent and would not allow himself to be used by her. He was given a text to copy in his own hand. It was full of spelling errors. Roozbeh copied it letter for letter, hoping that the uncharacteristic illiteracy of his note—so many elementary spelling errors, from a newspaper editor?—would make it an object of interest to the press.

• • •

T
HINGS STARTED TO GO WRONG
for Omid Memarian at the very end of September. He was invited to speak at the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington, D.C., but when he went to board his U.S.-bound flight in Frankfurt, two police officers stopped him cold. His name was on the no-fly list. Omid made an unlikely international terrorist. He flashed his press card. Mistakes happened all the time, the officers told him, but there was no way he could complete his journey.

Omid returned to Tehran. Ten days later, four armed officers came for him at work. They threw him to the floor of a van, covered him with a blanket, and held him down with a foot to his neck. In his cell at the secret prison, the light always blazed and other prisoners’ screams reached him through the vent near the ceiling. Sometimes Omid imagined that he was in a grave and that people were walking over him. He felt himself dislocated in time. Once he asked a prison guard the hour, and the guard replied, “Who cares what time it is?” But it was six o’clock, the guard
informed him. When Omid thought six or seven hours had passed, he asked again. It was seven. After five days Omid thought he’d been in prison for two months. Time, he understood now, had been a map of mental space. Now he had no map, no bearings, no notion of what the hours even meant.