Isfahan. Bet (ב)

Vacuum and the Poems of Hafez

9 Ordibehesht 1402 (April 29, 2023)

The day began with an equation. Even before the muezzin’s call to morning prayer, the azan, echoed from the turquoise minaret of the Imam Mosque, Zahra’s mind was already assembling partial differential equations that described the behavior of plasma. It was her ritual, her way of imposing order on the universe before the universe could impose its chaos on her. She lay in bed beside the steady-breathing body of her husband, Amirkhan, and mentally spun uranium hexafluoride in a simulation, separating valuable isotopes from worthless ones, like sifting wheat from chaff.

Home was the first cell. Here, she was a wife and mother. She rose without a sound, put on a house robe over her nightgown, and went to the kitchen. The air smelled of yesterday’s rice and rosewater. On the table lay her older daughter Nasrin’s textbook, open to a page of English irregular verbs, and next to it, the neatly folded school uniform of her younger daughter, Zeynab. Two daughters—two vectors, pointed in opposite directions. One was a centrifugal force, straining outward, toward forbidden music, encrypted messengers, and a world she’d only seen in films. The other was centripetal, a perfect student, the pride of her school, obedient and predictable as the motion of the planets. Zahra prepared breakfast: lavash bread, cheese, sweet tea. Mechanical movements, refined over years.

The car, her old Peugeot, was the transition zone. Here, in the flow of morning traffic in Isfahan, past ancient bridges and dusty plane trees, she underwent a transformation. Woman, wife, mother—these shells were shed one by one. By the time she reached the facility’s first checkpoint, only one entity remained: Dr. Musavi. Physicist. Function.

The laboratory was her sanctuary. Cell number two. A world of pure reason. Here reigned the cold light of fluorescent lamps, the hum of ventilation systems, and the smell of ozone. There was no room for emotions, only data. Her male colleagues nodded to her with restraint, with respect, but always from a distance. She was an anomaly to them: too intelligent, too withdrawn, a woman in a world ruled by men, shattering their conception of the world like a neutron shattering an atomic nucleus. She paid it no mind. Their opinions were just background noise, with no effect on the experiment’s results. It wasn’t their opinions that were dangerous, but their gazes.

Her workstation was a model of order. Monitors displaying graphs. Stacks of printouts covered in formulas. Perfectly sharpened pencils. Across the aisle was Rustam Yazdi’s desk. His desk was always a creative mess: books on philosophy sat next to manuals on spectrometry; napkins were scrawled not only with equations but with strange geometric patterns. Rustam was the only one with whom she could speak about more than just work. He could quote Hafez, speculate on the nature of time, and bring dates from home, claiming they were from his grandfather’s garden in Yazd. He was… an error in the system. A tolerable error.

That day, his desk was empty.

It was strange. Rustam was never late. By lunchtime, his space was still vacant. Zahra felt a prick of anxiety—an irrational, illogical impulse. She suppressed it. Perhaps he was ill.

The next day, the desk was not just empty. It was sterilely clean. The books, the stacks of paper, even the mug that read “I think, therefore I am in a state of superposition” were all gone. As if he had never been there.

Zahra approached the head of the laboratory, Dr. Rezai. He was a short, dry man with eyes that seemed to see the world in the infrared spectrum, noticing only the heat signatures of threats.

“Dr. Rezai, where is Rustam Yazdi?” she asked, trying to keep her voice even.

Rezai did not look up from his papers.

“Dr. Yazdi has been transferred. An urgent project at another facility.”
“He said nothing. It was so sudden.”
“In our line of work, Dr. Musavi,” Rezai finally looked up, and his eyes held nothing but cold steel, “the most important things always happen suddenly. Return to your work.”

It was an explanation. And at the same time, an order not to ask questions. But Zahra’s logic screamed that there had been a breach of protocol. People didn’t just vanish like that. Not even in their world. They said their goodbyes, handed over their duties. A transfer took weeks to process. This was wrong. The system had failed.

All day, she couldn’t concentrate. The equations blurred. Through the concrete and casings, in the hum of the centrifuges, she thought she heard other voices. She felt her colleagues’ eyes on her—or was she imagining it? Paranoia. An unacceptable variable.

In the evening, when almost everyone had left, she walked over to Rustam’s empty desk. Out of pure curiosity, she told herself. Just to be sure. She pulled open a drawer. Empty. A second one. Empty. In the third, her fingers brushed against something beneath a metal divider. A small piece of paper, folded into a square. Not official letterhead. Torn from a notepad.

She unfolded it. There wasn’t a single word written inside. Only a few lines, drawn in Rustam’s familiar hand.

It wasn’t a text. It was a line from a poem and a series of numbers.

“Where is the house of my friend, O companions?”

And below it:
74.4.12.3_9.1.5.7

A line from Hafez. And a code. A chill seized her. It was a message. But from whom? Her first thought was illogical, panicked: he knew. He knew about the data she had been copying for the man whose real name she had never learned. The man she had only seen twice. But if Rustam knew… No. It was impossible. She had been too careful. Too methodical. Or had she? She felt as if she were standing on the border between two worlds: the world of order and the world of chaos.

She clenched the note in her fist. The paper felt scorching hot. She was no longer just a physicist who had stumbled upon a mystery. She was a spy who had received a message that could be either a key to salvation or a warrant for her own disappearance. And she had no margin for error.

Or Rustam had left it for her.