Zendegi

‘Optical character recognition isn’t perfect,’ Haroun said. ‘The software can sometimes recognise that there’s been a problem and call on human help to patch things up, but that process isn’t perfect, either. This story is obscure, but my grandfather gave me a copy when I was ten, so I know that the heroine is named Mariam. This digital version, scanned from the English translation, has turned the “r” and “i” in her name into an “n” throughout. Mariam has become Manam – which, other than being an island off the coast of Papua New Guinea, so far as I know means nothing in any language.’

Martin said, ‘That doesn’t sound like a mistake the translator would have made. Not unless he was in the middle of an opium-smoking competition with Richard Burton.’

Haroun closed his laptop. ‘I’m sure no human was involved, beyond feeding the book down a chute, along with ten thousand others.’ He was smiling, but Martin could see the frustration in his eyes. He’d probably tried emailing these custodians of culture to put them straight, to no avail, while the grating error had seeped into mirror sites, multiplying irreversibly.

He gestured at Martin’s own damaged library. ‘With time and care everything could be preserved, but no one really has the patience.’

‘I was about to leave the country,’ Martin explained defensively. ‘I had a lot of things to do.’

Haroun inclined his head understandingly. ‘And why wouldn’t any traveller want to turn their fragile music into something robust and portable? But so many processes are effortless and automatic now that it’s easy to forget that most things in the world still play by the old rules.’

‘Yeah.’ Martin had to concede that; having treated the first few albums with care, he’d let himself imagine that the rest would follow as easily as if he’d merely been copying files from one hard drive to another.

‘We’re at the doorway to a new kind of world,’ Haroun said. ‘And we have the chance to make it extraordinary. But if we spend all our time gazing at the wonders ahead without remembering where we’re standing right now, we’re going to trip and fall flat on our faces, over and over again.’

2

‘Bidar sho! Agha Martin? Lotfan, bidar sho!’

Martin stirred, his head throbbing. He squeezed the button for the light on his watch; it was just after two in the morning. He recognised the voice: Omar, his neighbour from downstairs, was banging on the door, pleading with him to wake.

What was Farsi for fire? Martin had picked up a smattering of Dari – the Afghani dialect of Farsi – when he’d been stationed in Pakistan, but even after two months in Iran, most of it spent working with a professional translator by his side, his Farsi remained rudimentary.

‘Aatish?’ he called back. That was fire in Urdu, but he was fairly sure it was the same in both languages.

‘Na!’ Omar’s tone was impatient, but not baffled, so at least the question had made sense. ‘Lotfan, ajaleh kon!’ Omar usually spoke English with Martin, but whatever the emergency was it had apparently driven the language from his brain.

Martin switched on the bedside lamp, got into his trousers and stepped out into the entrance hall of the cramped apartment. When he opened the door, Omar was tinkering with his phone. Martin suppressed a groan of irritation; it had been bad enough in Sydney, but in Tehran nobody could go five minutes without whipping the things out and doing something pointless with them.

Omar handed the phone to Martin. Sometimes the tinkering wasn’t so pointless: the screen displayed an email message that had just been translated into English by a web service. It took Martin a while to make sense of the mangled syntax, but he suspected that in their present state he and Omar would have needed an hour playing charades to get the same information across.

There had been an accident on Valiasr Street, one of Tehran’s main thoroughfares. The two drivers, along with two passengers from one of the cars, had been taken to hospital with minor injuries. One of the passengers was Hassan Jabari, a high-ranking jurist and politician. The other passenger’s identity was unknown, but a bystander had filmed the aftermath of the accident on their phone and a still from that movie was embedded in the message.

Martin squinted at the ill-lit image of a paramedic helping a woman from the wreck. ‘Could that be his wife?’

Omar roared with laughter; his English hadn’t deserted him completely. The woman was flashily attired, with glittering pendant earrings and a tight-fitting evening gown. Tehran certainly had its Gucci set, and behind closed doors – or the tinted windows and dividing partition of a limousine – even the most respectable woman was no longer bound by the rules of hejab. But looking again at the still, he thought perhaps that was stretching the bounds of probability.