you.’
Martin glanced up at the watchtower; the sentries there had a clear line of sight, but they hadn’t fired on the men who’d captured the helicopter crew. Nobody wanted to be charged with treason by the present regime – but neither did they want to be charged with murder by their successors.
Half an hour later, the protesters sent a delegation of five people into the prison to negotiate face-to-face. No doubt there were things to be said that couldn’t be spoken over an open radio channel. Martin passed the tense hours that followed interviewing some of the people who’d been involved in the bench/car manoeuvre; the injured man had already been evacuated, but the other participants turned out to be mechanical engineering students who’d rehearsed something similar in the countryside a week before – albeit not with live ammunition and a helicopter. ‘We wanted to fit remote controls to the cars,’ one of them told Martin, ‘but we couldn’t get the parts without attracting suspicion.’ They’d bought half-a-dozen cheap Paykans from wrecking yards and left them in side- streets around the park before the siege had begun.
Just before dawn, the delegation returned. A deal had been struck in which the guards would continue to defend the cell blocks under the control of the prison authority – which held mainly convicted criminals – but they would not interfere with anything that took place in Evin 209 and 240, the political wings which came under VEVAK’s control.
Behrouz translated the news, but when he’d finished he told Martin bluntly, ‘If you report that deal, you can have my resignation. ’ If the regime survived, Martin doubted that his own silence would be enough to save anyone; someone on the inside would surely betray the prison guards to their brave superiors who’d flown off over the mountains. Then again, putting all the details down in newsprint would certainly diminish any prospect of a face- saving decision to let the guards’ inaction go unpunished.
He said, ‘I won’t mention it.’ He could find a circumspect way of phrasing things without actually lying. The protesters were still going to storm the prison, and the guards would still tactically withdraw, to concentrate on keeping the most dangerous prisoners confined. Nobody munching cornflakes in Sydney needed to know that certain choices had been made to allow all this to happen without bloodshed.
The sky was pale blue, but the sun was still hidden behind the apartment blocks of north Tehran as the protesters surged through the broken gates of Evin Prison. Martin let more than a hundred people enter before he even tried to elbow his way into the stream. If there was unexpected resistance ahead, he wanted to be close enough to the vanguard to witness it, but he didn’t feel obliged to put himself at any unnecessary risk. This wasn’t his revolution.
Still, as he and Behrouz passed through the gates and walked with the hushed throng between the grey cell blocks, Martin felt the history of the place weighing down on him. This was where the Shah’s henchmen had imprisoned and tortured his enemies. This was where thousands of opponents of Khomeini had been hanged in mass purges. This was where labour activists, journalists, homosexuals, scholars, environmentalists and women’s rights campaigners had been thrown into solitary confinement, beaten and raped. This was where Baha’i ended up, for the crime of believing in one prophet too many, or proselytising Christians for the crime of believing in one prophet too few. This was where student leaders, after the protests of 1999, had had their faces pushed into drains full of faeces until their bursting lungs had commanded them to inhale, and where ten years later those who’d marched against electoral fraud had been beaten into surreal confessions that the true source of their treasonous passions had been the meddling of foreign puppet-masters and excessive exposure to the BBC. But he couldn’t hold Evin’s obscenities at arm’s length as the aberrations of an alien culture. He had seen the American prison at Bagram, where innocent men had been battered to death; he had seen the detention camps in the Australian desert where refugees had lost their minds and slashed their bodies with razors. The toxic mixture of power and impunity was a universal human disease.
Martin turned to Behrouz, hoping they could exchange a few words that would puncture the solemnity, but the expression on his colleague’s face was so stricken that he looked away again, not wanting to embarrass him.
The watchtowers were deserted now; if anyone was training rifles on the crowd they were well hidden. Martin had read accounts of the prison’s layout by former inmates, but he hadn’t committed the architecture to memory; he could only assume that someone who knew the place inside out was leading them to one of the political wings.
Section 240 was a squat four-storey building with slits for windows. Apparently nobody had left a key under the mat, but Martin was too far from the doors to see exactly what was being done with crowbars, bolt-cutters and battery-powered tools in order to gain entrance.
When the main doors were opened the crowd surged forward, but not very far; inside the building there were more obstructions to be dealt with.
Behrouz said, ‘If every cell is this much work, it’s going to be a long day.’
Martin had read that there were about eight hundred. ‘Good practice for when you queue for your Metallica tickets.’
When they finally managed to squeeze into the building they found themselves in a kind of foyer between the main doors and a deserted checkpoint with a barred metal gate. There was a glowering portrait of Khomeini on the wall beside a scroll covered in dense writing; Martin sounded out and translated a few words, until Behrouz put him out of his misery. ‘It’s a kind of mission statement, committing everyone who works here to high ethical standards.’ His voice was thick with contempt. ‘It quotes some Quranic verses, but don’t ask me to repeat them, because in the context I’d consider that desecration.’
There was a sound of splintering wood. ‘Keleedha!’ someone shouted excitedly; Martin didn’t need that translated for him. People started passing jangling bunches of keys back through the crowd. A man in front of Martin offered him a bunch; Martin shook his head apologetically. ‘Ruznaame negaaram. Momken nist.’
Behrouz held out his hand and took them.
The protesters spread out, looking for the cells their keys would open. As Martin followed Behrouz to the crowded stairwell, he saw a woman ahead of them turn at the landing and he glimpsed Mahnoosh’s face in profile. He felt a sudden ache of panic in his chest; he wanted to call out to her, to plead with her to be careful, but he was afraid that might sound presumptuous.
On the third floor there were two more metal gates that needed power-tools to break through; it was another twenty minutes before they were standing before the cells themselves. Martin raised his phone and snapped the scene: a row of identical doors stretching away down the corridor ahead of them, with no windows, just thin slits that appeared to be bolted shut. The place was shabbily clean, with a strong smell of disinfectant not quite masking an undercurrent of excrement. Even now, Martin could hear only faint, muffled shouting from a few inmates; the cells were almost soundproof.
The first key was matched, the first door swung open. A middle-aged man limped out into the corridor; he seemed dazed, unsure of what was happening. He was dressed in loose white clothes, bare-foot; above his thick beard his face was covered in welts and bruises. He spoke with his liberators in a soft voice, with an air of puzzlement. Maybe he’d heard nothing of Jabari, of the strikes and marches. Perhaps he’d spoken to no one but his captors for years.
Martin held up his phone and started filming.
Behrouz said, ‘I’m going this way.’ He shook his keys and gestured at a second line of cells that started further to their right.
‘Okay.’ Martin didn’t follow him; he wanted to record what was happening, but he didn’t want to thrust his camera into the faces of these fragile people. Another door opened in the corridor ahead of him; a tall, skinny youth, shirtless, with long red weals on his back, stepped forward nervously. As he talked with the protesters he was as quiet as the first man, but much more anxious, blinking and flinching away from anyone who came too close. Then he sat down on the floor outside the cell and cradled his head in his arms.
When the third cell opened there were shouts of jubilation; Mahnoosh was among the liberators here, cheering the loudest. After a moment Martin recognised the freed prisoner as a young man who’d been arrested on the first day of the siege; his face was bruised and one eye was swollen shut, but he was still wearing torn street clothes rather than prison garb. Some of his friends lifted him up on their shoulders and carried him towards the stairs.
As Martin turned to keep them in view, he heard a gunshot, very close. One of the protesters staggered,
