Beyond Belief: Islamic Excursions Among the Converted Peoples (Vintage International) (39 page)

The prison was so extensive, such a large part of North Tehran, that it took a long time to read.

One afternoon, allowing my eye to follow the shadowed wall down the hill to the left, I saw that it led to another, between trees, and this wall led down to a wall running transversely from left to right at the foot of the hill. This wall at the foot of the hill was very high; and in it were high, blue gates, through which no doubt, after the revolution, the trucks came out at night with the bodies of the executed. Against the green and the brick and the concrete, the blue of the gates was noticeable; it made you wonder about the choice of the color.

Below the beautiful, many-charactered mountains, this presence: the great prison of Tehran, more awful and frightening than the castle of Prague. What came to me when I found out was like what had come to me in the British embassy in Dakar in West Africa, when I found out that the wall of the embassy tennis court was the wall of the morgue next door, which explained the daily crowd of grieving Africans in Muslim caps and gowns.

Ayatollah Khalkhalli, Khomeini’s hanging judge, used to sit in judgment in the revolutionary court, the Shah’s old military court, in Shariati Street, Ali had said. In the early days after the revolution that court used to be sitting almost round the clock, and Ali used to go every day to try to save people he knew. The prisoners would probably have been taken to Shariati Street from Evin.

In August 1979, when I first went to Tehran, the court was still in full flow. Khalkhalli, in an interview with the
Tehran Times
—Mr. Parvez still the owner and editor, and Mr. Jaffrey sitting at his high standard typewriter and rapping out peppery calls for the ayatollahs to get back to Qom—Khalkhalli, in that interview in August 1979, said that he had “probably” sentenced three or four hundred people to death. On some nights, he said, the trucks had taken thirty or forty bodies out of the prison.

They would have left through the blue gates.

6
 

M
EHRDAD AND
I met Abbas in the office of a book publisher. Abbas was twenty-seven, and a war veteran. He had volunteered—giving up school to do so—when he was fourteen, in the second year of the war; and he had served right through. He didn’t seem now to have a settled vocation. After the war, driven by spiritual need, he had done theological studies at Qom for three years; but then he had felt let down by Qom. Later, to please his girlfriend’s family, he had done his high-school diploma and gone to the university. Now he was learning about films; he was making very short, poetic, haiku-like films, lasting no more than a minute. He was also traveling about the country, gathering interviews from war veterans like himself, for the publisher in whose office we were meeting. The publisher seemed to have a line in books about the war.

There were any number of veterans, and Abbas, with his military training, had worked out his own procedures for getting many interviews at the same time. When he got to a new place he would call veterans to something like a public meeting, hand out printed questionnaires, and tell war stories of his own, deliberately simple stories, about simple things, to encourage the veterans to lose their shyness or self-doubt and write down their own memories.

He told us now one of the stories he told the veterans. Mehrdad, still close to his military experience, was so fascinated he didn’t translate the story for me. Mehrdad’s eyes shone; he never took them off Abbas.

Abbas was an arresting man, small, fine-limbed, classically handsome, with a neat trimmed beard and a full, barbered head of neck-length hair. He had dressed with care for this meeting with us in the publisher’s office. He was wearing a green shirt with broad, shiny vertical stripes over a patterned light-and-dark ground. His spectacle case, clipped to his waist, was part of his style. The style was affecting, because the man had been damaged in the head, and had clearly overcome a great deal to be still so much himself. His eyes were bloodshot, unemotional, strangely staring; he moved his head slowly; he said his legs still hurt.

And yet, after an hour, of eating fruit and drinking tea and talking, I had got nothing new from Abbas, had not been able to get beyond his gaze and what seemed to be his formality and pride; had not been moved to make a note or even to take my notebook out from the breast pocket of my jacket. And when the electricity failed in the neighborhood, and everything was suddenly dark all around, it seemed time to leave.

We stood up to say good-bye. It occurred to me, in the darkness, to ask whether in the course of his interviews he had met anyone from a martyrs’ battalion who had survived. He said a few had survived. When we asked whether we could meet one of them, he didn’t say anything. And then—it might have been the effect of the darkness, seeming to muffle life in the neighborhood, making us speak softly, with the voices of children still playing in the street below suddenly very clear against the roar of the boulevards not very far away—it might have been the drama of the power cut that made Abbas say, hesitantly, “I shouldn’t say this, but I was one.”

And then we stayed and stayed. Abbas talked at first in the darkness, and then by candlelight. The publishing house had a stock of candles, for these power cuts.

I made no notes. Later that evening in the hotel Mehrdad and I reconstructed what we had heard. I made my notes then.

When Abbas said that he had been in one of the martyrs’ battalions, much of what he had been saying earlier fell into place. He had volunteered at the age of fourteen. He had been taken close to the war, and then, on his own initiative, he had picked his way to the murderous Dezful front—the frontier town of Dezful had been utterly destroyed by the fighting. What had made him volunteer? He said that a government organization for development
had sent speakers to his school (and Mehrdad told me later, in the hotel, that this school was one of the very best in Tehran). The speakers said they wanted to take boys to the front to show them the war, and they asked for volunteers. So Abbas volunteered.

He had no business, even as a Basiji, to be on his own in Dezful. The soldiers wanted to send him away, but he begged them, did things for them, and they allowed him to stay.

He was at Dezful at the time of a big Iranian attack. For twenty-two days there was the sound of artillery and planes. And this was the time when Abbas had his first sight of death or martyrdom on the battlefield.

An ambulance came back from the front—a glimpse there of Iranian organization—and people ran to it. Abbas ran with them. At first he thought the people in the ambulance were only wounded. When they were placed on the ground he saw they were dead. Two of the dead men he had seen alive only two hours before. And he thought: I was looking for my friends. But these are not my friends. My friends are somewhere else. He felt then that death was an exalting and wonderful thing, and he knew that one day he would have to have the same experience and go where his friends were.

It was an intense spiritual moment, and it was heightened when he was washing the cartridge belts and harness straps of the dead men. That was one of the things he used to do at the front. Every day he used to go to the morgue—officially called
meradj,
the place of ascension—and collect the equipment from about forty dead men. He would clean the equipment in the evening. There was a shortage of equipment at this time because so many men were involved in this big attack. There was also a shortage of shoes. Another thing he did during the day was to help unload the supply trucks when they came up to the front. He did that unloading with a lot of zeal; it was one reason why the soldiers didn’t send him back.

The cleaning of the equipment of the dead men was a spiritual exercise for him because he would think that the pieces he was cleaning belonged to men who had gone to a place which they didn’t quite know. And it was possible—Abbas’s words were ambiguous here—that he also meant that though the men didn’t know where they were going, they had gone there straight and with determination.

A year later Abbas joined the army properly, and he was a member of one of the martyrs’ battalions. People who volunteered as martyrs proclaimed themselves ready for any job. They wore no special clothes when they were in ordinary battalions; they made themselves known to the officers by their extraordinary zeal. One martyrs’ battalion literally fought to the death; no one survived.

Before an attack there was “a good-bye ceremony.” Someone might sing; someone respected in the battalion, like a clergyman, a commander, an old man, or a popular man, might address the men. This person would stand on a podium or a chair and say, “Tomorrow we have an attack.” That was how the good-bye ceremony began. Some people would burst into tears right then; others would cry later. Generally there was a lot of weeping and wailing. The speaker would say, “Some of you might not come back tomorrow. We might not see each other again. Some people will see God tomorrow.”

Then there would be music and chanting. Abbas heard this as something in the background. Nobody could focus on it. Everybody was emptying himself of all feeling, pouring feeling into a common pool. In that pool there was a collection of miseries and worldly difficulties and family problems, a pregnant wife perhaps, a sick baby, financial problems, quarrels with parents. Everything went into that common pool and was disappearing. Joining this ceremony was like joining a ship. Whether you liked it or not you had to go with it.

Abbas was wounded twice. Though it would be truer to say that he talked of the two occasions when he was wounded. The first time was during an Iraqi counterattack at noon (the Iranians had attacked early in the morning). The people who were caught up in that counterattack were the injured, the martyrs, and a few other fighters who wanted to delay the enemy advance. A rocket exploded near Abbas. He was hit in both legs and fell unconscious. It was night when he awakened. He heard Arabic voices and saw Iraqi soldiers apparently standing on guard at twenty-yard intervals. They were a picket line at the head of the Iraqi advance. Abbas found a hand grenade and a machine gun. He threw the grenade at the Iraqis and killed four of them, and then he ran the fifty yards to the Iranian side. He was fired at but he zigzagged and wasn’t hit.