An Iranian couple's revolution

One night he came home covered with blood.

"What happened?" she asked, looking up from her textbook, aghast at the red splashes on his hands, shirt and face.

"Nothing," he said, before ducking into the bathroom. "I was helping some of the wounded."

She believed him. She had to. He was her husband, the man she loved.

Besides, she knew the rules of the Basiji, the hard-line Iranian militia he belonged to: An order was an order, and if that meant cracking the heads of some demonstrators during the unrest this summer, so be it.

She knew, because she belonged to the Basiji elite herself. Not only was her husband a member of the volunteer militia, her father was a commander. And, once, she had been a true believer too.

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Landlocked Tehran lacks a coast or even a riverbank. For escape, there are the mountains.

"I'm a spiritual person," the young man said once on a hike along the trail past the cafes and terraced gardens in Darrakeh, the mountainside Tehran neighborhood where he grew up. "I worship these mountains, this life up here above the city. Even the mosque I go to is here."

For the scruffy, working-class guy with days-old stubble and a slight gut, getting larger as the years went by, the mountains were of a piece with the rest of his life. His neighborhood, his friends and cousins at the mosque, his commitment to the Basiji -- they belonged to the same continuum.

The Basiji was a citizen militia formed by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini at the start of the Islamic Revolution, literally a "mobilization." Later, during the 1980s war with Iraq, its members became legends, fighting heroically against an invading army.

The man was born in 1975, too young to take part in the war. But as a child he became obsessed with the conflict, collecting memorabilia and war artifacts and taking annual trips to the battleground to honor those who had died.

Even if there were no armed invaders when he was old enough to be a defender, he could at least fend off the creeping cultural influence of the West. A bearded young man with intense eyes and an olive green military jacket, he roamed Darrakeh with a walkie-talkie, on the prowl for signs of Western decadence: a young woman whose Capri pants showed too much skin, a young man whose hair was too long, an unwed couple holding hands.

But when he was 27, something happened to mellow him. He married a distant cousin who was six years younger, a moon-faced beauty with almond-brown eyes and carefully groomed eyebrows.