SHULA WAS HOLDING JAMILEH WHEN they barged in. A group quite different from those in the parked car, whom Marvar had come to recognise over the summer. Men with beards and tight collars buttoned to the throat and wearing black baggy sirwal trousers a size too large. They would have shown Shula a photograph of herself and asked if it was her. Once she had confirmed that it was, they would have searched the house, even looking inside her slip-ons that he had bought in the Ducker’s closing-down sale. They would have discovered Shula’s radio tuned to the BBC Persian service. Tucked under the baby’s mattress they would have found the English novel that Marvar had purchased in haste from Blackwell’s before catching the bus to Heathrow. They would have blindfolded Shula, not allowing her to wear her shoes, and forced her outside to sit in the unmarked Paykan. They would have driven her, still clutching Jamileh, to the detention centre in Kahrizak and pushed her down a narrow corridor to a cell. Tiled floor, no windows, dark, the stench of faeces. Deaf to the baby’s screams, they would have grabbed Jamileh. Having covered her lustrous long black hair with a plain scarf, they would have slapped Shula, thrust her against the wall, stamped on her feet with their army boots, and then knotted her wrists and ankles to an iron bed. They would have hit the soles of her feet with a cable, all the while saying nothing, not asking questions. Before leaving, one of them would have tossed a blanket at her. Moments or hours later, Shula would have woken, feeling something move on her lips – until she realised that ants were crawling into her mouth and up into her nostrils. At some point, the men would have returned to untie her so that she could defecate in the corner. They would have gripped her by the shoulders, and half-carried her to another room, and only then would the blindfold have come off. As her eyes adjusted to the light, a black-bearded cleric in a black turban would have entered, sitting down at the bare wooden table between them. He would place a book on the table, and she would see that it was the English novel that Rustum had given her. She was an infidel, the turbaned man would begin. When he touched her, when he touched this filthy book, he became dirty, just as Jamileh became dirty when Shula fed her, and he would tell Shula that her milk was religiously prohibited because she was a non-believer, and she would not be allowed to bring up her daughter as a non-believer in an Islamic country, unless she cooperated. Then a guard, his face covered with a woollen mask showing only his mouth and eyes, would place a metal bowl on the table and Shula would see that it was filled with dried fruit. The cleric, after inspecting and selecting a date, would explain what other troubles she was in. She would be contaminated and tainted for ever unless she confessed and disclosed what her husband was hiding, which foreign agents he was seeing, what exactly he had revealed to them. The cleric would have listened, eating his date, and then another, while she insisted that she had no knowledge of her husband’s work in Oxford; Marvar never talked about it, she wouldn’t have understood even if he had, she was a student of literature, not a nuclear scientist. ‘Then what about this?’ the cleric would respond, and slide a note across the table that Shula would unfold with trembling fingers, on which were typed the words: Halfness, you changed the world for me – & again with our son & daughter. Now I may have done something! ‘What do you suppose he is talking about?’ And Shula would shake her head, ‘I don’t know, I don’t know,’ and after a long pause the cleric would say, ‘What about his Christianity?’ Did her husband never talk about going to house churches and attending services that were against national security? Again, Shula would have shaken her head, this time more vehemently, and exclaimed in her most exasperated voice, ‘That was not Rustum, that was his mother!’ At this, the cleric would look at her, and it would need no words to say what he was thinking: Like mother, like child. Then he would give a nod for the masked guard to place on the table another bowl which was filled, so the cleric would explain before she retched, with her own filth. She had to cooperate or eat it. And she would have looked at him as if he really was insane, or she was. When she had stopped wiping her nose and was in a state to continue listening, he would say, ‘Do you want to see Jamileh again?’ Unless she ate it, she would never hold Jamileh in her arms. Her choice. He would have talked to her, chewing his dried-up fruit, while he wrote down her charges one by one on a sheet of paper, glancing up now and then to observe her progress, or making his way into a corner of the room to pray. Only after she had forced the last of the bowl’s contents into her mouth and swallowed it between sobs, gagging, blocking her mind, thinking only of Jamileh, would he read out what he had written. He would be charging her with the crime of national security and ‘collaborating with enemy states’, to be tried by Branch 13 of the Revolutionary Court; the crime of disrupting public opinion – indicating the novel – by spreading false information and immorality, to be tried by a special Court in Region 21 of Tehran; and – most serious – the crime of insulting the prophets and the Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei, to be tried in Branch 16 of the Criminal Court. He would ask her to sign the piece of paper, and when – instead of picking up the pen and writing her name with the hysterical relief of nine out of every ten who sat there – she dragged her gaze up through his thick beard, over his plump lips, his pitted nose, into his eyes, thinking how much enmity comes out of two small pools which a thumbnail could extinguish, and said in a low searing voice that she would not commit this shitty perjury, even if that meant not seeing her daughter, because what good to a child on Allah’s earth was a mother who consented to lie in this sordid way, so that from now on whenever she looked into herself she would be afraid of seeing someone else, because she was innocent of these charges, as he well knew, he would meet her flaming gaze with no expression, and when she had finished speaking he would fold the sheet of paper and slip it into the novel, stand up, and before turning to leave, give another nod to the guard. After the cleric had closed the door behind him, the guard would tell her that she would be raped so that she could not go to heaven. He would take her to the prison library that was used for praying. They would rape her from behind and in front, both sides. Three men. In the library. All the time a hand, with dark hair on the knuckles, over her mouth. After half an hour, she would hardly be able to stand. She would be led back to her cell holding her stomach, walking in small steps, leaning forward. The guard would put her blindfold back on. He would retie her by the feet and hands to the bed. As an afterthought, he would cover her shoulders with the blanket. The last sounds that she would hear before she fell unconscious would be the grating of the guard’s heavy key and the hoarser cries of Jamileh along the corridor.