Free Zendegi by Greg Egan Page A

dealings with each other; when Sandra Knight broke Shokouh’s story in Paris she’d kept Martin right out of the picture, but the authorities would automatically have stepped up their surveillance of all foreign journalists.
     
    They passed Cinema Europa, then Cinema Hafez. The Iranian stars gazed down coolly from their billboards, offering neither encouragement nor disapproval. Ahead of the marchers, a long stretch of asphalt was utterly deserted, empty of cars as far as the eye could see; even with the chanting crowd around him, Martin had a moment of end-of-the-world goose-flesh. Police were following the march, but they remained at the edges and he hadn’t seen them administer so much as a provocative shove. Perhaps the authorities had decided to allow people to let off steam, unmolested, in one last show of defiance before Jabari’s resignation was used to draw a line under everything that had come before.
     
    Martin and Behrouz moved through the crowd, gathering quotes. ‘Jabari’s resignation means nothing,’ one man opined. ‘It won’t bring down rents. It won’t give my son a job.’
     
    ‘But how would a referendum help the economy?’ Martin pressed him.
     
    ‘Not quickly,’ the man conceded. ‘But it would open the door to different ideas, not the same group holding power year after year. The hardliners call everyone else un-Islamic, but Ansari is not un-Islamic. I asked him myself, would he ban the headscarf in some places, like they do in Turkey. He said no, it’s up to each woman if she wants to wear it or not.’
     
    Other people expressed similar views. They were tired of the stale, self-perpetuating clique that clung to power by wrapping itself in claims of piety. If throwing out the veto powers of the Guardian Council - or abolishing the Council entirely - was the only route to change, so be it. The voters themselves were perfectly capable of rejecting candidates who would harm the nation; as one woman put it, ‘We aren’t infants who need the bones picked out of our food.’
     
    ‘Rast! Injaa rast!’ Mahnoosh shouted urgently, raising her arms and gesturing. Right, here! She was steering the march off Jomhuri-ye-Eslami, into a side-street. She was not especially tall, but her voice carried, and her instructions were heeded and echoed back through the ranks. As the crowd squeezed into the narrower road Martin approached her.
     
    ‘What’s happening? I thought we were going straight to Ferdowsi Street.’
     
    Mahnoosh held up her phone, displaying an image of a train-carriage packed with militia, some of them carrying guns. A sign on the platform beside the carriage said Imam Khomeini Station - one stop south of Sa’di Station. If the marchers stuck to their original route, they would be approaching Sa’di Station just as the armed Basijis emerged from the Metro.
     
    Martin exchanged a glance with Behrouz; did they want to break from the march and check out Sa’di? Martin was tempted, but then decided it was better to stay with the crowd and see how they fared.
     
    He said, ‘So you’ve got a network of people with these phones . . . in all the Metro stations, on street corners?’ Mahnoosh responded with an irritated scowl, as if to say: Of course, but don’t expect me to spell it out.
     
    She said, ‘Excuse me, I have work to do.’ She stepped out of the flow and stood at the roadside, shouting instructions, ensuring that nobody in her charge got confused and failed to take the detour. Martin made a mental note to try to get a copy of the picture of the carriage from her later. This wasn’t the time to beg for it, but his editor would kill him if he didn’t get that image eventually.
     
    The detour, Saf Street, was reserved for pedestrians, so the marchers had no cars or motorbikes to contend with, just groups of startled shoppers and a couple of vendors selling balloon animals. After the run of men’s shoe shops opposite the Majlis, this whole street seemed to be