Children of Paradise by Laura Secor

Author:Laura Secor
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Canada
Published: 2016-02-01T16:00:00+00:00

TWELVE

THE SPIDER’S HOUSE

The parable of those who take guardians besides Allah is as the parable of the spider that makes for itself a house; and most surely the frailest of the houses is the spider’s house did they but know.

—The Holy Quran, 29:41

BEFORE HE WAS ARRESTED, Shahram Rafizadeh had a recurring dream. He stood in a beautiful garden, surrounded by all kinds of singing birds. He wanted to leave, but the garden had no exit. Every path was a blind alley. One led to a room. There, Ruhollah Hosseinian, an important intelligence official at the time of the chain murders, stood wearing his turban but not his robes. Hosseinian did not speak. With a gesture, he instructed Shahram to push up his sleeves: like this, like this.

Shahram had never put much stock in dreams. But he became convinced that the courtyard of his prison was the garden from his dream. Sometimes, within his cell, he could hear birds. Much later he would circle that detention center by taxi and study it on Google Earth. Just to the left of Hosseiniyeh Ershad, off Javanan Square, was the house with the gracious courtyard that no one knew concealed six Miracle Rooms, nine solitary cells, off a narrow corridor with a dim green light.

The cells were so small that a person could not turn around without walking backward. Shahram estimated that his measured about three feet by five feet. It was always dark. The green bulb in the hallway cast almost no light. Up near the ceiling was a barred window; in the door there was a narrow slot for delivering food. An air ventilator ran for hours at a time, making a grating and deafening noise.

For the first month Shahram was hardly ever in his cell. He was in the interrogation room where he was beaten, then questioned, then beaten again. The interrogation room had windows covered with white film, so that he could not see out but others could see in. His interrogators switched a video camera on while he was questioned, off while he was beaten.

Shahram’s face went numb from the punches and slaps. His interrogators smashed his head into walls. Once they broke a washbowl on his head. They whipped the back of his body from his shoulders to his heels with cable wires. They told him they would arrest his father and torture him in Shahram’s presence. They threatened to harm his children. Hundreds of traffic accidents happen in Tehran every day, they reminded him. His family might suffer one. Or maybe they would bring Bita, his wife, to prison: “And you know what will happen to her next.”

All his life, Shahram’s interrogators told him, he had made mistakes. They wanted to know about his connections and activities from the time he arrived in Tehran. Shahram protested that he was only twenty-two when he came to the capital. He’d forgotten a lot of things.

“If you forgot,” an interrogator told him, “you will remember here.”

They had seized a Revolutionary

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