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The man got inside his car and started the engine. Amir told me in a hurry, “I’ll call you later tonight, Maziar. They have staged a coup. Votes are rigged, ballot boxes are missing around the country, and Ministry of Interior computers have been hacked. We don’t know what exactly has happened. But one thing we know is that there’s been a coup. We have to go now. You have to go now. I don’t think you were followed. But we have to move. They may raid this office at any time.”

Amir got into the car, then rolled down the window. “Mousavi will have a press conference tonight,” he said. “Someone will call you in an hour or so.” With that, the car sped down the street.

I tried to push aside my feelings about what Amir was saying—my fears about what might be happening in my nation—and do my job.

Like many other journalists, I had planned to spend part of the night, after the polls closed, at the Ministry of Interior, where the votes were being counted. But at eight P.M., when I arrived at the ministry headquarters in Jihad Square, the streets around it were blocked by hundreds of policemen and officers from the anti-riot unit, fully armed with pistols and high-voltage clubs. I got out of Mr. Roosta’s car and approached a policeman at a checkpoint in the square. After I showed him my press card, the policeman politely asked me to wait and went to speak to his superior. He came back and apologized, explaining that no journalists from the foreign press were allowed inside.

Unusually for June in Tehran, it suddenly started to rain. The rain made the anti-riot policeman’s knee and elbow pads look shiny. I tried to insist that I be allowed in, and had begun explaining that I had reported on elections in Iran in the past and was always allowed into the ministry, when an anti-riot commander approached us. His face was hidden behind a plastic shield, shiny from the rain. He pushed me toward Mr. Roosta’s car, then beat its hood with his club.

“Berin gomshin!” he yelled at me and Mr. Roosta. “Get lost!” He pointed the club at me. “If you stay one more minute koonet mizaram, madar jendeh,” he threatened. “I’ll fuck you up the ass, you motherfucker.” Angry and upset, and soaking wet from the rain, I got back in the car and told Mr. Roosta to take me to my mother’s house. Later, I would be very grateful that I had not pressed the issue. I learned that many protestors were arrested and kept in the basement of the Ministry of Interior that night. They were beaten and raped with clubs by the same anti-riot police who had threatened to sodomize me.

When I arrived at my mother’s house, she was sitting quietly in front of the television with her cousin Jafar. They were eating sunflower seeds, and the plate in front of them was stacked with shells.

“Is he going to win again?” my mother asked me sadly, without taking her eyes off the television.

“It seems so,” I answered.

Jafar, who was in his seventies and was usually very mild-mannered, shook his head, a look of disgust on his face. “Khamenei would never have allowed Mousavi to get elected,” he said. “He doesn’t want a president. He wants a servant like Ahmadinejad. Mousavi would be his own man and would stand up to Khamenei. They only allowed Mousavi to run to stir people’s emotions and make them show up at the polls so they can say they are a popular regime.”

As the presenters on the state television shamelessly praised Khamenei and what they called Iran’s “Islamic democracy,” a small panel at the top right corner of the screen showed the number of votes for each candidate. Ahmadinejad’s numbers were rising dramatically. Mousavi and the other two candidates, Karroubi and Rezaei, were not even shown to be winning in their own places of birth. If these results were true, they were an unprecedented development in Iranian politics.

I couldn’t bear to watch. I lay down on my bed and called Paola. I needed to hear her voice and talk about my homecoming, to tell her how much I’d been dreaming about lying beside her and kissing her