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Shiraz. Chapter 1
The Day of Choice
2 Khordad 1376 (May 23, 1997)
On that May day, Shiraz seemed to hold its breath. The air, thick with the scent of blossoming bitter orange trees, vibrated with unspoken anticipation. It wasn’t just a Friday, the sacred day of rest and prayer. It was the day of choice, and that very word, almost forgotten, was being spoken in kitchens and teahouses, sometimes in whispers, sometimes with a feverish glint in the eyes.
Zahra walked between her parents, her hand lost in the large, warm palm of her father. She was almost fifteen, an age when you are no longer a child but not yet an adult—an awkward, liminal age when you see and understand more than you’re supposed to, but you don’t yet have a voice. In both the literal and figurative sense.
The polling station was located in the school she had attended in her primary years. The familiar courtyard, usually empty, was full of people today. On the walls were posters of the candidates, faded by the May sun. Khatami’s face smiled softly, almost apologetically. Nateq-Nouri looked stern, like a teacher ready to scold a negligent student.
The line snaked long and motley, and in it stood everyone—women in severe black chadors and in bright, fashionable rusari headscarves, men in formal suits and in worn-out jeans. This wasn’t just a crowd. It was two Irans, meeting today in one place to decide which way their shared river would turn.
Her parents were also two different Irans.
“Khatami is the future, Ali,” her mother had said that morning as she poured tea, the steam rising between them like a transparent wall. “He speaks of a dialogue of civilizations. About how one can be both devout and modern.”
“Modernization without faith is Westernization, Roxana.” Her father spread butter on his lavash with the same methodicalness with which he wrote his theological treatises. “Nateq-Nouri understands that tradition is not shackles, but roots.”
Yes, her mother, Roxana, a doctor, a woman with the thin, nervous fingers of a surgeon and eyes that always held a light, ironic sadness, did not hide her hopes. For her, Khatami was not just a candidate. He was a symbol—of the possibility to breathe a little more freely, to read books that didn’t need to be hidden, to speak to the world in a common language.
Her father, Ali, a theologian, a man whose face seemed carved from ivory, was the embodiment of tradition. He was going to vote for Nateq-Nouri, for the familiar, orderly world where everything had its place and the highest law was the word of the Prophet. But his conservatism was devoid of fanaticism. It was as complex as the patterns of an Isfahan mosque.
“Do you really think Rushdie deserves to die?” Roxana asked as they stood in line, her voice quiet but insistent.
“I think he wrote a bad, deceitful book,” Ali answered just as quietly. “But the fatwa… No. Allah did not give us the right to be His executioners. If a man errs, he should not be killed. He should be debated. Persuaded. With words, not with the sword. Otherwise, how are we different from those we fight?”
Zahra listened to them, and it seemed to her she was listening not just to a husband and wife, but to the eternal argument of the two halves of the Persian soul—poetry and law, doubt and faith.
Uncle Javad was not with them. He was in Tehran. “Just in case,” as he had said on the phone the day before. Zahra knew that “just in case” in the world of her uncle, an employee of VEVAK, meant the possibility of riots, arrests, chaos. Uncle Javad didn’t believe in elections. He believed in the patterns woven in the shadows.
They entered the school building. The smell of chlorine, the hum of voices, the rustle of ballots. Her parents went to separate voting booths, like ships parting at sea. Zahra was left to wait in the corridor, by a display of children’s drawings. She looked at the naive, bright pictures—houses, suns, flowers—and felt infinitely old. She already knew the world was far more complicated. That behind every sun, a shadow hid. And that today, on this day full of hope, her parents, whom she loved equally, would drop two ballots into the box that would fly in different directions, like two arrows shot into the future.
She watched as a woman in a black chador took a ballot, her fingers trembling like a patient with Parkinson’s disease. And next to her stood a girl in a bright headscarf, smiling as if it were not election day, but a wedding. Her father used to explain: “Allah gave us free will, but freedom is a heavy burden that not everyone is prepared to carry.” Now she knew: that weight pressed down on everyone who had come to her school that day to cast their vote into the future.
I remember, or I think I remember, or I’m inventing that I remember, how the roses smelled that day, they smelled not of roses but of time, which was curdling, like milk in tea when you add lemon, but we didn’t add lemon, we added cardamom, and Father would say that cardamom is the memory of paradise, and Mother would laugh and say that paradise is a hospital with no patients, which was a joke, but not a funny one, because a hospital with no patients is a morgue, but she would say it in Persian—sardkhaneh—a cold house, and I would think: why is death cold if hell is hot?
Khatami on the poster smiled, the way a physics teacher smiles when explaining that light is both a wave and a particle at the same time, which is impossible but it is so, and I thought: maybe a president is also both a wave and a particle, and that’s why we can’t know for sure where he is and where he’s going, the uncertainty principle, which I hadn’t studied yet but already knew, because some things we know before we know them.
The line moved, the way mercury moves in a thermometer—slowly, reluctantly, but inevitably, and I counted the people: seventeen, thirty-four, sixty-eight, a doubling, mitosis, the division of cells, which can be growth or it can be cancer, and Dr. Roxana, my mother, but I didn’t call her Mother when I thought of her as a doctor, Dr. Roxana knew the difference, but she didn’t say, because some knowledge is dangerous, like uranium isotopes, which I read about in the encyclopedia, U-235 and U-238, one explodes and the other doesn’t, but they look the same.
Uncle Javad didn’t come, and his absence was louder than his presence, just as silence is louder than sound when you’re waiting for an explosion, but I didn’t know I was waiting for an explosion, I thought I was waiting for the saffron ice cream Father had promised to buy after the vote, but the ice cream will melt, just as this day will melt, leaving only stains on memory, yellow like saffron, red like roses, black like the chador of the woman who stood before us and smelled of grief, although grief has no smell, or maybe it does, but we have no words for that smell.
I couldn’t vote, I was fourteen, or fifteen, no, fourteen, definitely fourteen, because I would turn fifteen next spring, on 25 Bahman, in the year my father would no longer be alive, but I didn’t know that yet, or maybe I did, because time in Shiraz doesn’t flow linearly but in a spiral, like water in a sink when you pull the plug,. and everything rushes to one point—the drain, oblivion, the day a car will crash into a car, and metal will meet metal, as atoms meet in a nuclear reaction, releasing energy that destroys everything around it.
But on that day, 2 Khordad 1376, I only felt that something was beginning, something big and terrifying, the way you feel a storm approaching by how the birds fall silent, and even the roses stop smelling, preparing for the blow that is as inevitable as Khatami’s victory with seventy percent of the vote, which was impossible but it happened, like light being both a wave and a particle at the same time.