Children of Paradise (26 page)

    EIGHT

T
HE
C
HAIN
M
URDERS

and the sights that rush in suddenly

turn seeing into a horrid thing,

even as they increase the temptation to look

over the expanse of this landscape dotted by white oaks,

or mummies

or faces of crystalline ice

or bodies of crystal salt,

all tugging at your eye to transform them.

—
M
OHAMMAD
M
OKHTARI,
“From the Other Half”

W
HEN
S
HAHRAM
R
AFIZADEH WAS NINE,
his mother died, the revolution came, and he discovered poetry. Heavyset, mournful, with tight brown curls and warm, weary eyes, Shahram was the sixth of seven children born to a rice huller in a village called Shaft, in the northern Iranian province of Gilan. He shared sleeping quarters with his father and all his siblings, under a roof made of galvanized iron; at the crack of dawn, he got up to practice sports and recite poetry while his family begged him for a moment’s sleep.

Shahram was not sure he believed in God. His mother, while she lived, had prayed, but like many working-class people in their part of the country, the family leaned to the secular left. His father was poor but proud and law-abiding. Shahram wanted a bicycle. His father found a man willing to sell one for a price he could afford. But as he and Shahram wheeled the bike away, Shahram’s father remembered that he hadn’t collected a receipt. They went back to the seller, who said he couldn’t provide one. So, to Shahram’s distress, his father gave the man back the bicycle.

He spent his mornings alone. His older siblings were in school, his father at work, his younger brother Bahram at his grandmother’s. His fourth-grade class met only in the afternoons. One of his older brothers, cleaning the attic, found two things he thought Shahram might use. One was an old space heater, the other a moldering volume of poetry that included selections from, and essays about, each of the great Persian poets, including Khayyám, Hafez, Mowlana, and Saadi. The binding was disintegrating. Shahram’s brother stitched it together by hand and gave the volume to Shahram.

The space heater was missing a plug. Shahram connected its naked wires to the 220-volt wall supply the next morning. A fierce electrical shock knocked him to the ground. One of his sisters found him unconscious when she came home from school in the afternoon. He thought he was lucky he hadn’t died.

The brother who gave him the heater and the poetry book was an active Marxist and an avid reader. When Shahram was younger, this brother had insisted that he read and write book reports before he could go out to play. Shahram, desperate to play, had read
The Little Black Fish
and other stories by Samad Behrangi. A teacher had given him a book he loved more, an obscure and haunting little story called
Where Are You, Hasanak?

Published in 1970 and written in verse by one Mohammad Parnian, the story opened with a heavy snow falling on a prosperous village. The village people were frightened and retreated to their homes. But a little boy named Hasanak was determined to bring the sun back from behind the clouds. He led an army of children to the mountains, over the protests of their parents. There are wolves in the mountains, the adults objected, and snow. You will freeze to death up there. But Hasanak led the children on.

Halfway up the mountain, the wolves attacked. Hasanak knew that he and the other children had only so much time before the cold would set into their very bones. So he told the others to stay and fight the wolves while he continued upward to retrieve the sun.

Alone now and undaunted, Hasanak ascended into ever thinner, ever more frigid air, his young body wracked with cold and surely dying. Nevertheless he reached the summit. There he found the sun, sleeping.

“Sun!” he called. “Sun! Wake up!”

The sun awoke to the sound of Hasanak’s voice. It rose, casting warmth and light again over the village, and over the other villages, near and far, and over the icy mountain. But when the sun looked down, far below, on the mountain’s peak, it could see the frozen, lifeless body of young Hasanak.

Forever after, in the ears of the other children and in the rocks of the mountain, Hasanak’s voice still sounded.

“I will go and I will remove the snow,” it said.

“I will go and I will sweep the clouds.

“I will open the way in the dark clouds.

“And in the end I will find the sun.

“Whoever wants the sun

“Get up and follow me!”

• • •

A
FTER THE ELECTRICAL SHOCK
that didn’t kill him, Shahram left the heater aside for the poetry book, where for the first time he discovered the masters of Persian literature. He read the book to himself and he read it aloud, at the top of his voice. The poems issued from a place of emotion that was never totally submerged from Shahram’s conscious life. He began to write. He showed the poems to his older brother, who told him they were extraordinary and that Shahram might become a poet.

When Shahram was eleven, in 1981, Bani-Sadr was president and the Revolutionary Guard fought the Mojahedin-e Khalq in city streets. Shahram knew a boy in Shaft who had joined the Mojahedin. The boy was fatherless, very tall, and very poor, and he read a great many books. He’d survived the street clashes and fled for a time, but then he returned to Shaft to see his mother. Shahram was sitting at home when he heard a gunshot. He and his family ran toward the young Mojahed’s home, which they found surrounded by Revolutionary Guardsmen. Shahram recognized one guardsman, another neighborhood boy. That boy turned his gun on Shahram and his family. “If anyone steps forward,” he said, “I will shoot.”

The tall, poor young Mojahed had been praying in his mother’s home when a guardsman lurking at his window shot him in the forehead. The assailants then entered the house and decapitated the corpse. Shahram saw them drag his neighbor’s headless body into a car. It was a ghastly thing to see. He opposed the Islamic Republic because his brother and his brother’s friends were Marxists. But from that moment he opposed it from his gut.

Shahram lost his teen years in teen fashion. After finishing his first two years of high school in one, he grew lax in his studies and even forgot poetry to prowl the streets of Rasht, the capital of his province, with friends, eyes fixed to the distant and intermittent glimmer of passing excitement. One day something unexpected came. It was the spring of 1988, and Shahram, seventeen years old, had moved to Rasht. He was walking with his friends when he saw a woman on the street who stirred in him something he had not felt for any girl he had known. Her name was Bita, and she lived just a few blocks from him.

Shahram got her phone number. But Iranian tradition required introductions to be made by families and engagements arranged among parents. Dating was neither legal under the Islamic Republic nor acceptable to traditional families who prized female honor. So Shahram would dial Bita’s number from a pay phone, hanging up when her aunt, her mother, or her other family members answered. Finally, Bita picked up. Shahram told her that he loved her. After that they had secret phone conversations. Sometimes they arranged to meet at the movies. They couldn’t walk down the street together for fear of being apprehended by the Basij for immoral
behavior, and equally for fear of Bita’s family. It was 1991 when at last they married. Shahram felt something inside him spring to life. He began to write poetry again, and to read.

Shahram’s older brother had settled in Tehran, where his work as a typesetter brought him into contact with poets and writers. He showed Shahram’s poems to some of those writers, who began corresponding with him, offering him their views on his work. Shahram exchanged letters with Ali Babachahi, the craggy-faced, wild-haired editor of
Adineh
, Iran’s most prominent secular literary magazine. Newly married, his confidence rolling high, Shahram moved with his wife to Tehran in 1992.

A friend in Rasht, the editor of a cultural magazine there, asked Shahram a favor. Since he was in Tehran, could he approach the secular poet and writer Mohammad Mokhtari for an article? the friend inquired. Shahram had never met Mokhtari, who was a well-known figure in Iranian letters. But he did as his friend asked, securing the article from the famous writer with a phone call.

Mokhtari invited Shahram to join him at a gathering at a friend’s house. It was a generous gesture from a literary eminence to a striving poet of twenty-two. Shahram felt his age acutely at the gathering. But when Mokhtari heard Shahram speak, he must have sensed in the portly, soft-eyed young man from Shaft a quality of mind kindred to his own. In front of all his friends, Mokhtari walked up to Shahram and planted a kiss on his forehead.

• • •

M
OHAMMAD
M
OKHTARI
was not a person to chew bubble gum at a gathering. But the last time Shahram saw him, on Monday, November 30, 1998, at a gathering of writers, Mokhtari was chewing gum. Now Shahram was stuck with that detail, insignificant and unforgettable.

The writers at the gathering mulled over their shock at terrible news. Nine days earlier Dariush Forouhar and his wife, Parvaneh, had been murdered and dismembered in their home. The Forouhars were secular nationalists. Dariush, seventy at the time of his death, had been a minister in
Bazargan’s government, an activist for more than forty years. He and Parvaneh had criticized the Islamic Republic’s human rights record. On November 22, 1998, their bodies were found riddled with stab wounds. The killers had reportedly stabbed Dariush eleven times and Parvaneh, twenty-four, twisting the knife 180 degrees at each entry. They turned Dariush’s mutilated body to face Mecca. At the time of the murders, the Farouhar home was under surveillance by the intelligence ministry. No criminal could have entered unseen. The couple had entertained dinner guests that night, and
the family’s lawyer would recount with some certainty that these guests committed the crime, tying Dariush to the chair where he sat talking with them in his study and surprising Parvaneh as she got ready for bed.

Two days earlier, another writer and critic of the regime had gone for a jog and never returned. Majid Sharif was an acolyte of Shariati’s and an editor of his posthumous books. He had also translated Nietzsche and Derrida into Persian. Tehran police found his body by the side of the road on November 24. Pirouz Davani, a leftist activist, had disappeared back in August. His body was never found.

Didn’t Mokhtari feel something was wrong with the Forouhar story? Shahram asked him. The train of death, Shahram said, had begun to roll.

That Saturday was a holiday. But Shahram, who wrote for the cultural section of a newspaper, was at work putting together Sunday’s edition when a friend called to tell him that Mokhtari had vanished. The friend, an editor, had assigned Mokhtari an article, and when he’d gone to pick it up from him at the appointed time, Mokhtari was nowhere to be found.

He’d been missing since he left home on Thursday evening at five o’clock to buy lightbulbs and milk, Mokhtari’s wife told Shahram when he called. The family was waiting until after the holiday to alert the media. But Shahram urged them to move faster. His brother Bahram swiftly placed a newspaper story under the headline “Where Is Mohammad Mokhtari?” So began a fearful week in Shahram’s life.

Shahram worked at the newspaper and at a publishing house called Tarh-e No, associated with the reformists, particularly Akbar Ganji. The religious intellectuals who gathered around Tarh-e No were afraid.
Shahram could feel it. There was, as he would later put it, no feeling or smell that Mokhtari had been arrested. His disappearance was quiet and, for that reason, more ominous. In three or four days’ time, Mokhtari’s son identified the poet’s body at the morgue.

That very night, Mohammad Jafar Pouyandeh went missing. Pouyandeh was a friend of Mokhtari’s, a writer and translator who was just then finishing a Persian translation of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. He was found strangled in Shahriar, to the south and west of Tehran.

• • •

F
ROM THE TESTIMONY OF
M
OKHTARI’S KILLERS
, Shahram would later reconstruct the final hours of his friend and mentor’s life. He committed this chronology to memory, as though its painful recitation could project Shahram’s presence backward, so that Mokhtari would have died in loving company instead of terror and solitude.

Mokhtari had gone to a store on Jordan Boulevard, near his home in North Tehran, to buy milk and lightbulbs. He did not know that as many as eight assailants followed him there in two cars, one a Peugeot and the other a taxi. When he started home, some men emerged from one of the cars and showed him a summons. They told him he was under arrest and to get in the car. For hours they drove him in circles around the north of Tehran. The plan was to murder him in the office the intelligence ministry maintained in Behesht-e Zahra, the enormous graveyard south of Tehran; but the operation was a secret one, and while the head of intelligence at Behesht-e Zahra knew about it, his underlings did not. The assassins were to wait until the building was empty.