The Moeen barbershop opened again for business, despite the cracks in the wall. Men still needed their hair cut.
Two weeks after an earthquake killed almost half the population in Bam, signs of everyday life started to return this week. Schools began registering students Monday. Men on motorcycles started delivering the newspaper to tents Tuesday.
And on Wednesday, Mahmood Hassani decided to go back to his regular barber at the shop.
“It helps me regain my spirit,” said Hassani, who lives in a tent nearby. “This really is such a great thing for me personally, because I feel that my life is back.”
The earthquake on Dec. 26 killed more than 35,000 people in Bam, although a final death tally will be difficult to determine. In the early days, dozens of people were buried in mass graves. Entire families wiped out by the earthquake still could lie under the rubble.
It is unclear what will happen to Bam, once famous for its dates, oranges and the largest ancient mud-brick city in the world. Iranian officials have announced plans to rebuild the city, better and stronger, capable of handling earthquakes along this major fault line. But that will take years, given the destruction.
For right now, life is by no means back to normal. Bam still looks as if someone took a box of crackers and crushed it. The road known as One Way Street is still a trail of broken homes, bent streetlights and sorrow. People live in tents near the road. Some sit in the rubble, staring off at nothing.
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But people seem to be waking up from their grief. Several corner grocers opened their doors, selling onions, potatoes and whatever they could salvage. Taxi drivers picked up customers. People twisted their bodies to fit into their crumpled cars, caved in by the earthquake but still drivable.
Throughout the city, people dug through what remained of their lives. They pulled out unbroken plates, teapots and treasured Persian carpets.
On one street near the city center, a 73-year-old man who lost five of his grandchildren cleaned up his grocery. Next door, a barber prepared his shop of 36 years to reopen in the afternoon.
In the pile of rubble next to the barbershop, Alireza Zaherara dug with his hands, trying to find his ID cards and important documents. He wore a key chain on a belt loop of his pants, with the photograph of his 9-year-old daughter, who died in the earthquake.
Blocks away at the Moeen barber shop, the floor was a mess of hair trimmings. About 30 men showed up on the first night of business.
Barber Gholamreza Afsharpur wanted to get back to work because he was bored doing nothing. The earthquake cracked the walls of the shop but left the building mostly intact. The angel statue lost a wing. The dog statue lost a nose. The comb lost a few teeth.
Afsharpur charged his customers the usual rate, a little more than $1. As with barbershops everywhere, the customers chatted about the news–how some had lost 100 extended family members, others 120.
“Today, I heard one of my friends has died,” said Afsharpur, running clippers along a customer’s neck. “One of the people here told me. He was a good friend. All of them, the whole family.”
This week, city services started again, despite the death of Bam’s mayor and many city workers. Police cars patrolled, although no one would say whether any of the prisoners who escaped jail during the earthquake had been caught.
Municipal trucks collected trash, picking up black plastic bags filled with banana peels and plastic soda bottles from the tents. Men in orange jumpsuits, all from other provinces, swept the streets, a small gesture in the shadow of broken buildings and devastation.
One family decided it was time to finish burying the dead. Fatemeh Tavakoli-Nejad and her remaining family members drove to the cemetery to mark the grave of 26 relatives who died in the earthquake. They had all spent the night in the same house after a large family dinner.
Several men were smoothing newly poured concrete. A sheet held in place by stones listed the names of the dead, to be inscribed in the concrete.
“We also might write some explanation of what has happened, of why they are here,” said Tavakoli-Nejad, whose husband died during his morning prayers.
Half-full bags of cement were strewn across the cemetery, along with plastic gloves and several stretchers. Men showed up with shovels to finish digging the graves.
For some in Bam, this was all too much. They gathered at the police station, filling out permission forms to leave the city. Outside the station, trucks and misshapen cars held all the possessions that survivors could pull from the rubble.
Farhad Tabasi, 24, saved his parrot and the cage, a television set and some tables. His parents, a sister and as many as 70 members of his extended family died. He was moving his three younger sisters to nearby Kerman. He was not sure where they would live.
“How can someone leave his hometown?” he said just before driving away. “I’m going to be back, but I bet it will never be the same place again.”