On the fifth day of the siege of Evin Prison, just before dawn, saboteurs got in among the protesters long enough to burn down the chemical toilets. Surveying the resulting black-edged sculptures in melted plastic, Martin wondered if the end had finally come. People couldn’t live like animals.
Within hours, though, shovels had been smuggled in from the surrounding suburbs and deep pits had been dug. Tents were commandeered, privacy was secured. By the time Martin confronted the inevitable and entered one of the reeking enclosures himself, the facilities were not just well-tested but adorned with graffiti, including some slyly vernacular English: ‘We honour Hassan Jabari for proving that a cock-up is better than a conspiracy.’
Evin Prison sat on the line where the northern suburbs of Tehran gave way, abruptly, to the Alborz Mountains, some twelve kilometres from the city centre. One minute there were crowded expressways, upmarket shopping malls and tiered apartment blocks in glittering white, the next there was barren rock sloping up into the mountains. Popular hiking trails began nearby, and a ski-lift wasn’t far away, though it was definitely not the skiing season. At the bottom of the rocky slope sat the prison, its high grey walls topped with razor-wire, watchtowers rising from the cell blocks. To the west lay a shady green park with a teahouse and restaurant; those facilities were closed now, but the park itself had proved invaluable, with the trees offering shelter from the sun, and now the soft, excavatable ground saving the assembled masses from complete indignity.
Protesters surrounded the prison on all sides, but the bare rock behind it had proved the hardest to defend. For three nights running, the police had used water-cannon to force a retreat back down the slopes. But they always ran out of water eventually, or their pumps ran out of fuel, and during the day the protesters rebuilt their barricades of metal drums and barbed-wire, and by sheer force of numbers pushed them up the mountain, driving back the police lines. Martin had watched from below as tear-gas grenades were smothered in drums of water or wrapped in fire-blankets, but never lobbed back to their senders. Apart from the sheer frustration of not prevailing, the police were offered no provocation: no stone-throwing, no swearing, no taunts.
The battles being waged in the suburbs around the prison were more complex, and it was hard to catch more than a few glimpses of the ebb and flow of territory, but the fact that supplies were still getting through demonstrated that the police had yet to form an impenetrable cordon between the protesters and their supporters. The authorities had cut off water to the drinking fountains in the park, but bottled water and a remarkable variety of home-cooked food were still finding their way in.
The prison itself was closed off now, but on the first day the guards had been only too willing to come out and interact. A line of protesters had stood at the main gate, and when ordered by a belligerent, near-hysterical officer to disperse, the first in line had replied, ‘My son is in your prison. He has committed no crime. I respectfully request that you release him now, or arrest me.’ IR links had ferried the man’s words from a phone in his shirt pocket all the way to a PA system in the park, and from there they’d blared out across the expressway.
When he’d been arrested, the next protester had stepped forward. ‘My sister is in your prison. She has committed no crime. I respectfully request that you release her now, or arrest me.’
The ritual had gone on for close to four hours; Martin had counted seventy-six arrests. Then, in the middle of the afternoon, the intake had ceased and the guards had withdrawn behind the gate. Either the beast had literally filled its belly, or someone in authority had decided that they’d made a mistake to play along at all.
Four days later, and still nobody knew what had befallen those seventy-six people. Rumours were rife, but Martin did not believe the worst: after surrendering themselves into custody, they would not have been lined up against a wall and shot. But the emergency decrees had eroded the already shaky protections of the legal system, and there’d be a strong temptation to portray the relatives of the dissidents caught up in the sweep as something far more sinister than anguished parents and siblings. Self-confessed spies and saboteurs would do nicely, and in Evin confessions generally came with bruises, or worse. With officials under stress and arguing among themselves, there’d be a perilous volatility added to the usual brutal machinery.
In the male ablutions tent beside the latrines there was a hefty pile of water bottles, but they were outnumbered by empties waiting to be refilled. Martin poured a little water into a basin, washed his hands thoroughly with soap, wiped some of the grime from his face and neck, then emptied the basin onto the ground outside. He itched to do more – literally, in places – but it was almost time for the noon prayers, which would put a big dent in the supply; it would have been selfish to make himself vastly cleaner than his own beliefs required.
Outside, he looked across the park and spotted Behrouz, sitting on the grass near the boarded-up teahouse, his face in his hands. Martin called out as he approached; Behrouz looked up but didn’t reply.
‘Did you contact your cousin?’ Martin asked him.
‘Yeah.’ Slightly Smart email was still diffusing through the porous police lines and across the troubled city, but Behrouz had insisted that his wife not carry one of the incriminating phones, which in any case were in short supply. ‘He talked to Suri. She’s fine. She’s just worried.’ As he spoke, he picked nervously at a stain on his sleeve.
Martin sat beside him. ‘If you need to get out, get out. I think I can survive a couple of days without you.’
Behrouz regarded him sceptically. Martin spotted Mahnoosh walking briskly through the crowd with a cardboard box full of smuggled essentials. ‘Do you need anything?’ he asked.
‘No.’
‘I’ll be back in a second.’ Martin jogged after her, sliding open his phone’s case as he went.
‘You get through these very quickly,’ Mahnoosh observed as he handed her his dead battery in exchange for a charged one.
‘Maybe,’ he replied, ‘but I’m not wasting them, I promise. I mean, I don’t play games.’
Mahnoosh said, ‘A man after my own heart.’
Martin tried out the recharged battery on his old phone first; there’d been cases of people’s phones getting fried, either by malice or some kind of inadvertent substitution. His old phone started up and gave the usual NO SIGNAL message, so he fitted the battery into his triple-S and waited to see if there was any data for him drifting through the crowd.
He made his way back to Behrouz, who was still looking despondent. ‘I’m serious,’ Martin said. ‘If you want to be with your family, just go. If they can get five shovels in past the cops, someone will be able to smuggle you out.’ In fact, he doubted that the police would be arresting deserters from the protest, but he didn’t want to put it like that.
Behrouz shook his head. ‘Forget it. Everything’s fine.’
The muezzin began calling from the mosque in the exhibition centre nearby; Martin could see the minaret from where they sat. Behrouz said, ‘I’m going to pray. I’ll meet you back here.’
‘Okay.’ Martin watched the crowd gathering on the grass, spreading their prayer mats. The regime had a long history of denouncing opponents who claimed to be good Muslims as ‘hypocrites’ – trying to inflate any political difference into a crime against Islam – but Jabari had rather robbed the word of its traction. In the face of defiance from hundreds of thousands of ordinary, moderately pious Iranians, there was a limit to how insulting they could be about their opponents’ religious bona fides, and even their gentlest fatherly admonitions were no longer being taken very seriously.
Martin’s phone chimed. No personal email had arrived, but he’d signed up to several newsfeeds. The system was being spammed, of course, but he’d only subscribed to digitally-signed bulletins from a whitelist of trusted senders; all the node-clogging disinformation being churned out by VEVAK was slowing down the network, but for most purposes it was invisible to him.
There were reports from across the country on the previous day’s Friday prayers; the phone’s translations into English were full of grammatical errors – and a few surreal touches that probably came from bad guesses between homographs in the source text – but Martin still found them faster to decipher than the original Farsi. The gist of it was that more than a dozen clerics in Tehran and the other large cities had come out publicly in support of constitutional change. Two months before, that would have seen them thrown into prison; Martin wasn’t sure that the more likely alternative these days wasn’t assassination, but in any case there’d been an infectious wave of outspokenness. Once religious scholars were ready to attest that velayat-e-faqih – their role as guardians of society – didn’t necessarily extend into every last corner of civil and political life, then the regime’s position was demoted to the status of just one view among many, all equally compatible with faith and tradition. And once those same scholars were willing to suggest – however politely – that the regime might in fact have abused its power, change became not just a possibility worth contemplating, but a positive duty.
The list of strikes and vigils across the country now ran into the hundreds, and the general public were treating any outbreaks of looting and violence as entirely down to Basiji provocateurs. The police were stretched thin, but cars were not burning in the streets, and without the true anarchy needed to justify the harshest countermeasures, sending in the Revolutionary Guards against unarmed protesters would have risked an all-out civil war.
So the question was, how badly did the incumbents want to cling to power for its own sake? When the alternative was not Marxism, or a surrender to depraved Western hedonism, but a moderate, non-aligned social democracy that remained far more obedient to tradition and religion than, say, Turkey… was that a fate whose avoidance demanded tens of thousands of deaths and a country in flames?
It would have been nice to be able to put that directly to the President and his inner circle, but they just weren’t giving interviews these days. So Martin sat on the grass and wrote it into his Tehran Diary, the five-hundred-words-a-day reward that his editor had given him for his serendipitous encounter with Kourosh Ansari. He was usually averse to such rhetorical flourishes, but in this case there was one saving grace: there was a chance that by the time the question saw print, his readers would already know the answer.
The first meal of the day arrived around dusk. As Martin joined the queue with Behrouz, he saw some people offering morsels to the feral cats that had been attracted by the shantytown’s rubbish.
‘Is that animal welfare, or are they testing it for poison?’ Martin wondered.
Whatever travails the smugglers had faced, the plastic containers of stew they were dispensing were still warm. Martin hadn’t realised how famished he was until he started eating. With a couple of pieces of flatbread to act as scoops, there was no need for cutlery, and the meal was gone in about two minutes.
‘Kheyli khoshmazeh,’ he declared approvingly.
Behrouz said, ‘Don’t get too used to it, or you’ll have to find yourself an Iranian wife.’
Martin was tongue-tied for a moment; it wasn’t Behrouz’s style to be casually sexist. Had he noticed something? Martin tried to avoid protesting too much. ‘You don’t think I can learn to cook like this myself?’
‘Maybe you could,’ Behrouz conceded, ‘but it’s a fulltime job. Someone spent two hours just chopping the herbs for this.’
‘I think I can live with herbs from a packet.’
Behrouz laughed. ‘Then why bother? Why not just give up and eat pizza?’
‘There are limits.’ Iranian pizzas – though inexplicably popular with the local teenagers – were the worst Martin had tasted anywhere.
Later, they walked around the park trying to gauge the mood of the crowd. Everyone looked anxious and weary, but they’d all read the news about the dissident clerics; momentum was still going their way. Martin gathered a few quotes, but he didn’t push it; people didn’t want to be forced to measure and re-measure the situation, to keep spelling out the best and worst possibilities and calling the odds.
They came to a spot where one of the prison’s watchtowers was in sight; Martin could make out two uniformed figures with rifles. A floodlight above them swept around automatically, illuminating the park and the protesters as often as it shone down on whatever grim courtyard was hidden behind the walls. Martin had an image of Omar sitting on a bunk, shadows of bars sliding across his cell in synch with the very same light. If they’d found evidence linking him to Shokouh’s escape, surely they would have made it public and charged him. But then, if they suspected him but had no evidence, they would be trying to extract a confession instead.
‘They hanged my uncle in there,’ Behrouz said. ‘In eighty-eight.’
‘Jesus.’ Martin was floored; this was the first he’d heard of it.
‘I was only a kid, nobody told me much.’ As he spoke, Behrouz kept his gaze fixed on the ground. ‘But I heard my father and grandfather talking about it.’
‘Do you know why he was arrested?’ There’d been thousands of extra-judicial killings in 1988; no trials, just a formulaic interrogation on political and religious matters, with wrong answers leading to death.
‘He belonged to some kind of leftist group. They weren’t killing people, or blowing things up – just publishing pamphlets against the mullahs. Actually, he’d been conscripted into the army, he was in Tehran on leave when they arrested him. No one really knew for sure what had happened for about a year. Then my grandfather heard that he was buried in a mass grave in Khavaran Cemetery. He was twenty-two years old when they killed him.’
Martin said, ‘That’s fucked.’ No wonder the place cast a pall over him. ‘Look, if you want to get out of here-’
Behrouz shook his head. ‘I can do my job. I’m only telling you so you’ll stop asking me that.’
‘Okay.’ Martin got it now. ‘I’ll shut up about it, and we’ll both just do our jobs.’
‘Good.’
As they walked on, Martin felt a surge of anger, but there was nothing to be done with it; the last thing Behrouz needed was to hear him ranting against tyrants.
‘So if I’m hooked on Iranian cuisine,’ he said, ‘where exactly does a middle-aged, atheist foreigner start looking for an Iranian wife?’
Behrouz said, ‘Outside the divorce courts.’
Martin woke from shallow, unquiet sleep to the sound of helicopters approaching. He staggered to his feet, reluctant for a moment to let the blanket he was wrapped in drop from his shoulders. The sound was coming from the direction of the prison, and it was accompanied by spotlight beams sweeping across the park; he counted six before one of them struck his eyes, blinding him to any more detail.
He crouched down and shook Behrouz awake. People were already gathering around the park’s scattered trees; there was no sign of the kind of panic that would have ensued if anyone had actually seen a gun mounted behind one of the spotlights, and a part of Martin still refused to believe that the government would slaughter its own people en masse – even in 1988 they’d gone through an elaborate inquisitorial ritual, not just fired into an unarmed crowd – but what if they strafed the park lightly and killed a dozen protesters out of the thousands? Were they prepared to sell that, politically, as a necessary trade-off for the sake of restoring order? Were they ready to call the bluff of the majority of Iranians who’d stayed out of the fray so far, and say: choose us – with a few unavoidable casualties – or back the traitors, and blame only yourselves when the streets are running with blood?
Martin joined the huddle of bodies in the shadow of the nearest tree. Under the circumstances, the whole idea of shelter was marginal, but anything was better than standing beneath a spotlight on open ground. He glanced at Behrouz, who was ashen; Martin knew better now than to offer any solicitous remarks, but he couldn’t help feeling a twinge of guilt at the disparity between them. Though he was far from nonchalant about the situation himself, he was certain that if he’d had a young family it would have been ten times harder to be here.
As the minutes passed, it became clear that this operation was not a simple aerial assault on the protesters. The spotlights remained trained on the park, but the helicopters were keeping their distance and showing no signs of dispensing anything unpleasant: no bullets, no tear-gas, not even a blast of pressurised water.
The dazzle of the beams made it hard to keep watching the airspace over the prison, but Martin noticed a subtle shift in the illumination on the ground; the lights bathing the immediate area hadn’t changed, but an adjacent region of the park had become darker. It took him a few seconds to make sense of that.
He turned to Behrouz. ‘I think one of them just landed inside the prison.’
‘Yeah.’
‘Meaning what?’
There was some angry shouting, and Martin saw people breaking cover and running across the grass to confer. Behrouz said, ‘I don’t know what it means, but they think the prison’s being evacuated.’
‘Okay.’ Martin considered this hypothesis. Anything was better than a hail of bullets, and maybe two could play the game of frustrating your enemy without bloodshed. There were plenty of inaccessible prisons out in the countryside – and even if they were full, it would have taken the government only a few days to assemble desert camps of huts ringed with razor-wire. If they plucked everyone out of Evin and deposited them in unknown or hard-to-reach locations, the siege would be deflated into an irrelevant farce.
Behrouz nudged him. ‘Look.’ Four men had picked up one of the concrete benches that were scattered throughout the park and were carrying it over their heads like an upside-down canoe. Martin supposed the concrete might offer a degree of protection from descending gunfire… but any safety advantages would be negated by the fact that the men were marching straight towards the prison itself.
When they passed out of sight behind a tree, Behrouz rose to his feet. ‘Come on.’
Martin’s skin turned to ice. ‘Are you crazy?’
‘We don’t have to get too close, but we should keep them in sight.’
For one uncharitable moment Martin wondered if Behrouz was just trying to outdo him in the bravado stakes – as if the mere suggestion that he might have wanted to rejoin his family had wounded his pride. But that was unfair; what he was proposing was reasonable. Martin stood and followed him, zigzagging across the grass from tree to tree, wondering what an observer from above would make of them scuttling along in the wake of the concrete canoeists.
They stopped at the corner of the park; they had a tree to themselves and a clear view of the road that ran past the park and alongside the prison’s perimeter wall. The men with the bench were already in front of the prison, twenty or so metres away. The wall itself blocked the line of fire from the watchtowers, but one of the helicopters was hovering directly above the prison gates. Martin couldn’t imagine what the men’s purpose was – unless they planned to use the bench as a battering ram, and he couldn’t see that ending well.
Before the men reached the gates they stopped and rid themselves of the bench, depositing it on the ground in an upturned V. Then they turned and walked back towards the park.
‘I don’t get it,’ Martin confessed. ‘Do they think the prisoners are going to be moved by truck?’
Behrouz said, ‘The general population’s about fifteen thousand, but even the thousand or so politicals would take an awful lot of helicopter trips. So maybe the helicopters are for the top brass, and the grunts and the prisoners will go by truck.’
‘Okay, but how is a park bench going to slow them down?’
Behrouz spread his hands; he had no idea.
Now that he was out of the direct glare of the spotlights, Martin could see the placement of the helicopters more clearly. Along with the one hovering above the gate, there were four lined up in a queue that stretched eastwards from the far side of the prison. As he watched, a sixth helicopter rose into sight and flew north, up along the slope of the mountains. Then the first in the remaining queue of four approached and descended inside the prison walls. It was like a taxi rank.
Another two groups of men came down the road, carrying two more benches from the park. Martin wasn’t sure how many benches there were in total, but perhaps a large enough pile of them would constitute more than a trivial nuisance that could be moved aside in seconds. As they approached the prison gate there was a burst of automatic gunfire from the helicopter standing sentry; Martin flinched and the men stopped walking, but nobody appeared to have been hit.
He stared at the surreal tableau: the grey wall, the hovering helicopter, the eight men standing in a bright pool of light, holding up the benches like office workers warding off rain with newspaper umbrellas. Belatedly he lifted his phone and began recording.
The group at the front started walking again. There was another burst of gunfire, and one man collapsed. His comrades heaved the bench onto the ground, then two of them lifted the fallen man, who was able to put his arms across their shoulders for support, and they all began walking back towards the park. The second group took a few steps forward, then they too dropped their bench and retreated.
As the injured man approached the edge of the park, a man and a woman ran forward to examine him. There was a dark patch of blood on his right thigh, soaking through his trousers, but he was still conscious; one of the men pulled off his T-shirt and the woman tied it as a tourniquet around the injured leg. Martin knew there were medical students among the protesters, though he hadn’t seen anything more than the most primitive first-aid supplies. He was torn between following the retreating group back into the park and retaining his present vantage point to see what the authorities’ next step would be. He suspected that at any moment a couple of guards would emerge to move the pieces of the aborted blockade aside – and unless all the rules of the game had changed and the protesters were preparing to physically attack the guards, that would be the end of it.
A new sound intruded on the relentless drone of the helicopters. Martin turned to see a white Paykan tearing down the road beside the park, both front doors propped wide open. The car shot past him, heading for the prison; he raised his phone and framed it just as the driver – wearing a motorcycle helmet, a leather jacket and thick swathes of cloth wrapped around his knees and elbows – jumped from the car and rolled across the ground. The gunner in the helicopter opened fire, but Martin couldn’t tell whether he was aiming for the car or the separated driver. In any case, the car kept moving straight ahead, struck one of the upside-down benches with its right wheel, veered sideways, and crashed into the prison gates.
Martin waited, tensed, half-expecting a fireball, but there was nothing; the car hadn’t been packed with explosives, and any damage it had done had been from momentum alone. Bollards protected the gates from being rammed head-on, but the impromptu ramp had allowed a long run-up followed by a sudden sharp swerve. The driver had taken cover in the bushes on the side of the road opposite the prison; he’d probably not got off unscathed, but unless he’d caught a bullet, he was probably not fatally injured either. Before the sound of the impact had stopped ringing in Martin’s ears, he heard a second car approaching. The helicopter left its post and flew rapidly towards the park; he grabbed Behrouz and pushed him flat against the ground, face-down in a mulch of decaying leaves, then stretched his arm out in what he hoped was the right direction and tilted his phone up.
He heard gunfire, then the roar of the car’s engine shifting pitch abruptly as it passed. The second crash was far louder than the first. Martin was shaking; the helicopter was hovering very close to their tree – he could feel the downdraft, and a gentle rain of dislodged leaves. After a few seconds he drew his right arm in towards his body and thumbed the controls on the phone to play back the footage it had captured. He’d caught the second car slamming into the first and travelling four or five metres down the road as the two of them gouged an opening in the prison gates.
Martin still had his left arm across Behrouz’s shoulder and he felt him move as if preparing to stand.
‘Don’t,’ he insisted, ‘it’s right on top of us.’
‘So what’s the plan?’ Behrouz asked.
Having failed to defend the prison from damage, the gunner was probably suffering from a strong urge to compensate by firing at anything that moved. It was possible that the two of them were already visible through gaps in the branches above, but until someone screamed through a loud-hailer that they should get to their feet with their hands in the air, playing possum seemed by far the best strategy.
‘We wait for it to move,’ Martin said.
‘Wait how long?’
‘I don’t know. It can’t stay there forever.’ Martin pictured the helicopter hovering above the tree, the gunner sitting in the open bay. He’d be wearing night-vision goggles, but with any luck he’d be scanning the park and the road for approaching threats, not looking straight down.
A branch above them creaked perilously. Martin wondered if the downdraft could dislodge something heavier than leaves; apparently Behrouz had the same idea. He pushed Martin’s restraining arm aside and rolled onto his back to see what was happening. When he failed to volunteer a report, Martin took a look for himself.
A man was standing in the tree, slowly edging his way out along one of the branches. He was steadying himself with one hand, carrying something in the other. Martin couldn’t actually see any part of the helicopter chassis through the branches and foliage, but the downdraft and the spill from the spotlight gave him a good idea of its location: it was only a few metres from the top of the tree, and their arboreal companion was moving closer to it.
Behrouz said, ‘If the chopper pilot sees him, which way will it move?’
‘Back towards the prison, so the gunner can get a better aim at him.’
‘But if we run in the opposite direction, into the park, we’re going to be right in the line of fire, aren’t we?’
‘Yes,’ Martin agreed. ‘Good point.’
‘So we should run… sideways?’
‘I think so.’
Behrouz shifted into a squatting position, ready to move, and Martin did the same. He was still mesmerised by the man in the tree. He could now see that the object in his hand was one of the shovels they’d brought in to dig the latrines. Maybe he’d been hiding up there since nightfall, waiting to swing it into the face of the next Basiji saboteur who crept in to mess with the waste disposal arrangements.
The man brought one shoulder back, stood poised for a second or two, then flung the shovel like a javelin; Martin couldn’t see his target, but there was a thwack followed by a deranged mechanical clatter. Behrouz ran one way, Martin the other, but the javelin thrower chose this moment to jump from the tree, landing on top of Martin and knocking him flat.
‘Fuck!’ He disentangled himself and looked up to see the helicopter spinning wildly, moving backwards away from the park as it spiralled towards the ground. The shovel must have wedged between the tail rotor and its support, long enough to do real damage before the handle snapped and it fell away.
Martin clambered to his feet; he’d hurt his back and his right knee was giving him alarming signals, but he could just about walk. He couldn’t see where the javelin thrower had gone, but a dozen men were running across the park, carrying tree branches and other improvised clubs. Martin watched anxiously as they neared the wounded helicopter; the pilot was struggling to bring it down safely, but it was rolling and pitching erratically as it descended.
It hit the ground with a thud about twenty metres away. The spotlight went out immediately, but as the men rushed in the main rotor was still turning. Martin waited for gunshots, but all he could hear over the engine was shouting. He looked around for his phone and finally located it a few metres away on the grass. He picked it up to start recording the scene, and it emitted a chime; the IR transceiver had come within sight of someone carrying fresh news.
Martin ignored the bulletin and kept filming, though he could make out almost nothing of what was happening in the shadows around the helicopter. The engine finally cut off, making it easier to hear the shouting, but apart from a general tone of belligerence this left him none the wiser. Then three uniformed men emerged from the mêlée, walking with their hands clasped behind their heads in front of a protester carrying an automatic rifle. Their captors made them kneel on the grass, then bound their hands with what Martin guessed were strips of webbing cut from harnesses inside the helicopter.
Behrouz approached. ‘Are you okay?’
‘Yeah. You?’
Behrouz nodded. Martin handed him his phone. ‘Can you read this? I don’t think I’m up to Slightly Smart translations right now.’
Behrouz checked the newsfeed and said, ‘The Ministry of the Interior has been occupied. Seven officials have been taken under citizens’ arrest.’ He held up the phone to show Martin a group portrait of sullen bureaucrats kneeling with bound hands, almost echoing the scene on the grass.
Martin looked over towards the prison. The taxi rank was empty now, with the last of the helicopters flying north across the mountains. He said, ‘They’ve evacuated the management, that’s all.’ Maybe they’d never even planned to move the inmates; rather, the tide was turning so rapidly now that the prison officials and intelligence officers with the most to fear from the crowd’s retribution had opted for self-preservation and a pre-emptive retreat.
They approached the group of men clustered around the helicopter. Martin spotted Kambiz, the student who’d tipped him off to the first protest in Ferdowsi Square; his jacket was torn and he was grinning nervously, managing to look both jubilant and anxious at the same time.
‘What now?’ Martin asked him.
Kambiz gestured at the helicopter. ‘They’re trying to raise someone inside the prison on the radio. Now that VEVAK has run away, maybe we can negotiate with the remaining guards. We’re not here to set thieves and murderers free. But anyone who hasn’t even been before a court should not be in this place.’
Martin said, ‘You’ve got one gun and three prisoners. What is there to negotiate with?’
Kambiz shook his head. ‘It’s not about weapons. I wasn’t even born when the Shah was toppled, but everybody understands that when something rotten starts to fall, you don’t want to be standing where it will bury you.’
Martin glanced up at the watchtower; the sentries there had a clear line of sight, but they hadn’t fired on the men who’d captured the helicopter crew. Nobody wanted to be charged with treason by the present regime – but neither did they want to be charged with murder by their successors.
Half an hour later, the protesters sent a delegation of five people into the prison to negotiate face-to-face. No doubt there were things to be said that couldn’t be spoken over an open radio channel. Martin passed the tense hours that followed interviewing some of the people who’d been involved in the bench/car manoeuvre; the injured man had already been evacuated, but the other participants turned out to be mechanical engineering students who’d rehearsed something similar in the countryside a week before – albeit not with live ammunition and a helicopter. ‘We wanted to fit remote controls to the cars,’ one of them told Martin, ‘but we couldn’t get the parts without attracting suspicion.’ They’d bought half-a-dozen cheap Paykans from wrecking yards and left them in side-streets around the park before the siege had begun.
Just before dawn, the delegation returned. A deal had been struck in which the guards would continue to defend the cell blocks under the control of the prison authority – which held mainly convicted criminals – but they would not interfere with anything that took place in Evin 209 and 240, the political wings which came under VEVAK’s control.
Behrouz translated the news, but when he’d finished he told Martin bluntly, ‘If you report that deal, you can have my resignation. ’ If the regime survived, Martin doubted that his own silence would be enough to save anyone; someone on the inside would surely betray the prison guards to their brave superiors who’d flown off over the mountains. Then again, putting all the details down in newsprint would certainly diminish any prospect of a face-saving decision to let the guards’ inaction go unpunished.
He said, ‘I won’t mention it.’ He could find a circumspect way of phrasing things without actually lying. The protesters were still going to storm the prison, and the guards would still tactically withdraw, to concentrate on keeping the most dangerous prisoners confined. Nobody munching cornflakes in Sydney needed to know that certain choices had been made to allow all this to happen without bloodshed.
The sky was pale blue, but the sun was still hidden behind the apartment blocks of north Tehran as the protesters surged through the broken gates of Evin Prison. Martin let more than a hundred people enter before he even tried to elbow his way into the stream. If there was unexpected resistance ahead, he wanted to be close enough to the vanguard to witness it, but he didn’t feel obliged to put himself at any unnecessary risk. This wasn’t his revolution.
Still, as he and Behrouz passed through the gates and walked with the hushed throng between the grey cell blocks, Martin felt the history of the place weighing down on him. This was where the Shah’s henchmen had imprisoned and tortured his enemies. This was where thousands of opponents of Khomeini had been hanged in mass purges. This was where labour activists, journalists, homosexuals, scholars, environmentalists and women’s rights campaigners had been thrown into solitary confinement, beaten and raped. This was where Baha’i ended up, for the crime of believing in one prophet too many, or proselytising Christians for the crime of believing in one prophet too few. This was where student leaders, after the protests of 1999, had had their faces pushed into drains full of faeces until their bursting lungs had commanded them to inhale, and where ten years later those who’d marched against electoral fraud had been beaten into surreal confessions that the true source of their treasonous passions had been the meddling of foreign puppet-masters and excessive exposure to the BBC. But he couldn’t hold Evin’s obscenities at arm’s length as the aberrations of an alien culture. He had seen the American prison at Bagram, where innocent men had been battered to death; he had seen the detention camps in the Australian desert where refugees had lost their minds and slashed their bodies with razors. The toxic mixture of power and impunity was a universal human disease.
Martin turned to Behrouz, hoping they could exchange a few words that would puncture the solemnity, but the expression on his colleague’s face was so stricken that he looked away again, not wanting to embarrass him.
The watchtowers were deserted now; if anyone was training rifles on the crowd they were well hidden. Martin had read accounts of the prison’s layout by former inmates, but he hadn’t committed the architecture to memory; he could only assume that someone who knew the place inside out was leading them to one of the political wings.
Section 240 was a squat four-storey building with slits for windows. Apparently nobody had left a key under the mat, but Martin was too far from the doors to see exactly what was being done with crowbars, bolt-cutters and battery-powered tools in order to gain entrance.
When the main doors were opened the crowd surged forward, but not very far; inside the building there were more obstructions to be dealt with.
Behrouz said, ‘If every cell is this much work, it’s going to be a long day.’
Martin had read that there were about eight hundred. ‘Good practice for when you queue for your Metallica tickets.’
When they finally managed to squeeze into the building they found themselves in a kind of foyer between the main doors and a deserted checkpoint with a barred metal gate. There was a glowering portrait of Khomeini on the wall beside a scroll covered in dense writing; Martin sounded out and translated a few words, until Behrouz put him out of his misery. ‘It’s a kind of mission statement, committing everyone who works here to high ethical standards.’ His voice was thick with contempt. ‘It quotes some Quranic verses, but don’t ask me to repeat them, because in the context I’d consider that desecration.’
There was a sound of splintering wood. ‘Keleedha!’ someone shouted excitedly; Martin didn’t need that translated for him. People started passing jangling bunches of keys back through the crowd. A man in front of Martin offered him a bunch; Martin shook his head apologetically. ‘Ruznaame negaaram. Momken nist.’
Behrouz held out his hand and took them.
The protesters spread out, looking for the cells their keys would open. As Martin followed Behrouz to the crowded stairwell, he saw a woman ahead of them turn at the landing and he glimpsed Mahnoosh’s face in profile. He felt a sudden ache of panic in his chest; he wanted to call out to her, to plead with her to be careful, but he was afraid that might sound presumptuous.
On the third floor there were two more metal gates that needed power-tools to break through; it was another twenty minutes before they were standing before the cells themselves. Martin raised his phone and snapped the scene: a row of identical doors stretching away down the corridor ahead of them, with no windows, just thin slits that appeared to be bolted shut. The place was shabbily clean, with a strong smell of disinfectant not quite masking an undercurrent of excrement. Even now, Martin could hear only faint, muffled shouting from a few inmates; the cells were almost soundproof.
The first key was matched, the first door swung open. A middle-aged man limped out into the corridor; he seemed dazed, unsure of what was happening. He was dressed in loose white clothes, bare-foot; above his thick beard his face was covered in welts and bruises. He spoke with his liberators in a soft voice, with an air of puzzlement. Maybe he’d heard nothing of Jabari, of the strikes and marches. Perhaps he’d spoken to no one but his captors for years.
Martin held up his phone and started filming.
Behrouz said, ‘I’m going this way.’ He shook his keys and gestured at a second line of cells that started further to their right.
‘Okay.’ Martin didn’t follow him; he wanted to record what was happening, but he didn’t want to thrust his camera into the faces of these fragile people. Another door opened in the corridor ahead of him; a tall, skinny youth, shirtless, with long red weals on his back, stepped forward nervously. As he talked with the protesters he was as quiet as the first man, but much more anxious, blinking and flinching away from anyone who came too close. Then he sat down on the floor outside the cell and cradled his head in his arms.
When the third cell opened there were shouts of jubilation; Mahnoosh was among the liberators here, cheering the loudest. After a moment Martin recognised the freed prisoner as a young man who’d been arrested on the first day of the siege; his face was bruised and one eye was swollen shut, but he was still wearing torn street clothes rather than prison garb. Some of his friends lifted him up on their shoulders and carried him towards the stairs.
As Martin turned to keep them in view, he heard a gunshot, very close. One of the protesters staggered, bleeding from the shoulder. Martin swung around, his ears ringing in the silence. A man with a neatly trimmed beard, wearing a pale green shirt decorated with the prison authority insignia, was standing a few metres away, in front of an open utilities closet.
The guard turned to Martin, shouting angrily, gesturing with his pistol. Martin raised his hands in surrender, but the guard kept screaming insults or instructions. Martin had no idea what he was saying, and the only response he could string together was an apology for his incomprehension: ‘Ma’zerat mikham, agha. Farsi balad nistam.’
The guard aimed his gun directly at Martin’s head.
Mahnoosh called out urgently, ‘Put down the phone! He wants you to put down the phone!’
Martin tried to drop it, but his fingers wouldn’t unclench. He wished he’d taken the keys when he’d been offered them.
The guard grunted and sagged to the ground. Someone had hurled a fire-extinguisher and hit him in the back. People piled on top of him, grabbing the gun and restraining him. Martin felt lightheaded; he sat on the floor and watched, detached from everything. The guard was taken to a newly vacated cell; the wounded protester was given a makeshift bandage and helped to the stairs. There was a hospital in the prison complex, Martin recalled. He wondered if they’d be willing to treat the man.
‘Hey! Martin jan!’
Martin looked up to see Omar approaching, with Behrouz following behind him. His face was gaunt and he was walking with a limp, but he was beaming. Martin rose to his feet and stepped forward to embrace him, fighting back tears of relief.
‘What happened? It looks like you lost twenty kilos.’
‘I did a hunger strike,’ Omar replied. ‘Looks like it worked. Twenty kilos and the walls come down; ten more and they would have made me President.’
Omar wanted to phone Rana. The protesters had managed to force open two offices with working landlines, but there were already long queues for those, so they decided to try the floor below. As the three of them were walking down the stairs, Martin’s phone emitted a chime he’d never heard before. He checked the display, and after a moment he realised that it was now showing an icon for the radio mesh network that he’d seen used at the Majlis protest. Someone must have found the local jammer and disabled it.
He showed Omar, who tried a few numbers, but the network was still jammed across most of the city. On the second floor one of the landlines was free; while Omar was making his call, Martin’s phone managed another novel sound. Someone on the network was offering a streaming video feed.
He tapped the icon, and it expanded into a shaky camera shot of a TV screen tuned to an IRIB news broadcast. Martin gave the phone to Behrouz.
Other people around them were already cheering ecstatically. Behrouz scowled, struggling to hear more. Martin waited patiently; there was a loop of text running at the bottom of the screen, it would all be spelled out eventually.
Behrouz said, ‘The moderate clerics have won some kind of deal. There’s going to be a referendum on the Guardian Council veto powers within three months, followed by new elections for the President and the Majlis before the end of the year.’
That was it, that was the saving move. If the deal held, there would be no civil war, but no turning back to the status quo either.
Omar was sitting on the floor, the office phone in his hand, weeping with joy. Behind him was a huge grey filing cabinet that someone had tipped on its side, spilling VEVAK’s meticulous accounts of their interrogations all over the floor. Maybe there hadn’t been enough time to put everything through the shredders. Or maybe the fuckers had thought they’d be coming back.
Martin turned to Behrouz and held out his hand. ‘Mubaarak.’ Behrouz shook it, but even as his expression of disbelief slowly melted into a kind of stunned acceptance, he wasn’t ready to claim victory.
‘Nothing’s certain yet,’ he insisted.
‘No,’ Martin conceded.
Behrouz smiled. ‘But it starts today. It might take us another ten years to be free – but it starts today.’