One Word

The photograph is from Farvardin 1358 (April 1979). The day people went to the streets at the urging of Ayatollah Taleghani to erase the walls of the city from the slogans of the revolution. The honorable cleric wanted to cleanse the city of memories of violence. What happened afterward I leave aside; I do not dwell on it. I return to the photograph itself. A little girl is at work erasing. She stands on tiptoe so her hand can reach the letters. We do not see her face, yet it seems that in that stance, in the world of childhood and in her mind, she is contemplating the word before her—and perhaps other words as well. If she is still alive, more than five decades have passed, and surely she still thinks of those words. I trace her slippers and reach the bucket of water. I do not know what dark and murky words that bucket has washed away.

The photograph’s frame is tight; the words that came before and after are unseen. And I linger on the word that comes after “and”.