On September 20, 1981, two armed Revolutionary Guards enter Isaac’s office in Tehran and arrest him. He remains calm, reflecting on the fact that many of his employees had not come to work that morning. The two guards drive him through the city streets on a motorbike, and he considers the city’s transformation from a Western-style commercial centre to a place of religious oppression. On arrival at the prison, Isaac is locked inside a small and smelly room containing a dozen men. Still calm, he allows his mind to wander to his comfortable home and his beautiful wife, although he feels regret for the recent growing estrangement between himself and Farnaz.

The prisoners are brought unappetizing food and ordered to eat it, and Isaac becomes aware that “his life, if anything is to remain of it, will be very different from this day on” (6). He talks with Ramin, a boy of about 16, whose father is dead and whose mother is in jail. Another prisoner, a middle-aged man in pajamas and good quality shoes urinates on the floor with great shame as he is not allowed to use the bathroom. Isaac is blindfolded and taken somewhere in a van. He thinks of a friend whose name he had seen recently in a list of executed people, and wonders if he himself will be next.