Zendegi Read online

  Martin flipped through the cover art. It was certainly a richer cue for memory than a mere list of names, but though the images had been endowed with perspective and reflections in some imagined glossy shelf-top, the faux-3D effects made it look like a museum exhibit trying too hard.

  No matter; he had the music itself, and that was the main thing. He’d even diligently backed up everything to an external drive; his laptop could fry itself and these memories would still survive intact.

  He wanted to hear something by Paul Kelly, but he couldn’t make up his mind where to start so he let the software choose. ‘St Kilda to King’s Cross’ filled the headphones; Martin closed his eyes and leant back in the seat, beaming nostalgically. Next came ‘To Her Door’, a song about a break-up and reconciliation. Martin kept smiling, focusing on the power and simplicity of the lyrics, refusing to countenance any connection to his own life.

  Something made a loud crackling noise. He tugged off the headphones, wondering if he was missing an emergency announcement by the pilot. But the plane was silent, save for the engines’ monotonous drone, and he could see a flight attendant chatting calmly with a passenger. Perhaps it had been some kind of electrical interference.

  Halfway through the next song, ‘You Can’t Take It With You’, he heard the crackling sound again. He paused the song, skipped back a few seconds and replayed the same section. The noise was there again, as if it was part of the recording itself. But it didn’t sound like dust on the stylus, a scratch on the vinyl, or some random electronic pollution that had snuck into the circuitry from a mobile phone or fluorescent light. As Kelly’s voice surged it became the noise, as if something mechanical inside the headphones might be scraping against its housing when the sound became too loud. But when Martin replayed the track with the volume turned down two notches, the noise was still there.

  He started playing other tracks at random. His heart sank; about a third of them had the same problem, as if someone had gone through his record collection with a piece of sandpaper. He pictured Liz flipping through the crates in the dark, urged on by the ghost of Peter Cook from Bedazzled. But petty vindictiveness wasn’t her style.

  Haroun said, ‘You seem very angry with that machine. You’re welcome to borrow my laptop if it’s any help.’

  Martin wondered nervously if the obscenities that had been running through his head had remained entirely unvocalised; it didn’t take much erratic behaviour for an overzealous flight marshal to pump you full of horse tranquilliser and lock you in the toilet. ‘That’s very kind of you,’ he replied, ‘but it’s nothing urgent. And I don’t think the problem’s with this laptop.’ He explained what he’d done with his music collection. ‘I checked the first seven or eight albums and everything sounded perfect.’

  ‘May I listen?’

  ‘Sure.’ Martin cued up an example of the strange blemish and passed Haroun the headphones.

  After a moment Haroun gave a smile of grim satisfaction. ‘That’s wave shaping. I’m afraid you’re right: there’s nothing wrong with your playback, it’s part of the recording.’

  ‘Wave shaping?’

  ‘You set the recording level too high.’

  ‘But I checked that! I adjusted the level when I did the first album, and it was fine for at least six more!’

  Haroun said, ‘The signal strength would vary from album to album. Getting the right level for the first few would be no guarantee for all the others.’

  No doubt that was true, but Martin still didn’t understand why the effect was so ruinous. ‘If the level from the turntable was too high for the computer, why doesn’t the recording just . . . fail to be as loud as the original? Just lose some dynamic range?’

  ‘Because when the level is too high,’ Haroun explained patiently, ‘you’re not shrinking the waveform, you’re decapitating it. Once the voltage exceeds the highest value the sound card can represent as data, it can’t take it upon itself to re-scale everything on the fly. It just hits the maximum and draws a plateau there, in place of the true signal’s complicated peaks. And when you truncate a wave like that, not only do you lose detail from the original, you generate noise right across the spectrum.’

  ‘I see.’ Martin accepted the headphones back from him and tried to laugh off the setback. ‘It seems I’ll be paying these starving musicians a few more cents after all. I just can’t believe I wasted so much time and made such a bad job of it.’

  Haroun was silent for a moment, then he said, ‘Let me show you something.’ He booted up his own laptop and summoned a website from his browser’s offline cache. ‘This book is a translation into English of a story in Arabic; it was published in the nineteenth century, so it’s now in the public domain. An American company obtained a copy and scanned it, making it available to the world. Very generous of them, no?’

  ‘I suppose so.’ Martin couldn’t see the screen clearly from where he was sitting, but the title bar read The Slave Girl and the Caliph.

  ‘Optical character recognition isn’t perfect,’ Haroun said. ‘The software can sometimes recognise that there’s been a problem and call on human help to patch things up, but that process isn’t perfect, either. This story is obscure, but my grandfather gave me a copy when I was ten, so I know that the heroine is named Mariam. This digital version, scanned from the English translation, has turned the “r” and “i” in her name into an “n” throughout. Mariam has become Manam - which, other than being an island off the coast of Papua New Guinea, so far as I know means nothing in any language.’

  Martin said, ‘That doesn’t sound like a mistake the translator would have made. Not unless he was in the middle of an opium-smoking competition with Richard Burton.’

  Haroun closed his laptop. ‘I’m sure no human was involved, beyond feeding the book down a chute, along with ten thousand others.’ He was smiling, but Martin could see the frustration in his eyes. He’d probably tried emailing these custodians of culture to put them straight, to no avail, while the grating error had seeped into mirror sites, multiplying irreversibly.

  He gestured at Martin’s own damaged library. ‘With time and care everything could be preserved, but no one really has the patience.’

  ‘I was about to leave the country,’ Martin explained defensively. ‘I had a lot of things to do.’

  Haroun inclined his head understandingly. ‘And why wouldn’t any traveller want to turn their fragile music into something robust and portable? But so many processes are effortless and automatic now that it’s easy to forget that most things in the world still play by the old rules.’

  ‘Yeah.’ Martin had to concede that; having treated the first few albums with care, he’d let himself imagine that the rest would follow as easily as if he’d merely been copying files from one hard drive to another.

  ‘We’re at the doorway to a new kind of world,’ Haroun said. ‘And we have the chance to make it extraordinary. But if we spend all our time gazing at the wonders ahead without remembering where we’re standing right now, we’re going to trip and fall flat on our faces, over and over again.’

  2

  ‘Bidar sho! Agha Martin? Lotfan, bidar sho!’

  Martin stirred, his head throbbing. He squeezed the button for the light on his watch; it was just after two in the morning. He recognised the voice: Omar, his neighbour from downstairs, was banging on the door, pleading with him to wake.

  What was Farsi for fire? Martin had picked up a smattering of Dari - the Afghani dialect of Farsi - when he’d been stationed in Pakistan, but even after two months in Iran, most of it spent working with a professional translator by his side, his Farsi remained rudimentary.

  ‘Aatish?’ he called back. That was fire in Urdu, but he was fairly sure it was the same in both languages.

  ‘Na!’ Omar’s tone was impatient, but not baffled, so at least the question had made sense. ‘Lotfan, ajaleh kon!’ Omar usually spoke English with Martin, but whatever the emergency was it had apparently driven the language fro
m his brain.

  Martin switched on the bedside lamp, got into his trousers and stepped out into the entrance hall of the cramped apartment. When he opened the door, Omar was tinkering with his phone. Martin suppressed a groan of irritation; it had been bad enough in Sydney, but in Tehran nobody could go five minutes without whipping the things out and doing something pointless with them.

  Omar handed the phone to Martin. Sometimes the tinkering wasn’t so pointless: the screen displayed an email message that had just been translated into English by a web service. It took Martin a while to make sense of the mangled syntax, but he suspected that in their present state he and Omar would have needed an hour playing charades to get the same information across.

  There had been an accident on Valiasr Street, one of Tehran’s main thoroughfares. The two drivers, along with two passengers from one of the cars, had been taken to hospital with minor injuries. One of the passengers was Hassan Jabari, a high-ranking jurist and politician. The other passenger’s identity was unknown, but a bystander had filmed the aftermath of the accident on their phone and a still from that movie was embedded in the message.

  Martin squinted at the ill-lit image of a paramedic helping a woman from the wreck. ‘Could that be his wife?’

  Omar roared with laughter; his English hadn’t deserted him completely. The woman was flashily attired, with glittering pendant earrings and a tight-fitting evening gown. Tehran certainly had its Gucci set, and behind closed doors - or the tinted windows and dividing partition of a limousine - even the most respectable woman was no longer bound by the rules of hejab. But looking again at the still, he thought perhaps that was stretching the bounds of probability.

  ‘Okay, so it’s his mistress. Or a prostitute.’ Even so, Martin was a little surprised that Omar and his friends would treat such a revelation with anything more than cynicism. Dozens of young Iranians had told Martin that their rulers were two-faced hypocrites, moralising endlessly in public while they embezzled oil money and lived like kings. One student had shown him a famous cartoon: in the first panel, the despised former Shah cupped his hands beneath a torrent of gold falling from the sky, with just a few stray coins spilling out from between his fingers to reach his subjects below. In the second, a glowering, bearded mullah stood in the Shah’s place - and this time every last coin was caught, with nothing slipping through.

  Omar wiped tears from his eyes. ‘Bebin!’

  Martin looked at the picture again, wondering what he was missing. The woman was statuesque, with striking bone structure - was she a famous actress, or a singer? Perhaps it was just the poor quality of the image, but there was something theatrical, almost mask-like, in the excess of make-up she was wearing—

  ‘Mibinam,’ he said. ‘Mifahmam.’ He understood, now, why Omar had woken him.

  Hassan Jabari, former government prosecutor and current member of the Guardian Council - the body that had declared more than two thousand aspiring candidates for last month’s election to be insufficiently loyal to the principles of Islam - had just been caught in his chauffeured Mercedes Benz in the middle of the night in the company of a glamorous, begowned transsexual.

  ‘Berim be—’ Martin struggled.

  ‘Hospital?’ Omar suggested.

  ‘Dorost,’ Martin agreed.

  Behrouz, Martin’s translator, had taken a fortnight’s leave to visit his parents. With the non-event of the election over and half the country shut down for Noruz, the Persian New Year, Martin was officially on leave himself, but he’d decided to stay in Tehran and catch up on paperwork.

  As they drove into the city, Martin contemplated the task ahead of him with unease. He recoiled from the prospect of treating anyone’s sex life as news - least of all when there was a potential death penalty hanging over the participants - but the email was already circulating, the revelation a fait accompli. The real story now was not Jabari’s behaviour, but the way the regime and the public would respond to the exposure of his hypocrisy.

  ‘We should call him “Hugh Grant” Jabari,’ Omar suggested - rather proudly, as if the time was long overdue for an Iranian celebrity to grab the attention of the international tabloid media.

  ‘I’m pretty sure Hugh Grant was caught with a woman,’ Martin said.

  Omar racked his brain. “‘Forty-Eight Seconds” Jabari.’

  ‘Keep this up and you’ll be hosting the Oscars.’

  Omar owned a shop that sold consumer electronics - and the odd bootleg DVD under the counter. His English had come back to him completely now, but Martin wished he wasn’t so reliant here on Omar’s help. Omar was a partisan player in all this, an unashamed pro-reformist; Martin was grateful for his tip-off, but it would be both naïve and unfair to expect him to act as an impartial colleague, like Behrouz.

  They drove down Taleghani Avenue, past the ‘Den of Espionage’ formerly known as the US Embassy. The walls of the compound were emblazoned with bombastic slogans - helpfully translated into English for the edification of tourists - and a series of murals that included a skull-faced Statue of Liberty that would not have looked out of place on a Metallica album. Even at this hour Tehran’s traffic made Martin nervous, with the ubiquitous Samands and old fume-belching Paykans weaving between lanes without warning, and motorbikes zigzagging into every tiny space that opened up before them.

  As he turned his company Peugeot Pars into the cramped hospital car park he hoped they hadn’t arrived too late. In a perfect Orwellian police state, Jabari’s companion - and every witness to the crash - would already have vanished without a trace, but Tehran was a very long way from Cold War East Berlin. He doubted that Jabari’s double life had been an open secret among the rigidly pious regime’s upper echelon, and while elements of VEVAK, the intelligence service, might have known about it - keeping it on file for a time when a political favour was needed - it would not surprise him in the least if they had not yet even heard about the accident; the email had been distributed in encrypted form to a relatively small number of people. In the first instance Jabari’s driver would be charged with keeping everything under wraps, but if he were out of action, who would call in the fixers?

  Martin turned to Omar. ‘So what does a paramedic do when he comes across a man dressed as a woman?’ He was assuming Jabari’s companion was pre-operative, though that wasn’t necessarily the case; Ayatollah Khomeini, no less, had issued a startlingly enlightened fatwa in the eighties, declaring that gender reassignment surgery was a perfectly acceptable practice.

  Omar said, ‘For a heroin addict lying in an alley, who knows? But for this, I think he acts like he doesn’t notice. Why make te-rouble?’

  Martin pressed the heels of his palms against his eyes. A male paramedic had an excuse to play dumb, but what happened when a female doctor examined the patient more closely? Notwithstanding Khomeini’s ruling, there was no guarantee that a man who took oestrogen and put on an evening gown was going to sail through the segregated medical system without igniting some form of commotion.

  ‘Are you sure you want to do this?’ he asked Omar. ‘If I screw things up myself, the worst anyone’s going to do to me is deport me.’

  Omar looked irritated. ‘I want you here as a witness, but no way you could do it alone. Berim.’

  It was a busy night; Omar spent ten minutes in a queue at the reception desk before a polite but harried woman could speak with him. Martin stood at his shoulder and tried to follow the conversation without letting the effort show. Omar said his wife had been in an accident. What was her name? Khanom Jabari: Ms Jabari. Martin’s skin crawled at the audacity of it, but this scenario offered them their only chance. Iranian women kept their family names when they married; Hassan Jabari’s sister would remain Khanom Jabari. If Jabari’s companion was still passing as a woman, it would surely be too risky to register as his wife, so claiming to be his sister was the only respectable option left.

  The receptionist typed something into her computer, then glanced up at Omar. ‘Shokouh Jabar
i?’ She gave a date of birth.

  ‘Dorost, dorost,’ Omar replied impatiently, as if these details were trivially familiar to him. Martin waited to see if the receptionist would ask Omar to confirm his own name against a recorded next of kin, but she had better things to do. ‘Bekhosh shishom,’ she said. Ward six? Omar was already walking.

  Martin caught up with him. ‘Your first wife will be thrilled by this addition to the family,’ he joked.

  ‘Fuck you!’ Omar snapped back angrily. Martin was startled by the intensity of his reaction, but on reflection he realised that he had no right to be surprised. Omar loathed political and religious extremism, but the DVDs under his counter tended more to Rambo than Transamerica; on this issue he was probably to the right of the ayatollahs. He was here for the sake of political expediency; this was not some humanitarian rescue mission.