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Shiraz. Chapter 4
The Arithmetic of Surahs
23 Khordad 1376 (June 13, 1997)
A week later, they went to Tehran. The train, an early morning express, carried them from the sleepy city shrouded in pre-dawn haze to the humming, nervous heart of the country. The station was like a lazy giant reluctantly opening one eye. The few passengers moved slowly, as if afraid to wake the silence.
The official reason for the trip was a visit to Uncle Hossein, her mother’s younger brother, a successful carpet merchant. But the real reason was to show Zahra the University of Tehran, its stern buildings and shady avenues. She would soon be fifteen. It was time to choose a path, to determine the vector of her future.
It was cool in the compartment. Zahra sat by the window, pressing her forehead against the glass. Outside, the suburbs of Shiraz drifted by, then the endless ocher plain, occasionally interrupted by green patches of gardens. The sun rose slowly, painting ancient Persia in shades of copper and gold.
“Why did you become a theologian?” Zahra asked her father, who was reading yesterday’s newspaper. “You love numbers. You could have been a mathematician.”
Ali put down the newspaper and looked at his daughter with that special attention adults reserve for unexpectedly serious childhood questions.
“And you think they are different things?” he smiled. “Theology is higher mathematics. An attempt to find the main law that describes the universe. To count the signs left for us by the Creator.”
He leaned toward her.
“In the Quran,” he began slowly, as if weighing each word, “the word ‘faith’ and its derivatives, without synonyms, are repeated eight hundred and eleven times. ‘Disbelief,’ its derivatives and synonyms—six hundred and ninety-seven times. The difference between these numbers is one hundred and fourteen. Exactly the number of surahs in the Quran. A coincidence? Or a message? I don’t know, Zahra-jan. But I wanted to find out. That’s why I became a theologian. To seek God in numbers and numbers in God.”
“But that can be checked!” Zahra exclaimed, enlivened. “You can count, make a table…”
“You can. And many have counted. And they found other patterns. Or found none at all. Faith is not a mathematical proof. It is the choice to see meaning where others see coincidence.”
Roxana, sitting opposite, looked up from her medical journal.
“And you, Zahra, do you like English? It will be difficult at the university without it.”
“I like French more,” Zahra admitted. “It’s… beautiful. Like music.”
“French is beautiful,” Roxana agreed, her gaze becoming dreamy. “The language of love and revolutions.”
“And the language of surrender,” her father chuckled, but there was no malice in his smile. “Your mother, when we first met, impressed me not with her French. She recited poetry to me in Latin. Can you imagine? A young female medical student in post-revolutionary Iran quoting a dead language of infidels. It was so bold. And so beautiful.”
“Do you remember those verses,” Ali continued, his voice as soft as velvet, “that you recited? At that student party where there were supposed to be no girls, but you came anyway.”
Roxana smiled—that special smile that for a moment transformed her from a tired middle-aged woman into a girl with burning eyes.
“I remember. The party. And the verses,” she cleared her throat and began to recite, and the Latin words in her mouth sounded like an incantation:
Totus in te, totus tecum,
Fatum scribit cursum rectum.
Quasi mutor — sum alius,
Quasi factus sum ignotus.
Sed nec tu es iam eadem,
Obscurata est manus illa,
Quae me leniter tangendo
Dabat corpus cum amore.
Et cum omisso mundo caro,
Donavisti te totam mihi.
Sed scio: dies veniet,
Cum me umbra succedet.
Nives cuncta tunc tegent,
Et solus radius longe
Inopinanter te tanget,
Iterum ibisque illuc,
Iterum me invenies.
Iterum simul ambo stamus,
Ianuam reseramus domus,
Et ibi tantum candelae,
Et deus — nos obviam venit.
She fell silent, then translated, and her voice trembled like the air above hot asphalt:
“I am all in you, I am all with you, fate writes a straight course, as if I am another, as if I have become a stranger. But you are no longer the same, and that hand has darkened, which, gently touching me, gave its body with love. And when, forgetting the dear world, you gave yourself wholly to me. But I know: the day will come, when a shadow will replace me, when snows will cover everything, and only a distant ray will unexpectedly touch you, and again you will go there, and again you will find me, and again we two will stand together, we will unlock the door of the house, and there will be only candles there, and a god will come out to meet us.”
Silence fell in the compartment. Outside, telegraph poles flew by, counting off the kilometers. Ali took his wife’s hand, intertwined their fingers. They looked at each other as if there were no one else in the compartment but the two of them.
Zahra turned to the window, feeling like an intruder in this moment of their intimacy. Her face was reflected in the glass—half-child, half-adult, with eyes full of questions that had no answers yet.
These verses, coming from another world, from another era, seemed like a prophecy to her. About love, about separation, about death, and about a meeting after death. She looked at her parents, at how her father’s hand found her mother’s in the dim light, and for the first time in her life, she felt a sharp, almost painful longing for something she had never had. For love. The very love written about in poems, which, like God, is made of faith, numbers, and mysteries.
Eight hundred eleven and six hundred ninety-seven, 811-697=114, and it’s true, I checked later, I spent all night counting with the Quran and a dictionary, and the numbers matched, but what does it mean? That Allah is a mathematician? Or that mathematics is the language of Allah? Or that we see patterns where there are none, just as we see faces in the clouds and constellations in the random arrangement of stars?
Latin, a dead language, but how can a language be dead if it speaks of love? Totus in te*, I don’t know Latin, but I hear the music,* totus tecum*, and it’s like a formula, where* totus* is the whole, an integer, an integral, and* te* and* tecum* are ‘you’ in different cases, and love is the integration of two functions into one, but I don’t know love, I’m fourteen, almost fifteen, and I only know how to solve equations with two unknowns, x and y, but what if love is an equation where both unknowns are yourself?*
Mama recited the verses, and her voice changed, became younger, and I still see her differently, not as Mother, but as Roxana, a medical student who came to a party where there were supposed to be no girls, but she came, because rules are only suggestions, not commands, if you have courage, and she recites Latin verses to a theologian who seeks God in numbers, and he falls in love, because she speaks a language older than Islam, older than Christianity, the language of Rome, which fell, but its language lives on.
Dies veniet, the day will come, and I think of the future tense in Latin, which is called futurum*, from the verb* esse*—to be, and the future is that which will be, which is not yet, but will be, and the verses speak of a day when a shadow,* umbra*, will replace Papa, and I shudder, because it’s a prophecy that will come true in a few months, when a truck crashes into his car, or the car into a truck, it doesn’t matter, metal will meet metal, and Papa will become a shadow, an umbra, and Mama will search for him,* iterum*, again and again, in every theologian, in every man who loves numbers.*
French is beautiful, yes, but Latin is the mathematics of languages, its declensions and conjugations follow strict rules, six cases, five declensions, four conjugations, and everything is logical, like in physics, where there are laws that cannot be broken, but French is impressionism, where the rules are blurred, where the same word can mean different things depending on intonation, on context, on who is speaking and to whom.
The train clacks on the rails, ta-dam, ta-dam, like iambic pentameter, like a heart, like a Geiger counter, counting down a half-life, and I think: we are going to Tehran, where Uncle Hossein is waiting for us with his carpets, and Uncle Javad with his theories, with his twenty-three mentions of enlightenment, and maybe he also counts words in texts, like Papa counts words in the Quran, only Papa was looking for proof of God’s presence, and Uncle for proof of a conspiracy, and both will find what they are looking for, because when you really want to find something, you always will.
I look at my parents, how they hold hands, their fingers intertwined like a DNA double helix, and I think: there it is, love, not in verses, not in words, but in this silent intertwining, in this double helix that creates a new life, me, but I am not just the sum of their genes, I am an emergent property, that which arises from interaction but is not reducible to the sum of its parts, just as water is not just H₂O, it is a liquid that can be ice and steam, and love is not just two people, it is a third state of matter.
Outside the window is the desert, and it looks like a sea, frozen in sand, and I think about time, about how time flows differently there, in that desert, slower, like honey, like molasses, as in Einstein’s theory of relativity, where time depends on speed and gravity, and maybe love is also a curvature of spacetime, when two people create a gravitational well, and everything around them begins to spiral, falling toward the center, where time stops.
And again we two will stand together, we will unlock the door of the house… and I imagined that house, empty, quiet, and only candles, and a god who comes out to meet them, but what god? The one who counts faith and disbelief in the Quran? Or the one who invented Latin and love, and the snows that will cover everything? Or is it all the same God, just speaking different languages, like Mama, who speaks Farsi, and Latin, and the language of love, which I didn’t understand yet, but I could already feel its grammar, its sad, inevitable logic.