God's Spies,

A collection of stories by: Alberto Manguel
A chapter of Dr. Reza Baraheni's long time banned novel: 'The Infernal times of Mr. Ayaz'
which originally was translated by Carter Bryant is published here in this book.
Some other writers in this collection are: Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Howard Fast, Isaac Babel,
and Vladdimir Nabokov. Here you can read the introduction written by Alberto Manguel plus a
piece from Baraheni's novel.The chapter that is selected from the original book and appears in
Manguel's selection is called: 'Dismemberment'

By Alberto Manguel

"Until he was deposed in 1979, Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi reigned as a despot over
the kingdom that was once Persia. The United States enthusiastically supported the
Shah's regime. It was estimated that over 30,000 Americans lived during the seventies
in Iran, training the Shah's army or working for American corporations. During that time,
hundreds of politicians and intellectuals critical of the government, were tortured and
killed, or were hounded into exile. Aided by the CIA, the Shah's secret police terrorized
civilians at home and harassed dissidents and students who had sought refuge abroad.
Reza Baraheni, novelist, poet and the founder of modern literary criticism in Iran, was
imprisoned and tortured for over a hundred days in 1973, and forced to leave the country.
He went to USA and worked with international organizations to expose the violations of human
rights in Iran. Baraheni had hoped that the overthrow of the Shah would bring some form of
democracy to his troubled country. He was mistaken. He returned to Iran early in 1979, when
the Shah had just fled the country and everyone was preparing for the revolution. Ayatollah
Khomeini returned to Iran and proclaimed the Islamic Republic as the form of the future government.
Baraheni worked with Writer's Association of Iran, which he had helped to found a decade earlier,
wrote articles on the rights of women and oppressed nationalities, and kept producing his own
novels and poetry. He spent a good part of 1981 and the winter of 1982 in the prisons of the
new regime. He was released after pressure from world writers and intellectuals, but was fired
from his post as professor of literature at the University of Tehran. Baraheni formed what he
called "Basement Workshop for Fiction and Poetry," training the young generation of Iranian
writers in his home. In 1990s, he was in the forefront of the writers' struggle for freedom of
speech and democracy in Iran. He is one of the original drafters and signatories of the "TEXT
OF 134 IRANIAN WRITERS," and the "DRAFT OF CHARTER OF THE WRITERS ASSOCIATION OF
IRAN," which form the basis of the recent democratic movement in his country. Escaping two
abduction attempts by the Ministry of the Intelligence in 1996, Baraheni first went to Sweden and
later accepted asylum in Canada.
The opening pages of The Infernal times of Mr. Ayaz, by Reza Baraheni, translated by Carter Bryant:

HE COMMANDED, “Bring the saw up here.” Ascending the ladder, I was in a position to see the withered, fleshless, dust- and bloodsmeared limbs of that one. I gazed at them, afraid, my mouth parched and dry, my breath strangled in my throat, the saw, large and gleaming white, savage saw with teeth, long and sharp, rude and merciless, held in one hand, my other hand grasping the rungs of the ladder, one by one — staring at him, appalled, from behind — that one, who was breathing heavily and mumbling something which I couldn’t hear. And as I moved up, rung by rung, my eyes were fixed on neither earth nor sky, but first on his feet, then the calves of his legs, then his burnt-out thighs — that one, the man whose name I am afraid to let pass my lips, although I admire it — and, of course he had a tattered loincloth, there, red and gray, blood-soaked, around his waist, a narrow waist, the hair around his waist sticky with blood as if they had wanted to pluck out each hair with their dagger-like, dreadifil, sharp nails, but had instead picked at the flesh underneath, leaving the hair standing in place on a surface of torn and ravaged flesh.

“The saw!” he commanded. “Bringing it,” I said.

“Faster,” he said, “bring it faster!”

“Bringing it faster!” I said.

And I moved faster — as if I were able to! — and closed my eyes so as not to see — as if I were able to! — as if it were possible to become blind! there before my eyes loomed the bloodied spike, whose gleaming point had passed through his body and protruded from his back — his back, him, that one whose name I did so like — point passing through his body and out his back through the timber of the rack to which he was fastened. Now I opened my eyes and looked at the spike with my eyes open and it was the same I had seen with my eyes closed.

“The saw!” he shouted.

And I said, “Bringing it,” and took another step upward and raised my right hand and stretched the handle of the saw, the handle on Mahmoud’s end, out to Mahmoud, and Mahmoud, from the other side of the man, from the side where his face — and the face of that one whose name made me afraid because I liked it so — could be seen, took the saw by its long, white, vertical handle.

And he said, “Up, come higher up so that we can begin.” And I moved another rung higher up, stopping right next to his head; his sweat—soaked, burning, fiery profile seemed. -in an aura of light?. . . No, but red and vast and even godlike. His thick beard seemed to grow out of his face in my direction.

“Measure the arm!” shouted Mahmoud, his end of the saw in hand, and I changed the handle of my end of the saw to my left hand and raised my right hand and bent forward a bit and placed my little finger on the pulsating wrist of him that one whom I liked so because I was afraid of him — and spread my comparatively rude fingers up his forearm, the fingers of the right hand along his naked forearm below the elbow, touching his inflamed body, sensing his humid, torrential fever to the capillary depths of me.

Then the cries, I heard the wailing, the rhythmical, howling voices of the assembled host of my countrymen, crying out in chorus, “His right hand first! His right hand first! His right hand first!”

And, these words having been repeated several times, like a ritual tribal chant, Mahmoud shouted, “Begin!” and with a harmonious, rhythmical motion we began, Mahmoud pulling the saw as I released it, I pulling the saw as Mahmoud released it and the saw slipping and slicing through the flesh with the grating sound of a potter’s wheel in a Ghaznein or Rey or Baghdad bazaar, What with Mahmoud pulling mightily upon the saw when I released it and myself pulling mightily upon the saw when Mahmoud released it, the arm was soon severed, two hands-breadth lengths from the wrist,just above the elbow, and Mahmoud shouted, “Bring the oil! Oil!” And from the foot of the ladder they handed me the bucket full of boiling, steaming, fiery hot oil, and I handed it to Mahmoud. and he managed with agility to hold it and to twist the severed stump of the arm into the oil and keep it there until the blood coagulated.

And then I heard his loud voice, like a spear — his voice, that one whom I liked because I feared him so — shouting something like “Annal haq!” or perhaps that very phrase “Annal haq!” And the people, the calamity-stricken dogs, wailed an answer in chorus: “Now his left hand! Now his left hand! Now his left hand!” And we fell to our work, but cutting through the left arm was harder than cutting through the right arm had been; this one thing I couldn’t understand: why should cutting through one arm be more difficult than cutting through the other? Isn’t it so, after all, that a man’s two arms are equal in strength or in weakness, equally thick and muscular or spindly and stringy and weak? I had descended the ladder. Mahmoud had done the same. The warm-odored blood of the one-armed man had spilled onto my knees and the apron of my winding sheet which had soaked it up drop by drop…

(from God’s Spies: stories in definace of oppression, edited by Alberto Manguel, p 232-235)