Two Wings of a Nightingale by Jill Worrall

Author:Jill Worrall
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction/General
ISBN: Two Wings of a Nightingale
Publisher: Exisle Publishing Pty Ltd
Published: 2008-12-31T16:00:00+00:00

7

A NIGHT BESIDE THE WORLD’S HOTTEST REACTOR

The Persian Gulf

Behind us, there is only the weariness of history

Behind us, the memory of waves carries cold shells of inertia on to the shore

Let’s go out to the seashore

And cast our nets into the sea

To catch the water’s freshness

Let’s pick up a pebble

To feel the weight of being.

Sohrab Sepehri

We leave Shiraz with the Rezas in hysterics as a result of one of my less-than-erudite observations made in the city centre.

Inspired perhaps by the fact that Shiraz has been much milder than anywhere else on our journey so far I’d been looking for signs of spring – and am delighted when we sweep into a roundabout to see four trees covered with white blossom.

‘Look, spring really has come to Shiraz. Life is returning to the trees!’ I cry. All that poetry has clearly affected me.

The two men look mystified. What, they ask, am I looking at?

I point at the blossom trees and while Reza B tries not to drive us off the road as he erupts into laughter, the other Reza, also hugely amused, tells me that if I look closely I’ll find it is not blossom.

I look more closely at the trees. Made of metal and studded with delicate glass lights along the branches which obviously are designed to be illuminated at night, they are clearly artificial.

Unfortunately for me, these metal trees adorn many towns along the rest of our route and whenever we drive past one, Reza cannot resist.

‘Spring has come to such and such a town,’ he solemnly intones in a passable imitation of my Kiwi accent.

‘It is truly remarkable how similar these trees are to those in the last town,’ he adds, trying to look serious, but not completely succeeding.

We are travelling west through another tail-end range of the Zagros Mountains through Kazerun; some of the mountains look extraordinarily like loaves of bread with rounded tops dusted with snow. Others have sheer sides of striated rock that give way to tapered flanks. As we drive further east oak trees appear on the slopes – the first forests I’ve seen since arriving in Iran. They wear a haze of pale green and this time it really is a burst of spring growth.

The Zagros mountains form a natural barrier between the humid warmth along the Persian Gulf and the arid central deserts of Iran – the contrast between the two aspects is dramatic. As the van descends through the forests, the oaks are replaced with groves of citrus fruits and the roadside stalls overflow with blood oranges, tangerines and oranges. We stop and buy the customary mountain of fruit. Reza also succumbs to the pleading of a young boy in a ragged striped jersey and worn jeans to buy chewing gum. Reza resists the entire time he is inspecting then buying the fruit, but I can tell he’ll give in eventually, even though he doesn’t like chewing gum.

Just before we reach the plain that stretches all the way to the sea itself,

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