Keeper of Truth

Author's Note

I did not write this book in ink.

I wrote it with memory. With the knot in my throat, with anger, with hope, and with a love that has lost nothing to all the years that have passed over it: love for Iran.

In these pages, names are sometimes invented, relationships have sometimes been changed, and characters have been created so that they could carry the weight of the telling on their shoulders. But not everything is imagination.

Inside this story there are stories that came from the heart of what is real. Stories that may be unbelievable to many people outside Iran's borders, but that, for us Iranians, have been part of life for years. Things we have seen, heard, and lived through, whose pain we have sometimes been forced to bury somewhere deep inside ourselves, only so that we could begin another tomorrow.

Author's Note

There have been mothers who left the house in the morning and came back at night with no word about their child.

There have been fathers who, to have the body of their child returned to them, stood behind doors that no father should ever stand behind.

There have been young people who took to the streets for freedom and never came home again.

There have been people who held on to a truth at the price of their safety, their freedom, and sometimes their lives, only so that one day someone could tell that truth.

Their names may not be in this book.

But the trace of their breath is in many of these pages.

Author's Note

For the historical sections and the political events of this book, I have researched as far as it was in my power. Documents, books, reports, speeches, interviews, archives, and a great many accounts were gathered and weighed against one another. Not because I claim this book is history's last word; history is never finished in one book. But because in a book called Keeper of Truth, one cannot be careless with the truth.

I have tried to keep a clear line between what is a document, what is an account, what is analysis, and what is one character's pain. There may be a slip somewhere along this road; I too am a human being standing before a history larger than myself. But one thing I can say with certainty:

Nowhere in this book have I knowingly sacrificed the truth to the story.

Because the truth, for me, is not this story's instrument.

It is this book's responsibility.

Author's Note

It has to be kept, cleaned of the dust and the lies, and carried to the next generation.

To the children of Iran.

Before anyone else, this book is dedicated to the children of Iran and to those who gave their lives for the homeland: to the javidnam of this land.

To those who went so that Iran would remain.

To those who stood before the bullets, who were broken in prison but never bowed, who went to the gallows with the name of Iran never falling from their lips. To the soldiers who fought for this soil, to the women who gave freedom its meaning with their lives, to the men who did not sell their honor cheap, and to the young who perhaps had not yet had the chance to live life the way they deserved to, but who gave up their own lives for the future of other people's lives.

Author's Note

To everyone who lived for the dignity, the freedom, and the endurance of Iran, whether their names have stayed in the history books or whether all that remains of them is a framed photograph on the wall of a house.

Author's Note

And with deep respect, I dedicate this book to the Pahlavi family: to a name that, it was believed, could be wiped from Iran's memory, but that rose again decades later, not from palaces or history books, but from the heart of the alleys and streets of that same Iran. A name that millions of Iranians, across generations that had never even seen those days, spoke of with pride. To a family that began its work at a time when Iran was suffering from poverty, disorder, and weakness, and carried a country toward education, development, progress, and a new dignity; and today, for millions of Iranians, its name is tied once again to the hope of a freer and prouder tomorrow. Perhaps the greatest Pahlavi legacy is neither the crown nor the throne; perhaps it is the belief that Iran can rise again, be free again, flourish again, and find again the place its history and its people deserve. And as long as that belief is alive in the hearts of Iranians, no darkness will be the last chapter of Iran.

Author's Note

This book is also my tribute to all those who for years, without fanfare, kept the scattered corners of the truth: who saved a document, archived a picture, recorded a voice, wrote a memory down, or took the thing that was meant to be forgotten and entrusted it to the next person.

We may never see one another.

We may not even know one another's names.

But sometimes it is by the hands of just such nameless people that history stays alive.

And I am grateful to those who were beside me while this book took shape: those who helped me gather documents and sources, those who read and asked and found fault, and those who stayed with me through the editing and through the dance of the words across these pages. Every hand that made a sentence more exact, every eye that caught an error, and every mind that made me think again about some truth has a part in this chain.

And last, to the dearest companions of my life.

Author's Note

To my wife and my children.

For the hours when my mind was here and my body was beside you.

For the nights when I was still writing and you waited, patient.

For the days when the sorrow of this story came home with me and you stood beside me without asking why.

If there is a love of the future in these pages, part of it I have taken from your eyes.

Because in the end, I did not write about all this past for the sake of the past.

I wrote it for the future.

Author's Note

For the day when an Iranian child, years from now, opens this book, and what is a wish for us today is, for that child, a distant memory. A day when freedom, for that child, is nothing strange. When justice is not a wish. When loving Iran is not a crime. And when, to understand the truth, that child does not have to pass through a mountain of lies.

If that day comes, perhaps it will no longer matter who wrote this book.

What matters is that the child should know that there were people who came before them who did not surrender.

People who brought the truth, however wounded, out of the heart of the darkness and passed it from hand to hand until it reached that child.

This book is my small share of that chain.

With respect for the lives given for this soil,

with love for those who have stayed,

Author's Note

and with hope for those who are yet to come,

I dedicate it to Iran.

Payandeh Iran. May Iran endure.

Prologue · The Eighth of January

Even now, every so often, a message comes in from an unknown number. It is the same number that for months left me not knowing whether the person on the other end of the line was a friend or a killer.

But before you can understand where that fear came from, and why I sat down and wrote all of this out for you, I have to begin with one night. The night that split my life in two. The eighth of January.

That night I lost my friend. His name was Bahram.

Bahram was younger than me, young enough that I could have been his older brother. He was the son of the neighbors across from Agha Bozorg [my grandfather], and ever since he was a child he would come and sit at Agha Bozorg's feet like a curious kitten, listening to him. I was his friend, the one he confided in, and often, his refuge.

Prologue · The Eighth of January

That day we both had a bad feeling. A strange one, the kind that won't let you settle down or walk away. Bahram kept asking, "Aram, do you think people will come? It's the Shah's order, we have to go. I'm just scared we'll go and nobody will show up. I just hope people do us proud."

I told him, "The people I've been seeing lately aren't afraid of anything anymore, and they can't take this any longer. Don't worry about people showing up. I'm hopeful too."

It was around half past six and the call was for eight. But Bahram couldn't wait. He said, "Get up, let's go early. I want to see with my own eyes whether people come. I can't sit here."

We had arranged to go to a different neighborhood, somewhere fewer people knew us, though in Ahvaz that was a joke in itself. This city is one big house where everyone knows everyone.

Prologue · The Eighth of January

We parked the car a few streets away, deliberately, so that if things turned bad we could work our way back to it through the alleys without being seen and get out along the routes we guessed would still be open. We walked the route together and learned it by heart. We told each other that if we got separated in the crush, then at nine forty-five, right here, by the car.

And we left our phones in the car. We were afraid that if we got picked up, everything would come out. That night it seemed like the most sensible decision in the world. But when I think about it now, I wish I had taken mine. I wish I had filmed it: the thing I saw that night that no camera recorded.

We put our masks on and came out onto the main street.

And what we saw was beyond anything either of us had imagined.

Prologue · The Eighth of January

They were pouring in from every direction, as if every door of a stadium had been thrown open at once. A flood. A flood of people breaking out of every alley and backstreet to join that one great river. Bahram smacked my arm. His voice was shaking.

"Aram! You hear that? Listen! Are people saying Javid Shah [Long Live The King]? Do you hear it? I don't believe it. I don't believe it, Aram!"

Tears had come into both our eyes before either of us gave them permission. Bahram couldn't hold it in any longer. He started shouting with everything he had, "Javid Shah! Javid Shah!" and then the chant that went up from thousands of throats that night: This is the final battle, Pahlavi will return.

Prologue · The Eighth of January

A little further on we saw a detachment of officers in military uniform, with batons, standing to one side. But it was strange; they looked as if they had been stunned too. They didn't move. They didn't do anything. They just watched that flood going past them. That gave the people even more courage. They pressed further and further forward, and still the officers did nothing.

Half an hour later the crowd was so big you couldn't see from one end of the street to the other. And I had been swept so deep into that wave that a gap opened between Bahram and me without my wanting it to.

And then, all at once, shouting went up: "No honor! No honor!"

It seemed the officers had moved in with their batons. I was so jammed into the crowd that I couldn't see properly what was happening. Next to me a woman turned her ankle and went down. We had been pushed a little way off the sidewalk, toward the middle of the street. I bent down to take her hand and get her up.

Prologue · The Eighth of January

And in that same moment something hit me hard on the head. And right behind it, a boot in my side.

Before I could lift my head, a few young men came past me and threw themselves at the officers. I was dazed. The world was spinning, and warm blood was running from my head.

Two of them got me under the arms without saying a word and dragged me clear. One said, "Go back." I said, "I can't. I have to find my friend." The other one, who had a trace of an Abadani accent, shouted, "Keep your head down, they'll grab you any second! Your head's bleeding too! Go! Come back tomorrow!" And then they were gone into the crowd.

They fired tear gas. The sharp smell of it caught in my throat. The kids were trying to get fires going fast, tipping trash cans over and hauling them into the middle of the street to hold the officers back.

Prologue · The Eighth of January

With my head bleeding like that, I kept scanning for Bahram. But the shouting was so loud and there were so many stones flying that I couldn't think straight.

I told myself maybe he had gone back toward the car. I'd go and look. Maybe he was there. Then I'd come back.

I had just come out of the second alley into the third, about to turn toward the car, when the shooting started.

Not one shot. Not two. It was a burst of automatic fire.

My breath stopped. I was afraid. I was very afraid. But the first thought that went through my head like a bullet was Bahram. Where was Bahram?

There was screaming. I couldn't get to the car. I turned back and ran toward the main street to find him.

Prologue · The Eighth of January

As I got close to the main street, I froze. Several people were lying in the street, covered in blood. And a lot of people were running west along it. I guessed the gunfire was coming from the east. I pressed myself against a wall to see what was happening.

And that was when I saw that in the alley I was standing in, the kids were going down too. But this time it seemed to be coming from above, from the roofs of the apartment buildings, down onto them.

What was this?

Someone went past me with his face bloodied. Someone went past with another person slung over his shoulder. Someone else... What can I say. I saw things my pen is ashamed to put on paper.

A crowd came into that same alley and ran toward the far end of it. They shouted at me too: "Run! They've brought the DShK [a heavy machine gun called Degtyaryova-Shpagina Krupnokaliberny]!"

Prologue · The Eighth of January

I don't know what state I was in. I just turned back toward the car. My brain wasn't working. I had told myself the worst they would do was birdshot. But the fragments scattered across that road looked nothing like what birdshot would have left behind.

When I got to the car I opened the door and sat down. I didn't know what to do. I reached into the glovebox for my phone.

And that was the moment I realized Bahram's phone wasn't there.

We each had a key, as a precaution, so whoever got there first could start the engine and be ready to leave. The instant my eye fell on the empty place where Bahram's phone had been, something in me settled. I thought, Good, then. He had come. He had taken his phone. He must have gone looking for me. I called him, but his phone was off. I thought he must be out looking for me and in a little while he would turn it on and call.

Prologue · The Eighth of January

I tried to close my eyes and rest in the car. But the sound of the shooting was getting closer by the minute.

Half past ten came and went. Bahram didn't. I called several more times. No answer. My phone rang; it was my mother. I didn't pick up. I didn't want her worrying, and I didn't want her hearing gunfire on the line.

I was in the middle of all that when two young women threw themselves against the car, crying. I opened the door. They jumped in. One of them had been shot in the arm and was sobbing. The other one, in a voice shaking with fear, said, "Sir, I'm begging you, get us to a hospital. The hospital's close. I'm begging you."

Prologue · The Eighth of January

I started the engine right away and set off through the crowd and the back alleys toward the hospital. The girl said, "Sir, don't go near it. It's better if you're not with us. It's dangerous for you." I said, "No. Let me take you in." But they wouldn't have it. A little before we reached the hospital they got out and walked away and were lost in the dark.

That night I came home without Bahram.

Guilt and fear had a hold on every part of me, like a cold hand. Had I brought him? No, he had brought me. But what difference did that make? We had gone together and I had come back alone. I didn't know what to tell his family. I had to do something. No matter how many times I called, there was no answer. The phone was off, all the way off.

And from that night began days that I will never forget if I live to be a hundred.

Prologue · The Eighth of January

One day passed. Two. There was no news. The Sepah (the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, or IRGC) had retreated into silence, the way it always does: the kind of silence that is a thousand times worse than any news, because inside it you are hoping and dying at the same time and you don't know which one to hold on to. His mother put on her chador every morning and went out: from this police station to that garrison, from this hospital to that medical examiner's office. And every evening she came back empty-handed. And every day, I was beside her.

What I saw in those two days may be beyond any pen. But it has to be said, and said with everything you have, or we become part of the same silence.

At first they told us: go to the hospital, the list is at the security office. The security office said there was no list; go around to the back alley. We went around to the back alley.

Prologue · The Eighth of January

The morgue was full. They had laid the bodies on the ground in the alley, in rows, one behind the other, under sheets and blankets and whatever had come to hand. Some of them had only a piece of cardboard. Water was coming out from under a door and running between the rows. An agent stood a little way off repeating one sentence: no photographs. No names, no directions. Just: no photographs.

And the mothers were there. They would bend down, lift the corner of a sheet, look, put the sheet back where it had been, and move on to the next one. Nobody screamed. That was the strangest thing in that alley, the silence. As if everyone had understood that making a sound meant you were next.

The next day they said not here; go to some shed outside the city. We went. It was a big metal shed with a sliding door. When you went in, the air wasn't cold; that one thing was enough to tell you what was happening. The bodies weren't in rows. They were on top of each other. On top of each other. Like freight.

Prologue · The Eighth of January

And people were moving them with their own hands. A father would take a young man he didn't know by the arm and pull the body aside to see what lay underneath. A woman was kneeling, turning the body of a girl she didn't know, slowly, with both hands so she could see her face; and when she saw it wasn't hers, she ran a hand over that girl's hair, like someone apologizing to somebody else's child, and went on to the next one.

That day I saw people who, to find their own child, had to move other people's children out of the way. The people of this country were made to lift bodies off one another to find their own.

Some had numbers written on their foreheads or forearms in marker. Some had no number at all. Bahram's mother searched that whole shed. To the last one. And then she came outside, sat down on the curb at the side of the road, and said, "He wasn't there." That was all. And I didn't know whether, in that moment, I was supposed to be glad.

Prologue · The Eighth of January

The world heard only a number in those days. And a number has no smell. A number doesn't have that alley in it. It doesn't have that shed. It doesn't have that woman who stroked the hair of somebody else's daughter and walked on.

It was the third day when the first message came.

It was late afternoon and we were sitting at his mother's house when my phone buzzed. An unknown number. I opened the message. It said:

Tell Mom not to worry about me. I'm alive and in one piece. It'll take a while, but I'm coming back.

My hand shook. I read it once, then ten times. This was how he talked. That same Mom, just the way he always said it. I held the phone out to his mother. That exhausted woman read those few words and broke down crying, but this time it was joy. When I tried to call the number, both phones were off: his and the other one. I was lost. But that night we tied our hearts to a maybe.

Prologue · The Eighth of January

The next day, out in the yard, out of his mother's sight, I was sitting with Bahram's father and uncle and we were stuck on one thing: what do we do with this message? Go to the police and tell them, in case it's a thread to pull on? Or wait? And what an ugly feeling that waiting was. Because there was no one to turn to, and no law that would protect us or defend Bahram. The lawmaker was himself the one killing our young. And only that morning we had seen on Iran International that in those two nights alone more than twelve thousand people had been killed, a figure that turned out later to be very, very far below the truth.

It was in the middle of all this that the second message came.

This time it was a short message. Cryptic:

The roof. That money that's gone now. What a night that was, the night we were thinking about getting even.

Prologue · The Eighth of January

I read it several times to be sure what it was saying. I called again; again both phones were off. But when I thought about it a little, I understood what it meant. And something in me settled: this was Bahram himself. It couldn't be anyone else.

Because in the whole world only two people had that memory: him and me. One night we had been sitting on the roof of Agha Bozorg's house; we got a small fire going and we were smoking hookah. And it was there that Bahram, for the first and last time, broke down and told me something he had never told anyone.

Prologue · The Eighth of January

He had been walking around like a dead man for months. That night I found out why. He had ordered fabric from China to sell in the bazaar and build up the capital for a shop. First they told him the ship had taken on water and the cargo was lost. Then it came out that this was a lie; customs itself had pocketed the cargo. They hit him with a fine of three times the value of the goods, and in the end some IRGC stooges confiscated all of it, acting as if they were doing him a great favor, and got more money out of him on top. His whole capital was gone: capital that had been his mother's gold, sold, in secret. And out of shame he had told no living soul. Only I knew. And that night, on that roof, we sat and swallowed our anger at this country until in the end, like two young men at the end of their rope, we thought about getting even: about the day they would pay for it.

And that night, no one else was with us. No one. So that message could only have been from Bahram himself. And in that moment, in the middle of all that fear and grief, I was happy. Because it meant Bahram was still alive somewhere.

Prologue · The Eighth of January

Until the day the phone rang and everything fell apart.

They told us Bahram had been in Sheiban prison this whole time.

Sheiban. That silent torture chamber of Ahvaz, beyond the world's gaze, whose name had sent a shudder through us Khuzestanis for years: what they had done a generation ago at Kahrizak in Tehran was being done this time in our own city. So Bahram, all these days, hadn't been on the run and hadn't been in hiding. He had been there. Which meant those messages... No. My brain couldn't take it. He had texted only a few days ago. How could that be?

And then the messages stopped.

Prologue · The Eighth of January

Two days, three days, nothing came. And that silence was more frightening than any message, because a vile thought crept into my mind: what if he had been alive until only a few days ago? What if at the very moment he was texting me he was still breathing somewhere, in a cell, and then...? I didn't even want to think about that one. But the thought wouldn't leave me alone. And that became the question I still have no answer to: did they take Bahram's life that night in the street, or later, in the silence of the prison?

And then those few days of wrangling began: days whose shame will stay on this regime's forehead forever. To release the body, they wanted money. Money for the bullet. Meaning we had to pay the price of the very round that had gone into Bahram's body. A mother who had worked herself to the bone for this son all her life now had to count out banknotes to get his lifeless body back.

Prologue · The Eighth of January

I couldn't go. I couldn't have seen that and stayed on my feet; and to be honest, there was my own fear too, of having my name written down somewhere. Bahram's father went. That old man went alone to the medical examiner's office in Ahvaz, and saw his son's body, and identified it. When he came back he wasn't the man he had been. As if something in him had died in that cold room too.

On the day of the burial, they put limits even on saying goodbye.

They allowed no more than ten people at the grave. Ten. For a boy half the city loved. An officer stood at a distance, counting. There were ten of us, silent, and the fresh earth, and nothing else.

We gave Bahram to the ground. And I thought that at least it was over. That from here on this wound only had to grow old.

But on the way back from the grave, while the dirt of it was still under my fingernails, my phone buzzed.

Prologue · The Eighth of January

One message. From that same unknown number. It said:

I know they only let ten of you stand at the grave today. You were one of them. Thank you for coming, Aram.

My blood ran cold.

Bahram's body had been laid in the ground an hour before. And this message knew about the burial, about those ten people, about me being there. Which meant either Bahram, in some way beyond my understanding, was still somewhere and could see; or someone had been watching us at that very moment through a camera; or that officer, with Bahram's phone, was playing with me now to find out who to go after next.

That night I sat down to delete my X and Instagram accounts. My finger hovered over the delete button. I didn't press it.

I told myself, now that he is gone, now that he is a javidnam†, what difference does it make? Let them stay, even if they are nothing but keepsakes that take me apart joint by joint every few nights.

Prologue · The Eighth of January

> † Javidnam: built from Persian javid, "everlasting," and nam, "name." The word this book uses, in place of "martyr," for those who gave their lives in Iran's uprisings.

On those nights, when I couldn't sleep, I would open Bahram's Instagram: a page still sitting there, untouched, like a room whose owner is going to walk in any second.

And there, for the first time, I really looked at it. All the things I had smiled at for years and never taken seriously. Photographs of the Crown Prince, dozens of them. Photographs of Iran in its flourishing days. And underneath all of them, one phrase that seemed to have come straight out of Bahram's heart: Javid Shah.

And that night I understood something I hadn't understood until then. I had been this boy's closest friend for years, and I had never once properly asked what exactly he was living for. What that light in his eye was for. And now, what he had died for.

Prologue · The Eighth of January

Bahram had given his life for something I didn't even really understand. And I couldn't bear that.

So I decided to find out. I went to the only person who could lay the whole picture out for me: someone who had lived on this soil and through its history and knew the Pahlavi name not from a book but through his own life. I went to Agha Bozorg.

And what he told me over those months is what I am writing here, now, for you. I am writing it because Bahram once told me, on the roof of Agha Bozorg's house, that if he were ever gone, I should entrust the truth to someone I had faith in.

And I still haven't found that person. So I am entrusting it to all of you.