The Persian Notebook: Architects of Shadow

Юрий Мельников

The Persian Notebook: Architects of Shadow

Isfahan

Aleph: The Transcript

CASE FILE No. 788-AT/IRGC-ISF

RECORD OF INTERROGATION

Date: 24 Ordibehesht 1402 (May 14, 2023)

Time Start: 14:47

Time End: 15:58

Location: Counterintelligence Directorate of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, Isfahan. Interrogation Room No. 4.

Subject: Musavi, Zahra, daughter of Ali.

Interrogator: Major Mohsen Karimi, Directorate Investigator.

Present:

The Investigator.

The Secretary (recording the minutes).

Musavi, Z.

(The room is sterile. Beige walls. A metal table. Three chairs. On the table: a switched-off voice recorder, a glass of water for the subject. An air conditioner hums monotonously, maintaining an unnatural chill. There is no smell. None at all. This in itself is unnerving.)

Investigator: Bismillāhi r-raḥmāni r-raḥīm. In the name of Allah, the Most Gracious, the Most Merciful. Dr. Musavi, let us begin. State your full name.

Musavi: Zahra Musavi, daughter of Ali.

Investigator: Date and place of birth?

Musavi: 25 Bahman 1361. The city of Shiraz.

Investigator: Age?

Musavi: Forty years old.

Investigator: Marital status?

Musavi: Married.

Investigator: Husband’s name and occupation?

Musavi: Amirkhan Musavi. Head of Security for the Isfahan Municipality.

Investigator: Children?

Musavi: Two daughters. Nasrin, seventeen, a high school student. And Zeynab, twelve, a middle school student.

Investigator: Education?

Musavi: Graduated from the University of Tehran, Faculty of Physics, Department of Nuclear Physics. Doctorate in Plasma Physics.

Investigator: The year you defended your dissertation?

Musavi: Thirteen eighty-seven. By your calendar, two thousand and eight.

Investigator: The topic of your dissertation?

Musavi: “Modeling Plasma Instabilities in Tokamaks Using the Gyrokinetic Approximation Method.”

Investigator: Current place of employment?

Musavi: The Nuclear Technology Research Center, Isfahan. Laboratory Number Four.

Investigator: Position?

Musavi: (The investigator fingers his tasbih – prayer beads.) Senior Research Fellow.

Investigator: Your supervisor?

Musavi: Dr. Hassan Rezai.

Investigator: Do you wear the hijab out of conviction or out of necessity?

Musavi: (A pause) As required by the law of the Islamic Republic.

Investigator: That is not an answer to the question.

Musavi: I abide by all the laws.

Investigator: How often do you pray?

Musavi: Five times a day, when my work allows.

Investigator: Is there a prayer room in the laboratory?

Musavi: Yes. A separate one for women.

Investigator: Who are the other women working in your laboratory?

Musavi: I am the only one.

Investigator: Does that not create difficulties?

Musavi: I am used to it.

Investigator: We see a note in your file about an internship abroad.

Musavi: Yes. From 2009 to 2011. In France. At the French Alternative Energies and Atomic Energy Commission, the Saclay center.

Investigator: Have you maintained contact with any of your French colleagues since returning to your homeland? Name them. Dr. Philippe Dubois? Dr. Agnès Fournier?

Musavi: All contact was of an exclusively scientific nature and was terminated upon my return to Iran, as the protocol required. Our email correspondence concerned only the finalization of a joint publication on the behavior of uranium isotopes in a gaseous medium at supercritical speeds. The last email was sent in 2012.

Investigator: Are you saying that reality consists of protocols, Doctor? Or that protocols are reality?

Musavi: I am saying that I followed procedure. Reality is the aggregate of physical laws. Protocols are merely a faint reflection of them in the social sphere. An attempt to bring order to chaos.

Investigator: An interesting philosophy… Your colleague, Rustam Yazdi. How long did you know him?

Musavi: Since I first joined the laboratory. About ten years.

Investigator: Describe your relationship.

Musavi: Collegial. We worked on adjacent aspects of the cascade centrifuge. Sometimes we would discuss the Helmholtz equations. Sometimes we would drink tea in the canteen. He had good taste in dates.

Investigator: Were you close?

Musavi: Proximity is not a category from the world of physics. Our orbits intersected at strictly designated points. We were not friends. We were functions in the same system.

Investigator: When was the last time you saw him?

Musavi: Last Thursday. At the end of the workday. He was leaving a little earlier than I was. He said “Khodahafez” (Persian for “God protect you,” a farewell). As usual.

Investigator: Did you notice anything unusual in his behavior in recent weeks?

Musavi: (After a pause) He was more silent than usual. Distracted. Once, I saw him sketching on a napkin, not formulas, but something that resembled a Fibonacci spiral, only with an error in the sequence. It was irrational. Not like him.

Investigator: Irrational. (He makes a barely perceptible note on a sheet of paper. The pen makes no sound.) Dr. Musavi, do you consider yourself a loyal citizen of the Islamic Republic of Iran?

Musavi: My work is the best proof of that. I serve my country using the knowledge it gave me.

Investigator: Your work is splitting the atom. The atom, as you know, can be used for creation and for destruction. It all depends on the intention. The same is true of loyalty.

Musavi: My intentions are pure. As a vacuum in a centrifuge.

(The investigator puts down the pen and picks up the tasbih again. He leans forward slightly. The room becomes even quieter, as if the hum of the air conditioner has muffled itself to listen. The investigator’s voice, until now as monotonous as a metronome, takes on a different, metallic edge.)

Investigator: Dr. Musavi, have you ever consumed alcohol or illicit substances?

(The question lands in the silence like a drop of acid on marble. Absurd, out of place, insulting. Her fingers, resting on the table, grow cold. She looks at the investigator, trying to solve this logical anomaly, to find the reason for such a failure in the protocol.)

Musavi: No. Never. It is haram. And it is… illogical.

(The investigator does not react to her answer. He does not blink. His gaze is like a camera lens, dispassionate and all-seeing. He holds the pause, letting the first question do its destructive work, and then, without changing his tone, delivers the second blow.)

Investigator: How did you know that Rustam Yazdi was murdered?

Musavi: (A long pause. She mechanically adjusts her maghnaeh – a part of her hijab.) I… I never said that.

Investigator: But you suspect it.

Musavi: (Barely audible) Yes.

Investigator: On what grounds?

Musavi: Intuition. Just intuition.

Investigator: A woman’s intuition? Is there a place for intuition in nuclear physics?

Musavi: They are different things.

Investigator: The interrogation is suspended at 15:58. Dr. Musavi, you will remain here. We will have additional questions.

Time in the room stops.

Bet: Vacuum and the Poems of Hafez

9 Ordibehesht 1402 (April 29, 2023)

The day began with an equation. Even before the muezzin’s call to morning prayer, the azan, echoed from the turquoise minaret of the Imam Mosque, Zahra’s mind was already assembling partial differential equations that described the behavior of plasma. It was her ritual, her way of imposing order on the universe before the universe could impose its chaos on her. She lay in bed beside the steady-breathing body of her husband, Amirkhan, and mentally spun uranium hexafluoride in a simulation, separating valuable isotopes from worthless ones, like sifting wheat from chaff.

Home was the first cell. Here, she was a wife and mother. She rose without a sound, put on a house robe over her nightgown, and went to the kitchen. The air smelled of yesterday’s rice and rosewater. On the table lay her older daughter Nasrin’s textbook, open to a page of English irregular verbs, and next to it, the neatly folded school uniform of her younger daughter, Zeynab. Two daughters – two vectors, pointed in opposite directions. One was a centrifugal force, straining outward, toward forbidden music, encrypted messengers, and a world she’d only seen in films. The other was centripetal, a perfect student, the pride of her school, obedient and predictable as the motion of the planets. Zahra prepared breakfast: lavash bread, cheese, sweet tea. Mechanical movements, refined over years.

The car, her old Peugeot, was the transition zone. Here, in the flow of morning traffic in Isfahan, past ancient bridges and dusty plane trees, she underwent a transformation. Woman, wife, mother – these shells were shed one by one. By the time she reached the facility’s first checkpoint, only one entity remained: Dr. Musavi. Physicist. Function.

The laboratory was her sanctuary. Cell number two. A world of pure reason. Here reigned the cold light of fluorescent lamps, the hum of ventilation systems, and the smell of ozone. There was no room for emotions, only data. Her male colleagues nodded to her with restraint, with respect, but always from a distance. She was an anomaly to them: too intelligent, too withdrawn, a woman in a world ruled by men, shattering their conception of the world like a neutron shattering an atomic nucleus. She paid it no mind. Their opinions were just background noise, with no effect on the experiment’s results. It wasn’t their opinions that were dangerous, but their gazes.

Her workstation was a model of order. Monitors displaying graphs. Stacks of printouts covered in formulas. Perfectly sharpened pencils. Across the aisle was Rustam Yazdi’s desk. His desk was always a creative mess: books on philosophy sat next to manuals on spectrometry; napkins were scrawled not only with equations but with strange geometric patterns. Rustam was the only one with whom she could speak about more than just work. He could quote Hafez, speculate on the nature of time, and bring dates from home, claiming they were from his grandfather’s garden in Yazd. He was… an error in the system. A tolerable error.

That day, his desk was empty.

It was strange. Rustam was never late. By lunchtime, his space was still vacant. Zahra felt a prick of anxiety – an irrational, illogical impulse. She suppressed it. Perhaps he was ill.

The next day, the desk was not just empty. It was sterilely clean. The books, the stacks of paper, even the mug that read “I think, therefore I am in a state of superposition” were all gone. As if he had never been there.

Zahra approached the head of the laboratory, Dr. Rezai. He was a short, dry man with eyes that seemed to see the world in the infrared spectrum, noticing only the heat signatures of threats.

“Dr. Rezai, where is Rustam Yazdi?” she asked, trying to keep her voice even.

Rezai did not look up from his papers.

“Dr. Yazdi has been transferred. An urgent project at another facility.”

“He said nothing. It was so sudden.”

“In our line of work, Dr. Musavi,” Rezai finally looked up, and his eyes held nothing but cold steel, “the most important things always happen suddenly. Return to your work.”

It was an explanation. And at the same time, an order not to ask questions. But Zahra’s logic screamed that there had been a breach of protocol. People didn’t just vanish like that. Not even in their world. They said their goodbyes, handed over their duties. A transfer took weeks to process. This was wrong. The system had failed.

All day, she couldn’t concentrate. The equations blurred. Through the concrete and casings, in the hum of the centrifuges, she thought she heard other voices. She felt her colleagues’ eyes on her – or was she imagining it? Paranoia. An unacceptable variable.

In the evening, when almost everyone had left, she walked over to Rustam’s empty desk. Out of pure curiosity, she told herself. Just to be sure. She pulled open a drawer. Empty. A second one. Empty. In the third, her fingers brushed against something beneath a metal divider. A small piece of paper, folded into a square. Not official letterhead. Torn from a notepad.

She unfolded it. There wasn’t a single word written inside. Only a few lines, drawn in Rustam’s familiar hand.

It wasn’t a text. It was a line from a poem and a series of numbers.

“Where is the house of my friend, O companions?”

And below it:

74.4.12.3_9.1.5.7

A line from Hafez. And a code. A chill seized her. It was a message. But from whom? Her first thought was illogical, panicked: he knew. He knew about the data she had been copying for the man whose real name she had never learned. The man she had only seen twice. But if Rustam knew… No. It was impossible. She had been too careful. Too methodical. Or had she? She felt as if she were standing on the border between two worlds: the world of order and the world of chaos.

She clenched the note in her fist. The paper felt scorching hot. She was no longer just a physicist who had stumbled upon a mystery. She was a spy who had received a message that could be either a key to salvation or a warrant for her own disappearance. And she had no margin for error.

Or Rustam had left it for her.

Gimel: The Crystal Lattice of Loyalty

29 Mehr 1401 (October 21, 2022)

Autumn in Isfahan is a time when the light becomes as fragile as old porcelain, and the air grows thick with the scent of wilting plane trees and golden dust carried from the desert. Zahra loved this season. The equations in her head, usually as sharp and cold as the lines on an oscilloscope, took on color and warmth in October. Returning home, she would feel the logic of the laboratory, a world of predictable trajectories and controlled reactions, slowly dissolve into the viscous, irrational haze of the evening city.

That evening, everything was different.

The rain began suddenly, the way all catastrophes begin – with a barely perceptible change in the usual order of things. First, it was just a few drops on the windshield of her Peugeot, then a dense curtain that transformed the world outside into an impressionist painting. Zahra turned on the wipers. Their measured squeak was like a metronome counting out the beats of someone else’s symphony.

The stream of cars on Chaharbagh Avenue had frozen. Not just slowed, as in a normal traffic jam, but stopped dead, as if time itself had thickened and ceased to flow. Ahead, an unnatural silence hung in the twilight air, pierced only by nervous honks and distant, bark-like shouts.

Zahra turned off the radio, where an announcer was cheerfully reporting new successes in agriculture. She peered ahead, trying to break the chaos down into its component parts. People in black uniforms. The Basij. The dull thud of batons against plastic shields. A woman’s shriek, cut off on a high note. She saw a single white sneaker roll across the asphalt, and nearby, caught by the wind, a hijab torn from someone’s head fluttered – lilac, like the flower of a Judas tree.

Students. Again.

Her fingers clenched the steering wheel in a death grip. It was an abstract picture, a scene from the news that her mind was accustomed to classifying and filing away in a drawer labeled “Society: unpleasant, but distant.” But today, the distance had vanished.

A knock on her side window. It was a police officer. She lowered the glass, and the smell of rain, mixed with something acrid – tear gas – flooded the car.

“Documents,” his voice was tired, mechanical.

She handed him her ID. The officer took the card, held it up to his eyes. His gaze flickered from her photograph to the name of her institution and back. Something in his face changed – indifference was replaced by a shadow of respect. Or perhaps just a different kind of suspicion. He returned the ID.

“My apologies, Doctor. Where are you headed?”

“Home. The Jolfa district.”

“Where are you coming from?”

“From work. The research center.”

He handed back her documents, studying her more closely, as if weighing something.

“You may proceed, Doctor. Be careful.”

Zahra reached for the gearshift, but he didn’t move away. He leaned a little lower, and his voice became quieter, almost confidential.

“I hope your children aren’t involved in this,” the officer nodded toward the chaos behind him. “The youth today don’t understand the consequences.”

The words were not a threat. They were something worse. A statement of fact, a reminder of her vulnerability.

“My children are at home,” she replied, hoping it was true.

Then he stepped back.

Zahra pulled away slowly, maneuvering around a group of Basij who were dragging a young man across the ground. She stared straight ahead, but she didn’t see the road. She saw Nasrin. Her sixteen-year-old daughter. Her fire, her fury, her conviction that the world could be rewritten from a blank slate, like a failed equation. She saw Nasrin with her secret social media accounts, her forbidden music, her burning eyes when she spoke of justice – a word that, in Zahra’s world, had long since become just a variable in other people’s political formulas.

And in that moment, Zahra’s orderly, calibrated universe cracked.

All her life, she had believed – or forced herself to believe – that her work, her genius, served a great purpose. The creation of a shield that would protect Iran. That would give her daughters a future, security, pride. But now, watching the suppression of this desperate, youthful rebellion, she understood with terrifying clarity: the shield she was helping to forge was not only turned outward. It was also turned inward. She was building the world’s strongest fence, but in reality, she was forging the bars of a cage in which her own children would have to live. Her work was giving power to those who dragged boys across the asphalt and tore hijabs from girls who could have been her Nasrin.

That evening, in her soul, in its most protected chamber, a quiet, invisible phase transition occurred. Just as water under ultra-high pressure transforms into ice VI, with a completely different crystal lattice, so her loyalty, while remaining outwardly the same, changed its internal structure.

She had almost cleared the cordoned-off area when her gaze caught a figure on the sidewalk. A man. He was standing slightly apart from the chaos, under the shade of a plane tree, and he wasn’t looking at the protesters. He was looking at her. At her car.

He was not participating. Not sympathizing. He was analyzing. He wore a nondescript dark coat, had a calm, almost academic face, and eyes that didn’t just see, but read information.

Where had she seen him before? Her memory, usually as precise as a Swiss watch, failed her. A conference in Tehran? No. The university? No, not there either. But the feeling of recognition was real, physical, like an electric shock.

The light turned green. She moved forward, but couldn’t tear her eyes from the rearview mirror. The man did not move, continuing to watch her. Then he took out his phone and began to type something.

Zahra pressed the accelerator. For the first time in years, the equations in her head were silent. Their place had been taken by a single question, as cold and heavy as lead: if the trajectory you are on leads to the disintegration of everything you hold dear, is deviation not the only correct solution?

At home, Nasrin was sitting over her textbooks. Innocent. Safe. This time.

“How was your day?” Zahra asked, trying to keep her voice normal.

“Fine. Physics, chemistry, literature. Boring.”

“You didn’t go out?”

Nasrin looked up, and something flickered in her eyes – not a lie, but an omission.

“Only to the library. With Maryam.”

The library. Or the rally. How could she know? How could she protect her? How could she explain that some experiments cannot be repeated, because they destroy the object of study itself?

Physics taught that for every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. But she had forgotten another law – the one about increasing entropy. The one that states that any closed system tends toward chaos.

Dalet: Tea and French Lace

30 Mehr 1401 (October 22, 2022)

“Zahra-jan, Reza and his wife, and Morteza and his family are coming over this evening,” Amirkhan said, fastening the cuffs of his shirt without looking at his wife. The morning light slanted through the blinds, striping his face with parallel lines. “Wear something more modest, janam. Appropriate. A long dress, a thicker headscarf. You know they hold very traditional views.”

Appropriate. The word hung in the bedroom air like an equation demanding to be solved. Zahra knew its meaning: a black chador instead of her usual manteau, no jewelry, minimal makeup. The transformation from a doctor of physics into a shadow, a function of service. She, Dr. Musavi, whose mind penetrated the secrets of the atomic nucleus, had to become the faceless function of “hostess” for men whose greatest intellectual achievement was knowing how to properly file a report. A dull, cold wave of indignation rose in her chest, but she only nodded.

“Of course,” she replied, continuing to brush her hair.

But the mirror reflected a woman she barely recognized. That other Zahra, the one who had defended her dissertation with honors, who had argued with Professor Martineau about the nature of quantum fluctuations, seemed like a character from someone else’s biography.

The day dragged on like a viscous fluid in a centrifuge. At work, she performed her calculations mechanically, but her thoughts kept returning to the previous evening. To the man under the plane tree. To the feeling of recognition without memory – like a déjà vu in reverse.

By seven in the evening, the house was ready for the guests. The living room was divided by an invisible boundary: the sofas for the men were closer to the television, the armchairs for the women by the window. In the kitchen, a tray held tea glasses in golden holders, small bowls of local gaz candy, and pistachios from Kerman. Every detail was in its place, like atoms in a crystal lattice.

Reza and his wife, Maryam, were the first to arrive. Reza was Amirkhan’s deputy, a man with a face nature had designed for mistrust: narrow eyes, thin lips, and a habit of squinting even in dim light. Maryam was his opposite: buxom, loud, with gold bracelets that jangled with every movement.

“Salam, Zahra-jan!” Maryam embraced her, enveloping her in a cloud of cloying perfume. “How are your girls? Is Nasrin still such a rebel?”

Zahra smiled the rehearsed smile she kept ready for such occasions.

“They’re growing up. Nasrin is preparing for her exams.”

Next came Morteza, with his wife Fatima and their teenage son. Morteza worked in cybersecurity, a man who saw threats in every byte of data. Fatima was quieter than Maryam, but her silence held a certain vigilance – she noticed everything, cataloged everything.

The men occupied their territory. They turned on the television – Persepolis was playing against Esteghlal. Amirkhan poured tea, Reza was already criticizing the coach, and Morteza checked his phone between comments on the game.

The women settled by the window. Zahra brought the tea and poured it, adding cardamom – exactly two pods to each glass, as her mother-in-law had taught her. A ritual honed to automation.

On one side: male shouts, arguments about offsides and politics, the smell of sweat and confidence. On the other: female chatter, as quiet as the rustle of dry leaves. Talk of children, of market prices, of a new fabric that had arrived at a shop in the bazaar.

“Did you hear about Goli’s daughter?” Maryam began, sipping her tea. “They caught her without a hijab near the university. Now they’re in trouble.”

“The youth have completely lost their minds,” Fatima sighed. “My nephew too… well, it doesn’t matter.”

The rest of the conversation flowed predictably: vegetable prices, a new TV series, someone’s wedding, someone’s funeral. Zahra nodded, agreed, refilled the tea. Her mind, accustomed to complex calculations, was bored in this swamp of banalities. She thought of the flawed Fibonacci spiral Rustam had drawn. Of the code in his note.