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.’
