The New Yorker COVER SUMMER SKY

Kindle Edition, 2015 © The New Yorker COVER SUMMER SKY CHRISTOPH NIEMANN COMMENT TELLING THE STORY BY AMY DAVIDSON A year ago, at the Cannes film festival, Leila Hatami, an Iranian movie star best known in this country for her role in “A Separation,” was walking the red carpet, wearing a gold- embroidered turban and a matching long-sleeved dress, when she encountered Gilles Jacob, the festival’s president. She reached out to shake his hand, but he kissed her on the cheek, and that, as the Washington Post’s Tehran correspondent, Jason Rezaian, wrote, is when the “fuss” began back home. Certain factions in Iran had portrayed the kiss as an affront to Islam; a student group called for the actress to be publicly flogged. Rezaian, a thirty-nine-year-old Californian who had been working in Iran for six years, wrote that Hatami had apologized in a statement in which she said that she regretted “hurting the feelings of some people.” She had not wanted to be kissed. Jacob, she said, had simply forgotten the “rules.” Eight weeks after the story ran, Rezaian himself was under arrest in Tehran, and it was hard to say what rules he may have transgressed—no charges were made public. His writing about Iran had been marked by cultural generosity and care. One of the last stories he wrote before he was jailed was about Iran’s tiny but emerging baseball scene, in which he described the players’ love of the game and the impact of the economic sanctions on their aspirations. (“Catcher’s mitts and gloves for left-handers are scarce.”) Rezaian is a dual citizen—his father was Iranian—and those who know him say that he did not intend to insult or injure Iran, though he had no interest in whitewashing it, either; another recent Post story he wrote was about how government mismanagement had precipitated a water crisis. Rezaian’s wife, Yeganeh Salehi, who is an Iranian citizen and a reporter for the National , an English-language newspaper based in Abu Dhabi, was arrested at the same time. She was eventually released on bail, but for the past ten months Rezaian has been held at the Evin prison, which is notorious for its many executions and its abuse of political prisoners. His mother, Mary Rezaian, was allowed just two brief visits with him five months ago, and he has spent a substantial amount of time in solitary confinement. Joel Simon, of the Committee to Protect Journalists, has called him the victim of a “judicial kidnapping.” Rezaian’s trial began last Tuesday, just a few weeks after his family finally learned what crimes he may have been charged with: espionage, collaborating with hostile governments, and “propaganda against the establishment.” Even then, the news came through a lawyer whom Rezaian had not chosen and who has met with him only briefly. The proceedings, held in Revolutionary Court Branch 15, are off limits to the public. The charges, which carry a possible sentence of up to twenty years, have no apparent basis in fact—which may be why the government is choosing to pillory in secret a man whose profession was openness. The judge, Abolghassem Salavati, is known for condemning dissidents to death and for having presided over a mass trial in which scores of activists and journalists were compelled to give televised confessions. In Rezaian’s case, after a few hours of questioning behind closed doors, Salavati adjourned the trial indefinitely. Martin Baron, the executive editor of the Post , said in a statement, “There is no justice in this system, not an ounce of it, and yet the fate of a good, innocent man hangs in the balance.” The months of Rezaian’s imprisonment have also been a period of intense nuclear negotiations between the United States and Iran. One theory is that Rezaian is being held to give the Iranians leverage in the talks, or, since some elements of the government feel that President Hassan Rouhani is conceding too much, to sabotage them. Mohammad Javad Zarif, the foreign minister and the lead nuclear negotiator, who dealt with Rezaian as a reporter before his arrest, said in April that he hoped “my friend Jason” would be acquitted, but he also insinuated that American intelligence might have “tried to take advantage” of Rezaian. This may be interpreted as the expedient equivocating of a nonetheless reform-minded official, but it is not reassuring. The opacity of the Iranian system makes it hard to sort out the various motives. When a journalist is put on trial for doing his job, there are two kinds of attacks on the truth. The first is an effort to suppress particular ideas and information. Rezaian seems to have an instinct for how stories of all kinds can orient us in the midst of politicized cacophony. The second takes the form of an expressed preference for lies. When a judge demands testimony that he knows is false to prove a crime he knows has been concocted, he is rejecting the idea that there is value in searching for the truth. This is the inverse of journalism. Rezaian is not alone. The Committee to Protect Journalists’ year-end census counted thirty journalists in Iranian prisons, out of two hundred and twenty-one imprisoned worldwide. The tally included forty-four in China and twenty-three in Eritrea, a country of little more than six million people. This was the second-highest count since the C.P.J. began keeping track, in 1990. (The United States is not on the current list, but that is not necessarily a reason for complacency; lately, the government has been aggressively pursuing investigative reporters’ sources, under the Espionage Act.) Prosecution is not the only threat: this year began with journalists being killed in a magazine office in Paris, because gunmen objected to their cartoons. That was followed by less well-known cases, such as the death, in March, of Danilo López, a Guatemalan reporter who was shot in a park after writing stories about local corruption. Changes in the news industry have also meant that wars are being covered by increasingly vulnerable freelancers, equipped with barely more than smartphones. Rezaian worked freelance for years before the Post hired him. The Post applied for a visa so that one of its editors could attend Rezaian’s trial, but the request went unanswered. His wife is still in Iran, and she may go on trial soon. His mother is in the country, too. Even after learning that the proceedings would be closed, the paper reported, she went to the courthouse so that when Jason arrived he would see her. She waited for hours, but he was taken in and out through a back entrance. He may not even have known that she was there. ♦ INK YOURS TRULY BY REBECCA MEAD Harper Lee’s published output is about to be doubled: on July 14th, HarperCollins will bring out “Go Set a Watchman,” which is being described by the publisher as a sequel to “To Kill a Mockingbird.” (“Mockingbird” came out in 1960; “Watchman,” though set later, was written earlier.) “Watchman” went to the top of Amazon’s best-seller list as soon as its impending publication was announced, propelled by readers’ enduring affection for Lee’s singular novel, and by an equally enduring fascination with an author who has, for the most part, declined to live a public life, even while her work is considered cherished public property. This interest in Lee—who is eighty-nine and reportedly compromised by various ailments, and who resides in an assisted-living facility near Monroeville, Alabama, her home town—no doubt also accounts for the forthcoming appearance, at Christie’s, of a handful of her personal letters, which will be auctioned on June 12th. The letters were written to the late Harold G. Caufield, an architect in New York, and to their circle of friends, which included her early patrons Michael and Joy Brown. (As a Christmas gift in 1956, the couple pledged to fund Lee for a year so that she could work on her fiction.) Lee’s personal letters rarely emerge on the market; Charles J. Shields, the author of “Mockingbird: A Portrait of Harper Lee,” says that he had access to very few of them while researching his book. The half-dozen letters are being sold by a private collector, who acquired them a few years ago. Christie’s pre-sale estimate is a hundred and fifty thousand to two hundred and fifty thousand dollars. The letters, which Lee wrote from Monroeville and sometimes signed with comic aliases—“Francesca da Rimini,” “the Prisoner of Zenda”—are chatty and fond. The earliest predate the publication of “To Kill a Mockingbird,” and were written while Lee was in Alabama after returning from New York in order to help care for her ailing father, A. C. Lee. In one, dated June 16, 1956, she writes, “I’ve done things for him that I never remotely thought I’d be called on to do for anybody, not even the Brown infants, but I suppose there is truth in the adage that you don’t mind it if they’re yours.” In another, undated letter, Lee writes poignantly of sitting at the kitchen table with her father, a small-town lawyer who is commonly taken to be the model for Atticus Finch, in “Mockingbird”: “I found myself staring at his handsome old face, and a sudden wave of panic flashed through me, which I think was an echo of the fear and desolation that filled me when he was nearly dead.” The letters also convey Lee’s amused impatience with her home town, whose sometimes stifling contours she drew upon to describe Maycomb, the setting for “Mockingbird.” “A Monroeville election is perhaps the most complicated token of democracy to be found,” she writes, during one election season.

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