Maybe Shokouh could be portrayed as a Mossad agent who had made the ultimate sacrifice, purely for the sake of embarrassing the Iranian regime. Or, as it turned out, not quite the ultimate sacrifice, which only compounded the embarrassment.
In the absence of a black ops extraction team with helicopters and night-vision goggles, Omar had managed to get Shokouh a doctored passport and a second fake husband – this one to escort her from the country and take the focus off her own documents. That she’d made it through the airport at all suggested that the ‘cousin’ at the hospital had been acting for Jabari alone; VEVAK, mercifully, appeared to have dozed through the whole thing.
Martin’s phone chimed. There was a message from Kambiz, a student he’d met in the run-up to the election; it read ‘Please go to Ferdowsi Square.’
Downstairs, people were lined up outside the bakery for the lunchtime rush, men and women in separate queues. Some carried their stacks of flatbread from the serving window to a cooling table, compounding the olfactory lure. When Martin slowed down to savour the smell, Behrouz grabbed his elbow and tugged him through the crowd towards the alley where their car was parked.
They reached Ferdowsi Square just as the demonstration was getting underway. About thirty young men and women had gathered on a grassy traffic island around a statue of the famous poet. They were holding up signs, all bearing the same slogan: haalaa entekhaab-e-taazeh! Martin had no trouble reading Persian script when the calligraphy wasn’t overly ornate – the alphabet was almost the same as Urdu – and in this case the individual words could not have been more familiar: New Election Now!
The signs themselves offered no English translation; though that might have made for wider coverage in the Western media, it would have opened up the protesters to accusations that they were British or American stooges. Nor was there any reference to Jabari to attract charges of defamation. But the slogan appeared to have hit the right note; Ferdowsi Square was one of the busiest roundabouts in the city, and most of the passing drivers were honking and cheering over the roar of the traffic.
Martin spotted Kambiz, but when their eyes met the young man looked right through him; Martin respected his wish not to be singled out as the reason a foreign journalist was here. There were no police yet, and only one other reporter – Zahra Amin, from the reformist weekly Emkaanha – but Kambiz wouldn’t need to be paranoid to worry that there might be informers among the demonstrators themselves. Martin headed for the opposite side of the group to Zahra, to avoid having to compete with her for interviews. He and Behrouz approached a young, plainly dressed woman and introduced themselves. Her name was Fariba; she was studying engineering at Tehran University. Martin asked her permission to record the interview on his phone; he no longer carried a separate audio recorder. She baulked at first, until he showed her the controls and satisfied her that he would not be recording vision.
‘You’re calling for a new election,’ Martin began. ‘What was wrong with the one you’ve just had?’
‘Two thousand candidates were banned from taking part,’ Behrouz translated. ‘That’s not a fair election. People wanted to vote for many of those candidates, but they didn’t have a chance.’
‘But isn’t it too late to complain now? Wouldn’t it have been better to protest before the election?’
‘We did protest! We were ignored. The government didn’t listen at all.’ As she spoke, Martin kept his eyes on Fariba’s face and paid close attention to her tone of voice, letting Behrouz’s unimpassioned words seep into his mind through a separate channel.
‘So what conditions are you calling for, if a new election is held?’
‘It must be open to anyone who wishes to stand. The approval of the Guardian Council should not be required.’
‘But isn’t that role written into the Constitution?’ Martin asked. ‘It can’t be discarded overnight.’
Fariba hesitated. ‘That’s true, but the Guardian Council should make a commitment to do their job impartially and only disqualify real criminals, instead of everyone with different political ideas. That would be a gesture of good faith, a way of showing that they trust their own people. We’re not children. They’ve put themselves above us, but they are not above us. They’re ordinary people, no better than anyone else.’
Martin knew better than to press her to comment directly on the Jabari scandal; that last oblique sentence would have to suffice. And while the Western media were, predictably, chortling over Jabari’s indiscretion – Omar’s fondest wish having been granted by everyone from CNN to Saturday Night Live – the political ramifications of the phrase they are not above us had a potential life that stretched far beyond Jabari’s fifteen minutes of fame.
Martin thanked her, and went on to seek comments from some more of the demonstrators. He was halfway through his third interview, with a goateed accounting student named Majid, when Behrouz broke off in mid- sentence. A green police car had pulled up on the island, one side of the vehicle still protruding into the road, and three uniformed officers disembarked.
The senior officer was carrying a megaphone; he raised it to his lips. ‘You are instructed by the Chief of Police to move on,’ Behrouz translated. ‘This gathering is a distraction for drivers and a threat to public safety.’
‘We’re big fans of public safety!’ one demonstrator shouted in reply. ‘Drivers should keep their eyes on the road and their hands on the wheel at all times!’ Majid and the others laughed, and Martin saw the two junior officers struggling to keep themselves from cracking up.
‘You are instructed to disperse,’ the senior officer persisted. ‘This is a reasonable and lawful request.’ He didn’t sound particularly vehement, or particularly confident that anyone would obey him.
‘People like our signs!’ Majid called back. ‘We’re not distracting anyone.’ One of the cops came over and asked to check Martin’s papers, but he wasn’t belligerent about it, chatting matter-of-factly with Behrouz and trying out his English.
‘I like Australia,’ he said, returning Martin’s passport. ‘We beat you at football last year.’
‘Mubaarak,’ Martin replied. Congratulations. He’d long ago given up hope of finding a country anywhere in the world where it was safe to tell total strangers that he had no interest in sport whatsoever.
A small motorbike with a pillion passenger drove up onto the grass, closely followed by three more. The young men on the bikes wore dark glasses, army boots and green-and-brown camouflage trousers; some had full beards, but most were clean-shaven. Martin couldn’t see any firearms, but at least two of the men were carrying batons.
‘Basij or Ansar-e-Hezbollah?’ he wondered aloud; both paramilitary groups had a habit of showing up at demonstrations. Martin was expecting Behrouz to answer, but it was the cop who replied, ‘Basij.’
Two of the Basijis strode to the front of the assembly. The policemen did nothing, but Majid went to join the ranks of his companions. Martin couldn’t see Zahra any more; there were too many people crowding the island. He switched his phone to video mode, hoping the battery would hold out.
‘Put down the signs, you traitors!’ one Basiji began. ‘We’ve had the election! The honest Iranian people have spoken. We don’t need you parasites to tell us what to think.’ Martin heard the buzz of small engines yet again; more Basijis were arriving.
Some of the demonstrators began jeering angrily. There was too much for Behrouz to translate at once, and most of the fragments he offered sounded so idiomatic or obscure that they added nothing to the obvious body language. Martin tensed; he knew what was coming next. In Pakistan he’d covered protests that ended in gunfire, in bomb blasts, in visits to the morgue, but he hadn’t become desensitised; none of that had inured him to lesser acts of violence. Before the first blow had even been struck a voice inside him was already screaming at the Basijis to stop.
Instead, they started: with fists, batons, boots. They were aiming for the placards, but they pummelled and tore at everything that lay in their path. The demonstrators were not outnumbered, but they were hemmed in on all sides. They were attempting to regroup to protect the women, and at the same time trying to hold on to the placards and keep them aloft as a gesture of defiance. The men being beaten on the perimeter were quickly becoming dazed and bloody, but it was hard for their comrades to pull them back from the front line without ceding ground. Martin heard brakes squealing. He swung around. A tarpaulin-covered truck had stopped dead in the road, and for one terrible moment he had a vision of soldiers with automatic weapons piling out. But nobody emerged from the back of the truck, just the driver and two companions from the cab. They were solidly built middle-aged men, in work clothes, not uniforms, and they threw themselves into the fray with a grim, unflinching determination that reminded Martin of one of his uncles trying to separate feral cousins at a family gathering thirty years before. He filmed one of the men grabbing a baton-wielding Basiji under the arms and flinging him back onto the grass as if hefting a sack of potatoes.
