“The man lights a cigarette. The smell of his cigarette is strangely familiar. I take a sip of coffee. My eyes drift toward the street and toward the man fading into cigarette smoke. I rest my head on the table. I want to end everything; the pain, the exhaustion, the loneliness. But none of it ever ends. I lift my head from the table. The man has finished his coffee. He looks at me. I cannot see his face, only the glimmer of his eyes. The man leaves money on the table. He picks up his coat from the chair and puts it on. Slowly he walks past me. He opens the café door and steps onto the snow-covered ground. He stops. Turns toward the café. Looks at me. Should I have stood up? I stand. I leave money for the coffee on the table. The old woman’s curious stare means nothing to me. I open the café door. I walk into the snow-covered street, toward the man…”
The lines above are from the short story “Forty-Eight Steps” by Iranian writer Paxima Mojavezi, who lives in Washington, D.C. The story was recently published in an international anthology titled International Short Stories by the prestigious publisher Penguin Books. The story appears alongside works by some of the most important contemporary literary voices in the world: Haruki Murakami, the internationally acclaimed Japanese author whose books have sold millions of copies and been translated into fifty languages; Salman Rushdie, the celebrated Indian-British writer whose literary achievements — and the fatwa issued by Ruhollah Khomeini against him — made him a familiar figure to Iranian readers; Han Kang, winner of the International Booker Prize; Olga Tokarczuk, recipient of the 2018 Nobel Prize in Literature; Mo Yan, winner of the 2012 Nobel Prize in Literature; Edwidge Danticat, whose books have become bestsellers in the United States; Mariana Enriquez, renowned for her Gothic horror fiction; along with several other distinguished women and men of world literature.
The publication of a short story by an Iranian woman writer beside some of the greatest names in world literature may well be one of the most significant literary events for Iranian literature in recent years. It is an achievement that places the name of Iranian literature among the leading voices of contemporary world writing and may open a luminous path for other Iranian authors seeking international recognition. It may also draw global attention to contemporary Iranian literature and to issues such as censorship and resistance against it.
“Forty-Eight Steps” had previously appeared in 2013 in the New York–based online literary magazine Words Without Borders, alongside seven other short stories by Iranian writers. Those eight stories, selected by the renowned Iranian novelist Shahriar Mandanipour, were published in a collection titled Writers After the Revolution on the occasion of the magazine’s tenth anniversary, with the aim of introducing the work of younger generations of Iranian writers who emerged after the 1979 Revolution. The English translation of “Forty-Eight Steps” was done by Sara Khalili, an Iranian translator based in New York who has previously translated works by Shahriar Mandanipour into English, including the novel Censoring an Iranian Love Story. Khalili, who has also received a PEN translation award, has translated and published poetry and prose by writers such as Siavash Kasraei, Fereydoon Moshiri, Forough Farrokhzad, Shahrnush Parsipur, and Simin Behbahani.
The short story “Forty-Eight Steps” possesses a circular structure. It begins at what feels like the ending of a brief narrative about the life of a middle-aged woman from the poorer strata of society. The woman has no name, and the story itself unfolds in a placeless setting. No one in the story is named, nor is there any clear indication of a particular country, except for a moment when the elderly café owner greets a newly arrived man in Armenian. It is as though only the old woman possesses a concrete identity. She is a café keeper, and like many elderly Armenian women, she makes exceptional coffee. Yet the position of the female protagonist transcends both geography and time. She could be Iranian, Japanese, Kenyan, Danish, or Peruvian. She is a woman who is exhausted, whose strength has run out, whose body and spirit are trapped in pain and suffering — and yet every night, when she returns home from work, she prepares dinner for her children, sets the table, and later watches television beside her husband. Whenever her husband — referred to only as “the housemate” in the story — desires her, she sleeps with him. A housemate who smokes, whose hair is streaked with gray, and who remains a stranger to her.
What makes this short story remarkable can be examined from two different perspectives. The first is the writer’s technique: through the use of extremely short sentences in the present continuous tense and in the first person, Mojavezi creates a rhythm akin to music. These concise, simple, restrained, minimalist sentences — stripped of unnecessary detail — evoke the short fiction of Raymond Carver and, at times, the stories of Ernest Hemingway. In this sense, the story feels classical and modern at once.
The second distinctive feature is the story’s open ending, which leaves interpretation entirely in the hands of the reader. Did the events of the story actually happen, or did they unfold only in the woman’s imagination? Is the stranger in fact the woman’s husband? Was the entire narrative merely a dream? Or does the ending mark the beginning of a new life for the woman? These are the questions that linger in the reader’s mind long after finishing the story. Perhaps it is precisely this combination of simplicity and complexity, together with the universality of Mojavezi’s narrative, that has placed her work beside the giants of world short fiction and led the anthology’s editors, John Freeman and Rabih Alameddine, to select it.
Paxima Mojavezi is a writer, journalist, researcher, and university professor born in Tehran in 1977. She holds a PhD in the Sociology of Literature from the University of Delhi and began her career in journalism in Iran in 1995. Her published works include the short story collections Tarh-e Vahm (“The Design of Illusion”), I Become the Sky, He Comes at Night, and A Window Facing the Hospital. She has also written a book titled The Other Side of Hedayat’s Coin, which examines the stories of Sadegh Hedayat through the lens of love. Another of her books, Seven Years in India, explores the many layers of Indian life, culture, and history through the prism of her own seven years living there, combining a sociological perspective with a vivid and engaging narrative style.