The Moving Prison Read Online Free PDF Page A

splashed icy water from the ceremonial urns at the mosque entrance on his hands and head, making his ritual ablutions before leaving for home. The water was so frigid it almost burned his skin, but even such harsh cleansing as this did not wash away the misgivings he felt deep within. The Islamic revolution was still in its infancy, but he smelled a rottenness at its heart that disturbed him profoundly.
    Nader Hafizi had been born and reared in a small village in the northwestern province of Azerbaijan. His father had died when Nader was sixteen, and he had worked as a day laborer to supplement the meager living his mother eked out from their three-acre farm with its cow and handful of chickens. For Nader and his two younger brothers, it was an austere, harsh life. They rarely went hungry, but there was never anything to spare.
    His mother dreamed of a proper education for her oldest son. Despite his day work—carrying loads and digging ditches for anyone who had the price of his hire—she insisted that he continue his studies at night and whenever he failed to find work. Many were the days when his mother would walk to the school, twelve kilometers from their village, to bring him food. In this haphazard, stop-and-start fashion, he managed to complete the course of study to qualify for graduation from high school.
    At his mother’s urging, he began to seek permanent employment. “A good job with a desk” was the phrase she used over and over. Diligently he applied at all the government offices in the district, waiting for hours in the summer sun or the winter cold to be admitted to the presence of some bureaucrat who had the power to make his mother’s dreams come true. And time after time, he was denied. His application would be placed at the bottom of the pile, and the job would go instead to a boy with wealthier parents or better political connections. Resentment hatched within him toward the corrupt system that gave no consideration to worth—only to advantage.
    At last, he decided to enter the clergy, for it seemed the only path out of the backwardness his circumstances dictated for him. He spent a year in the mosque at Tabriz, studying the Koran and learning Arabic. For thirty-five years now, he had given his life to the service of Islam. Although his dedication had not given him wealth—he did not even own the small house he and his wife inhabited—at least it had given him self-respect and purpose in life.
    The mullah walked slowly along Talleghani Avenue, almost oblivious to the shuffling masses through whom he waded in the graying light of the overcast January evening. The chanting mob of students, gathered outside the gates of the American Embassy compound, distracted him for a moment; but then the same nagging questions kept running through his mind, and he trod slowly homeward along the drab streets, wrestling within himself for the source of his malaise. He remembered a conversation he had just had inside the mosque, with two of his peers.

    They sat on cushions in a small side chamber in the mosque; Nader, Mullah Hojat, and Mullah Hassan. The other two men were several years his junior. Hojat spoke of what he planned to do when the forces of Islam achieved final victory over the Shah.
    “The first thing I will do, baradars ,” he announced smugly, “is travel to the village of my family and kill the miserable cur whom Mohammed Reza appointed to administer the land program there.”
    Hassan nodded in agreement. “When the Pahlavis stole the land from the mosque in Meshed, this alone showed they were no lovers of Islam, regardless of what they may say in public.”
    Hafizi was troubled by the casual malevolence of his two colleagues. It was true that the modernization programs of the Shah and his father had weakened the grip of Islam upon the wealthier merchant classes. He, like the others, had suffered financial hardship, since many of the most devout, on whose tithes the mullahs depended, were