City of Lies Read Online Free Page A

engineering. From their first conversation, they were both struck by the inevitability of what was going to happen. In many ways they were similar: serious and bruised by life. Arezou told Dariush that both her parents had been killed during the revolution for being political activists. She was guarded and evasive when it came to ordinary questions about her family. Other students found her cold; Dariush was intrigued. They approached their inchoate love cautiously. When she finally submitted, Dariush was utterly captivated. He had found his soulmate.
    They had just made love when Arezou first told him that she was a member of the Group, the MEK. Dariush had sat up in shock. He had heard the MEK were a bunch of crazies, just as bad as the mullahs, and that they were loathed by all.
    Dariush argued with Arezou against them, but she became indignant and defensive, ranting at him. Even though he dis-agreed with what she said – that the MEK were freedom fighters, that everyone in Iran was rooting for them and that they were the only credible dissident group – he could not help but be impressed by her knowledge, by her grasp of history and her ability to reel out facts. Arezou began to talk of the
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more often. It would always end in an argument. She tried to persuade him to go to meetings; he always refused.
    One evening, in the middle of cooking supper, she told him it was over. He had burst out crying. She told him that unless he respected the cause, and accepted it was a part of her life, she could not be with him. She spoke with absolute dispassion. ‘This is who I am. If you love me, you have to accept all of me.’ Dariush had no choice but to say yes; he promised to try.
    It had taken another few months for Arezou to reveal the whole truth to Dariush. That her parents were not dead, but were living in Camp Ashraf in Iraq. They had been forced to separate from each other by the leader of the MEK, Massoud Rajavi. He had ordered a mass divorce, part of an ‘ideological revolution’ that Massoud and his wife Maryam had launched for members to prove their loyalty. Hundreds were forced to cut ties from all they loved, and that included legally divorcing their spouses. Massoud had even demanded members in Camp Ashraf hand over their wedding rings. Arezou was only a few years old at the time and had been living in the camp with her parents. She was immediately sent away to a ‘group house’ in Washington where a distant relative worked. Arezou’s parents had long cut off contact with anyone who did not agree with the
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. Arezou had been brought up in a big suburban home run by her father’s second cousin. The second cousin took care of three other children, all victims of the mass divorce.
    Instead of being angry that Arezou had lied to him, Dariush was grateful that she had entrusted him with her secrets. The revelation brought them closer together. It also helped him appreciate what the Group had done for her.
    Dariush had turned against his religion in his teens, blaming it for the revolution that had ruined their lives; all he saw in it was a list of restrictions, of what one was not allowed to do. But Arezou painted a different picture: one of real social justice and where women had equal rights. She told him how there were women fighters in Camp Ashraf who drove tanks and fired weapons. Dariush was fascinated.
    The gun-runner spotted Dariush immediately. ‘You don’t half stick out. You look like a spy. Follow me.’
    Dariush had followed Kian’s instructions and had arranged to meet the gun-runner outside a fruit juice shop on Haft-e Tir Square, midtown Tehran. It was a symbolic meeting place; Dariush wondered whether the gun-runner was a member. Haft-e Tir was the 28 th of June, the day in 1981 when the Chief Justice Ayatollah Beheshti and seventy-five high-ranking officials of the regime were blown up by an MEK-planted bomb in the square. For Dariush, Tehran’s streets were dotted with victories,