Children of Paradise (55 page)

The Franklin Book Programs were a classic American export—part public diplomacy, part market colonization, and part high-minded endeavor to promote literacy and cultural expression in developing countries allied with the United States. The editors in each country were local intellectual figures who selected the publications—mostly translated American works—to suit their countries’ literary appetites. By far Franklin’s most ambitious outpost was in Iran. There the program published some eight hundred titles, about fifty of which were original works in Persian. The schoolbooks that the short-story writer Samad Behrangi had railed against in the 1960s were Franklin publications: under the shah, the majority of the textbooks used in Iranian elementary schools were Franklin books translated from English and replete with irrelevant or inscrutable cultural references.

Traditionally, Iranian book publishers were also retailers: their storefronts were boutiques selling their own wares. Franklin introduced national book retailing to Iran by mass-producing cheap paperbacks and selling them everywhere, on stands that popped up near bus stops and grocery stores or wherever they might catch a passerby’s notice. The appetite for these affordable, broadly available, mostly translated works was vast. Long after the Franklin Book Programs dissolved in 1977, and long after the Islamic Republic nationalized its local assets, certain improbable American authors and titles remained in the Iranian canon. Will Durant, whose breezy, readable surveys provided Iranian readers with a painless introduction to the Western philosophical tradition, was one of them.

• • •

F
OR
A
SIEH,
D
URANT CAME FIRST;
then she read Tabatabai; only later, Soroush. In the meantime, not quite by accident, she allowed math to languish. She flubbed the
concours
. She didn’t qualify in math, and she didn’t get into an elite public school. Asieh was too proud to go anyplace less prestigious than where her sisters had gone. She decided to repeat the
concours
the following year. And she would do it, this time, in the humanities.

She would have to master the equivalent of four years’ studies on her own. She came back to the farm near Shahsavar and took up her studies behind the closed door of her bedroom, reading from morning until midnight. Finally her passions and her studies converged. She taught herself to speed-read until she could digest a book in just four hours. And she loved what she read. She placed seventeenth in the country in journalism on her
concours
. Soon she was off to the university that bore the name of her favorite philosopher, Allameh Tabatabai. It was among the top humanities
campuses in Iran. She could read philosophy on her own, she thought; but to be a social and political journalist was a vocation, and this she would learn at school.

• • •

A
SIEH WAS NOT THEN
and would never become a political creature. But she would find politics, always, just beneath her fingertips, like a banister that ran alongside the steep staircase she climbed. To be a journalist was to scale the structure of politics and to grasp onto politics for support, even involuntarily, and even when the journalism was not itself about politics. In 1993, when she moved to Tehran, there was not yet a term in common parlance for the space she would come to occupy, there in the hollows of the structures of the state, by whose prerogatives her work would suffocate or flourish. Later she would understand this as civil society, and it was her natural home. Politics, she surmised, was by contrast little more than the pursuit of power, which did not interest her at all.

She was a freshman in journalism at Allameh Tabatabai when she went to a journalism fair with some of her friends, determined to convince an editor to give her a chance to write for a real newspaper. If she had been a political creature, Asieh would have cared first and foremost which newspaper that might be. But she did not. And so she stumbled upon
Kayhan
, the hardline newspaper that was practically an arm of the security forces. Asieh little knew, at the time, that
Kayhan
had denounced and threatened many of the writers whose work she loved. An editor who ran a yearly supplement for the newspaper gave Asieh her first assignment. When he left
Kayhan
for
Iran
, a centrist government newspaper, he invited Asieh to write for him there.

Iran
was less strident than the hardline papers, and very large. Asieh felt lucky to find herself there. She did not much like the dress code: the strictest hijab, either a chador or a loose coat with the enveloping headdress called
maghnae
, was required in all government offices. Nor did she appreciate the gender segregation in the newsroom. But she was happy. The job slaked her ambitions. She was there to excel, not to wage futile battles with the world as it was. She was learning her trade; she respected her teachers
and her boss; and she took an interest in sociology on the side, especially in John Locke and contemporary theorists of civil society.

One day, a colleague invited her to come with him to interview a famous writer: Javad Mojabi, a poet, satirist, and editor of one of the few literary magazines that had survived the first revolutionary decade. Asieh thrilled to the prospect of meeting this man. She didn’t know that he lived under mortal threat, like so many writers in the period before the chain murders were exposed, or that he endured regular investigation and harassment. She was enthralled by his presence, and that of his chic and beautiful wife, and she was gobsmacked when, on learning that she wrote poetry, he asked her to recite some. She obliged. Mojabi invited the young stranger to join his writers’ circle, even as his wife, protective and frightened for her husband’s life, demanded to know: Was he sure he could trust Asieh?

The circle was very small and very critical, Mojabi told Asieh. She should be punctual, serious, disciplined, and strong. Yes, said Asieh, yes—anything. The meetings were not open, Mojabi continued. She could not bring anybody. The writers published nothing from these meetings, but they were very free within their confines. And the group needed another poet. Asieh would be that poet. And Mojabi would be her most important mentor, the person from whom she learned how, as a writer, to be free.

• • •

W
HEN
A
SIEH’S BOSS TOOK OVER
Iran-e Javan
, a youth-oriented supplement to
Iran
, he made Asieh its cultural editor. It was a bold appointment. She was female, single, and very young, in a male-dominated workplace. And now she had a job that made her responsible for twenty-eight pages of content. Her supervisor thought she could do it, and Asieh thought so, too. But she felt herself surrounded by colleagues looking for her to fail. She supervised men who were older than she was and resented reporting to her. The paper’s chief editor found fault with her every move. She put her head down and worked harder. Her days were often thirteen or fourteen hours long; when they were over, she brought still more work home.

One day a young male colleague pulled her aside.

“I don’t know how to explain this to you,” he said miserably, “but please leave this job.”

“Why?” Asieh demanded.

The young man seemed to be fighting back tears. Every day, he told her, their colleagues spoke ill of her. “People don’t like for a young, single girl to be an editor here,” he told her.

“That may be true,” Asieh replied, “but it’s their problem, not mine.”

• • •

I
N LATE 1996
, Asieh took little notice of the coming presidential election. Rafsanjani would go, she expected, and Nategh-Nouri would replace him. She never imagined that this decision was made by anyone but the Leader. But she was friendly with one of her professors at the university, a reformist intellectual named Hadi Khaniki, who kept her vaguely apprised of the political scene. She found him sad one day in the run-up to the election. Mir Hossein Mousavi had just declined the reformists’ entreaties to run, he informed her. Mousavi preferred to remain an artist, outside of politics. Now the reformists had no candidate to offer.

Asieh didn’t much care one way or the other about the election. But she wanted to cheer up Khaniki, and she thought, suddenly, of a rather lovely cleric who was a librarian she’d recently interviewed for her newspaper.

“You have somebody better than Mousavi,” she told Khaniki. “You have, for example, Khatami.”

Khaniki laughed. “Asieh,” he said, “you’re a poet. You should stick to poetry.” If she knew politics, he explained, she would understand that Khatami was the wrong man for that job. He was a cultural figure who’d left politics years earlier because he didn’t like to fight.

“Okay,” said Asieh. “I just think people would like him.”

Some weeks later, in a university corridor, Khaniki came charging toward Asieh with a newspaper in his hand.

“How did you know?” he practically shouted.

Khaniki was to become a speechwriter and adviser to President Khatami. During the campaign, he asked Asieh a favor. Khatami’s press office
badly needed an editor. Out of loyalty to Khaniki, Asieh volunteered her services at the Khatami campaign at night, after she left
Iran-e Javan
.

She would never know for certain, but she suspected that her moonlighting for the Khatami campaign sealed her fate at
Iran
, which had favored Nategh-Nouri. In the month after Khatami was elected, the tension between Asieh and her boss mounted until she felt she had no choice but to resign. She would always joke that the new president’s gift to her, in thanks for her volunteer work, was unemployment.

Khaniki found her work in the president’s office, but Asieh lasted only a day. She was a journalist and wanted to remain one. And journalism was flourishing. There were new publications on the scene, including a newspaper called
Zan
(Woman). Asieh saw no utility in segregating news by gender. She even rather opposed it. But a former colleague from
Kayhan
had gone to
Zan
and wanted Asieh to work with him. She liked the colleague and needed a job. As it happened, Asieh would work for
Zan
for the short duration of the newspaper’s existence. She met her husband there.

Javad Montazeri was a photojournalist. He had a broad, round face, kindly eyes, and a long beard that melted into his long hair. He cut a recognizable figure on the streets of Tehran with his mane and his camera. Like Asieh, he came from Mazandaran. Within a month Javad left
Zan
to work for
Khordad
, a newspaper run by Khatami’s erstwhile interior minister, Abdollah Nouri, who was chased from office by hard-liners in 1998.

On Asieh’s wedding day in April 1999, a friend called her at the beauty salon with bad news.
Zan
had been banned. Her job was gone. But Asieh could hardly react. Javad still had work, and she was still happy. More than five hundred wedding guests were waiting.

• • •

A
SIEH WASN’T OUT OF WORK FOR LONG.
She was an enterprising reporter, covering demonstrations in Kurdistan and an earthquake in Shiraz for first one newspaper and then another. The work gave her energy and a feeling of incontestable purpose. Around her, the Iranian press was changing. More young women were entering journalism. The reformist
papers weren’t free, but they were far more daring than the old papers had been. The Eighteenth of Tir would test the limits of the independent press, and of Asieh’s detachment.

Asieh was on her way to a meeting when her taxi driver informed her that the roads were closed because of a disturbance at the University of Tehran. She canceled her meeting and called Javad, telling him to meet her at the university entrance. They found the gate locked. Beyond it, they could see students and staff milling about in shock and in tears. A journalism student who’d attended occasional meetings at Asieh’s newspaper recognized her. “I know her,” he called out. “Let her in.” It was early morning, and they were the first reporters to enter the blasted campus.

Javad’s photographs that day became iconic ones. A small dorm room lay in cinders from a grenade strike, the mattresses burned from metal bed frames, the paint stripped from the walls. In other rooms, television sets had been smashed, belongings ransacked, air conditioners hurled to the street below; a student in a ruined corridor showed his back hatched with red welts. A window was broken where a student had been thrown.

Their attackers, the students told Asieh, said they did all this for their imams. But the attackers had come upon them in their dormitory as they slept. Asieh was not a party to this fight: she was a journalist covering a story. But she could not tear herself away. For the next week she and Javad were among the students, documenting a battle between unmatched adversaries, and a story that had been distorted beyond recognition in the state press.

A few days into the unrest, Asieh and Javad heard gunshots. They understood that a student had been shot. At the nearest hospital, they connived to see him, posing as family members. The photo was perhaps Javad’s most daring. Officially, no students had been injured. But there in the limpid green light of a hospital room, a student lay intubated, unconscious, with bandages patching his abdomen and chest. An oxygen mask obscured his face, and a childish cartoon bedsheet covered his lower body.

Abdollah Nouri, the publisher of
Khordad
, viewed Javad’s photos and reminded him gravely that he published them at his own risk as well as the
newspaper’s. But the images were too important to hold back. Javad insisted.
Khordad
splashed the pictures across its cover and ran two pages of photos inside as well. The demonstrating students held copies of the issue aloft like protest placards. They had been given little, Asieh understood. Every day they told her that they wanted to talk with President Khatami. Although the president sent his ministers, he never came.