Azar Nafisi (9 page)

But Yassi would not give up. “Laugh, please, laugh,” she implored Mahshid. “Dr. Nafisi, please command her to laugh.” And Mahshid's attempt at laughter was drowned out by the others' less guarded hilarity.

There was a pause and a silence as I placed the tray of tea on the table. Nassrin suddenly said: “I know what it means to be caught between tradition and change. I've been in the middle of it all my life.”

She seated herself on the arm of Mahshid's chair, while Mahshid did her best to drink her tea and keep it from coming into collision with Nassrin, whose expressive hands, moving in all directions, came precariously close to knocking the teacup over several times.

“I know it firsthand,” Nassrin said. “My mother came from a wealthy, secular and modern family. She was the only daughter, had two brothers, both of whom had chosen a diplomatic career. My grandfather was very liberal and he wanted her to finish her education and go to college. He sent her to the American school.” “The American school?” echoed Sanaz, her hand lovingly playing with her hair. “Yes, in those days most girls didn't even finish high school, never mind going to the American school, and my mother could speak English and French.” Nassrin sounded rather pleased and proud of this fact.

“But then what did she do? She fell in love with my father, her tutor. She was terrible in math and science. It is ironic,” said Nassrin, again lifting her left hand dangerously close to Mahshid's cup. “They thought my father, coming from a religious background, would be safe with a young girl like my mother, and anyway, who would have thought that a modern young woman like her would be interested in a stern young man who seldom smiled, never looked her in the eyes, and whose sisters and mother all wore the chador? But she fell for him, perhaps because he was so different, perhaps because for her, wearing the chador and caring for him seemed more romantic than going to some college and becoming a lady doctor or whatever.

“She said she never regretted it, her marriage, but she always talked about her American school, her old high school friends, whom she never saw again after her marriage. And she taught me English. When I was a kid she used to teach me the ABCs and then she bought me English books. I never had trouble with English, thanks to her. Nor did my sister, who was much older than me, by nine years. Rather strange for a Muslim woman—I mean, she should have taught us Arabic, but she never learned the language. My sister married someone quote, unquote”—Nassrin made a large quotation mark with her hands—“'modern' and went to live in England. We only see them when they come home for vacations.”

The time for break was over, but Nassrin's story had drawn us in, and even Azin and Mahshid seemed to have come to a temporary truce. When Mahshid stretched her hand to pick a cream puff, Azin handed the dish over to her with a friendly smile, forcing a gracious thank-you.

“My mother remained faithful to my dad. She changed her whole life for him, and never really complained,” Nassrin continued. “His only concession was that he let her make us weird food, fancy French food my father would call it—all fancy food for him was French. Although we were brought up according to my dad's dictates, my mother's family and her past were always in the shadows, hinting at another way of life. It wasn't just that my mother could never get along with my father's family, who considered her uppity and an outsider. She's very lonely, my mother is. Sometimes I think I wish she would commit adultery or something.”

Mahshid looked up at her, startled, and Nassrin got up and laughed. “Well,” she said, “or something.”

Nassrin's story, and the confrontation between Azin and Mahshid, had changed our mood too much for us to return to our class discussion. We ended up making desultory conversation, mainly gossiping about our experiences at the university, until we broke up.

When the girls left that afternoon, they left behind the aura of their unsolved problems and dilemmas. I felt exhausted. I chose the only way I knew to cope with problems: I went to the refrigerator, scooped up the coffee ice cream, poured some cold coffee over it, looked for walnuts, discovered we had none left, went after almonds, crushed them with my teeth and sprinkled them over my concoction.

I knew that Azin's outrageousness was partly defensive, that it was her way of overcoming Mahshid's and Manna's defenses. Mahshid thought Azin was dismissive of her traditional background, her thick, dark scarves, her old-maidenish ways; she didn't know how effective her own contemptuous silences could be. Small and dainty, with her cameo brooches—she did actually wear cameo brooches—her small earrings, pale blue blouses buttoned up to the neck and her pale smiles, Mahshid was a formidable enemy. Did she and Manna know how their obstinate silences, their cold, immaculate disapproval, affected Azin, made her defenseless?

In one of their confrontations, during the break, I had heard Mahshid telling Azin, “Yes, you have your sexual experiences and your admirers. You are not an old maid like me. Yes, old maid—I don't have a rich husband and I don't drive a car, but still you have no right, no right to disrespect me.” When Azin complained, “But how? How was I disrespectful?”, Mahshid had turned around and left her there, with a smile like cold leftovers. No amount of talk and discussion on my part, both in class and with each of them in private, had helped matters between them. Their only concession had been to try and leave each other alone inside the class. Not very malleable, as Yassi might say.

16

Is this how it all started? Was it the day we were sitting at his dining room table, greedily biting into our forbidden ham-and-cheese sandwich and calling it a croque monsieur? At some point we must have caught the same expression of ravenous, unadulterated pleasure in each other's eyes, because we started to laugh simultaneously. I raised my glass of water to him and said, Who would have thought that such a simple meal would appear to us like a kingly feast? and he said, We must thank the Islamic Republic for making us rediscover and even covet all these things we took for granted: one could write a paper on the pleasure of eating a ham sandwich. And I said, Oh, the things we have to be thankful for! And that memorable day was the beginning of our detailing our long list of debts to the Islamic Republic: parties, eating ice cream in public, falling in love, holding hands, wearing lipstick, laughing in public and reading
Lolita
in Tehran.

We sometimes met on a corner of the wide, leafy boulevard leading to the mountains for our afternoon walks. I used to wonder what the Revolutionary Committee would think of these meetings. Would they suspect us of political conspiracy or of a lovers' rendezvous? It was encouraging in a strange way that they would perhaps never guess the real purpose of our encounters. Was not life exciting when every simple act acquired the complexity of a dangerous secret mission? We always had something to exchange—books, articles, tapes, boxes of chocolates he received from Switzerland—for chocolates were expensive, especially ones from Switzerland. He brought me videos of rare films, which my children and I, and later my students and I, would watch:
A Night at the Opera, Casablanca, The Pirate, Johnny Guitar.

My magician used to say he could tell a great deal about people from their photographs, especially the angle of their noses. After some hesitation, I brought him some photographs of my girls, anxiously awaiting his pronouncement. He would hold one in his hand, scrutinize it from different perspectives and issue a short statement.

I wanted him to read their writings and to look at their drawings, right there and then: I wanted to know what he thought. They are fine people, he said, looking at me with the ironic smile of an indulgent father. Fine? Fine people? I wanted him to say that they were geniuses, although I was glad to be assured of their fineness. Two of them, he thought, could make something of their writings. Shall I bring them to you? Will you meet with them? No, he was trying to get rid of people, not add to his acquaintances.

17

Cincinnatus C., the hero of
Invitation to a Beheading,
talks of a “rare kind of time . . . the pause, hiatus, when the heart is like a feather . . . part of my thoughts is always crowding around the invisible umbilical cord that joins this world to something—to what I shall not say yet.” Cincinnatus's release by his jailers depends on his discovery of this invisible cord deep inside himself that joins him to another world, so that he can finally escape the staged and fake world of his executioners. In his preface to
Bend Sinister,
Nabokov describes a similar link to another world, a puddle that appears to Krug, his fictional hero, at various points in the novel: “a rent in his world leading to another world of tenderness, brightness and beauty.”

I think in some ways our readings and discussions of the novels in that class became our moment of pause, our link to that other world of “tenderness, brightness and beauty.” Only eventually, we were compelled to return.

During the break one morning, while we were enjoying our coffee and pastries, Mitra began to tell us how she felt as she climbed up the stairs every Thursday morning. She said that step by step she could feel herself gradually leaving reality behind her, leaving the dark, dank cell she lived in to surface for a few hours into open air and sunshine. Then, when it was over, she returned to her cell. At the time, I felt this was a point against the class, as if it should somehow guarantee open air and sunshine beyond its confines. Mitra's confession led to a debate about how we needed this pause from real life, in order to return to it refreshed and ready to confront it. Yet Mitra's point stayed with me: what about after the pause? Whether we wished it or not, our lives outside that living room made their claims.

But it was the fairy-tale atmosphere Mitra had alluded to that made it possible for all eight of us to share confidences and to share so much of our secret life with one another. This aura of magical affinity made it possible for Mahshid and Manna to find a way to peacefully coexist with Azin for a few hours every Thursday morning. It allowed us to defy the repressive reality outside the room—not only that, but to avenge ourselves on those who controlled our lives. For those few precious hours we felt free to discuss our pains and our joys, our personal hang-ups and weaknesses; for that suspended time we abdicated our responsibilities to our parents, relatives and friends, and to the Islamic Republic. We articulated all that happened to us in our own words and saw ourselves, for once, in our own image.

Our discussion of
Madame Bovary
continued way past the hour. It had happened before, but this time no one wanted to leave. The description of the dining table, the wind in Emma's hair, the face she sees before she dies—these details kept us going for hours. Initially our class hours were from nine to twelve, but gradually they were prolonged into the afternoon. I suggested that day that we continue with our discussion and that everyone stay for lunch. I think this is how we established lunches.

I remember all we had in the refrigerator were eggs and tomatoes, and we made a tomato omelette. Two weeks later we had a feast. Each one of my girls had cooked something special—rice and lamb, potato salad, dolmeh, saffron rice and a big round cake. My family joined us, and we all gathered around the table, joking and laughing.
Madame Bovary
had done what years of teaching at the university had not: it created a shared intimacy.

During the years they came to my house, they knew my family, my kitchen, my bedroom, the way I dressed and walked and talked at home. I had never set foot in their houses, I never met the traumatized mother, the delinquent brother, the shy sister. I could never place or locate their private narrative within a context, a locality. Yet I had met all of them in the magical space of my living room. They came to my house in a disembodied state of suspension, bringing to my living room their secrets, their pains and their gifts.

Gradually my life and family became part of the landscape, moving in and out of the living room during the breaks. Tahereh Khanoom would sometimes join in and tell us stories about her part of town, as she liked to call it. One day my daughter, Negar, burst in crying. She was hysterical. Between tears she kept saying she couldn't cry
there;
she didn't want to cry in front of
them.
Manna went into the kitchen and came back with Tahereh Khanoom and a glass of water. I went to Negar, held her in my arms and tried to calm her. Gently I took off her navy scarf and robe; under that thick scarf her hair was damp with sweat. Unbuttoning her uniform, I asked her to tell us what had happened.

That day in the middle of her last class—science—the principal and the morality teacher had barged in and told the girls to put their hands on their desks. The entire class had been escorted out of the classroom, without any explanation, their schoolbags searched for weapons and contraband: tapes, novels, friendship bracelets. Their bodies were searched, their nails inspected. One student, a girl who had returned from the United States the previous year with her family, was taken to the principal's office: her nails were too long. There, the principal herself had cut the girl's nails, so close that she had drawn blood. Negar had seen her classmate after they were dismissed, in the school yard, waiting to go home, nursing the guilty finger. The morality teacher stood beside her, discouraging other students from approaching. For Negar, the fact that she couldn't even go near and console her friend was as bad as the whole trauma of the search. She kept saying, Mom, she just doesn't know about our rules and regulations; you know, she just came back from America—how do you think she feels when they force us to trample on the American flag and shout, Death to America? I hate myself, I hate myself, she repeated as I rocked her back and forth and wiped the mixture of sweat and tears from her soft skin.

This of course diverted the whole class. Everyone tried to distract Negar by joking and telling her stories of their own, how once Nassrin had been sent to the disciplinary committee to have her eyelashes checked. Her lashes were long, and she was suspected of using mascara. That's nothing, said Manna, next to what happened to my sister's friends at the Amir Kabir Polytechnic University. During lunch three of the girls were in the yard eating apples. They were reprimanded by the guards: they were biting their apples too seductively! After a while Negar was laughing with them, and she finally went with Tahereh Khanoom to have her lunch.