Among the Ruins

by Ausma Zehanat Khan

  “Did she have an appointment book?”

  Paristesh looked at Max for permission. He nodded.

  “Yes, it’s here, in my desk.”

  Paristesh fished out a small silver key on a chain from under her sweater. She glanced at Max, who didn’t notice, with a blush. She arranged herself in the Eames chair, moving neatly and quickly to unlock the desk drawer. Rachel could see it was kept in order. Paristesh extracted a black date book she passed to Rachel.

  Rachel flicked back through the date book several months, working her way forward. Paristesh pointed helpfully to the first appointment with Charlotte Rafferty. Rachel moved ahead, week by week, to Zahra’s departure for Tehran.

  Nowhere did she find the name Lin.

  There were, however, a series of appointment times listed beside the initials FY. And in one case, a location and a time, Winfield Park at 2:30 P.M. This came two days after the last appointment with FY. No other names or initials had been recorded in that period. But beside the last appointment with FY, Zahra had written two words and heavily underlined them.

  The Yellows.

  Rachel turned to Paristesh.

  “There’s no Lin listed here, no mention of the ROM.”

  Paristesh’s answer was impatient.

  “Most of the time, she didn’t note down places, just names and times. But Lin’s right there.” She pointed to the diary. Her eyes widened in dismay. “I’m sorry, I should have realized. Lin is Franklin Yang. He’s Charlotte Rafferty’s assistant.”

  And that might explain the scrawl on Charlotte’s calendar, and Franklin Yang’s well-timed interruption. He must have wanted to talk to Rachel.

  “What about ‘the Yellows’?” Rachel asked. “Does that mean anything to you? Does it signify a connection to the Green Movement—the Greens?”

  Max and Paristesh looked at each other. Neither seemed to know.

  Rachel asked Paristesh one more question.

  “This appointment at Winfield Park. Do you know what that was about?”

  Paristesh locked the desk drawer and slipped the key back under her sweater.

  “I’m afraid I don’t. I can look around her papers and let you know if I find anything.”

  Such a search should be undertaken by Rachel and no one else. She didn’t know who to report to on this with Khattak so far away. She settled for suggesting she’d work with Paristesh to sort the papers later in the week. She asked again about the coronation and the Shah’s cap. Paristesh folded her hands. Zahra had never discussed the purpose of the appointments with her, she hadn’t asked Paristesh to find her video footage of the coronation, she’d never mentioned the military cap. Nor had Zahra mentioned her ex-husband’s name.

  With her non-answers, Paristesh conveyed an impression of Zahra as a woman with a great deal on her mind in her last weeks in Toronto. Beyond that, she couldn’t help.

  Rachel thanked them both for their time.

  Max laid a hand on her forearm. She noticed the green, plastic band on his wrist was inscribed with three words.

  Freedom for Iran.

  “Sergeant,” he said. “When I’ve finished the piece for my mother, I’d like you to hear it. And if you’d be kind enough, bring Mr. Clare back with you. He did something that helped me understand it.”

  From the other room, the strains of the violin rose again.

  “When the violin forgives the past, it begins to sing,” he said.

  “Rumi?” Rachel guessed.

  “Hafiz,” he answered. “If you have Hafiz and the Qur’an, you have everything.”

  This, too, sounded like a quotation.

  Rachel didn’t wonder at it. As she’d found with Zach, artists and musicians belonged to their own world.

  An undiscovered country.

  36

  Khattak waited for Maryam Ghorbani at the gravestones of her brothers in the Golestan-e Shohada, the Rose Garden of the Martyrs. Seven thousand graves marked Esfahan’s share of the casualties of the protracted Iran-Iraq war, begun a year after Khomeini’s revolution.

  Iran’s neighbors had feared the revolution would inspire their own populations to rebel against their ruling tyrannies. On the pretext of border skirmishes, and backed by Saudi Arabia and other Arab allies, Iraq had launched its invasion of Iran in 1980. Internally, the invasion had served another purpose. It had provided Khomeini with the opportunity to consolidate power in the face of increasing internal dissatisfaction and dissent. Instead of answering the people’s demand for social and economic justice, he had mobilized the country behind the war effort. The graves of the war’s martyrs were scattered all over the country.

  And in Esfahan, the Rose Garden of the Martyrs was one of the few places Roxana’s mother was permitted to visit. She made a daily pilgrimage to the tombs of her brothers, killed in the fighting to recapture the border town of Khorramshahr from the Iraqi army—a battle that had passed from history into folklore, aligning God, state, and martyrdom in the national mythos.

  Khattak had kept up a vigil for most of the morning, wandering the gravestones like a tourist, occasionally nodding his head at families who’d come to mourn the dead in this labyrinth of ghosts. Placards hung above the graves. Each one hosted a picture of a martyr on one side and an image of Khomeini on the other, tying the dead to the legacy of the republic, a legacy reinforced by the Iranian flags planted at the graves.

  Potted roses dotted the gravestones under romantic billboards. Some scenes idealized the war, others portrayed a comradely affection, a fallen soldier cradled by another.

  Khattak meandered through the rows, reflecting on a war that had squandered the promise of a generation. The war had lasted eight years, claiming a million lives. Arabic graffiti could still be spotted among the ruins of Khorramshahr.

  We have come to Khorramshahr to stay.

  Many of the Iranians Esa had met spoke of the defense of Khorramshahr with pride, but when it came to the reciprocal trespass into Iraq, their eyes had slid away from his.

  We were proud to defend our country from attack, but when we crossed the border, we didn’t know what we were fighting for anymore. To invade another country wasn’t who we thought we were.

  Nothing had been gained by the war. A million dead on both sides for a cause that amounted to nothing in the end was something Esa couldn’t fathom. There were things worth dying for, he believed, but the schemes of old men in turbans or despots in Ba’athist palaces were not among them.

  Or he might have been simplifying the Iran-Iraq war and the sacrifice of the dead.

  He knew if he asked the families at the graves, they would insist on their martyr’s reward for rising to the call of the nation. Those who admitted the war’s transgressions would be few: to admit such a thing was to deny the dead had died for anything at all, the idea of a thing more meaningful than the thing itself.

  Maryam Ghorbani entered the garden of the martyrs from the north end. She headed to a bench not far from where Khattak stood, touching her hand to the photographs before the graves.

  These were photographs of two boys whose somber eyes belied their extreme youth. They had set their mark upon the earth, the grave opening to receive them like a pool of black blossoms.

  Esa felt inexpressibly sad. He remembered the book Taraneh had given him, written by the famous sociologist of religion; Ali Shariati’s lyrical essay on the plight of the oppressed had stayed with him. He thought of Shariati’s elegy for Muhammad, the messenger of Islam.

  His eyelids under the heaviness of death curtained our shining sun.

  What did the mothers and sisters and daughters of these martyrs feel when they came to the Golestan-e Shohada after the years had passed? The sight of the woman in her coal-colored chador bringing flowers to the graves of her brothers raised a lump in Khattak’s throat. He waited for her to finish scattering the petals for two young boys deprived of their lives. Khorramshahr had known suffering on a scale he couldn’t imagine, the city erased by a war without grace.
The closest parallel he could think of was Assad’s bombardment of Aleppo.

  These tyrants, these broken cities, this prodigal waste of life.

  He felt a sinking in his bones as he took a place upon the bench, a little distance from the woman who didn’t look at him. She was small to begin with, but grief had diminished her further, her careworn face lost within the folds of her chador. She was reciting a series of prayers by numbering the segments of her fingers.

  When she finished, her shoulders caved in, hunched before the portraits of her brothers.

  Khattak took a breath. He introduced himself in a hushed, respectful tone, as a friend of Zahra Sobhani’s, explaining his errand in some detail.

  Her head swiveled in his direction. Her bird-bright eyes considered him before she turned back to the gravestones. She straightened her shoulders, the tips of her toes swinging above the ground. She didn’t look around. If she was afraid of the regime’s minders, he couldn’t tell.

  “Where are you from? Though your Farsi is polished, I can tell you aren’t from Iran. Afghani?” she asked.

  He told her the truth. She placed one gnarled hand over the other, scattering crushed petals. The scent of roses infused the air.

  “Please,” he said. “I know you don’t have much time. I have a few questions I need to ask. Can you tell me what Zahra was doing in Tehran? Do you know where your husband is, Khanom Ghorbani?”

  She took her time replying, unmoved by Khattak’s urgency. Perhaps she was wondering whether she could trust him, perhaps she kept her family’s secrets to herself, conditioned by the regime’s censorship.

  “It would be good to know,” she agreed. “Zahra was very kind. It didn’t matter if Mehran had disappointed us, we understood each other. She loved Roxana, just as I love Mahmood.”

  Rachel had told him Mahmood was Max Najafi’s original name.

  “Zahra asked Roxana to desist in her activities. She knew what it was to be harassed by the regime, so did Mehran. I begged Mehran to have Roxana released. When that didn’t work, I asked Zahra to convince him.”

  As Khattak had conjectured.

  “Why wouldn’t your husband have done what he could to free Roxana?” He gestured at the cemetery’s grounds. “You’re the sister of two martyrs. Doesn’t that result in some clemency from the regime? Aren’t the people outraged on behalf of your family?”

  “What can I tell you, Aghayeh Khattak? We belong to a country that doesn’t belong to us.” She pressed the palms of her hands to her eyes. “You see where my daughter is now, you know what they did to Zahra.”

  Khattak couldn’t find the words that would speak to her conclusions, so he invoked the traditional acknowledgment of reverence for the Prophet’s martyred grandson. It expressed his personal sympathy, and it affirmed his deep-rooted religious and cultural ties to the people of Iran.

  “Ya Hossein.”

  “Ya Hossein,” she echoed, with a pleased smile, shading her eyes from the sun with her hand. Petals drifted to her lap. With a spark of mischief, she added, “Ya Mir Hossein Mousavi.”

  Which explained to Khattak why the family was under house arrest.

  Like many supporters of the Green Movement, Maryam Ghorbani’s family had been supporters of the 1979 revolution. The intervening years had shown her the revolution’s decay. Some of its most prominent figures had charted a new path as leaders of the Green Movement. Maryam would have come to believe in the moral stature of men like Mousavi and Ayatollah Montazeri, the spiritual leader of the Green Movement. She may have been inspired by the presence of Zahra Rahnavard at the forefront of the movement. This Esa had gleaned from his conversation with Omid Arabshahi, who had spoken of the women’s movement with enormous pride.

  Khattak re-examined his assumptions yet again. A black chador said nothing about a woman’s thoughts or hopes or her engagement with her country’s political future. There were voices on all sides of the spectrum. He had misjudged Maryam Ghorbani. She was under house arrest because she’d made a political choice.

  Then what of Mehran? Why was Mehran conspicuously absent, when the women of his family had taken a stand?

  The regime has suffered a crack.

  What was the crack? Where was the crack?

  “Mehran was working on a business deal. He seemed to think if it turned out well, he would be able to ask for anything he wanted. Zahra didn’t listen. She said Roxana’s freedom couldn’t wait on his schemes.” The ghost of a smile whispered over Maryam’s lips. “We have been victims of those schemes, so I could understand Zahra’s impatience. But now she’s dead and Mehran has disappeared. Now no one is left who can fight for Roxana.”

  And Khattak couldn’t promise he would try. He had no jurisdiction to act in Iran. And if Roxana was associated with his activities, it could seal her fate inside Evin.

  “Why was Mehran imprisoned?” he asked at last.

  Her answer astounded him.

  “He was in and out of prison. The first time was after a visit to Neyshabur—and I don’t know the reason for that. But he was only in Ward 209 once. He claimed he’d found Mossadegh’s letters to Dariush Forouhar. Mossadegh is no hero to the regime—but why would they have imprisoned Mehran for that? The letters were burned the night the Forouhars were killed. Mehran was released once he recanted.”

  But Khattak’s hidden correspondent had written: Find out what Zahra wanted with the letters.

  He was beginning to peel away the edges. The Mossadegh letters mattered. Just as he now knew Roxana was his correspondent. She’d written to him of her father’s time in prison.

  The how of it didn’t matter. What mattered was the why.

  * * *

  Esa called Rachel, reaching her at their offices where she’d gone to run a background check on Mehran. Discoveries were compared, the route of Mehran’s travels discussed, and conclusions drawn. Khattak pondered the military cap’s importance to Zahra. No matter how he tried, he couldn’t draw a line from the Shah’s coronation to the Mossadegh letters and the Chain Murders, straight to the rise of the Greens.

  “Let’s speculate, Rachel, as we have nothing conclusive to go on.”

  “I thought you said speculation was the enemy of good police work.”

  “I didn’t know you’d memorized my homilies,” Khattak answered. “Please, I’d find it helpful.”

  Rachel chuckled under her breath.

  “All right, but then I’m really going to go out there, so don’t say you weren’t warned. I’ve been thinking about Mehran Najafi’s yacht. Max said he was an exporter, caviar in the main. Touka told you he was more of a renegade, doing favors for top dogs. Are you with me so far?”

  “Yes.”

  “Suppose those trips up the Caspian, the business deals with his contact Mordashov—suppose he had something lucrative to export, some kind of stolen goods. Say it’s these letters. Nate told me something about them. Mossadegh’s legacy isn’t one to mess around with. His letters should be part of the record—some would call them priceless. If they weren’t destroyed, as everyone assumed, maybe Mehran found a buyer for the letters, and that’s what had him so distracted he couldn’t focus on Roxana.”

  “Where does Zahra fit into the picture?”

  “That’s easy. Max said his folks were on good terms. Let’s say Mehran put her in the picture. He says, ‘Hey, don’t worry. I’ve got something cooking, and then we’ll deal with Roxana.’ But Zahra doesn’t want to wait. She sees the letters as leverage—maybe there’s something in them, something that discredits the regime—don’t ask me what, I’m just reaching here. So she sets up this meeting with the Supreme Leader and tells them what she has. She demands access to Roxana, they give in—what she doesn’t know is that Radan will be there waiting. They trace the letters back to Mehran—presto, he disappears, never to be heard from again. And now they know they can do what they want with Zahra.”

  “Why do they torture her, then?”

  Rachel had been getting carried aw
ay, enjoying the outlandishness of her theory. The mention of the circumstances of Zahra’s death brought her back to reality with a thud, curbing the excitement in her voice.

  “Aside from it being de rigueur? To find out what she knew about the letters.”

  But Khattak thought they could just as easily have gotten the information from Mehran. When he pointed this out to Rachel, she fell silent.

  “Do you find it odd,” he asked her, “that Zahra had printed letters on her sleeve on the day she visited Evin? Or that she tore them off?”

  “You’re thinking they were some kind of insurance policy?”

  “In a way. She wanted Roxana out, so she made sure she passed her leverage—whatever it was—onto someone else.”

  “Any idea who?”

  “I think the answer is in those letters.”

  “The letters on her sleeve, you mean. Not the Forouhar letters. Not the letters you’ve been receiving.”

  He told her his theory that Roxana was the author of the letters, connecting it to Mehran’s time in prison. It was a reasonable conclusion, but for someone who’d just been suggesting an international smuggling conspiracy, she poked holes through his modest proposal with an air of palpable smugness. He grinned at the phone in his hand.

  “I don’t think the answer’s in Canada, sir. I want to come to Iran, and help you dig for the truth. And I want to meet your stalkers and set them straight.”

  Khattak tried to picture that meeting and failed. His smile widened. Mistaking the smile, a passing car honked an invitation at him.

  “You’d need to come with a tour group of some kind, and getting a visa is difficult, given there are no consular relations between Canada and Iran. You’d have to have your visa processed through the Pakistan embassy in D.C. And you wouldn’t know until the last minute if you’d been granted one, which would make for an expensive flight.”

  “I have friends in high places,” Rachel said airily. Khattak thought she was surprised he’d given in, but the chances of Rachel getting the visa were slim to none, or he’d have done more to deter her.