The Bird of Wisdom

In the time of our history when a harmless boy named Amadou was slaughtered by police in New York, and when China banned all opposition groups, there was a man deep in the labyrinth of Evin Prison whose only wish was to hear of his daughter’s freedom.

In this place, information traveled like a vapor, in quiet centimeters. Some time ago—the man had lost sense of time—news came that the reformist government would seek justice for the Writers who had been strangled and stabbed and poisoned and bludgeoned, their bodies strewn and then discovered and then neatly buried in the Cemetery of Zahra’s Heaven. The Assassins—rogue agents and Chain-Makers of murdered bodies—would stand trial before the nation.

The man was not fooled. The Assassins took orders from the Righteous Patriarchs of the shadow theocracy. Nothing would change. He turned his gaze inward, hid the victims in the folds of his heart, and allowed himself a thimbleful of tears. He understood that the Tehran Spring was over, that it had been scorched by Summer, murdered by Autumn, and now buried by Winter.

When the vapor brought a message from the old Russian woman that his daughter was free, he rejoiced and silently toasted his oily tea at the walls of his cell. It was all that mattered, she was all that mattered.

He hoped he had nurtured her long enough, that she perceived all that he valued: the lure of Telling and the delirium of Remembering, the addiction of Uncovering and the liberation of Testimony. He hoped she would write the stories of the people who had been taken, which was the story of herself.

Lying on the dirty blanket that was his bed, he imagined the sound of her pen scratching on paper, and he was lulled to sleep. He dreamt of the mythical simorgh’s radiant wings beckoning him. Nestled in its loving talons, he rose above the earth to see the feline shape of his homeland, the two seas that kiss her north and south shores, the desert plateau and the mountain ranges that guard it. The Bird of Wisdom then flew him beyond the fortress of his hijacked country to soar over the wide-open earth—the dry countries and the small countries, the forests and the borderless ocean—to hover for a moment above the island city where the citizens would resurrect his daughter’s true name, and where she could begin anew, never again in Silence.