Children of Paradise (40 page)

Their ceremony was intimate. Solmaz’s parents and sister were there, along with a relative of her father’s who came as the witness from her side. Roozbeh’s parents and siblings attended, too. His witness was Abbas Amirentezam. When the wedding party presented itself to the government office responsible for the paperwork, an official took their documents and requested the identity cards of the witnesses.

“Is this Amirentezam,” the official said, indicating the card in his hand, “any relation to, you know,
that
Amirentezam?”

“What do you mean?” Roozbeh asked. “This is Abbas Amirentezam. There is only one.”

The official rose from his desk and clasped Amirentezam in his arms, kissing his cheeks. It had always been his dream, he confided, to meet this man. He would not accept the payment the family owed; it was enough, he said, that he would have there in his file the marriage documents with Amirentezam’s signature upon them.

Roozbeh and Solmaz were married at the turn of the Persian new year, in March of 2004. It was an unstable time in Roozbeh’s life. He’d left
Etemad
and worked now, briefly, at a newspaper called
Jomhuriat
. Solmaz worked for
Jomhuriat
as well, reporting on women’s issues and social affairs. Their stint there was truncated because
Jomhuriat
did not last long, publishing only thirteen issues before it was banned on account of its insistence on following the Zahra Kazemi case. Roozbeh and the rest of the staff continued to report to the office, but they were forbidden to publish a newspaper.

• • •

P
AYAM
F
AZLINEJAD WANTED TO KNOW
all kinds of things: about Shahram’s life, his home, the documents and sources he drew on for his work. One day he warned Shahram not to keep any documents in his apartment. Shahram thought Payam was trying to scare him. He didn’t take Payam seriously. But his friends did. Payam was a dangerous person, a number of friends warned him when they saw Shahram out with him. He should sever his relations. In due time, he did.

A few months passed quietly. He didn’t publish much of anything. Roozbeh, bit by bit, moved out of the Eskandari apartment and into a cramped one-bedroom near the train station with his wife. Shahram planned to go to Rasht to spend a week with his family, move them into a new apartment, and enroll his daughter in first grade. Just before he was to leave, he was at work at
Etemad
when a young man brought him a summons. But the summons was for a date already past. The young man apologized and told him to report to a police station the following morning. Shahram agreed and went back to his work.

Forty minutes later the young man returned. Shahram should leave the building now, he said. A senior officer was waiting for him in the street and would answer all his questions. Shahram argued with the young man. If the senior officer wanted to see Shahram, he should come in. No, the young man insisted; Shahram had to go out. If he refused, he would be arrested.

But as Shahram suspected, the arrest was already happening. Outside the
Etemad
office, where a group of his colleagues kept watch after him at the gate, another man emerged and ordered Shahram to follow. He flashed a gun and handcuffs, and took Shahram by the hand.

Shahram recognized this man. He’d seen him once, talking with Payam Fazlinejad.

“Aren’t you Payam’s friend?” Shahram asked.

No, the man replied.

The first stop was the apartment in Eskandari, which the men ransacked for documents while Shahram looked on. On his shelf, Shahram spotted copies of the Iranian constitution and criminal code. He asked if he could take them. The men told him he would have no need; he’d be released soon enough. Then they put him in a black car with curtained windows, hit him from behind, and said, “Put your head down.”

He was blindfolded, but his senses were on high alert when the car stopped. He was not at any known prison. The site felt quiet, residential. He felt himself guided through a courtyard, down a corridor on its left side, and into a building about the size of an urban house. His captors took his glasses, his belt, and his shoes. He heard a metal door open. He was thrust into a pitch-dark cell with a large vent. For hours Shahram sat, listening to odd noises he could not identify.

At long last, he was dragged into a chair, his hands cuffed behind his back. He heard a low voice.

“Do you know where you are?”

“No,” said Shahram.

“You are in the Miracle Room.”

Shahram smiled. Then he landed on the floor with the chair still bound to his back. He could not tell how many people punched and kicked him as he lay handcuffed and blindfolded. He did not know how long it lasted. When he came to, he was in a bathroom. The hand he lifted to his face came away covered in blood.

  TWELVE  

T
HE
S
PIDER’S
H
OUSE

The parable of those who take guardians besides Allah is as the parable of the spider that makes for itself a house; and most surely the frailest of the houses is the spider’s house did they but know.

—
T
HE
H
OLY
Q
URAN,
29:41

B
EFORE HE WAS ARRESTED,
Shahram Rafizadeh had a recurring dream. He stood in a beautiful garden, surrounded by all kinds of singing birds. He wanted to leave, but the garden had no exit. Every path was a blind alley. One led to a room. There, Ruhollah Hosseinian, an important intelligence official at the time of the chain murders, stood wearing his turban but not his robes. Hosseinian did not speak. With a gesture, he instructed Shahram to push up his sleeves: like this, like this.

Shahram had never put much stock in dreams. But he became convinced that the courtyard of his prison was the garden from his dream. Sometimes, within his cell, he could hear birds. Much later he would circle that detention center by taxi and study it on Google Earth. Just to the left of Hosseiniyeh Ershad, off Javanan Square, was the house with the gracious
courtyard that no one knew concealed six Miracle Rooms, nine solitary cells, off a narrow corridor with a dim green light.

The cells were so small that a person could not turn around without walking backward. Shahram estimated that his measured about three feet by five feet. It was always dark. The green bulb in the hallway cast almost no light. Up near the ceiling was a barred window; in the door there was a narrow slot for delivering food. An air ventilator ran for hours at a time, making a grating and deafening noise.

For the first month Shahram was hardly ever in his cell. He was in the interrogation room where he was beaten, then questioned, then beaten again. The interrogation room had windows covered with white film, so that he could not see out but others could see in. His interrogators switched a video camera on while he was questioned, off while he was beaten.

Shahram’s face went numb from the punches and slaps. His interrogators smashed his head into walls. Once they broke a washbowl on his head. They whipped the back of his body from his shoulders to his heels with cable wires. They told him they would arrest his father and torture him in Shahram’s presence. They threatened to harm his children. Hundreds of traffic accidents happen in Tehran every day, they reminded him. His family might suffer one. Or maybe they would bring Bita, his wife, to prison: “And you know what will happen to her next.”

All his life, Shahram’s interrogators told him, he had made mistakes. They wanted to know about his connections and activities from the time he arrived in Tehran. Shahram protested that he was only twenty-two when he came to the capital. He’d forgotten a lot of things.

“If you forgot,” an interrogator told him, “you will remember here.”

They had seized a Revolutionary Guard document from Shahram’s apartment that belonged neither to him nor to Roozbeh but to their third roommate. They wanted Shahram to confess that the document was his. They also wanted him to confess to unlawful sexual relationships. They showed him lists of names of every woman he knew, demanding that he confess to affairs with at least one. They questioned him about the Writers Association, about his writer friends, including Mohammad Mokhtari and
Houshang Golshiri. They wanted him to incriminate Shirin Ebadi, the human rights lawyer who had just won the Nobel Prize for Peace.

From the beginning, Shahram’s interrogators told him they would arrest Roozbeh, but they didn’t know where to find him. Shahram tried to convince them that Roozbeh was not important. He said he didn’t know his friend’s new address. One day they put Shahram in a car and demanded that he lead them to Roozbeh’s married home. Shahram led them to three buildings in three alleys. He did not know which one was Roozbeh’s, he lied. The roads all looked alike. He and Roozbeh had once made a deal that if one of them was arrested, he’d hold out information about the other for twenty days, giving him time to leave the country. Shahram kept his word.

He was given only one set of clothes: pants, an undershirt, and a short-sleeved shirt. He wore this for seventy-two consecutive days, and he was allowed to wash the clothes in his cell only once. He was permitted to use the restroom three times a day, for three minutes at a time, and he was required to perform ablutions during those visits. He believed there were drugs in his food, because he began to hallucinate. He would see himself in the middle of a road or surrounded by people who wanted to kill him.

But no drug was more powerful or more terrifying than solitary confinement itself. His senses starved. In time he saw nothing, heard nothing, tasted nothing. There was nothing to touch, nothing to smell. Only memory bound him to the world of experience and human connection. But memory began to elude him. In the beginning he conjured images of the people he loved, their faces hovering before him during interrogations and when he was alone in his cell. But day by day the nothingness lapped at Bita and the children until, to his anguish, their faces vanished. He strained and railed against the blackness. He could no longer picture his daughter’s eyes.

• • •

M
UTUAL ACQUAINTANCES URGED
R
OOZBEH
to leave the country. Web technicians associated with reformist sites had begun disappearing months before. With Shahram, the crackdown had taken a clear political turn, as he was not a programmer but a writer. Moreover, Roozbeh’s life and
his work were intertwined with Shahram’s. But Roozbeh, in his phlegmatic way, shrugged off the warnings. He let the twenty days lapse. He had committed no crime. In the meantime he worked with Shahram’s family to spread the word about his friend’s disappearance, giving interviews to newspapers and calling government offices in the attempt to force his release.

Roozbeh and his wife had moved to a southern Tehran neighborhood called Gomrok, famous in pre-revolutionary days as the gateway to the red-light district. Solmaz, who was otherwise busy petitioning Ershad, the Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance, for a license to start a women’s sports magazine, set about making the apartment a home. She had no domestic instinct or experience, but she gamely began to teach herself to cook. A glass-fronted corner cabinet in the couple’s tiny living room displayed a collection of wineglasses and figurines; blue-and-white plates hung on a wall. A large wedding photograph in a gilt frame overlooked the facing wicker-framed couches that crowded the space. In the picture, Roozbeh wore a red flower in his lapel, and Solmaz gripped his shoulder. They looked intelligent, uncomfortable, and young.

“What will you do if I’m arrested?” Roozbeh asked his new bride one evening at home.

“Nothing,” Solmaz teased, smiling. “When you’re released, they’ll make you editor in chief.”

She was cracking wise about the way journalists made heroes of political prisoners. But she was also trying to puncture the tension she sensed building in him. Moments later she confronted herself in the bathroom mirror. It was a valid question he had asked. What would she do?

She would give as good as she got, she told herself. It wouldn’t be an equal fight, but she would make those responsible suffer.

Solmaz woke Roozbeh early on the morning of September 27, 2004. She’d had a terrible dream, she told him. She’d dreamt that he was arrested in a small café where they sat with Shahram’s brother and another colleague. The colleague was covered in blood. Roozbeh rose from sleep and stood at the bedside. The doorbell rang.

Shahram had protected Roozbeh’s address, but their former roommate
had not managed to hold out. He was at Roozbeh’s door now, with the men who had arrested Shahram. They wanted Roozbeh, he told Solmaz through the door. They had forced him to lead them there. Solmaz hesitated only long enough to catch Roozbeh’s eye. She girded herself inside, determined to show no emotion. Her composure, she felt somehow certain, was vital, both for Roozbeh’s peace of mind and for whatever lay ahead of them. And then she opened the door.