The guttural sounds of Arabic’s throat-grabbing vowels had disappeared. No trace. Words sounded crisp and clipped. “History, like a badly constructed concert hall, has occasional dead spots where the music can’t be heard,” the American poet Archibald MacLeish once wrote. In our search for Hassan, we had resolved to seek out the nation’s dead spots. For twenty years, the Islamic Republic had offered its version of truth, yet other truths existed. Only by listening to the past could we hope to reach beneath the surface.
