by Greg Egan
The prison itself was closed off now, but on the first day the guards had been only too willing to come out and interact. A line of protesters had stood at the main gate, and when ordered by a belligerent, near-hysterical officer to disperse, the first in line had replied, ‘My son is in your prison. He has committed no crime. I respectfully request that you release him now, or arrest me.’ IR links had ferried the man’s words from a phone in his shirt pocket all the way to a PA system in the park, and from there they’d blared out across the expressway.
When he’d been arrested, the next protester had stepped forward. ‘My sister is in your prison. She has committed no crime. I respectfully request that you release her now, or arrest me.’
The ritual had gone on for close to four hours; Martin had counted seventy-six arrests. Then, in the middle of the afternoon, the intake had ceased and the guards had withdrawn behind the gate. Either the beast had literally filled its belly, or someone in authority had decided that they’d made a mistake to play along at all.
Four days later, and still nobody knew what had befallen those seventy-six people. Rumours were rife, but Martin did not believe the worst: after surrendering themselves into custody, they would not have been lined up against a wall and shot. But the emergency decrees had eroded the already shaky protections of the legal system, and there’d be a strong temptation to portray the relatives of the dissidents caught up in the sweep as something far more sinister than anguished parents and siblings. Self-confessed spies and saboteurs would do nicely, and in Evin confessions generally came with bruises, or worse. With officials under stress and arguing among themselves, there’d be a perilous volatility added to the usual brutal machinery.
In the male ablutions tent beside the latrines there was a hefty pile of water bottles, but they were outnumbered by empties waiting to be refilled. Martin poured a little water into a basin, washed his hands thoroughly with soap, wiped some of the grime from his face and neck, then emptied the basin onto the ground outside. He itched to do more - literally, in places - but it was almost time for the noon prayers, which would put a big dent in the supply; it would have been selfish to make himself vastly cleaner than his own beliefs required.
Outside, he looked across the park and spotted Behrouz, sitting on the grass near the boarded-up teahouse, his face in his hands. Martin called out as he approached; Behrouz looked up but didn’t reply.
‘Did you contact your cousin?’ Martin asked him.
‘Yeah.’ Slightly Smart email was still diffusing through the porous police lines and across the troubled city, but Behrouz had insisted that his wife not carry one of the incriminating phones, which in any case were in short supply. ‘He talked to Suri. She’s fine. She’s just worried.’ As he spoke, he picked nervously at a stain on his sleeve.
Martin sat beside him. ‘If you need to get out, get out. I think I can survive a couple of days without you.’
Behrouz regarded him sceptically. Martin spotted Mahnoosh walking briskly through the crowd with a cardboard box full of smuggled essentials. ‘Do you need anything?’ he asked.
‘No.’
‘I’ll be back in a second.’ Martin jogged after her, sliding open his phone’s case as he went.
‘You get through these very quickly,’ Mahnoosh observed as he handed her his dead battery in exchange for a charged one.
‘Maybe,’ he replied, ‘but I’m not wasting them, I promise. I mean, I don’t play games.’
Mahnoosh said, ‘A man after my own heart.’
Martin tried out the recharged battery on his old phone first; there’d been cases of people’s phones getting fried, either by malice or some kind of inadvertent substitution. His old phone started up and gave the usual NO SIGNAL message, so he fitted the battery into his triple-S and waited to see if there was any data for him drifting through the crowd.
He made his way back to Behrouz, who was still looking despondent. ‘I’m serious,’ Martin said. ‘If you want to be with your family, just go. If they can get five shovels in past the cops, someone will be able to smuggle you out.’ In fact, he doubted that the police would be arresting deserters from the protest, but he didn’t want to put it like that.
Behrouz shook his head. ‘Forget it. Everything’s fine.’
The muezzin began calling from the mosque in the exhibition centre nearby; Martin could see the minaret from where they sat. Behrouz said, ‘I’m going to pray. I’ll meet you back here.’
‘Okay.’ Martin watched the crowd gathering on the grass, spreading their prayer mats. The regime had a long history of denouncing opponents who claimed to be good Muslims as ‘hypocrites’ - trying to inflate any political difference into a crime against Islam - but Jabari had rather robbed the word of its traction. In the face of defiance from hundreds of thousands of ordinary, moderately pious Iranians, there was a limit to how insulting they could be about their opponents’ religious bona fides, and even their gentlest fatherly admonitions were no longer being taken very seriously.
Martin’s phone chimed. No personal email had arrived, but he’d signed up to several newsfeeds. The system was being spammed, of course, but he’d only subscribed to digitally-signed bulletins from a whitelist of trusted senders; all the node-clogging disinformation being churned out by VEVAK was slowing down the network, but for most purposes it was invisible to him.
There were reports from across the country on the previous day’s Friday prayers; the phone’s translations into English were full of grammatical errors - and a few surreal touches that probably came from bad guesses between homographs in the source text - but Martin still found them faster to decipher than the original Farsi. The gist of it was that more than a dozen clerics in Tehran and the other large cities had come out publicly in support of constitutional change. Two months before, that would have seen them thrown into prison; Martin wasn’t sure that the more likely alternative these days wasn’t assassination, but in any case there’d been an infectious wave of outspokenness. Once religious scholars were ready to attest that velayat-e-faqih - their role as guardians of society - didn’t necessarily extend into every last corner of civil and political life, then the regime’s position was demoted to the status of just one view among many, all equally compatible with faith and tradition. And once those same scholars were willing to suggest - however politely - that the regime might in fact have abused its power, change became not just a possibility worth contemplating, but a positive duty.
The list of strikes and vigils across the country now ran into the hundreds, and the general public were treating any outbreaks of looting and violence as entirely down to Basiji provocateurs. The police were stretched thin, but cars were not burning in the streets, and without the true anarchy needed to justify the harshest countermeasures, sending in the Revolutionary Guards against unarmed protesters would have risked an all-out civil war.
So the question was, how badly did the incumbents want to cling to power for its own sake? When the alternative was not Marxism, or a surrender to depraved Western hedonism, but a moderate, non-aligned social democracy that remained far more obedient to tradition and religion than, say, Turkey . . . was that a fate whose avoidance demanded tens of thousands of deaths and a country in flames?
It would have been nice to be able to put that directly to the President and his inner circle, but they just weren’t giving interviews these days. So Martin sat on the grass and wrote it into his Tehran Diary, the five-hundred-words-a-day reward that his editor had given him for his serendipitous encounter with Kourosh Ansari. He was usually averse to such rhetorical flourishes, but in this case there was one saving grace: there was a chance that by the time the question saw print, his readers would already know the answer.
The first meal of the day arrived around dusk. As Martin joined the queue with Behrouz, he saw some people offering morsels to the feral cats that had been attracted by the shantytown’s rubbish.
‘Is that animal welfare, or are they testing it for poiso
n?’ Martin wondered.
Whatever travails the smugglers had faced, the plastic containers of stew they were dispensing were still warm. Martin hadn’t realised how famished he was until he started eating. With a couple of pieces of flatbread to act as scoops, there was no need for cutlery, and the meal was gone in about two minutes.
‘Kheyli khoshmazeh,’ he declared approvingly.
Behrouz said, ‘Don’t get too used to it, or you’ll have to find yourself an Iranian wife.’
Martin was tongue-tied for a moment; it wasn’t Behrouz’s style to be casually sexist. Had he noticed something? Martin tried to avoid protesting too much. ‘You don’t think I can learn to cook like this myself?’
‘Maybe you could,’ Behrouz conceded, ‘but it’s a fulltime job. Someone spent two hours just chopping the herbs for this.’
‘I think I can live with herbs from a packet.’
Behrouz laughed. ‘Then why bother? Why not just give up and eat pizza?’
‘There are limits.’ Iranian pizzas - though inexplicably popular with the local teenagers - were the worst Martin had tasted anywhere.
Later, they walked around the park trying to gauge the mood of the crowd. Everyone looked anxious and weary, but they’d all read the news about the dissident clerics; momentum was still going their way. Martin gathered a few quotes, but he didn’t push it; people didn’t want to be forced to measure and re-measure the situation, to keep spelling out the best and worst possibilities and calling the odds.
They came to a spot where one of the prison’s watchtowers was in sight; Martin could make out two uniformed figures with rifles. A floodlight above them swept around automatically, illuminating the park and the protesters as often as it shone down on whatever grim courtyard was hidden behind the walls. Martin had an image of Omar sitting on a bunk, shadows of bars sliding across his cell in synch with the very same light. If they’d found evidence linking him to Shokouh’s escape, surely they would have made it public and charged him. But then, if they suspected him but had no evidence, they would be trying to extract a confession instead.
‘They hanged my uncle in there,’ Behrouz said. ‘In eighty-eight.’
‘Jesus.’ Martin was floored; this was the first he’d heard of it.
‘I was only a kid, nobody told me much.’ As he spoke, Behrouz kept his gaze fixed on the ground. ‘But I heard my father and grandfather talking about it.’
‘Do you know why he was arrested?’ There’d been thousands of extra-judicial killings in 1988; no trials, just a formulaic interrogation on political and religious matters, with wrong answers leading to death.
‘He belonged to some kind of leftist group. They weren’t killing people, or blowing things up - just publishing pamphlets against the mullahs. Actually, he’d been conscripted into the army, he was in Tehran on leave when they arrested him. No one really knew for sure what had happened for about a year. Then my grandfather heard that he was buried in a mass grave in Khavaran Cemetery. He was twenty-two years old when they killed him.’
Martin said, ‘That’s fucked.’ No wonder the place cast a pall over him. ‘Look, if you want to get out of here—’
Behrouz shook his head. ‘I can do my job. I’m only telling you so you’ll stop asking me that.’
‘Okay.’ Martin got it now. ‘I’ll shut up about it, and we’ll both just do our jobs.’
‘Good.’
As they walked on, Martin felt a surge of anger, but there was nothing to be done with it; the last thing Behrouz needed was to hear him ranting against tyrants.
‘So if I’m hooked on Iranian cuisine,’ he said, ‘where exactly does a middle-aged, atheist foreigner start looking for an Iranian wife?’
Behrouz said, ‘Outside the divorce courts.’
Martin woke from shallow, unquiet sleep to the sound of helicopters approaching. He staggered to his feet, reluctant for a moment to let the blanket he was wrapped in drop from his shoulders. The sound was coming from the direction of the prison, and it was accompanied by spotlight beams sweeping across the park; he counted six before one of them struck his eyes, blinding him to any more detail.
He crouched down and shook Behrouz awake. People were already gathering around the park’s scattered trees; there was no sign of the kind of panic that would have ensued if anyone had actually seen a gun mounted behind one of the spotlights, and a part of Martin still refused to believe that the government would slaughter its own people en masse - even in 1988 they’d gone through an elaborate inquisitorial ritual, not just fired into an unarmed crowd - but what if they strafed the park lightly and killed a dozen protesters out of the thousands? Were they prepared to sell that, politically, as a necessary trade-off for the sake of restoring order? Were they ready to call the bluff of the majority of Iranians who’d stayed out of the fray so far, and say: choose us - with a few unavoidable casualties - or back the traitors, and blame only yourselves when the streets are running with blood?
Martin joined the huddle of bodies in the shadow of the nearest tree. Under the circumstances, the whole idea of shelter was marginal, but anything was better than standing beneath a spotlight on open ground. He glanced at Behrouz, who was ashen; Martin knew better now than to offer any solicitous remarks, but he couldn’t help feeling a twinge of guilt at the disparity between them. Though he was far from nonchalant about the situation himself, he was certain that if he’d had a young family it would have been ten times harder to be here.
As the minutes passed, it became clear that this operation was not a simple aerial assault on the protesters. The spotlights remained trained on the park, but the helicopters were keeping their distance and showing no signs of dispensing anything unpleasant: no bullets, no tear-gas, not even a blast of pressurised water.
The dazzle of the beams made it hard to keep watching the airspace over the prison, but Martin noticed a subtle shift in the illumination on the ground; the lights bathing the immediate area hadn’t changed, but an adjacent region of the park had become darker. It took him a few seconds to make sense of that.
He turned to Behrouz. ‘I think one of them just landed inside the prison.’
‘Yeah.’
‘Meaning what?’
There was some angry shouting, and Martin saw people breaking cover and running across the grass to confer. Behrouz said, ‘I don’t know what it means, but they think the prison’s being evacuated.’
‘Okay.’ Martin considered this hypothesis. Anything was better than a hail of bullets, and maybe two could play the game of frustrating your enemy without bloodshed. There were plenty of inaccessible prisons out in the countryside - and even if they were full, it would have taken the government only a few days to assemble desert camps of huts ringed with razor-wire. If they plucked everyone out of Evin and deposited them in unknown or hard-to-reach locations, the siege would be deflated into an irrelevant farce.
Behrouz nudged him. ‘Look.’ Four men had picked up one of the concrete benches that were scattered throughout the park and were carrying it over their heads like an upside-down canoe. Martin supposed the concrete might offer a degree of protection from descending gunfire . . . but any safety advantages would be negated by the fact that the men were marching straight towards the prison itself.
When they passed out of sight behind a tree, Behrouz rose to his feet. ‘Come on.’
Martin’s skin turned to ice. ‘Are you crazy?’
‘We don’t have to get too close, but we should keep them in sight.’
For one uncharitable moment Martin wondered if Behrouz was just trying to outdo him in the bravado stakes - as if the mere suggestion that he might have wanted to rejoin his family had wounded his pride. But that was unfair; what he was proposing was reasonable. Martin stood and followed him, zigzagging across the grass from tree to tree, wondering what an observer from above would make of them scuttling along in the wake of the concrete canoeists.
They stopped at the corner of the park; they had a tree to
themselves and a clear view of the road that ran past the park and alongside the prison’s perimeter wall. The men with the bench were already in front of the prison, twenty or so metres away. The wall itself blocked the line of fire from the watchtowers, but one of the helicopters was hovering directly above the prison gates. Martin couldn’t imagine what the men’s purpose was - unless they planned to use the bench as a battering ram, and he couldn’t see that ending well.
Before the men reached the gates they stopped and rid themselves of the bench, depositing it on the ground in an upturned V. Then they turned and walked back towards the park.
‘I don’t get it,’ Martin confessed. ‘Do they think the prisoners are going to be moved by truck?’
Behrouz said, ‘The general population’s about fifteen thousand, but even the thousand or so politicals would take an awful lot of helicopter trips. So maybe the helicopters are for the top brass, and the grunts and the prisoners will go by truck.’
‘Okay, but how is a park bench going to slow them down?’