Azar Nafisi (26 page)

The signs coalesced in all sorts of small events, like the sudden phone calls from various universities, including the University of Tehran, asking me to teach. When I refused, they would always say, Well, how about one or two classes, just to get a feel for how things are right now? Many would try to convince me that things had changed, that people like me were in demand, the atmosphere had become more “relaxed.” I did teach a course or two at the Free Islamic University and the former National University, but I never accepted to return as a full-time faculty member.

By the mid-eighties a new brand of Islamists were gradually coming into being. They had begun to sense that all was not right with the direction their revolution was taking, and decided it was time to intercede. The lack of progress in the war with Iraq was taking its toll. Those who had been ardent revolutionaries at the start of the revolution—people now in their late teens and early twenties—and the younger generation, who were coming of age, were discovering the cynicism and corruption of the leaders who had taken power. The government also had discovered that it needed the cadre it had so casually expelled from the universities to meet the growing demands of the student body.

Some within the government and some former revolutionaries had finally realized that there was no way the Islamic regime could make us intellectuals vanish. In forcing us underground, it had also made us more appealing, more dangerous and, in a strange way, more powerful. It had made us scarce and, because of this, also in demand. So they decided to have us back, perhaps partly to be more certain of their control, and they started to contact people like me, who had once been branded as decadent and Westernized.

Mrs. Rezvan, an ambitious teacher in the Department of English at the Allameh Tabatabai University, was one of the intermediaries between the more progressive Islamic revolutionaries and the alienated secular intellectuals. Her husband had been a Muslim radical at the start of the revolution, and she had connections with the progressive revolutionaries and the secularists—with the insiders and outsiders; she was determined to use both to her advantage.

This Mrs. Rezvan seemed to have cropped up out of nowhere, bent on changing the course of my life through the sheer force of her will. I remember our first meeting well, partly because it was during one of those periods known in the history of the war as “the war of the cities.” Sporadically, the two sides carried out ferocious attacks for a sustained period on certain key cities, such as Tehran, Isfahan and Tabriz in Iran and Baghdad and Mosul in Iraq. Usually, the fighting relaxed for a time after that, until the next bombing attack, which could sometimes last as long as a year.

It was mid-morning in the winter of 1987. My daughter, who was now three, and my one-and-a-half-year-old son and I were alone at home. Tehran had been hit by two rocket attacks earlier that morning, and I was trying to divert my children's attention by playing a favorite song involving a rooster and a fox on a small tape recorder—I was encouraging my daughter to sing along. It sounds too much like a sentimental movie: brave mother, brave children. I did not feel brave at all; the seeming tranquillity was due to an anxiety so paralyzing that it translated itself into calm. After the attacks we went to the kitchen, and I made them lunch. We then moved to the hall, where we felt more secure, because there were fewer windows. I built for them houses of cards that they destroyed with a touch of their small hands.

Right after lunch, the phone rang. It was a friend who had been one of my graduate students the previous year. She wanted to know if I could come to her place on Wednesday night. Mrs. Rezvan, a colleague of hers, really wanted to meet me. She liked me, had read all of my articles. Anyway, my friend concluded, Mrs. Rezvan is a phenomenon in her own right: if she didn't exist, we would have to invent her. So could you come, please?

A few nights later, in the midst of another blackout, I set off to my friend's house. When I got there, it was already dark. As I entered the large hall, from the depth of darkness I could see, flickering in the light of a kerosene lamp, a short, stocky woman dressed in blue. Her physical appearance is perfectly clear and alive in my mind. I can see her plain face, the sharp nose, short neck and dark cropped hair. But none of this captures the woman who, at the height of our intimacy, after we had visited each other's houses, once our children had become almost friends and our husbands got to know each other, remained always Mrs. Rezvan. What I cannot describe is her energy, which seemed to be caged inside her body. She appeared to be in constant motion, pacing her small office, my living room, the halls of the university.

She always seemed determined: determined not only to do certain things herself, but to make others, whom she targeted carefully, perform specific tasks that she had outlined for them. I have seldom met anyone whose will was so physically imposing. It was not the plainness of her features but the determination, the will and the half-ironic tone of her voice that remained with you.

Sometimes she would come to my house unexpectedly, in such an anxious state that I would think some disaster had befallen her. Yet it would only be to inform me that it was my duty to participate in some meeting or another. She always framed these requests as matters of life and death. Some of these “duties” I am grateful for, like forcing me to meet with a handful of progressive religious journalists—who are now fashionably called the “reformists”—and to write for their journals. They were fascinated by Western literature and philosophy and I discovered, to my surprise, that there were many points on which we could agree.

It is such a privilege to meet you, she told me that evening, the first time we met. I want to become your student. She said this with a perfectly serious expression, without a trace of humor or irony. This threw me off balance so violently that I immediately disliked her; I became shy and could not respond.

That night she did most of the talking. She had read my articles; she knew about me from certain friends and students. No, she was not trying to flatter me; she really wanted to learn. At any rate, I must teach at their university, the only liberal university in Iran, which still had some of the best minds. The head of the department, you will like him, not a man of literature, but a serious scholar. The state of literature in this country could not be any worse, and the state of English literature is most hopeless of all. We, those of us who care, must do something about this; we should leave our differences aside and work together.

After our first meeting, she pressured me through various intermediaries to accept her offer to teach at Allameh Tabatabai University on a regular basis. She called me incessantly, evoking God, students, my duty to the homeland, to literature: it was my task in life to teach at that university. She made promises; she promised to talk to the president of the university, to whomever I wished her to talk to.

I told her I did not want to wear the veil in the classroom. Did I not wear the veil, she asked, whenever I went out? Did I not wear it in the grocery store and walking down the street? It seemed I constantly had to remind people that the university was not a grocery store. What is more important, she countered, the veil or the thousands of young people eager to learn? What about the freedom to teach what I wanted? What about it? she asked conspiratorially. Haven't they banned any discussion of relations between men and women, drinking, politics, religion—what is there left to talk about? For you, she said, they would make an exception. Anyway, things are much freer now. They have all had a taste of good things; they want to get there too. Why not teach them James or Fielding or whoever—why not?

9

The meeting with Mrs. Rezvan had thrown me off balance. She was like an intermediary pleading on behalf of an unfaithful and unforgotten lover, pledging complete loyalty in return for my affections. Bijan thought I should return; he felt that is what I really wanted to do, if only I would admit it to myself. Most of my friends merely confused me by posing the dilemma back to me: is it better to help the young people who might otherwise not have a chance to learn or to refuse categorically to comply with this regime? Both sides were absolute in their position: some thought I would be a traitor if I neglected the young and left them to the teachings of the corrupt ideologies; others insisted I would be betraying everything I stood for if I worked for a regime responsible for ruining the lives of so many of our colleagues and students. Both were right.

I called the magician one morning in panicked confusion. Another urgent meeting was set up, for late afternoon in a favorite coffee shop. It was a tiny place, a bar in its pre-revolution days, now reincarnated as a café. It belonged to an Armenian, and forever shall I see on the glass door next to the name of the restaurant, which was in small letters, the compulsory sign in large black letters:
RELIGIOUS MINORITY.
All restaurants run by non-Muslims had to carry this sign on their doors so that good Muslims, who considered all non-Muslims dirty and did not eat from the same dishes, would be forewarned.

The space inside was narrow and shaped like a wide curve, with seven or eight stools on one side of the bar and, on the other, next to the wall-length mirror, another set of stools. When I went in, he was already seated at the far end of the bar. He got up and with an imperceptible mock curtsy, bent down, saying, Here I am, your servant at your service, m'lady, as he drew a stool for me to sit.

We ordered and I said breathlessly, This is an emergency. So I gathered. I have been asked to teach again. Is this new? he asked. No, but this time I'm wavering; I don't know what to do. Then somehow I managed to divert my own emergency meeting into a discussion of the book I was immersed in at the moment, Dashiell Hammett's
The Continental Op,
and Steve Marcus's marvelous essay on Hammett in which he cited a line from Nietzsche that struck me as pertinent to our situation. “Whoever fights monsters,” Nietzsche had said, “should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. And when you look long into an abyss, the abyss also looks into you.” I had an amazing talent for subverting my own agendas, and we got so involved in our discussion that I completely forgot about the real purpose of the visit.

Suddenly, he said, Aren't you going to be late? I should have known how late it was by the changing colors of the window and the pale, withdrawing light. I went to telephone Bijan and shamefacedly informed him that I would be late. When I got back my magician was paying the bill. But we haven't finished yet, I feebly protested. We still need to discuss the main business we came here for. I thought all we had been discussing was the main business—your rediscovery of your love for Mr. Hammett and Co. You're lucky I've given up on life and am not trying to seduce you. All I would have to do is to let you go on about Hammett and the shameful disrespect for the detective story in Iran and other matters that apparently turn you on. No, I said with some embarrassment—I mean, about my teaching again. Oh that, he said dismissively. Well, obviously you must teach.

But I was not one to let go that easily. I was in love with the idea of moral imperatives and taking a stand and all that. So I relentlessly pursued my argument about the morality of returning to a job I had sworn I would never take up again so long as I was forced to wear the veil. He raised an eyebrow with an indulgent smile: Lady, he said at last, will you
please
wise up to where you live? As for your qualms about submitting to the regime, none of us can drink a single glass of water without the grace of the moral guardians of the Islamic Republic. You love the work, so go on, indulge yourself and accept the facts. We intellectuals, more than ordinary citizens, either play scrupulously into their hands and call it constructive dialogue or withdraw from life completely in the name of fighting the regime. So many people have made their name through their opposition to the regime, yet they too can't get along without it. You don't want to take up arms against the regime, do you?

No, I conceded, but I don't want to make deals with them, either. Anyway, how can
you
give me such advice? I asked him. Look at you. What about me? Didn't you refuse to teach, to write, to do anything under this regime? Aren't you saying through your actions that we should all withdraw? No, I am not saying that. You are still making the mistake of using me as a model. I am not a model. In many ways I might even be called a coward. I don't belong to their club, but I am also paying a big price. I don't lose, and I don't win. In fact, I don't exist. You see, I have withdrawn not just from the Islamic Republic but from life as such, but
you
can't do that—you have no desire to do that.

I tried to turn the tables, and reminded him that he had become a sort of role model for his friends and even for his foes. He disagreed. No, the reason I am so popular is that I give others back what they need to find in themselves. You need me not because I tell you what I want you to do but because I articulate and justify what you want to do. That is why you like me—a man without qualities. That's what yours truly is all about. What about what you want? I asked. I've given that up, but I make it possible for you to do what you want. But you are going to pay the price, he told me. Remember that quote you read me about the abyss? It is impossible not to be touched by the abyss. I know how you want to have your cake and eat it too, I know all about that innocence, that Alice in Wonderland persona you want to preserve.

You love teaching. All of us, including me, we're all substitutes for your teaching. You enjoy it, so why not go ahead and teach? Teach them your Hammetts and your Austens—go on, enjoy yourself. Well, we are not talking about pleasure here, I shot back righteously. But of course, he mocked me, the lady who constantly boasts about her love for Nabokov and Hammett is now telling me we should not do what we love! That is what I call immoral. So now you
too
have joined the crowd, he said more seriously—what you've absorbed from this culture is that anything that gives pleasure is bad, and is immoral. You are more moral by sitting at home and twiddling your thumbs. If you want me to tell you it's your duty to teach, you've come to the wrong person. I won't do it. I say teach because you enjoy teaching: you will nag less at home, you will be a better person and probably your students will also have fun and maybe even learn something.