Юрий Мельников – The Persian Notebook: Architects of Shadow (страница 11)
“No. Just his regards.”
He looked at her for a long time, and his gaze was as heavy as X-ray radiation.
“You are an asset to us, Dr. Musavi. A valuable asset. We would not want you to become a threat.”
She was released. But she understood: she was no longer just a scientist. She was a piece on a board, and now other hands were moving her.
Today had thawed her fear. In the laboratory, she had become an unwilling listener to a conversation between Rezai and Rustam. They were standing by a blackboard covered in formulas, but they weren’t talking about them.
“The latest data from Fordow confirms it – we have almost reached the required level. Eighty-three percent. Nearly weapons-grade,” Rezai was saying in a quiet, almost casual voice. “From here on, it’s no longer theory. It’s a matter of political will.”
“Will for what?” Rustam asked.
“To establish a balance. To launch a preemptive strike against any enemy in the region, if necessary.”
Rustam was silent.
“We have the delivery systems,” Rezai continued, as if thinking aloud. “The Shahab-3 covers the entire necessary territory.”
“And what if their air defense system intercepts it?” Rustam’s voice was barely audible.
“Allah knows best. It is all in His hands.”
“Or they will retaliate. And then a balance will be achieved. A balance of ash.”
“Perhaps. But did the Prophet Hussein retreat at Karbala, knowing the enemy’s superior forces? Martyrdom is also a form of victory,” Rezai concluded the conversation.
Zahra stood at her desk, feeling the floor give way beneath her. A preemptive strike. A theology of retribution. This was no longer deterrence. It was madness, cloaked in the form of state doctrine. They were truly prepared to turn the region into a radioactive wasteland in the name of an abstract idea of resistance. She had to do something.
After work, she didn’t go home. For the first time in a month, she headed for the Jameh Mosque. In the rearview mirror – the familiar silhouette of the silver car.
She parked near the mosque, got out, and walked toward the entrance. But instead of going in, she turned into an alley leading to the bazaar. In her peripheral vision, she caught a figure – a man in a dark coat, for a moment she thought it was Fakhrabadi. The same tilt of the head, the same gait.
Her thoughts leaped like electrons between orbits. He saw me leaving the mosque. He knows about the library. Or has he been following me from work? If it’s the IRGC, they already know everything. If it’s not them, then who? She walked quickly but steadily, weaving between merchants and shoppers. I need to disappear. To shed my skin.
She quickened her pace, diving into the labyrinth of the bazaar. Here, among hundreds of stalls and thousands of shoppers, she could dissolve. Carpets, spices, fabrics – a kaleidoscope of colors and scents. She stopped at a stall selling women’s clothing.
“I need a different hijab. A black one. And a longer manteau.”
The shopkeeper – an elderly woman with hands lined with time like an ancient manuscript – nodded knowingly. Not the first customer wanting to change her appearance.
Zahra went into the fitting room – a tiny cubicle curtained off. She took off her light gray hijab and put on a black one. She changed her beige manteau for a dark blue one. The mirror reflected a different woman – one of Isfahan’s thousands of faceless shadows.
She came out of the cubicle, paid, and stuffed her old hijab into her bag. The shopkeeper watched with a slight smile – she had seen it all before. Women changing their appearance, fleeing from husbands, from the morality police, from their own shadows.
Zahra moved deeper into the bazaar, weaving between the stalls. The pursuer’s logic would dictate looking for a light gray hijab. She had given him a false target.
Right, through the jewelry row. The gold in the windows like frozen solar flares. Left, past the carpet stalls. Patterns in which one could get lost, like in a Borges labyrinth.
She left the bazaar through a side exit onto Chaharbagh Avenue. She glanced back – no one who looked like a pursuer. But that meant nothing. A professional always keeps his distance.
She returned to the mosque by a circuitous route. The library. The old librarian was dozing over a Quran. She went to the far shelf. The netbook was in its place, as cold as a corpse.
She turned it on. VPN – a server in India today. Forum. A private message for JagdpanFer_83:
She turned off the netbook, hid it again. Left the library. Evening prayers were underway in the mosque. She joined in – rows of women in black, bowing in unison. There was salvation in this anonymity.
After the prayers, she left through the main entrance. The silver car was gone. Or it was somewhere else, with a different observer.
At home, Amirkhan was watching the news. The anchor was talking about new sanctions, about the machinations of Iran’s enemies.
“Where were you?” he asked, his eyes fixed on the screen.
“At the mosque. Praying.”
“In a new hijab?”
She froze. He had noticed. Of course, he had. An investigator notices details.
“I bought it at the bazaar. The old one was worn out.”
He nodded, but something remained unsaid in his gaze. A suspicion, coiled up and waiting for the right moment to strike.
Quantum superposition: she was simultaneously a traitor and a patriot, a savior and a destroyer, until an observer opened the box and saw which one she really was.
Nun: The Fragility of Porcelain
The January snow fell on Isfahan in sparse, hesitant flakes, as if the sky had forgotten how to cry and was now merely feigning sorrow. After weeks spent on the razor’s edge of paranoia, a calm had set in. Life seemed to be settling into its winter groove, and in this monotony, there was an illusion of peace. Zahra clung to this illusion like the last thread connecting her to a world where equations had solutions and the future held at least a hypothetical predictability.
On Friday afternoon, the doorbell rang. On the threshold stood Adil, Nasrin’s classmate. The same boy with the eyes of a medieval poet who had been led away from the schoolyard by men in plain clothes.
He stood there, shifting from foot to foot, holding a plate of homemade cookies covered with an embroidered napkin.
“My mother asked me to give you this. As thanks for your help with math.”
Zahra looked at him and saw not so much a boy as a scar. Those two days at the Ettela’at had aged him by ten years. The childish roundness of his cheeks was gone, his gaze had become deep and weary, as if he had peeked behind a curtain where there was nothing but emptiness. But he was smiling, and in his smile there was not brokenness, but a new, bitter strength.
Nasrin fluttered into the hallway, a blush flaring on her cheeks as bright as pomegranate seeds. She looked at Adil as if he were not just a classmate, but a hero returned from a perilous journey. And in that gaze, Zahra saw all the poignant, clumsy beauty of a first crush – a feeling as fragile as the old Chinese porcelain from her father’s collection.
“Come in, Adil, we were just about to have tea,” Zahra said, stepping aside.
They sat in Nasrin’s room, surrounded by posters of K-pop groups, whose members with their brightly colored hair and flawless faces looked down from the walls with an otherworldly, androgynous beauty, and stacks of textbooks.
Her daughter sat on the edge of the bed, her legs drawn up; Adil sat on a chair by the desk. Between them was a meter of space and an entire universe of the unsaid. They didn’t speak of what had happened. The topic was like a radioactive object that everyone could see but no one dared to touch. Adil said he had come for advice.
“Dr. Musavi, I want to choose a foreign language for advanced study. But I don’t know which one. Russian or English?”
Zahra sipped her tea. The question seemed simple, but in it, as in a drop of water, their entire fractured world was reflected.
“That depends on which road you choose, Adil. Which universe you want to discover for yourself. Russian is the language of our current ally. We work with them, we buy and sell technology. If you become an engineer or join the military, it will be useful. But that is a road leading north, into the cold.”
She paused.
“English is different. It is the language that science speaks today. Articles are written in it, debates at conferences are held in it. It is a global language, like Latin in the Middle Ages. It opens doors to the West. But those doors can turn out to be a trap.”