Azar Nafisi (47 page)

When I entered the living room, Nassrin was staring at the birds-of-paradise and chewing her nails with the distracted focus of a professional nail chewer. I should have guessed before that she belonged to the category of people who bite their nails, I remember thinking—she must have exercised a great deal of restraint in class.

At the sound of my voice, she turned around abruptly and impulsively hid her hands behind her back. To cover the awkwardness she had brought into the room, I asked her what she wanted to drink. Nothing, thank you. She had not taken her robe off, only unbuttoned it, revealing the outlines of a white shirt tucked into a pair of black corduroys. She was wearing Reeboks and her hair was pulled back into a ponytail. She looked like a pretty girl, young and fragile, like any other girl from any other part of the world. She shifted restlessly from one leg to another, reminding me of the first time I had seen her, almost sixteen years earlier. Nassrin, stand still for a moment, I said quietly. Better yet, sit. Sit down, please—no, let's go downstairs to my office; it's more private.

I was trying to delay what she had come to tell me. We made a stop in the kitchen. I handed her the fruit bowl and put a jug of water, two glasses and some plates on a tray. On our way down the stairs, she caught me: I'm going away, she said. I knew from experience that I should not throw her any further off balance by showing too much surprise. Where are you going? To London, to live with my sister for a while. And what about Ramin? We had reached my office. She waited for me to open the door, shifting her weight from one leg to another, as if neither leg would take responsibility for its burden. I could tell by her pale color and the stunned expression on her face that I had asked the wrong question. I'm done with him, she muttered as we entered the room.

How are you leaving? I asked her once we had sat down, she with her back to the window and I slumped on the couch against the wall with its large painting—much too large for the small room—of the Tehran mountains. Smugglers, she said. They still won't issue me a passport. I'll have to make my way to Turkey by land and wait for my brother-in-law to pick me up.

When? In about a week or so, she said. I'm not sure of the exact date; they will let me know. You will know through Mahshid, she added after a pause. She's the only one in our class who knows.

Is anyone going with you? No. My father's against it. The only thing he finally agreed to do was help pay for part of the trip. My sister is taking care of the rest—she calls it my rescue operation. My father says if I insist on going ahead with this crazy plan, I'm on my own. To him these people, no matter what we think of them, they're our people. He lost one daughter, now this other one. He says first it was the class, and now this. I thought he didn't know about the class, I said. Apparently, he did; he too was keeping up appearances.

She rubbed her hands obsessively and refrained from looking at me directly. This was Nassrin, or to be honest, this was the two of us together: sharing the most intimate moments with a shrug, pretending they were not intimate. It wasn't courage that motivated this casual, impersonal manner of treating so much pain; it was a special brand of cowardice, a destructive defense mechanism, forcing others to listen to the most horrendous experiences and yet denying them the moment of empathy: don't feel sorry for me; nothing is too big for me to handle. This is nothing, nothing really.

She told me that of all the years she had spent in jail, all the years of the war, this period of adjustment had been the hardest for her. At first she had thought she needed to leave only for a while. But gradually she had realized that she just wanted to leave. They would not issue her a passport, so she would have to go illegally, and that suited her fine.

I acted as if we were talking about a normal trip, a routine visit to her older sister in London—it's far too wet at this time of year; do ask them to take you to the Globe. . . . And why did you end it with Ramin? I could not stop myself from asking her. Was he opposed to your move, or did he inspire it? No, he, he—well, he knew how much I wanted to leave, because of this illness I have, you know, from my jail time. We, my sister, my mother and I, have been thinking for a long time that there might be a better way of handling it over there. I never asked her what exactly the illness was.

At first Ramin, he's an honorable man—a genuine grin brought back for a brief glimpse her girlishness—agreed that I should go, but he thought we should at least be engaged. I waited for her to continue. But then, well, then I broke it up. Nassrin? She paused and lowered her head, concentrating on her hands. She said, very fast: He was . . . he is no better than the others. Do you remember that line you read from Bellow about people emptying their garbage of thought all over you? Again she smiled. Well, that's Ramin and his intellectual friends for you.

This was too much, even for an experienced evader like myself. Taking a sip of water, as we know from novels, is a good way of gaining time. What do you mean no better than the others? Which others?

My uncle was cruder, she said slowly. You know, more like Mr. Nahvi. Ramin was different. He had read Derrida; he had watched Bergman and Kiarostami. No, he didn't touch me; in fact he was very careful not to touch me. It was worse. I can't explain, it was his eyes. His eyes? The way he looked at people, at other women. You could always tell, she said. She lowered her head miserably, her fingers touching one another. Ramin thought there was a difference between the girls that you were sexually attracted to and the girls you married—a girl who'd share your intellectual life with you, a girl you'd respect.
Respect,
she said again, with a great deal of anger.
Respect
was the word he used. He respected me. I was his Simone de Beauvoir, minus the sex part. And he was too much of a coward to just go and have sex with others. So he looked at them. It got to the point where he'd look at my older sister while he was talking to me. He just looked. He stared at women in the way . . . in the way my uncle touched me.

I felt sorry for Nassrin and, oddly, for Ramin too. I felt that he too needed help—he too needed to know more about himself, his needs and desires. Couldn't she see that he was not like her uncle? Perhaps it was too much to ask of her to sympathize with Ramin. She was quite ruthless to him; she had convinced herself she couldn't afford any feelings there. She had told him they were through, had made it clear that in her eyes, he was no better than the men he criticized and despised. At least you know where you stand with Ayatollah Khamenei, but these others, the ones with all sorts of claims and politically correct ideas—they were the worst. You want to save mankind, she had told him, you and your bloody Arendt. Why don't you start by saving yourself from your sexual problems? Find a prostitute. Stop looking at my sister.

Whenever I think of Nassrin, I always begin and end with that day in my room when she told me she was leaving. It was evening. Outside, the sky was the color of dusk—not dark, not light, not even gray. Rain was coming down in heavy sheets, the drops hanging from the bare brown leaves of the pear tree.

She said, “I am going away.” She said she was twenty-seven now and didn't know what it meant to live. She had always thought that life in jail would be the hardest, but it hadn't been. She brushed a few strands of hair from her face. She said, There, in jail, I like the rest of them thought we would be killed and that would be the end, or we would live, we would live and get out, and begin all over. She said, There, in jail, we dreamed of just being outside, free, but when I came out, I discovered that I missed the sense of solidarity we had in jail, the sense of purpose, the way we tried to share memories and food. She said, More than anything else, I miss the hope. In jail, we had the hope that we might get out, go to college, have fun, go to movies. I am twenty-seven. I don't know what it means to love. I don't want to be secret and hidden forever. I want to know, to know who this Nassrin is. You'd call it the ordeal of freedom, I guess, she said, smiling.

21

Nassrin had asked me to tell the class about her departure. She couldn't face them—it was too intolerable. Better just to leave without good-byes. How should I break the news to them? “Nassrin won't be coming to class anymore.” The statement was simple enough; it was how you said it, where you put the emphasis, that counted. I said it abruptly and rather crudely, forcing everyone into a stunned silence. I registered Yassi's nervous titter, Azin's startled glance and the quick exchange of looks between Sanaz and Mitra.

“Where is she now?” asked Mitra after a long pause.

“I don't know,” I said. “We have to ask Mahshid.”

“Nassrin left for the border two days ago,” Mahshid quietly informed us. “She's waiting for the smugglers to get in touch with her, so by next week she should be riding a camel or a donkey or a jeep across the desert.”

“
Not Without My Daughter,
” said Yassi with an uneasy giggle. “I'm so sorry,” she said, putting her hand to her mouth. “I feel so terrible.”

For a while everyone speculated about Nassrin's journey: the perils of traveling from the Turkish border, her loneliness, her future options. “Let's not talk about her as if she's dead,” said Azin. “She's much better off where she's going, and we should be happy for her.” Mahshid threw her a sharp glance. But Azin was right. What else could we have wished for her?

The person who reacted most strongly, not to Nassrin's departure but to my own now that Nassrin's sudden vanishing act had made concrete the threat of separation, was the one who identified with me most—Manna.

“This class will be over very soon anyway,” she said without looking at anyone. “Nassrin has gotten the message from Dr. Nafisi.” What message? “That we should all leave.”

I was rather startled by the bitterness of her accusation. I felt guilty enough on my own, as if my decision to leave was a betrayal of some promise I had made to them. (Guilt has become part of your makeup. You felt guilty even while you had no notion of leaving, my magician said later, when I complained to him.)

“Don't be silly,” Azin said, turning to Manna, her voice full of reproach. “It isn't her fault if you feel trapped living here.”

“I am not being silly,” said Manna savagely, “and, yes, I do feel trapped. Why shouldn't I?”

Azin's hand went to her bag, perhaps to fish out a cigarette, and came out empty. “How could you? You talk as if it's all Mrs. Nafisi's fault,” she said to Manna, her hand shaking.

“No, let Manna explain what she means,” I said.

“Perhaps she means . . .” Sanaz started lamely.

“I can explain myself, thank you,” said Manna crossly. “I mean, you set up a model for us”—she turned to me—“that staying here is useless, that we should all leave if we want to make something of ourselves.”

“That's not true,” I told her with some irritation. “I never suggested that my experience should be yours. You can't follow me in everything, Manna. I mean each one of us has to do what's best for her. That's all the advice I can give you.”

“The only way I can convince myself that it's okay for you to leave us here,” said Manna (I remember she said to
leave us here
), “is that I know if I had half a chance, I would too. I would leave everything,” she said as an afterthought. Even Nima? “Especially Nima,” she shot back with a wicked little smile. “I am not like Mahshid. I don't think any of us has a duty to stay. We have only one life to live.”

For so many years now I had acted as their confessor. They'd poured out their heartaches, their troubles, as if I never had any troubles of my own to cope with, as if I lived under a magical spell that allowed me to avoid all the pitfalls and hardships not just of life in the Islamic Republic but of life in general. And now they wanted me to carry the burden of their choices as well. People's choices were their own. The only way you could help them was if you knew what they wanted. How could you tell someone what she should want? (Nima would call later that night. “Manna is afraid you don't like her anymore,” he said half jokingly. “She asked me to call.”)

Other people's sorrows and joys have a way of reminding us of our own; we partly empathize with them because we ask ourselves: What about me? What does that say about my life, my pains, my anguish? For us, Nassrin's departure entailed a genuine concern for her, and anxieties and hopes for her new life. We also, for the moment at least, were shocked by the pain of missing her, of envisioning the class without her. But in the end we finally turned back towards ourselves, remembering our own hopes and anxieties in light of her decision to leave.

Mitra was the first to express her own anxieties. Lately, I had observed an anger and bitterness in her that was all the more alarming because it was so unprecedented. She had started to raise her voice in her diaries and notes, beginning with her account of her visit with her husband to Syria. The first thing that struck her was the humiliations Iranians suffered, quite meekly, at the Damascus airport, where they were segregated into a separate line and searched like criminals. Yet what had shocked her most were her sensations in the streets of Damascus, where she had walked freely, hand in hand with Hamid, wearing a T-shirt and jeans. She described the feel of the wind and the sun on her hair and her skin—it was always the same sensation that was so startling. It had been the same with me and would be so later with Yassi and Manna.

In the Damascus airport she had been humiliated by what she was assumed to be, and when she returned home, she felt angry because of what she could have been. She was angry for the years she had missed, for her lost portion of the sun and wind, for the walks she had not taken with Hamid. The thing about it, she had said with wonder, was that walking with him like that had suddenly transformed him into a stranger. This was a new context for their relationship; she had become a stranger even to herself. Was this the same Mitra, she asked herself, this woman in jeans and a tangerine T-shirt walking in the sun with a good-looking young man by her side? Who was this woman, and could she learn to incorporate her into her life if she were to live in Canada?