Children of Paradise (41 page)

Two men burst through as though expecting a chase. But the apartment hardly left room to walk, let alone run. To reach the bedroom closet required climbing over the bed.

One of the men looked around in amazement and blurted out, “This is the apartment? Where is the money from the CIA?”

They presented a torn piece of paper on which someone had scrawled instructions to search Roozbeh’s home and detain him. There was no letterhead, no seal. The handwriting was a mess. The men were in plainclothes. But they said the office of the chief prosecutor, Saeed Mortazavi, had sent them. One told Roozbeh, “I see that you write articles and provide interviews to antirevolutionary radio stations working against the regime.”

Roozbeh had never imagined that anyone could search such a small space for two full hours. But Mortazavi’s men left nothing to chance. They emptied Roozbeh’s folders and studied his photographs, flipped the pages of his books and checked under the furniture; they even searched the refrigerator and freezer in the hope of finding alcohol, possession of which could be entered as a charge against him. They were visibly disappointed not to find an illegal satellite dish.

Solmaz’s equanimity seemed to irk them. “It seems the lady hasn’t realized what is happening yet,” one of the agents remarked to the other while Roozbeh was in the bathroom throwing on his clothes.

“I realize it,” she answered coolly. “But my faith will see me through.”

“You’d best make breakfast for your husband,” the man retorted. “He won’t have anything to eat for days.”

“I’ll make breakfast for you, too,” said Solmaz. And she did. But no one ate.

The men lit on some of Roozbeh’s CDs: a recording of Soroush’s lectures, a couple of movies. They loaded these, together with some of Roozbeh’s papers and Roozbeh himself, into a Paykan parked outside.

Before they left, one of the men put a finger in Solmaz’s face. “Don’t do any interviews with the international media,” he commanded her. “If you do, it will be very bad for you.”

The Paykan took Roozbeh to a police station on Motahari Street, where he waited about two hours in a basement room. When his captors transferred him into a van with tinted windows, he stole what he knew would be his last look for some time at a normal city thoroughfare, bustling with quotidian activity. Then he was blindfolded with a napkin, his hands zip-cuffed behind his back, his head shoved beneath the driver’s seat as the van zigged and zagged at a sickening pace to the secret prison with the garden full of birds.

• • •

O
MID
M
EMARIAN HAD NOT PREPARED
for adversity the way adversity had prepared for him. He was a golden boy, ambitious, intelligent, hardworking, and charmed with success. Clean-cut, with thick, close-cropped curls and an oblong, open face, he had an ingenuousness about him, a quality frank and expectant. He seemed perpetually delighted to have been invited to the party that was his life. When he spoke, the words tumbled so rapidly that one was hardly finished before the next began; the listener invariably straggled paragraphs behind. His name meant “hope,” and it suited him.

Omid came from a lower-middle-class family. His parents were civil servants with high school educations, and they raised him partly in a northeast Tehran neighborhood called Lavizan and partly in the gritty outlying city of Karaj. He read and wrote poetry; he thrilled to Shariati and struggled through Soroush when he was still in high school. He went to university to study metallurgical engineering, but he found his vocation as a community organizer instead.

For the price of an ice cream cone, Omid and a friend offered tutoring
sessions in math and physics at a neighborhood mosque. Within six months they had nearly a dozen tutors serving close to a hundred students, many of them abjectly poor. Omid and his friends started publishing a newsletter. They hired a psychologist to man a hotline for marriage and family counseling. Almost by accident, Omid had created a civic group like the ones Hajjarian had envisioned: a neighborhood association that could help organize the public according to its affinities, its needs, its demands.

But the mosque was a contested space. Omid and his friends looked and talked like outsiders: clean-shaven, educated, unabashedly cosmopolitan. Although the imam welcomed them, and although the congregants consumed their offerings hungrily, the local Basij distrusted their influence and lobbied the imam, saying that Omid and his friends had girlfriends, that they were sinners and infidels. The Basij had money, authority, connections Omid’s group did not have. Militiamen began to demand copies of Omid’s newsletter before publication. Eventually, Omid registered his group as a nongovernmental organization, linked it to similar groups from other parts of the city, and moved it out of the mosque.

If Omid had been less inclined to optimism, he might have understood his experience at the mosque as an ominous one. The talk of civil society, so anodyne to Western ears and so thrilling to Omid’s cohort, rang as a threat and even an insult to Iran’s religious elements, which already understood themselves as civic actors. What was the mosque if not an institution of civil society? What, even, was the Basij? Who were these arrogant young men, and with what foreign ideas did they hope to supplant the hard-won revolutionary order? The Basij, for its part, little understood the effects of civic disempowerment on the educated middle class: the alienation young people like Omid felt, their hunger to contribute to their country’s development.

Under Khatami, the interior ministry licensed hundreds of nongovernmental organizations. Some of these were surely exercises in grant writing and career inflation. But others were sincere efforts to assume responsibility for social welfare, to build the vital bridge that Hajjarian had spoken of between society and state. Omid never imagined that this would be
dangerous work. The president himself had made it his signature. Some of the new organizations served the environment and helped the city recycle. Others addressed the rights and welfare of women and children, or helped educate immigrants, or issued microcredit, or addressed the growing and hidden problem of drug addiction. To be a citizen, this new crop of organizers believed, had to mean something more than voting every four years and expecting politicians to change everything. One nongovernmental organization took on Tehran’s rat problem, laying poison on blighted boulevards.

Omid converted his NGO into a think tank and resource center for the leaders of other NGOs. He called it Alternative Thinkers of Civil Society and got funding from the Tehran office of the United Nations Development Programme. He was the organization’s public face, holding meetings with newspaper editors and reformist members of the parliament and the city council. He published a magazine. When a newspaper brought him on as a columnist, Omid felt that he’d arrived. He adored seeing his name in print, hearing strangers talk about his ideas. Soon he was helping the municipality of Tehran coordinate among the NGOs serving the city. Later the interior ministry took him on as an adviser on social issues. Through this work, Omid had access to privileged information, to official reports and high-ranking politicians. He couldn’t publish all the information to which he was privy, but he could steer other journalists to sources and topics he knew were worth excavating.

Gholamhossein Karbaschi, the former mayor of Tehran, tapped Omid to run for city council in 2003. Omid was a logical choice. He had the voracious ambition, the connections in both government and media, and the command of the urban landscape. He was also witty and personable. He campaigned all over Tehran, addressing crowds that reached, at their height, five thousand listeners. He reminded his audiences that he was an ordinary guy, clean-shaven and cologne-wearing, not the son of an ayatollah. This was a kind of reverse populism for a postrevolutionary age. And it was not ineffective. But Omid knew the election was doomed when his mother told him she would not be voting.

“Omid dear,” she said, “even if you are elected to city council, what can you do?”

Although this was the municipal election that the reformists lost spectacularly, Omid placed a respectable fifty-fourth out of 1,200 candidates. He was not given to regrets. He was the sort of person who savored even his rejection letters for the attention they suggested someone had paid to his submissions. Now he turned his attention to writing a blog, which he published in Persian and English, and to his work with Alternative Thinkers of Civil Society.

Through his civil society work, Omid started traveling abroad. He went to conferences, mainly in Europe. He visited nine countries in two years. He and his boss at the UNDP raised money from European foundations to publish books and train civil society leaders. He felt privileged to be doing something that he loved and that his elected leaders also desired and rewarded. Only later would Omid understand that he had placed himself in the crosshairs—that he had taken on exactly the project that hard-liners like Mortazavi most feared as the groundwork of a velvet revolution. Then he would imagine himself a soldier who’d advanced with his army only to turn around, too late, to see that everyone had retreated, leaving him in no-man’s-land.

• • •

R
OOZBEH STUDIED THE WALLS
of his cell with his fingers. Slowly, systematically, he caressed them from the floor to as high as he could reach. He felt for carvings left by other prisoners; he felt for bumps and divots and bubbles in the paint. He had the uncallused, painstaking fingers of a blind man or a surgeon. There were no books, nor was there light to see or read by. He read the walls instead, and he committed them to memory, centimeter by centimeter.

Roozbeh’s cell was on a different hall from Shahram’s. He learned this from the prisoner who had been sent from Shahram’s block to mop the hall in Roozbeh’s. Near Roozbeh were a man from Mashhad, arrested for selling photocopies of law books at the legal bazaar, and the head of the Japanese
yakuza organization in Iran, one Haj Ali, whose body was covered in tattoos and who was accused of a major role in trafficking heroin and cocaine. Haj Ali served only a week or so. Massoud Ghoreishi, the young webmaster of one of the reformist sites for which Roozbeh used to write, was also there, and would remain for ninety days because of his refusal to confess. The prisoners could communicate sometimes after two in the morning, when the guards were asleep, through the vents at the tops of their cells.

The interrogations had begun immediately after Roozbeh arrived. At first he faced only one question. The interrogators put a piece of paper before him and told him to disclose all of his illicit sexual relationships. Roozbeh wrote that he’d had none.

“Get up,” the interrogator ordered.

Roozbeh stood. The interrogator slapped him.

“Are you lying to me?”

“I have no reason to lie.”

The interrogator beat Roozbeh, tore up the paper, and ordered him to sit down and answer the same question again. Roozbeh answered in the same way.

“Are you being hardheaded?” the interrogator demanded.

“But I haven’t had any!” Roozbeh exclaimed. “You have brought me here and are accusing me of having illicit relationships. What is the charge? What is the crime?”

The interrogator ordered Roozbeh to his feet, then punched his stomach and chest until he hit the wall. It was the first time anyone had laid a hand on Roozbeh in anger in his life. And the interrogation went on for nine hours that day. Sometimes his captor smashed his head into the table or the wall. Once he threatened Roozbeh with a baton, though he never used it. The second day of questioning and beatings lasted from eight in the morning until after midnight. After that, the schedule mellowed into a six-hour routine, four hours in the morning, two in the afternoon. Roozbeh told the time by his scant bathroom breaks.

On the third day, he accepted the charge, hoping that this would be the end of it. Sure, he said. He’d had a relationship with a woman. The interrogator placed in front of him a list of female journalists: “Which one?”

There was a plan, Roozbeh soon discerned, and the question was not whether he would play his part but when. The interrogator steered him toward a particular woman who had been a reporter at
Etemad
when Roozbeh was there. She, too, had covered the Zahra Kazemi affair. She was Roozbeh’s friend. They went for walks sometimes, or out for coffee, to talk about work; once, Roozbeh accompanied her and her boyfriend on a trip to the Caspian, and they had all stayed with Roozbeh’s family in Rasht. This woman was not his girlfriend. She was the mutual friend who had introduced him to his wife. But like Roozbeh, and unlike most unmarried Iranians, she lived independent of her parents in an apartment in Tehran. Roozbeh, Solmaz, and their friends often went to gatherings there.

His interrogators knew this. They also knew all kinds of things that weren’t true. They presented Roozbeh with statements from other imprisoned journalists, alleging a relationship between him and his former colleague.

The female colleague had recently married and started a new life with her husband, away from journalism. Now Roozbeh might become the instrument of that life’s destruction. The interrogators would force him to confess to things that would sow distrust in her marriage and add ammunition to her judicial file. Resistance met with blows. He allowed himself to believe the interrogator who reassured him that this confession would not be used against his friend.

Roozbeh must now describe their sexual acts, the interrogator said. In graphic detail.

“I was alone in a room with her,” Roozbeh replied. But when he couldn’t supply anything further, the interrogator dictated from his own lurid fantasies. In due time, Roozbeh wrote what he was told.

Of all the things that were done to him in prison, this would be among the most mortifying and the hardest to undo. When that female colleague was arrested, Mortazavi’s deputy placed Roozbeh’s confession before her, telling her she would most likely be stoned for what she’d done.

• • •

W
HAT A MESS THEY’D LEFT.
Solmaz sat, stricken, on one of the wicker couches in her ransacked home. She must have sat there for forty-five minutes after Roozbeh was taken away. Sometimes she cried. At other times she just stared and thought. She was not surprised, but she was in shock.