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Isfahan. Nun (נ)
The Fragility of Porcelain
29 Dey 1401 (January 19, 2023)
The January snow fell on Isfahan in sparse, hesitant flakes, as if the sky had forgotten how to cry and was now merely feigning sorrow. After weeks spent on the razor’s edge of paranoia, a calm had set in. Life seemed to be settling into its winter groove, and in this monotony, there was an illusion of peace. Zahra clung to this illusion like the last thread connecting her to a world where equations had solutions and the future held at least a hypothetical predictability.
On Friday afternoon, the doorbell rang. On the threshold stood Adil, Nasrin’s classmate. The same boy with the eyes of a medieval poet who had been led away from the schoolyard by men in plain clothes.
He stood there, shifting from foot to foot, holding a plate of homemade cookies covered with an embroidered napkin.
“My mother asked me to give you this. As thanks for your help with math.”
Zahra looked at him and saw not so much a boy as a scar. Those two days at the Ettela’at had aged him by ten years. The childish roundness of his cheeks was gone, his gaze had become deep and weary, as if he had peeked behind a curtain where there was nothing but emptiness. But he was smiling, and in his smile there was not brokenness, but a new, bitter strength.
Nasrin fluttered into the hallway, a blush flaring on her cheeks as bright as pomegranate seeds. She looked at Adil as if he were not just a classmate, but a hero returned from a perilous journey. And in that gaze, Zahra saw all the poignant, clumsy beauty of a first crush—a feeling as fragile as the old Chinese porcelain from her father’s collection.
“Come in, Adil, we were just about to have tea,” Zahra said, stepping aside.
They sat in Nasrin’s room, surrounded by posters of K-pop groups, whose members with their brightly colored hair and flawless faces looked down from the walls with an otherworldly, androgynous beauty, and stacks of textbooks.
Her daughter sat on the edge of the bed, her legs drawn up; Adil sat on a chair by the desk. Between them was a meter of space and an entire universe of the unsaid. They didn’t speak of what had happened. The topic was like a radioactive object that everyone could see but no one dared to touch. Adil said he had come for advice.
“Dr. Musavi, I want to choose a foreign language for advanced study. But I don’t know which one. Russian or English?”
Zahra sipped her tea. The question seemed simple, but in it, as in a drop of water, their entire fractured world was reflected.
“That depends on which road you choose, Adil. Which universe you want to discover for yourself. Russian is the language of our current ally. We work with them, we buy and sell technology. If you become an engineer or join the military, it will be useful. But that is a road leading north, into the cold.”
She paused.
“English is different. It is the language that science speaks today. Articles are written in it, debates at conferences are held in it. It is a global language, like Latin in the Middle Ages. It opens doors to the West. But those doors can turn out to be a trap.”
She looked at him, at his serious, uncharacteristically adult face.
“And then there is the East. China. Their language is ideograms, an entire universe in every character. They are building the future with the same speed we are trying to preserve the past. Perhaps in twenty years, it will be more important than both Russian and English.”
Adil thoughtfully stirred his tea with a small spoon.
“I haven’t decided what I want to be yet. I like poetry, Hafez, Rumi, Omar Khayyam… And the moderns—Shamloo, Akhavan-Sales. But you can’t make a living from poems.”
“That’s not true,” Zahra said softly. Suddenly, she wanted to tell this boy something real, something that had nothing to do with espionage, politics, or fear.
“If you love your work, it will become poetry for you. Any work is an act of creation. You can create equations that are more beautiful than any ghazal. You can trade in the bazaar in a way that becomes an art. Or you can write poems that change the world. The important thing is not what you do, but how you do it. Whether you find your own, inner music in it.”
“The Sufis say,” she added, standing up, “that there is a language of the birds—a universal language understood by all beings. Perhaps poetry is an attempt to speak that language.”
A silence filled the room, imbued with the warmth of the setting sun and the aroma of cardamom tea. Nasrin looked at her mother with surprise and admiration, as if seeing her for the first time not as a stern scientist, but as a woman who knew something important about life.
And in that moment, the fragile harmony shattered.
A sharp, demanding knock on the front door. Not a ring. A knock—hard, official, admitting no delay.
Amirkhan looked into the room. His face was tense.
“Stay here. I’ll get it.”
He went out. They heard his muffled voice, then other, unfamiliar voices. The seconds stretched into an eternity.
Amirkhan returned. He didn’t look at Adil or Nasrin. He looked only at his wife. There was no anger in his eyes, no surprise. Only a heavy, dull acknowledgment of the inevitable.
“Zahra. They’re here for you.”