City of Lies: Love, Sex, Death, and the Search for Truth in Tehran

Evin prison, Tehran, August 1988

Amir squeezes his little nose under the crack of the door, pressing his cheek down hard on the dirty tiled floor. Maryam is next to him, doing the same, their foreheads touching as they wriggle their bodies into place. A rush of ice-cold air tingles Amir’s skin. Bliss. He closes his eyes and sticks out his tongue, trying to reach into the jet stream of air conditioning that shoots along the corridor outside. It is the height of a scorching summer and the overcrowded cell heats up like a kiln. The hot, sticky air in the room fuses Amir’s clothes to his skin and he is covered with big, fat droplets of sweat, making the sensation of cool air on his face all the more delicious. This is his favourite thing to do here. He and Maryam lie in silence, fingers and faces wedged under the door, panting softly, until one of the women spots them.
‘If they open the door, they won’t see you and you’ll get hurt! They’ll tread all over you and you’ll break your necks and never be able to walk again!’ is the usual cry, expressed with the exaggerated alarm employed by Iranian mothers. But Shahla never exaggerates anything. Amir has noticed she is not as strict in here. She is softer, more forgiving. When he and Maryam are told off, he runs into Shahla’s outstretched arms and she smiles. ‘My love, my beautiful boy. Did you feel the cold air? Are you cooler now my angel?’
Amir still dreams of those moments crammed in the gap under the door, stealing slivers of chill from the slipstream of cold air outside. In moments of panic and stress, he shuts his eyes and transports himself back there, marvelling at the irony that a memory from Evin prison is what pacifies him.

Jomhouri Street, Tehran, April 2013

Amir had just returned from work when the old man called. It was the day after the meeting.
‘You should be more careful. Inviting a lawyer round who is being followed twenty-four hours a day, with a load of journalists and a known blogger. It isn’t the brightest thing to do. People will start to wonder what you are up to. What with the elections coming up, you know it’s a sensitive time. Not forgetting your parents’ record, it doesn’t look good. And then not even I will be able to help you.’ The voice sounded stronger than before, more authoritative. Amir had no words left for the old man.
‘Are you still there?’
‘Who are you? How do you know these things?’ This was the first time Amir had not shouted.
‘I’m an old man who wants to explain.’
Amir put the phone down. But the old man had finally got the boy’s attention, as he suspected he would.

Ghassem Namazi had the blood of quite a few of his people on his hands and it needed washing off. The onset of guilt had coincided with his decrepitude. There were few signs from Ghassem’s outward appearance that this was a man made of flesh and blood. His skin was tinged grey, his eyes were unflinching. His pursed mouth barely moved when he spoke in his quiet monotone voice, carefully crafted to conceal any show of emotion. This immutability was to be expected of a man of Ghassem’s standing, of a man who spent years working as a judge in the Revolutionary Court of the Islamic Republic of Iran. Ghassem and

his colleagues were man-made myrmidons of the machine; dispassion was lauded by the regime.
But somewhere along the line there was a shift. Many of the judges changed, as Ghassem had changed. At the beginning they had believed in their work, dispensing God’s justice. They were serving their country and standing up for the dispossessed. But it was no longer about Islamic Revolutionary principles. It was now about money and power.
Ghassem had worked hard to cultivate his urbane exterior, for he was from peasant stock. For generations they had ploughed the land in the fertile plains of Varamin, south of Tehran. The Shah had overlooked these peasants and that was one of his greatest mistakes. The villagers did not complain when plunged into darkness in the winter, nor did they complain when their precious supply of fresh water ran out during the torpid summer months. They had lived more or less the same way for centuries. While the world around them was changing their belief in God was inflexible, and so when an uprising began in the name of God and the poor, they dutifully followed. Generations of monarchs had kept them alive but had not given them much more than a hand-to-mouth existence. They glimpsed new possibilities.
Ghassem was the youngest son, and by the time he was born his mother had already given birth to all the farmhands that her husband would need. Ghassem’s father wanted more for his youngest than a life of subsistence. The decision was made to send him to a religious seminary in Tehran. He studied under the tutelage of a well-known, firebrand cleric who was impressed by this sharp peasant boy who had witnessed the drudgery of village life and had realized God and the Koran were his only chances to step up the ladder. The cleric made sure that by the time the revolution happened, Ghassem was ready.
Soon after the revolution, the regime realized it had an ever-increasing caseload but its judges knew nothing of Islamic law. Most of the judges presiding in courts were remnants of the Shah’s rule; they had simply removed their ties, grown beards and renounced the king, like snakes shedding their skin to reveal new scales. They did brisk business: between the revolution in 1979 and June 1981, revolutionary courts executed nearly 500 opponents of the regime. In 1983, clerics were drafted into the judiciary to enforce mojazat, punishment under Koranic law. Ghassem was one of them.
His ascent was swift. In 1988 he was assigned to a special court in Evin, set up for the cleansing of moharebs, enemies of God, and mortads, apostates. Ayatollah Khomeini had given a secret order to execute all prisoners who
remained opposed to the Islamic regime. Trials were brisk, sometimes with only one question used to determine the accused’s innocence, such as ‘Do you pray?’ or ‘Are you a Muslim?’ and ‘Do you believe in Heaven and Hell?’ Some of the questions confused the panicking prisoners, who knew their answers would mean the difference between life and death. When asked: ‘When you were growing up, did your father pray, fast and read the Holy Koran?’ they would lie, and answer in the affirmative, not knowing that if they had responded truthfully, with a ‘no’, they then could not have been held accountable for their un-Islamic views and they would have escaped execution, which happened there and then.
It was easy work. During a few months over the summer of 1988, over 3,000 – and maybe over 5,000, for nobody is really sure – Iranians were either hanged or shot by firing squad. Ghassem was rewarded handsomely for his bloodletting and was given a residence at the top of Vali Asr, in Tajrish.
Ghassem witnessed this new Islamic jurisprudence during his first year as a judge. A few years before he started signing countless death warrants, he joined a crowd of a few hundred people gathered in a courtyard at Evin prison. In the middle of them a man and two women were half buried in the ground. They had been found guilty, by another cleric, of adultery and moral turpitude. They had been given their death rites, their bodies washed and ready for the grave and encased in white shrouds. The living corpses were placed upright in dug-out ditches, the man up to his waist and the women up to their breasts. The law states that if the accused manages to wriggle out of the holes and escape, they must be allowed to walk free (if they have admitted their crime) – an impossible task for women, who have no way of using their arms to prise themselves out. This discrimination is justified in the name of decency, for as the victims are ready for burial they are naked underneath, so if the stones rip open the material, breasts may be revealed and that would be a sin for them all.
Ghassem felt nothing when he threw his first stone. He felt nothing when the first burst of blood soaked the white muslin cloth, spreading its red tentacles across it like hundreds of riv-ulets. This was justice. The law also states that spectators guilty of the same crime are forbidden from throwing stones. Everyone wanted to be seen throwing stones. How could he not join in?