Children of Paradise (45 page)

Friends and relatives started arriving almost immediately. By midnight, twenty or thirty people had come to Solmaz’s mother’s apartment, including some of the bloggers who’d been released when Roozbeh went to Evin. Roozbeh received a hero’s welcome, and he cringed from it inside. He was
trapped in a vise that he did not dare mention. The confession letter, when he published it by his own hand, would humiliate and incriminate him; it would point a finger at others and announce him as a collaborator. What would all these people think of him then? He told himself that his friends in prison were on his conscience. If he talked about the confession letter, if he told anyone at that night’s gathering that he was still under pressure, someone, he imagined, might go to the prosecutor and reveal his double game. Roozbeh had left prison, but he brought with him his all-seeing God.

The next morning the first phone call came. Roozbeh was to meet Keshavarz in Azadi Square, not far from where he was staying with his in-laws. He took Solmaz into his confidence then, explaining the unfinished business before him. She studied her husband. He had always been remote, but now he seemed lost to her, imprisoned still in some unknowable place, his passivity like the zip cuffs that tightened when he struggled against them. She would have to fortify his will, she saw.

Solmaz went with Roozbeh to Azadi Square. She borrowed a digital voice recorder from a friend and slipped it into Roozbeh’s breast pocket. He only had to switch it on and leave it there, she told him. She didn’t know how or when or where, but she felt certain this evidence of coercion would be useful one day.

Keshavarz greeted Solmaz as though he’d known her all along. But he needed to talk to Roozbeh alone, he told her, and he took Roozbeh into his car while Solmaz waited on the street.

Had Roozbeh written the letter for publication yet? the interrogator demanded. Roozbeh pleaded for time. He was released only the night before; he hadn’t even been to Rasht to see his parents. But Omid, Shahram, and Javad were waiting, Keshavarz objected. He handed Roozbeh a pencil and paper and dictated a list of the subjects Mortazavi wanted him to address. Roozbeh was to write the letter that afternoon, give a copy to Keshavarz, and then publish it before leaving for Rasht.

Roozbeh faxed the letter to ISNA and ILNA, two government news agencies controlled by reformists, just before he and Solmaz left for Rasht.
He knew that neither network would publish a forced confession, but he’d gone through the motions.

Three days later Keshavarz reached Roozbeh on Solmaz’s cell phone. The interrogator was furious. Roozbeh hadn’t published his confession! His friends were still waiting for him in prison! Roozbeh protested that he’d sent the letter to two agencies. It wasn’t his fault they hadn’t printed it. Mortazavi was not happy, the interrogator insisted. Roozbeh should come back to Tehran, publish the letter, and report to the prosecutor’s office. Roozbeh and Solmaz were on their way back to the capital when a friend called to tell them that a letter had already appeared under Roozbeh’s name in Fars News, the media organ of the Revolutionary Guard. Mortazavi had faxed the confession himself.

After that, the prosecutor called the newspapers where Roozbeh had worked and ordered their editors to publish the confession in full, under lurid headlines: “Exposed!,” “The Confessions of a Reformist Journalist,” and “Roozbeh Mirebrahimi Reveals Secret Group in Reformist Movement.” The letter read, in part:

I, Roozbeh Mirebrahimi, have been one of the accused in connection with the file of internet sites. . . . During the past few years I and others like me had fallen into the hands of those whose only strategy was to vouchsafe their own political interests, and who made use of people like me in order to implement their evil projects. . . . I strongly attacked various pillars of the system, especially the judiciary, by making various allegations against them, and I have portrayed them as being against human rights. . . .

During the past few years, it was an undeniable fact that there existed . . . a frightful network, one end of which was inside the country and the other end existed beyond the borders. . . . Due to my weakness, I also joined that network. . . . The involvement of some organizations and individuals from outside the country for supporting
individuals such as me is shameful, because people like me have trampled upon the laws of this country and have committed an offence. . . .

The claim that I was in solitary confinement is not true about me under any circumstances. Throughout the period of my detention I experienced nothing but kindness and respect from those who were dealing with us. Here, I wish to express my gratitude for the kindness of those individuals and to pray to God Almighty for their success and well-being.

I was detained in Evin prison, and I was released from that prison too and returned to the warm embrace of my family. . . .

With best wishes for the glory and steadfastness of all true servants of the people.

Roozbeh Mirebrahimi, November 26, 2004

O
MID AND
S
HAHRAM NEVER BELIEVED
that their release depended on Roozbeh’s confession. The interrogators told lies and made false promises as a matter of course. Omid thought that if Roozbeh recanted and appealed to the reformists for help, all of their confessions would be discredited before they published them, and the pressure might redound to Mortazavi instead. But none of the cellmates trusted Roozbeh enough to offer him this advice. Suppose Roozbeh reported to Keshavarz that the others were not sufficiently repentant? Omid, for one, could hardly see past his cellmate’s preternatural calm to know where, if anywhere, Roozbeh’s outward compliance ended and inner refusal began.

Omid never doubted that help was forthcoming. The journalists’ union was organizing a sit-in on the bloggers’ behalf. Even the European Union was pressing for the bloggers’ release. Still, the prosecutor’s office stalled. For nearly a week after Roozbeh was released, Shahram and Omid fielded new threats. Shahram learned that his younger brother, Bahram, had been arrested. Keshavarz told Omid that his brother would be next.

Finally, Evin’s warden came to see Omid, Shahram, and Javad in their cell. “Why are you still here?” he said abruptly when he walked in. Within thirty minutes, Omid and Shahram were released, with orders to publish their confession letters right away. Javad would stay behind.

Keshavarz took the time to communicate one last warning to Shahram. “There are devils waiting for you outside,” he said. “And they want you to speak against us again. Be careful. You have three bouquets of flowers.” Shahram understood that Keshavarz was talking about his children. “Those three bouquets are your bail.”

Shahram never returned to the apartment in Eskandari, even though all his belongings were there. Instead he resolved to go to Rasht as soon as possible. They needed a strategy, Shahram urged Omid. They should make themselves as difficult as possible for their tormentors to reach. Shahram had no cell phone; Omid ignored blocked calls on his. And they should reach out to everyone they trusted, inside or outside the country, to explain what had happened to them in prison. Shahram wrote to Shirin Ebadi, called friends who reported on Iran from outside the country, and alerted his colleagues and higher-ups at
Etemad
. His case, he knew, was linked to the work he’d done on the serial murders. His very life was at risk. He came to Tehran as infrequently as he could, but that was still not infrequent enough.

Omid returned to his family’s apartment in Lavizan. He had always been an open person, expressive and forthcoming, given easily to intimacy, not least with his parents. Now he wrestled with memories he couldn’t share and anxieties he couldn’t explain. He felt humiliated and angry, and he cried a lot. Sometimes when he was alone in his room, crying, he could hear his mother crying just outside his door.

But to reach out was natural to Omid even now. He wrote to two Iranian journalists living abroad, explaining the ordeal he had just endured. He did it in his own name, but Shahram persuaded him to include his and Roozbeh’s as well. Then Omid took a deep breath and sought out everyone
he could think of whom he’d named in his confessions, warning them and apologizing, even when it meant facing their anger.

Through a colleague in the NGO world, Omid obtained the e-mail address of a researcher at Human Rights Watch in New York. He set up an alternative e-mail account and wrote a long letter to the international watchdog group detailing the bloggers’ treatment in prison. Human Rights Watch soon published a report on the incident that stunned Mortazavi with its inside knowledge. On Shahram’s advice, the next time Omid communicated with Human Rights Watch, he planted a piece of misinformation to cover his tracks. No, he could tell Mortazavi, he was not the source of the reports—whoever the source was had reported that Shahram was flogged in prison, which he and the other witnesses all knew wasn’t true.

And yet, he also did the unthinkable, much as Roozbeh had done. With the threats to his brother and to Shahram’s children in mind, Omid approached ISNA and ILNA with his and Shahram’s confession letters the day after his release. The letters were inscribed with beautiful penmanship, the product of stalling tactics and boredom. The government-run, reformist-operated news agencies refused to publish them. ISNA even asked that Omid return with a lawyer. Finally, Omid brought the letters to Fars, which turned out already to have copies. Just as he had done with Roozbeh, Mortazavi ordered the reformist papers to follow Fars in publishing Omid’s and Shahram’s letters on their first or second pages. Editors called Omid to apologize, but they did as they were told.

When the confession letters were all published, Mohammad Ali Abtahi, Khatami’s vice president, who had been so kind to Solmaz during Roozbeh’s incarceration, wrote a scathing blog post titled “Repentant and Unrepentant Bloggers,” unfavorably contrasting Roozbeh, Omid, and Shahram with the others in their case file who’d been released before them, without conditions. Abtahi referred to Roozbeh, Omid, and Shahram as
tavob
s, equating them with the hated collaborators in the prisons of the 1980s.

Omid, enraged, called Abtahi from a taxicab. What Abtahi had written was completely unfair, Omid fulminated. He had no idea what the bloggers
had been through. And as a matter of fact, Omid told the vice president, the interrogators had made it very clear that Abtahi would see them in prison soon enough, and that they anticipated a very colorful confession from him then. Abtahi snapped at Omid that his phone was tapped. What did Omid want from him? An apology, Omid demanded. Abtahi published a follow-up article conceding that there might be aspects of the case he did not know.

• • •

R
OOZBEH DIDN’T HAVE CONTACTS
abroad or relationships with reformist politicians. He was little-known, young, and connected only tenuously to political figures, who were unlikely to assume any risk on his behalf. He withdrew in prison and he withdrew now. Even his friends did not take him into their confidence. When Mortazavi or Keshavarz called him, he answered, and what they asked, he mostly did. Javad was still in prison, he reasoned, and he was there because of Roozbeh. The most prudent strategy was to comply and keep quiet until he could make a clean break.

His reputation was ruined. The reformist media and elites were nearly unanimous in their condemnation: the young blogger had broken in prison and sold out his colleagues. He’d betrayed the whole Second of Khordad movement. He should have been stronger than that. Now Mortazavi called him into his office with numbing regularity, demanding one or another self-destructive public statement. Thirteen times, Roozbeh reported to the prosecutor’s office. Mortazavi had him sign over his confessions to an Article 90 commission in the parliament as evidence against the reformists. Roozbeh drew the line when the letter he’d signed to the Article 90 commission wound up in the hands of
Kayhan
, which called Roozbeh for comment. If
Kayhan
published one word of that letter, Roozbeh told the caller, he would recant everything.

Roozbeh had always been taciturn; now he was nearly mute. He avoided people, skipping even a relative’s wedding in Rasht. Strangers sometimes recognized him on the street and expressed sympathy and understanding, but the elites were obdurate in their disapproval. One day Ebrahim Nabavi,
an Iranian political satirist in exile abroad—the recipient of one of Omid’s letters, though Roozbeh didn’t know it—published an article reprimanding his countrymen for piling onto young men who had clearly been coerced. Anyone who had spent even an hour in prison would see this thing for what it was, he wrote. Lies cast no light. They revealed only darkness. Not these young men but their interrogator should be ashamed before his children of the filthy job he’d done. When Roozbeh read the article, he didn’t say a word. He cried soundlessly, unaware that Solmaz saw.

• • •

O
MID,
S
HAHRAM,
R
OOZBEH, AND
S
OLMAZ
kept a tight circle when Shahram was in town. As Shahram saw it, they needed one another, even if they did not all trust one another. They had no one else. The conservatives had already hurt them, and now the reformists feared them because they were potential weapons in Mortazavi’s hands. They stood alone, and so they had to stand together. They had a secret meeting place, a nondescript café where they came together at night, taking care to shake off anyone who might be following them, and confiding the location to no one else.

It seemed to Omid that Roozbeh had gone over to the other side and was a liability to the others now. Roozbeh never guessed that Omid felt this way about him. He thought they were in the same boat, paddling against a current that wanted to carry them all toward the same ignoble fate. But Roozbeh’s placidity rendered him inscrutable. He did not take Omid into his confidence, and Omid kept Roozbeh at a stiff arm’s length. Their persecutors had labored to achieve exactly this: To shatter bonds of trust and forge new ones of mutual destruction. To take three young men, all of them innocents, each in his own way exemplary of his generation’s good faith and constructive potential, and turn them radioactive in their own and one another’s eyes.