Among the Ruins

by Ausma Zehanat Khan

  “Tell them I’m not here, I’ve left for Tehran.”

  He held Nasih’s gaze for a moment longer than necessary, until he could be sure that Nasih understood. A slight frown of worry on his amiable face, Nasih nodded his answer.

  Khattak took a taxi to the gymnasium.

  The weight he’d carried in the weeks leading up to his visit to Iran was beginning to shift. He was no longer as preoccupied with his mistakes. He’d set aside the question of the life he had taken, thinking of the life he might be able to answer for.

  Zahra’s life.

  He was also deeply interested in the puzzle he couldn’t unravel.

  Who was sending him the letters?

  And how did a yacht at the Caspian Sea fit in to the puzzle?

  He’d read Rachel’s text first thing that morning, a text she’d sent through Telegram, hearing the self-deprecating humor beneath her words.

  My brother and me, sir. We’re tag-teaming this one. He’s the one who found the yacht.

  She made no mention of Nate or Sehr Ghilzai.

  She’d also filled him in on Charlotte Rafferty’s unwillingness to cooperate. They were due another phone call soon, but it was no substitute for an investigation with Rachel by his side.

  As he’d done the night before, he had the taxi drop him several blocks from his destination, taking a circuitous route to the gym. Its Persian name was zurkhaneh, which translated as “house of strength.” It had a single opening at the top and a sunken octagonal pit for the zurkhaneh’s activities in the center. There were three sections around the pit: one for the audience, one for the athletes who had come to participate, and one for the musicians who conducted the session. The audience’s section filled the greater part of the circumference. A drummer was seated in an alcove above the pit, a comfortably overweight man poised with a large traditional drum known as the zarb, a microphone above his head. Beneath this alcove, a digital clock announced the time. Fifteen men were doing warm-up exercises in the pit, a video feed of their progress blaring from the wall. One of the men was Omid Arabshahi.

  The first thing Khattak noticed was the portrait of Ali, a figure revered in the Sunni and Shia traditions, as the cousin, son-in-law, and successor of Muhammad. A kind face with solemn, dark eyes loomed over the audience from one side of the gym. Beneath it hung an art deco portrait of Ayatollah Khomeini and Supreme Leader Khamenei, two unsmiling heads paired together like the watchful eyes of Big Brother.

  The ancient sport of varzesh-e bastani practiced within these walls had originally served to train warriors, its roots in the Parthian era, while spiritual elements from the Sufi and Shia traditions had been incorporated over time. The exercises began with calisthenics, moved on to weight training, and culminated in combat practice.

  Any male could join the zurkhaneh after a suitable period as a member of the audience. Today, the gym was packed with observers. Khattak cast around for a sign of Ali or Darius. The drum sounded, and the exercises began, the master, or morshed, reciting the praise of pious religious figures over the heads of the athletes. The athletes jumped in time to the beat of the drum, rotating through a sequence of movements.

  A hand touched Khattak’s shoulder. Ali slipped onto the bench beside him. Piped-in music rang out in accompaniment with the drum. The religious hymns had switched to a recitation of poems from the Shah Nameh, the Book of Kings. The young men in the pit took turns whirling in the center, echoing Sufi rites. One lost his footing, sparking a round of laughter.

  “Where’s Darius?” Esa asked, under cover of the laughter.

  “Watching from the other side. I need to talk to you first.”

  “What were you able to find out about the flash card?”

  “Wait,” Ali said. “We’ve sent photographs of the letters to your partner in Toronto. I’m afraid we burned them afterward as the safest thing to do. Have you received any others?”

  Khattak pressed subtly against the zipped outer pocket of his jacket.

  “I’ll take it before I leave and send it on.”

  “Were you able to make any sense of them?”

  He felt Ali’s shrug against his shoulder, the audience packed together. Omid glanced up, grinning as he flexed his massive biceps in the pit. Khattak was impressed by his stamina.

  “They’re preparing a demonstration for Eid Nowruz, the Iranian new year. That’s why we picked today for a meeting. We knew the zurkhaneh would be full.”

  The Persian new year was ten days away.

  Khattak hoped to be out of Iran by then.

  “The letters are a record, that’s all,” Ali went on. “A record of what happened after the election, may God praise the Supreme Leader and uplift him.”

  Khattak understood this to mean the Green Birds hadn’t been able to decode the letters. Otherwise, Ali wouldn’t have spoken in platitudes that praised the regime.

  “Did you ask the girls?”

  “Yes. They didn’t know either.”

  Ali slipped a hand into Esa’s pocket. When he removed his hand, the letter was in it.

  “Shall I send this to your partner?”

  Esa nodded.

  Noise sounded in the zurkhaneh’s pit. Weight training had begun. Each of the athletes collected a pair of heavy wooden clubs called mils. They raised and lowered the mils above their shoulders in a series of maneuvers. The sound of the clubs filled the gymnasium. Omid was adept at the maneuvers. Khattak wouldn’t have wanted to face him in the dark.

  Ali slipped away. He hadn’t answered Esa’s question about the flash card, tipping his head to the other side of the pit.

  Khattak followed his gaze.

  Darius was seated just beneath the drummer’s alcove. He made a subtle gesture with his hand. Khattak squeezed out of the audience and headed to the exit. A few minutes later, Darius joined him in the street. They walked a little distance apart. When Darius disappeared inside a well-lit electronics store, Khattak waited several minutes to follow him. The shop was crowded with customers, the latest model televisions displayed from floor to ceiling, the shelves stocked with laptops, a Persian pop song blaring in the background.

  Khattak scanned the store for Darius. The young man was waiting at the back, in front of a door marked Staff. He was wearing a conspicuous gray T-shirt with a white bull’s-eye on it. At the heart of the bull’s-eye was a skull with a red X across the mouth. The words Tehran City were printed beneath it.

  To Khattak, the T-shirt read as the slogan of a dissident.

  When Darius led him through the staff door to a darkroom at the back, Khattak asked, “What are we doing here?” And pointing to his shirt: “Isn’t that dangerous for you to wear?”

  Darius’s smile transformed his face, splitting the scar in two just above a muscle in his cheek. It lightened his eyes, softening them. Like Ali and Omid, his features were striking.

  “It’s the name of an Iranian rock band. They sing about girls, fast cars, broken hearts.” He shrugged. “Iran belongs to the young. They can’t stamp us out, even though they want to. And don’t worry, I work here. We have a few minutes, my friend is watching the door.”

  He opened one of the cabinets at the back of the room, bringing back an envelope labeled Park Scenes.

  “What’s this?” Khattak asked, becoming aware of a chemical smell in the room.

  “We spread the word about the flash card. Someone left these photographs at the store. I don’t know if it’s all of them, but we thought you’d want to see.”

  The envelope shifted in Khattak’s fingers. He was holding the photographs from Zahra’s camera, her last public act of defiance.

  He swallowed down the lump in his throat.

  “Have you looked at these?” he asked Darius.

  The young man ran his fingers along the crew neck of his T-shirt.

  “I’ve seen them. But I don’t know what I’m seeing.”

  “Radan? He’s there?”

  “Yes. In some of the photographs.”

&n
bsp; Khattak shook out the envelope, spreading the dozen or so photographs along the surface of a table in the darkroom. Darius flicked on a small overhead light above the table.

  One by one, Khattak studied the photographs.

  Six were of the exterior of Evin prison. These included shots of the watchtower and of the sign Yazdashtagah Evin. The next group were photographs of the milling assembly of women, many in dark chadors, some in white. They were taken at close range. Khattak could see the faces of most of the women. Of others, he could see only their chadors. In some cases, the women had been accompanied by the men of their family: an old man with a threadbare turban and a grief-stricken face, a youth with sepulchral eyes, sunk deep within the hollows of his face. Nearby was a middle-aged man whose face was weathered by outdoor labor, defeated by the vagaries of Evin. There was another man farther back in the distance. Khattak couldn’t make out his face, he could only tell the man was bearded. He was carrying a case in his hands, perhaps containing paperwork for a prisoner’s release.

  In the background of each of these photos were the guards. Four uniformed guards and the man in the suit, Barsam Radan.

  The disdainful disregard on Radan’s face didn’t bode well for Zahra—or for any of the women seeking information about missing sons and daughters, locked in Ward 209, if their bodies hadn’t disappeared like Zahra’s.

  “Do you recognize any of these people?” he asked Darius.

  There were two photographs left in the series. From the angle of the pictures, he realized Zahra had pointed the camera halfway to the ground. The pictures were waist-level. He could see hands. He was fairly certain one of the hands was Zahra’s, as he could just make out a piece of the camera’s strap falling across her wrist. It was reaching for the fine-boned hands of another woman, a woman in a manteau, judging from the sleeves that ended at her wrists. He scanned the previous photographs of the women again. They were dressed in chadors or scarves. No one was wearing a manteau.

  “No,” Darius answered. “Apart from Radan, I don’t recognize any of them. Most of them are probably at Evin, still looking for their loved ones. Do you think it matters?”

  Khattak showed him the two photographs.

  “I think this is Zahra’s hand. It looks like she knew someone in the crowd. Maybe it’s the same person who had the flash card, the person who sent you the photographs. Could you try to find out? It’s important. This person may have seen something that would help, something to implicate Radan.”

  Darius looked doubtful.

  “Wouldn’t they tell us if they had? It was their choice to send us the photographs, no one made them do it.”

  It was an excellent question.

  Why help with Khattak’s inquiry but choose to remain in the shadows? Was someone trying to point him to a deeper reason behind Zahra’s murder?

  He realized he knew very little about Darius or any of the others. Taraneh had said they kept each other’s secrets. He wondered if Darius would be more forthcoming.

  “How did you get interested in the Green Movement?” he asked.

  Darius answered his question with a question.

  “How old do you think I am?”

  “Twenty-one? Twenty-two?”

  Darius touched his scar, its fissures forging fresh trails on his face.

  “I’m twenty-nine. I thought the scar made me look older.”

  Khattak shook his head. “You and your brother seem younger to me.”

  “Ali is older than I am,” Darius told him. He tried another smile that fractured his scar. “The election stopped time for us. I was in film school, Ali had found a job at a newspaper. When we joined the protests in support of Mousavi, we didn’t know the costs would be so high. We were arrested.” The smile on his face faded, leaving only the scar. “We were lucky to be released, so many others have vanished.”

  “That doesn’t sound like luck to me,” Khattak said.

  But it could have been.

  It was a system of justice where the rules were arbitrary, where decisions over life or death could be made without accountability. Those who raised their voices were given reasons to become silent.

  “We’re better connected than most people. We paid the price in other ways.”

  Darius’s hands sorted through the photographs on the table, laying the last two side by side. He and Khattak stood close together under the light from the bulb overhead. Darius’s voice dropped low. It whispered over the hum of a printmaker in the corner.

  “Ali’s newspaper was shut down. He’s barred from writing for publication. His colleagues are in jail or under house arrest, so he spends his time reading. He understands the principles of the movement much better than he did when we were arrested. He knows what he wants for the future.”

  “And what is that?”

  Up close, Darius’s scar flickered like a flame over his skin. Khattak took a step back, his sleeve catching on the edge of a photograph. He looked down.

  “The same things anyone wants. Accountability for what happened during the election, the freedom to make our own choices.” His hand strayed to his scar. “I was expelled from my program, and I’ve been banned from making films, so now what do I do?”

  He stabbed his finger at the photograph on the table. He pointed to Zahra’s hand. At a glimpse of the white sleeve of her blouse.

  The chemical scent of the photo processing solution assailed Khattak’s nostrils. He felt a strong desire for fresh air. He could see nothing of note in the photograph. A blank sleeve, a hand reaching for other hands. The clamor and crush of a crowd.

  Darius slid one photograph over the other, aligning Zahra’s sleeves.

  Khattak scrutinized the photographs.

  In the first photograph, there was a band of writing on the sleeve.

  In the second, the sleeve was bare.

  The photographs had been taken seconds apart.

  He looked around the darkroom. There was an enlarger on the opposite counter. He carried the photographs over to it. He placed them under the lens, one at a time, peering through the viewfinder. He could just make out the writing on the sleeve, a neat row of capitals printed in English. ADTVBMJBT.

  In the second photograph, the edge of the sleeve was torn off, the writing missing.

  In the split second before she’d removed the camera’s flash card, Zahra had passed the scrap of writing to someone in the crowd. Or she’d dropped it.

  He asked Darius if the string of letters meant anything, the young man shook his head. He pinned Darius with a steady glance.

  “Can you send these to my partner in Canada?”

  He hadn’t mentioned Rachel’s name, and he didn’t intend to. She was safe in Toronto, and he planned to keep it that way. The name of the recipient on the e-mail address he’d given the students was “puckface48.” It was so close to an epithet and so entirely in Rachel’s style that it made him smile. The Maple Leafs hadn’t won the Stanley Cup in decades. Rachel had other accounts for each successive year the Leafs had failed to make the play-offs: “puckoff47,” “whatthepuck49.” She’d saved “puckanddoublepuck50” for 2017. Before Omid had shown him the Telegram app, Khattak had rotated his e-mails to Rachel through these accounts.

  “This is the first time I’ve seen you smile,” said Darius. “I thought Esfahan didn’t agree with you. I wondered how that was possible.”

  Khattak looked at him, surprised.

  He hadn’t realized Darius was monitoring his actions with such interest. Could Darius have been the one following him, sending him the letters?

  “You’re writing to a woman,” Darius guessed. “That lightens a man’s spirits.”

  Khattak tested his theory.

  “Alas for the lack of rose petals in modern communications.”

  Darius skipped over his comment. “She’s your lover, this woman?”

  A blunt question that flouted the conventions of Iranian etiquette.

  Esa’s imagination failed to conjure up Rachel’
s response if she heard the question. The most she’d been able to bring herself to do was to call Esa “boss” in the offhand manner of two friends at a bar. He couldn’t envision her casting him soulful looks, or pretending she needed his help. Rachel’s modus operandi ran more along the lines of, “You’re slowing me down, sir, do you mind?”

  “She’s my partner,” Esa said, his voice weighted with things he wouldn’t share.

  “I ask because I wonder how you might court a woman, what is it you would do?”

  Behind the words was a plea.

  “You’re not married?” Khattak asked gently.

  Twenty-nine was not young to marry in Iran.

  Darius spread out his hands.

  “I have no profession. I’m on a watch list, and I have this scar.”

  Khattak didn’t tell him the scar didn’t matter. He knew very well that it did. He also wondered why, with the prevalence of plastic surgery among the upper classes of Iran, Darius hadn’t taken steps to have it repaired. Was the scar a badge of honor? Was he struggling for legitimacy among his peers? Did it prove his courage in the face of affliction?

  Khattak found he couldn’t ask.

  “What about Taraneh or Nasreen?”

  Darius’s laugh was bitter.

  “Taraneh is like a sister, we were raised together. And Nasreen is focused on Saneh.” He eyed Khattak with a measuring glance. “Nasreen asks about you, though. Is there anything I should tell her?”

  Khattak thought of Rachel, he thought of Sehr, he thought of a woman named Mink. He remembered his wife, Samina, and the life he’d left behind in Toronto. A man dead at his hands, a sister who wouldn’t speak to him. Too many uncertainties, no means of absolution.

  How could he say, I’ve killed a man, will you tell her that? Will it change what she wants from me, how she looks at me?

  “There’s nothing to say. I’ll be leaving for my own country soon.”

  Darius didn’t press him. Politely, he turned away, replacing the photographs in the envelope.

  “I’ll send these to your partner. And in the meantime, I’ll try to find out who left them at the store.”