такое кино
Isfahan. Yod (י)
Double Sanctity
30 Aban 1401 (November 21, 2022)
That morning at breakfast, Zahra introduced a new variable into the equation of her life. A lie, wrapped in concern.
“Amirkhan, I need to see Dr. Afshar after work today,” she said, stirring sugar into her tea. “My head has been aching for a few days now.”
“Migraines again?” He looked up from his newspaper, a shadow of worry in his eyes. “Maybe you should take a vacation? You’re working yourself to exhaustion.”
“It’s just overwork. A couple of pills and it’ll pass.”
The lie was simple, calibrated, almost indistinguishable from the truth. She was, indeed, exhausted. Only it wasn’t her head that ached, but her soul. But Dr. Afshar did exist—an old family friend whom she would visit. Later. Afterwards.
All day, the data from Fordow pulsed in her memory like a phantom pain. Numbers, coordinates, percentages. She felt like a walking bomb, and the timer was already running. She knew that radioactive decay was inevitable. So was her own transformation. But unlike radioactive decay, her transformation did not obey the laws of physics. It obeyed the laws of morality, which were far more complex and unpredictable.
At five o’clock, she left the building. The gray car wasn’t there. Or was it, but a different color? Paranoia and reality had woven themselves into an indistinguishable pattern.
After work, she didn’t drive toward the clinic. She turned onto a bypass road and stopped at one of those faceless roadside cafes where truckers drink bitter tea and eat kebabs straight from the lavash.
She ordered food to go, returned to her car, and parked a little further away, in the shade of eucalyptus trees. She took the netbook from the first-aid kit. Her heart hammered against her ribs, beating out a ragged rhythm. VPN. Malaysia. Forum.
She began to type. Her fingers, accustomed to the precision of a spectrometer’s keyboard, produced a dry, emotionless text on the screen. It wasn’t a denunciation, but a scientific report.
“Data on facility F. The IR-2m and IR-6 cascades in sector B-7 show a systematic outperformance of 4-6% compared to the declared models. Power consumption in the specified sector is 9% above the norm, which is inconsistent with the operation of the declared 1044+174 centrifuges. Traces of tellurium-130 isotopes have been detected, which may indicate experiments with neutron initiators. Resonance effects suggest possible modification of standard protocols.”
She listed numbers, coordinates, technical parameters. Cold, irrefutable physics. But when she reached the personnel list, her fingers froze. The face of Professor Massoud Alimohammadi, her former teacher, flashed in her memory…
January 2010. An explosion in the parking lot outside his home. A magnetic mine on a nearby motorcycle. Mossad never admitted it, but everyone knew. He had been her academic supervisor. A brilliant mind, torn to pieces in the name of someone else’s security. A smiling, kind man, blown up in his car. He, too, had been just a name on someone’s list.
She couldn’t do it. That was a line she could not cross. To betray the system was one thing. To betray the people with whom you drank tea and argued about philosophy was something else entirely. She deleted the section with the names. Let them hunt ghosts and machines, but not people. And this was not mercy. It was her last attempt to preserve herself.
She sent the message and snapped the netbook shut. The data was now outside. The isotope had left her body.
Next stop: the alibi. Dr. Afshar’s clinic, her mother’s old friend. Zahra entered with a box of gaz—Isfahani sweets.
“Doctor, I was passing by and decided to bring you greetings from my mother.”
“Zahra-jan, what a delight!” The elderly woman in a white coat embraced her. “How are you? You look tired.”
“Work,” Zahra smiled. “You know how it is.”
They spoke for ten minutes. About the weather, her parents’ health, the price of pistachios. Ten minutes of impeccable, rock-solid normality.
And then—the Jameh Mosque of Isfahan.
She entered it as one enters another dimension. Outside, the noisy square, the cries of merchants, the bustle. Inside, silence, coolness, and divine geometry. Light, falling through the latticed windows of the dome, painted a pattern on the turquoise tiles like a peacock’s tail. A prayer, frozen in stone.
She walked past the worshippers, into a side corridor, to an inconspicuous door with a sign that read “Library.” It was a forgotten appendage of the mosque, its secular subconscious. A room filled with shelves of books and old magazines from the Shah’s era. Almost no one ever came here.
She carefully moved one of the bookcases. The space behind it breathed oblivion—the dust of centuries, the smell of decaying paper. The irony was almost physical. Here, in the heart of faith, in a room crammed with the secular heresies of the past, she was about to hide her own, new heresy. Wrapped in a newspaper where the Shah smiled from a photograph, the netbook seemed not just a device, but a seed of chaos that she was planting in the dead soil of someone else’s history. She pushed the bookcase back into place. Now her secret was under double protection: of oblivion and of sanctity. A perfect equation. But in that moment, she already knew: this was only the beginning. Whatever happened next, she could not return to her old life.
It was already dark when she returned home. Amirkhan was waiting in the living room.
“Well?” He stood up to meet her. “What did the doctor say? You were gone for a very long time.”
His voice was calm, but Zahra caught the professional tone of an investigator in it. He wasn’t asking. He was corroborating a story.
“Nothing serious. Just a migraine from overwork. She prescribed vitamins.” She pressed against his shoulder, seeking warmth and hiding her lie. “I’m so tired, Amirkhan. So tired.”
“Maybe you should take a vacation?”
“After the IAEA inspection. Now is not the time.”
He nodded. The logic was flawless. But something flickered in his gaze—not suspicion, but unease. A husband’s intuition, sensing his wife slipping away, like water through his fingers.
That night, lying sleepless, Zahra thought of double exposure—the photographic effect where two images are superimposed. Her life had become such a photograph: wife and traitor, mother and spy, guardian of secrets and their destroyer. Two images, laid one on top of the other, creating a third—ethereal, elusive, new. And this third image frightened her more than anything.