ĀFĀQ (Horizons) — Tehran, independent daily, cultural pages 6 Āzar 1408 — November 27, 2029
The Stones Have Not Spoken, and We Are the People Who Know How to Wait
by Simin Dowlatshāhi
Simin Dowlatshāhi taught Persian literature for thirty-four years at a girls’ high school in Rey. Since her retirement she has written for the cultural pages on poetry, grief, and the discipline of both. This is her first column about the sky, and, she promises, not her last.
Recovered press item, English rendering. Predates First Voices (December 12, 2029); the writer has not heard the stones speak, and does not know what March will bring.
My neighbor Batul-khanom, who is eighty-six and buried a husband, a son, and a country she still calls by its old street names, put her tea down on my kitchen table last Thursday, looked at the ceiling in the direction of the asteroids, and delivered the finest piece of political analysis I have heard this year:
“So. Now everyone lives in Iran.”
I have been unable to improve on this, and believe me, I have tried.
Consider, before you laugh, what has actually happened to the fortunate nations this autumn. An unanswerable power, which does not negotiate, does not explain itself, and does not permit appeal, has drawn a circle around their entire world and their plans within it. Their money cannot buy it off. Their weapons — we all watched, eleven nights running, my grandson translating the astronomy channels — are received the way the sea receives a thrown pebble, with a ripple and a closing. Their futures, so recently the one commodity they possessed in surplus, have been placed under seal pending a decision they will not be consulted on. They wake each morning and check whether the terms have changed. The terms have not changed. The terms are never announced. There is only the circle, and the waiting, and the fact that the ones who drew the circle do not hate you enough to speak to you.
Forgive me. We have been rehearsing this life since before my students were born. We know its cuisine, its jokes, its funerals. We know how to repair the irreparable with the wrong parts and how to hold a wedding inside a siege. The embargo of heaven has been declared on all mankind, and I regret to report that the Iranians are the only people on earth who arrive at this moment already fluent.
I am told I should not gloat, and my editor is right, and I will stop — because gloating dies quickly in me when I think of my granddaughter, who lives in Bandar Abbas, where her husband works, and who called me on Friday to ask, in the too-light voice she has used since childhood for the things that frighten her, whether I thought the sea was safe. She was not asking about the sea. There is no analysis in me, no irony, no verse, that is any use against the sound of that voice. Whatever is coming is coming for her sky too, and the arrogant and the innocent stand under the same November stars, and this — I want to say it plainly, because our sermonizers will not — this is the moment’s true terror. Not the stones. The indiscriminacy of the stones.
For what has our whole civilization insisted upon, from Karbala forward, if not that the ledger is kept? That the arrogant powers — we have a word, estekbār, that the foreign newspapers always translate and never understand — will answer for the account someday, and that the oppressed hold receipts? Very well: something has come at last that the arrogant cannot bribe, cannot bomb, cannot sanction, cannot even insult, since it declines to listen. The drones that hummed over other people’s weddings, the fleets that renamed other people’s waters, the satellites that counted the fruit trees in other people’s courtyards — all of it suddenly provisional, all of it under review by a landlord no one has met. A person could be forgiven a certain dark satisfaction. But the ledger, if this is the ledger, is being read in the dark, silently, and the auditor makes no distinction I can detect between the emperor and the fisherman’s daughter in Bandar Abbas. If this is justice, it is justice in a script we have not yet been taught to read. And if it is not justice, then it is only weather — and I have buried too many people to accept, at my age, that the universe is only weather.
So I do what a literature teacher does with an unreadable text. I attend to its silences.
And here is the silence that keeps me at the window past midnight: they have not spoken. Six thousand five hundred and sixty-one stones — my grandson tells me the number keeps a secret arithmetic, nine multiplied upon itself four times, and that a sect has already formed around it, humanity being unable to leave a number unworshipped — and from all of them together, in five months, not one word. The Qur’an tells us that God does not destroy a city until He has sent it a warner; the flood itself came with Noah attached, a hundred and twenty years of him, preaching to people who laughed. Every catastrophe in our books has the courtesy of an announcement. But the sky over Tehran this month holds only a gathering, wordless attention — a guest who has entered the courtyard and stands there, not knocking, which every Iranian knows is far more serious than knocking.
Unless — and I offer this to the theologians of Qom with an old teacher’s apologies — unless the warning was ours, and we delivered it to ourselves. They drilled through the ice of a hidden ocean on a moon named for a stolen woman, with a probe named for the poet who went down into the world of the dead to take back what death had lawfully claimed. Orpheus, the Greeks say, was warned not to look back, and looked. Four thousand scientists signed their letter; the fired warning-givers gave their warnings; the ice was drilled anyway, because a great power feared arriving second. We are a people who have produced a thousand years of poetry on exactly one theme: that the Beloved’s veil is not yours to lift, and that those who force the door of the hidden find the hidden looking back. Perhaps the warner was sent. Perhaps the warner was Dr. Okonkwo-Bassey with her letter, a Cassandra with a fax machine. It would be very like mankind to demand a prophet and then require that he come with tenure.
I do not know what the stones intend, and unlike the men on the evening broadcast, I decline to pretend. We are, after all, the civilization of the Occultation — fourteen centuries of training in the presence of a hidden thing that is nonetheless there, whose silence is not absence, whose delay is not neglect. Our neighbors to the west count time from an arrival; we have learned to keep time by a waiting. I do not say the stones are holy. I say only that of all the world’s peoples, we are the least likely to mistake silence for emptiness, and the least likely to be destroyed, inwardly, by a decision that will not explain itself. The fortunate nations are learning this month that history can simply stop consulting you. They are taking it very badly. One almost wants to send instructors.
What will I do, then, between now and March, I who am seventy-one and command no fleets?
I will tell you exactly, because it is the only counsel this column has to offer, and I did not invent it; I inherited it. This week I began teaching my granddaughters poetry — by heart, the old way, my hand keeping the meter on the tabletop the way my own grandmother’s did through a war I was too young to name. Sa’di on the sons of Adam being limbs of one body. Hafez on the fortress of the world and its treacherous foundations, and on love as the only load-bearing wall. Forough — yes, Forough, let the committee write to the editor — on the window, and on planting one’s hands in the garden.
Because here is what a lifetime among books and sieges has taught me, and it is my answer to Batul-khanom, and to the silent stones, and to whatever March intends: everything that can be confiscated will someday be confiscated. Ships, skies, savings, cities — held on lease, all of it, from a landlord whose name changes but whose terms do not. What cannot be confiscated is what has been memorized. When the Mongols came, the poems walked out of Nishapur in the mouths of refugees and outlived the walls. If the worst comes, it will come for a people who have practiced. And if the best comes — if the stones pass over us like the angel in somebody else’s scripture — then my granddaughters will merely know some poems, and no century was ever the worse for that.
The guest stands in the courtyard and does not knock. Very well. We will put the kettle on, and wait, and recite. It is what we were doing anyway.