Children of Paradise (57 page)

On the streets of Neka, men told Asieh that Atefah Sahaaleh was not a good girl. She sold her body, one man explained; a lady like Asieh shouldn’t pursue such a story. Asieh wheeled on him. Could he really speak of killing a girl in the name of respecting her body? And who was he to tell Asieh what she should do? Another man told Asieh that Atefah had a psychological disorder.

At length Asieh found a small wooden gate that stood open. Over it hung black clothing and placards of mourning. This must be Atefah’s family’s home. It was half built and derelict. A young man appeared to have passed out on a flight of stairs within, his eyes half lidded and rolled back, drool pooling on his chin, flies swarming his face.

“Mister? Mister?” Asieh called out fearfully. “Are you okay?”

“Who are you?” someone asked her from behind. Asieh spun around. A muscle-bound young man regarded her warily.

“I’m a journalist,” she replied.

“You came too late,” said the young man, who turned out to be Atefah’s cousin. “We lost her.”

Over the days that followed, Asieh located the girl’s living relatives and pieced together her story. Atefah was five when her mother left her father for another man, then died in a car accident. The father, heartbroken, turned to drugs and neglected his children. One of Atefah’s brothers
drowned in a river. Another became a drug addict. Atefah, eight years old, went to live with her grandparents, who were too old and poor to care for her.

When she was nine, a neighbor raped her. He paid her money for her silence. Then he came back, again and again. He brought other men to her. She was repeatedly raped, and given money to tell no one. That money was her subsistence. When she was thirteen, the Revolutionary Guards arrested her for the first time. Judge Haji Razaei sentenced her to a hundred lashes—the punishment for sexual crimes. Under the Iranian penal code, a woman could be sentenced to a hundred lashes three times. On the fourth arrest, she would be executed.

Asieh had never known about these laws. She lived in a world where they were never applied. Everyone had sex outside of marriage. The whole society was guilty. Why should anyone be hanged? Why, especially, a sixteen-year-old girl with mental problems and a childhood lost to the neglect, depravity, and violence of others? The girl was definitely sixteen: Asieh found her identity card. International law forbade the execution of minors under eighteen, regardless of the fact that the Iranian penal code made the age of criminal responsibility nine for girls and fifteen for boys. And so far as Asieh could ascertain, Atefah had been arrested only twice, not three times, before being sentenced to death.

Judge Haji Razaei in Neka had wanted Atefah dead, Asieh imagined. He’d placed the noose around the child’s neck himself before she was hoisted on a crane in the town square. This was the typical Iranian execution method, which took longer and caused more pain than a trapdoor hanging. He’d falsified her age in order to circumvent the law. Had he raped her himself? Some reports suggested that Atefah had ripped off her hijab in the courtroom in an act of rage, and Razaei was determined to punish her for her backtalk. Asieh would never know. But something was wrong, and it wouldn’t let her go.

Asieh had covered earthquakes, demonstrations, the rumors of war. But nothing would seize her the way that Atefah did. Was she a sister, an alter ego, a daughter Asieh might have had, or never had, in her life of relative
privilege and safety, of literature and ambition, a life that had begun so close to where Atefah had suffered and died? Atefah was, maybe, all those things. She was the restless spirit of injustice done, a wrong Asieh could never right, although she would devote much of her life—and even her poetry—to Atefah, in ways no one had bothered to while the girl lived. Forever after, Asieh spoke of Atefah tenderly, by her first name, as of an intimate friend. Asieh would say that Atefah changed her life.

Back in Tehran, Asieh went over and over the notes and documents she’d gathered in Neka: Atefah’s identity card, interviews with the father and aunts, even report cards from the brief time Atefah spent in school. But Asieh couldn’t write and she couldn’t sleep. Every time she’d try to set the story to the page, she cried until morning. When at last she pulled the report together, her newspaper wouldn’t publish it.

“Why not?” Asieh demanded. “I have all the documents.”

“Because you’re fighting with sharia law,” her editor in chief replied. “You’re fighting the judiciary, and we can’t do that.”

Asieh sent the report to another newspaper, which also declined it. Finally,
Zanan
magazine, a women’s publication that had long shared space and traded ideas with
Kiyan
, agreed to publish an edited version of Asieh’s piece.

Asieh couldn’t return to the life she had lived before Atefah. She found herself wondering how many other girls were in prison, awaiting execution for sexual crimes. She had a friend, Shadi Sadr, who was a human rights lawyer. Asieh brought Atefah’s father and brother to Tehran to meet with her. Surely they could press charges against Judge Haji Razaei for hanging a juvenile. But Razaei, as a clergyman, would have to be tried by the Special Court of the Clergy. When Shadi brought the case there, the Special Court’s chief justice, the ultra-hardline Gholam-Hossein Mohseni-Ejei, ordered the case permanently closed and sealed.

• • •

S
CANT DAYS AFTER PUBLISHING
her report on Atefah, Asieh heard about another girl sentenced to death. The city was Arak, southwest of
Tehran, and the girl was nineteen-year-old Leyla Mafi, developmentally delayed with a mental age of eight. She, too, had been sentenced to death on account of offenses against chastity. And she, too, was a victim of child rape. Asieh heard about the case at nine at night. By four a.m. she was on a bus bound for Arak. This time she was not too late. Leyla was still alive and in prison.

Leyla had been a child—some sources said eight, others five—when her mother first prostituted her, to a sixty-year-old man. From then on her mother and brother prostituted her every day, living off the money. Leyla gave birth for the first time at the age of nine, and again, to twins, at fourteen. At ten, after the first baby, she received her first hundred lashes for prostitution. By the time she was sentenced to death at nineteen—for incest, among other things, because her brothers were among the many townsmen who had raped her—she couldn’t talk, care for herself, or live as a normal person in any way.

At the courthouse, the judge who had sentenced Leyla to death was polite and respectful, sending everyone out of the room so he could speak with the journalist from Tehran. The law, he told Asieh, was the law. It was his job simply to apply it. And the law looked darkly on Leyla because her sexual availability was destructive to family life. If society were an apple, the judge explained to Asieh, Leyla Mafi would be a worm.

“Do you have children?” Asieh demanded.

“Yes,” said the judge.

“Boys? Girls?”

“Both,” said the judge.

“My daughter is four years old,” said Asieh. “In three or four years, somebody could rape her, and you would sentence her as a worm for society. How is that possible? What do you make of that?”

“I sentenced Leyla Mafi at nineteen, not at eight,” the judge replied.

Sure, said Asieh, but from eight to nineteen, the girl had been enslaved; she had known no other life.

Asieh had with her a retainer from Shadi Sadr’s office. What she wanted more than anything was to visit Leyla in prison and get her signature on
that form. Then Leyla would have a lawyer, and a fighting chance. Asieh spent an hour with the judge, interviewing him and arguing with him. He should let Asieh take Leyla away and remake her life, she pressed him. Then he could judge whether or not Leyla was good for society.

The judge laughed. “Go,” he said finally, dismissively. “Go and see what you want to see.” He wrote a note to the prison ordering the wardens to admit Asieh as a visitor to Leyla Mafi.

Asieh was elated. She would do for Leyla everything she hadn’t managed to do for Atefah. The wardens took the judge’s note. But they didn’t read it carefully. They assumed that Asieh was Leyla’s lawyer. And so they brought the condemned girl before Asieh: a tall, beautiful young woman with the affect of a baby, a woman who could not speak or read or write, and who looked at Asieh in simple confusion.

Asieh put her arms around Leyla and spoke quietly in her ear.

“I am your sister,” said Asieh. “I want to help you. Your situation is not good. You have to trust me. And I promise you that I will help you.”

She took out Shadi Sadr’s retainer: “I just need you to sign this.”

But Leyla could not sign her name. So Asieh painted Leyla’s finger with ink and stamped it on the signature line. A guard exploded in anger. Asieh had lied to them. The guard understood now that Asieh was not Leyla’s lawyer—that Leyla had not had a lawyer until the moment Asieh stamped her finger on the form.

“This girl is sentenced to death!” the guard exploded. “She will be executed very soon. You can’t do this. Get out of here!”

Asieh didn’t care. It was done. Back in Tehran she told Shadi to go to Arak and see her new client. Asieh published an account of Leyla’s case in
Zanan
, and it landed like a bomb. Her e-mail box lit up with well-wishers wondering what they could do for Leyla Mafi. Push for the girl’s retrial and release, Asieh replied. The prison officials filed charges against Asieh, who had not known that it was illegal for her to bring a lawyer’s retainer into the prison. But because it was the judge himself who’d signed the note granting her entry, he ordered the charges dropped.

Leyla’s story became known not only within Iran but internationally,
with press reports that started with Iranian journalists and bloggers abroad and ricocheted through the international media and human rights organizations. When President Khatami paid a state visit to Norway, the prime minister, who had read about Leyla Mafi in the Norwegian papers, raised the matter with the Iranian president. In due time Leyla had a second trial with a younger, more sympathetic judge.

Asieh was there, pacing outside the courtroom door while the judge deliberated.

“Relax,” the judge popped out and told her. “She’ll be free.”

But Asieh was worried, she told the judge. Just to be free would not be enough for Leyla. If her family forced her back into the sex trade, there would be nothing Asieh or anyone else could do for her.

“I can have her sent to Tehran as her punishment,” the judge offered. “But then what will you do?”

“Just do it,” Asieh said. And he did.

Asieh and Shadi found an organization for indigent young women that took Leyla into its care. They raised money to support Leyla’s needs, which included a nanny, for she could not care for herself; a psychologist to help heal her lifelong trauma; and a private tutor who taught her to read and write and to pass the equivalent of fifth grade. Asieh brought Leyla to her own home as often as she could, so that she could play with Ava and experience family life. Leyla’s psychologists told Asieh that the girl’s exposure to Javad was especially important, as she lacked any normal experiences interacting with men.

“You’re like a mother to me,” Leyla told Asieh once. “You should find me a husband.”

Asieh filmed Leyla often. When she had enough of these clips, she planned to edit them together to send to Leyla’s first judge, with a question: Was Leyla good for society now?

• • •

A
YOUNG WOMAN IN
Q
AZVIN
faced the death penalty for murdering a man whom she claimed was trying to rape her. Again Asieh found the
judge to be a decent man. But the young woman had not convinced him that she’d acted in self-defense. There was, under Iranian law, an alternative to the death penalty in such cases:
diyeh
—blood money—paid by the accused to the family of the victim. The girl in Qazvin could never afford the man’s
diyeh
. So Asieh published a plea on the women’s news website and on a weblog she had started to keep. In less than fifteen minutes, she raised the money to buy the Qazvin girl’s life. She rented a car with two friends. They drove to the victim’s family’s home in the mountains outside Hamadan with a box of candy and a check.

Asieh was changing. She was still the high-powered newspaper editor, running sixteen pages of
Etemad
daily now, and still a poet. She was also becoming something else: someone possessed by the stories of underage prisoners on death row, of impoverished young women convicted of crimes against chastity, lives rendered cheap before they began. All the paradox of her country, in its decency and its cruelty, lay upon her conscience. Colleagues reproved her. She couldn’t be a journalist and an activist at once, and these were death penalty cases, lost causes, not worth her reportorial time. Asieh knew only that she had work to do. If she, as a journalist, had not known about these laws or their enforcement, what might she owe to the better education of her 70 million countrymen?

At the beginning of Khatami’s first term, Asieh had fought with her old professor, Hadi Khaniki, then a presidential spokesman, about civil society. He spoke of it as of a program that could be instated from above. Asieh protested that, by definition, civil society should come from the people, not the government. The argument grew heated. Asieh told Khaniki that he no longer spoke to her as her sociology professor but as the occupant of the chair he sat in, which happened to belong to a government office. Khaniki sent her away and cut their ties. Now, years later, she saw him at a meeting. The very best things in civil society, he conceded publicly, were those done by people like her.

But Asieh didn’t know where President Khatami and the reformists stood on the issues that mattered to her. Given the choice, she preferred to work with reformists rather than their rivals. But she neither trusted nor
expected to trust politicians. When Shirin Ebadi, the human rights lawyer, won the Nobel Prize for Peace in 2003, President Khatami’s comments belittled Ebadi’s achievement. Iran could be proud of a Nobel Prize in science or literature, he said, but the prize for peace was not important. Asieh replied in a column arguing that Ebadi’s recognition honored the nation.