I'm Writing You from Tehran

by Delphine Minoui

  On June 19, the Supreme Leader made his choice. After a week of silence, Ayatollah Khamenei stood with Ahmadinejad. Despite calls for a new election. Despite thousands of protesters in the streets. He made one speech, only one, delivered at the time of the Friday prayer. In his own words, he said that the party was over. That the rallies had to come to an end. Under threat of severe punishment. The speech issued a carte blanche to the Pasdaran and their paramilitary, the Basij, to repress all those who opposed the forced reelection of Khamenei’s protégé.

  By the next day, the face of Tehran had changed considerably. Like an open-air prison, the city was locked down by the police and riot squads. But the protesters persisted. All over the place, improvised gatherings defied the tear gas. There was indignation in people’s wounded gazes. For two hours, I marched along the panic-stricken streets before turning back down Kargar Street, lined with flaming tires. It wasn’t only Ahmadinejad who was targeted by the chants, but also the Supreme Leader. In one night, hope for a peaceful resolution to the crisis had been transformed into screams of rage against the Islamic Republic. In the middle of the road, a protester had transcribed his hatred in white chalk. DEATH TO KHAMENEI, his message read in Persian calligraphy. In the middle of the crowd that had come to applaud this subversive work, a man yelled, “Ahmadinejad commits crimes. The Supreme Leader backs him up.” And he threw stones in the direction of the riot police. A roar of motorcycles muffled his words. Batons in their hands, the Basijis charged the crowd. The man fell backward, face bloody. The wave broke, crashing against the pavement of adjacent streets. Along with other protesters, I wound up pressed against the door of a building. It buckled under our weight. We dived into the stairwell. On the first floor, a grandmother in a chador offered us orange juice on a plastic tray. Another distributed bandages to wounded protesters. One of those surreal scenes that spoke volumes about the surge in mutual support emerging at every level of society. We climbed to the roof. It was packed. A makeshift refuge between two street battles. The tear gas seeped through the bars of the railing. It stung our eyes.

  “I can’t see, I can’t see!” a woman was moaning when the first bullet whizzed by.

  A leaden silence immediately stifled her cries. Our small group froze. It was the first time in Iran that I had heard such a close shot. A real bullet, no doubt. I shuddered, thinking of the stranger who had been hit in the middle of the street. And then came another barrage of bullets, this time farther away, followed by a confused commotion in the street. The sounds of chains and cries and tears mixed together. I peered through the railing. Below, the last protesters were dispersing in a surge of panic. “They’re killing us! They’re killing us!” one of them screamed. In the distance, the militiamen were only small black shadows. From the roof, we followed their trajectory before watching them disappear down a small side street. Someone whispered that it would be best to wait on the roof before going back out. So we stayed there, frozen in fright, caged up with the same macabre thought: a few minutes earlier, and that bullet could have killed one of us. In Tehran, no one was protected anymore from the violence unfolding over the city.

  A half hour later, we recognized with relief the familiar concert of horns. Outside, life was gradually resuming. A disturbing normalcy, as if nothing had happened. Single file, we left our shelter. In the street, we passed a woman, her face haggard. She confirmed that a young woman had been killed here by a sniper, the same shot we had heard. Along Kargar Street, I followed in the footsteps of other lost protesters. The sidewalks were dreary and severe. Everywhere, detritus. Under a half-burnt tree, a few scattered leaves blanketed the ground. Patches of assassinated greenery, lined up like cadavers on the scarred asphalt.

  * * *

  Back at home, I found Borzou again. He was leaning over his computer, head in his hands.

  “Did you see what happened?” he asked, staring at his screen.

  I grabbed a chair and sat down next to him. He had managed to get on the Internet. Though still bad, the connection worked better at night. Thanks to the magic of proxy servers that circumvented the censor, he had even managed to open Facebook and Twitter. The photo of a young woman filled his computer screen. He signaled for me to open another page. She reappeared, her porcelain face framed by a black headscarf.

  “Here, look at this one, too,” Borzou added.

  I opened another site. I saw her again. The portrait of the unknown woman was everywhere, on every form of social media. I clicked on a video link. She was there again, the young girl with the face of an angel, on the ground this time, her big eyes turned to the sky. Blood ran from her mouth, flooded her cheeks. I squinted. Lying on the ground, she was dying in front of the lens of a protester who had filmed her death and posted it to the Internet. Below, a caption said that she was named Neda. That she had gone to the demonstrations with her piano teacher. That she had been killed at the end of the afternoon from a bullet to the chest, not far from Kargar Street. So, she was the woman who had received that fatal shot. Who had died a few yards from our hiding place. The innocent victim of a Basiji bullet! Like thousands of other Iranian women, Neda had ignored her mother’s orders. She had taken to the street to demand her right to be heard. She had joined the crowd with her music teacher. On the video, he was begging her to stay alive. In vain.

  I was in shock. Neda was not the icon of bravery that destiny had made of her by broadcasting her photo all over the planet. Neither was she a militant or a combatant. Neda was a girl like any other, an everyday heroine. Simply a protester, nothing more. She was Sara, she was Sepideh, she was Anousheh. A young Iranian woman who dreamed of a happier future. She was only twenty-six years old.

  * * *

  In the morning, the telephone rang. It was Fatemeh.

  “I hope I’m not interrupting anything?” she murmured.

  I was rooted to the spot. After fruitless attempts, I had given up calling her. I had figured that, after Khamenei’s speech, the Basiji’s wife had rejoined the ranks.

  “Poor Neda,” she added.

  Those two words said everything. They were enough to summarize her state of mind. So Fatemeh had chosen her clan. She was against brutality. She was opposed to repression through violence. Watching the death of a young woman, broadcast live, had devastated her as much as it had us. Perhaps even more.

  “Let’s get together, if you want?” I suggested.

  I was dying to have a private conversation with her. She owed me an explanation. I wanted her to tell me what was going through the minds of the Basijis. Why this brutality, why this mess, why all these useless deaths? A few days earlier, we had learned that the militiamen had killed other young people, right in the middle of the Amir Abad dormitory. A raid like the one in 1999. Except that, this time, a video was already circulating on the Internet. These days, with social media, nothing could be hidden anymore.

  “For now, we’d better not see each other … I’m sorry,” replied Fatemeh.

  I sensed that she was embarrassed. Her voice was hesitant. She told me that she didn’t leave her house much. She had been warned not to go out. I thought of her father, a Basij leader in the suburbs. He must have given her orders. I didn’t insist. She was already taking a big risk by calling me. I just asked about her health, according to the ta’arof, that customary Iranian pleasantry.

  “Oh, I spend my days in front of the television. I like the satellite channels, when they’re working. Because Iranian television is really a lot of nonsense!”

  I recognized her veiled audacity. Her way of telling me that she wasn’t being fooled. That she hadn’t succumbed to the soup of propaganda the regime was ladling out every day. From morning to night, the Revolutionary Guards, known as the Pasdaran, multiplied their televised appearances, claiming that they had uncovered a plot “hatched by Iran’s enemies,” a “velvet revolution” orchestrated by the United States and Israel. The supporting “evidence,” images of “crimes,” was broadcast on Iranian TV all day long: satel
lite dishes, machetes and swords, laptops seized from protesters’ homes. A few days later, we even heard that Neda had been killed by “a paid assassin hired by a BBC correspondent.”

  “And Mahmoud?” I asked.

  I was itching to ask the question, even if I was afraid I already knew the answer.

  “Mahmoud?” she repeated. “He’s very busy. We don’t see each other much at the moment.”

  There was a long silence. I figured she was hesitant to talk too much on the phone. Then she added:

  “I think he’s done with me … You know, I told him I didn’t want to have children.”

  I sat down, ear glued to the phone. Tehran was crumbling, and Fatemeh, the reformed militiawoman, was opening her broken heart to me, turning to intimate secrets. Was she trying to divert the discussion, or was this her way of calling for help? I replied:

  “Do you mean that you are thinking of divorce?”

  “I don’t know … At the same time, he’s a good man. He doesn’t beat me. Normally, he gives me my freedom. I can even go out with my girlfriends … The only problem is that he’s married to the Basij … Really, he’s cheating on me with the Basij!”

  I could tell she was flustered, breaking down the usual boundary between public and private.

  “Are you saying that Mahmoud followed the orders of the Leader?” I added, making an allusion to Khamenei’s speech at Friday’s prayer.

  Fatemeh gave me the answer I feared:

  “The other day, he came back home very late … His shirt was covered in blood.”

  I didn’t know how to react. I already knew too much. The two of them, Fatemeh and Mahmoud, were symbols of an Iran that was destroying itself from the inside. In the ring, it was no longer “Islam versus Islam.” It was turbans versus Pasdaran, a peaceful majority striving for an opening to the rest of the world, supported by distinguished clerics, versus a bellicose minority aligned against the West, preferring isolation and violence in the name of an obsolete ideology. Which of the two clans would win out? I needed to speak directly to Mahmoud. Had he, the aspiring soldier, transformed into an assassin? Hanging up, I called his number numerous times. It rang without response. At night, while I was writing my article about Neda, he called me back.

  “What’s up?” he asked in that indifferent tone I knew so well.

  In the background, I recognized the irregular tumult of the street. He was still outside at that late hour.

  “I have to ask you a question,” I said right up front.

  “Okay, I’m listening,” he replied, surprised.

  “You’re not too rough with the protesters, right?”

  He gave a fake laugh. He must have guessed that I had spoken to Fatemeh.

  “Of course not. Don’t worry! I simply bring the wounded to the hospital … Sometimes my shirt gets stained.”

  I stayed silent. I had nothing more to add. I was convinced he was lying to me, but it might have been my imagination. I didn’t know if I should hate him, be mad at him, or share my suspicions with him. But was it wise to continue the conversation? He broke the silence:

  “Don’t worry! This chaos won’t last. You’ll see. In a few days, everything will go back to normal.”

  And with these words, he hung up.

  IT WAS THE morning of June 22; I will never forget that day. In the living room, the television was set to the Iranian news. Exhausted from too many all-nighters, I was half listening to the bulletin. The presenter’s voice accompanied my breakfast like background music. When I heard “journalist,” I didn’t notice right away. The sound was low. And then the word was said again multiple times. An unusual repetition. I raised my head. My photo took up half the screen. I jumped out of my chair. I think my mug of tea went flying. I gripped the remote. I wanted to turn up the sound. Listen to the commentary that accompanied the photo. The presenter was speaking too quickly. Other photos were displayed with the same speed. I didn’t recognize the faces. I grasped only a few snippets: “Western conspiracy … manipulation by the foreign media … agents of Mossad and the Great Satan.” Enough to understand that danger was closing in.

  I called out to Borzou. He was in the shower. When he came into the living room, feet wet, the news had turned to something else. I didn’t need to say much. Seeing my devastated expression, he knew there was something to worry about. The day before, Maziar Bahari, Newsweek’s Iran correspondent, had been arrested in his home. He was Iranian Canadian. Along with him and about ten other dual-nationality reporters, we were among the last representatives of Western media on Iranian territory. In the days before, all the press visas had expired and the last special correspondents had been kicked out. We had watched them leave, one after another, while choosing to stay. Had our hour come? Officially, we had the right to extend our stay. Our Iranian passports spared us such constraints. But they also exposed us to the risk of being arrested. Unbeknownst to us, we had become the potential hostages of a desperate regime. I shuddered, thinking again of what Mahmoud had said. Perhaps this was it, the return to order he had predicted.

  The next day, a trusted friend came to see us, distraught. With a trembling hand, he unfolded a newspaper on the table. It was the latest issue of Kayhan, the mouthpiece of the regime. He flipped through it hastily and placed his index finger on the page he wanted to show us.

  “Here. Read this,” he said.

  It was a short article. One of those tidbits you rarely pay attention to. A few words written from left to right, as brief as they were abrupt. “Western media outlets are dispatching their binational reporters to Iran to spy and glean information illegally,” the text read. No need, for once, to tear my hair out trying to read between the lines. The message was clear.

  “This is bad,” said Borzou.

  Our friend turned toward us, looking grave.

  “Instead of accepting the demands of the people, our leaders have chosen to dream up a grand play entitled something like The Velvet Revolution Incited by the West. A piece of advice: leave. Leave before the casting office decides you’re the best actors for the lead roles!” he said.

  And then, flustered, he whispered that there were other reasons to worry about our situation.

  “What?” I asked.

  “I got a call from a guy in the intelligence service who knows you.”

  Mr. Fingers! My lead interrogator. I had almost forgotten about him. The passage of time had nearly managed to chase him from my memory. His reappearance didn’t bode well.

  “He wants to see us?” I interrupted him, already imagining a summons.

  “No. It’s worse.”

  We were hanging on his every word. He continued:

  “He told me to warn you both. To tell you that he is no longer in charge. Neither he nor his cronies. Other ‘services,’ ones that are much more dangerous, have taken over. These people are no joke. If they catch you, there’s nothing anyone will be able to do for you.”

  We understood immediately. It was the Revolutionary Guards who were steering the country. Mr. Fingers’s call was a warning bell. The last one before prison. We had to leave right then. No more haggling for a few extra days. We had already stayed too long.

  Within a few hours, we planned our departure. We would go in a group, with the last remaining dual-nationality reporters. We consulted one another via Skype, which seemed to be the most secure means of communication. We agreed to reserve the same red-eye flight for Dubai. It took off in the early morning. Then we packed our bags. We had never really unpacked them. Consumed with worry, Borzou and I sat one last time at our living room table to write an email to our close friends and family: a denial of the “confessions” they might extract from us by force if we were arrested. The document would serve, we hoped, to defend us.

  In the late afternoon, Sara came to say good-bye. I wanted to give her one last hug before leaving. Wish her all the courage that I no longer had. I squeezed her very tightly. I could feel her bones beneath her blouse.

  “You�
�ve gotten even skinnier,” I said.

  “Have you heard the latest joke? The Iranians started a super-trendy diet: lose weight by protesting. And the best part? It costs nothing!”

  Her good humor impressed me. A shield against tyranny. Before taking her leave, she slid a piece of paper into my pocket. “My newest poem,” she murmured. I told myself that I would have plenty of time to read it. In the plane or in prison.

  Sepideh arrived immediately afterward. She was breathless. She had spent the day chasing after bad news. All around her, stories fell like flaming arrows. The leaders of the opposition had been put under house arrest. Their advisers, behind bars. And her writer friends were en route to the Turkish border. She knew they were looking for her, too. Each night, she slept somewhere new to avoid being caught.

  “Leave. Leave before it’s too late,” she insisted.

  “What about you?” I asked, my voice trembling.

  My heart was on my sleeve.

  “Don’t worry. I’ve seen worse!” She laughed, cracking her shoulder, the one that had never fully set back into place after her first tangle with a militiaman, in the ’90s.

  I was frozen. I couldn’t smile. Or even cry.

  “But today they’re much more violent,” I said.

  “Promise me just one thing,” she added. “Don’t forget us!”

  I took her in my arms. She nestled her head against my shoulder, face buried in my hair. I felt her tears soaking through my T-shirt.

  “I’m just tired. I’m just tired,” she mumbled.

  At that moment, I didn’t imagine she would be arrested a few days after our departure.

  By the time the taxi arrived, in the middle of the night, a lump of anxiety had lodged in my throat. The unthinkable had turned into the inevitable: we were leaving for good. My previous years had been an accumulation of false departures. This time, after such an endless game of hide-and-seek, I was shredding the map I had pieced together with my memories of Iran. Closing the gate to the building, I glanced one last time at the family home, where I had been the last resident. Who would come to water the plants in the garden? Who would feed the goldfish in the pond? Would I one day have the chance to see Tehran again, other than in a photo?