Among the Ruins

by Ausma Zehanat Khan

  Khattak studied Omid. He might have been twenty-five or twenty-six, though the bulging muscles, greased-back hair, and general air of dissipation made him seem older. Grooves ran from the corners of his nose to his mouth, emphasizing his sardonic style of speech.

  Ali and Darius seemed more like university students. Quiet, well spoken, thoughtful, their wavy hair groomed, their faces reflections of each other; young intellectuals testing out theories of democracy and statecraft by joining the underground resistance.

  He wondered if their families knew of the risks they were taking.

  “A man named Larijani followed me today,” he warned them.

  Omid let out a short bark of laughter.

  “He’s a lebas-shaksis, a plainclothesman. He gets all the shit jobs. I’d be careful, but I wouldn’t get paranoid, Larijani just wants to get paid.”

  “What happens if someone connects us?” Esa asked. He gestured at the satellite dishes. “What if Larijani gets word about this?”

  “The dishes aren’t bolted down. If we get a few minutes’ warning, we can shift them over to the neighbor’s roof to a shed. It would be a shame if they dragged the satellite dishes down to the street. In Tehran, they crushed them with tanks.” Ali sounded wistful.

  “Yeah,” Omid chimed in. “Because this isn’t the only thing we like to watch.”

  The young men grinned at each other, a faint blush coloring Darius’s cheeks.

  Khattak didn’t think it was wise to linger on the roof. Larijani could be waiting in the shadows. He should find out about the footage and get out. And he would tell the others to disperse from here as well.

  “Did you review the footage on the flash drive?” he asked Omid.

  “Darius cleaned it up, he’s the film student. But I have it here.” Omid opened a file on his screen, handing his laptop to Khattak.

  Esa watched the security footage from the tower again. The images and sound were clearer this time. He jumped ahead to the moment when Zahra rubbed her hand against her neck. Again the movements jumbled together in a blur, other hands reaching for Zahra as she was hooded and detained.

  He stopped the film at the critical moment.

  “There,” he said. “Something happens there, something I can’t see.”

  Darius leaned forward. “I think I see what you mean.”

  “Can you enlarge that section?”

  “Give me a few minutes.”

  The laptop changed hands again.

  “Where do you see Radan?” Khattak asked.

  Ali answered. “He comes from inside the gatehouse at the end. He’s the one wearing the suit, the others are in uniform.”

  “And you told this to Touka Swan?”

  “She saw it for herself.”

  Darius called them over. He perched the laptop on the wall, an intermittent light against the mild purple waves that flooded the roof. Khattak and the others joined him. Darius used a freeze-frame function to move the footage a little at a time.

  The hand Zahra pressed to her neck encountered other hands, hands that fell away as Zahra was handcuffed and marched away.

  For the brief moment the hands touched, it was possible to see Zahra had passed something to her accomplice, something whose square edge was black and gold.

  “There!” Ali shouted.

  “What is it, do you know?”

  It was Darius who answered Esa, a note of wonder in his voice.

  “I know because I have one. Actually, I have a few of them. It’s a compact flash.”

  Esa frowned. “I’m sorry, I don’t know what that is.”

  Omid removed his laptop from the wall, cradling it in his forearms. He reviewed the footage for himself.

  “You’re right,” he said to Darius. “It’s the compact flash from a DSLR camera like the one Zahra took to Evin.”

  Now Khattak understood.

  Zahra’s photographs weren’t lost. She’d passed them to someone in the crowd.

  Someone the guards had ignored.

  They couldn’t tell who it was from the footage.

  They were at a dead end.

  “You were friends of Zahra, you said. But none of you were in Tehran that day, none of you accompanied her to the prison. Why is that?”

  At the change in Khattak’s tone, Omid pushed his shoulders back. Though he loomed over Khattak, he seemed defensive.

  “We have to think of our families. We put them through enough during the election.”

  Darius added more, holding up his hands as if he were framing a scene. His long, gentle face was filled with an abstracted urgency, the recent past renewing itself in his words as he spoke.

  “We weren’t worried about what might happen at a demonstration. We didn’t ask if the other protesters were students, or if they were agents of the regime hoping we’d take the bait.”

  He went on to describe the days of the election as a fever dream, the faces in the crowd like a waving field of wheat, something to be planted, something to be reaped. He spoke of a sense of jubilation, of personal invincibility. And then he spoke of community, his eyes wet.

  Omid interrupted him.

  “Tehran was like a war zone. Our families didn’t know if we’d been arrested or shot, or buried in the night like the carcasses of dogs. But they couldn’t stop us from going out again.”

  “We thought everything would change,” Darius said. “The Green Movement was like a wave.”

  Khattak gestured at the roof. He was deeply moved by their description of the protests. He was beginning to imagine the films a young man like Darius would make. But he could also feel the hollowness of their hope.

  “And this is what’s left? Satellite dishes on a rooftop? What is your actual work?”

  It came out sounding harsher than he’d meant.

  “There’s not many of us left.” Ali braced his elbows on the wall. “We learned some lessons from the Arab Spring. Libya, Egypt, Syria.” He spoke with an air of detachment, laying out the facts like the journalist he’d been. “The army moves against the people, the country falls apart, the population is displaced or violently suppressed. Walls go up around the world, saying, ‘Don’t come here, you’re not wanted.’ So in Iran, we chose stability over freedom. But that doesn’t mean we’ve given up.”

  Then Khattak was right to worry. “Then what are you actually doing?”

  Ali looked over at Omid, perhaps to ask his permission. After a weighty moment of decision, Omid gave the barest nod.

  “We’ve built a network of others like ourselves. That’s why we have someone inside Evin. And he’s not the only one, there are many others. Whenever an organization is shut down—a human rights group, a defense lawyer’s office, a student protest—we do what we can to further their work. We connect people, we pay informants—we get behind closed doors. And we keep track of our fellow protesters. Every now and again we hack into the regime’s propaganda services with information on political prisoners. We keep their voices alive.”

  Darius looked at Khattak searchingly.

  “We want the regime to know that we’re watching, so they don’t disappear our friends.”

  Khattak’s reply was grave. “They killed Zahra Khanom anyway.”

  Darius looked stricken. “We didn’t say we have any power. Their resources are so much greater than ours—they have a dozen hackers for every one of ours. It doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try.”

  Khattak studied each of their faces. He heard the quiet force of their words.

  They were representative of a generation who would use music to express their defiance like the rapper Shahin Najafi, or make films to surpass the meditations of Kiarostami. The Iran of social scientists, religious reformists, and civil society activists who’d articulated a strategy of institution-building and engagement, of constitutionality above all, and a democratic future at the end of a long road.

  A green road.

  The confrontation was simply delayed.

  “Tell me about Zahra,�
�� he said at last. “Tell me how I can help.”

  A signal passed between Omid and the others.

  “Zahra wanted answers about conditions inside Evin. She asked about Ward 209. She wanted to know about connections between the prosecutor’s office and the prison’s interrogators. She wanted Roxana out of the country.”

  “Those seem like sound reasons for a politically motivated murder.” Khattak said it gently, wanting to bring them around to a truth they would have to accept in time.

  “If that’s what she wanted, why was she taking photographs at Evin? She wasn’t foolish, there had to be a reason.”

  Khattak realized he was right. And he wondered if that reason had been orchestrated to place Zahra in a position where she was most vulnerable. Someone could have wanted Zahra at Evin that day—but to get her there, Radan would have needed an accomplice. He wouldn’t have been able to persuade her on his own, Zahra would never have trusted him. Which left Khattak with the question, what had Zahra been offered to induce her to dare the prison?

  “If it wasn’t one of you she passed the flash card to, do you have any idea who it could have been? It would help to see the photographs on her camera.”

  “I can ask around,” Ali said. “Zahra had other contacts. Will you stay in Esfahan a day or two more? Come to the zurkhaneh wrestling pit on Tuesday and sit at the back. One of us will meet you there.”

  It was the least Khattak could do.

  “Don’t send Taraneh or Nasreen,” he advised, remembering Larijani. “Think of the kind of trouble that’s possible.”

  Omid flashed him an incredulous look.

  “Is that how you do it where you’re from? Who do you think pioneered the One Million Signatures campaign?” He snorted. “An Iranian woman won the Nobel Peace Prize, it wasn’t one of our distinguished mullahs.”

  “I’m not discounting that,” Esa said. “I have as much respect for Shirin Ebadi as I do for Zahra. I’m worried the consequences will be worse for your friends than for you.”

  Omid shrugged this off.

  “Then you don’t know Kahrizak like we do. Girls aren’t the only ones who get raped.”

  Khattak braced himself against this knowledge.

  “Is Saneh Ardalan still alive?”

  “We don’t know. You can’t imagine how little they care about us. If the leaders of the Green Movement are under house arrest, what do you imagine our lives are worth?”

  Darius swept his hands together as if he was brushing chalk dust from them.

  “Nothing,” he told them. “They don’t even count in the balance.”

  As Khattak looked at Darius, he thought of a report he’d read of another of the regime’s victims, and of the quiet dignity of a father’s elegy for his son. His tribute was still fresh in Khattak’s mind.

  He wanted to be a filmmaker. He was the kind of boy, believe me, who would have been another Asghar Farhadi. But I knew if my son studied art in this country, he would either starve to death or end up in prison.

  The young man had been shot and killed at a demonstration. The government had offered compensation for his death—the family had refused to accept.

  We could never betray our son. We give him to the Iranian nation. And we ask the artists to remember him.

  Listening to the rhythms of Darius’s speech, Khattak recognized an artist prepared to sacrifice himself, not for the nation but for an idea.

  This is a path of long and grave suffering.

  “All right,” he said. “I’ll be there. But don’t take any unnecessary risks.”

  Perhaps as a concession to Khattak, Omid offered, “It’s a men’s exercise class. They don’t allow women to attend, so there’s no reason for you to worry.”

  Khattak wondered if he was disappointed not to be seeing Nasreen.

  Omid asked for his cell phone.

  “This is yours?”

  “Yes. I have a disposable one I’ve been using to call my partner. This is my personal phone.”

  “You won’t need the other one.” Omid made a few quick adjustments to Khattak’s phone. “I’ve downloaded the Telegram app to your phone. You’ll be able to send and receive encrypted messages that are timed to self-destruct. You can do the same thing with phone calls, delete the records. You can also send media, but for now I’ll do that for you if it’s necessary. You don’t need to keep buying SIM cards.”

  “The service hasn’t been banned?”

  Omid shrugged. “Not yet. It could happen at any time, depending on events.”

  Khattak thanked him, unable to shake the shadow of his fear.

  Omid smiled. “You’re an honorary member,” he said. “You could be the sixth.”

  24

  The American Prisoner

  “Do you know Jason Rezaian?” It’s the first question any of us gets asked. I feel sorry for Jason, but I’m also jealous. So many people are working to have him released. He’ll have phone calls to his mother, rations of rice and kebab, someone will cut his hair and shave his beard. He’ll have a table, some books, a pen and paper. I bet the guards ask questions about Anthony Bourdain. His room must be ten times the size of mine. There’s no gun to his head, no one asks where he’s from, no one calls him a traitor peshmerga. No one hangs him from a hook or beats him with a cable, no one breaks his teeth or batters his genitals. And when the Swiss liaison reports on whether Evin’s guards are adhering to the Geneva Conventions, he’ll leave behind a piece of soap and a Toblerone bar, enacting a chocolate diplomacy. Jason Rezaian isn’t a Kurd. To him, they won’t say, “Tell us what you’ve done, tell us who our enemies are.”

  But I don’t know what the hell I’m talking about because I haven’t been to the Suite.

  25

  A case without a case, and technically, Rachel was her own boss until Khattak returned. She hadn’t been doing much of late, closing cases, reviewing potential trouble spots, making note of groups they should meet with to further the work of Community Policing. And just a bit of personal stuff on the side—looking for a piano teacher, hoping to re-light a spark that had never really had a chance to catch. The piano at Max Najafi’s house had reminded her. Nate’s ease with the piano had been a luxury Rachel couldn’t have afforded in Don Getty’s home. But she’d thought she’d always known how to listen, how to hear what the music was saying.

  Her mother playing Shostakovich’s Romance in C Major.

  Hope springing eternal, youth and loveliness, a girl’s first kiss.

  Her mother racing through the introduction of the Carnival of the Animals.

  Her father using his fists on Zachary.

  And when one of those moods of introspection would bring Rachel and her mother close together, “Tristesse,” always “Tristesse.” Rachel hadn’t liked it then, she didn’t like its somber perfection now. Sometimes Zach had hidden under the piano.

  A young Rachel had had a penchant for The Nutcracker. In a good mood, her mother would play the “Waltz of the Flowers” or the “Grand Pas de Deux,” but these were pieces served better by an orchestra than an out-of-tune piano.

  They had listened to a recording of the music on an endless loop, the music transforming the damp space of the basement into a concert hall with velvet seats and a magical stage, a subtle commotion of violins and reeds.

  Lillian had never taken Rachel to see the National Ballet.

  When she’d finally attended a performance on her own, it had felt as though her heart was no longer stagnant, the music hastening her—delicate as the strings of a harp, bright as the notes of a trumpet—untethered, fleet-footed, vast with her imaginings.

  It was why she was playing it now.

  Zach was coming over, their last uneasy conversation resulting in a shared project that Rachel hoped they could navigate together.

  Anyone would have thought she was crazy.

  She was finally out on her own, out of Don Getty’s house, distant from the tangled emotions that tied her to her mother, her life a field of sp
ring, redolent with promise.

  And now she was taking on her brother, closing down the possibilities of her personal space, of whatever romantic inclinations she may have possessed because she wanted to assure Zach that now he came first, now there was no one else. Not Esa Khattak, not Nathan Clare. And definitely not Don or Lillian Getty.

  * * *

  Zach knocked on the open door, and Rachel reminded herself to play it cool.

  She grinned at her brother, waving the paintbrush in her hand.

  “Is this what you had in mind?”

  She was dressed in a tattered hockey jersey. Her yoga pants had lost their clinging elasticity and were moored drunkenly below her hips. Her hair was piled in a straggly knot on top of her head.

  Zach’s room was empty, a ladder in one corner, painting gear strewn over drop cloths that covered the floor.

  He looked exactly like Rachel. Maybe an inch taller, his face leaner, with the same sparky brown eyes, the same reluctant smile that fought back at the corners, the same square-shouldered frame. He was wearing eyeliner, something Rachel never did. And he was carrying a giant duffel bag. She wondered if it contained the sum total of his possessions.

  “You can leave that in the laundry room, if you want.”

  Zach slouched over to his sister. He’d developed the habit of pressing a snuffling kind of kiss into her hair, snagging one of his earrings in the process.

  One ear had studs. The other had a dangling lightning bolt that reminded Rachel of Vicky D’Souza’s fingernails. He shrugged his bag onto the floor, and folded his lanky limbs onto her leather couch.

  “You sure you’re cool with this?”

  It took every ounce of Rachel’s self-possession not to betray her quivering excitement.

  “I am entirely cool,” she said, flattening her voice on purpose. “I am as cool as a big sister can possibly be.”

  “Shut up,” was Zach’s answer.

  An awkward grin broke over his face, the first one Rachel had seen in a while. The anger that had simmered between them had faded. They were ready to tease each other again.