Ali decided to try the shortcut anyway. Their parents would be able to find their own way through the snarl, and they’d meet up again at the home they were being chaperoned to.
Theirs wasn’t the only car to ditch the main streets for the alleyways. Traffic was still heavy, but at least moved forward by yards instead of mere inches. For almost ten minutes, they weaved and wound through one side street after another before coming to a full stop on a one-way alley just south of Esfandiar.”
Ali switched off the car.
“We’re low on gas,” he explained.
The night’s heat began to seep into their air-conditioned bubble. Sarah tried to distract herself by flipping down the sun visor and examining herself in the mirror. The makeup artist had done a good job. Sarah liked how she’d used shading and false eyelashes to make her small slanted eyes look so much bigger. With her mother’s eyes and her father’s flat nose, Sarah had an almost East Asian look, like that Japanese Iranian girl, Roxana, who’d been jailed for spying.
She flipped up the sun visor and loosened her chador to let some air in. Sarah had never been a particularly sweaty girl. Even in black coverings on a simmering August day, a bit of dampness under her arms was all her body produced. Tonight, however, she seemed to be suffocating in rivers of perspiration. The soaked silk of her corset wrapped around her like a boa constrictor intent on squeezing the breath out of her, and the awkward satin chador added another layer of insulation hugging the heat to her body. She envied Ali, who had not only shed his suit jacket but also rolled up his sleeves and undone the top buttons on his shirt.
The muggy air was made more oppressive by the fact that they were hopelessly stuck in this narrow alleyway with cars and buildings pressing against them from all sides, blocking any conceivable escape route. For a moment, Sarah wondered if she might faint.
She was distracted by the sight of a young woman hurrying in their direction from up ahead. The girl didn’t wear a chador but had a black maghnaeh head covering, the type Sarah had worn in high school, that was paired with a black, relatively long manteau worn over jeans and white tennis shoes.
Sarah wondered whether the girl was a driver who’d abandoned her trapped car in frustration. But why was she breathing so heavily, moving in such a hurry, and looking over her shoulder so frequently? And then, suddenly, she wasn’t the only one. Dozens of young people were now moving swiftly through the alleyway, turning sideways to squeeze between vehicles, leaping over hoods, and maneuvering the mashup of cars like water over a pebbled surface.
With a jolt of adrenaline, Sarah realized they were afraid. They were running from something. Or someone.
It didn’t take long to identify their pursuers. Looking further up the street, Sarah could see the black-clad riot police, batons swinging, moving methodically down the alleyway.
As the police came closer, the stream of runners became eddied and confused. The girl Sarah had first seen, who’d run past them seconds earlier, passed them again but in the opposite direction.
“Ali, what are they yelling?” Sarah asked.
Ali cracked the window to listen, but visual clues proved to be more enlightening. Through the rear window, Sarah saw a new group of police rounding the corner into the alleyway from the southern end. The demonstrators were trapped.
The newlyweds watched in silence as the young people’s faces registered their situation and they began searching the walls, the alleyway, the skies, for some escape. Sarah watched them pound on doors—some of which eventually opened—begging for admittance. A garbage dumpster became sudden home to three young men, while others tried to hide under cars. The girl in the black manteau and maghnaeh simply stood still in front of their Benz, resignation mixed with defiance settling on her face. She saw Sarah watching and nodded her head slightly in greeting.
The girl was beautiful. Her light-green eyes shone in the dark much as Sadegh’s had just an hour ago. But hers were further accentuated by well-sculpted eyebrows, cheekbones so prominent they left hollow spaces beneath them, and perfectly shaped lips. How could someone so exquisitely beautiful have gotten mixed up with these rioters? Sarah felt certain it must have been a mistake or a bad twist of fate. Maybe she was in love with one of the young men. Or maybe she was just in the wrong place at the wrong time. All Sarah knew with absolute certainty was that the girl didn’t deserve whatever the security forces would be meting out. The panic that the girl refused to show began to rise in Sarah’s own throat.
“Ali,” Sarah whispered with urgency, “let her in the car!”
Her husband’s eyes were wide as he looked at her. “What? Are you sure?”
“Yes, yes! Hurry, oh God, please hurry!”
Ali unlocked the doors, and Sarah used her eyes and eyebrows to direct the girl, who was still looking at her calmly, toward the car’s back door. The girl took a moment to comprehend the lifeline that had been extended before dropping to the ground, crawling along the length of the Benz to reach the back door, and then clambering inside.
“Mersi!” she whispered.
“Stay low,” Ali warned the girl. “The windows are tinted, but someone still might be able to see you.”
Outside, the scene proceeded with surprising calm. The police at the south end of the alley were sweeping the operation, flushing the runners out of their hiding places and prodding them forward. At the north end of the alley, their comrades were lining the young men and women up against the wall and escorting groups of them back toward the intersection where, Sarah assumed, police minibuses were waiting to take them to Evin Prison.
The southern line of police moved northward, ever closer to their car. Sarah looked to the back seat and saw the girl crouched down with Ali’s jacket over her face. She wondered how well the inside of their car was concealed and whether it would be obvious that the girl was one of the demonstrators. She wondered, with a start, whether the danger she’d feared for the girl was now a possibility for herself and Ali. Surely, even if they found the girl, the police would realize they were simply newlyweds on their way home and had nothing to do with these rioters. Perhaps they could claim they hadn’t even noticed her crawling in to begin with? Was it too late and too cruel to ask the girl to leave? What had she been thinking, Sarah admonished herself, to insert herself and her husband into this mess?
Black sleeves and baton-wielding hands could be seen out of the driver’s-side window. A twin pair of sleeves, hands, and batons passed on the right. Both were followed by more of the same as the police line streamed around their car. Sarah tensed, waiting for a rap on the window or door that would indicate one of these black-clad men had noticed the girl.
But they all moved on without stopping.
Relieved, Sarah released the breath she hadn’t realized she’d been holding.
“Raftan,” Ali announced with his own exhale. “They’re gone.”