Milad Tower: A story of what we build when no one is finished with us

Milad doesn't exist. But the wooden table exists. Somewhere, for somebody.A boy grows up at a walnut table in Tehran, listening to a father who talks and a mother who nods in the right places. He learns to cut cloth. He learns what is not paid for and not seen.Then two twenty-year-olds with valid passports take a bus to Turkey, and everything after that is a different arithmetic: a building where the rooms are three metres wide, an eight-person boat lined with cardboard, an island, a black-and-white sheet of paper, a town in Germany where he is finally not hungry.And a hand that may or may not have come up out of the water.Told across ten books and forty-six chapters, in the voice of a man being interviewed eleven years later, Milad Towerfollows one route out of Iran and the people it costs. It is about brothers who stop speaking, fathers who never ask, and the sentence you carry for twenty years because no one ever answered it.It is also about who is doing the telling. The last chapter says so.From the collection Cities We Could Not Keep.