Isfahan. He (ה)

The Tank Hunter

6 Aban 1401 (October 28, 2022)

Friday in Iran is a pause. A day when time slows its pace, submitting to a different rhythm: not the hum of centrifuges, but the call of the muezzin from the minaret of Isfahan’s Jameh Mosque. It is a day for family, a day when the crystal lattice of society becomes, for a moment, visible and orderly.

After her morning prayers, Zahra retrieved her old laptop from the top of the wardrobe—a massive, heavy artifact from a decade past. The dust on its lid lay like volcanic ash on the ruins of Pompeii.

“Where are you off to?” Amirkhan asked, fastening his watch as he prepared for Friday prayers at the mosque.
“To Naqsh-e Jahan Park, with Zeynab. She needs some fresh air.”
“You’re taking that data mausoleum for a walk? Why?”
“I want to reread drafts of some old papers. Something for my current research. There were ideas… that I abandoned. Perhaps I shouldn’t have.”
“In the park?” His eyebrows rose with that particular blend of disbelief and condescension men reserve for a woman’s whims.
“Zeynab will play. I’ll have some time.”

Amirkhan shrugged. To him, it sounded like another of her physics abstractions, bearing no relation to the real world where one had to pay for electricity and water and ensure one’s daughters did their homework.

“As you wish. Just don’t sit with it the whole time. Zeynab wants to feed the ducks.”

On a Friday morning, the park was like a Persian carpet woven from a hundred living threads. Families spread tablecloths on the grass, children chased pigeons, and old men played backgammon in the shade of the plane trees. The air smelled of jasmine, cotton candy, and the damp earth near the fountains. Zahra chose a bench set slightly apart, by the rose bushes.

“Mama, I’m going over to the girls, see them, by the swings,” Zeynab, whose face was the embodiment of pure, undistorted geometry, pointed a finger at a group of her peers.
“Go on, my sweet. Just stay where I can see you.”

Zeynab ran off. Zahra was left alone. She was a mother watching her daughter. A perfect disguise. She opened the laptop. The old version of Windows seemed to take an eternity to load. Every turn of the cooling fan sounded deafeningly loud to her.

On the desktop, among folders with names like Plasma_Instabilities_2011 and Tokamak_Simulations, was a shortcut icon depicting a tank—World of Tanks. A portal to another world, to a simulacrum of reality where she had once found an escape.

She launched the game. The interface was as familiar as an old, forgotten formula. A field for a username and password. She entered the credentials for her old account, NeutronStar_7. The system replied: “Incorrect username or password.” She tried again. And again. The memory that held the most complex equations refused to yield this simple combination. Perhaps the account had been deleted for inactivity. Ten years was an entire epoch in the digital world.

She would have to find another way in. She clicked “Register.” She created a new identity. Zahra_K_1983. A name, an initial, a year of birth. Minimum information, maximum truth. The best lie is one that is nearly indistinguishable from the truth.

She entered the game. In the garage stood a basic, pathetic Tier I tank. It didn’t matter. She wasn’t interested in combat. She was interested in the list. The catalog of players. An endless list of names, a library of shadows.

She opened the search. What was she looking for? A ghost from a decade ago. A name similar to “Fakhravadi.” She tried variations: Fahrabad, Fahrabadi, FahrabadyFer… Nothing. Then she remembered—Jagdpanther. He had been proud of that machine. A search by vehicle… by registration date…

She changed tactics. Instead of a name, she typed the tank’s name into the search bar. Jagdpanther. The list was enormous. Thousands of players owned this German tank destroyer. It wasn’t looking for a needle in a haystack; it was looking for a needle in a mountain of needles. She began to scroll through the list, page after page. PanzerKiller_Ali. DesertFox_66. Reza_Sniper. The names flashed by, blurring into a meaningless mass. Her brain, trained to find patterns, found nothing.

She felt like an astronomer searching for a faint gravitational anomaly in a cluster of millions of stars. The results were nil. Hundreds of players with similar names, but none of them resonated.

Maybe he had changed his name? Or abandoned the game as well? The thought was cold and clammy. She was looking for a sign, but what if the sign no longer existed? What if she was interpreting random noise as a meaningful message? It was a trap many minds had fallen into—seeing a system where only chaos reigned.

“Mama, what are you doing?”

Zeynab’s voice was so close and unexpected that Zahra started and slammed the laptop shut with such force that the plastic cracked. Her heart plummeted into a void. She had been so engrossed in her search that she hadn’t noticed her daughter approach and look over her shoulder.

“Zeynab! You scared me, azizam!”
“But that’s… that’s a computer game? You play games?” Her daughter’s voice was a mixture of shock and admiration. As if she had discovered her mother was a secret superhero.
“I…” Zahra gathered the fragments of her composure. “I just stumbled upon an old game. I wanted to remember why I used to like it. Silly, isn’t it?”
“Show me! Please, show me! The boys at school are always talking about it, but they won’t show the girls!”

Zahra opened the laptop. Her hands trembled slightly.

“It’s… a very old game. I haven’t played in a long time. I just saw it and was curious why I once liked it. It’s like… rereading an old book.”
“Can you show me? What kind of tanks are there?”
“There are tanks from different countries. Here are the Soviet ones, the American ones, the German ones… Here’s a list of players. You can choose any tank and…”
“Why do some players have such strange names?”
“People choose pseudonyms. Like… like poets in the old days. To be someone else.”
“Like Hafez? His name wasn’t really Hafez, was it?”
“Shams-ud-Din Mohammad. Hafez is a nickname. ‘The Guardian,’ one who knows the Quran by heart.”

She spoke, while her cursor frantically moved across the list left on the screen. And as she explained the difference between heavy and medium tanks to her daughter, her gaze caught on a line.

JagdpanFer_83

The name was inaccurate. A typo or a deliberate distortion. Fer instead of Fakhr. But it was too close to be a coincidence. 83. His year of birth? Or just a number? Next to the name was an avatar—a tiny image, a pixelated mosaic. But even in that low resolution, she recognized him. The faint outline of his face, the line of his jaw, the calm gaze. It was him. The ghost from the plane. The oracle in the rain.

“Mama, can I have some ice cream?” Zeynab tugged at her sleeve, her world simple and made of desires that could be fulfilled. “Pistachio! Or saffron!”

Relief washed over Zahra like a wave.

“Of course, janam. Of course.”

She exited the game, closed the laptop.

They walked to the bastani stall, Zeynab chattering about school, her friends, an upcoming math test. Zahra nodded, smiled, but her mind remained there, in the digital space where the hunter had noted the appearance of new prey. Or perhaps, had recognized the old.

Zeynab was choosing between pistachio and saffron ice cream. The sun was setting, painting the fountains the color of molten copper. Somewhere in the distance, a muezzin began the call to evening prayer.

“Mama, why do people play at war?” Zeynab asked, tasting her ice cream.
“To learn not to fight in reality.”
“But doesn’t the game teach you to fight better?”
“A paradox, isn’t it? We study what we want to avoid… Or to fight and win.”
“Mama, did you win? In the game?”
“What? No, azizam. I haven’t even started playing.”
“But you will?”

Zahra looked at her daughter—innocent, pure, full of faith in the world’s justice.

“Perhaps,” she answered. “Sometimes you have to play, even when you don’t know the rules.”