Azar Nafisi (27 page)

When we were in the taxi on our way home, he turned to me again and broke the silence that had descended between us. Seriously, he said, go back and teach. It isn't forever. You can always get out if you want. Make your deals, but go only as far as you can without compromising the fundamentals. And don't worry about what we, your colleagues and friends, might say behind your back. We'll talk behind your back no matter what you do. If you returned, we'd say, She's caved in; if you didn't, we'd say, She's scared of taking up the challenge. So I did what he advised, and they did talk behind my back just as they saw fit.

10

Less than a week after our emergency session, Mrs. Rezvan called me at home. She wanted me to meet with the head of the department, a nice man. You'll see things are different now, she insisted. They have become more liberal; they realize the value of good academics. What she forgot to mention was that “they” wanted the impossible: good academics who would preach their ideals and conform to their demands. She was right, however, about the head of the department. He was a first-rate linguist, a graduate of one of the best universities in the U.S. He was religious, but not ideological and not a sycophant. And, unlike most, he was genuinely interested in academic standards.

After that first meeting with the head of the department came a less pleasant meeting with the pious and less flexible dean of the faculty. After the usual preliminaries, he took on a serious expression, as if to say, Enough about such trivial matters as philosophy and literature—now let's get down to the basics. He began by expressing some concern about my “background,” especially my defiance of the veil. I told him that this was now the law of the land, that I could no longer appear anywhere in public without the veil and that therefore I would wear it. But I would not compromise on my classes: I would teach what I wanted to teach as I saw fit to teach it. He was surprised, but decided to accede, at least in principle, to my requirement for freedom.

All during the meeting, as befitted a truly Muslim man, he did not look me in the eyes. Most of the time he kept his head down like a shy eighteen-year-old. He focused on the design of the carpet, or targeted the wall. Sometimes he would play with his pen, looking at it intently, reminding me of my last meeting with Mr. Bahri. I had by now become something of an expert in the manners of pious men. They showed their opinion of you by the manner in which they avoided looking at you. Some made an aggressive point of averting their gaze. Once, a high functionary for whose organization I had prepared an evaluation report at the request of a male colleague, pointedly looked the other way throughout the thirty minutes of my report, and later addressed his points and questions to my male colleague, who I felt was literally sweating with shame. After a while I decided to address myself also solely to my colleague, refusing to acknowledge the high personage's presence—and foolishly, I refused the money the organization paid me for my pains.

But this dean seemed to avert his gaze out of genuine modesty and piety; I did not particularly appreciate his manner, but I could not feel hostile towards him. Had we not lived in the Islamic Republic, I might have shown some sense of humor about our awkward situation, for it was obvious that it was more embarrassing and painful to him than it was to me; and it was clear that he was curious and eager to discuss with me matters of which he knew little, like English literature, and just as eager to show off his knowledge of Plato and Aristotle.

When Mrs. Rezvan heard a report of our conversation she told me with a laugh that I was not the only one afraid of being “compromised.” The university officials were also worried about me. In asking me to join the faculty, they had taken certain risks.

The next thing I knew, I was preparing for my first class. In my first semester I was loaded with three undergraduate introductory courses, ranging from introduction to the novel to drama and criticism, and two graduate courses, one on eighteenth-century fiction and the other a survey of literary criticism. My undergraduate classes each had between thirty and forty students, and the graduate seminars were crowded, some of them with more than thirty students. When I complained about the workload, I was reminded of the fact that some of the faculty taught over twenty hours a week. For the administrators, the quality of the work was of little consequence. They called my expectations unrealistic and idealistic. I called their indifference criminal.

As it turned out, neither one of us kept our promises. I always wore my veil improperly, and that became their prime excuse for constantly harassing me. And they never gave up on trying to force me to teach and act more acceptably. But for a long time we lived under a sort of truce. Mrs. Rezvan became a buffer between the administration and me, trying to smooth things over like a mediator in a bad marriage. Like all mediators, she did not forget her own advantages—persuading people like me into more active participation gave her leverage with the university officials—and for as long as she remained at the university, for better and for worse, the marriage somehow lasted.

She would tell me in that ironic tone of hers how we should mount a united front to save literature from the clutches of ignoramuses in the faculty who had no knowledge of literature. Did you know that the woman who taught the twentieth-century novel before you assigned only Steinbeck's
The Pearl
and one Persian novel? Or that a professor at Alzahrah University thought that
Great Expectations
was written by Joseph Conrad?

11

“Attention, attention! The siren you hear is the danger signal. Red alert! Leave at once and repair to your shelters!” I wonder at what point in my life, and after how many years, the echo of the red siren—like a screeching violin that plays mercilessly all over one's body—would cease in my mind. I cannot separate the eight years of war from that shrill voice that several times a day, at the most unexpected hours, would intrude into our lives. Three levels of danger had been established, but I never managed to differentiate between the red (danger), yellow (possibility of danger) and white (danger has stopped) sirens. Somehow, in the sound of the white siren, menace still lurked. Usually the red siren sounded too late, after the bomb had already been dropped, and in any case, even at the university we had no real shelters to repair to.

The air raids over Tehran were memorable for so many different reasons, not least for the sudden friendships and intimacies they inspired. Acquaintances who came to dinner would have no choice but to stay the night, sometimes over a dozen of them, and by morning it was as if they had known you all their lives. And those sleepless nights! In our house I was the one who slept least. I wanted to sleep close to my children so that if anything happened, it would happen to all of us. My husband slept or tried to sleep through the raids, but I would take two pillows, a few candles and my book to a small hall that separated the children's bedroom from ours and station myself by their doorway. I seemed to think that somehow, by keeping awake, I might throw a jinx and divert the bomb from harming our house.

One night I awoke suddenly at three or four in the morning and discovered that the house was in complete darkness. I knew at once there had been another blackout, because the small light in the hall was out. I looked out the window and saw that the streetlights were also gone. I turned on the flashlight; it cut a small circle of light from the darkness around me. A few minutes later I was ready with my pillows up against the wall, two lit candles and my book. I heard a sudden explosion. My heart heaved up and down and my hand went involuntarily to my stomach, just as it had during similar raids when I was pregnant. My eyes pretended nothing had happened, and rested on a page of
Daisy Miller.

It was during this time that, while reading certain writers, I unconsciously took up pencil and paper again. I had never wholly given up my pleasurable undergraduate habit of underlining passages and taking notes. Most of my notes on
Pride and Prejudice, Washington Square, Wuthering Heights, Madame Bovary
and
Tom Jones
were made on these sleepless nights, when oddly enough my concentration was high, fueled perhaps by the effort to ignore the all-engrossing threat of bombs and rockets.

I had just begun
Daisy Miller
and was reading about that Europeanized young American, Winterbourne, who meets in Switzerland the enchanting and enigmatic Miss Daisy Miller. Winterbourne is fascinated by this beautiful—to some, shallow and vulgar; to others, innocent and fresh—young American woman, but he cannot decide if she is a “flirt” or a “nice” girl. The plot centers on Winterbourne's vacillations between Daisy, with her defiance of the rules of nicety, and his aristocratic aunt and her community of snobbish Americans, who decide to ignore her. The scene I was reading takes place after Daisy asks Winterbourne to introduce her to his aunt. Winterbourne tries to inform her, as delicately as he can, that his aunt will not see her. “Miss Daisy Miller stopped, and stood looking at him. Her prettiness was still visible in the darkness; she was opening and closing her enormous fan. ‘She doesn't want to know me!' she said suddenly. ‘Why don't you say so?' ”

I heard the sound of another explosion. I felt thirsty, but could not make myself get up and get a drink. Then two more explosions. I read on, my eyes sometimes drifting from the book to the darkened hall. I am afraid of the dark, but the war and its explosions had made that fear insignificant. And in a scene I will always remember—not only because of that night—Daisy tells Winterbourne: “ ‘You needn't be afraid. I am not afraid!' And she gave a little laugh. Winterbourne fancied there was a tremor in her voice; he was touched, shocked, mortified by it. ‘My dear young lady,' he protested, ‘she knows no one. It's her wretched health.' The young girl walked on a few steps, laughing still. ‘You needn't be afraid,' she repeated.”

There is so much courage in that sentence, and irony in the fact that what Winterbourne was afraid of was not his aunt but Miss Daisy Miller's charms. For a moment I believe I really was diverted from the explosions, and I did manage to draw a line around the words
You needn't be afraid.

As I continued to read, three things happened almost simultaneously. My daughter called me from her room, the phone rang and I heard a knock at the hall door. I picked up one candle and moved towards the phone, telling Negar I would be with her in a second. At that moment, the hall door opened and my mother, holding a candle, entered, saying, Are you okay? Don't be afraid! Almost every night after the explosions, my mother came in with her candle; her action had taken on the form of a ritual. She went to my daughter's room and I answered the phone. It was a friend; she also wanted to know if we were okay. It sounded to them as if the explosions had come from our part of the city. This had also become a ritual, to call friends and family to make sure they were safe, knowing that your own relief implied someone else's death.

During these nights of interchanging red and white sirens, I unconsciously mapped out my future career. Throughout these endless nights of reading I concentrated only on fiction, and when I started to teach again, I found I had already prepared my two courses on the novel. Over the next decade and a half, more than anything else, I thought, wrote about and taught fiction. These readings made me curious about the origins of the novel and what I came to understand as its basically democratic structure. And I became curious as to why the realistic novel was never truly successful in our country. If a sound can be preserved in the same manner as a leaf or a butterfly, I would say that within the pages of my
Pride and Prejudice,
that most polyphonic of all novels, and my
Daisy Miller
is hidden like an autumn leaf the sound of the red siren.

12

There were the sirens and the mechanical voice that commanded you to attention, the sandbags in the streets and bombs usually early in the morning or after midnight; there were long or short periods of calm in between the bombings and their resumption, and there were Austen and James and the different classrooms on the fourth floor of the building that housed the Faculty of Persian and Foreign Languages and Literature. Two rows of classrooms were situated on either side of the long and narrow hall. On one side they opened to a view of the not so distant mountains, and on the other to the rather sad and lovely garden, always a little neglected, with a small ornamental pool and a chipped statue in the middle. Around the pool were circles and squares of shrubs and flowers, surrounded by trees. The flowers appeared to have grown randomly: beautiful roses, large dahlias and daffodils. Always it seemed to me that the garden belonged not to the university but to the pages of a Hawthorne novel.

I developed a ritual in preparation for my public appearance. I was careful not to wear any makeup. The contours and lines of my body would disappear as I slipped on my T-shirt and baggy black trousers, a comfortable half-size too big for me, and over them my long black robe and the black scarf that coiled around my neck. Last, I put my books and notes in my bag. I would stuff my bag with far too many books and notes, most of them unnecessary, but I took them with me anyway, like a safety net.

Somehow the distance between my home and the university has become hazy in my memory. Suddenly and magically, without passing the green gate and the guard, without passing the glass entrance door to the building with signs denouncing Western culture, I am inside the Faculty of Persian and Foreign Languages and Literature, standing at the bottom of the stairs.

As I walk up the stairs, I try to ignore the posters and notices pasted haphazardly on the walls. They are mainly black-and-white photographs of the war with Iraq, and slogans denouncing the Great Satan, namely America, and the emissaries of that Satan. Quotations from Ayatollah Khomeini
—WHETHER WE KILL OR ARE KILLED WE SHALL BE VICTORIOUS! OUR UNIVERSITIES MUST BE ISLAMIZED! THIS WAR HAS BEEN A DIVINE BLESSING FOR US!—
accompany the pictures.