Children of Paradise (68 page)

Tajzadeh repented now, on behalf of the reformists, for failing to defend the first persecuted dissident cleric and for failing to take a strong, early stand for human rights. If, Tajzadeh wrote, “we are to confess and ask for forgiveness, which we must, we must apologize for the wrong treatment that Bazargan . . . received; and also apologize to all those political activists who wanted to be legally active in politics, but their rights were ignored by making various excuses. We must apologize to the citizens for imposing on them a certain lifestyle and interfering in their private lives.”

Those who, like Tajzadeh, now found themselves subject to the violent persuasion of prison interrogators had a duty to expose and condemn their torturers. But they should begin, he said, by asking “for forgiveness from those who were truly oppressed, and accepting the fact that if we had fulfilled our moral and national duty at the right time, we would not have been trapped in the forced confession and repenting.”

In his letter Tajzadeh spoke not to the Revolutionary Court that demanded his contrition, but to the younger generation of Iranians who had waited, so far in vain, for a revolutionary of his stature to take responsibility for the system he’d helped forge. Tajzadeh broke his generation’s “consenting silence.” To the empty symbolics of confession, he appended the meaning of the history he had lived.

• • •

T
HROUGHOUT THE FALL OF 2009,
demonstrators used official gatherings for cover. They would never get permission for protests of their own, but when the regime marked al-Quds Day, or the anniversary of the American embassy seizure, or Student Day, some of the hardiest Greens lifted their heads, usually to have them smacked down.

The Mourning Mothers met every Saturday at Laleh Park, which was the park nearest where Neda was shot, at the hour when Neda was killed. They dressed in black and carried photos of the slain demonstrators,
speaking about the dead to passersby. The police confronted them so aggressively, even beating seventy-year-old women who participated, that the group drew more media attention than it ever anticipated.

Aida Saadat was summoned for interrogation one day and questioned for fourteen hours. She was banned from leaving the country; she was banned from leaving the city; she was all but banned from using her car. She was forced to stop working and had already stopped going home: for a month she’d stayed with friends. Walking back to her friend’s apartment from the intelligence ministry late that night, Aida was jumped by baton-wielding men who beat her face, hands, and foot bloody and told her that next time they would kill her.

She could see where she was headed, like the others before her whose families struggled to put up bail with the deeds to their homes, whose networks and secrets lay open to their interrogators unless they put up a terrible resistance. Was she someone who could resist like that? Most people weren’t.

Aida had a child, an eleven-year-old son who now fielded calls from security agents looking for his mother. She felt everything she’d worked for, all her years in Qazvin, receding beyond her reach: the impossibly long days at multiple jobs, driving perilous roads late at night, building her country. She’d linked poor rural families with psychologists to break cycles of abuse and violence. She’d set up a free day care center to keep the children of working parents from neglect. She stopped an honor killing once. Now, in Tehran, she’d helped organize the Mourning Mothers and publicize the post-election abuses. She was the link between Karroubi and some of the early rape allegations. She was a member of one of the country’s most secretive and fierce human rights organizations, the Committee of Human Rights Reporters, which smuggled information about political prisoners out of the jails. She knew things, and she imagined the damage that information could do when it was wrested from her.

Her passport had expired. She couldn’t apply for a new one while she was banned from leaving the country. But there were smugglers known to lead people illegally across the Turkish border. December was very cold in the mountains that divided Turkey from Iran. Chances were fifty-fifty that
she would pass safely or that she would be arrested or freeze to death, the smugglers told Aida.

There was no time to hesitate or to nurse her fears. She had no time, even, to go home to pack a bag. She took as many warm things as her friend could give her, bought a bus ticket to Orumiyeh in the far northwest of Iranian Azerbaijan, and stopped in Qazvin to say good-bye to her parents in the night.

“Don’t do this,” her father implored her. He’d been to those mountains and knew how frigid they were in winter.

“This is the only way,” Aida told him. “I can’t take a plane, I can’t take a bus. I can’t even go legally because I don’t have a passport. This is the only way.”

Aida was the only woman on the smuggling route. She had given herself into the care of dangerous men, people she would normally have been afraid even to speak to. The other refugees in their hands were also men, mainly Afghans and Pakistanis. Aida feared for her life and she feared assault. She clutched her hijab closely around her and kept apart from the others. The only ones she talked to were an Afghan man and his young son, Abdollah, who reminded Aida of her own child. She helped care for Abdollah, and the father wept to her about his late wife, who had died in a suicide bombing. His suffering reminded Aida that her own was nothing in the greater scheme. She would manage.

Abdollah’s father watched over her, but when he slept, and she, too, was expected to sleep in a small room with all those men, she was afraid to close her eyes. She felt herself stiffen with every move, every audible breath among the rugged strangers, until she couldn’t stand it anymore, and she left. She sat outside in a cold that seemed to freeze her very blood. And in the morning she and the Afghan and Pakistani men had to scurry like animals, ducking to hide behind bushes and hillocks, at an altitude that crushed the breath from Aida’s lungs.

She couldn’t go on. She sat gasping on the ground, and a smuggler came to stand over her.

“You are putting the rest of our lives in danger because you can’t take
it?” he demanded. “You can’t tolerate it? You can’t breathe? I could simply leave you right here and you’ll be killed by animals. Are you coming or staying? Make a decision now.”

Aida couldn’t stand up. An Afghan went to her, took her bag and her hand, and helped her to join the others. After almost half an hour, they were near the border. The smugglers had paid off a border guard. There were two groups of refugees. Aida’s was in front. The boy, Abdollah, and his father were in the one behind hers. A river lay before them. Aida was not a swimmer; she feared the water. Now she couldn’t hesitate. They would walk across, on a winter night. It was not so bad while she was submerged. But when she reached the shore and stepped out into the frigid air, she might have taken a knife to her skin.

The smugglers had made a mistake. The first group was paid off to cross the border; the second group was not. The border guards shouted at the second group of refugees to stop. Then they started shooting. Aida was only a short distance away when she saw Abdollah fall. She was on Turkish territory, frozen in wet clothes, and she could not move or even cry until later that night, when she couldn’t do anything else.

• • •

P
EOPLE
A
SIEH
A
MINI KNEW
were disappearing. Often they were arrested in the middle of the night, spirited off to prison for unknown terms. Asieh had visions of her own midnight arrest, before the terrified eyes of nine-year-old Ava. Sometimes she felt that she was waiting for this. She was back in touch with Shadi Sadr, who told her it was obvious which pseudonyms were Asieh’s on Roozonline. Anyone who knew her style of writing could figure it out. Surely someone in the intelligence ministry had an eye as keen as Shadi’s.

When she saw the show trials and forced confessions on television, Asieh cried. Her friend, the journalist and filmmaker Maziar Bahari, was gaunt. He seemed a broken man, hardly recognizable. Mohammad Ali Abtahi was a specter. If these people had broken in prison, what would happen to her?

Early one Friday morning, Asieh’s doorbell rang. It was a colleague of Javad’s. She had been arrested at a small demonstration in Valiasr Square and released from prison two days earlier. Thirty-six women were held in her cell, she said, and half of them had been interrogated about Asieh Amini. Asieh should leave her house, the woman insisted. She should probably leave the country.

Before the election, Asieh had been invited to a poetry festival in Sweden. She responded to the Swedish ambassador now. She would go to the festival, she told him, but she needed to bring her daughter. At the airport, she left her cell phone open, connected on a call to Javad, so that he could listen and know if she was stopped. But she got through.

Every day, Javad told Asieh when she spoke with him from Sweden, things were getting worse. The defendant in one of her cases, Behnoud Shojaie, seventeen when he killed another man in a fight, was executed. Their friends in prison had been swallowed into the system; there was nothing anyone could do for them. When Maziar Bahari was released, he sent Asieh a short note: Don’t come back, it said. She understood that he’d been forced to speak about her in prison.

Everything Asieh was and everything she did was in one or another way tied to her country—its complexities, its language, its terrors, and its splendors. She was not an engineer, with skills transferable anywhere in the world. She would carry, always, a weight of work unfinished, a sense of being needed in a place where she couldn’t live. On cell walls in the women’s section of Evin, she was told, prisoners had etched lines from her poems.

Asieh was one of the lucky ones. Through a program for writers at risk, she landed in Trondheim, Norway, as the poet in residence at the public library. Javad joined her and Ava there. She published two books of poetry and started work on a memoir, studied Norwegian, and regarded her new compatriots with a warm and gentle quizzicality. The landscape, in its jagged immensity and its brilliant blues and greens, its rock-faced coast and glassy fjord, reminded her and Javad of Mazandaran. In Trondheim in summer, the sun never set, and in winter it never rose. The light had a broad, flat quality, and life, an element of unreality. Even the airport highway cut through spectacular, unspoiled scenes of undulating land and saturated color. Off the road to Asieh’s apartment building was a recreational sight of singular frivolity: beach volleyball courts. As though the world were such a place, and Asieh such a person as to live in it. For now, she was.

E
PILOGUE

I
LAST VISITED
I
RAN
at a dark time, in February 2012. Almost three years had passed since the Green Movement was subdued, and the hard-liners who’d consolidated power called reform by a new name:
fetneh
, or “the sedition.” Some reformists were still in prison. Others had retreated into private life, at least for the moment, their movement now beyond the pale of legitimate, even legal, opposition. Young people who had once found an outlet for their civic energies and their grievances in the reform movement now faced largely unpalatable options—among them, acquiescence, apathy, or outright defiance of a state that would not tolerate it.

In my past experience, Iran’s repressive apparatus had the presence of a snake coiled out of view. You trod a bland, well-tended path through a landscape of surpassing beauty, knowing that if you set foot off the trail, you risked disturbing something hostile and watchful you couldn’t see. In 2012 the menace was in the open, the subject of jokes and cynical asides even among compliant bureaucrats. Iranian analysts spoke of the “securitization” of the state. There was a measure of relief in this—an end to the gaslight, a new clarity about where the lines were drawn. But of course it was also grim. Those lines seemed to encircle an ever narrower realm of elite opinion as the only permissible arena for debate.

And yet, debate there was. One of the delicious paradoxes of the Islamic Republic is its seemingly endless capacity to produce internal opposition to its own authoritarianism. No matter how many people or groups are cast out of the circle of power, those who remain continue to divide and to challenge one another. That challenge is built into the state Khomeini wrought, with all its calculations and compromises, and it is a veritable life force. When I visited Iran in 2012, I could not meet with any reformists. But among the hard-liners then campaigning for seats in the parliament and fulminating from the pages of newspapers and websites, I heard lively, energetic discussions of everything from the economy to
velayat-e faqih
, all within the boundaries of relative ideological orthodoxy.

If there was one figure teetering on the edge of that inner sanctum, it was Ahmadinejad. Like Khatami before him, the populist president was fighting for his political life at the end of his second term. He had gotten big for his britches, overtly challenging Khamenei on cabinet appointments and going into public sulks when he didn’t get his way.
Kayhan
began a drumbeat against the president, labeling his faction a “deviated current” and suggesting that his chief of staff was an agent of velvet revolution. You might say it couldn’t have happened to a nicer guy. Still, Ahmadinejad was besieged and isolated. Conservative parliamentarians called for the president’s impeachment and summoned him to the legislature for aggressive questioning about his management of the economy. I will never forget meeting the president’s bewildered media adviser shortly after he was sentenced to prison for insulting the Supreme Leader, whom he revered. Another close Ahmadinejad ally, the infamous prosecutor Saeed Mortazavi, was indicted for his role in the Kahrizak affair. (In the end Mortazavi would be acquitted—yet another only-in-Iran story of authoritarian self-policing and impunity at once.)

Out on the streets, people wanted to talk about chicken. Inflation had been a chronic complaint, but now it was acute, as nothing reflected more clearly than the rising price of food. Chicken was normally the affordable meat, even when lamb was out of reach. But now chicken was becoming a luxury, and this was an assault on the dignity of people living in a
resource-rich country. The national police chief urged television networks not to broadcast images of chicken for fear of setting off social unrest. This stricture resulted mainly in a new strain of chicken humor on social media. But the economic malaise was a serious business. The conservative establishment variously denied it or blamed it on Ahmadinejad, because at that time one could not yet talk about the ferocious trade sanctions that were beginning to choke Iran’s oil industry and financial sector.