"Zendegi" - читать интересную книгу автора (Egan Greg)

8

Nasim had stayed late in the lab, running simulations for the finch paper she was co-writing with Redland, so it was almost ten o’clock when she arrived home. Her mother was in the living room, watching the BBC World News channel.

Nasim kissed her on the cheek. ‘Anything I should know about?’

‘Did you eat?’ her mother replied.

‘Not really.’

‘I made khoresht sabzi.’

‘Oh, yum.’ Nasim could smell the delicate fragrance of the herbs; she went into the kitchen and opened the pot. ‘Khoresht sabzi?’ she wailed. ‘When did chicken become a vegetable?’

‘You should be happy,’ her mother protested. ‘I didn’t use beef.’

‘I’m a vegetarian! I told you that! Have you ever seen a chicken photosynthesise?’ Luckily there was a pot of rice, too; careful examination with a fork revealed sultanas, but no fleshy surprises. The rice was still warm; Nasim spooned a small hillock of it – along with what remained of the crisp tadigh where it had browned on the bottom – onto a plate and carried it to the living room.

‘One of my Ph.D. students is a vegetarian,’ her mother said. ‘He eats chicken all the time. Or maybe it’s fish.’

‘If he eats chicken or fish he’s not a vegetarian.’

Her mother sighed. ‘You should be eating beef. Women need iron. You talk to biologists all day, you should know that.’

‘And you’re an economist, so you should know that meat production wastes land, water and energy.’ She had given up meat only three months ago, but Nasim was already disgusted by the thought of eating flesh. ‘Anyway, it’s a personal choice. Imagine how you’d feel if someone tried feeding you pork.’

‘I ate bacon once,’ her mother confessed. ‘Accidentally, at a faculty party; it just tasted like fat drowned in salt. But the rule against pork is completely rational; the diseases of pigs are more communicable to humans. What diseases can you catch from cows or chickens?’

Nasim opened her mouth, then closed it again. She’d simply have to accept that she’d need to cook for herself from now on. ‘What’s happening in Iran?’

‘They’ve arrested someone for shooting Ansari.’

‘Really?’

‘I recorded it.’ Her mother picked up the remote and hit a few buttons; the DVR began replaying the IRIB report.

The police had arrested a Palestinian immigrant, who had already confessed to the murder. His taped confession was played on air; he repeated no less than five times that he’d been acting alone, without assistance or encouragement from anyone. He’d been angry about Ansari’s policy on Israel, so he’d bought an AK-47 from a drug dealer and ridden his motorbike to Ansari’s house to make his opinion known. The police had also arrested the drug dealer, and were parading him as a kind of confirmatory witness.

Nasim didn’t believe a word of it. If it had happened six months ago it might have been just barely plausible, but this was far too convenient.

It looked like no one in Iran had been appeased either; when Nasim switched back to the BBC, they were showing smuggled images of huge crowds outside half-a-dozen government buildings. If Jabari’s hypocrisy had acted as a tiny seed for the superheated national psyche, just enough to make the simmering frustration visible, the murder of Ansari had brought everything to the boil. Ansari had not been a beloved national hero, just a calm, decent man with some modest ideas – but everyone in the country knew someone who had paid a high price for the crime of decency.

‘Too many to kill,’ her mother mused, with a chilling tone of detachment. ‘If there were a tenth the number, they’d just mow them down and say they were all in the pay of foreign governments.’

‘However,’ the BBC announcer interrupted her, ‘this reformist sentiment is far from unanimous. Government employees bussed into Tehran from the countryside have been seen brawling with the protesters and disrupting their vigils. Commentators say that this is likely to be a more effective tactic than armed confrontation, whether by the security forces or the conservative militias.’

Nasim felt her chest tightening with a familiar ache of helplessness. ‘Anything new about the MEK?’ she asked; the last she’d heard on the subject had come from the White House that morning.

‘The State Department, the Pentagon and the Iraqis have all chimed in with their own denials,’ her mother replied. ‘They insist that nobody in the MEK will be getting access to weapons, or a chance to cross the border.’

‘Do you believe that?’

Her mother frowned. ‘Now that it’s been denounced by Ansari’s brother and plastered all over the New York Times, I can’t see them going through with it. But maybe the publicity will do some good: the UN should be resettling these people somewhere else, because they’re never going to be safe in Iraq or Iran.’

‘Yeah.’ The MEK’s base in Iraq, known as Camp Ashraf, held thousands of Iranian exiles, including women and children – not just would-be soldiers. Until 2009 it had been guarded by coalition troops, but since Iraq had assumed responsibility for the camp the situation there had become far more precarious. Pro-Tehran factions in Baghdad were constantly trying to deport the occupants back to Iran – and if international pressure precluded shipping people straight into Iranian prisons, the same factions could still do their best to make the camp’s continued existence untenable. The MEK leadership certainly had a bloody history, and it was hard to know whether their renunciation of their old methods was sincere, but the whole community deserved something better than this desert limbo.

Nasim put her plate aside and curled up on the sofa beside her mother. It had been hard enough for the two of them, living illegally in Syria for three years, waiting for the UN to classify them as refugees and find a country willing to take them. They’d been cooped up in Damascus, in verminous apartments in the poorest neighbourhoods, sweltering in summer, freezing in winter. Their lives had revolved around evading the authorities, always having to move, or having to find the money to pay bribes to avoid being imprisoned or deported. Some schools had been willing to turn a blind eye to Nasim’s status, but that had generally proved both risky and expensive, so most of her lessons had been at home. Sometimes her mother had found back-alley jobs sewing clothes, and Nasim had stood beside her sewing machine, passing her pieces of material; at the end of the shift their ears would be ringing so loudly that they couldn’t hear each other speak. But she still met people who assumed that they’d simply jumped on a plane from Tehran to New York, where the mere mention of her dissident father had seen them naturalised on the spot, complete with bouquets and brass bands.

On the day they’d left Tehran, she’d wept twice as hard as on the day they’d hanged her father – because even after his death, she had felt she was abandoning him. She’d wanted to stay and fight, wanted to spit in the faces of his killers. That had been a meaningless, childish vision – and she would never forgive herself for the brutal accusations of cowardice she’d flung at her mother as she’d packed their suitcases – but even now, she couldn’t simply cast those emotions aside.

She knew that above all else, her father would have wanted the two of them to escape the shadow of the ayatollahs, to find a safe home, to flourish. But she doubted that she’d ever stop feeling that she owed him something more.