for another passenger, a single woman. Azadi moved to the front seat, as the rules required, so that he wouldn’t have to sit next to her.
His mind was somewhere else. He hated meeting the British in Tehran. They weren’t supposed to do this. They were supposed to wait and talk in Qatar or Dubai. They were supposed to use the mysterious communications device they had left in the bushes in Lavizan Park many months ago. Something bad was happening, it could only be that. When Azadi received the message the day before summoning him to the apartment, he had been sick to his stomach. He had been afraid even of his own vomit, that it was a telltale sign of his secret work.
The September smog had settled over the city like a noxious cloud. Azadi couldn’t even see the Alborz ridge through the haze, and it was only a few miles away. He had grown up in this neighborhood, born in the last gaudy days of the shah. He was lucky that his father had been a religious man with the right friends in the bazaar. Otherwise the family would have been destroyed, and he might be driving a cab instead of riding in one.
The traffic edged up Vali Asr. At each corner, cars entering from the right pushed their way in, defying the oncoming traffic. People drove here by inches. They were ready to die for a car’s length of space. It hadn’t been that way in the Netherlands, when Azadi was a student at Utrecht. “Sun of justice, shine upon us.” That was the university motto. There were rules. People stood in lines. They stopped at traffic lights. A man’s dignity wasn’t at risk every time he entered an intersection.
Azadi got out on the corner of Vali Asr and Satari Boulevard. The driver said he didn’t want any money for such a short ride, but of course he didn’t mean it. Azadi gave him five tomans. Too much, but he was nervous. The apartment was two blocks north, on Foroozan Street. He walked slowly, looking in the store windows the way the Englishman had told him to do. There was someone behind him, a man in sunglasses, walking as slowly as Azadi. Why was that? He had that queasy feeling again, as last night, that he wanted to be sick. The man in the sunglasses continued past him, but then he stopped at the corner of Foroozan Street and began reading a newspaper. Nobody did that. Azadi was panicking now. He wanted to run, all the way back to Holland if he could. The foreigners were devils, and they had made him a devil, too.
He hailed an empty taxi coming up Vali Asr. From the driver’s open window came the buoyant sound of an American country singer. He recognized the voice: it was Sheryl Crow; Azadi had a bootleg copy of one of her CDs. The young taxi driver asked Azadi if he minded the music, and when he didn’t answer, he let it play. The driver was a brave man, or maybe just a careless one. Azadi was reassured, either way. Why should he be so afraid? Perhaps he had just imagined the surveillance.
He told the driver he wanted to go to the Nigerian embassy, on Naseri Street. They inched their way two blocks north, so close to the other cars that the metal skins seemed to be touching. They turned right off the main drag and moved slowly down the side street. Azadi looked up at the rooftops of the buildings. You could see satellite dishes on most of them, sucking down the sweet signals of pirate television from Los Angeles and Toronto and Dubai. They were illegal, officially, but that didn’t matter most of the time. When the authorities decided to crack down, there would be a little story in the paper, and people would move the dishes back from the edge of the roof so they couldn’t be seen from the street. A few dishes would be confiscated, and then sold on the black market by the police. And then after a few weeks everything would go back to normal. The authorities didn’t lose face; the people didn’t lose face; the rituals were preserved.
Azadi was feeling almost relaxed now. The taxi crossed Afriqa Boulevard, and a few moments later they were at the Nigerian embassy. Azadi knew it because he had worked there as a translator, before he went to Holland. He had been