Children of Paradise (44 page)

On her second or third visit to Mortazavi, the prosecutor asked something of Solmaz. She could help Roozbeh, he told her, if she would just sign a little confession of her own. She’d need to write a letter about Mostafa Tajzadeh, Behzad Nabavi, and Emadeddin Baghi, a sociologist who was the editor of
Jomhuriat
and who had been active in exposing the serial killings. Solmaz should allege that these three men had misused young, naïve journalists in the pursuit of their own ambitions and that they had forced Roozbeh to spread lies about the regime.

“I don’t know these people,” Solmaz protested. “If you’re angry with them, why have you arrested Roozbeh instead?”

“Their time will come,” Mortazavi replied darkly.

Solmaz was not sentimental. As she understood it, she and Roozbeh were exposed and alone and in danger, paying the price for the ambitions of more important men who did not rise to their defense. She would sign what she needed to sign to get Roozbeh out of prison. But even when she’d resolved to do it, she could not make the pen move on the paper the prosecutor placed before her.

“I’ve read your open letters about your husband’s case,” Mortazavi prompted her. “You’re a writer. Write this.” In the end he dictated her confession word for word.

• • •

O
NE DAY IN
N
OVEMBER
, when Roozbeh had been in detention more than forty days, he and Shahram were thrown into a single cell no bigger than their solitary ones. They understood they’d been reunited in the hope that they would incriminate themselves in conversation. Instead they traded stories and recounted memories from better times. At night Roozbeh sang for Shahram, just as he had promised so long before in jest.

After ten days they were transferred, together with Omid and Javad Gholam-Tamimi, to Evin Prison. That day seventeen others associated with their case—now known as “the bloggers’ file,” although it included civil society activists as well as journalists—were released.

Evin was a vast improvement on the secret prison. The food was
incomparably better. The guards were ordinary working people who showed them no malice. And Roozbeh, Omid, and Shahram were no longer in solitary confinement. Instead they shared a suite composed of two solitary cells with a shower and a kitchenette. These suites, on the fourth floor of Evin’s Section 9, were the prison’s showpieces when international human rights groups came calling. They also happened to sit on death row. The halls echoed with violence, and in the early mornings the cellmates could hear the condemned being led to their executions.

A cell down the hall from theirs belonged to a notorious serial killer named Mohammad Bijeh. Just twenty-four years old, Bijeh had been convicted of murdering and raping some seventeen boys between the ages of eight and fifteen, as well as three adults. He and his accomplice lured their victims to the desert south of Tehran, where they killed them by poisoning them or striking their heads with heavy stones before raping them and burying them in shallow graves.

Omid had an idea. Could he interview Bijeh? he asked a prison guard. He imagined publishing an article after his release, maybe on the occasion of Bijeh’s execution. No one would have access to the killer any later than he. His cellmates teased him: even in prison, that was Omid, always looking for his next big chance. Sure, the guard told Omid. Just so long as he didn’t mind sharing Bijeh’s cell for the night. Omid thought better of it.

In their shared confinement, Roozbeh, Shahram, Javad, and Omid fought bitterly over who had revealed what about whom and why. The first hours were an ugly catharsis. The “Spider’s House” editorial, by all appearances, was little more than Shahram’s coerced prison confession, twisted, distorted, and layered with additional malign untruths. Omid was uncomfortable sharing a cell with Roozbeh, who he felt had given away too much, too easily, delivering himself into the interrogators’ hands. As Roozbeh understood it, they had all agreed to cooperate until their release. There was little point in making a show of struggle as they did so. But when the recriminations were spent, the cellmates could also confer. Their cases, they understood, were linked. Javad had been charged with espionage. They understood that he had been grouped with them to lend gravity
to the case file. All of them had the sense that they had been arrested opportunistically, that they had been interrogated as a kind of fishing expedition, and now they were being used to set up known targets, like Tajzadeh and Nabavi.

The weeks they’d spent in the secret prison—Shahram had been there almost three months, Roozbeh two, and Omid a little less—had scarred their psyches, and every day they spent in prison compounded the damage. The most important thing, they agreed, was to get out. Then they could follow Ali Afshari’s example and renounce their confessions. For now, they would do what was necessary to be released.

They spent their time in Evin writing and rewriting their confessions for Keshavarz, who was an exacting editor. Omid was to specifically incriminate Nabavi, Tajzadeh, and two other reformist figures as he confessed to taking money and orders from them in order to blacken the image of the Islamic Republic. He was also to smear NGO activists. Shahram was to incriminate poet and writer friends who were already dead and then to confess to having sought to inflate his own reputation by association with such people. Roozbeh assumed responsibility for everything from street demonstrations to secret scheming sessions with reformist conspirators.

They worked slowly and meticulously, for they’d noticed that Keshavarz left them alone as long as they were busy writing. And then there were the rehearsals. Each in turn, but never together, they sat in the office of the prison director, which had been staged with plants and a pitcher of orange juice, and recited their confessions into the camera.

Shahram noted that this process began only after his visible bruises had healed. But for the most part, the bloggers’ bruises were not visible to begin with. Theirs had been a classic program of white torture—battery afflicting the body far less than the soul.

• • •

T
HE CHIEF JUSTICE OF
I
RAN,
Ayatollah Mahmoud Hashemi Shahroudi, was an Iraqi-born cleric with a relatively moderate temperament. He had ostensibly appointed Mortazavi to his post, but it would be alleged that
he tried several times to fire Mortazavi, only to find that the prosecutor’s position was protected by forces he could not challenge. Ayatollah Shahroudi held monthly public meetings where thousands of ordinary people could petition for his ear. They filed past him, making their pitches either to a subordinate or to the chief justice himself. Solmaz decided that she needed to be one of them and that she needed to speak to the ayatollah personally.

She got permission to attend the public meeting the same way she seemed to be getting everything lately: through insistence verging on harassment. She’d gone to the judiciary’s spokesman’s office with a letter in hand making her request. The spokesman took the letter, tucked it away, and hurried upstairs, saying he’d see to it. Solmaz called to him from the bottom of the stairs: “I’ll wait right here until you come back with my permission.” It was, she understood, her last shot. She got what she came for.

Solmaz liked Ayatollah Shahroudi instantly. Among the clerics there were some who exuded ambition, severity, even cruelty, but there were others who seemed fully men of the cloth, sincere in their religion and committed to the vision of justice they found there. Shahroudi, Solmaz felt, was among the latter. He was a black-turbaned cleric in his sixties, with a long white beard and an easy smile. Solmaz handed him her letter and pleaded her case as swiftly as she could. She was a young newlywed who wanted her husband, whom she believed innocent, home for Eid. Moreover, she understood that her husband’s keepers had broken a law Shahroudi himself had passed, prohibiting blindfolding and handcuffing in the prisons, as well as interrogations lasting more than forty-eight hours. “I’m a journalist,” she appealed to him. “I know what it means to break your law.”

Ayatollah Shahroudi told her to wait while his people prepared a letter. When she left the public meeting, she clasped a sealed envelope, the seal stamped by the judiciary. She was to bring the letter to Mortazavi. But Solmaz knew better than to bring the prosecutor anything she had not read herself. That night she and a friend took turns holding the envelope to the light, trying to discern what was typed on the folded sheet within. It took them three hours and a world of patience to make out the words and
transcribe them to Solmaz’s notebook. When they finished, they were ecstatic. It was an order for Roozbeh’s release on bail.

Solmaz returned to Mortazavi’s office in the morning. “I have my husband’s release order,” she told the prosecutor’s assistant. “Please deliver it to Mr. Mortazavi.”

And then she sat and waited. She didn’t look at the camera this time. She figured Mortazavi would need a little time to compose himself. She felt well prepared. She knew she’d need bail for Roozbeh, and she’d persuaded a journalist friend to sign over the deed to some property worth eight million tomans. Solmaz had the paperwork in her bag.

“You lied to my assistant,” Mortazavi said when she entered. “Mr. Shahroudi didn’t order your husband’s release. He only asked me to cooperate.”

Solmaz took out her notebook and read Mortazavi the transcript of the letter as though she had been given a copy of it herself.

“Sit down,” he said at length. “Let’s talk about bail.”

Solmaz showed him the deed to her friend’s property. He repeated the name of her friend slowly, with interest.

“But this will not be enough,” he told her. “Roozbeh’s bail is fifty million tomans.”

“I thought you said Roozbeh wasn’t worth anything to you,” said Solmaz, furious. Fifty million tomans—more than $20,000—was more than twice the bail on which other bloggers had been released.

“He’s not worth anything,” Mortazavi affirmed. “But that is his bail.”

No one in either Roozbeh’s or Solmaz’s family had property worth fifty million tomans. Solmaz’s parents’ homes had been mortgaged; Roozbeh’s parents rented theirs. There was not a relative Solmaz could think of with anything close. What was worse, she had already told Roozbeh that she’d secured his release. Now he was waiting in prison, with no way of understanding that she was scrambling to come up with the money.

Solmaz got back on the phone. She left messages for Asgharzadeh, but he didn’t return them. When at last she successfully connived to get him on the line, she was in no mood to be polite. Could he help with Roozbeh’s bail? Asgharzadeh said he’d work on it. Solmaz knew he wouldn’t. To a reformist newspaper editor, Solmaz was even less deferential. She had gone begging to all her family members, she told him. Was Roozbeh in prison because of her family members? You reformists, she said, are all in one party, advancing one agenda against the conservatives. Surely you should help one another when one of you becomes a target of those conservatives. Young journalists did everything for the reformists and assumed all the risks.

At length she reached out to Roozbeh’s mother. Wasn’t there a family member, Solmaz recalled, who’d stayed with them for a year before buying her own place? To ask that relative for the bail would not be easy, but at least she owed them something. She was their best and only shot.

Solmaz got the deed to that relative’s home, but it was worth only 30 million tomans. This was, she understood, the very best their two families could do. She would have to finesse the rest. And so she went to see Mortazavi with the 30-million-toman deed in hand and a gambit born of desperation and fantasy.

“Something has happened that you should know about,” Solmaz informed the prosecutor gravely. She’d promised him that she would look after Roozbeh and keep him away from the pernicious influence of Nabavi, Tajzadeh, and Baghi, she reminded Mortazavi. But now Tajzadeh and Baghi had contacted her. They’d heard she was short on the bail and they were offering to make up the difference.

“I’ll have to accept it,” Solmaz said, doing her best to play the ingenue. “But it’s a big debt, and if they ask us for anything, we’ll owe them. I don’t see how I can keep Roozbeh away from them after this.”

This scheme was so crazy, she figured, it just might work. And it did. With a stroke of his pen, the prosecutor reduced the bail.

That night Solmaz waited outside her mother’s apartment. The families of prisoners knew the routine: Evin released prisoners at nine at night. If your loved one was not home by ten, it was not his day. But Solmaz had posted bail. Surely Roozbeh was just briefly delayed. Until midnight she sat outside in the cold. Then she went to bed, feeling truly hopeless for the first time.

• • •

M
ORTAZAVI AND HIS MEN
were scrambling, Roozbeh would later understand. They’d been ordered to release him, but they were determined not to do so without getting what they’d come for. Keshavarz presented the cellmates with a plan. They would be freed on bail under the condition that they publish confession letters
after
their release, bringing their letters personally, as allegedly free men, to their media contacts.

All along, they had imagined that their confessions would be aired while they were still in prison and clearly under duress. Then they would renounce everything upon their release. This expectation had sustained them. But Mortazavi was well ahead of them. Release from prison, Roozbeh understood now, would be something short of freedom. He would emerge less like Ali Afshari than like Payam Fazlinejad.

Roozbeh was to go first. He was freed with the understanding that only when he’d published a confession letter would the second of his cellmates be released. On publication of the second prisoner’s letter, the third would be released, and so on. Roozbeh would later describe this as a hostage situation. Shahram, Omid, and Javad were his collateral.

He walked out of Evin Prison the night of November 26. He searched the crowd at the gate for a familiar face. No one had known to come for him. He had only the clothes on his back and a long way to go, from the northern hills near Darakeh to the edge of the southern plain at Mehrabad. He hailed a taxi, hoping someone would be home to pay for it on the other end. It was 9:45 p.m. when he rang the doorbell of the apartment near the airport. Solmaz dashed outside barefoot when she realized who was there. They embraced on the steps. Roozbeh, Solmaz noticed, was clean and groomed, unlike when she’d seen him at the deputy prosecutor’s office. She clasped him tightly, jubilant, convinced that at last their ordeal had come to an end.