Azar Nafisi (36 page)

In the Behesht-e Zahra cemetery, as an attempt was being made to carry the body out of the helicopter, the crowd rushed forward once more and this time actually got hold of its prize, tearing pieces of the white shroud from the dead man's body, revealing a leg dangling from the white cloth. The body was finally retrieved, and rushed back to Tehran to be shrouded again. And when it was returned a few hours later, inside a metal case, the Revolutionary Guards and some members of the inner circle forced the people back. A friend remembered seeing Hojatol-Islam Nategh Nouri—who would later lose the election to President Khatami—standing near the container with a whip and lashing those who tried to approach the dead body. And thus they finally buried Ruhollah Khomeini, whose given name meant “the soul of God.”

The government, in a move to turn Khomeini into a sacred figure, tried to create a shrine for him close to the Behesht-e Zahra cemetery. It was hastily built, without taste or beauty: a country famous for some of the most beautiful mosques in the world now created the gaudiest shrine to this last imam. The monument was built close to the burial place of the martyrs of the revolution: a small fountain gushed sprays of red water, symbolizing the everlasting blood of the martyrs.

Khomeini's death carried its own illuminations. Some, like me, felt like aliens in their homeland. Others, like the taxi driver I came across a few weeks after the funeral, were disillusioned with the whole religious fraud, as he put it. Now I know how fourteen hundred years back they created the imams and prophets, he said—just like this guy. So none of it was true.

At the start of the revolution, a rumor had taken root that Khomeini's image could be seen in the moon. Many people, even perfectly modern and educated individuals, came to believe this. They had seen him in the moon. He had been a conscious mythmaker, and he had turned himself into a myth. What they mourned after a well-timed death—for after the defeat in the war and the disenchantment, all he could do was die—was the death of a dream. Like all great mythmakers, he had tried to fashion reality out of his dream, and in the end, like Humbert, he had managed to destroy both reality and his dream. Added to the crimes, to the murders and tortures, we would now face this last indignity—the murder of our dreams. Yet he had done this with our full compliance, our complete assent and complicity.

34

I stray for no good reason to a dark and musty antique shop in downtown Tehran. I had gone to a street lined with secondhand stores in search of an old book to give Nima, who had recently brought me rare videos of an old television series popular before the revolution. When I entered the shop, the owner, sitting behind the counter, was too busy reading the morning paper to bother to glance at me.

As I browsed around the semi-lit room, lost in the objects scattered haphazardly on old wooden tables and shelves, my eyes fell on an odd-looking pair of scissors. They were beautifully handcrafted; one of the handles was much bigger than the other, and they were shaped like a rooster. The blades were blunter than those of ordinary scissors. I asked the shopkeeper what it was. He shrugged. I'm not sure—maybe for trimming the mustache or beard. It probably came from somewhere in Europe, maybe Russia.

I don't know why I was so fascinated by this object, but I found it quite extraordinary that perhaps a hundred years ago this pair of scissors—or mustache trimmer, or whatever it was—had been brought over all the way from Europe to finally end up on an old table in the farthest reaches of this dusty shop. Yet so much work had gone into this quite dispensable object. I decided to buy it for my magician. I had a theory that some gifts should be bought for their own sake, exactly because they were useless. I was sure he would appreciate it, that he would be pleased to receive something he did not need, a luxury item that was not luxurious. Instead of buying something for Nima, I left with my rooster-headed scissors.

When I gave them to my magician with my explanation, he was making coffee and was seemingly so involved in his task that he did not respond. He carried the tray with two mugs and his box of chocolates to the table, and went into the library. A few moments later he returned with a leather-bound book, in solemn green with gold lettering. It was
The Ambassadors.
Since you bought me the gift you should have gotten Nima, I have a gift for him: tell him to reread the scene in Gloriani's garden. Your Nima sounds like a chap who needs to be reminded of things by someone such as myself. So why don't you ask him to reread that scene?

In the book, my magician had marked two passages. One was in the preface, where James mentions a famous and oft repeated scene as the “essence” of his novel; the other was the scene itself. It occurs at a party given by the famous sculptor Gloriani. Lambert Strether, the hero of the novel, tells a young painter, little Bilham, whom he has unofficially appointed as his spiritual heir: “Live all you can; it's a mistake not to. It doesn't so much matter what you do in particular so long as you have your life. If you haven't had that what
have
you had? I'm too old—too old at any rate for what I see. What one loses one loses; make no mistake about that. Still, we have the illusion of freedom; therefore don't, like me to-day, be without the memory of that illusion. I was either, at the right time, too stupid or too intelligent to have it, and now I'm a case of reaction against the mistake. For it
was
a mistake. Live, live!”

35

We work in the dark—we do what we can—we give what we have. Our doubt is our passion, and our passion is our task. The rest is the madness of art.
—Henry James

It was early in the morning, the first class of the day; the classroom was filled with light. I was summing up James. Last time we talked about certain traits in James, how they appear in different characters and within different contexts, and today I want to talk about the word
courage,
one that we bandy about a great deal these days in our own culture.

There are different kinds of courage in James. Can you think of an example? Yes, Nassrin? The most obvious example is Daisy, Nassrin said. She pushed herself forward with an effort, tried to brush an imaginary strand of hair from her forehead and continued. Daisy tells Winterbourne at the very start not to be afraid. She means not to be afraid of conventions and traditions—that is one kind of courage.

Yes, I said encouragingly. Daisy is a good example, and then there are other characters, others whom we never credit with courage, because we never think of their kind as courageous; we think of them as meek. Mahshid's face lit up, and before she had bolstered the courage to raise her hand, I turned to her and said, Yes? The light withdrew from her face and she hesitated. Tell us, Mahshid, I insisted. Well, when you said “meek,” I suddenly thought of Catherine. She is shy and retreating, not like Daisy, yet she stands up to all these characters, who are much more outgoing than her, and she faces up to them at a great cost. She has a different kind of courage from Daisy, but it is still courage. I . . .

It was at this point that we heard a commotion in the hall. I paid no attention to it. Over the years I had come to see such interference from outside the class as part of the class itself. One day, two janitors had walked in with two chairs and placed them in one corner. They left without a word and a few minutes later came back with two more chairs. Another time, a janitor with a crooked neck came in with a broom and started sweeping the floor while I continued to talk about
Tom Jones
and pretended not to notice him.

And then there is
The Ambassadors,
I continued, where we find several different kinds of courage, but the most courageous characters here are those with imagination, those who, through their imaginative faculty, can empathize with others. When you lack this kind of courage, you remain ignorant of others' feelings and needs.

Maria, the soul mate Strether finds in Paris, has “courage,” while Mrs. Newsome has only “exultation.” Madame de Vionnet, the beautiful Parisian whom Mrs. Newsome is determined to expel from her son's life, demonstrates courage when she risks all the known quantities of her life for the unknown quantity of her love for Chad. But Mrs. Newsome chooses to play it safe. Having imagined what everyone is like, having imagined their function and role, she refuses to change her formulations. She is a tyrant much in the way of a bad novelist, who shapes his characters according to his own ideology or desires and never allows them the space to become themselves. It takes courage to die for a cause, but also to live for one.

I could tell by the restless movements of my students and their glances towards the door that they could not wholly concentrate on this most intriguing point, but I was determined to be undisturbed for as long as possible, so I continued. The most dictatorial character in the novel is the invisible Mrs. Newsome. If we want to learn about the essence of a dictatorial mind, we would do well to study her. Nima, could you please read the passage where Strether describes her—” ‘That is just her difficulty—' ”

“ ‘That is just her difficulty—, that she doesn't admit surprises. It's a fact that, I think, describes and represents her . . . she's all, as I've called it, fine cold thought. She had, to her own mind, worked the whole thing out in advance, and worked it out for me as well as for herself. Wherever she has done that, you see, there's no room left; no margin, as it were, for any alteration. She's filled as full, packed as tight, as she'll hold. . . . I haven't touched her. She won't
be
touched. I see it now as I've never done; and she hangs together with a perfection of her own . . . that does suggest a kind of wrong in
any
change of her composition.' ”

By this time the disturbance outside had grown louder. There were sounds of feet running and people shouting. Miss Ruhi and Miss Hatef were now visibly agitated and whispered loudly, casting significant glances at the door. I sent them outside to find out what was happening, and tried to go on.

“Let us return to the quotation . . .” I was instantly interrupted by Miss Ruhi and her breathless mate, who stood on the threshold as if they did not intend to stay. They reported that a student had set fire to himself in an empty classroom and had then started to run down the hall, shouting revolutionary slogans.

We all rushed out. From both sides of the long hall, students were running in the direction of the staircase. I found a place near the stairs, close to one of my colleagues. Three people were carrying a stretcher, trying to make their way through the crowd towards the stairs. From the way they were carrying the stretcher, their burden seemed light. On the stretcher, under a white sheet, I could make out a remarkably pink face, marked by patches of dark gray. A pair of black minstrel hands extended out motionless above the white sheet, creating the impression that they were trying to avoid contact with the sheet at all costs. Two huge black eyes seemed to be attached to the face by invisible wires. They appeared completely motionless, as if fixed on a scene of unbelievable horror, and yet, paradoxically, they also seemed to be roving, but from side to side. Of all the wild images of that morning, those roaming eyes have continued to haunt me.

The loudspeakers urged everyone to return to their classes. No one moved. We were watching the pink face, the minstrel hands and the sooty eyes as they were carried down the staircase in what seemed like a spiral motion. The murmurs died down and rose again with the stretcher's approach and descent. It was one of those scenes which, while happening in front of one's eyes, have already acquired the quality not just of a dream, but of a memory of a dream.

As the stretcher moved down the stairs and out of sight, the murmurs became more articulate and clear. The almost magical creature on the stretcher became more tangible, acquired a background, a name, an identity. This identity was mainly impersonal. He had been one of the most active students in the Muslim Students' Association. To say that he was “active” meant that he was one of the more fanatical. He belonged to the group responsible for the posters and slogans on the walls, the group that had authorized the notices at the entrances to the university listing the names of those who had transgressed the dress code.

I thought of him on that stretcher, going down the staircase, passing the now irrelevant photographs of the war, passing by Ayatollah Khomeini, who even after death was glaring down on the procession with his usual stern and impenetrable gaze and passing his precious slogans about the war:
WHETHER WE KILL OR ARE KLLED WE ARE VICTORIOUS! WE WILL FIGHT! WE WILL DIE! BUT WE WON'T ACCEPT COMPROMISE!

There were so many young men like him on all our campuses, those who had been very young at the beginning of the revolution, many from the provinces or from traditional families. Every year, more students were admitted to the universities based on their loyalty to the revolution. They belonged to the families of the Revolutionary Guards or the martyrs of the revolution and were called the “government's share.” These were the children of the revolution, those who were to carry its legacy and eventually replace the Westernized workforce. The revolution must have meant many things to them—mainly power, and access. But they were also the usurpers, who had been admitted to the university and given power not because of their own merit or hard work but because of their ideological affiliations. This, neither they nor we could forget.

I went down the stairs, slowly this time, surrounded by a group of students who were talking excitedly among themselves. Who he was had already become an excuse for our remembrances, and our stories. My students spoke heatedly about the humiliations they had suffered at the hands of members of his organization. They repeated the story of another leader of the Muslim Students' Association, one who had died during the war, who claimed to have been sexually aroused by the sight of a white patch of skin peeking out from under a head scarf. Not even death could erase the memory of that white patch and the penalty the young girl had been made to pay for it.