He was pondering his reflection in the mirror when the phone rang. He had been thinking, he was looking tired. The lines around his eyes and his ears were creased. Like the greaseproof paper he had used to wrap his sandwiches in everyday for work. It would never be smooth again. He would never be able to welcome another heart, and wrap it safely within his skin, it had already changed beyond any hope of recovery.
The phone's bells peeled for a second time. More insistent than the last. Cutting through his train of thought. A shrill and trembling distraction encased in a shiney dumb green plastic egg. To answer its call would be to crack the shell of anonymity. To lift the receiver and speak; into the humming electro-magnetic poles; alerting the caller to listen; then enter the game; taking turns to speak; to introduce themselves; exchange pleasantries; in a dance, over countless miles of cables; stretching between being and becoming; the self and the other; reflecting each others' intentional thoughts and actions; varying it slightly to make a new point; upon which the the yang and yang of every bit would turn; unfolding new dimensions in the mind which would have been beyond the reach of any singularly linear perspective; in an interpersonal ritual that had been worked out for this very purpose; over centuries; before they had ever invented the words for it; or the tools.
The third ring called him to action. He turned, and facing the direction of travel, he inhaled sharply. Pressing his lips together he energised his body with pneumatic pressure. Forward, towards an image that had penetrated his mind and would not let him rest. Crossing the carpetted floor, passing through columns of sunlight, his steps measured the familiar route. One, two, three. Brrrring, brrring. The bells rung out again before he got to five. Several names and faces competed for his attention, thinking, who might be calling him this beautiful morning? He reached the secluded shade of the hallway, turned without thinking, extending a hand towards the receiver, and sat in the chair, next to the phone, an isolated enclave beneath the stairs, all in one swift seamless, moment of movement.
His warm hand pressed against the hard shell immediately. Engaging its perfect shape, he heard the satisfying click and buzz of the electrical circuit begin as he lifted the receiver. The ferocious memory of ringing bells echoed in his mind briefly, as he enjoyed the release that comes from their avoidance. The spring-like chord attached to the receiver quivered like a dart hitting the plastic shell as he raised the encased microphone-to-mouth and the speaker to his left ear.
"Hello, Swen here?" he said in a controlled but inquisitive tone.
"Swen, Swen! Thank God, how are you?" A distant crackle and fade made him lean in a little. He could make out the trembling falseto of a female voice but couldn't place it in his list of potential callers. In that moment of hesitancy she seemed to sense and interpret the meaning of the pause. As if the electrons themselves had been able to communicate the absent recollection across the interconnected wires that lay between them, closing the loop in their thoughts, without him ever having to make a sound.
"Swen it's me!" she said with a note or two of humour.
"Shirin, is that you?" the moment of tension was relieved.
A mutual exhaling of emotion followed. It seemed to bring each to the fore in the mind of the other. A brief sharing of consciousness. An image that rapidly collapsed across a decade, condensing into one millisecond, the knowledge of all their previous encounters.
"Shirin! How wondeful to hear from you. When was the last time? How are you?"
"Oh Swen, you are sweet. I'm so sorry things have been so busy here"
"Yes, I know I have been following the stories. In the press! Are you still working? At the University?"
"Yes, the University. The press? Oh yes, the press, well I suppose. Ha! You know you shouldn't believe everything you read in the press Swen. You know that."
She attempted a giggle, but an edge of fear stuck in her throat; her tongue suddenly felt dry against the roof of her mouth and she swallowed uncomfortably to release it.
"Yes I am still at the University, but I really don't know for how much longer."
"Why? what's wrong?"
"Tehran is very different now, its all very confusing. I'm not sure how much I can say. [Pause]. How is everything with you?..."
The attempt to change the topic of conversation was not well received. Swen did not reply, forcing her to go on. That was all the encouragement she needed.
"....Well, you always told me to call..." [giggle].
He finished her sentence for her:
"....Shirin, are you in trouble, do you need help? I can send money of you need me to?"
"No, no, its nothing like that. I can't explain...things are different...one of our students didn't come to lessons last week...this week its been three or four...you know what it is...nobody is asking any questions anymore...."
"Shirin, are you safe?"
"Swen, please, I need to tell you,.... I, I had a dream...I don't know what it means but I had to tell someone. I had this dream and its been playing on my mind."
Swen was admittedly confused. His heart was starting to race. This was all very sudden and unexpected. It was true that he knew a thing or two about the interpretation of dreams. Freud and Jung's "Royal Road to the Unconscious". Symbols and metaphoric meanings that were buried deep in the archeology of human reason.
To delay further was to risk her embarrassment. Like a patient who was already disrobing behind the screen in his surgery. His analytical mind clicked into gear. He emplored her to tell him more about her dream, but only what she felt safe to tell him. She didn't need any persuading and dived straight into the depths of her subjectivity, exploring her thoughts explicitly, bringing everything to the surface of consciousness for the very first time. This contraption attached to his ear became a distraction. It was just a vehicle, but he felt the anxiety that was driving their conversation. He was there now, just for her. Peering into the road ahead, receiver pressed to his ear, with headlights on, no map, just travelling into the darkness, looking for the turn.
"Oh you know, my dreams, huh!? It was, well, terrible, you could say. I had a terrible dream last night. I woke up with no emotions. It scared me. You know, but I just felt this mild disdain and distaste for what I had witnessed. It wasn't that bad but it felt wrong. It was horrific. Really. Actually. I shoud have been terrified."
"Go on", said Swen.
"I was crouching in a corner, in this dark room, and could see a man sitting upright in front of me. In a sort of hospital bed with bits of his body being sliced off and eaten in front of him by a group of other men who were stood round enjoying it. Oh God! They looked like, I don't know, geurrillas, wearing black fatigues, with long black bushy beards, I don't know if they were SAVAK or Mujahedin-e-Khalq. I just don't know anymore..." she started to cry a little and wiped her tears and nose, determined to continue with her tale.
"The victim, this man, he was alive and in pain and crying. His body looked like a Cadaver. You know like the Cadaver's that the medical students used to practice on at the University. His flesh looked like a beautifully cured beef or salmon. It's so sick how it was just like restaurant food. Am I sick? But it was glistening sticky raw met Swen, it wasn't cooked. This meat was being carved fresh from the bone with, like a razor sharp knife. The group of men were so enjoying it. They were taking smaller and smaller pieces of flesh so as to keep this man alive longer and enjoying eating every last morsel in front of his face."
"Shirin, what did you eat last night? This is just your food playing tricks on you."
"Swen, yes, in a way you are right. I know this is stupid. But I think its about sin. You know. You're right, of course, yes, I know, I agree, I was hungry, I am always hungry these days, I am, there is no food in the shops, the petrol prices are so high, inflation you know, the corruption is everywhere, we are having to share everything that we have,...but, I, I musn't say too much, I'm sure they are...well, you know. Swen please, I think, maybe I am going mad. These men. In the dream. They were taking great care to avoid damaging the tendons and nerves in order that the every last morsel of pain would be sunk into this man's brain. His consciousness. His soul. So that only the sheer terror of this poor man should remain. They were trying to destroy his soul Swen. I could hear like an orchestra of screams as a breeze blew through these sinews. They wanted him to go to hell. You know, hell! Swen, they were laughing and joking together and occasionally glancing and smiling at me. I had a thought that I would be next. I was sad and worried of course, but not in a blind panic as I should have been. I can't go to hell Swen, I can't, you know I'm not ready....this is hell!....Oh my God, this is...."
Shirin had almost finished everything she had intended to say and Swen started to feel the release that she did. She broke into uncontrollable fits of tears and couldn't say another word. Swen felt completely out of control of the situation but resolute and determined to stay strong. Moments ago he had been at peace but these wires that plugged into his brain so easily a moment ago had delivered a terrifying reality into his London home. What could he say in response? There was a certain momentum, a velocity, that required it. The return. He struggled to find the target.
He remembered Shirin's smile as they had hugged at the airport in 1976 the day he had left Tehran. Some sunshine had lit up her face on that cold day, breathing life and warmth into her heart, as they had wished each other fond farewells. He had been there to give a lecture on sleep to her medical students and she had given him a tour of the facilities. He and Shirin had spoken a little bit about the role of the British in Iran before the War. She giggled a lot and flirted with her eyes. How, if he had not had used his Swedish passport he would have had a lot more more trouble getting his visa. Definitely. Yes, almost certainly. As a Tudeh Party sympathiser from an old colonial power, he would have been followed from the airport by the Shah's men. She had laughed at his calmness and reserve. This was cold and clinical work. They were happily scoring points off each other. Dancing the ritual with a fixed distance between them. Her eyes would hesitate on him, and open him up, swiftly turning away, as sharp as the blades the students used to open the Cadavers. He seemed to remember having muttered a reply. He had told her she was deluded. She had turned, and smiled again, but sympathetically this time. He hadn't really understood. But felt the warmth of her sympathy anyway.
The University was getting a lot of American money for medical research. But he had seen how, in the last few years, in the media, the tide was turning against the Western industrialisation it had brought in. The workers that had been drawn into the Cities, and the intelligensia, had once been on the same side, but these old alliances were no longer certain.
Oil was the problem really, as it had been during the Second World War. The British Empire had bled the country dry and been kicked out by a Democratic revolt led by the Tudeh Party. A brief secular republic had effectively been quelled in 1953. The Shah had been temporarily exiled. The CIA had returned him to power after destroying his opponents. American candy was now littering the streets. They had put the King in to check the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. Both sides needed oil to fuel a global "military-industrial complex". Once proud neighbours. Now broken relics of Empire. Cowering colonies, pitted against each other in a chess game. Temporarily postponing a nuclear winter, across the icy no-man's land of the Cold War.
Tehran was infested with spies and paranoia. It hung around the necks of every isolated inhabitant like an empty Kalashnikov. These new masters were just as bad as old. Proud Persians resented the insult of being denied their traditions, their religion and their democracy. Their own monarchy, a totalitarian dictatorship, was being imposed on them by a foreign power. A thin veil of propaganda made Tehran's rich culture as hollow as Paris had been under the Vichy. Now a new form of religious Nationalism was starting to take root beneath the concrete of the University.
The people had had enough. The Shah was in the pocket of the Americans. That was no secret. The whole country was still held to ransom by the Soviet threat. Iran had been a bridge between the Britain, US and Russia during the War, playing a crucial role in the allied victory against the Nazis. But now the British had retreated and Iran was being crushed between the super-powers. The opposing materialist ideologies of Capitalism and Communism. The petit bourgeois, the middle classes like Shirin, had nowhere to turn. Caught in this contradiction, the international Intelligensia at Tehran University had been hamstrung, while religious dogma had provided some straightforward answers. Weak minds needed strong moral guidance to protect the people from their foreign invaders. It made sense, in a way. The Mujahedin-e-Khalq had wanted reform, more fundamentalist factions wanted Sharia law.
Swen knew from his colleagues in academia that there had been various factions starting to organise against the Shah in the last few years. The Americans had unwittingly fuelled an anti-colonial backlash against Capitalism by supporting the Shah's secret Police, the SAVAK, in a brutal crackdown against free speech. Just like the war in Vietnam, and the French in Algiers, they had become an enemy of the people they said they were protecting. Hearts and minds had been lost, at home and abroad. Now it seems Tehran and the University was becoming a hot bed of political intrigue.
Poor, poor Shirin was trapped, wondering if she would be next. The country was being picked to pieces. Suffering the intractable contradictions of the Cold War. On a break from his studies at Cambridge, Swen had helped out at the Red Cross mission in London. He had looked into the hollow eyes of some refugees arriving from Budapest. It was at the time of the uprising in 1956 just before the Soviets tanks had rolled in. He had seen the same thing. They were psychologically and emotionally damaged. That was just over twenty years ago. The Cold War had been raging solidly throughout Europe and the Middle East since then. People thought that the World was at peace since the Nazis had been defeated, but as far as he could see, the dialectic had continued, just as Marx had predicted. Every new power that came into authority was immediately usurped from below. Eaten up by its own brutality. A carcas would remain. A state in ruins. Run by dictators and colonising forces.
"Shirin, it's fine I know what to do..." he said. "...I'm going to talk to my friends at the Medical School, I'm sure they'll be able to get you a visa to come to London. We need people like you to help us with our research. You come and stay with me for a while, until you get yourself sorted out. It'll be fine. I'm sure, it'll be fine."
Shirin rallied a little, grapsing the moment to control her emotions behind a smile, a moment of warmth on a cold day, but she couldn't hide her fear now.
"Swen, you are so sweet. I knew you would understand. But it's not that. It's not that I want to leave. I need to stay here. I need to work it out. I have my students to think about. I can't leave. Not now."
"Shirin! Don't argue" he replied. "I'm going to call them right now. Give me your number and I'll call you right back after I have spoken to them."
Shirin did as she had been instructed and gently put the phone down as Swen had asked. The end of her conversation was accompanied by the same comforting click with which it had begun. She had gone, but for some reason, Swen held the phone to his ears for a few seconds longer, listening to the warm buzzing whirs and crackles across the wires fading into the distance. Letting his thoughts be with her, the moment, the memories, being someone to her was something. Then suddenly, he heard a second click. The amplituide of noise was reduced by at least one half again. Had they been listening in? His heart sank to his shoes and he looked for meaning across the path that he had trod, from the mirror to the telephone, just ten minutes before. And he wondered, silently, passively, with fear, but without pain, if he would ever see his friend again.
