Zendegi (13 page)
Authors: Greg Egan
After almost an hour there was a flurry of activity in the adjoining room; Martin hadn’t heard the front door open, but apparently a small entourage had arrived, maybe through another entrance. Mehdi picked up the remote and turned down the volume on the TV. Martin managed to rise to his feet before Kourosh Ansari entered the room, alone.
Kourosh greeted Martin in English and Behrouz and Mehdi in Farsi. Martin said, ‘Please accept my condolences on your brother’s death.’
‘Thank you.’ Kourosh had deep hollows under his eyes, and a few days’ growth of beard set against a much longer moustache. ‘I heard him speak on a few occasions,’ Martin added. ‘He was impressive.’
Kourosh murmured agreement.
There was an awkward pause; Martin wasn’t sure whether it would be rude to get down to business immediately. He had never managed to get an interview with Dariush, and though that had rankled slightly, he’d understood why; the elder Ansari really hadn’t had any reason to court a foreign audience. All Martin knew about Kourosh was that he, too, had studied chemical engineering. He looked to be in his late thirties.
Mehdi invited everyone to sit, then went to fetch more tea. ‘Do you work in Abadan?’ Martin asked.
‘No, in Esfahan,’ Kourosh replied, ‘but my job there is finished. I will work for Hezb-e-Haalaa now.’
‘In what role?’
‘I have been chosen as provisional leader by the party’s executive council. At present, we face some logistical problems with holding an election for the position.’
‘I can appreciate that.’ It was a minor, and possibly short-lived miracle that mere membership of Hezb-e-Haalaa was not yet illegal. ‘So where do you see things going from here? The strike won’t be tolerated indefinitely.’
‘Of course not.’ Kourosh hesitated. ‘But I’m still hopeful that the government will give some ground. They want to look reasonable; they want to be seen to be reacting to the people’s anger. That’s why they had Jabari resign.’
‘But how much more ground can they give? What are you hoping for?’
‘A referendum within a year, to end the Guardian Council veto in time for the next presidential election.’
Martin said, ‘Is that realistic?’
Kourosh ran a hand over his eyes. ‘I don’t know. But I think it’s the smallest thing that the people would treat as anything but an insult. How much Iranian history do you know?’
‘A little.’ Martin fervently hoped that he wasn’t about to be tested on the names of the Safavid kings.
‘Abadan was once controlled by the British, by the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company. They refused to share their profits fairly - they wouldn’t even give Iran the same deal as the Saudis received - but it was only a strike by the workers that gave the Majlis the courage it needed to nationalise the industry.’
‘A move that ultimately cost Mossadegh his job.’
‘Of course,’ Kourosh agreed. ‘Mr Churchill persuaded Mr Eisenhower that our Prime Minister was a dangerous socialist, and the CIA engineered their very first coup. But if they’d left him in place to rein in the Shah, we would not have had the mullahs taking power twenty-six years later.’
‘Perhaps,’ Martin replied. Mossadegh himself had been a far-from-perfect democrat, and the clerics of the time had had their own problems with him.
‘Now I’m afraid we’re facing the risk of more American meddling, ’ Kourosh said.
‘Really? Have they approached Hezb-e-Haalaa?’
Kourosh scowled. ‘Yes, but that’s old news; my brother told them to keep their distance a long time ago. But now they’re trying to start a new game. My friends in Iraq tell me there are plans to unleash the MEK and send them across the border.’
The MEK - the Mujahedin-e-Khalq, the People’s Army of Iran - was a nationalist group formed in opposition to the Shah. Its members had been pushed aside by Islamists in the 1979 revolution and ended up in exile in Iraq. Accepting the hospitality of Saddam Hussein while he’d engaged in a long and bloody war against their homeland had not been the best PR move in history. Though they claimed to answer to a kind of parliament-in-exile, they now had very little support within Iran, and since the 2003 invasion most of them lived in Iraq, in a strange twilight state, somewhere between refugees and prisoners-of-war.
‘You think Washington would actually do that? Re-arm them and let them loose, just to make trouble?’ The Bush administration had funded several armed Iranian opposition groups - including the MEK, and a Baluchi terrorist group called Jondollah - in the hope of eliciting a bloody crackdown from the regime that would serve as the pretext for an all-out war, but Martin thought those programs had been flushed down the chute with the change of administration. ‘You must have heard Obama acknowledge the CIA’s role in the Mossadegh coup, in that speech in Cairo not long after he came to power? Reaching out to the Islamic world and announcing an end to American interventionism?’
Kourosh said, ‘I’m in no position to know if this plan has the President’s blessing, or if some other arm of government has taken the initiative without his knowledge. But I can tell you exactly what would happen if the MEK came across the border: first, the Iranian Army would wipe them out with very little trouble, and second, the Iranian people would unite under the present regime and the reformist movement would be back in the wilderness for another twenty years at least. Not Hezb-e-Haalaa, nor anybody else, would try to exploit the situation for their own benefit. We are not traitors, and we are not idiots.’
‘Isn’t the MEK still classified as a terrorist organisation by the Americans?’
‘Yes,’ Kourosh replied. ‘So of course they would do this quietly. That’s why I prefer not to be so quiet.’
Martin finally understood why he’d been plucked out of the crowd so eagerly; Kourosh wasn’t interested in raising his celebrity profile; what he needed was a story that would embarrass the Americans into thinking twice - or dragging their rogue elements back into line, if none of this was actually coming from the top. Brother of Slain Reformist Condemns US Backing for Terrorists would get picked up immediately from his own paper’s website and splashed all over the American broadsheets.
He said, ‘I can write part of this story, but I’ll need to get messages to my colleagues in Washington and Baghdad to follow up on your claims.’
‘How long are you staying in Abadan?’
Martin glanced at Mehdi, who said, ‘You are my guest here tonight.’
‘Thank you.’
Kourosh said, ‘When you’ve written whatever you need to send, pass it to Karim. We can get your email on a boat to Kuwait within a couple of hours.’
‘Okay.’ Email on a boat no longer sounded strange; at this point, Martin would not have been fazed by pigeons carrying flash drives.
Behrouz glanced at the TV, and Martin followed his gaze; the Supreme Leader was making an address to the nation. Mehdi turned up the volume and the four of them sat and watched the grandfatherly man with his black turban, white beard and round glasses.
Behrouz didn’t bother translating; it had been a long day and Martin suspected there was nothing in the speech they hadn’t all heard before. He managed to pick up the usual admonitions: do not take part in strikes or demonstrations, work hard to show your love for God and the nation, don’t be fooled by the lies of the traitors and foreign enemies.
Just as Martin was tuning out, something in the speech caused Kourosh to stiffen with revulsion, then Martin heard jeers erupting from neighbouring houses all down the street. He turned to Behrouz.
‘He just thanked his beloved children, the Basijis, for showing restraint and keeping order across the country,’ Behrouz explained. Dariush Ansari had been shot in a motorcycle drive-by; if the killer had not actually been a Basiji, he’d been doing his best to imitate one. The police were investigating the murder, but so far nobody had been charged.
Kourosh left and Martin sat writing up the interview on his phone; the tiny virtual keyboard on the touch-screen drove him crazy, but it was still faster than using voice recognition then correcting all the errors. It was almost one o’clock when he finished; he realised he didn’t have PGP encryption keys for anyone but his editor, but she’d pass the story on to his colleagues almost as quickly as if he’d CC’d it to them himself.
He found Karim in the next room; the data jumped between their phones, then the young man went out into the night. Mehdi showed Martin to the guest room; as he lay down on a mat a couple of metres from where Behrouz was already sleeping he suddenly realised that he’d left his stupid woollen hat on all this time, even through the interview.
The next thing he knew, Behrouz was shaking him awake. Martin squinted at his watch, his eyes narrowed against the glare of the ceiling light. ‘If that’s not four-thirty in the afternoon, I’m going to have to kill you.’ He had a pounding headache and a lump of undigested food in his gut; as he sat up he discovered all the places he was aching from being confined in the freezer-truck the day before.
Behrouz handed Martin his phone, which was showing an image of a very large crowd at the entrance to a building. The picture had been taken at night, and Martin didn’t recognise the location. ‘What’s happening?’
‘That’s the Ministry of the Interior,’ Behrouz replied, ‘just before midnight.’
‘Did they trash it?’
‘I don’t know; at the time this was sent it was surrounded, but not actually occupied. Three people had been shot, but the crowd still hadn’t dispersed.’
‘News travels fast.’ This wasn’t random hitchhiking; Hezb-e-Haalaa must have set up some kind of data relay, stretching between the cities. ‘Thanks for waking me.’
‘I’ve organised a ride back.’
‘Can we get coffee on the way?’ Martin begged.
Behrouz looked dubious. ‘I said we’d be there by five.’
As they hurried through the dark streets, it struck Martin that the only thing preventing Behrouz from doing both of their jobs was the fact that, as an Iranian citizen, he’d face much harsher penalties for writing a story that crossed the line. Behrouz’s written English wasn’t perfect, but a subeditor could easily deal with the occasional minor blemish. And as for the supposedly greater journalistic impartiality of a foreigner, Martin had to admit that ever since he’d swapped clothes with Shokouh in the hospital his own claim on that virtue had been tenuous.
And Omar? What had Shokouh’s rescue cost him?
Martin finally realised that they were heading back to the place where they’d been dropped off the night before. When they arrived, the same freezer-truck was parked there, waiting for them.
He turned to Behrouz. ‘Have you got any decent music on your phone?’
‘Define decent.’
‘Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan?’ Martin suggested hopefully. They’d never talked about music before.
Behrouz grimaced. ‘Do I look like a Sufi?’
‘Do I? I can still appreciate qawwali.’
‘The Sufi-est thing I’ve got is Metallica,’ Behrouz replied pityingly. ‘The rest is hardcore.’
‘So after twenty-five hundred years of Persian culture—’
‘Yeah, yeah. I already had that lecture from my grandmother.’
Martin slipped the driver a hundred US dollars and they followed him into the back of the truck. He tried to get ‘Mast Qalandar’ running through his brain, but by the time he’d been sealed in beside the compressor, ‘Enter Sandman’ was already rising up from the noise.
8
Nasim had stayed late in the lab, running simulations for the finch paper she was co-writing with Redland, so it was almost ten o’clock when she arrived home. Her mother was in the living room, watching the BBC World News channel.
Nasim kissed her on the cheek. ‘Anything I should know about?’
‘Did you eat?’ her mother replied.
‘Not really.’
‘I made khoresht sabzi.’
‘Oh, yum.’ Nasim could smell the delicate fragrance of the herbs; she went into the kitchen and opened the pot. ‘Khoresht sabzi?’ she wailed. ‘When did chicken become a vegetable?’
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