Children of Paradise (56 page)

Wednesday was the hardline counterdemonstration. Asieh and Javad stopped at a phone booth on the street so that Asieh could call her editor. While she was talking, she saw four or five big men in white shirts and kaffiyehs approach and begin to lead Javad away. She dropped the phone.

“Where are you taking him?” she demanded.

“That’s his wife,” one of the men said. “Arrest her, too.”

The men did not take Asieh and Javad to a detention center or a police station. They took them to a dress shop in a duplex on Fatemi Square. They ordered the shopkeepers to leave as they led Asieh and Javad up a spiral staircase.

One of the men had a gun. He pushed the barrel into Asieh’s abdomen and said to Javad, “Do you work for Abdollah Nouri?”

“Yes,” Javad said.

The man rammed the gun harder into Asieh. He asked Javad, “Do you believe that Abdollah Nouri, Behzad Nabavi, Mostafa Tajzadeh, and Saeed Hajjarian work with Israel?”

“I don’t know,” Javad said.

“How is it possible you don’t know?” fulminated the man with the gun to Asieh’s stomach. “You work with them, and they work for Israel, and they made this demonstration this week. They killed the students because of Israel.”

“How should I know?” said Javad. “I just work as a photographer.”

“No,” said the man. “You’re a photo editor.”

This was true. Asieh, the gun beneath her ribs, thought fast.

“Let me explain something to you,” she interjected. “This is our job. I could be a teacher. A teacher just teaches students. A teacher doesn’t make decisions about the education system. I could be someone who works in a bank. Not someone who makes decisions for the bank. We’re journalists. We don’t make decisions about the system. Your problem is with the system.”

The man considered this. She might be right, he conceded. But in that case she could as easily work for the hardline press as for the reformists. Would she come over to the other side?

“I’ll think about it,” Asieh offered. She tried to sound natural. “But I’d have to leave the job I have now. I need to think.”

“So think,” the man commanded.

One of the men had taken Asieh’s bag from her. Now he shook out its contents. Asieh’s stomach lurched. A few days back, a friend had given her a Xerox copy of a photo that showed a cleric kissing the hand of Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi. As a joke, someone had written below the image the name of a high-ranking cleric in the judiciary. Asieh had slipped the paper into her bag. Now it could cause her untold trouble.

The captors found a notebook where she’d kept notes for a freelance project on antiquities for a cultural television program. The television network belonged to hard-liners.

“What is this?” one of her captors demanded.

Asieh felt a rush of relief. “It’s for television,” she said. “For your side.”

The notes were exactly what she needed: proof positive that she was nothing but a journalist on assignment, neutral toward her subject, neutral even toward the politicized press, taking notes on historical objects for hardline television.

“Go to Abdollah Nouri,” one of the white shirts told Javad before letting the couple go, “and tell him that we will arrest him and the others, and we will sentence them. We have a lot of evidence that they work with Israel.”

Out on the street, Asieh rummaged through her bag. The picture of the cleric and the shah, mercifully, had been tucked into a zippered compartment the men had never checked. Asieh collapsed on the sidewalk with relief.

• • •

T
HE FIRST PHONE CALL WOKE
Asieh from sleep the very next morning.

“Yesterday I asked you to work for us instead of for your newspaper,” said the voice on the other end. Asieh hung up.

But the calls kept coming. “We know where you live. We know everything about you. Just think about how you can work with us.”

Javad went back to work, but Asieh brooded, afraid to leave their apartment. She wrote a long, frank letter to President Khatami. She was not herself a believer in reform, she wrote, but surely the president was. Someone needed to protect people like her. She and her husband were in danger. The security forces wanted her to work for them. She didn’t want to do it. What recourse did she have?

Asieh gathered her courage and left home. She went to
Khordad
. It was evening. Javad was surprised to see her there.

“I’ve come to see Abdollah Nouri,” she told him simply. She waited hours outside Nouri’s office. When at last he read her letter, she saw tears in his eyes.

“I’ll bring it to President Khatami,” he said.

He did better than that: he read her letter to the National Security Council. Maybe that was why the phone calls stopped. Or maybe her harassers simply lost interest. Whatever the reason, Asieh could breathe again. But Javad couldn’t sleep. Often he woke in terror from nightmares of being followed; he had not only the demonstration photos to worry about but photos he’d taken at the mourning ceremonies of the victims of the chain murders. He implored Asieh to consider leaving Iran. But Asieh couldn’t imagine a life in a country that wasn’t her home, in a language that wasn’t Persian.

They considered moving to another city instead. They decided on Chabahar, the southernmost city in Iran, in the remote province of Sistan-Baluchestan. But before they could leave, Asieh got another job offer in
Tehran. This one was from
Sobh-e Emrouz
, Hajjarian’s newspaper, where Ganji also wrote. It was the hottest property in the Iranian media. Asieh took the offer. They would think about Chabahar another time.

• • •

A
SIEH HAD NOT BEEN
on the job for six months when she learned that she was pregnant. She wasn’t ready. Her life was already overfull. When she wasn’t working at the paper, she painted, wrote poetry, or played music on her tanbur, a traditional long-necked lute. She never imagined herself a mother. Only after long thought and searching talks with Javad did she resolve to see the pregnancy through.

Asieh was prepared for many things in life, but not this. To begin with, it wasn’t fair. There was Javad, going about his life and his work just as before. Asieh’s body grew cumbersome, volatile, somnolent, captive to sudden needs. She would not slow down. She would prove to herself and her colleagues that she could work as hard as before, accomplish as much as before. One day she was out in the street for sixteen hours, covering a police roundup of homeless people. About a week later she started leaking amniotic fluid. Her doctor ordered bed rest for the final three months of her pregnancy.

Asieh was confined to her home and no longer at home in her body. She had an engine inside her that churned the very air if there was no place for it to take her. She knew by now that she loved her unborn daughter and wanted to keep her well. But she herself was not well. She cried every day. She saw Javad as though from an unbridgeable distance. He tried to console her. The baby was fine. There was no problem. Why did she cry?

Asieh was not much better after her daughter was born. During her trimester of bed rest, the judiciary had shut down
Sobh-e Emrouz
and
Khordad
. Javad found work first with a Brazilian magazine and then with Abdollah Nouri’s next venture, a newspaper called
Fath
. But Asieh was tied down. She had a baby, and the baby didn’t sleep through the night for seven months. Sleep deprivation unraveled Asieh’s mind and left her enervated,
uninterested in the things she used to do and the people she used to see. She cared for her daughter and felt that the rest of her life was finished. The past was unrecoverable, and with it, the person she used to be.

Ava was a year old when Javad came home from work one day and asked his wife, “Do we have a cup of tea?”

“No,” said Asieh.

“Is there anything to eat?”

“No,” said Asieh.

“What did you do today?”

“Nothing,” said Asieh wanly. “I just took care of the baby. I have a baby.”

“I thought I married a person who was a poet and a journalist,” said Javad. “I didn’t know I married a housewife like you.”

Asieh shed her last tears of self-pity that day. The next morning she started looking for a babysitter and a job.

• • •

S
OON
A
SIEH HAD
again not one job but two. An editor with whom Asieh had worked at
Iran
pulled her over to
Etemad
, where she was social editor, handling special reports and interviews. Most days, she worked from eight-thirty until it was time to pick up Ava at preschool at four. At night, when Ava slept, Asieh managed a website called Women’s News in Iran. She still objected to gender-specific news, but some friends from
Zan
had asked for her help, and she took it on as a favor to them.

Asieh began to travel again for her reporting, leaving Ava with her sister, Afsoon, or other family members. She felt that she had returned to her own skin after an intolerable absence. She went to Bam, in southern Iran, to cover a devastating earthquake there. And then she heard that the United States was planning to invade Iraq. Early in 2003, reporters the world over began converging on Iraqi Kurdistan, often crossing through Iran; but so far as Asieh knew, the Iranian press hadn’t approached the story.

Asieh went. She fell in with a crew from Al Jazeera, some German reporters, and Kaveh Golestan, an eminence among Iranian
photojournalists. Golestan had a magnificent mustache and a storied career that spanned the twentieth century. In the 1960s he’d worked for the Franklin Book Programs, photographing Iranian schoolchildren using Franklin texts. In the 1970s his photos of Iranian poverty displeased the queen; in the 1980s his documentation of revolutionary censorship enraged the mullahs. He stilled the heaving flux of Iranian life in iconic black-and-white, and he taught photography at the University of Tehran, where Javad had been his student. To Asieh, he was avuncular and kind. In the Iraqi Kurdish cities of Erbil, Sulaimaniya, and Halabja, Asieh returned to her hotel at night and bantered amiably with Golestan and the other reporters about the likelihood of the American invasion.

From Sulaimaniya, Golestan urged Asieh to venture up the mountain that divided Iran from Iraq. Three groups of hardline Islamic militants camped on that mountainside. She could approach without setting them on edge if she wore the full hijab of their women, hands and face covered. Asieh looked into it. She learned that the mountain was so heavily laced with mines left over from the Iran-Iraq War that only the extremists themselves knew how to pass safely through. Asieh didn’t go. But Kaveh Golestan did. He stepped on a land mine and was instantly killed on April 2, 2003.

• • •

W
HEN
A
SIEH RETURNED TO
T
EHRAN,
she understood that she was pregnant again. Her first pregnancy had been complicated, the aftermath disorienting. She had only just become herself again. Moreover, the life she and Javad led was a precarious one. They traveled on no notice, at their own risk, and their employers flickered in and out of existence. This was her primary self, the life she knew. She could not conceive of carrying another baby to term.

Asieh’s doctor refused to help her abort the pregnancy. She had two friends who were doctors, one of them a gynecologist, but they refused as well—not, they explained, because the procedure was illegal but because they disapproved. One of them told Asieh she had two options. One was to find a doctor—however unscrupulous and expensive—who was willing to perform the surgery underground. The other was to take some pills so that she would start to bleed and damage the pregnancy. At that point an emergency room would be obliged to perform a dilation and curettage.

Asieh chose the second route. There was no way to proceed but blindly. The medicine she purchased on the black market came not as pills but as an injection. She would never know what it was. She hired a woman to administer it. The woman knew instantly what the injection was for, and she demanded that Asieh pay her the fetus’s
diyeh
, or blood money, up front, to indemnify her in case Asieh demanded it later. Asieh paid.

She passed the night in terrible pain. But the blood didn’t come. She knew now that she could not carry the fetus; she’d already harmed it beyond salvation. But no hospital would evacuate her uterus if she wasn’t bleeding. So she injected herself a second time. Again the pain. Her doctor friend told her to walk or run to bring on contractions. Asieh did, continuously, despite the pain. But the blood didn’t come. She had no choice now but the underground surgery, whatever its price.

The abortion doctor was very old, and Asieh believed he was a drug addict. He had no patients and seemed to perform no surgery other than abortions. His rooms were filthy. He told Asieh that in addition to the steep fee she’d owe him, she would have to pay an anesthesiologist and a nurse, whom he would hire. She agreed. On the day of her procedure, they showed up, the anesthesiologist with a vividly yellow face, Asieh imagined from drink, the nurse in towering heels and heavy makeup. Asieh delivered herself into the hands of sinister strangers in dirty rooms. Javad, supportive but very worried, asked again and again if she was sure. Asieh didn’t see that she had any other choice.

In the days that followed, she bled and bled. Her body quaked with shock. She could not seek medical care or advice anywhere or tell anyone, other than Javad, what she had done. She told
Etemad
she was sick and took a few days off. Then she returned to life as she had known it, until everything changed.

• • •

I
N THE SUMMER OF 2004,
a news item from the town of Neka in her home province of Mazandaran brought Asieh up short. She’d been combing the country’s media for stories about women to post to the women’s news website. Now she saw that a sixteen-year-old girl had been executed for “acts incompatible with chastity.” Or maybe, according to a different news source, the girl was twenty-one. Which was it? Asieh wondered. Why the discrepancy? And why was a young girl hanged? She pressed the matter at the website’s next meeting. They should send someone to Neka to find out, she said. But no one wanted to go. Asieh took it on.