The Last Day: Yousef Miri — Twenty Minutes from Home

The Last Day — Written by S. Rouzbeh

Twenty Minutes from Home

The story of Seyyed Yousef Miri

Some waits last no more than twenty minutes, yet never end in a lifetime.

Nothing was supposed to happen that night, either.

Yousef was supposed to finish work, get behind the wheel, drive a few streets, and come home. His mother was waiting, the ordinary waiting of every night when her son was out and due to return.

Yousef was eighteen.

He worked as a car-battery technician. His hands knew cars and tools. In his photographs, he is sometimes bent over a car boot, sometimes standing beside a Peugeot 405, a car that seemed to have become part of his young world.

Football had been with him since childhood, too. He had played since about the age of seven. In some photographs he wears sports kit; in others he stands in the countryside beside water, or smiles beside his mother.

The photographs do not yet know what is going to happen.

In them, Yousef still has a future.

He can still grow older, work, play football, buy another car, fall in love, travel, bring his mother gifts, grow old.

Death has not yet entered the frame.

Yousef and his mother shared more than the bond of a mother waiting for her child. When he was out, he kept in touch. He sent photographs. Sometimes he told her his location. His mother more or less knew where he was and when to expect him home.

And when he said he was coming, he came.

Often, he even arrived earlier than he had said.

He would come home tired from work, but smiling. He would see his mother and go into her arms, and the day's weariness seemed to stay outside the door.

To his mother, Yousef's return was no special event; it was part of life's order.

His arrival.

The door opening.

Yousef's voice.

An embrace.

Food.

A few words.

And then the end of another day.

But that night, this simple order broke.

It was the night of Chaharshanbe Suri.

Isfahan's streets were full of people coming and going, and the sound of firecrackers. Yousef was still at work.

At close to one in the morning, his mother's phone rang.

It was Yousef's voice.

As always, he called to say he was coming home.

‘I'll be home in twenty minutes.’

An ordinary sentence.

So ordinary that no mother hearing it thinks she will have to remember it for the rest of her life.

Twenty minutes.

His mother waited.

Yousef's food was ready.

Perhaps her gaze moved to the clock now and then, and back again.

Twenty minutes passed.

Yousef did not come.

Two minutes more.

Twenty-two minutes.

There was still nothing strange about it.

The streets were busy. It was Chaharshanbe Suri. Perhaps he would be a few minutes late.

Twenty-five minutes.

Still he did not come.

But this time, something small began to stir in his mother's heart.

Yousef was not usually late.

If he was going to be late, he let her know.

He was not someone who left his mother waiting.

It had been thirty minutes.

These were no longer just a few ordinary minutes.

His mother picked up the phone.

She dialled Yousef's number.

It rang.

No one answered.

Again.

Still no voice.

Worry slowly took the place of waiting.

Cold sweat settled on her forehead.

Why isn't he answering?

What has happened?

Her heart was uneasy.

When someone we love suddenly stops answering, the mind races down the worst paths at a terrifying speed.

Could he have had an accident?

Perhaps something has happened to the car?

Perhaps he cannot hear his phone?

Perhaps…

No.

Don't think the worst.

He'll call any moment.

Any moment his car will stop outside.

Any moment the door will open.

His mother probably pulled herself back from the worst thought again and again.

No.

Yousef said he was coming.

Yousef kept his word.

He has to come.

But his phone was still not switched off; it rang, and no one answered.

Perhaps the most frightening sound that night was neither the firecrackers nor the explosions in the street.

It was a ringing phone with no one answering at the other end.

Only minutes earlier, Yousef had been alive on that same line.

His voice had been there.

He had said he would be home in twenty minutes.

Now that same phone rang, and silence answered.

Between work and home, near Hafez Street, something had happened that his mother did not yet know about.

Shots had been fired.

And those twenty minutes that were meant to bring Yousef home had taken him to a place from which there was no return.

Then the news came.

What the family heard was that Yousef had been shot, and that the shooters were members of the Basij.

His mother probably still wanted not to understand the sentence.

There are things we hear that the mind refuses to accept.

It isn't possible.

He was speaking to me a few minutes ago.

He said he was coming.

His food is ready.

How can it be?

No.

Perhaps he's wounded.

Perhaps he's in hospital.

Perhaps they've made a mistake.

Perhaps it's another Yousef.

Among those ‘perhapses’, his mother searched for somewhere to keep her son alive.

But reality forced its way through.

Yousef was not coming back.

His mother's whole world collapsed in that moment.

The son she had lived for through eighteen years, whom she had raised, worried over, laughed for, gone out with, photographed, waited for, and watched return each time, was not coming back this time.

‘My Yousef…’

‘My beautiful boy…’

‘My whole life…’

There would be no sound at the door.

He would no longer come in tired from work and embrace his mother.

He would no longer sit behind the wheel of the 405.

He would no longer put on his football boots.

He would no longer send his mother photographs and tell her where he was.

That night, even death did not end the waiting.

The family waited five days to receive Yousef's body.

Five days.

For the boy who had said:

‘I'll be home in twenty minutes.’

His mother was supposed to wait twenty minutes.

Twenty minutes became half an hour.

Half an hour became a night.

A night became a day.

And a day became five days.

Who can measure the true length of those five days for a mother?

Their minutes?

Their nights?

Each time she opened her phone?

Each surge of hope and fear?

Each thought that perhaps something else might still happen?

Five days later, they handed Yousef over.

But what came home was no longer the son his mother had been waiting for.

She received Yousef in a shroud.

The same boy who was supposed to walk home could no longer embrace his mother.

Perhaps it was here that those twenty minutes stopped for ever.

In her heart, his mother could cry out:

What right did you have?

What were you thinking?

He was only eighteen.

He was coming home from work.

His mother was waiting.

With a few shots, you took from a mother the only fruit of her life. But did you think, even for a moment, about what remains in a home after those bullets?

A killer does more than destroy a body.

A chair is left empty.

A place is left missing at the table.

A phone becomes a museum of the voice and photographs of someone who is no longer there.

A mother is condemned, whenever she hears a familiar car, to imagine for a few seconds that her son has come back.

After Yousef, ordinary things were no longer ordinary.

His watch.

His fragrance.

His bag.

His childhood photographs.

The flowers he had once brought his mother.

The car.

The images on his phone.

Each became a piece of him.

His mother placed some of them together in a frame.

Before that night, a watch was simply a way to tell the time.

After that night, time itself became pain.

One o'clock.

A call.

‘I'll be home in twenty minutes.’

One twenty.

Waiting.

Twenty-five minutes.

Worry.

Thirty minutes.

An unanswered call.

Then news that divided life into ‘before’ and ‘after’.

Even the mobile phone was no longer an ordinary object.

The photographs stayed there.

The videos stayed there.

The messages stayed there.

The voice of a boy who had died could still be heard again at the touch of a screen.

Sometimes you open a video, and for a few seconds time deceives you.

Yousef is alive again.

He laughs.

He speaks.

He moves.

His mother hears his voice again.

Then the video ends.

The screen goes dark.

And Yousef leaves the room a second time.

The car, too, acquired another story.

Later, when his mother saw a car like Yousef's 405, she would imagine for a moment that it might be him.

The heart does not always accept the truth as quickly as the mind.

A car approaches in the distance.

Its colour is familiar.

Its shape is familiar.

For one second:

Yousef?

The car comes closer.

Someone else is at the wheel.

And once again, a mother understands that her son is not coming home.

His birthday came.

Nowruz came.

Sons' Day came.

Occasions arrived one after another.

The calendar kept moving without Yousef.

But in his photographs, time had stopped.

The same young face.

The same faint moustache.

The same eyes.

The same smile.

The same boy who does not yet know that his life will last only eighteen years.

In real life, his friends grow older.

They change their cars.

They work.

They marry.

Perhaps they have children.

But in the photographs, Yousef remains that same young man for ever.

Eighteen.

Perhaps this is one of the cruellest forms of dying young.

You lose more than someone's past.

You lose their entire future all at once.

Everything they could have been and never became.

Every morning they could have woken to.

Every flower they could have bought their mother.

Every goal they could have scored.

Every car they could have repaired.

Every embrace they could have given their mother.

And now, out of all those memories, one sentence remains, perhaps the simplest sentence Yousef ever spoke:

‘I'll be home in twenty minutes.’

He did not know those words would become a lifetime of waiting for his mother.

Nor did she know, when she hung up, that it was the last time she would hear her son's voice before he reached home.

Had she known, perhaps she would not have hung up.

Perhaps she would have said a thousand things.

Perhaps she would only have said:

‘Yousef… come home soon.’

But people do not know, during their last conversation, that it is their last conversation.

That is why last words are often simple.

‘I'm on my way.’

‘Warm up the food.’

‘I'll be there in twenty minutes.’

And perhaps this is the most painful part of Seyyed Yousef Miri's story:

He did not lie to his mother.

Nor did he forget his promise.

He was coming home.

They simply did not let him get there.

And for his mother, the clock is still caught somewhere between that phone call and that closed door.

Twenty minutes from home.

A distance Yousef never finished travelling.

And a mother who, somewhere in her heart, is still waiting to hear the door.