Authors: Greg Egan
Zendegi (9 page)
Martin felt a sudden ache of loneliness; he could not have expected Liz to be marching beside him here, but it would have been enough to be able to sit with her in the evening and say: You know what I was reminded of today? Now their shared memories meant nothing.
‘Did you see that?’ Behrouz asked him.
‘Sorry, I was—’
‘Her phone.’ Martin followed his gaze; the green-sashed marshal was using it to talk to someone. Martin checked his own phone; there was still no signal.
‘Do you want to ask her about it?’ Martin suggested. ‘If you can convince her we’re not informers.’
When she’d finished the call Behrouz approached her and made introductions. The woman gave her name as Mahnoosh.
She addressed Martin directly, in English. ‘I read some of your stories before they cut the internet.’
Martin felt a twinge of self-consciousness; his reports were written for Australian readers skimming half-a-dozen foreign political stories over breakfast, not sophisticated Tehranis in the thick of the action. He said, ‘I hope you’ll excuse any mistakes I made; I’ve only been here a few months.’
She smiled slightly. ‘Of course.’
‘Do you mind if I ask you how your phone’s working?’
‘It’s not going to the towers,’ she said. ‘Just direct to other phones.’
‘I don’t understand.’
She spoke with Behrouz. ‘We’ve set up a mesh network,’ he translated. ‘It doesn’t rely on any infrastructure from the phone company; the phones just pass the data between themselves. Email, text messages, voice calls, web services.’
Martin was impressed. No doubt the government would soon find a way to block the system - they were already jamming satellite TV - but for now the protesters had an unexpected advantage. ‘Can I plug into this network?’
Mahnoosh held out her hand and he passed her his phone. She inspected it for a few seconds then returned it. ‘Sorry, no. The best one is this—’ She took her own phone from her pocket and showed it to him. The manufacturer’s logo was one he’d never seen before: a triangle formed from three copies of the letter S.
‘Who makes these?’
‘Slightly Smart Systems,’ Mahnoosh replied, a hint of amusement in her eyes at the wonderfully self-deprecating name. ‘Indian software, Chinese hardware. But we made some changes ourselves.’
Martin handed the phone back. He was surprised that Omar hadn’t tried to sell him one, knowing how useful it would be. But since the night of the crash they’d been more circumspect in their dealings with each other; when Sandra Knight broke Shokouh’s story in Paris she’d kept Martin right out of the picture, but the authorities would automatically have stepped up their surveillance of all foreign journalists.
They passed Cinema Europa, then Cinema Hafez. The Iranian stars gazed down coolly from their billboards, offering neither encouragement nor disapproval. Ahead of the marchers, a long stretch of asphalt was utterly deserted, empty of cars as far as the eye could see; even with the chanting crowd around him, Martin had a moment of end-of-the-world goose-flesh. Police were following the march, but they remained at the edges and he hadn’t seen them administer so much as a provocative shove. Perhaps the authorities had decided to allow people to let off steam, unmolested, in one last show of defiance before Jabari’s resignation was used to draw a line under everything that had come before.
Martin and Behrouz moved through the crowd, gathering quotes. ‘Jabari’s resignation means nothing,’ one man opined. ‘It won’t bring down rents. It won’t give my son a job.’
‘But how would a referendum help the economy?’ Martin pressed him.
‘Not quickly,’ the man conceded. ‘But it would open the door to different ideas, not the same group holding power year after year. The hardliners call everyone else un-Islamic, but Ansari is not un-Islamic. I asked him myself, would he ban the headscarf in some places, like they do in Turkey. He said no, it’s up to each woman if she wants to wear it or not.’
Other people expressed similar views. They were tired of the stale, self-perpetuating clique that clung to power by wrapping itself in claims of piety. If throwing out the veto powers of the Guardian Council - or abolishing the Council entirely - was the only route to change, so be it. The voters themselves were perfectly capable of rejecting candidates who would harm the nation; as one woman put it, ‘We aren’t infants who need the bones picked out of our food.’
‘Rast! Injaa rast!’ Mahnoosh shouted urgently, raising her arms and gesturing. Right, here! She was steering the march off Jomhuri-ye-Eslami, into a side-street. She was not especially tall, but her voice carried, and her instructions were heeded and echoed back through the ranks. As the crowd squeezed into the narrower road Martin approached her.
‘What’s happening? I thought we were going straight to Ferdowsi Street.’
Mahnoosh held up her phone, displaying an image of a train-carriage packed with militia, some of them carrying guns. A sign on the platform beside the carriage said Imam Khomeini Station - one stop south of Sa’di Station. If the marchers stuck to their original route, they would be approaching Sa’di Station just as the armed Basijis emerged from the Metro.
Martin exchanged a glance with Behrouz; did they want to break from the march and check out Sa’di? Martin was tempted, but then decided it was better to stay with the crowd and see how they fared.
He said, ‘So you’ve got a network of people with these phones . . . in all the Metro stations, on street corners?’ Mahnoosh responded with an irritated scowl, as if to say: Of course, but don’t expect me to spell it out.
She said, ‘Excuse me, I have work to do.’ She stepped out of the flow and stood at the roadside, shouting instructions, ensuring that nobody in her charge got confused and failed to take the detour. Martin made a mental note to try to get a copy of the picture of the carriage from her later. This wasn’t the time to beg for it, but his editor would kill him if he didn’t get that image eventually.
The detour, Saf Street, was reserved for pedestrians, so the marchers had no cars or motorbikes to contend with, just groups of startled shoppers and a couple of vendors selling balloon animals. After the run of men’s shoe shops opposite the Majlis, this whole street seemed to be dedicated to women’s shoes and handbags; the advancing crowd drove many of the leisurely window-shoppers through the doors of these establishments, possibly doubling the day’s sales.
When they’d gone a few hundred metres Behrouz looked back and said nervously, ‘I hope there won’t be people coming round that corner for another half-hour.’ The whole march would take a long time to flow through, and the Basijis could be at the intersection in as little as ten minutes.
Martin squeezed his way to the side of the road and climbed onto an electricity junction box. From this vantage he could see the crowd stretching all the way back to Jomhuri-ye-Eslami Avenue, but as he watched, the tail of the procession came into sight. He said, ‘Looks like the organisers have split up the march. They haven’t just put a kink in the route; the people behind us must have been sent south.’ The Basijis would find no easy targets ahead of them, just a long deserted avenue.
‘There’ll be cops and informers tracking every move,’ Behrouz reminded him. ‘They won’t make it obvious with helicopters, but they’re still watching.’
‘Yeah.’ The cops had their radios; they didn’t need Slightly Smart phones. Still, splitting up was better than everyone marching blindly into an ambush, and at least the Basijis had lost the advantage of surprise.
‘Chap, chap!’ Mahnoosh commanded them. Pedestrian-friendly Saf Street was coming to an end and the street ahead was narrow and full of cars. Martin tensed, expecting a heated confrontation between marchers and drivers, but after a short battle of wills, accompanied by a lot of honking and shouting, the crowd prevailed. A few drivers managed to reverse out of the way; others just stopped where they were and allowed the protesters to squeeze around them.
Martin stayed within sight of Mahnoosh, trying to pick a good time to ask her for an update on the militias. After a couple of minutes she motioned to him to approach again.
‘We chained the gates at Sa’di Station,’ she confided, ‘but we didn’t succeed to close Darvazeh Dowlat, and now half the Basijis are headed there.’ Darvazeh Dowlat was the next station up the line. If the marchers had kept going north they would have been heading into danger again.
‘We couldn’t go back to the Majlis?’ Martin wondered.
‘There’s another group headed for Baharestan Station.’
The street they were on ended at a T-junction with Sa’di Street, which ran between the two Metro stations; here, they were about the same distance from both. Mahnoosh called a halt, then instructed the marchers to leave their banners on the ground, cease all chants and disperse in groups of no more than three.
A young man behind Martin began objecting loudly, shouting that he hadn’t come onto the streets just to surrender, but nobody else spoke up in his support, and his friends did their best to calm him down. It looked like most people felt they’d achieved a reasonable trade-off: having shown their numbers outside the Majlis and marched in defiance of the President’s orders, they had not been cowed, but nor would they be reckless.
As the protest broke up, Behrouz said, ‘I want to find a pay phone and see if I can call my wife.’
‘Okay.’ Martin could imagine how she’d be feeling, with fresh denouncements of the protesters all over the TV and the mobile network disabled. He remembered when the army had opened fire on a demonstration in Peshawar and he’d left Liz wondering for hours if he was dead or alive. He said, ‘I’ll meet you at the car in an hour.’ They were parked about three kilometres away, and Martin wanted to hang around a little longer and try to get that photo and some more background information from Mahnoosh.
Behrouz headed off. Martin looked around; Mahnoosh was nowhere in sight. He stood at the corner for a while, scanning the street, swearing under his breath. He’d lost her.
He decided to head south towards Sa’di Station; if he couldn’t show his readers a train packed with Basijis, he might yet get a snap of them emerging from the Metro en masse. As he walked past shops and teahouses he could still see people around him that he recognised from the march; most had heeded the suggestion to break up into small groups, but there were also visible packs of young men - some of them dressed in heavy metal T-shirts, the uniform most despised by the regime - walking together, talking and laughing. It was easy to sympathise; there was something undignified about being asked to disown your comrades and slink away into the crowd.
Martin heard angry shouting from further down the street; he couldn’t make out the words, but he had no doubt what was happening. A group of women with shopping bags walking ahead of him turned around and hurried away; at the same time he could see people running to join the fray. Part of him wanted to slip into the safety of a shop or an alleyway - nobody would know, nobody would reproach him - but he forced himself to keep walking. It suddenly struck him that he’d been far less timid in Pakistan, when it should have been the other way around: back then, he should have been thinking about Liz. But back then, whatever insanity he’d been swept up in, he’d always pictured himself telling her about it. Just having her to share his stories with had made him feel bulletproof; if nothing was quite real until he’d recounted it to her, how could the world ever intervene and break that narrative thread?
The source of the shouting came into sight: on the opposite side of the street, five Basijis were fighting with three young men, relentlessly swinging batons into flesh. One Basiji was brandishing an automatic pistol, ranting about traitors and pointing the weapon at anyone who came near, keeping a larger group of angry civilians at bay.
One of the youths in the centre of the mêlée was swaying drunkenly, bleeding from a head wound, clearly in bad shape. Martin checked his phone, but there was still no signal. He looked around; a shopkeeper was standing in a doorway watching nervously. Martin mimed holding a handset and asked ‘Ambulance?’
‘Kardam,’ the man replied tersely: he’d already called. The landlines must be working.
Martin turned back to the fight and took some pictures. As he pocketed his phone he saw another, larger group of Basijis in the distance, coming north from Sa’di Station along his own side of the street. He was about to turn and begin his retreat when something else caught his eye: a green sash draped across the shoulder of a brown manteau. Mahnoosh was about fifteen metres from him, walking south.
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