Children of Paradise (46 page)

Omid wanted to cut Roozbeh loose. Shahram refused. If Roozbeh went down, he told Omid, they all went down. What they had to do instead was to shore up Roozbeh’s strength and prove to him, if he didn’t know it, that
he could still come in from the cold. Nabavi’s article and Abtahi’s retraction, both of them the fruits of Omid’s tireless advocacy, had helped. Now they would bring Roozbeh to see Rajab Ali Mazrui, the head of the journalists’ union, who was annoyed with the young bloggers for publishing their confession letters.

Mazrui scolded them but heard them out. Shahram and Omid thought they were doing Roozbeh a favor. Roozbeh needed to see that if he reached out, these people would forgive him, his friends reasoned—he needed to know that there was a way back. But what Roozbeh would mainly remember about that night was that Mazrui was harsh and ungenerous at a time when others, like his former editor Emadeddin Baghi, had shown sensitivity to his plight. Baghi once told Roozbeh to confess against him all he needed to if he thought it would be of any help.

At the café at night, the three bloggers and Solmaz conferred about each day’s news and debated their options. They could break with Mortazavi and speak about everything that had happened to them. But it was not far-fetched to imagine that Mortazavi would have them killed. They could cooperate until the prosecutor was finished with them. But who knew if he ever would be? And to what harmful use might he put them in the meantime? They needed allies in the system if they were to escape this bind. Otherwise they would stand alone, powerless players in a dangerous game. They decided to try to see the president. Omid went to one of Khatami’s spokesmen, whom he knew from better times, and he went to Abtahi.

• • •

R
AJAB
A
LI
M
AZRUI
wrote an open letter to President Khatami. He described the conditions his son had endured in prison as one of those accused in the bloggers’ file, and he suggested that Shahram, Omid, and Roozbeh had confessed under pressure. The president should look into the matter, Mazrui wrote. The prosecutor’s office should be investigated with regard to the bloggers’ file.

The “repentant” bloggers did not have time to be grateful for this
intervention. Mortazavi, furious, summoned them right away. He demanded that they respond with a letter of their own, refuting Mazrui’s claims, making the “unrepentant” bloggers out to be liars and lauding the conditions of their imprisonment. Javad Gholam-Tamimi was still in prison, he reminded them, and his fate rested in their hands.

They composed a letter denying that they had been held in solitary confinement, denying that they’d been tortured, and thanking the judiciary for having given them the opportunity to recognize and atone for their many mistakes. They exaggerated to the point of absurdity, claiming that the prison guards had shared their own food with the prisoners out of the kindness of their hearts. Mortazavi was not amused. He was angry. He told them he would not publish the letter. But he did not send them home. He had made other arrangements.

“When you walk out of this room, there will be reporters waiting for you,” Mortazavi said. “Tell them the things you were going to talk about in court and in your letter about Mr. Mazrui.” Javad had been brought from Evin to join them for this press conference.

“This is the last thing you have to do,” Mortazavi told them. “Do not play with your lives. In this country, many people die in car accidents. It’s not only journalists who die in car accidents. Merchants, members of the parliament, butchers—all of them die in traffic accidents.”

Outside the prosecutor’s chambers, a press scrum awaited them. Reporters from ILNA and ISNA were there, along with IRIB, the hardline television network, and Fars News. Omid saw the Fars news reporter greet Keshavarz as though they were old friends. For some reason, Payam Fazlinejad was also there. The reporter from the reformist ILNA sidled up to Roozbeh and assured him that his network would be asking no questions.

The four young men sat in a row of hardbacked chairs in front of a low coffee table. On the far left, Javad Gholam-Tamimi wore a windbreaker and spectacles and looked at the floor. Next to him, Omid glowered, in a posture of closure, his arms folded, his legs crossed, his expression tense. Shahram wore a gray blazer and cocked his chin at the camera; he alone looked
more angry than wounded. Roozbeh looked positively haunted. He wore a black jacket and kept his arms folded, his face a presentiment of fear.

There was a long silence while the reporters before them seemed to wait for a cue. Then Shahram pointed to the Fars reporter and the questioning began.

The bloggers denounced Mazrui and denied his claims. Omid’s hands shook uncontrollably. He spoke through tears, recounting how he’d sought to blacken the face of the Islamic regime. Later a hardline journalist would jeer that he had cried like a baby, but Omid didn’t care. He figured his demeanor had made it clear to anyone watching that he was under duress. Shahram confessed to having become secular under the influence of his writer friends. Roozbeh spoke of being a pawn of the reformists. Mortazavi had instructed Roozbeh to link the Mazrui family to the Mojahedin-e Khalq, but he did not.

One of the television reporters approached the bloggers at the end and tried to console them. “We know what an animal Mortazavi is,” the anchor confided.

Omid exploded at his interrogator that day. He’d reached the end of his tether, he said. No more. Pushed one more inch, he would turn on the prosecutor. He’d reveal everything. He could not do a single thing more at Mortazavi’s behest.

The press conference aired that night at eight, and then again, again, and again. That it had taken place in the prosecutor’s headquarters was never mentioned. Javad went back to Evin. Shahram went to Rasht, but Mortazavi frequently called him back to Tehran.

Keshavarz continued meeting Roozbeh in public squares and on street corners, pulling him into his car for chats—as though they were mafiosi, Roozbeh would later muse. Solmaz had Roozbeh record everything surreptitiously from his pocket. The interrogator had good news, he told Roozbeh once. He’d found an excellent venue for Roozbeh’s writings.
Kayhan
would pay him handsomely to write a book about the reform movement and how it was all made up of spies. Keshavarz had set up a meeting for Roozbeh with
Kayhan
’s editor, Hossein Shariatmadari, the author of
“The Spider’s House.” Roozbeh just needed to sign a paper. Roozbeh might as well join
Kayhan
, Keshavarz urged; he had no friends left among the reformists, after all. Roozbeh rejected the offer.

Earlier Keshavarz had tried to lure all three young bloggers to work at a research institute attached to
Kayhan
. Omid had been livid. He could hang himself, but he could not do this. If they so much as met with Shariatmadari, the game would be over. They would have given Mortazavi their very souls. Keshavarz had once told Omid that sixteen hardline newspapers could not equal the value of one flipped reformist advocating against his own side—one Payam Fazlinejad.

• • •

P
RESIDENT
K
HATAMI HAD RESPONDED
to the Mazrui letter by asking something called the Constitutional Watch Committee to investigate the bloggers’ file. The committee, which included several high-ranking clerics as well as government ministers, professors, and members of the parliament with legal backgrounds, invited several of the “unrepentant bloggers” to testify. Mohammad Ali Abtahi was on the committee and heard the testimony. He wrote a blogpost about the meeting, giving credence to the allegations of solitary confinement and torture.

Mortazavi sprang into action. He called the chair of the Constitutional Watch Committee and berated him for meeting only with the “unrepentant” bloggers. Roozbeh, Omid, and Shahram—the “repentant” bloggers—had complained about this, the prosecutor lied, and they would take their complaint to the parliament, which would be forced to form an Article 90 commission to investigate the matter. The “repentant” bloggers had a very different account of their time in prison, and the committee should meet with them, too, to hear their side, Mortazavi insisted. The committee chairman agreed to this. Without consulting his quarry, Mortazavi scheduled the meeting for the very next day, which was a Saturday.

Roozbeh got the call from Mortazavi’s office with only hours to spare. The prosecutor needed him, Omid, and Shahram to report to his office immediately, Roozbeh was told. They were going to the Constitutional Watch
Committee. At once the film unrolled in Roozbeh’s mind: Mortazavi and Keshavarz would threaten and intimidate them, then breathe down their necks while they testified, making sure they didn’t deviate from the script. Just as in the press conference, the three former prisoners would become instruments in Mortazavi’s hands, used to exonerate him of the offenses he’d committed against them and to bludgeon the bloggers who’d told the truth. Roozbeh thought fast. The lack of notice would work in his favor. He told Mortazavi’s assistant that he couldn’t make the meeting; he had work to do, he wasn’t in Tehran, today just wasn’t possible. Then he switched off his phone and called Omid from Solmaz’s.

“Meet us in Enghelab Square,” he told Omid. “I need to talk to you.”

Roozbeh told Omid about the phone call and about what he imagined Mortazavi’s plan to be. He had a plan of his own. They should avoid Mortazavi and allow him to believe he needed to reschedule their appointment with the committee. But then they should go to the committee by themselves. Without the thugs or the scripts or the threats, they could at last tell their story to people close to the president, who might listen. Roozbeh joked that while God had chosen not to help them through their reformist allies, perhaps he’d done so through Mortazavi himself.

Omid was stunned. He had already agreed to meet with a member of that committee in private, though he had not scheduled an appointment. He’d never expected that Roozbeh would come with him, let alone testify before the whole committee. What Roozbeh proposed now was a breathtaking act of courage—all the more so because his reversal would come, seemingly, from nowhere. Omid readily agreed to it. They talked frankly for what might have been the first time, acknowledging that their lives were about to change forever. At the very least, they would likely be arrested again. But there was no better way to break free and clear their names.

Roozbeh called Abtahi to confirm the meeting’s time and place. Abtahi was abrupt and rude. But yes, there would be a meeting at two o’clock at the office of the president, on Pasteur Street.

Omid, Roozbeh, and Solmaz entered the committee’s chamber at two.
Shahram could not get down from Rasht in time. Before them sat Abtahi; the minister of justice; a member of the governing committee of the parliament; an elderly ayatollah from the Assembly of Experts; and a number of legal experts.

The minister of justice was puzzled when they walked in. Mortazavi had called to say that the meeting was canceled, he told them. Roozbeh explained that they had shaken off Mortazavi to come on their own.

“We have decided to talk about things that we have never spoken about,” he said, “and we put our trust in you.”

“Wait a second,” said the minister of justice. “If you think that what you’re about to say will have negative consequences or cause you trouble, know that we can’t guarantee your safety.”

Solmaz choked back rage. These powerful men—a vice president, the minister of justice—professed powerlessness even as Roozbeh and Omid risked everything to sit before them. They lacked the courage of the young people whom Abtahi, at least, had dared to call cowards.

“I am really sorry that we are sitting in the presence of three government ministers who say such things and can’t guarantee our safety,” Roozbeh replied. “But it’s not important to us. We realize that as soon as we walk out of this building, there will be trouble.”

“Okay, okay,” said the committee chairman. “We will listen to what you have to say.”

“It’s not important to us what happens to us,” Roozbeh went on. “The only thing that is important is that you are the president’s confidants, and as long as the president knows what happened to us, that is sufficient.”

Roozbeh told his story first. Solmaz described her meetings with Mortazavi during Roozbeh’s imprisonment. They produced the recordings Solmaz had insisted Roozbeh make, proving that the interrogator had continued to harass and coerce him after he was released.

The justice minister interrupted Roozbeh impatiently. Roozbeh kept speaking of pressure. What did that even mean?

Omid asked Solmaz, the only woman present, to leave the room.

“Why are you asking us to describe the pressure?” Omid, incensed, demanded of the justice minister. “You’ve been an interrogator! You’ve been in the intelligence service for years. You’re the minister of justice! You’ve been head of the organization of the prisons. Now you’re saying you don’t know? You’re lying to us!”

He wheeled on a cleric who was falling asleep in his chair, and yelled at him to wake up. He began to reenact one of his interrogations, detailing the sexual abuse he’d suffered, beating himself, throwing papers at the head of the committee. He demanded, “Why should we pay the price because your interrogators are sexually sick? No matter that they fought in the war with Iraq. Why should we pay the price for that?”

After two hours everyone was drained and unsettled. Some of the committee members had even wept while Omid spoke. Abtahi took a picture with his cell phone, capturing Roozbeh and Omid with red-rimmed eyes. Within twenty-four hours Abtahi would publish an account of the meeting on his blog and give an interview to ISNA verifying that the “repentant” bloggers had recanted their confessions. Overnight, the collaborators would become heroes. And they had no greater advocate than Mohammad Ali Abtahi.

But before that happened, Mortazavi, knowing nothing of their visit to the committee, was quoted in yet another interview claiming them for his side. The “repentant” bloggers would set the record straight on the bloggers’ file, the prosecutor confidently explained. When Roozbeh saw that, he winced. Maybe Mortazavi really would kill them when he found out what they’d done.