* * *
Once back at the house, it was impossible to fall asleep. After walking in circles around the bag, we opened it. Without knowing us, this young stranger had entrusted her entire life to us: cell phone, wallet, keys to her apartment, ID card. A laminated document indicated that she was an architect. And where was she now? I couldn’t stop myself from thinking the worst. I imagined she was gone forever. I thought of her parents, eaten up with worry. I opened her address book in search of a number to call. I wanted to give them what remained of their daughter. The book was empty. Around four in the morning, I nodded off, head on the blank pages. Suddenly, an unexpected melody, between an alarm clock and a cell phone ring, wrested me from my sleep. I opened my eyes. It was past noon on June 14. The stranger’s cell phone was vibrating repeatedly. I picked up.
“Salam, it’s Anousheh.”
Anousheh! My heart leaped to the ceiling. I recognized the name printed on the ID card.
“Salam!” I replied enthusiastically, as if I had found an old friend.
“You … You have my bag?”
“Yes, of course!” I answered, giving her our address right away.
* * *
A few hours later, she rang the intercom. I pressed the button to open the door. In the stairwell, I saw a young woman come up the steps limping, eyes creased in pain. I took her arm, closing the door of the apartment behind us.
“Look what they did to me!” she moaned.
Then she took off her coat, pulled down her pants: her legs were lacerated with marks from the militiamen’s blows.
“I wasn’t even protesting … I only rushed over to help my brother. He had just been arrested. When I saw him collapse, I hurried to help him. The Basijis beat me up … Then they took both of us to the police station in a van. They kept us there all night before letting us go.”
Her translucent face betrayed a profound lack of sleep. I still couldn’t get over the fact that she had trusted us enough to give us her bag.
“Oh, a survival reflex!” she replied. “If something had happened to me, I at least wanted people to know where I had disappeared from. And also, I trust my people. Iran is a country of benevolent souls. By manipulating the election, the regime achieved only one victory: they brought us closer together. From now on, I will protest every day, in solidarity with my fellow citizens.”
“Did you vote?”
“No. I’ve never believed in the system. Powerless to change it, I ended up resigning myself to it.”
“So why take to the streets?”
“Now something different is happening: Iranians were tricked by a semblance of democracy. They came out to put their votes in the ballot boxes. And now they’re being punished for voting. It’s unacceptable! I’ll protest for my compatriots’ choice to be respected. And to be done with Ahmadinejad, Khamenei’s pawn! You heard his speech today: he dared to call his opponents ‘garbage.’ It’s scandalous! We’re so sick of his arrogance. It’s waking up even the most comatose among us.”
I watched her speak, waving her hands. Sometimes a grimace betrayed her pain. Anousheh was one of those heroines from the shadows who defied suffering as she defied danger. Would Iranian women like her be the ones to rattle the regime?
“Pandora’s box is open,” she whispered. “The genie won’t go back in the bottle so easily.”
THE NEXT DAY, the unimaginable unfolded in front of my eyes. One of those magical moments when you would have been right at home, my epicurean grandfather, the aspiring poet, the passionate democrat. It was June 15, Khordad 25 in the Iranian calendar. I’ve kept the planner I had back then, the date circled in permanent ink. Beneath it, I scribbled a small note addressed to you. I told you how moved I was at having found all your ideas assembled in a single protest, the most dangerous and the most beautiful I had ever witnessed.
That morning, Mousavi the “hero” had canceled a heated protest for fear of a bloodbath. But the most audacious dissidents planned to meet at Enghelab Square at the end of the afternoon. Borzou and I headed downtown, our reporters’ notebooks hidden in our pockets. The riot police were on the lookout. Spread around the University of Tehran, students formed mobile clusters. Their frozen faces revealed the uncertainty of the moment. They advanced slowly, brushing the windows of bookstores, exchanging a few furtive words, then walking a bit farther down the road. There were girls, lots of girls. With blue headscarves, red headscarves. And green, too. I lowered my eyes. They were all wearing sneakers. A sign: those girls were prepared to protest. And to run if needed. We followed them down Enghelab Street, toward Azadi Square and the unknown. A stubborn silence accompanied our march. At the next intersection, stray onlookers joined the movement. It was as if they had been waiting for this gathering to give meaning back to their miserable day. And then we passed other intersections, other streets, other buildings. And other protesters. I saw grandmothers veiled from head to toe, businessmen with briefcases, workers in overalls, disabled war veterans in wheelchairs, children on their parents’ shoulders. I observed them, their gazes to the sky, their moon-shaped mouths ready to shout their slogans at the signal.
In less than an hour, these little disjointed links had formed an immense human chain. Next to us, two old gentlemen, hand in hand, started belting out, “Give us back our vote!” One of them said that he hadn’t left his home in a year. He added, “For how long have I dreamed of this day? Sometimes I closed my eyes, cried, and imagined this moment. And here it is before my eyes. Anything can happen to me now. I could die happy.” He was trembling all over, stunned by his own feelings. And I listened to him as if it were you speaking. Farther on, a woman said that she had driven straight from Shahriar, about an hour from Tehran. She and her neighbors had rented a minibus to come protest. Her husband didn’t know. “Down with the dictator!” she yelled. “Hey, Nuclear Ahmadi, give it a rest—you’re tired!” added one of her companions. In Persian, the slogan rhymed. Even when they protest, Iranians express themselves in poetry.
Borzou and I went up on a bridge. The human wave unfurled as far as the eye could see. In the middle of the avenue, crammed on the sidewalks, on top of bus shelters, hundreds of thousands of Iranians were marching. Behind us, someone murmured that there were a million people, maybe two million. Leaning over their balconies, onlookers cheered the absence of the police. Deterred by the size of the crowd, the security forces had vanished. Only a few helicopters skimmed the rooftops from time to time. Later, we learned that Mousavi had even risked a brief public appearance before disappearing again. I thought once more of the protests on Enghelab Street in 1999. Ten years later, the stifled cry of students had evolved into a cry of national anger that transcended generations. For the first time, all of Iran was in the street. An ocean of rebels.
The movement slowed as it approached a building guarded by Basijis. In this hive of activity, a few young people volunteered to form a protective barricade. A woman chanted at the top of her voice: “Don’t be afraid, don’t be afraid. We are all together!” Like a refrain, the crowd repeated her slogan. And then all that was left of fear and sadness was erased under the protesters’ steps. The street was pulsating. The sun was splashing their faces. The light was warm and reassuring. I let myself be blinded, guided only by the sound of our steps on the cobblestones. I had lost Borzou in the crowd. I was alone in the middle of all those strangers. But unlike in 1999, I understood all the slogans, all the words, all the gestures. For the first time, I understood Iran in its entirety. I’d had to wait all those years to be able to penetrate its secrets. Beneath my eyes, in that defiant crowd, an entire country was revealing itself. Proud people, infatuated with democracy, were discovering that they existed; they were waking up in unison. Old men, zealots, disillusioned bearded men, the unemployed. The noose might tighten, bullets might whiz by, but, I told myself, never, never again would this pulsing wave of life be subdued.
* * *
At that moment, dear Babai, something inside me broke away. A
nguish left me. I felt like a little link in that chain of rebels. I found something in their fight that resembled your convictions. My convictions, too. They were marching. We were marching. I was marching. Toward an unknown we no longer doubted. I had seen Enghelab Street red with roses, then with blood; now there was nothing left but the present, visible, the force of a desire for justice that grew with each second. The horizon was boundless. That march, although slow, resembled a frantic race, a dance that was brazen, uncertain, terrifying, and happy. It sucked me in; it filled me up. The world had grown larger around me, like an uncharted territory whose borders were constantly receding. In the middle of all these anonymous faces, I had forgotten my name, my profession, where I was, where I came from. My life melted into theirs. I was Iranian. We were all Iranian.
* * *
Back home that night, your memory continued to invade my thoughts. At the entrance to our street, normally so calm, a concert of “Allahu Akbar” rained from the sky. It wasn’t the traditional call of the neighborhood mosque. It was a gentle, sinuous clamor, a chant that slid along the walls, caressed the leaves of the trees, and enveloped the melody of the jub. Intrigued, I opened the door to the building and climbed the steps that led to our roof, which hid our forbidden satellite dish. The chant amplified, grew closer, intensified. “Allahu Akbar … Death to the dictator!” The voices answered one another from roof to roof, in perfectly orchestrated rounds. In a circular movement, I scanned the other roofs. Through the mesh of the black sheet of night, I recognized the faces of all those strangers I had walked past for so many years. The zealot neighbors from next door who got on our nerves with their litanies during the religious festivities of Ashura. The apathetic bourgeois who lived opposite our house and collected luxury cars. The old lady from the end of the street who never left her home. “Allahu Akbar … Death to the dictator!” Those people didn’t know one another, perhaps detested one another. They probably had never spoken. But there they were suddenly chanting “God is great” in one voice. From one house to another, from one roof to another, they took up this rallying cry as their chorus, a strange echo of the 1979 revolution.
* * *
I thought again of that period, of your generation’s revolt. Of that age when, at twilight, Tehran echoed with the same chant in the hope of overthrowing the shah. Through protesting, resisting, the dissenters had brought about the fall of the monarch. Would it be the same this time around? Would the Iranian people be heard? Would that astonishing national awakening bring down, if not the Supreme Leader, then at least Ahmadinejad? In 1979, passions had crystallized around a man, Khomeini, and an ideology, Islam. It was one of the reasons you stayed out of it, little inclined to sell your soul in the name of any dogma. This time the revolt was different. The movement had neither leader nor motivation other than respect for the people’s choice. That was its weakness but also its strength. I asked myself what role you would have played. If, like all those rebels, you would have ascended to the roofs in protest. If you would have hummed “Allahu Akbar,” a chant of resistance henceforth stripped of its religious texture.
I wanted to call Mamani. I was curious to hear her opinion. In her apartment in Paris, she was stamping her feet at not being in Tehran. As when she was in Iran, she spent her days flipping between various satellite channels. In the course of the conversation, she was the one who told me that, at the end of the day, the protest on Enghelab Street had descended into violence after reaching Azadi Square. Several protesters had even fallen to Basijis’ bullets.
“What do you mean, you didn’t know? You’re the journalist!”
In Tehran, text messages were blocked, and the Farsi BBC and Voice of America were jammed, complicating access to information. Internet filters made our task even more difficult. Apart from wildlife documentaries and video clips depicting the glory of the martyrs of the Iran-Iraq War, the state television didn’t show much.
“Oh, and have you heard the latest? They’re saying that some Iranian diplomats posted abroad are starting to quit,” continued Mamani, triumphant.
At the other end of the line, her voice sounded young again. She told me she had heard this news about multiple resignations during a protest that day in front of the Parisian embassy of the Islamic Republic, on Avenue d’Iéna, in the sixteenth arrondissement. I thought I had heard incorrectly. I made her repeat it.
“You mean you went to a protest?” I asked.
“Well, yeah,” she retorted, as if it went without saying.
I was astounded. Mamani, too, had joined the farandole of the unruly. Young Anousheh had been right: the entire population was waking up. Including your wife, the professional grinch, transformed late in life into an Iranian Joan of Arc. Before going to sleep, I replayed her words. If you had still been in this world, how would you have greeted her metamorphosis? I let myself imagine that you would have been seduced by her fervor. And that you might even have fallen in love with her again, this time for good.
THE NEXT DAY, I was finally able to see Sara, my Persian teacher. Since my return to Tehran, we’d had to keep postponing our reunion, repeatedly compromised by current events catching us off guard. Sara was particularly busy. During the day, she protested. At night, she went in search of her missing friends: she knocked on their parents’ doors, made the rounds of the hospitals, visited the morgues, prowled around the prisons.
“Here. This is for you,” she said, taking a surgical mask out of her bag.
This was the new shield for protesters. A modest armor to protect us from the tear gas. On the way over, she had taken time out of her busy schedule to stop at the pharmacy in her neighborhood before they ran out. In Tehran, these masks broke sales records. Sara wanted me to wear one, too.
“Can you imagine me wearing this?” I responded.
Actually, her gift couldn’t have come at a better time. That morning, all press passes had been revoked. Several visiting reporters had received visits from the intelligence service in their hotel rooms. Others had been escorted to the airport. The order had been given from the Ministry of Islamic Culture and Guidance that we were no longer to set foot at the protests. I had to find a way to continue my reporting without being seen. Facing the mirror, I pressed the square of fabric against my mouth. And as usual, I hid my hair under a black headscarf. With my sunglasses on top, I was unrecognizable.
“Perfect!” Sara said, proud of her find, inviting me to accompany her to that day’s rally.
As a precaution, my notebook and camera were to stay at the house this time. Sara assured me that my cell phone would be more than enough. I took her advice. Before leaving, I turned to face her. Apart from the color of our headscarves, we were dressed like twins.
* * *
The procession began at Vanak Square, at around 5:00 p.m. Sara had received the details, scribbled in green felt-tip pen on a banknote. With no text messaging, this was the new way of passing on information. Sometimes, the banknotes could turn into antiregime pamphlets. Or even into poems. When we arrived, I saw the same mix of fear and audacity as the day before, the same brazen slogans. On a sign held overhead, someone quoted Mahatma Gandhi: “First They Ignore You, Then They Laugh at You, Then They Fight You, and Finally, You Win.” Farther along, another protester was holding up the portrait of Ayatollah Montazeri. The day before, the turbaned wise man from Qom had emerged from his shell, calling for three days of national mourning in memory of the dead of Enghelab Street. Sara and I plunged into the wave. We marched side by side, accomplices on the same quest. A solemn calm accompanied our steps. The crowd was dense, faces on alert. An extraordinary scene I couldn’t photograph. All those gleaming eyes I would have liked to immortalize. Then I saw Sara raise a hand in the air, the lens of her cell phone pointed at the crowd. A second cell phone followed. And a third. And a fourth. And then dozens of others. The hands were those of protesters. Holding tight to their cell phones, they filmed history in the making, the history that we, professional reporters, no longer ha
d the right to document. True citizen journalists, at once participants in and witnesses to their own history. Without our having noticed, in the course of these events, a surprising switch had taken place. Sara, photographer by default. Me, impromptu protester.
* * *
In the following days, the little ritual happened again, even spreading to the sleepy provinces. At the end of each march, the next day’s plan was announced by word of mouth. Or sometimes simply on pieces of cardboard exchanged between two subway cars during the protests. It was a moment of great conviviality. New friendships formed. Colleagues who had never spoken discovered one another. As soon as a protester learned that a reporter was among them, he or she would offer that person fruit juice and hugs. But each day, the regime’s frayed nerves pushed us to redouble our caution. Borzou and I often went out separately, to dodge the intelligence service. In the crowd, he went by the name Behrouz. I was Élahé. It was the first time I had ever used my middle name, my Iranian name.
Our daily life had gradually taken the form of a play in which we were condemned to wear masks in order to keep on documenting what was happening. And to stay alive. It was a time of hope and apprehension. We didn’t know what had happened to the majority of our friends. People said that Evin Prison was overflowing with prisoners. Never had we been so close to being behind bars. To this day, I still don’t know what compelled us to take to the streets despite everything: passion for our work, love for country, addiction to risk, adrenaline. Or all of it combined.
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