*’I Am Afraid Iran Will Be Destroyed – Yet The Islamic Republic Will Remain’
By Elahi, in Tehran
It’s 5am on Thursday 12 March. I was finally falling asleep after a day full of fear when the phone rang.
Terror rushes through me. It’s not the right time for a call. Someone must need help – or maybe they are alone and frightened.
I answer the phone, exhausted. It’s my younger sister. She is crying and cannot speak. My heart breaks into a thousand pieces. I haven’t seen her for many days.
When I was released from prison, she had gone to another city to take care of our mother.
She returned on her birthday. But then the war began, and we remained separated in two different homes in Tehran.
She is much younger than me, yet she took on the responsibility of protecting my son so that I could stay somewhere safe and avoid being arrested again. I remind her how grateful I am.
My heart is in turmoil: I thought something terrible had happened at home and that she was unable to say it.
I tell her that right now the only thing that matters is staying alive, even if we no longer have a home.
Through her sobs she says: “Our neighbour was caught in the blast wave … and he’s gone.”
For a moment I picture our neighbour. Like me, he smoked cigarettes. He must have been on the balcony for a smoke. Or maybe, like many others, he had gone out to watch the drones and see which direction they were flying.
Maybe he had gone there to cry for a country and a people being destroyed. Maybe he was thinking about where to find gasoline so he could take his two children to a safer city.
I wish I were in a desert where I could scream. Where I could cry as loudly as I want. The last time I cried was after the massacre of protesters in January.
Why is it that here, unlike everywhere else in the world, we cannot cry like ordinary people? Why have we suffered so much that even new pain no longer shakes us?
I can’t sleep any more. I go to the place where I have put a small gas burner – what I call my kitchen.
I want coffee, but coffee has become very expensive and I have to save money. Cigarettes are also expensive, but I smoke anyway: one, two, five …
Ever since the fuel depots were bombed at the weekend, my chest has burned and I can barely breathe. I bought an inhaler that now hangs around my neck.
At 6.30am another loud explosion shakes the air. I look out the window. Some supporters of the government have come into the streets in their cars, chanting mourning songs and saying: “People, we are all together, compatriots.”
Compatriots? Your foolishness destroyed this homeland. We tried. We struggled so these days would never come. We were imprisoned, tortured, executed.
I think about Donald Trump. If he had acted 50 days earlier, 35,000 people might still be alive. Now I am afraid Iran will be destroyed – and yet the Islamic Republic will remain.
I am preparing to send a few packets of lentils and a small amount of money to a woman whose husband is in prison and who has a small child. It is the last banknote we have. There is no cash anywhere. I don’t know if one day we will ever have enough money to rebuild this devastation.
It is now 8am. The streets are crowded again. People are going about their business. I see several tired and hopeless men, day labourers who still come here every day. But there is no work.
Life continues in Tehran. But it is dark and bitter.
*PHOTO CAPTION: Thick,dark smoke billowing skywards after yet another bombardment of Tehran, the Iranian capital.
*Elahi, a former political prisoner writing under a pseudonym, details a sleepless night in the Iranian capital.
