Zendegi

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.’