Content Warnings (click to reveal)
Depicted: death, guns, political violence
On Trial
Ali had been holding his breath for forty years. Maybe that’s why he had come to the tribunal that day. To exhale. Why had he come? He was happier at home, where his evening ritual of falling asleep in his favourite grey armchair watching YouTube kept him clear of other people. It was his daughter who had bought the airfare, pressed the printed confirmation into his hands at dinner.
It was Nika who was to blame.
‘Baba, goosh kon. Listen. It’s time. If you won’t talk to me, talk there.’
‘But–’
‘I’ve already emailed to let them know. Your accommodation is booked, too. You don’t have to worry about anything aside from getting on the plane.’
Something about her voice, the way it cut through him like steel. Something about the printed ticket. He hated wasting money. He spent his Saturdays collecting bottles to return to recycle centres; he always ate food past its ‘best by’ date, claiming it was ‘use by’ that was more important. He wasn’t someone who changed his mind easily. And yet: daughters.
‘Bashe,’ was all he said, reading across the table for barbari bread.
‘Okay,’ she said. An exhale.
How long had she been holding her breath? Ali had been holding his long before she was born. Long before he met his wife, her mother, in the line for petrol back when they had to queue for it. Nika would probably laugh at the image of her father pushing his Paykan along a busy road because he had underestimated how much fuel he needed to get home. He had never told her this story, and probably never would. He hadn’t even told her about the time they had packed all their possessions into three suitcases and a series of boxes to be shipped over three weeks. As with many of his stories, he found they were better left unspoken.
Forty years ago, Ali had died.
Now, standing in front of the tall glass doors of the tribunal hearing room, he wondered if he even wanted resurrection.
* * *
In 1980, he was a student at Tehran University. The third of a four-year chemical engineering degree. He liked his professors, especially the dean of the faculty: a man with round glasses and a tuft of white hair above both ears. Every time Ali was late to class, which was often, the professor would not chide him. He would simply point to the back of the room and continue in his address in his characteristic Esfahani sing-song lilt. After class, Ali would go up to the lectern and they would spend a few minutes talking. He found himself full of questions, and sometimes his professor had answers for him in the form of Sadi or Hafez proverbs, like his own grandfather. He treasured these few minutes, promised himself he wouldn’t be late all the time and what’s more, he would help his mother around the house. Promises he repeated to himself at night, alone in his bed. Ali’s classes were shut down, on and off, since Khomeini had stepped onto the tarmac back from Paris. By September, Saddam had launched air strikes and Ali packed away his textbooks for good. What was the point?
This question followed him at home, or at the corner store where his eldest brother worked. It followed him throughout his twenties, then his thirties when he became a father, and into his forties when he lost his wife. It made Ali feel tired. More than anything, he wanted to not feel tired. He wanted to tell jokes. Specifically, the kind of fart jokes he and his brothers would tell each other when their mother wasn’t listening. He wanted to tell fart jokes and not have it feel political. On a summer afternoon when they were walking back from the post office, he had once told his wife this. His wife had stopped in the street, by a paperbark tree, resting her hand on the trunk like a soldier. We are Iranian, joonam. Even fart jokes are political.
* * *
He was haunted by memories. He could not unyoke his thoughts from the past. They lived alongside the present-day in his mind—two trains on parallel tracks. He knew if he did not replay certain memories, they would be gone, and he would finally be alone. Replaying the camera roll of regret was Ali’s way of punishing himself. His brothers told him he should be grateful. Especially this eldest, Armin. Their country was enlightened. They had gotten rid of the dictator. They had gotten rid of the secret police. They had wise people in power now. They were free from Western influence. He nodded along, offering only silence in return.
* * *
The first meeting he had gone to with his friend Bahram came a month after his mother died. He read about someone called Karl Marx for the first time in one of these meetings, in the living room of a retired professor. They drank tea and cracked sugar cubes. They spoke quietly and left at different times. Ali had no-one to wait for him at home, so he was always the last to leave. The last time he left the professor’s house, the moon glowed like an orb behind clouds of polluted smoke. He had been told about a mission. The plan was whispered, not written down. He had never held a gun but had promised Bahram he would try.
* * *
Ali had walked from his hotel, down by lake Hofvijver. The hearing was at 11am, and it was not yet 9, so he figured he could spend another hour walking by the water. There were men in grey suits. School groups on outings, speaking in frantic Dutch. One group was heading on an excursion to where was going, too, so he followed them. A lost duckling trailing the pack. As he walked towards the multi-storey building, he allowed his thoughts to wander to the last time he had faced a courtroom. The trial was televised. A banner with clerics’ faces hung overhead. Tapping into the microphone. Test, test. The prosecutor had a pair of half-moon glasses. Together, they acted out a script. The prosecutor asked questions, and he answered them. Occasionally, he would look to the large video camera silently recording his affirmations. A red light. Blinking.
-Do you support the Republic?
-Yes.
-Do you pray?
-Yes.
-Are you Muslim?
-Yes.
The other inmates had prepared him for these questions. Then the question he was not expecting.
-Would you participate in the execution of another prisoner?
* * *
With one answer, two men died that day.
* * *
‘Yes, my name is Ali Hashemi.’
He spoke in English, but a translator was sitting on the podium next to a man in an even greyer suit to the ones he had seen by the lake.
‘Are you Ali Hashemi, from Melbourne, date of birth 19 September 1953?’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘Ali, you have come a long way. Welcome to The Trial. As you can see,’ he gestured to the small crowd who had gathered in the stands, ‘the proceedings are open and recorded. Do you object?’
‘No, sir.’ In 1981, his trial had been recorded and television—into jail cells, into living rooms.
‘What brought you here today?’
‘My daughter.’
‘Your daughter?’
‘She’s my only one.’
* * *
Ali had never seen a gun, let alone felt its cold weight, when the guard led him off the minibus, pulled off the handkerchief covering his eyes and put one in his hands. A lump swelled in his throat. He had said yes to the judge because his fellow inmates said to agree with everything. To be seen to be cooperating.
‘I thought the judge was bluffing,’ he had told his wife once, the only time he had ever talked about it.
‘I held the trigger but I did not pull. I did not pull.’ He did not cry, not when he told her—or now, to the judge. Strength meant holding on to memories, replaying them in your mind, over and over, until you were so tired you fell asleep watching YouTube. He wanted them to think he was strong.
* * *
‘I saw the line of people in front of me, standing in a row. Men, and to my surprise, women. Some bodies were slumped. I saw an older woman in a chador whispering. I could not hear what she said. The guard lifted the handkerchief. There was sweat on my brow. I remember his hands felt so cold; I remember thinking that was strange. He guided my hand to the trigger and I pulled it.’
* * *
The lawyer asked him if he needed to stop.
‘No,’ he stumbled, putting his hands in his lap, ‘All I wanted to add was this: I did not think they were telling the truth. I thought the guards were bluffing. We had no choice. I am so sorry.’
The room was silent. Only the tapping of keyboards. He had expected an exhale, but it didn’t come.
‘I have no further questions,’ the lawyer said.
‘We are now finished.’ The judge’s temples were greying. He gestured behind Ali, where a row of journalists were hunched over their notebooks, furiously writing.
‘As you know, the outcome of this tribunal is not binding in law. This is a cathartic space, a space for restitution. We will be publishing a full report that we hope more people read, to find out what happened during the mass arrests and executions in the early 1980s in Iran. You may stay for the rest of proceedings.’
He did not know what else to say. The judge, this man with hair as grey as his own, had put into words what he had feared: that none of this was real.
Slipping wordlessly out into the Dutch winter, he hugged his jacket tight against his chest. He knew she would be sleeping, but there was only one person he wanted to speak to now. Only Nika could talk to him about her day, and he of his, and he knew he would feel lighter when he told her what happened. Maybe the kind of lightness he had only felt before the universities had shut down, before he had seen the line-up that day, before the course of his life had curved into the dark. Nika was the same age now as he had been in those shadow years. He pictured her sitting at her computer, studying for her psychology exam the following day. He continued to walk to the hotel, only this time he knew the way.
* * *
He had left out one detail: on the way back from the line-up, the guards had not put the handkerchief back over their eyes. The guards knew they could no longer see.
* * *
Another detail: the last words he heard before the gun shot was: It’s me, it’s Bahram. Of all the people, of all the days, why did he pretend not to recognise his friend’s voice?
* * *
The dead, he wanted to tell his daughter, stay with us for as long as we say their names. For as long as we remember what they liked for breakfast, or the shape of their eyebrows, or the outline of their frightened eyes. If we don’t think about them, if we don’t say their names out loud, they stay behind wisps of smoke.
It was not enough to live in the moment, Ali thought. It was never enough.
You contain multiple cities in your heart, Nika. We mind the dead along with the living.
Farz Edraki is an Iranian-Australian writer, editor and host of the SBS podcast Queer Renegades. Her writing has featured in Debris Magazine, The Belladonna Comedy, The Age, ABC, Sydney Review of Books, and Growing Up In Country Australia. She has appeared at the Sydney Writers’ Festival, BBC Radio 3’s Contains Strong Language Festival and is currently a PhD candidate at Macquarie University writing on testimonial technique in literature.
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