Page 2 of Grave Danger
“Not well enough for the UK to renew our entrepreneur visa, I’m afraid.”
“I’m so sorry,” said Javad.
“It’s a shame, really,” said Ava. “Just when the pilot hotel was getting traction, COVID shut down the whole industry. There was no way to recover.”
“How is Farid taking it?”
“About as you’d expect,” said Ava.
He nodded slowly, as if knowing exactly what she meant. “I’ll be sure to steer clear. Hey, I have to run, but let’s have coffee one morning after drop-off, okay?”
Javad was the first boy ever to tell her she was beautiful, but that was at the age of eleven. She had, in fact, grown into a truly beautiful woman, with shoulder-length raven hair, soft brown eyes, and captivating eyebrows that shone in the sunlight like filigrees of silk thread. Getting together for coffee would be harmless, even if they were both married—as long as Farid approved.
“Yes, let’s try and do that,” said Ava.
They said goodbye, and Ava took a slightly different route home for a stop at the bazaar. One of the joys of returning to Tehran was the outdoormarket near ValiAsr Square, which was a culinary delight. Metal pots and pans hung from hooks, holding dried spices and onions. Colorful displays of fresh fruit and vegetables filled block after block of tented vendor stands. The air was alive with the aromas of roasted saffron and chives, sweet carrot, bitter melon, and fresh herbs. That morning, however, Ava couldn’t get near the market. The street was impassable. In the time it had taken Ava to walk Yasmin to school, thousands of demonstrators had crowded the street.
“Zan, zendegi, azadi,” they chanted in unison.Women, life, freedom.It was the rallying cry of the grassroots movement against oppression.
Vehicular traffic was at a standstill, horns blasting. A small fire was burning in the crosswalk. Young women were publicly removing their head coverings and tossing them into the flames. Across the way, a woman was standing atop a mailbox. The crowd around her chanted even louder—“Zan, zendegi, azadi”—in support.
Ava stopped for a moment and watched as the woman took a pair of scissors from her bag, cut off her long ponytail, and then held it defiantly over her head. The crowd around her erupted. It was an act of political symbolism, at once a statement against the rules of compulsory hijab for women, and an act of defiance in honor of Mahsa Amini, the young woman whose death had sparked so many demonstrations like the one in which Ava had suddenly found herself. Ava believed in everything the demonstrators were fighting for. But the street was not her battleground of choice. She turned away from the crowds and continued toward home.
Her apartment building was one of the newest in the neighborhood, five stories of concrete and steel, with a rooftop garden. Outside the gleaming glass doors, a doorman dressed in a black suit and a red cravat bid Ava good morning as she entered the lobby. Ava took the elevator to the eighth floor and entered their corner apartment, a two-bedroom unit with plenty of space for a family of three. It was actually nicer than their flat in London, though the surrounding neighborhood was not nearly as interesting—older stucco apartment buildings painted in dirty white andfaded shades of green or yellow. From a window in the living room, Ava could see the demonstrations in the square below. She removed her scarf slowly, watching, and then returned to the door to make sure she’d locked it. Her heels clicked on the wood floor in the hallway to the master bedroom. She stopped at the bureau and unlocked the top drawer. Her cell phone was inside. She’d left it behind, under lock and key, because the morality police had been stopping women on the street and checking their phones. If “seditious” messages were found, they would be arrested on the spot.
Ava had one text message:What did you have for dinner?
She texted the coordinated reply that told the sender that it was safe to communicate:Soup.
Ava was part of a growing grassroots effort by Iranian women whose common objective was to keep information flowing after the government’s shutdown of the internet in response to the demonstrations. The network was too unstructured to have formal “rules,” but it was common sense and commonly understood that if you received a text, you read it, passed it along to the next woman, and then deleted it. It wasn’t safe to keep the messages on a cell phone. If the morality police found them, both the sender and recipient would be arrested.
Her phone chimed with the arrival of another text message. It was a photograph of an ugly circular bruise on a woman’s leg. The message read:Rubber bullet. I was doing nothing. Riot police shot me.
Ava texted back.Why the crowds on Keshavarz? Did something bad happen?
Some of the women who were brave enough to participate just stuck to the facts, no questions asked or answered. But when trouble was so close to home, it was impossible not to start a conversation and fish for more.
The reply came quickly.315 protesters indicted this morning. 4 as mohareb.
Mohareb.“Enemy of God.” It is the worst possible crime in Shiite Muslim law. The regime had resorted to desperate measures, charging demonstrators asmohareb. Ava had studied enough of her country’shistory to know that even Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the founder of the Islamic regime in the late 1970s, had onlythreatenedto accuse his opponents of being “enemies of God.” The penalty was public execution.
Another text appeared on Ava’s screen, but it was a different sender. After the introductory exchange—dinnerandsoup—the news followed.
School raid in District 6. I’m taking my daughter home now.
Ava assumed the sender meant the girls’ high school. Teenage girls had been among the most vocal opponents of the regime, and while at school they were easy targets for the morality police. Ava texted back:
Mine is too young to know what is going on.
A quick response came:Not too young to be caught in the crossfire.
So true, and the message chilled Ava. The last tally circulated by text said that 27 children were among the reported total of 215 demonstrators killed since September. Ava put her cell phone back in the locked drawer, covered her head with a scarf, and hurried out the door to the elevator. The ride to the lobby seemed to take forever, and she ran out of the building, hitting full speed by the time she passed the doorman on the sidewalk. The demonstration on the street seemed to have grown even larger, the cries for justice even louder.
Ava’s heart was pounding like a jackhammer, the blood rushing to her head, as she ran as fast as she could past the demonstrators. The smell of tear gas filled the air as she approached Yasmin’s school, which only heightened her concern. Ava continued straight ahead, pushing through the crowd, determined to reach the school at any cost, nearly breathless as she arrived. A dozen other mothers were already waiting outside the entrance gate to the school grounds. Like Ava, they had come to pull their daughters out and take them home, where it was safe. Yasmin was onlyin prekindergarten, but the primary school was adjacent to the girls’ high school, and the text message was burned into Ava’s mind:Not too young to be caught in the crossfire.
The schoolmaster was standing on the other side of the iron gate. She was clearly sympathetic to the pleas of distressed parents who had come for their daughters. The gates creaked open as girls, one by one, were passed to waiting arms outside the schoolyard. Ava caught sight of Yasmin coming through the door, escorted by her teacher.
“Mommy’s here!” Ava shouted.