Children of Paradise (39 page)

Tajzadeh had never believed that street protests should figure into reformist strategy. The public was deeply aggrieved and poorly organized. If protests turned radical, the conservatives would crack down. They’d close what little space existed for reformist maneuvering; they’d destroy more young people in the prisons; and nothing would be gained. Tajzadeh and other reformists had long counseled their supporters to resist provocation and their colleagues to persevere in their internal efforts at negotiation and compromise. But after 2001, Tajzadeh tweaked the formula in a more aggressive direction. He still discouraged street mobilization, but now he called for reformists in government to use their positions to battle repression and expose the deep illegal apparatus of political violence. The Article 90 commission report investigating the Zahra Kazemi affair was exactly the sort of thing he had in mind.

• • •

I
N A NEIGHBORHOOD CALLED
E
SKANDARI
in south-central Tehran, the poet and writer Shahram Rafizadeh shared a not-quite-five-hundred-square-foot one-bedroom apartment with Roozbeh and another colleague from
Etemad
. They lived on the third floor of a four-story building, in a space adorned with little but beds and books.

From the time Shahram accepted Roozbeh’s invitation to write for
Etemad
’s political section, the men had become close friends as well as roommates and colleagues. Shahram was older and already becoming known.
His book
Shooting at Reform
had just passed the censors, to be published with only a few words excised. This book was about Saeed Hajjarian, and in it Shahram and a coauthor reconstructed from newspaper archives and legal documents the mechanics and motives behind Hajjarian’s attempted murder. The journalists linked the shooting to other state-sponsored assassinations and explored Hajjarian’s ideas, showing how they had made him a particular target. Writing about reformists gave Shahram cover that writing about his friends in the Iranian Writers Association never had. So long as the reformists remained in power, the red lines of censorship would be elastic enough to accommodate their ideas. But Shahram never expected that to last forever.

Shahram knew the reformists, although not as well as he knew the writers. He had worked for the reformist publishing house Tarh-e No back in the nineties, and he’d encountered Tajzadeh and some other reformist intellectuals there. Now he and his fellow editors from
Etemad
, including Roozbeh, occasionally met with Tajzadeh and other reformist officials in the course of their work. Shahram respected some and kept a skeptical remove from others, aware that the members of what was once the Islamic Left probably could not tolerate very deep changes to the structures they themselves had helped build. Still, like his old friend Mohammad Mokhtari, Shahram sought out common ground.

During his court-mandated hiatus from politics, Tajzadeh started a bold online publication called
Emrooz
. Shahram and Roozbeh both began writing for it even while they worked at
Etemad
. Iran’s online media was relatively new, and it promised a comparatively free space for exploring sensitive subjects. Friends at another newspaper introduced Shahram to weblogs. The technology looked easy to master and difficult to censor. Back at
Etemad
, Shahram began asking around. Could anyone teach him how to post and update such a site? An Internet-savvy colleague built Shahram and Roozbeh each a blog.

Roozbeh, Shahram, and several other journalists from their circle were pioneers in this new medium. Although they published under their own names, their blogs had so few readers—mainly intellectuals, journalists,
and activists—that they were unconcerned about reprisals. But blogging—much of it not overtly political—would soon explode in Iran as a means of sharing experience in a country that lacked unmonitored public space. By 2005, Persian would be one of the world’s leading languages for blogs. With blogs, Iranians could outrun the censors, taking sites down and putting them back up elsewhere, technologically always strides ahead of the old-fashioned intelligence apparatus.

Roozbeh called his blog
shabnameh
, or “night letters,” a Persian term for samizdat. He mainly used it to publish uncut and uncensored versions of his newspaper stories. Shahram posted about freedom of expression and the censorship of books and newspapers. He continued writing about the chain murders. He covered allegations of more recent murders carried out on the orders of the same ayatollah thought to have masterminded the serial killings. And he wrote about a notorious court case in which a woman accused of killing a security officer claimed she was defending herself from rape.

If Shahram wasn’t already a marked man, an article he published online—in
Emrooz
—in 2003 certainly marked him. The essay was called “The Miracle Room,” and it was about forced confessions. The Miracle Room was the interrogation chamber in which political prisoners, seemingly by magic, transformed into repentant lackeys. Shahram analyzed several published confessions, including Ali Afshari’s, and he tried to explain how interrogators went about breaking people. He took special note of a prominent reformist journalist (and hostage taker) who had recently “confessed” under pressure. This confession signaled a turn, Shahram noted: Even famous reformists were now fair game. His essay and its title would enter the lexicon of Iranian politics and help render speakable the psychological power of torture.

• • •

I
N EARLY
N
OVEMBER
2003, Roozbeh was summoned to the intelligence ministry’s main office. There, in an interrogation room furnished with a table and chairs, an affable agent informed Roozbeh that Saeed Mortazavi had complained about him to the Supreme National Security
Council. Just three days had passed since Roozbeh had spoken to Radio Farda, telling the reporter that Mortazavi had silenced the press on the Kazemi affair. In his complaint, Mortazavi had pointed to a circular his office had issued a few months earlier forbidding Iranians to give interviews to foreign media. Moreover, Mortazavi charged, Roozbeh had libeled him by describing his actions as illegal.

Roozbeh’s interrogation lasted about three hours, but he did not feel it was unfriendly. He explained that he believed the constitution protected his speech, despite Mortazavi’s circular. And he tried to persuade his interrogator that it was good for the public to know that the regime did not stand united behind the violence done to Zahra Kazemi. Mortazavi, he told the intelligence agents, was but one face of the regime; he, Roozbeh, knew this, but much of the public did not. His interrogators told him that they were worried about him. They came from the intelligence ministry, which was part of the reformist government. But Roozbeh might yet hear from a less sympathetic parallel intelligence service that was connected to the Revolutionary Guard and the prosecutor. These people, he was told, knew about his relationship with Amirentezam.

Roozbeh answered questions about Kazemi and Mortazavi, but also about the reform movement and the Supreme Leader. Someone had told the intelligence ministry that Saeed Hajjarian had trained Roozbeh in psychological warfare. Roozbeh laughed. He had seen Hajjarian just once in his life, he replied, and that was after the political strategist was shot. He understood from some of the questions that his cell phone had been monitored for some time, but he had suspected this in any case, as he’d heard beeps on the line when his calls went through.

He was released with nothing more than a verbal warning and an admonition not to speak with the foreign press. The agents, he understood, wanted a relationship with him. They gave him a card and urged him to call them if he had problems. Could they, an interrogator asked him, call him as well if they wanted his opinion on something?

Roozbeh declined. He didn’t like to talk with intelligence agencies, he
informed them coolly. If his interlocutors were curious about his opinions, they could always refer to his published work.

• • •

S
HAHRAM
, partly by dint of his character and partly on account of his background on the secular left, seemed to float above Iran’s filigree of factional rivalries. He moved in a world that was lousy with intrigue—journalism, compounded with politics, compounded with heavy surveillance by a divided state. He brought to this a nearly studied innocence that was also a moral posture: a refusal to live as though it were true. Little else could explain the friendship he cultivated with a haunted young man named Payam Fazlinejad.

The first time Shahram met Payam, it seemed to be by chance, at a movie theater. One of Shahram’s poet friends introduced him to the wiry, narrow-faced young man, who could not have been more than twenty-one years old at the time. Shahram had heard of Payam. He’d once been a writer for a weekly cinema magazine. When a senior cultural figure was arrested in 2001, Payam Fazlinejad was one of a number of acquaintances arrested along with him. Payam was young, inexperienced, and apolitical. He was not somebody one might expect to mount a heroic resistance to physical pressure. As a condition for his release, it was widely believed that he had agreed to confess against his friends and then to become an informer—a modern-day
tavob
operating outside the prisons rather than within. There was something mouselike about him, at the same time pitiable and unsettling.

Shahram felt certain that Payam had been sent to get to know him, but he did not resist. Rather, he agreed to meet with him, always in public places. Sometimes Roozbeh joined them. Shahram reasoned that he had nothing to hide. He would treat Payam like anyone else. And anyone who knew Shahram even slightly knew that he was as honest as he was deep. He spoke openly with Payam about the Islamic Republic, about its officials, and even about Islam. Payam insisted that he wanted to see where Shahram worked. At length Shahram agreed to let him stop by
Etemad
, where Payam struck up conversations with the journalists, flattering them and ingratiating himself.

One night, working late at
Etemad
, Shahram took a desperate phone call from Payam.

“I’m calling to say good-bye,” Payam told Shahram. “I’ve betrayed my old friends. I’ve talked too much.” He could not live with it anymore, he said, and he had decided to commit suicide.

Shahram and Roozbeh conferred. They collected Payam and, finding him disheveled and very dirty, as though he had been sleeping on the streets, they took him to their apartment to bathe. While he showered they washed and ironed his clothes. He seemed soothed by their company and he stopped talking about killing himself. Instead, the three young men decided to go to Darband, on the outskirts of Tehran, where a trail lined with traditional restaurants and teahouses climbed the Alborz foothills. Payam, who, despite his appearance, had turned up with a new white Kia Pride, was driving, and he asked if Roozbeh and Shahram would mind stopping by his office first. He wanted to smoke a little hash he had there.

Payam pulled up to a building near Fatemi Square, by the Ministry of Interior. Roozbeh and Shahram sat in an anteroom while Payam disappeared within. Much later, Roozbeh would learn that this office belonged to a special cyberintelligence detail of the parallel intelligence apparatus—not the Ministry of Intelligence, but the spy agency that had formed from the elements purged from that ministry, in coordination with Mortazavi and the Revolutionary Guards.

Payam emerged, and the three young men continued on to Darband, where they sat over chelo kebab and a water pipe. They got to talking about a mutual acquaintance, a defector from Ansar-e Hezbollah who had just fled to Turkey. Did Shahram want to speak to him? Payam asked eagerly. Shahram demurred, but it was too late. Payam had dialed the number and put the phone to Shahram’s ear. Shahram greeted the acquaintance. Then Payam thrust the phone at Roozbeh, who also blandly wished their mutual friend well.

• • •

S
OLMAZ
S
HARIF WAS WORKING
at
Etemad
as a sports reporter when she noticed Roozbeh. He wasn’t like other men she knew. He seemed gentle and lucid, walled within a force field of tranquillity that set him apart from the tumult of youth. She wondered if he was unhappy, or distracted by a love affair, or simply putting on an act. She wanted to know him. When a group of colleagues including Roozbeh went to Chitgar Park one Thursday night, Roozbeh invited Solmaz to join them. She accepted readily. She had met Roozbeh before, through a mutual friend at the paper, but this was the first time they really spoke. Two months later, Solmaz asked Roozbeh to marry her.

Solmaz could hardly have found a man more different from herself. Where Roozbeh’s intelligence pulled him into a world of ideas, hers fastened her to the concrete. She was street smart without being exactly practical; rather, she was audacious and persistent, and she lived by the belief that even unlikely things might come to those who were not afraid to ask for them. She steered her mother to end her unhappy marriage and find work as a lawyer. She practically raised her younger sister, in the flat the family owned in a concrete development near Mehrabad Airport, in southwestern Tehran. She was seventeen when she got herself her first job in journalism by cold-calling television stations to tell them that they really should hire female sports reporters. Solmaz accepted few constraints, even from her own psyche; depression, when it came, was something to be named, stared down, and defeated. She was aggressive, in her way, undaunted by self-consciousness or fear of error. But she was also girlish, voluble, and high-spirited, and she hated to be alone.

In Roozbeh she’d found a man as solitary as she was social, as static as she was active, as reserved as she was forthright. They complemented each other and also ruffled each other. But they were not without commonalities. They were in different ways idealistic, in different ways worldly, in different ways resourceful in a life that would anchor them to little. They resisted the traditional gender roles assigned to them and sympathized with Iran’s underground feminist movement. They agreed in the end to a wedding, but only under pressure from their puzzled families.