Isfahan. Gimel (ג)

The Crystal Lattice of Loyalty

(29 Mehr 1401 — October 21, 2022)

Autumn in Isfahan is a time when the light becomes as fragile as old porcelain, and the air grows thick with the scent of wilting plane trees and golden dust carried from the desert. Zahra loved this season. The equations in her head, usually as sharp and cold as the lines on an oscilloscope, took on color and warmth in October. Returning home, she would feel the logic of the laboratory, a world of predictable trajectories and controlled reactions, slowly dissolve into the viscous, irrational haze of the evening city.

That evening, everything was different.

The rain began suddenly, the way all catastrophes begin—with a barely perceptible change in the usual order of things. First, it was just a few drops on the windshield of her Peugeot, then a dense curtain that transformed the world outside into an impressionist painting. Zahra turned on the wipers. Their measured squeak was like a metronome counting out the beats of someone else’s symphony.

The stream of cars on Chaharbagh Avenue had frozen. Not just slowed, as in a normal traffic jam, but stopped dead, as if time itself had thickened and ceased to flow. Ahead, an unnatural silence hung in the twilight air, pierced only by nervous honks and distant, bark-like shouts.

Zahra turned off the radio, where an announcer was cheerfully reporting new successes in agriculture. She peered ahead, trying to break the chaos down into its component parts. People in black uniforms. The Basij. The dull thud of batons against plastic shields. A woman’s shriek, cut off on a high note. She saw a single white sneaker roll across the asphalt, and nearby, caught by the wind, a hijab torn from someone’s head fluttered—lilac, like the flower of a Judas tree.

Students. Again.

Her fingers clenched the steering wheel in a death grip. It was an abstract picture, a scene from the news that her mind was accustomed to classifying and filing away in a drawer labeled “Society: unpleasant, but distant.” But today, the distance had vanished.

A knock on her side window. It was a police officer. She lowered the glass, and the smell of rain, mixed with something acrid—tear gas—flooded the car.

“Documents,” his voice was tired, mechanical.

She handed him her ID. The officer took the card, held it up to his eyes. His gaze flickered from her photograph to the name of her institution and back. Something in his face changed—indifference was replaced by a shadow of respect. Or perhaps just a different kind of suspicion. He returned the ID.

“My apologies, Doctor. Where are you headed?”
“Home. The Jolfa district.”
“Where are you coming from?”
“From work. The research center.”

He handed back her documents, studying her more closely, as if weighing something.

“You may proceed, Doctor. Be careful.”

Zahra reached for the gearshift, but he didn’t move away. He leaned a little lower, and his voice became quieter, almost confidential.

“I hope your children aren’t involved in this,” the officer nodded toward the chaos behind him. “The youth today don’t understand the consequences.”

The words were not a threat. They were something worse. A statement of fact, a reminder of her vulnerability.

“My children are at home,” she replied, hoping it was true.

Then he stepped back.

Zahra pulled away slowly, maneuvering around a group of Basij who were dragging a young man across the ground. She stared straight ahead, but she didn’t see the road. She saw Nasrin. Her sixteen-year-old daughter. Her fire, her fury, her conviction that the world could be rewritten from a blank slate, like a failed equation. She saw Nasrin with her secret social media accounts, her forbidden music, her burning eyes when she spoke of justice—a word that, in Zahra’s world, had long since become just a variable in other people’s political formulas.

And in that moment, Zahra’s orderly, calibrated universe cracked.

All her life, she had believed—or forced herself to believe—that her work, her genius, served a great purpose. The creation of a shield that would protect Iran. That would give her daughters a future, security, pride. But now, watching the suppression of this desperate, youthful rebellion, she understood with terrifying clarity: the shield she was helping to forge was not only turned outward. It was also turned inward. She was building the world’s strongest fence, but in reality, she was forging the bars of a cage in which her own children would have to live. Her work was giving power to those who dragged boys across the asphalt and tore hijabs from girls who could have been her Nasrin.

That evening, in her soul, in its most protected chamber, a quiet, invisible phase transition occurred. Just as water under ultra-high pressure transforms into ice VI, with a completely different crystal lattice, so her loyalty, while remaining outwardly the same, changed its internal structure.

She had almost cleared the cordoned-off area when her gaze caught a figure on the sidewalk. A man. He was standing slightly apart from the chaos, under the shade of a plane tree, and he wasn’t looking at the protesters. He was looking at her. At her car.

He was not participating. Not sympathizing. He was analyzing. He wore a nondescript dark coat, had a calm, almost academic face, and eyes that didn’t just see, but read information.

Where had she seen him before? Her memory, usually as precise as a Swiss watch, failed her. A conference in Tehran? No. The university? No, not there either. But the feeling of recognition was real, physical, like an electric shock.

The light turned green. She moved forward, but couldn’t tear her eyes from the rearview mirror. The man did not move, continuing to watch her. Then he took out his phone and began to type something.

Zahra pressed the accelerator. For the first time in years, the equations in her head were silent. Their place had been taken by a single question, as cold and heavy as lead: if the trajectory you are on leads to the disintegration of everything you hold dear, is deviation not the only correct solution?

At home, Nasrin was sitting over her textbooks. Innocent. Safe. This time.

“How was your day?” Zahra asked, trying to keep her voice normal.
“Fine. Physics, chemistry, literature. Boring.”
“You didn’t go out?”

Nasrin looked up, and something flickered in her eyes—not a lie, but an omission.

“Only to the library. With Maryam.”

The library. Or the rally. How could she know? How could she protect her? How could she explain that some experiments cannot be repeated, because they destroy the object of study itself?

Physics taught that for every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. But she had forgotten another law—the one about increasing entropy. The one that states that any closed system tends toward chaos.

Dalet (ד): Tea and French Lace