Azar Nafisi (42 page)

“Over here we have an identity,” she said doubtfully. “We can make something of our lives. Over there, life is unknown.”

“The ordeal of freedom,” Nassrin said elliptically, echoing my favorite line from Bellow.

Only Mahshid was silent. She, I knew, was more confident than the rest about what she wanted. She didn't want to marry. Despite all her traditional beliefs and moral imperatives, Mahshid was less of a marrying type than Sanaz. She disapproved of the regime, but her problems were more practical than existential. Long disappointed about the prospects of marrying her ideal man, and utterly without illusions about her ability to survive abroad, she had set her whole heart and mind on her work. At the moment, her problem was how to surmount the stupidity and ignorance of her bosses, who rewarded her exceptional work with something akin to envy and held her political past over her head like a sword.

I worried about Mahshid and the solitary path she had chosen for herself. And about Yassi and her irrepressible fantasies about that never-never land where her uncles lived. I worried about Sanaz and her broken heart and about Nassrin and her memories and about Azin. I worried about them all, but I worried most about Manna. She had one of these honest, demanding intelligences that is hardest on itself. Everything in her present situation offended her, from the fact that she and her husband were still financially dependent on her family to the mediocre state of intellectuals and the everyday cruelties of the Islamic regime. Nima, sharing the same feelings and desires, reinforced her imposed isolation. Yet unlike Yassi, Manna obstinately refused to do anything about her situation. She seemed to take an almost gleeful satisfaction from the knowledge that her powers were going to waste. She, like my magician, was determined to be harder on herself than on the world around her. They both blamed themselves for the fact that such inferior people had control of their lives.

“How is it that we keep coming back to marriage,” Mitra said, “when we're supposed to be here to talk about books?”

“What we need,” I said with a laugh, “is for Mr. Nahvi to remind us how trivial we are to read Austen and talk about marriage.” Mr. Nahvi, with his dusty suit, buttoned-up shirt, layered hair and squishy eyes was every once in a while resurrected as an easy target of our jokes. He earned my eternal contempt the day he announced that the protagonist in Gorky's
Mother
was a far finer specimen of womanhood than all the flighty young ladies in Jane Austen's novels.

9

Olga was silent.

“Ah,” cried Vladimir, “Why can't you love me as I love you.”

“I love my country,” she said.

“So do I,” he exclaimed.

“And there is something I love even more strongly,” Olga continued, disengaging herself from the young man's embrace.

“And that is?” he queried.

Olga let her limpid blue eyes rest on him, and answered quickly: “It is the Party.”

Every great book we read became a challenge to the ruling ideology. It became a potential threat and menace not so much because of what it said but how it said it, the attitude it took towards life and fiction. Nowhere was this challenge more apparent than in the case of Jane Austen.

I had spent a great deal of time in my classes at Allameh contrasting Flaubert, Austen and James to the ideological works like Gorky's
Mother,
Sholokhov's
And Quiet Flows the Don
and some of the so-called realistic fiction coming out of Iran. The above passage, quoted by Nabokov in his
Lectures on Russian Literature,
caused a great deal of mirth in one of my classes at Allameh. What happens, I asked my students, when we deny our characters the smallest speck of individuality? Who is more realized in her humanity, Emma Bovary or Olga of the limpid blue eyes?

One day after class, Mr. Nahvi followed me to my office. He tried to tell me that Austen was not only anti-Islamic but that she was guilty of another sin: she was a colonial writer. I was surprised to hear this from the mouth of someone who until then had mainly quoted and misquoted the Koran. He told me that
Mansfield Park
was a book that condoned slavery, that even in the West they had now seen the error of their ways. What confounded me was that I was almost certain Mr. Nahvi had not read
Mansfield Park.

It was only later, on a trip to the States, that I found out where Mr. Nahvi was getting his ideas from when I bought a copy of Edward Said's
Culture and Imperialism.
It was ironic that a Muslim fundamentalist should quote Said against Austen. It was just as ironic that the most reactionary elements in Iran had come to identify with and co-opt the work and theories of those considered revolutionary in the West.

Mr. Nahvi kept following me to my office and spouting these pearls of wisdom. He seldom brought them up in class; there, he usually kept silent, preserving a placid and detached expression, as if he had agreed to remain in class as a favor to us. Mr. Nahvi was one of the few students in whom I was unable to find a single redeeming quality. I could say, like Eliza Bennet, that he was not a sensible man. One day, after a really exhausting argument, I told him, Mr. Nahvi, I want to remind you of something: I am not comparing you to Elizabeth Bennet. There is nothing of her in you, to be sure—you are as different as man and mouse. But remember how she is obsessed with Darcy, constantly trying to find fault with him, almost cross-examining every new acquaintance to confirm that he is as bad as she thinks? Remember her relations with Wickham? How the basis for her sympathy is not so much her feelings for him as his antipathy for Darcy? Look at how you speak about what you call the West. You can never talk about it without giving it an adjective or an attribute
—decadent, vile, corrupt, imperial.
Beware of what happened to Elizabeth!

I still remember the look on his face as I said this and, for once, used my privilege as his teacher to have the last word.

Mr. Nahvi exercised a great deal of influence in our university, and he once reported Nassrin to the disciplinary committee. His eagle eyes had detected her running up the stairs one day when she was late for a class. Nassrin at first refused to sign a retraction stating that she would promise never again to run on the university premises, even when she was late for class. She had finally conceded, persuaded by Mrs. Rezvan, who had reasoned with her that her obstinate resistance was not worth expulsion from the university.

During our reminiscences about Mr. Nahvi, I noticed Mitra and Sanaz whispering and giggling. When I asked them to share with us the source of their mirth, Sanaz encouraged a blushing Mitra to tell her story. She confessed that among their friends, they called Mr. Nahvi the Mr. Collins of Tabatabai University, after Jane Austen's pompous clergyman.

One evening after class, Mr. Nahvi had suddenly appeared in front of Mitra. He had not seemed his usual . . . “Redoubtable self?” the incorrigible Yassi suggested. No, not exactly. “Pontificating? Pompous? Ponderous?” Yassi continued, unabashed. No. Anyway, Mr. Nahvi did not seem himself. His arrogance had given way to extreme nervousness as he handed Mitra an envelope. Sanaz nudged Mitra to describe the envelope. It was a hideous blue, she said. And it reeked. It reeked? Yes, it smelled of cheap perfume, of rosewater.

Inside the envelope, Mitra had found a one-page letter, with the same dreadful color and smell, written in immaculate handwriting, in black ink. “Tell ‘em how he started the letter,” Sanaz encouraged Mitra.

“Well, he, he actually began by writing . . .” Mitra trailed off, as if lost for words.

“
My golden daffodil!
” shouted Sanaz, bursting into laughter.

Really? Golden daffodil? Yes, and he had gone on to express his undying love for Mitra, whose every move and every word were ingrained in his heart and mind. Nothing—no power—had ever done to him what her smile, which he hoped was for him and him alone, could do. And so on and so forth.

What had Mitra done? we all wanted to know. All this had taken place in the middle of Mitra and Hamid's highly secretive courtship, Sanaz reminded us. The next day, when Mr. Nahvi happened to jump out of nowhere and waylay her in the street, she tried to explain to him how impossible it was for her to return his affections. He nodded philosophically and went away, only to reappear two days later. She had parked in an alley near the university and was in the process of opening the door to her small car when she became aware of a presence right behind her. “Like the shadow of Death,” Nassrin ominously interjected. Well, she had turned to find Mr. Nahvi, wavy hair, squished eyes, ears jutting out—he had a book in his hands, a book of poems by e. e. cummings. And the blue of another envelope could be detected from between its pages. Before Mitra had time to protest, he thrust the book into her hands and disappeared.

“Tell Dr. Nafisi what he wrote,” prompted Sanaz. “She'd love to know that her classes were of some use to Mr. Nahvi.” Inside he had written,
To my bashful rose.
And what else? And, well, he reproduced a poem that you used to teach in your introduction to literature class:

somewhere i have never travelled,gladly beyond
any experience,your eyes have their silence:
in your most frail gesture are things which enclose me,
or which i cannot touch because they are too near

your slightest look easily will unclose me
though i have closed myself as fingers,
you open always petal by petal myself as Spring opens
(touching skilfully,mysteriously) her first rose

or if your wish be to close me,i and
my life will shut very beautifully,suddenly,
as when the heart of this flower imagines
the snow carefully everywhere descending;

nothing which we are to perceive in this world equals
the power of your intense fragility:whose texture
compels me with the colour of its countries,
rendering death and forever with each breathing

(i do not know what it is about you that closes
and opens;only something in me understands
the voice of your eyes is deeper than all roses)
nobody,not even the rain,has such small hands

It's enough to put you off teaching poetry, I said, infected by their girlish mood.

“From now on, you should only teach morbid poems like
Childe Harold
or ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,' ” suggested Mahshid.

This time, Mitra felt she had to resort to more drastic measures before things got out of hand. After several consultations with her friends, she reached the conclusion that a plain outright
no
would be dangerous to deliver to someone as influential as Mr. Nahvi. Best to tell him a convincing lie that would put him in an impossible position.

By the time they next crossed paths, Mitra had plucked up the courage to stop Mr. Nahvi. Blushing and stammering, she told him that she had been too bashful to reveal the real reason for her rejection: she was engaged to be married to a distant relative. His family was influential and very traditional, and she was scared of what they would resort to if they found out about Mr. Nahvi's outpourings. The young man paused for a fraction of a second, as if rooted to the ground, and then turned away without a word, leaving Mitra, still slightly trembling, in the middle of the wide street.

10

The last New Year Mrs. Rezvan was in Tehran, she bought me three small clips. They were hair clips that many women used to keep their head scarves in place. I never learned to wear my scarf properly, and it had become a ritual between us that before talks or lectures she would check and make sure that it was more or less in place. She said, My dear Mrs. Nafisi, I'm sorry that this is what you will remember me by, but I do worry about you. Will you promise me you will wear these when I am gone? I want to see you here when I return.

Mrs. Rezvan was preparing to go to Canada. She had finally, after years of toil, managed to get her coveted scholarship to pursue her Ph.D. For years she had dreamed of this, but now she was too anxious to enjoy the moment. She constantly fretted about whether she would succeed, whether she was up to the task. I was happy that she was leaving, both for her sake and for my own. It came almost as a relief.

I felt at the time that she was overly ambitious, and that she used me and people like me to get where she wanted to go. Later I discovered there was more to the story. Hers was not a mere ambition to go places, to become president of the faculty, although she had that in mind too. She yearned to become a literary personage: her love of literature was real, yet her talents were limited and her ambition for power and control sometimes surpassed and even came to clash with that love. She managed to evoke such contradictory feelings in me. I felt she was always on the verge of telling me something important about herself, something that would reveal her to me. Perhaps I should have been more curious. Perhaps if I had been less wrapped up in her intrusions and demands, I would have noticed more.

In the late summer of 1990, for the first time in eleven years, my family and I left for Cyprus for a vacation and to meet up with my sisters-in-law, who had never seen our children. For years I was not allowed to leave the country, and when they finally did give me permission to leave, I felt paralyzed and could not make myself apply for a passport. If it were not for Bijan's patience and persistence, I never would have followed through. But I got my passport in the end, and we did really leave, without any misadventures. We stayed with a friend, one of Mrs. Rezvan's former students. She said Mrs. Rezvan used to ask her about me, my work and my family.

Later, after we had returned home, my friend informed me that the day we left, probably on the same plane aboard which we had flown to Tehran, Mrs. Rezvan had come to Cyprus on vacation. She was alone. She called my friend inquiring after me and was told that I was gone. My friend told me Mrs. Rezvan wanted her to take her to the same places we had visited together during my stay. She asked what I had done there, where I had gone. One day, they went to the beach where we had gone swimming.