Children of Paradise (47 page)

• • •

W
HEN
R
OOZBEH,
S
OLMAZ, AND
O
MID
emerged onto Pasteur Street that afternoon, they understood that there was no place safe for them to go. That week Mortazavi called everyone who knew them, leaving instructions for the three young people to turn themselves in. He sent a summons for Roozbeh to the relative who had posted his bail. He also sent Roozbeh a message reminding him that two more traffic fatalities would hardly be noticed in the city of Tehran. Shahram, in Rasht, got a warning that his
children’s lives were at risk. For twenty days Roozbeh, Solmaz, and Omid were homeless, wandering city streets by day, showing up at friends’ houses unannounced at night, staying in any one place only long enough to sleep. But the bloggers were no longer divided now: they were all unrepentant, and Roozbeh was no longer cut off from his peers.

Thanks to the Constitutional Watch Committee, Khatami had spoken to the country’s chief justice, Ayatollah Shahroudi, about the bloggers’ case. Shahroudi initially objected that Mortazavi could not possibly have done the things the bloggers alleged. But Khatami insisted that the claims needed to be investigated.

Shahroudi assigned a deputy to debrief the bloggers in secret. Under cover of night, the bloggers met this intermediary at an office not far from Evin Prison. There they spoke for five hours, presenting all the evidence they could muster, including blindfolds that they’d secreted out of prison. After the deputy made his report, Shahroudi said he would meet with the bloggers himself on December 31, 2004.

Shahram came down from Rasht. He was selected to open and close the presentation. The ayatollah had only an hour to give them, they were told, as he had a high-level meeting just after them. There in the justice’s chambers, Roozbeh told Shahroudi that until that moment he had presumed that Mortazavi, as his subordinate, acted with the chief justice’s knowledge and approval. Now he understood that the prosecutor often acted independently. But Mortazavi’s actions reflected badly on the judiciary as a whole, and Shahroudi should not allow his own reputation to be sullied by them. He told Shahroudi about the death threats, and that Mortazavi had once said to him, “I can do whatever I want! I am one quarter of this country.”

Shahroudi chuckled. “It’s a good thing he’s satisfied with just a quarter.”

The ayatollah seemed genuinely troubled, muttering
“Allahu Akbar”
from time to time when Omid detailed the sexual aspect of his interrogations. The story of the sexual confessions offended him as a man of religion. Even if the bloggers had sinned, they should not have been questioned about it, Shahroudi explained; to question a sinner about his sins was itself
a sin. He was shocked to learn of the threats against Shahram’s children. “Oh!” he exclaimed. “Are my subordinates really involved in these kinds of things?” He canceled his later meeting and talked to the bloggers for two hours instead of one. And then he got up to go perform his prayers.

Shahram stopped Shahroudi on his way out. He took the ayatollah’s hand.

“What will be the result of this session?” Shahram demanded. “When I walk out this door, there might be another one of those white cars with tinted windows waiting for me. How do I know they won’t take me again? How do I know they won’t make me write another letter, saying that everything I just told you was a lie?”

Then Shahroudi said something remarkable. “If anyone, from anywhere, calls you and summons you and says they need to discuss something with you, do not obey them or answer them,” the ayatollah instructed. “Simply tell them that your case is being handled by Hajj Agha and that they should follow up with me.

“Go live your lives,” the chief justice told the frightened young journalists, “and do not worry about these matters.”

Roozbeh, Solmaz, and Omid at last returned to their homes. The next day the judiciary announced that the bloggers’ file had been removed from the prosecutor’s office and remanded to a three-member committee for investigation. In the end, that committee would exonerate everyone but the four who’d been indicted by the prosecutor: Roozbeh, Omid, Shahram, and Javad. They would have to settle their cases in court. During the long interval while their cases remained open, the person to whom Shahroudi had assigned their file, Jamal Karimi-Rad, died in a car accident, and the file reverted to the prosecutor’s office.

But to Omid, the glass was assuredly half full. The bloggers had succeeded in removing the stigma of their false confessions from themselves and attaching it to Mortazavi instead. The public learned the truth and was broadly outraged. And for the first time in the history of his country, so far as he knew, the head of the judiciary had been forced to meet with defendants to hear claims of abuse in the prison system.

• • •

R
OOZBEH WAS FREE
, at least for the moment, but he was unemployable. Mortazavi made sure of that. No newspaper could hire him or Solmaz even as a freelancer without facing threats of being shut down. Roozbeh’s last opportunity came from a source he would never have expected before he went to prison. Mehdi Karroubi, the cleric who had been speaker of the parliament, was starting a newspaper for his moderate wing of the reform movement. Before his arrest, Roozbeh had been critical of Karroubi and sympathetic to his rivals within the reformist faction. But Solmaz had told Roozbeh of Karroubi’s help and compassion through his prison months. Now the editor of Karroubi’s forthcoming newspaper,
Etemad Melli
, hired Roozbeh to a committee that helped conceptualize the paper and build its editorial staff.
Etemad Melli
gave Roozbeh a place to channel his energies during tense and difficult months.

By June of 2005, Shahram and Omid had both quietly left Iran. Omid told Roozbeh he was off to work on a project in a provincial city. Instead, as the only one of the three with international connections, he made his way to the United States by way of Istanbul.

Shahram just told Roozbeh he was going away. He didn’t have a passport. He placed his life in the hands of smugglers, reaching Canada by way of Turkey, with its squalid and anxious refugee towns near the Iranian border; by way of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, where the application process could—did—take years. It was the way out of Iran for those who had no way out of Iran. In due time, his three children would come to speak English, maybe even to think of themselves as Canadian. Shahram and Bita were made of other elements.

On the outskirts of Toronto, Shahram wrote poetry, as he had always done. He also wrote for his weblog, and for Persian-language websites based in Europe, about who in Iran had been arrested and who had been killed; about a university professor who raped a student; about the time the police killed eighteen women in Khuzestan. There was nothing natural about this existence. Sometimes Shahram imagined it was the water that
had followed him. When he opened the faucet to fill a glass in Canada, the water that came out was Iranian. He drank of it, secreted it. Other times he imagined himself as a balloon expanding over a fire, the warm air inside him originating abroad. He bobbed through cool Toronto streets where people worked or relaxed or lived simply for themselves, and soon enough he would explode.

Roozbeh remained in Iran for another year, until August 2006. He would later say that the person he’d been before prison was dead: a new Roozbeh had taken his place. Sometimes the new Roozbeh still worried Solmaz. The torturers had dimmed a light in him and ferried his spirit even further from the surface of his skin. But Roozbeh had thought about a lot of things in prison, too. He had learned that the country’s judiciary was as complex and factionalized as its other branches of government; that it housed men of conscience cheek by jowl with the psychopaths and power mad. The same was true of the intelligence apparatus. He still believed that the key to Iran’s future was an honest reckoning with its past. He took reformists to task for their avoidance of that discussion.

Roozbeh had no illusions about Khatami by the end of the president’s second term. He believed that when Khatami had asked Ayatollah Shahroudi to look into the bloggers’ file, he’d done so because others around him had forced his hand. Shahroudi, by contrast, had been genuinely troubled by their story and moved to make it right. But if anything, this made the case for reform even stronger. It was not the person of the president who could bring justice to bear. It was the system itself, if only its ranks were populated by people with open minds. That kind of evolution—painstaking, irresistible, psychological as much as political—had to come from the society.

If Roozbeh had been able to work in his chosen field, he might have stayed in Iran, even knowing that sentencing still awaited him. But penury combined with repression drove him and Solmaz first to France and then to the United States. The last person they saw before leaving Tehran was their old friend Abbas Amirentezam.

In February 2009, the Tehran court at last handed down sentences on
some of the bloggers’ charges. For Shahram, nine months in prison and twenty lashes. For Omid, two years, ninety-one days and ten lashes. For Roozbeh, two years and eighty-four lashes. A couple of years later, an appeals court would drop all the charges against them. But by then it was far too late. Even before they were sentenced, all of them had gone.

  THIRTEEN  

P
OSTMORTEM

By criticizing our theories we can let our theories die in our stead.

—
K
ARL
P
OPPER,
The Myth of the Framework

Apart from our ideas we are flesh, we are like any other animal, any other plant. Isn’t it the case?

—
A
BDOLKARIM
S
OROUSH,
2008 interview

O
N
D
ECEMBER 6, 2004,
President Mohammad Khatami and his security detail squeezed through the crowded halls of the Faculty of Technology building at the University of Tehran. The students had long anticipated the president’s visit on this day, celebrated annually as Student Day to commemorate a university uprising that the shah violently crushed in the early 1950s. Some students greeted the official entourage by singing the anthem of the student movement; others sang the national anthem of Iran. But the television cameras that followed the official delegation to the ceremonial hall captured a different sentiment. Students held up handwritten placards to the camera lenses:

“Khatami! What happened to freedom of expression?”

“The Iranian nation detests despotism!”

“After eight years, students want a response.”

“We will stand like a candle that is not afraid of fire.”

The ceremonial hall was too small. Students thronged the corridor outside, yelling and pounding against the door until their hands bled. The president’s security squad beat them back. Inside the hall, student leaders rose one after another to denounce the president when he had finished speaking. Khatami had failed to make good on his promised reforms. He’d allowed the regime to shut down newspapers and suppress student protests with violence.

“Mr. Khatami!” exclaimed another student speaker. “Was it necessary for us to endeavor for eight years only to learn that the root of our problems lies in the fact that our spirit has been crushed by despotism?” A young woman rose to protest the exclusion from the room of many students who had waited there since dawn; one of the security guards in the corridor, she added, had “hurled an insult at me that I will never forget for as long as I live.”

Khatami would later say that the humiliating scene was simply evidence of how far Iran had come from the violent repression that had followed the Islamic Revolution in 1979: the students at the gathering felt safe criticizing their president to his face, surely something that had not been true under the Rafsanjani administration before him. But that day at the University of Tehran, there was a nearly palpable sense that, for better or for worse, something was coming undone, and the president stood by helplessly, watching and reasoning with chaos.

There, amid the waving placards and the accusatory slogans—“Khatami, you turned your back on us!” and “Khatami, give us back our votes! Khatami, guilty of treason, treason!” the students chanted—the president did what it seemed he always did: too little, too late. He calmly explained that the auditorium was too small. He told the students to “behave, listen, and tolerate.” And at long last, as the cries mounted outside the hall and the chanting inside drowned out all other discussion, he called out to his security team.

“Gentlemen!” he admonished weakly. “Please hurry up and stop the beating of students.”