The #944 to Tabriz

As the train departed Isfahan station, Amir reached into his suitcase and felt it. Pulling it out, he carefully examined the colorful shard of ceramic between his fingers, remembering its history.

That morning, his apartment shuddered; dust and plaster raining down from the ceiling. He decided to leave before it was too late. As he hastily packed his suitcase, the yellow fragment glimmered on the floor and he plucked it up, a memento of the home he had lived in for seventeen years.

The American bombings were unlike anything he had ever witnessed. Horrendous in their thunder and fury.

Yet, on the train he rode what irritated him most was the sight of nervous young men whispering to each other and clutching their bags as if the world might end.

Ignoring them, he double checked his other precious belongings in his suitcase. The silver hash pipe he bought in his youth was there. A commodity he could barter in Turkey if Rials weren’t accepted.

When he was young, he and his friends wouldn’t have been afraid. They would have climbed Soffeh Mountain, smoked hash and watched the explosions, laughing at the meaninglessness of human existence.

Humans have been fighting over the empty desert plateaus of Persia since the time of the Sasanid Empire. Best to stay out of it and chill, is what he would have said in his youth.

The Raja train steadily clanked north, improbably still running. It rattled across the high Iranian plateau, past dark villages and moonlit desert flats. He sat wedged between a silent family and a young student and began to weary. He wasn’t young anymore. He grasped his suitcase on his lap like an anchor.

He pulled out an old train ticket stub. His first ticket out of Isfahan. He stormed out at age 17 after another fight with his father, shouting that he never wanted to see his old man again, and ran away to the big city.

In Tehran he waited tables fifty hours a week, while scraping through community college. The work was worth it to escape the endless rules, the lectures from his father about “honor.”

Even in his fifties, Amir still didn’t not know what honor meant.

But he knew duty.

He pulled out a faded photograph.

Amineh gazed back at him, young, hopeful, under the arches of Golestan Palace. Their names had felt fated: Amir and Amineh. Even his father, surely disapproving of a liberal woman from Tehran, held his tongue when he heard her fortuitous name. After he got a job, they married, and Amir and Amineh dreamt of children, books, and a quiet home.

Four years later, still childless, ovarian cancer arrived. Amineh grew weaker despite every doctor Amir took her to in Tehran. Sanctions blocked the best medicines, people said; without millions of rials or government connections, escape for treatment abroad was impossible.

“Inshallah,” the doctors said, “with rest and good food, she will recover.”

After she was no more, her relatives in Tehran comforted him, but they were not his family. His family was in Isfahan. Swallowing his pride, he returned home for a teaching post at UI. He and his father did not see eye to eye, but his mother urged patience. Eventually, after countless dinners and treating his father respectfully, he began treating him like a son again.

Amir buried himself in work. Having received a scholarship in Tehran before he married Amineh, he had become an academic researcher on memory loss. and social systems for treatment of dementia. He worked and worked. At University departmental dinners, he smiled quietly, knowing his publication count outstripped the other professors.

Academic success bred inner confidence. From his post, he could influence people. They should listen to a professor who had sacrificed, who had led progress at his university. Whose papers were published abroad.

He began voicing his political opinions in Isfahan, hosting Reformist talks, urging students to volunteer for political campaigns.

One day, he noticed a conservatively dressed student staring at him oddly during a lecture. The next morning, Doost, the Dean of Education, called him into his office and told him it would be best for everyone if Amir applied for early retirement. All good things come to an end.

Reluctantly, he resigned from UI, stating ‘family issues’ of the form he signed with his name on the bottom. In Iran, threats hang in the air, unspoken. Things could be far worse than collecting two-thirds of his pension and not needing to teach class at 9 am in the morning.

Not daring to take it out of his suitcase, he looked at his IIPF membership card. It had given him so much hope in the 2000s.

Getting involved in politics was a mistake. A folly of the male ego. He saw it now in so many middle-aged men. Professional success, and then delusions of grandeur, before being hammered down by the system.

Politics never change.

After leaving the university, Amir spent more time attending his poetry circle. At the Awakening Society, he vented about Dean Doost until Hamid—whom he had thought a close friend—suggested he skip the next meeting. After that betrayal, he attended the poetry gathering once or twice more, then stopped. Better to stay home.

He had learned how the world really worked. All the political and patriotic slogans were empty rhetoric. Soldiers’ medals were just tin trinkets pinned to their jackets. Job titles were just words on paper. The academic reports he had been so proud of as a Full Professor weren’t read by anyone. The system is a monster.

The conductor announced two hours to Tabriz. A small cheer rose from the passengers. Many, like him, would be continuing on to Van in Turkey. Amir had an uncle in Turkey. He hadn’t spoken to him in over a decade and was unable to reach him with the internet down. But family was family.

Shuffling up and down the aisle of the train was a young man, no more than twenty, clutching a plastic bag, eyes wide with fear. He had no ticket beyond Tabriz and begged passengers to help him.

Amir checked the last item in his suitcase. A tarnished brass key.

A few months after returning to Isfahan, his father gave him the key. It was to an apartment he inherited from his grandfather. He could have it. Like father like son, he had said. He lived there for 17 years. The yellow piece of tile was from there. The weight of the key felt heavy in his fingers, heavy with the weight of family history.

Amir looked at the boy. Something inside him gave way, the loosening of the last thread of selfishness. He stood, spoke to the boy, and pressed his onward ticket to Van into the young man’s palm.

The boy protested, tears welling, but Amir shook his head.

The train pulled into a stop at Tabriz station, and Amir took the young man to board the onward train, out of the country, and told him, after he arrived in Turkey, to find his uncle and tell him Amir sent him.

Waving goodbye quickly, melodrama was for the foolish, Amir stepped back onto the platform with only his suitcase and no clear plan beyond walking to the open-air cafe across the street to get a cup of tea.

None of us worker bees control the hive, an ancient Persian poet wrote.

Letting go of the struggle for control made him feel unburdened. For the first time in his life, Amir felt free.