Children of Paradise (60 page)

“We’re here because of
you
,” one of the activists told the policewomen, “because of your daughters, your nieces. You should support us.”

The police and their detainees erupted in discussion. Some of the policewomen confided that they did support the women’s activism and regretted detaining them; others barked at the sympathizers to shut up. The detainees were moved to Evin Prison, and all discussion came to an end.

Asieh could see, from the bottom of her blindfold, that her interrogator had a thick file in his hands. On top she thought she saw printouts from her
blog. The interrogator complained one day that her incarceration had attracted a lot of news coverage. What could she say? Asieh tossed off; she and her colleagues were important. But from the tone and the line of his questioning, she understood something else. She wasn’t supposed to be in prison just yet. The security forces had meant to keep her and the other women activists under surveillance, to track their network and their activities and spring the trap later on. But the protest outside the courtroom was a provocation, and now here she was.

Her interrogator knew that the activists planned a women’s rights demonstration in front of the parliament for the following week. Asieh should cancel it, he instructed her. But she couldn’t do that from prison, she pointed out. She’d be out in time, he told her. And she was. Asieh and most of the other prisoners were released five days after their arrest. Only two remained in prison, and they were Asieh’s two partners in the Stop Stoning Forever campaign.

All the released women were under the same instructions: to cancel the demonstration. But if they did so, there was a good chance not everyone would hear in time. The women who showed up would be vulnerable to brutal reprisals, and the organizers would be responsible. But if they didn’t call it off, Asieh was certain her friends would suffer in prison.

Asieh came up with a plan. They should call the demonstration off. But then they should go to the parliament at the appointed time, ostensibly in order to tell anyone who mistakenly showed up to go home. They were there, they told the security forces ingenuously, to cancel the demonstration. The security forces beat them with batons. Asieh took pictures of a fellow activist’s foot, black with bruises.

The remaining two prisoners were released on March 15. One posted $220,000 bail; the other, $280,000. Organizations each of them ran had been shut down. But not the Stop Stoning Forever campaign.

Their work, they understood, was closely monitored now. So were their lives. Asieh knew her phones were tapped and her comings and goings watched. One day a stranger dropped in on one of Asieh’s neighbors. He
said he was researching an accident report for insurance purposes. He asked the neighbor about all the families in the building and their cars. He left but some minutes later rang the neighbor’s bell again. Through the intercom he said, “I forgot to ask you about Mrs. Amini’s car. Which one is hers?”

The neighbor had never given Asieh’s name. And everyone in the building knew her by her married name, as Mrs. Montazeri.

• • •

O
NE EVENING
, Asieh found herself at home alone. Ava was at a friend’s house; Javad was working. The apartment was dark. Suddenly Asieh felt that she couldn’t breathe. She had an overwhelming urge to weep, but she couldn’t make a sound. She thought she might die. She took a shower. And then she checked her e-mail. She found a nice note from a journalist friend in exile. For some reason, it unlocked her. She sobbed so violently and long that her neighbors came to check on her. She’d lost a relative, she lied.

Her e-mail was flooded now with terrible stories from far-flung towns, from relatives and lawyers of the condemned who had no recourse and had heard of Asieh’s work. Three men in Semnan province, she was told, were to be executed. She referred the case to another activist group. But one morning at five, it was Asieh their lawyer called, to say that the men were about to be hanged. Asieh’s hand was paralyzed in that moment. She couldn’t move it. She observed her body as though from without. The moment passed. Then she went to see Delara’s mother in Rasht. On her return she felt her body quake, as though feverish, in the night. This happened once a week now. She had fevers she could not explain. She figured they were viruses. She took pills, but still the shivering returned.

There was trouble within the campaign. Asieh’s partners flew at a higher altitude than she did: they were more internationally connected and preoccupied at times with matters of theoretical framing that seemed to Asieh a distraction. There were divisions and disagreements among them even as their caseload grew. Asieh was on the phone one afternoon, in a tense discussion with one of her partners, when she fell. The phone dropped. She wasn’t asleep. She could hear the room around her. But she couldn’t move. For an hour or two she lay there.

Headaches came: immense, pulverizing headaches that responded to no pill, no therapy. Asieh’s partners were not returning her calls or e-mails. There was work to be done, desperate people who depended on them. Finally Asieh went to see a neurologist. She’d had some kind of nervous shock, he surmised. There was nothing to do but rest. Every day and every night the shivering convulsed her body, a fever she could not shake. And then one day she couldn’t move her eyes, her shoulders, her neck. She went to the hospital.

For a week, Asieh was tested for everything from meningitis to AIDS to malaria. She had an MRI, a spinal tap. Everything came back normal. But the pain in her head and now her eyes was unendurable. She felt as though her eyes would leave her skull. But the hospital could not admit her, because according to her test results she was healthy. Maybe she should see an eye doctor, one of the emergency room doctors suggested. She left in a fury of disbelief. And the next morning she woke up blind.

Two red bulbs had replaced her eyes, as though her eyelids had turned inside out and swelled to the size of grapes. She visited a very famous professor of ophthalmology, who told her she had no problem. She was crazed with frustration. How could she be blind, she demanded, and have an eye doctor tell her she was normal?

“My daughter,” the professor said, “I can see your eyes. But the problem is not with your eyes.”

Asieh went now to the top neurologist in Tehran. He confirmed what the first neurologist had said. A psychological trigger had sent her body into shock, and this had set off an earthquake in her nervous system. Her syndrome was extremely rare. Maybe one in a million bodies would respond as Asieh’s had to extreme stress. But when he understood the nature of Asieh’s work, he became convinced of his diagnosis. He prescribed her high doses of cortisone to relieve the swelling. The drugs blurred her memory and dulled her mind. Sometimes when she left home, she couldn’t find her way back.

Asieh, fogged and enervated, had a bad feeling about the campaign. She could not get through to Shadi. But she reached the campaign’s contact person in Montreal, at an international organization under whose umbrella the campaign had recently decided to work. The woman told her to relax. No one would do anything without her.

But something drastic had already been done. While Asieh was sick, her colleagues had dissolved the Iranian campaign entirely into the Montreal-based contact’s organization. Like that, everything Asieh had built disappeared. She would never know why or by whose hand.

As she convalesced, Asieh was summoned for questioning by the intelligence ministry. Her interrogator knew the campaign well. Intelligence agents had broken into its offices and searched her files. Her interrogator asked after her health, specifically her eyes, as if to let her know he knew all about that, too. Even her body, it seemed to Asieh, was subject to malevolent scrutiny. But most of all, they wanted to know about that network of civil society activists she had helped forge in the office of Shirin Ebadi.

• • •

L
ONG, DARK MONTHS HURTLED DOWN ON HER.
Asieh had lost her campaign, her vocation, her friends—even, it seemed at times, her body and mind. The latter two were the first to return to her. The swelling in her eyes receded. By March 2009, Asieh was well enough to travel to New York to give a speech about juvenile execution before a group affiliated with the United Nations. But when she thought of the families of the condemned who had placed dim and fragile hopes in her, and she knew no way to explain to them the collapse of the campaign, she became depressed.

Asieh wrote poems to her interrogator: “How many times have I asked you / ‘Don’t come to my dreams with a gun.’” And she wrote a moving letter to an expatriate friend in the United States about the need for human rights workers to have training, counseling, and periods of rest she’d never thought to carve out. The friend published a translation of Asieh’s letter on an English-language website called Iranian.com, and she included photographs of Asieh’s eyes, squeezed into their sockets by the shocking red protuberances that looked like nothing any of Asieh’s doctors had ever seen.

Were human rights workers in other countries better prepared, better trained? Asieh didn’t know. But she couldn’t imagine circumstances more chaotic than those that prevailed in Iran. She had become deeply enmeshed with the subjects of her research, she reflected in her letter. Delara, Atefah, and others peopled her dreams. She had sat alongside mothers at the scaffolds of their sons. She had no models, no mentors, no handbook to follow that might have cautioned her to keep her distance or flagged the signs of her coming collapse.

“The truth is that we work on a remote island,” she wrote. “We are alone. I realized this while I was staring at the ceiling for two months with painful eyes.”

  SIXTEEN  

T
HE
E
PIC OF
D
IRT AND
D
UST

The destiny of each generation must be in its own hands.

—
A
YATOLLAH
R
UHOLLAH
K
HOMEINI,
February 2, 1979

A
T THE END OF
M
AY 2009,
Tehran exploded with a strange, political nightlife. Its color was green, for the candidacy of Mir Hossein Mousavi, and its eruption was a surprise to anyone who’d watched cynicism set in with reformist voters since Khatami’s time. What came to be called the Green Wave could not be explained, at first, as a groundswell for the uncharismatic, backward-looking candidate that Mousavi was when he entered the race. Nor was it a sudden resurgence of investment in the vision the reformist intellectuals had once set forth. Rather, it was a groundswell against Ahmadinejad, its fuel as much anger as hope.

Mousavi was at first an unlikely vehicle for that anger. Those who were drawn in 2005 to Ahmadinejad’s asceticism and old-school revolutionary rhetoric knew Mousavi as the real thing—a font of Islamic Left ideology and a religious ascetic without Ahmadinejad’s eclecticism and showmanship. Only as he absorbed the demands of his burgeoning support base after the debates did Mousavi come to stand for other values, including
civil rights and freedoms and, above all, the rule of law. He did not speak of “political development” or “civil society.” He was not nearly as progressive, intellectually, as Khatami had been. But his campaign speeches railed against official lies, crookedness, and favoritism, and against what Mousavi described as the president’s lack of respect for the rights of those outside his own circle. Iran’s martyrs had not died for this.

Much later, Mousavi would say of the color green that his supporters had chosen it, and he had fallen in behind them. This statement—“I followed you”—would affix itself to the former prime minister. Most everyone would forget that he did not say it in reference to the Green Movement itself. He might as well have. For by dint of little more than character and happenstance, Mousavi was all but conscripted to travel a road well beyond the fallow fields Khatami once plowed.

• • •

A
SIEH AND
J
AVAD WENT
into the streets of Tehran before midnight and stayed there until after dawn. Crowds of people in green danced, linked arms, and loosed a wild happiness that was alien to those streets. They traded poems, and jokes upon jokes about Ahmadinejad. They debated, almost civilly, with Basijis who ventured into the green crowds to press the case for Ahmadinejad. For all the world, it looked like the germ of democracy. Asieh was concerned, she confided to Javad. Things were not normal.

On June 8, Mousavi supporters, organized by Setad 88, planned to form a human chain eighty-eight kilometers long, with links in cities throughout the country. They would stand single file, each holding fifty centimeters of green ribbon upraised as a symbol. In Tehran, the chain would stretch the length of Valiasr, Tehran’s longest boulevard, from Tajrish Square in the north to Rah Ahan Square in the south. In the area near Fatemi Square, by the interior ministry, so many people showed up that no cars could pass. Asieh, who brought Ava into the streets that day, was stunned. She’d never expected to see such an outpouring for Mousavi.