The neighbor had never given Amini’s name. And everyone in the building knew her as Mrs. Montazeri.

Amini’s e‑mail in-box regularly overflowed with terrible stories from remote Iranian towns, from relatives and lawyers of the condemned who had heard of her work. Three men in Semnan province, she was told, were to be executed. She referred the case to another activist group. But one morning at five o’clock their lawyer called Amini to say that the men had been hanged. Suddenly, she could not move her hand. About once a week now, she felt her body quake, as though feverish, in the night. She figured that it was a virus. She took pills, but the shivering returned.

There was trouble within the Stop Stoning Forever campaign—divisions and disagreements among colleagues—even as its caseload grew. Amini was on the phone one afternoon, in a tense discussion with one of her colleagues, when she fell down. The phone dropped. She wasn’t asleep—she could hear the room around her—but she couldn’t move. For an hour or two, she lay there.

In the days that followed, she had pulverizing headaches that responded to no pill, no therapy. Finally, she went to see a neurologist. She’d had some kind of nervous shock, he surmised, from extreme stress. There was nothing to do but rest. One day, she couldn’t move her eyes, her shoulders, her neck. She went to the hospital. Every test came back normal, and the hospital discharged her. But the pain in her head and, now, her eyes was unendurable. She felt as though her eyes would leave her skull. One morning, she woke up blind, with red swellings that blocked her vision.

While Amini convalesced, her colleagues dissolved the Stop Stoning Forever campaign into an umbrella organization based abroad. Like that, everything Amini had built disappeared. She would never learn the reason. Intelligence agents, meanwhile, had broken into her office and searched her files. They called in Amini and interrogated her about her activities. The interrogator also asked about her health—specifically, her eyes, as if to let her know that even her body was under surveillance. He seemed most curious about the network of civil-society activists that she had helped forge.

By March, 2009, Amini was physically well again. But when she thought of the families of the condemned who had placed dim and fragile hopes in her, and of how she could not explain to them the collapse of the campaign, she became depressed. In one of her poems, she addressed her interrogator: “How many times have I asked you / ‘Don’t come to my dreams with a gun.’ ”

On her blog, she observed that she had become deeply enmeshed with the subjects of her research. Leyla, Sahaaleh, and others peopled her dreams. She had sat alongside mothers at the scaffolds of their sons. She had no models, no mentors, no handbook to follow that might have cautioned her to keep her distance or flagged the signs of her collapse.

“The truth is that we work on a remote island,” she wrote. “We are alone. I realized this while I was staring at the ceiling for two months with painful eyes.”

That June, a Presidential election returned Ahmadinejad to office for a second term, provoking a storm of protest. The demonstrations were the largest and most sustained that Iran had known since its 1979 revolution. Amini was there, elated. When security forces cracked down, Amini was there, too, beaten with batons and nursing her concussion in the first courtyard that she could find off the street. She spent the chaotic days of unrest searching for the mothers of demonstrators who’d been killed, in an effort to record their stories. She reported for a Web site, Roozonline, using four pseudonyms.

People she knew were disappearing. Often, they were arrested in the middle of the night, spirited off to prison for unknown terms. Amini had visions of her own midnight arrest, before the terrified eyes of nine-year-old Ava. Sometimes she felt that she was waiting for this. A friend cautioned her that it was obvious which online pseudonyms were hers. An intelligence operative who knew her style of writing could figure it out.

Reformist journalists and politicians appeared on television, in prison garb, confessing that they’d taken part in a seditious conspiracy. When Amini saw them, she cried. These well-known people were hardly recognizable. If they had broken in prison, what would happen to her?

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Early one Friday morning, a woman rang Amini’s doorbell. It was an acquaintance of Montazeri’s. Two days earlier, she had been released from prison after being arrested at a small demonstration in Valiasr Square. Thirty-six women had been held in her cell, she said, and half of them had been questioned about Asieh Amini. The woman told Amini that she should leave her house.

Before the election, Amini had been invited to a poetry festival in Sweden. She wrote to the Swedish Ambassador. She would go to the festival, she told him, but she needed to bring her daughter. At the airport, she left her cell phone open, connected on a call to Montazeri, so that he could listen and know if she and Ava were stopped. But they got through.

Every day, Montazeri and Amini talked on Skype. He told her that things were getting worse at home. The defendant in one of her cases, Behnoud Shojaie, who had been seventeen when he killed a man in a fight, was executed. Amini’s friends in prison had been swallowed into the system; there was nothing anyone could do for them.

Everything Amini was, and everything she did, was tied to her country—its complexities, its language, its terrors, and its splendors. She was not an engineer, with skills that could be transferred anywhere in the world. She would carry, always, a weight of work unfinished, a sense of being needed in a place where she couldn’t live. On a cell wall in the women’s section of Tehran’s Evin Prison, she was told, an inmate had etched one of her poems: “Eve was not tall enough / I’ll pick all the apples.”

Through a program for writers at risk, she landed in Trondheim, Norway, as the poet-in-residence at the public library. Montazeri joined her and Ava there. She published two books of poetry and started work on a memoir, studied Norwegian, and regarded her new compatriots with a warm and gentle quizzicality. The landscape, in its jagged immensity and its brilliant blues and greens, its rock-faced coast and glassy fjord, reminded her and Montazeri of Mazandaran. In Trondheim, there were days in summer when the sun never set, and days in winter when it never rose. The light had a broad, flat quality, and life an element of unreality. Even the highway to the airport cut through spectacular, unspoiled scenes of undulating land and saturated color. Not far from Amini’s apartment building was a recreational sight of singular frivolity: beach-volleyball courts. As though the world were such a place, and Amini such a person as to live in it. ♦