• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 1364 0

later on, the regime seemed to relent, and even to encourage the trip. In the end, twenty-odd members accepted the invitation. They decided to hire a bus for their journey. Accounts differ here as to the details—some claim to have suspected something fishy was going on from the start; others accuse one another of being complicit in the plot. But what all agree is that on the morning of the trip, twenty-one writers made their way to the bus station. Some found it a little odd that the bus was not on time and that the driver had been changed. Others noticed that certain colleagues had reneged and decided not to go, on the very morning of the trip.

Finally, they were on their way. The journey went smoothly until after midnight, or some say until around two in the morning, when all of the passengers were asleep—all but one single insomniac, who noticed that the bus had stopped and the driver had disappeared. He glanced out the window and saw that the bus had stopped at the tip of a very high precipice. At this point, he ran—all the time shouting to wake up the others—to the front of the bus, got behind the wheel and turned the bus around. The other passengers, waking startled from their sleep, filed off the bus in a certain commotion, only to be met by members of security, who were there with their Mercedes-Benzes and helicopters. The passengers were taken to different interrogation outposts, and after being detained and expressly advised not to say a word, they were released. The next day, the whole of Tehran had heard the news. Apparently there had been a plot to push the bus over the cliff and claim it was an accident.

There were many jokes about this incident, as there were about similar events. Later that night, on our way home, Bijan and I discussed the writers’ terrible ordeal. It’s so strange, he said. Usually when you talk about most of these writers, it’s because of your frustrations with their ideological stance towards literature, but something like this makes all that irrelevant. No matter how much you might disagree with some of these people or think of them as bad writers, compassion will ultimately overtake all other considerations.

Not long after that, we were awoken early one morning by a friend who was married to one of the founders of the writers’ association. Her voice was frightened. She wanted to know if we could call the BBC and let them know what was going on. She and her husband had been forced to leave Tehran for a while until things cooled down, and she wanted to know if their son could stay with us for a few days.

This incident was preceded by many others: the attack on a small party given by a German consul at his house for intellectuals and writers, and their arrest; the disappearance of a well-known leftist journalist, the editor of a popular magazine who had been arrested with others and kept after they were released. Later it was said that he had left for Germany, where his wife and family lived, but he never arrived there. The Iranian government claimed he had left Iran and that the Germans were keeping him. The German government denied the allegations. The international hue and cry surrounding his disappearance helped keep the matter in the public eye. Then one day he appeared in the Tehran airport with a strange story about having gone to Germany and from there to a third country. A few days later, he wrote an open letter in which he described his tortures at the hands of the regime and he was promptly rearrested. Finally, he was released after much international pressure. Shortly afterward, an Iranian publisher who had helped him and other dissident writers left his home and never returned. His body was dumped in a deserted place on the outskirts of Tehran, like those of so many other dissidents.

In the mid-nineties, in an effort to reach out to Europe, a number of Western intellectuals were invited to Iran. Paul Ricoeur came for a series of lectures. He gave three talks; for every one of them, audiences spilled out into the hall and stairs. Some time afterward, V. S. Naipaul came to