At five o’clock on Thursday, 12 March, I was drifting off after a day steeped in dread when the telephone rang. A surge of terror ran through me; it was an untimely call. Someone must have needed help—or perhaps was alone and frightened.
I answered, exhausted. It was my younger sister, sobbing and unable to speak. My heart shattered. I had not seen her for many days. When I left prison, she had moved to another city to look after our mother.
She came back on her birthday, but the war erupted soon after, and we have been separated in two different homes in Tehran.
Although she is far younger, she assumed the duty of safeguarding my son so that I could stay somewhere safe and avoid another arrest. I reminded her of my gratitude. My mind swirled: I feared something terrible had happened at home and that she could not tell me.
I told her that, for now, survival was the only priority, even if we no longer had a roof over our heads.
Through her cries she managed to say, “Our neighbour was caught in the blast… and he’s gone.”
For an instant I pictured the neighbour. Like me, he smoked. He may have been on the balcony for a cigarette, or, like many, watching the drones to gauge their direction.
Perhaps he had stepped out to mourn a country and a people being torn apart. Perhaps he was searching for gasoline to take his two children to a safer city.
I wish I were in a desert where I could scream, where I could weep as loudly as I wished. The last time I truly wept was after the January massacre of protesters. Why, here, unlike elsewhere, can we not cry like ordinary people? Why has our suffering become so great that fresh pain no longer rattles us?
Sleep eluded me. I went to the corner where I keep a small gas burner—my makeshift kitchen. I wanted coffee, but coffee has become prohibitively costly, and I must conserve funds. Cigarettes are also dear, yet I smoke regardless: one, two, five…
Since the fuel depots were struck over the weekend, my chest has burned and breathing is shallow. I bought an inhaler that now hangs around my neck.
At 6:30 a.m. another loud explosion rattled the air. I looked out the window. Some government supporters had taken to the streets in cars, chanting mournful songs and declaring, “People, we stand together, compatriots.”
Compatriots? Your folly has ruined this land. We tried. We struggled so these days would never arrive. We were imprisoned, tortured, executed.
I thought of Donald Trump. Had he acted fifty days earlier, perhaps 35,000 lives would still be intact. Now I fear Iran’s destruction—yet the Islamic Republic may endure.
I am preparing to send a few packets of lentils and a small sum of money to a woman whose husband is incarcerated and who has a young child. It is the last banknote we possess. Cash is nowhere to be found.
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