Disengaged

by Mischa Hiller

  But on the fifth day things turned more ominous. They started to ask her about what contact she’d had in London with the Mossad agent. She’d had no contact with any agents, she said, and if she had she didn’t know they were agents. What about Jews, had she met any Jews in London? If she’d been a civilian she could have asked for a lawyer, for all the good it would have done. Since, however, she was working for the very people who were questioning her, she held out little hope. If only she’d had the inclination, the energy, the will to carry on, the need to carry on, she might have fought the coming battle with logic, arguments, everything at her disposal. She might still have had allies in the ministry. People liked Farsheed, they respected his work. But then Farsheed was gone and with him any hope she might have had. Any friends would keep their heads down once they knew of her fate. Being tarnished by association was a real career-ending fear.

  Towards the end of the day, after repetitive questions and long periods of waiting around for them to go and confer, or eat, or have an afternoon nap – or whatever it was they were doing as she waited in the room with a barred window that had a view on to a courtyard with a fig tree growing in the middle – she was shown a photograph of Farsheed. It was in colour but grainy, she guessed, because it had been taken with a long lens. But unmistakably him, hunched over a chess board in a café opposite a large, older man with a dark moustache and greying hair.

  ‘Do you know that man? Did you see him in London? Did you meet with him?’ they pressed. No, she indicated, truthfully, by shaking her head, unable to speak, mesmerized by the photo, thinking only that they must have others which she would love to see. She could feel the tears running down her face; she hadn’t wanted to cry in front of them.

  ‘Why did they kill him? Why?’

  ‘They killed three ministry people. Farsheed was not the one they were after, he just happened to be driving the car. The other two were more senior,’ the older man said, not unkindly. She looked at the photo.

  ‘He liked to play chess,’ she said when they took it away. ‘Wherever he went, he took a chess set and would play with whoever he could find.’

  ‘He was not choosy about who he played with?’ one of them asked.

  ‘As long as they provided a good enough challenge. He rarely found people who matched his intellect,’ she said, looking at Farsheed’s boss, holding his gaze.

  He looked away. ‘We’ll need to reclaim the apartment,’ he said. ‘It belongs to the ministry and is meant for a family, not a woman living on her own.’

  FIFTY-FOUR

  ‘I’d rather you didn’t come to the house tonight, or the airport tomorrow,’ Sheila said. ‘Do you mind?’

  Julian, who had been planning to accompany her back home and to the airport, was secretly pleased; he didn’t really want to stand around watching her pack and he hated airport goodbyes, especially as the one staying behind. She had come to see his studio apartment before he moved out, just out of curiosity, she said. He’d told her, as they lay on the bed, that it felt like he’d brought a woman back to his bachelor pad.

  ‘That’s exactly what’s happened. How many does that make?’

  ‘You’ve just experienced the mattress – do you think I’d bring anyone back here?’

  ‘They wouldn’t come back for seconds, that’s for sure.’

  ‘Thanks.’

  ‘I meant perhaps we should have used that chair, stupid.’

  ‘I don’t think it was built for that sort of thing.’ He could smell the perfume he’d bought her every Christmas for the last ten years. Strange he should just notice it now and not earlier. ‘I’m happy not to come home or to the airport,’ he said. Anyway, as far as he was concerned, they had just said their goodbyes. ‘I’m proud of you, by the way,’ he said to her back as she put on her shirt, ‘for what you’re doing.’

  She turned to study him, her face ready in anticipation of his mocking her.

  ‘Really, I mean it.’

  ‘Well, I’m bricking it,’ she said, padding without underwear to the toilet.

  ‘You’ll be fine once you’re there.’ Part of him was worried – it was Afghanistan after all – but he was determined not to fuss, and Gulnar was going with her. He trusted Gulnar to make sure she didn’t do anything stupid.

  ‘Ooh, I forgot to tell you,’ she shouted from the toilet. ‘Guess who’s agreed in principle to be a patron of Standing Together?’ She flushed before he could ask and he had to wait for her to come back in.

  ‘Jude Law.’

  ‘Wow, how did you wangle him?’

  ‘Gulnar bagged him. Her partner is a film make-up artist and guess who happened to be starring in the last film she was working on?’

  ‘The man himself.’

  ‘Gulnar and I are meeting him and his people when we come back, you know, to show them what we’re planning. You’ll get to meet him at the launch if he signs up.’ She pulled on her underwear.

  ‘Maybe he’d be interested in the story of Boris.’

  ‘Have you heard anything about that?’

  He shook his head. ‘It’s as if it never happened.’

  ‘The new owners have moved in. An American family with young kids.’

  ‘I’m surprised you could bring yourself to go back there.’

  ‘I thought it would be traumatic, you know, visiting the place again. It was fine actually. It felt good putting an actual family in there. Those toddlers running around were like an exorcism or something. I feel sorry for him more than anything.’ She sat on the edge of the bed, stepped into her jeans then lay back and lifted her legs to pull them over her buttocks, like a teenager. ‘Did you learn anything from his diary?’ she asked.

  ‘Not really, I couldn’t make sense of it all. He’d lost his faith, I think.’

  ‘Religious faith?’

  ‘I’m not sure he had any religious faith to start with. It’s more a faith in humanity he lost. Maybe that’s overstating it – maybe it was political faith, but not just in any one idea, more the ability to believe that anything was worth pursuing any more. Does that make sense?’

  ‘Sounds like he was in a pretty dark place.’ She stood up and scanned his still-naked body. He was enjoying being naked now that he was fitter. ‘What about you – you haven’t lost your ability to believe, have you?’

  ‘I don’t know. I’ll be able to tell you when you get back.’

  Three days later, with Sheila gone, Julian sat with Nizar and his friends in a pub which he had the niggling feeling he’d been in before. For some reason he’d decided to come in a linen suit, half treating it like an interview. It was a mistake; he felt overdressed, everyone else was in jeans, trainers and T-shirts, one of which read ‘Edward Snowden for Nobel Peace Prize’. He was also the only white person at the table, and twice the average age. He couldn’t have been more different, yet they all had a common bond, otherwise they wouldn’t be here.

  Some of the five present – each a different nationality, according to Nizar – regarded him with open suspicion. One of the things he’d ascertained from Nizar before coming was whether they had some religious agenda, but was assured that they didn’t, and that although two of them were Muslims (one practising), the others were Christian or, in Nizar’s case, an atheist. He wondered whether he could drop something about Sheila’s charity into the conversation to give himself some much-needed kudos.

  When Nizar had approached him in the café, after Julian had just split the partnership and effectively dismantled many years of hard work, he had laid out a grand vision of providing secure and anonymous Internet access to those living in repressive regimes that monitored and blocked it, with a focus on the Middle East. Although he was not overly excited by the idea itself – there were already variations of it floating around – Julian had been excited by Nizar’s enthusiasm. Nizar, if not the others before him now, understood their limitations, which were not just technical, but were also about people management and project planning. Nizar had given him a l
ook at what they were doing (without their knowledge, it turned out, which partly explained the hostility) and Julian had immediately discovered several ways in which things could be improved or streamlined. Nizar had arranged this meeting to give him a chance to explain how he could help them. A job interview, Julian thought, by people half his age.

  ‘I admire what you’re trying to do,’ Julian kicked off. ‘It needs doing. But it needs doing properly.’ Here some looks were exchanged and Julian pushed on, explaining how he could help them in terms of project management and expertise, how he could assess each of their strengths and divide the labour accordingly, with Nizar nodding all the while. There were some sceptical questions about whether they actually needed any help and some of the conversation was in Arabic, and heated. Julian decided to make things clearer.

  ‘Look. I’m not planning to be the Lawrence of Arabia of the programming world.’ He looked for smiles but saw none. ‘I’m offering to be a servant to your cause, to bring you my years of experience in this area. You’ve got a good idea here, but it’s something that could become useful everywhere. Your vision has universal appeal, so you need to think beyond the Middle East, especially with what we now know is happening in the USA and in the UK.’ Here he gestured at the Edward Snowden T-shirt and glanced at Nizar, who gave a nod.

  ‘Governments everywhere are increasingly wanting to control access to online information. But having the right approach at this early stage is going to matter later on. It will make it easier to both scale it and adapt it to changing situations. Because believe me, once you create a way to bypass state security or censorship they will plug the hole and make the virtual walls higher and thicker. What I’m saying is that it’s going to be an ongoing struggle and it’s something that will need to be configurable at a local level by as many people as possible. Think big, think flexible, think open source. Also, think about what the next project is going to be, and how you’re going to fund the development time, ’cause nobody is going to pay you to do this.’

  They looked at each other and shrugged but appeared mollified by his little speech, and Julian went to the bar to get another round of drinks while they had a discussion. As Julian waited to be served he remembered why the pub was familiar: of course he’d been in it before, many years ago, although it had changed from a smoky dive for university lecturers and PhD students to something more upmarket.

  It was near Conway Hall, where Julian had attended some political rallies and heard some rousing speeches. He’d also been to his last rhetoric-filled SWP meeting there. Boris had approached him afterwards, in this very pub, telling him what a waste of time it all was and asking whether he wouldn’t be interested in doing something that would have actual, real-world results. Julian had been intrigued, not least because he had frankly become lost in all the political infighting and splits, and being of a practical bent had been thinking that exact thing himself. Of course, it was easy to see now that Boris had picked up on the fact that Julian was looking for something to belong to, something bigger than himself, and had offered him entry to a secret and exclusive club. Looking across the room at the earnest young men (no women – not yet, anyway) he smiled, thinking that here was something he could belong to. Nizar came up to help him carry the beers and Cokes back to the table.

  ‘You’re in,’ he said, ‘but you’ll need to prove yourself.’

  ‘That, comrade, is a two-way street.’

  ‘Fair enough.’ They drank a toast, and Julian wondered whether Boris would approve of his new venture with this disparate bunch, thrown together by common cause. He liked to think he would. He picked up the drinks. ‘Shall we get started?’ he asked.

  FIFTY-FIVE

  Upon leaving the interrogation house for the last time Mojgan noticed a dusty car with its back up against the closed metal gates leading to the front of the house. A man she vaguely knew, a factotum for Farsheed’s computing unit, leant against the bonnet of the car, smoking. He was a distant relative of Farsheed for whom he had created a job, something she had objected to on principle. He’d told her it was a nothing job, inconsequential, the man had no ambition, just a simpleton whom nobody else would employ. In the back seat sat a woman in a chador, talking and laughing into a mobile phone. The woman, whom Mojgan recognized, was a guard at the Evin prison and was usually dispatched to accompany female prisoners who were being taken there. She did not acknowledge Mojgan, but that may have been because she was on the phone. Another man, the driver, sat behind the wheel, reading the latest copy of Kayhan, the official newspaper of the hardliners; Farsheed had said it was run by the intelligence agency.

  As she passed the smoking man he smiled at her and said, sotto voce, ‘We’ll pick you up in the morning.’

  Without giving her time to acknowledge or question what he’d said, he moved away as if he hadn’t spoken, heading into the building she had just emerged from. As she walked home she understood what he was telling her.

  She wasn’t going back to the same interrogation house in the morning; that was a mere five minutes’ walk from her apartment, and they wouldn’t be picking her up from home for that short a journey. Mojgan climbed the stairs to her empty apartment, her feet heavier with every step. She had been to Evin prison many times, before moving to the computing section, so she knew the routine. On arrival she would be blindfolded and led to the special women’s wing run by the intelligence ministry, where she would be placed in solitary confinement. She would seize on the smallest kindness given by one of the female prison guards as a sign of hope, a shared humanity. It meant that she would spend months, possibly years, being submitted to interrogations, blindfolded there and back. They would go back over every mission, every perceived failure, every person she had met outside Iran. Worse still, her relationship with Farsheed would be subjected to forensic examination, and it was this she couldn’t bear the thought of. She opened the door and locked it behind her, drawing the bolts across the top and bottom. She went to the bathroom cabinet, where Farsheed kept sleeping pills that he didn’t need. She’d asked him once why he had them.

  ‘In case I need to sleep,’ was his droll answer, but maybe he had an escape route planned in the back of his mind. Maybe, if he was in the same position, without her, he would also want to sleep forever.

  She made some chamomile tea and recovered his tattered book of Rumi poetry from the bedroom shelf, the corners of certain pages folded over in a way she’d told him off about. She also pulled out the plastic chess set he’d had in Baku, the one she had seen him using in the photo they’d shown her. He had been playing white, and because the pieces were one of the last things that his fingers had touched she took them out and held them to her lips, in the hope that they might transfer his physicality to her at some atomic level. She lay on the bed, propped up by embroidered cushions they had chosen together in the Grand Bazaar, the tea and pills by her side, and turned the pages of the Rumi, looking for solace, looking for something that would ease her transition. A ghazal grabbed her attention: number 911, ‘On the Day of My Death’. She started to read it, swallowing pills:

  On the day of my death when my coffin is going by, don’t imagine that I have any pain about leaving this world.

  Don’t weep for me, and don’t say. ‘How terrible! What a pity!’

  She took another pill, another sip of chamomile tea.

  When you see my funeral, don’t say, ‘Parting and separ-ation!’ Since for me, that is the time for union and meeting God.

  Another pill. More tea. The time for union and meeting God.

  This wasn’t what she was looking for. She wanted something that indicated she would have a union with Farsheed. She moved through the book, reaching ghazal number 1392, ‘I Was Dead’.

  I was dead

  I came alive

  I was tears

  I became laughter

  If only he had sent a message, a final message. A message. An email message. The email she had sent him from the black woman’s house, on
the encrypted email website: in her grief she hadn’t thought to check and see if he’d replied. Stupid, stupid Mojgan. She got off the bed and felt her legs give way. Her netbook was not far, in the living room, which she reached with difficulty. Woozy, she switched it on, and the start-up sound made her open her eyes. She logged on. Inbox: one message. It was enough for her to drag herself to the toilet and stick her fingers down her throat.

  At the border crossing of the small town of Bazargan, Mojgan could see ‘Türkiye’ neatly spelled out in stones on a hill, beckoning with the promise of freedom on the other side of the fence.

  She’d been relieved – two days ago now – to see the half-digested pills emerge from her throat, along with the tea. When nothing more came up but bile and her eyes were watering, she made coffee. Strong coffee, lots of it, coffee as thick as syrup, more bitter than the stuff she would soon be able to get once over the border that she was waiting to cross. Only after emptying her stomach and drinking her first cup had she gone back to the computer and opened the message. It was short. But it was enough.