There are some news stories that make you instinctively put down the coffee pot. Not because you understood them—but because you need a moment to realize you've even heard them. Ali Khamenei, Supreme Leader of Iran, in power since 1989, 85 years old—dead. Killed. On the night of February 28, while I slept, American and Israeli fighter jets attacked Tehran. I stood in the kitchen, holding the pot, waiting for the radio to tell me it had made a mistake. The radio said nothing of the sort.
I put on my jacket and went out.
Outside, it was one of those early March days that can't yet decide whether it wants to be winter or spring—that hesitant, pale sky that can't make up its mind. Perhaps that was fitting. Because the world had changed that night, and it, too, seemed unsure of where it would lead.
A woman stood on the corner, tapping away on her phone. I wondered if she was reading the news. Probably. Everyone was reading the news. Live bloggers were writing, commentators were commenting, experts were speaking—and yet, in the end, no one knew the essentials: How long would this last? And what would happen next?
I walked past the gas station. The sign with the gas price—I hadn't consciously noticed it for weeks—displayed a number that I had to read twice. Thirty percent, I read later, was the increase in gas prices since the escalation began. As if the war had found its way here, silently and impersonally, into the everyday. Not as a headline, but as a price tag.
The word wouldn't leave me as I walked on: escalation. It comes from the Latin scala—ladder, staircase. So, to escalate essentially means to climb one step higher. Another, then another. And when you hear that word, you wonder if someone is standing at the top of the stairs saying: This is the end. We're not going any further. Or if the stairs simply continue, step by step, and at some point you look down and wonder how far you've actually climbed.
I turned into the pedestrian zone. Normal life, to my slight surprise: a baker, a hairdresser, a man with shopping bags, two schoolgirls laughing. As if the night hadn't changed anything. I thought of the 20,000 sailors who, according to reports, were stranded on their ships in the Persian Gulf—trapped between restricted airspace and a strait whose fate is currently being decided in Tehran. The Strait of Hormuz, a name I had hardly ever consciously heard before: thirty kilometers wide at its narrowest point, and through it flows a significant portion of the oil that powers the world. Whoever closes it closes a lifeline of the global economy. That's not something you see in any shop window. But it's there, somehow, if you look long enough.
In the middle of the pedestrian zone, I stopped in front of a newsstand. The front pages lined up like witness testimonies: Bombs on Tehran. Khamenei dead. Hegzet: "No mercy." His son, Mojtaba—the new leader, just proclaimed—called for revenge, for retribution for Iran's martyrs. Experts, I read, currently see three scenarios: a swift military breakthrough, a protracted war of attrition, or an escalation that would require ground troops. An escalation that could last for years. I stood before these headlines and thought of someone standing at a crossroads where all three paths lead into the fog.
An elderly man bought a newspaper, folded it under his arm, and continued on his way without flinching. Perhaps he had already experienced other wars. Perhaps he had learned to carry news like luggage: inconvenient, but one gets used to it. I watched him and thought: That's how history is, I suppose. It usually happens elsewhere, and you read about it at breakfast, and life goes on, and yet somehow everything is different, even if you can't quite put your finger on what.
On the way back, a thought came to me that troubled me: The Iran-Iraq War began the night Oman announced that they were on the verge of a breakthrough, that peace was within reach. The next morning, the first bombs fell. Peace, within reach, then gone. There's no better word for such moments than the Persian "Inshallah"—God willing. Except that on that morning, God apparently had a different opinion than the Omani foreign minister.
I thought of the women in Iran who have been taking to the streets for their freedom for years, and who now, in the shadow of the war, continue to be imprisoned and persecuted—as if the external war had given the internal regime a pretext to disregard rules—rules that no one enforces anyway—amid the noise of the bombs. And I thought of a sentence I'd read somewhere: If Iran feels its survival is directly threatened, it might also target European countries. I looked down the familiar streets and wondered what it actually means to live at a safe distance—and how far that distance really extends.
Back home, I turned the radio on again. The situation, they said, remained as serious as ever. While rocket attacks on Israel had decreased by ninety percent since the beginning of March, this wasn't a sign of de-escalation, but rather of restructuring. The war was shifting. It was changing its form. Escalation, I thought: another step.
I poured myself a second cup of coffee. Outside, normal life continued, this astonishing, stubborn, unwavering everyday existence that pays no heed to world events. And yet: Something had shifted. Not loudly, not visibly—but palpably, like a draft from a window you can't find.
No one knows what will happen next. That's perhaps the hardest part: not the news itself, but the open-endedness, the incompleteness. The story that doesn't yet have a final sentence. I drank my coffee and waited for the radio to eventually know more than I did.
So far, it hasn't.
S.
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