Shiraz. Chapter 3

The Magic of Numbers

16 Khordad 1376 (June 6, 1997)

Two weeks later, the air in Shiraz seemed lighter. Something had subtly changed, as if a heavy, invisible shroud had been lifted from the city. In the evenings, there were more young people on the avenues and in the parks. They weren’t doing anything forbidden. They were simply there—sitting on benches, laughing a little louder than before, their laughter mixing with the music drifting from the open windows of cars. The girls wore their headscarves a little more loosely, revealing strands of hair, as defiant as the first blades of grass pushing through asphalt. Hope seemed to be an almost physical substance, like patches of sunlight on the pavement, like glints in shop windows.

That Friday, Zahra was walking around the city with her mother. Her father had stayed home, citing work on an article. They walked down an avenue, and Roxana, usually reserved, was almost childishly happy today. She bought Zahra cotton candy and told funny stories from her student days.

“Look,” she said, nodding toward a group of students by the fountain. “It’s as if they’ve woken up.”

But Zahra saw not only them. She also saw those who were watching. Men in nondescript shirts, sitting at a distance with newspapers in their hands, but their gazes were not on the letters. They were everywhere, like the shadows cast by the bright June sun.

“At our school, the upperclassmen have gone crazy, it seems,” Zahra said, looking at a group of students arguing about something with heat and excitement. “They’re talking about poetry nights, about new newspapers. They say they might even allow concerts soon.”
“God willing,” Roxana adjusted her sunglasses, and for a moment, the sky was reflected in them as if in a looking-glass. “I hope Uncle Javad’s words remain just words. Just a grim fairy tale for adults.”

She said it quietly, almost like a prayer. A prayer that reality would turn out to be simpler than her brother described it.

When they returned home, they were met with silence. But it was not the peaceful silence that reigned when her father was working. It was a dense, electrified silence. Muffled voices came from the living room. Her father and Uncle Javad.

They were sitting opposite each other, and the carpet between them looked like a chessboard. Uncle had arrived from Tehran without warning. Laid out on the carpet were not newspapers, but printouts. The ashtray was full, the coffee cups empty.

“Have you read his latest speeches?” Javad’s voice was quiet but insistent, like the sound of a drill. “I counted. He used the word roshanfekri—‘enlightenment’—twenty-three times. Twenty-three times, Ali! Exactly twenty-three.”

Zahra’s father picked up a cup of cold coffee from the table. An ironic sparkle danced in his eyes.

“Twenty-three, you say? Well, that’s serious, Javad. That’s the number of the Illuminati. A terrible coincidence. And if you add two and three, you get five. A pentagram. The symbol of man, but also the sign of Baphomet, if you turn it upside down. The star of Solomon and the seal of the devil. It all adds up.”
“Don’t laugh, Ali!” Javad slapped his hand on the stack of papers. “Don’t you see? It’s a language, a code! They are speaking to us, but we are not listening! ‘Enlightenment’ is their password! They want to replace the light of Allah with their own artificial, electric light of reason!”
“Or maybe he just likes the word?” the father asked calmly. “Maybe he genuinely wants the nation to become more educated?”

At that moment, Roxana entered the room. She surveyed both men with a long, weary gaze.

“Are you at it again? You’ve had too much coffee and smoked too many cigarettes. Soon it will be impossible to breathe in this house from all your theories. Let me make you some fresh tea. With mint. It clears the head. Get your minds off your politics.”

Uncle Javad looked at her as if she were offering a glass of water to a drowning man. But her father, Ali, nodded with visible relief.

“Yes, Roxana-jan, you’re right. Tea is an excellent idea.”

Zahra stood in the doorway, invisible to them. She saw her father wink at her. He was playing along with his uncle, trying to push his paranoia to the point of absurdity to show him its untenability. But she saw something else, too. She saw a cold, confident fire burning in Uncle Javad’s eyes. He wasn’t playing. He believed. And his belief was more terrifying than any irony.

Twenty-three, Uncle said, and I think about numbers, about how strange it is that we call them Arabic, though the Arabs got them from the Indians, or maybe from the Persians, or the Persians from the Indians, but definitely not from the Arabs, but the West calls them Arabic because it got them from the Arabs, and it’s like a game of broken telephone, where each successive player distorts the message but thinks they are passing it on accurately.

I know twenty-three was just a number. A prime number, divisible only by itself and by one. Like a person. Like a country. But if you add it to another number, it becomes part of something bigger, part of a pattern. But back then, I only saw the beauty of numbers, their cold, flawless logic, which was more honest than any words. Zero is the silence from which everything is born, just as the world is born from the silence of Allah. And the silence, when they began to drink their tea, was the only truth in that smoke-filled room.