Zendegi (8 page)
Authors: Greg Egan
Still, the brain beckoned. Trying to turn a blurred jigsaw puzzle of snapshots from a thousand dead finches into something that could mimic their song was a very strange job, but she had to keep hoping that it would be good for something eventually.
5
Martin left his office at ten o’clock in order to cover the protest scheduled for noon outside the Majlis, but by the time he and Behrouz arrived at Baharestan Square the crowd already filled the street and they could get no closer than the Mosque of Sepahsalar, a hundred metres south of the centre of the gathering. Martin’s permit to travel to Shiraz had, unsurprisingly, come too late for him to cover the big march there the week before, but it looked as if the Tehranis were determined to outdo their cousins and reclaim the record for the biggest demonstration since the fall of the Shah. Police lined the street, and though they were heavily outnumbered and were not intervening so far, every one of the protesters would be aware of the bashings and shootings by militia in this very location, just three years before. Simply being here took a great deal of courage.
The Mosque of Sepahsalar also functioned as a madrassa, and Martin took the opportunity to buttonhole a few of the young men who were squeezing their way through the crowd to reach its gates. Most of these pious Islamic students turned out to be noncommittal, rather than angrily opposed to the protests. ‘The people have many legitimate grievances,’ one ventured. ‘I won’t march with them, but they deserve to be heard.’ The uprising had become far too broad to be dismissed as a conspiracy of traitors and stooges; apart from a solid core of die-hard loyalists who refused to accept any criticism of the regime, many conservative Iranians had started to take a highly jaundiced view of the status quo. Once your children had been jobless for a decade, the streets were flooded with heroin and the guardians of morality had proven themselves to be hypocrites, what was left to fear from reformists who preached transparency and offered new economic ideas?
Certainly the demographics were changing: this crowd was dotted with grey-haired men in suit coats, and there were quite a few middle-aged women. Most of the latter declined to be interviewed, but Martin managed to get a quote from one woman who looked to be in her fifties. ‘I marched against the Shah,’ Behrouz translated, ‘because he shot his own people and imprisoned his opponents. Why wouldn’t I march against thugs in clerical robes who think they can settle disputes the same way?’
Given that she was willing to speak so plainly, Martin decided to risk asking her opinion of Jabari.
She smiled. ‘Really, I don’t care about that stupid man. It gives us all some encouragement to see a tyrant with his trousers around his ankles, but having seen it once we don’t need to stop and stare.’
Martin had been trying to wend his way through the crowd towards the Majlis as he fished for vox pops, but a steady stream of people were squeezing in from other directions, and he still couldn’t catch a glimpse of the parliament’s distinctive pyramid-shaped chamber. Whether or not the symbolism was intentional, the architectural heart of Iranian democracy was dwarfed and obscured by the tall, rectangular towers full of government offices that rose up beside it, so you could only see the thing itself if you were standing directly in front of it.
Still, he’d come within sight of the core of the protest, where placards and banners were thicker on the ground. The original slogan - New Election Now! - had been replaced by a single word: Referendum! That might have sounded tame to outsiders, or just plain cryptic, but no Iranian would be in any doubt as to what it meant. The 1979 referendum had approved the present constitution; to call for a new referendum was to call for a change in the whole system of government.
Martin’s phone emitted a forlorn beep. He took it from his pocket, expecting to find that the battery was flat, but the message on the screen read NO SIGNAL.
He held it up to Behrouz. ‘What about yours?’
Behrouz checked. ‘Same thing. It looks like they’ve shut down the phones.’
Martin felt a chill in the pit of his stomach. Blocking internet access had made it harder for the protesters to organise, but text messages and phone trees were better than nothing. Now the movement had lost all communications, just when it needed to be able to respond to events as rapidly as possible.
There was a squawk of feedback from a public address system, then a voice reached them, so distorted by the dodgy amplifier and overlaid with echoes from the surrounding buildings that Martin couldn’t even make out his usual one word in three. Behrouz did his best to give a running translation, staying close to Martin and keeping his voice low to avoid annoying the people beside them, who were straining to hear the original.
The protest organiser welcomed the crowd and commended them for their courage, bringing an answering roar of approval: ‘Balé!’
‘And because we are brave, we will be peaceful!’
‘Balé!’
‘And because we are peaceful, the people will listen!’
‘Balé!’
‘And because they listen, they will join us!’
‘Balé!’ The last cheer was deafening, and Martin felt an intoxicating wave of optimism sweep through the crowd. A rush and a push and the land is ours? The regime still had tens of millions of supporters, and loyal militias ready to deal with dissent just as brutally as they had the last time. But while part of his mind clung to those dismal facts, the sound of some hundred thousand people shouting in unison made him feel that anything was possible.
All of this was just a warm-up act; the unnamed organiser announced that a distinguished speaker would now address the gathering. Before the introduction was complete, Martin could hear applause breaking out closer to the podium.
‘We welcome Mr Dariush Ansari, founder of Hezb-e-Haalaa!’
As Martin scanned the crowd he spotted a handful of people whose greeting looked distinctly lukewarm, though there were not as many as he would have expected. Ansari’s conciliatory foreign policy did not endear him to everyone who was simply weary of the regime, but he was the first politician to address one of these rallies, so perhaps people would give him credit for that. Thirty student leaders and more than two hundred demonstrators were already in prison; seven people had died in clashes with the militias. What he was doing carried no small risk.
‘In the name of God, the compassionate, the merciful,’ Ansari began; the familiar words of the bismillah needed no translation. ‘I am honoured by the invitation to speak here today, at this peaceful gathering of my fellow Iranians. I was in Shiraz last week - not to speak, only to listen - and I can tell you that whatever you read in certain newspapers, the people there were peaceful too. The shop-keepers whose windows were broken should send their accounts to the Ministry of the Interior.’
That attracted some wry laughter from the crowd and even a few embarrassed smiles from the police, who had already formed a protective human chain in front of a long row of nearly identical establishments specialising in men’s shoes. Martin wasn’t sure that anyone would feel better to be reminded that they too could expect to be blamed for the vandalism of provocateurs; then again, maybe a bit of pre-emptive truth-telling would ease their frustration in the face of that inevitable libel.
Ansari continued in this unassuming fashion. He was no fire-brand, but nor did he drone on interminably; Martin’s attention had wandered for only a few seconds before Ansari had come to the point.
‘If my brother is behaving in a way that troubles me, I might speak to a mullah and ask his advice. If I’m contemplating a business deal and my conscience can’t decide if it’s fair to everyone, perhaps a mullah can assist me. After all, it’s his job to have studied the Qur’an and the Hadith, to have thought deeply about many complex moral questions, to have refined his ideas by disputation with his colleagues.
‘But it is a very different thing to hand the mullah a machine-gun, an army, a prison, and tell him: if anyone questions your power, silence him. After more than thirty years, we have seen with our own eyes what the consequences are: the weight of all their weapons and privileges has dragged the mullahs down so they are no closer to God than anyone else.
‘I believe the time has come for us to take responsibility for our own lives before God. The advice of true scholars should always be welcome, but let them live like scholars, not rule like kings. We need to prise open this closed system that protects itself from all possibility of change—’
Ansari broke off. Martin couldn’t see what was happening, but the people who could were remaining silent and orderly, so it was unlikely that he’d been seized and dragged away.
After about a minute, Ansari spoke again. Behrouz translated: ‘I’ve been told that the President has just appeared on television and made an announcement. Mr Hassan Jabari has resigned from the Guardian Council, because - I quote - “it is for the good of the nation to rob the disruptive elements and their foreign supporters of their dishonest ammunition”.’ Behrouz winced apologetically; however pompous the original, he usually managed to produce less turgid English than that.
‘Furthermore, the President tells us that he has appointed a senior judge to review all of Mr Jabari’s decisions when he was Prosecutor, as a guarantee against any hint of impropriety.’
Martin contemplated this odd move. Bringing charges against Jabari would have been both embarrassing and unlikely to succeed; this would act as a sop to those conservatives who’d believed the accusations against him. Now an independent judge could reassure them that Jabari had not, after all, abused his earlier position to protect a secret cabal of sexual deviants.
‘Finally,’ Ansari continued, ‘the President has declared that this must be the end of the matter. No complaint against the institutions of government, however fanciful, remains. So the people must leave the streets and return to their ordinary business.’
An uneasy silence followed. Martin looked around at the faces of the demonstrators; no one was quite sure how to take the news. Deposing a member of the Guardian Council might have been seen as a great victory if it had flowed directly from a political dispute - say, a deadlock with a reformist Majlis. But Jabari had not been removed for frustrating the will of the people, and his replacement would be yet another conservative. The next election would see exactly the same kind of candidates disqualified as before. Nothing had changed.
Ansari broke the silence. ‘I must respectfully disagree with the honourable President. I say that many complaints remain - and they are not fanciful at all.’
It was a simple observation, but the response was electric; the shouting and applause went on for at least a minute. If the announcement of Jabari’s resignation had been timed to puncture the mood of the demonstration, that had been badly misjudged; instead, it had given everyone in the crowd a chance to affirm, with the vocal support of their fellow malcontents, that the momentum of the uprising was undiminished.
The organiser took the microphone and began giving detailed instructions for the march. After reminding everyone of the route, he added, ‘Most importantly, please obey the marshals wearing green sashes.’ Martin looked around and located a woman a few metres away, only now draping a broad strip of green fabric across one shoulder of her brown manteau.
They began to move north, towards Jomhuri-ye-Eslami Avenue. The marchers wouldn’t expect any help from the traffic police, but the protest had been publicised well enough to deter most drivers from the route, and in any case, sheer force of numbers gave the pedestrians right of way. The density of the crowd kept their pace to a shuffle, and the afternoon heat was beginning to bite, but the atmosphere was upbeat, and the constant rhythmic chant of ref-eren-doom - the English loan-word imported virtually unchanged into Farsi - was echoed playfully between different groups, breaking up the monotony and sparing people’s throats.
Jomhuri-ye-Eslami Avenue was a broad, elegant street, with a stately row of fountains where it met Baharestan Square. It had been spared from the current spate of road-works that plagued much of central Tehran - all the flyovers and tunnels-in-progress that filled the streets with concrete dust, coating Martin’s trouser cuffs and shredding his nasal membranes. Some of the upmarket clothing shops along the route were closed and shuttered, but others had banners of support in the windows, and a few had proprietors, sometimes even whole families, standing in the doorways waving and cheering. Martin thought back to 2003, when he and Liz had joined an anti-war march through Sydney, just before the invasion of Iraq. Given the outcome, that was hardly an encouraging comparison, but he wasn’t reaching for a political analogy. It was simply that the measured, determined mood of the crowd, the steady rhythm of their advance, the whole texture of sounds and emotions, had been cut from the same cloth.
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