Azar Nafisi (46 page)

“I can't get used to it,” Manna had said one day in class. And I couldn't blame her. We were unhappy. We compared our situation to our own potentials, to what we could have had, and somehow there was little consolation in the fact that millions of people were unhappier than we were. Why should other people's misery make us happier or more content?

When I arrived home, Bijan and the children were downstairs in my mother's apartment. I put the napoleons I had brought for them in the refrigerator and left the carrot cake out to take to my mother. Then I went straight to the freezer, made myself a big bowl of ice cream, poured coffee and walnuts over it, and by the time the kids and Bijan had come upstairs, I was already in the bathroom throwing up. All evening and all night, I threw up. My magician called at some point. I am very sorry, he said. One feels so tainted. I'm sorry, too, I said back. We're all sorry—don't forget to date and autograph my book.

I could not keep anything in my stomach that night, not even water, and in the morning when I opened my eyes, the room started to rotate; tiny specks of light formed brightly spiked coronets, dancing in the dizzying air. I closed my eyes, opened them again and the deadly coronets reappeared. I held on to my stomach, went to the bathroom and vomited nothing but bile. All day I stayed in the luxury of my bed, my skin sensitive to the touch of the sheets.

17

You could not shock her more than she shocks me;

         Beside her Joyce seems innocent as grass.

It makes me most uncomfortable to see

         An English spinster of the middle class

         Describe the amorous effect of “brass”,

Reveal so frankly and with such sobriety

The economic basis of society.

A girl is raped, carried in the trunk of a car and murdered. A young student is killed and has his ears cut off. There are discussions of prison camps, of death and destruction in Bellow, in Nabokov we have monsters like Humbert, who rape twelve-year-old girls, even in Flaubert there is so much hurt and betrayal—What about Austen? Manna had asked one day.

Indeed, what about Austen? Austen's comedies and her generosity of spirit sometimes led my students to share the common belief that she was a prim spinster, at peace with the world and unaware of its brutality. I had to remind them of Auden's “Letter to Lord Byron,” in which he asks Byron to tell Jane Austen “How much her novels are beloved down here.”

Austen's heroines are unforgiving, after their own fashion. There is much betrayal in her novels, much greed and falsehood, so many disloyal friends, selfish mothers, tyrannical fathers, so much vanity, cruelty and hurt. Austen is generous towards her villains, but this does not mean that she lets anyone, even her heroines, off easy. Her favorite and least likable heroine, Fanny Price, is in fact the one who also suffers the most.

Modern fiction brings out the evil in domestic lives, ordinary relations, people like you and me—Reader!
Bruder!
as Humbert said. Evil in Austen, as in most great fiction, lies in the inability to “see” others, hence to empathize with them. What is frightening is that this blindness can exist in the best of us (Eliza Bennet) as well as the worst (Humbert). We are all capable of becoming the blind censor, of imposing our visions and desires on others.

Once evil is individualized, becoming part of everyday life, the way of resisting it also becomes individual. How does the soul survive? is the essential question. And the response is: through love and imagination. Stalin emptied Russia of its soul by pouring on the old death. Mandelstam and Sinyavsky restored that soul by reciting poetry to fellow convicts and by writing about it in their journals. “Perhaps to remain a poet in such circumstances,” Bellow wrote, “is also to reach the heart of politics. The human feelings, human experiences, the human form and face, recover their proper place—the foreground.”

18

Our decision to leave Iran came about casually—at least that is how it appeared. Such decisions, no matter how momentous, are seldom well planned. Like bad marriages, they are the result of years of resentment and anger suddenly exploding into suicidal resolutions. The idea of departure, like the possibility of divorce, lurked somewhere in our minds, shadowy and sinister, ready to surface at the slightest provocation. If anyone asked, I would recount the usual reasons for our departure: my job and my feelings as a woman, our children's future and my trips to the U.S., which had once more made us aware of our choices and possibilities.

For the first time, Bijan and I had serious fights, and for a while we talked about nothing but leaving or staying. When Bijan discovered that this time I was determined to leave, he went into a period of mortified silence; then a phase began when we had long, torturous arguments, in which family and friends participated as well. Bijan said it wasn't a good idea, we should at least wait until the children were older, ready for college; my magician said it was the only thing to do; my friends were divided. My girls didn't want me to leave, but then so many of them had themselves decided to go. My parents wanted us to leave, despite the fact that our departure would mean their loneliness. The offer of a better life for their children—even if it is an illusion—is so attractive to most parents.

In the end, Bijan, always judicious and far too reasonable, had agreed that we should leave—for a few years at least. His acceptance of our new fate had set him in motion. His way of dealing with our impeding departure was practical; he kept himself busy with dismantling eighteen years of life and work and fitting them into the eight suitcases we were allowed to take with us. Mine had been to evade the situation to the point of denial. The fact that he was taking it so graciously made me feel guilty and hesitant. I deferred packing, and refused to talk about it seriously. In class, the light and flippant attitude I espoused made it difficult for my girls to know how to react.

We had never properly discussed in class my decision to leave. It was understood that the class could not continue indefinitely, and I had voiced the hope that my girls would form their own classes, to bring more friends into the fold. I had felt the tension in Manna's silences and Mahshid's oblique allusions to duty towards home and country. The others showed a certain anxiety and sadness at the thought of the class coming to an end. Your place will be so empty, Yassi had said, using a Persian expression—but they too began to nurture their own plans to leave.

As soon as our decision was final, everyone stopped talking about it. My father's eyes became more withdrawn, as if he were looking at a point beyond which we had already vanished into the horizon. My mother was suddenly angry and resentful, implying that my decision had once more proven her worst suspicions about my loyalty. My best friend energetically took me shopping for presents and talked about everything but my journey, and my girls barely registered the change; only my children mentioned our impending departure with a mixture of excitement and sadness.

19

There is a term in Persian, “the patient stone,” which is often used in times of anxiety and turbulence. Supposedly, a person pours out all his troubles and woes into the stone. It will listen and absorb his pains and secrets, and this way he will be cured. Sometimes the stone can no longer endure its burden and then it bursts. My magician was not my “patient stone,” although he never told his own story—he claimed people were not interested in that. Yet he spent sleepless nights listening to and absorbing others' troubles and woes, and to me his advice was that I should leave: leave and write my own story and teach my own class.

Perhaps he saw what was happening to me more clearly than I did. What I now realize is that, ironically, the more attached I became to my class and to my students, the more detached I became from Iran. The more I discovered the lyrical quality of our lives, the more my own life became a web of fiction. All of this I can now formulate and talk about with some degree of clarity, but it was not at all clear then. It was much more complicated.

As I trace the route to his apartment, the twists and turns, and pass once more the old tree opposite his house, I am struck by a sudden thought: memories have ways of becoming independent of the reality they evoke. They can soften us against those we were deeply hurt by or they can make us resent those we once accepted and loved unconditionally.

We sit again with Reza around the same round dining table, under the painting of green trees, talking and eating lunch, the forbidden ham-and-cheese sandwiches. Our magician does not drink. He refuses to compromise with the counterfeits: the bootleg videos and wine, censored novels and films. He does not watch television, nor does he go to the movies. To watch a beloved film on video is anathema to him, although he obtains tapes of his favorite movies for us. Today he has brought us homemade wine, its color a sinful pale pink, poured into five vinegar bottles. Later, I take the wine home and drink it. Something has gone wrong and the wine tastes like vinegar, though I do not tell him.

The hot subject of the day was Mohammad Khatami and his recent candidacy. Khatami, mainly known to intellectuals for his brief stint as minister of Islamic Culture and Guidance, had within a few weeks become a household name. In buses and taxis, at parties and at work, everyone talked about Khatami, whom it was our moral duty to vote for. It was not enough that for over seventeen years the clerics had announced that voting was not just a duty but a religious duty; we ourselves had now adopted the same stance. There were fights and ruptures in friendships over this matter.

That day as I was walking to my magician's house, struggling with my scarf and trying to keep it around my neck, I noticed a campaign poster for Khatami on the opposite wall. There was a big picture of the candidate ornamented in huge letters:
IRAN HAS FALLEN IN LOVE AGAIN.
Oh no, I said to myself despondently—not again.

As we sat around my magician's table, the site of so many stories we told or created, I was telling them about the posters. We love our family, our lovers, our friends, but do we have to fall in love with our politicians? Even in my class we're fighting over him. Manna can't see how anyone could vote for him; she says it doesn't make much difference to her if she can wear a lighter-color scarf or let a bit more hair show. Sanaz says that given a choice between bad and worse, you choose the bad, and Manna shoots back that she doesn't want a nicer jail warden—she wants to be out of jail. Azin says, This guy wants the rule of law? Isn't this the same law that allows my husband to beat me and take my daughter away? Yassi is confused, and Mitra says, Even in these elections there are rumors that they'll check your passports and won't let you leave if you don't vote. Another rumor, Mahshid says tartly, that you don't need to listen to.

“People usually deserve what they get,” said Reza, biting into his ham and cheese. I gave him a reproachful look. “I mean it,” he said. “If we are prepared to be duped by every so-called election—we all know they aren't real elections when only Muslims with impeccable revolutionary credentials, chosen by the Council of Guardians and approved by the Supreme Leader, can become candidates. Anyway, the point is that as long as we accept this charade called elections and hope that some Rafsanjani or Khatami can save us, we deserve our later disenchantments.”

“But this frustration is not one-sided,” my magician added. “How do you think Mr. Khamenei feels”—he turned a quizzical eye to me and raised an eyebrow—“to see your Mitra and Sanaz going on their merry way and corrupting good Muslim girls like Yassi and Mahshid in the bargain? Or hearing their former radical revolutionaries quoting Kant and Spinoza instead of Islamic sources? And then we have our president's daughter, peddling votes by promising to give women the right to ride bicycles in public parks.”

“But all of this is so ridiculous,” I said.

“It might be ridiculous to you,” he said, “but it is not very funny to this president and his followers, who have to win the hearts and minds of the children of the revolution by promising them—at least implicitly—access to all things Western. And still,” he added with relish, “these young people listen more to Michael Jackson and read your Nabokov with more enjoyment and enthusiasm than you and I ever did in our decadent youth.

“Besides, what are you worrying about anyway?” he said. “You'll be leaving us and our problems very soon.”

“I won't be leaving either you or your problems,” I said. “I'm counting on you to keep me posted.”

“No, I won't,” he said. “We won't communicate once you go.”

In response to my startled look, he said, “Call it self-defense or cowardice; I don't want to be in touch with those of my friends who are lucky enough to leave.”

“But you encouraged me,” I said, bewildered by what I was hearing.

“Well, yes, that's another matter. But anyway, these are my rules. Seldom seen, soon forgotten; out of sight, out of mind and all that. A chap needs to protect himself.”

He did everything in his power to help me leave, and yet when he saw that I was finally leaving, when it all came out well in the end, he was not happy with me. Was he disenchanted? Did he think my departure was a comment of sorts on those I was leaving behind?

20

I was on the phone when Nassrin arrived. Negar, who had opened the door, kept shouting, quite unnecessarily, Mom, Mom, Nassrin is here! A few minutes later a shy Nassrin entered, standing by the door as if already regretting her visit. I gestured for her to wait for me in the living room. I'll have to call you later, I told my friend. One of my girls is here to see me. Girls? she said—she knew very well what I meant. Students, I said. Students! Get a life, woman. Why don't you return to teaching? But I am teaching. You know what I mean. By the way, talking of your students, your Azin is going to drive me crazy. That girl doesn't know her own mind—either that or she's playing a game I don't understand. She's worried about her daughter, I said hurriedly. But listen, I really have to go. I'll call you later.