Fordow. Solitaire for One Player

14 Tir 1404 (July 5, 2025)

“Do not expect too much from the end of the world,” Stanisław Jerzy Lec once wrote. Apparently, he had connection problems too.

The room in Aunt Nilu’s house resembled a crypt from which the corpse had been thrown out and the lid forgotten open. The red clay walls had soaked up the day’s heat and were now giving it back slowly, suffocatingly. The old fan in the corner was silent—electricity here played hide-and-seek with death and lost more often than not.

Nasrin sat on the rug, legs crossed. Before her, like the ruins of a destroyed city, lay General Alavi’s archive.

Folder: “MOUSAVI, AMIRKHAN. File No…” Classified «Secret.» A photo of Father in profile, taken with a hidden camera. He looked tired and angry, like a man who knows he is being followed but is too proud to turn around.

Folder: “MOUSAVI, ZAHRA. File No…” Mom. Young, in Paris, with her hair down. And another—in Isfahan, in a hijab, with eyes full of ice.

Folder: “FERZALI, ALI.” Grandfather. A red stamp “Liquidated” (crossed out) “Died in RTA.”

Folder: “GAFARI, JAVAD.”

Folder: “YEZDI, RUSTAM.”

She laid out this solitaire, and the cards fell into a terrible, flawless pattern. The entire history of her family was not a history of love, not a history of faith, but a history of surveillance. Their lives were filed, numbered, and held together by paperclips now rusting from the humidity.

Only one card was missing.

Hers.

Nasrin ran her palm over the rough pile of the rug. Not a single sheet with the name “MOUSAVI, NASRIN.” No “Potential Threat.” No “Surveillance Target.”

She suddenly realized what this meant.

She was Terra Incognita. A statistical error. To the System that had devoured her parents, her grandfathers, and her friends, she simply did not exist. She was too insignificant to waste paper and ink on.

“Congratulations,” she thought, and the thought was cold as a scalpel. “In a country of total paranoia, you are nobody. You aren’t even a suspect. You are a void.”

Nearby on the floor stood an aluminum kettle covered in soot. Inside splashed the remnants of water—murky, collected during the first rain. Next to it—a glass of tea. It had gone cold long ago. Black dregs had settled at the bottom like silt on the bed of a dried-up lake.

She looked at the tea. A dead fly floated in it.

Suddenly, she wanted to laugh. This entire archive, all these secrets, Masons, Mossad agents, uranium enrichment formulas, conspiracy theories—all of it was now worth less than this fly.

All of it made sense only when the world was hot. When blood flowed in veins, not fear. Now the world had cooled. It had become like this tea—bitter, murky, and useless. Drink or don’t drink, you won’t quench your thirst.

In the next room, Zeynab was quietly howling. It wasn’t crying. She was humming the same melody, looped like a madman’s prayer. A song from her playlist, which she had listened to until the battery died. Now there was no music, only a voice—thin, trembling, breaking into falsetto.

“…the sand has run out in your hourglass…”

Zeynab sat on the rug, rocking back and forth. On her knees lay the Quran, open to Surah Ya-Sin. She traced the lines with her finger, but her eyes looked through the walls.

“…the sand has run out in your hourglass…”

“You still hope it will turn over?” Nasrin asked, approaching.
“Do we have any other sand?” Zeynab parried. Her eyes were red but dry. She lifted the Quran from her knees. “I’ve reread Ya-Sin three times already. Just in case. If all this…” she jerked her head somewhere upwards, toward the sky, “if this is all a joke, let Allah have a laugh too.”
“Allah has already unsubscribed from this channel,” Nasrin said. “It’s just us and the switched-off router.”

Aunt Nilu peeked out from the kitchen.

“Girls, want some tea?” she asked out of inertia.
“We will,” they answered in unison.

The tea was the same—weak, bitter, without sugar. But now it wasn’t a symbol or a metaphor. It was just tea.

In recent days, no one here prayed for real anymore. Even Aunt Nilu.

The old woman moved through the house soundlessly, like a shadow. She put the kettle on, cleared the plates, adjusted the pillows. Her movements had the automatism of a robot whose logic board had burned out but whose motor functions remained. She had no one left. Her husband died in the war forty years ago. Her son died in some alleyway. And now she had two stranger girls and a white antenna dish on the roof, looking at the sky where no one answered.

The information vacuum was denser than the clay walls. The internet died without an obituary. Even the soldiers’ radios were silent.

All of them had become hostages of this silence. She, Zeynab, Aunt Nilu. Zahir at the checkpoint, playing backgammon because there was nothing else to do. The sergeant major, repeating “Do not leave your post” in the hoarse voice of an old radio, like a mantra. Their parents—somewhere in the other half of the world, if they still existed.

Nasrin picked up her father’s file. Opened it at random.

“Subject prone to reflection. Vulnerable through family.”

She hurled the folder at the wall. Papers flew like a fan, settling on the floor like last year’s leaves.

“Vulnerable!” she shouted into the void. “You are all vulnerable! You are all dead! And we are here! We are here, and we are waiting for it to cover us!”

No one answered. Zeynab didn’t even break her rhythm.

“…the sand has run out…”

Outside the window, a noise began again. First quiet, like a whisper, then louder. Rain.

The same one. Warm. Oily. With the taste of metal and iodine.

It drummed on the roof, on the antenna dish, on the dry earth that drank this poison with the greed of the dying.

Nasrin walked to the window. The glass was murky, dirty. Through it, the world looked like an underwater kingdom.

Somewhere out there, behind the veil of rain, in the middle of the world, were her parents. If they still were.

She didn’t know. And this not knowing was more terrifying than any truth.

She returned to the scattered papers. Picked up a blank sheet that had fallen out of some folder. An empty form. No name. No number.

She took a pen. Her hand trembled.

She wrote: “MOUSAVI, NASRIN.”

And below: “STATUS: ALIVE. FOR NOW.”

She placed the sheet on top of the stack. This was her file. Her archive. Her story, which was just beginning where the story of everyone else had ended.

Zeynab fell silent. In the stillness, the sound of the rain became deafening. It sounded like applause. And then it stopped.

The end of the world was proceeding strictly according to schedule, but no one had sent us an invitation. We just happened to be in the front row.

And at that moment, the door flew open. Zeynab burst into the room, kicking aside the entire solitaire Nasrin had so carefully laid out. Her eyes burned with a mad fire, and in her hand, she clutched a revived, glowing phone.

“Nasrin!” she screamed, and her voice broke into a squeal. “Mom is calling! They are coming tomorrow with Dad!”

Postscript →
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← Isfahan