Amir is playing with Lego in his room when they come. He hears the bang on the door and his parents whispering to each other. He runs out of his bedroom and stands at the top of the stairs, straining to listen. He can hear men’s voices.
‘There’s no need to take them, Ibegyou, just take me,’ his father, determined and unbroken. Then silence, apart from his mother’s gentle sobs. When the crying stops, she comes upstairs.
‘Darling, put on your clothes, we’ve got to go somewhere.’
‘I don’t want to go.’ Amir is scared. Shahla tenderly strokes his hair, and takes off his pyjamas. ‘Where’s daddy?’
‘He’s coming with us, we’re all going together. Darling, you never have to be scared when you’re with mummy and daddy. You’re always safe. We won’t let anything bad happen, OK?’ Amir nods. The men with the guns march them out into a cool night. The electricity has gone in the street and Amir has never seen his road so dark. Nobody speaks as they climb into the back of the pick-up truck, Amir in his father’s arms. Behind curtains, neighbours are watching. Friends or enemies, who can tell?
They are driven straight to Shiraz prison.
Tehran, March 2013
It had been a week since Amir had met the old man; a week since Bahar had told him she was leaving. He had sunk into depression, grappling with it in his sleep. He dreamt of his parents: of being back in prison in Shahla’s arms. Of being on his father’s shoulders walking up Vali Asr, under the trees. He dreamt the old man was there too, begging Manuchehr for forgiveness. But Manuchehr could not talk, because now his neck was broken, snapped by the noose that hung round it, his feet swinging off the ground.
Shiraz prison, June 1988
The days are hot and the nights are cold. The sour smell of sweat and stale breath. Distant screaming and shrieking. Amir is too little to know that this is the sound of torture.
It has been two weeks since they were brought here. The guard tells them they are being taken to Evin prison in Tehran. Shahla looks shocked. Serious political cases are transferred to Evin. The prisoners here in Shiraz talk about it often enough. Rumours collect in prison like nowhere else she has been; like scarab beetles rolling ever-growing balls of dung, each inmate brings new speculation that swells and feeds them for weeks. They’regoingtokillalltheprisonersin Evin, says a monarchist who heard it from his mother’s cousin’s husband, who works with a man whose son is in the Prime Minister’s office. The statement is treated in the same way as all the other rumours, with a mixture of terror and sceptical disbelief. But one thing everyone knows for sure: only serious cases are transferred to Evin prison.
Shahla does not understand how it has come to this. It is all the more galling considering that they had started on the same side; that Manuchehr and Shahla had initially embraced the revolution with passion. They had thought that no one could be worse than the Shah and it was under the Shah’s regime that Shahla and Manuchehr had first discovered the political underground and taken solace in subterfuge. The Shah had embarked on eliminating communists and leftists, ever desperate to please the Americans and with a genuine fear of the Soviet Union’s threats to Afghanistan. Between 1971 and 1977, over 130 guerrillas and members of armed political groups were executed or tortured to death. Some said over 3,000 political opponents were killed during his reign. The minute the Shah was deposed the leftists and communists surfaced, confident.
Shahla and Manuchehr, with their unshakeable sense of justice, had been full of hope and mesmerized by Khomeini’s anti-imperialist, egalitarian talk. Khomeini, the softly spoken, handsome man with modesty as his signature tune. After the shrill fanfare of the Shah and his wife’s glaring ostentation, this new tune was a hit. His plain words, calmly preached from underneath thunderous eyebrows, stirred the nation. His slogans daubed on the walls of Tehran had spread, like ivy, across the walls of the nation:
ISLAM REPRESENTS THE SLUM-DWELLERS, NOT THE PALACE-DWELLERS! THE OPPRESSED OF THE WORLD UNITE!
One by one, for pragmatism, faith or expediency, protesters jumped onto his Islamic bandwagon as it rattled to victory. But memories are short. Iran’s tricky relationship with the left had really taken hold in 1960 when the Iraqi Shia cleric and Khomeini’s mentor, Ayatollah Hakim, had issued a fatwa forbidding any Shia from joining the Communist Party. Still, the communists and the leftists thought they had a chance. As it turned out, they would have less than a year before being beaten back down. Fear of communism was something that the Islamic dissidents and the Shah had in common.
Shahla and Manuchehr threw themselves into the revolution. Shahla joined Khomeini’s literacy campaign, a bedrock of revolutionary zeal (and the foundations of which had been laid down by the Shah). She advanced into the hinterland armed with books, pencils and the thirty-two letters of the Persian
alphabet. Some of the villages were eerily quiet. Illiterate village boys make excellent cannon fodder and thousands were sent to the front line to fight in the war with Iraq. Shahla’s patience and kindness were not enough. After four years she was sacked, swallowed up by the wave of suspicion that was casually sweeping the country. Manuchehr also fell victim to it, first during the Cultural Revolution when universities were closed for two years and the country was purged of all Western, un-Islamic influences, and then again when he lost his job, accused of being a communist. So their lives continued to unravel.
