Free Children of Paradise by Laura Secor Page A

the group of intellectuals inspired by Shariati. It was a radical group, both Islamist and egalitarian, but it was occupied mainly with producing newspapers, a voluminous literature penned by an industrious few.
    Alireza had not vested himself in history only to pass his youth in the Shiraz bazaar. In 1979, Khomeini ordered the creation of a vast volunteer militia, called the Basij, to be made up of men above and below the age of conscription, as well as of women. Alireza was still seventeen in 1980, a year younger than draft age for the regular army, and so he reported to a training camp for the Basij. The instruction was part physical, part ideological. The war with Iraq, Alireza believed, transcended the factional politics that divided him from the Hezbollahis who populated the Basij. But those running the training camp saw things differently. One recognized Alireza and accused him of infiltrating the Basij only to spy on it. Alireza was expelled.
    He joined the navy. To enter the military during wartime allowed him an honorable discharge from that other war—the one among political adversaries who saw their young followers as cannon fodder. From the navy base, politics unfolded vaguely and afar. Alireza and the other enlisted men could not go into the city or mix with civilians, and they read only the official newspapers. Later he would imagine that if he had not been on that base in 1981, he might have been arrested or worse. Instead, he shipped out to the front just in time to see the end of the war’s decisive battle at Khorramshahr.
    It was Khorramshahr, just fifteen kilometers north of Abadan on the Shatt al-Arab, that Iraq first besieged in September 1980. The city fell after thirty-six days of heavy artillery pounding, a battle that quickly became revolutionary legend as a ragged Basij and Revolutionary Guard force unsuccessfully defended the city from within its mosque. Under Iraqi occupation, Khorramshahr was a ghost town, half razed, graffitied, and bullet-scarred. Iraqi soldiers used photos of Khomeini for target practice. It wasthe fall of 1981 before the Iranian armed forces broke the yearlong siege of Abadan and then, at the end of a monthlong campaign in May of 1982, regained Khorramshahr.
    Alireza arrived in Khorramshahr on the last day of battle. He stayed a month in the broken city. With Khorramshahr, Iran had successfully repulsed the Iraqi invasion just a year and a half after it began. Khomeini was in a good position to wrest a favorable peace from the Iraqis, who might have slunk back to Baghdad without further hope of annexing Iranian territory. Iran might have turned, then, to its internal troubles: political violence, social unrest, an economy in free fall. But that was not Khomeini’s choice. Instead, the Islamic Republic went on the offensive, resolving to topple the Baathist regime of Saddam Hussein. Six more years of war would ravage the two countries.
    Alireza returned to the navy base, and from there to civilian life. He had other obligations. His mother had fallen and broken her pelvis. At the hospital in Shiraz, Alireza was certain she would be neglected, a poor woman with little recourse. He would need to sit at her bedside to be sure she got proper care. But since the revolution, the hospitals were segregated by sex, and he was not technically permitted to stay in the women’s section. And so he struck a deal with the nurses, one that allowed him to split his time between his father’s shop and his mother’s bedside, where he sat reading Gabriel García Márquez—and tending to all the patients on the ward when they buzzed, while the nurses talked and laughed among themselves.
    One day, by chance, Alireza ran into the mosque librarian who had introduced him to The Little Black Fish when he was a child. The librarian was surprised to learn that the pious boy who had devoured books with such intensity now worked in the bazaar. The librarian served on one of the committees that