такое кино
Isfahan. Vav (ו)
The Geometry of Fear
10 Aban 1401 (November 1, 2022)
Memory is also a laboratory, where the past can be analyzed again and again in the hope of a new result. That day, long before Rustam Yazdi’s desk became a sterile rectangle of emptiness, the break room had smelled of strong tea and anxiety. An advance IAEA report lay on the table, its pages, riddled with diplomatic phrasing, resembling a map of a minefield.
“They are blind,” Dr. Rezai said, setting down his glass with a thud, as if punctuating the end of an argument. “They search for traces of particles, not traces of intent. The Great Satan’s intent is obvious—to leave us defenseless. Israel’s intent is to finish what they started in Natanz.”
“Or that which exists, but is well hidden,” Rustam remarked quietly, not looking up from his teacup.
“Iran has a sovereign right to defend itself. The Great Satan keeps its fleet in the Persian Gulf; the Lesser Satan has the largest nuclear arsenal in the region. Are we supposed to wait, with our hands tied?”
“Their intention is to uphold the treaty we signed,” Rustam countered. “Besides, the geopolitical map has changed. Russia, our situational ally, is bogged down in the Ukrainian steppes. They have no time for us now.”
Rezai smirked, but there was no mirth in his eyes.
“You think in terms of newspaper headlines, Rustam. I prefer history textbooks. During World War II, the USSR was also ‘busy’ fighting Hitler. That didn’t prevent Operation Countenance, when the Red Army occupied the entire north of our country. History teaches us: great powers always find time for smaller nations when their interests are at stake. Allies are a variable. Threats are a constant. The only language well understood in this world is the language of mutually assured destruction.”
The silence that fell in the room was thicker than the lead shielding of a reactor. Zahra, who had only been listening until then, could not hold back.
“Dr. Rezai, let’s assume, hypothetically, that we create a device,” her voice was quieter than she had expected. “Do you really believe we would use it?”
Rezai slowly turned his head toward her. He looked at her with the gaze of an engineer assessing the reliability of a structure.
“A nuclear weapon, Dr. Musavi, is like a prayer. Its power lies not in being uttered, but in the knowledge that it can be. And whether Allah will permit us to speak it aloud… I hope not. But it is better to have a sword and not draw it, than to stand unarmed before wolves.”
“The sword of Damocles,” Zahra muttered.
“What?”
“Nothing. A Greek parable. It doesn’t matter.”
That evening at dinner, it was Nasrin who uttered the prayer. She was picking at her saffron rice, staring into her plate, and said it as if she were announcing the weather forecast:
“They came to our school today.”
The knife froze in mid-air.
“Who?”
“From security. The Ettela’at. They took several people right from their classes. Adil, too.”
Amirkhan froze, his spoon in hand. Zahra felt the blood drain from her face.
Adil. Zahra knew the boy—quiet, polite, with the eyes of a medieval poet. He often came over to do homework with Nasrin; they would solve algebra problems together.
“What happened?” her husband asked in the voice he used to give orders.
“They said they were agents. Of Israel and America.” Nasrin looked up, and fear rippled in her eyes. “Baba, Adil barely even knows English. What kind of agent could he be?”
Zahra sat down across from her daughter and took her hands. They were cold, trembling.
“Sometimes… sometimes the authorities see threats where there are none. It’s like… like Brownian motion. Chaotic, unpredictable.”
“But why him?”
Zahra had no answer for that. Or rather, she had one, but she couldn’t say it aloud: because the system feeds on fear, just as a reactor feeds on uranium.
“Alright, Nasrin, but we don’t talk about this at the table,” Amirkhan ended the conversation. “And stay away from this whole affair. Do you understand me?”
“I understand,” Nasrin replied quietly.
That night, Zahra didn’t sleep. The room was filled with silence and her husband’s steady breathing. But in her head, the centrifuges of paranoia were roaring. Adil. A boy who just yesterday was solving quadratic equations had today become a variable in the equation of state security. They were just children. Their rebellion wasn’t treason. It was the growing pain of an organism starved of air. They just wanted a little more freedom than their parents, who had grown up in the shadow of the Islamic Revolution, in a world divided into black and white.
Perhaps it wasn’t they who had lost their way. Perhaps it was us. The whole country. We had spent so long building a fortress to protect ourselves from enemies that we didn’t notice it had become a prison. Saudi Arabia, the bastion of Wahhabism, was opening cinemas and letting women drive. Jordan was balancing tradition and modernity. And us? We were building centrifuges and walls. Enriching uranium and impoverishing souls. We kept reinforcing the walls, having forgotten to open the windows.
The shield she had helped to forge was now descending upon the heads of children. Her children. It was the final straw.
At four in the morning, long before the first call to prayer, when the house was plunged into its deepest phase of sleep, she got up. On tiptoe, she went to the living room. The dusty laptop opened with a faint creak. The screen glowed with a pale light—a window into another world.
The game. The garage. The contact list. She found his name. JagdpanFer_83. The cursor blinked like a lonely heart on an EKG. Her fingers froze over the keyboard. It was a leap into the void. She began to type a private message. Her fingers trembled.
“Bismillah ar-Rahman ar-Rahim. I remember you. The flight from Paris, January 2012. We spoke of tank battles and optimal angles of attack. I need to talk. My children… I must protect them. The system devours its own children, like Cronus.”
She deleted the last sentence. Too revealing. Then she rewrote the whole thing: “Praise be to Allah! I remember you. I want to talk. I want to protect my children.”
She pressed Enter.
The reply came in seconds.
“Hello. Communicating with me here is not secure. But you can write to me or send useful information that will help our country on the private forum wotrandom.com/forum/mods-world-of-tanks. The login is the same. An invitation is below.”
Zahra stared at the screen. Outside, the eastern sky was beginning to lighten. Soon, the muezzin would sing the Fajr. She closed the laptop, but the forum address was already seared into her memory, like the afterimage of a flash on a photographic plate.
In the bedroom, Amirkhan turned in his sleep, muttering something. She lay down beside him, pretending to be asleep, but her heart was beating with the decay rate of radioactive iodine—fast, erratic, dangerous.