Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books

by Azar Nafisi

  I got up and started pacing around the room. You sit down, he said, pointing to a spot on the couch beside him. Sit here and be quiet. Don’t fidget—that’s a good girl. I said, Before you start up again, let me make a phone call. I rang up Bijan and told him to go to the party without me, I would join him later. When I returned, I heard Reza saying, It’s amazing, this obsession with taking possession not just of the living but also of the dead. At the start of the revolution, the revolutionary prosecutor bulldozed Reza Shah’s grave, destroying the monument and creating a public toilet in its place—which he inaugurated by pissing in it. I interrupted their conversation and asked if they wanted coffee. I brought out three mismatched mugs and set them on the table with a pot of boiling water and some instant coffee. He got up, went to the refrigerator and brought us a box of chocolates; always the perfect gentleman.

  So the Kid had borrowed a car from a friend and was standing there with his sniffling aunt. He couldn’t imagine leaving him with the aunt to take care of the corpse and decided to go with them, despite the Kid’s strong protestations. He had thought of me and called my house, but there was no answer. No, he had not thought of calling Reza or any other friend. He had gotten into the car with the Kid.

  They drove to the back of the hospital, and there, the corpse, already wrapped in a white shroud, was given to them. They each took hold of one end and put the corpse in the trunk of the car. They then proceeded to drive to a garden he had heard of outside Tehran for the burial. They worried they might be stopped—what would they tell the militia? How would they prevent them from opening the trunk? The Kid worried about the car. After all, it belonged to his friend and he didn’t want to drag innocent people into this. Innocent people! my magician cried out. Can you imagine feeling guilty about trying to bury your grandmother, to give her any kind of burial, never mind a decent one?

  I wanted to touch him, but the experience had put him outside of our reach: he was still there in that car, driving towards the garden. There were many such instances, when expressions of sympathy could not be exchanged. What do you say to someone who is telling you about the rape and murder of virgins—I’m sorry, I feel your pain? My magician and Nassrin were of the type who did not want sympathy; they expected us to understand and to tailor our empathy to the shape of their grief. Of course, with him it was worse: he felt guilt and anger.

  They drove down the same highway they had taken so many times, towards the Caspian Sea. The land, the trees, the mountains, slipped by and the aunt did not say a word; she just sat in the back, and from time to time they heard her sniffles and snorts. The men could not talk about anything real; they made halfhearted small talk about last year’s Oscars.

  The garden looked like any other garden; behind the mud-brick walls, he could see the tall trees inside. They honked. An old man opened the gate and they were led inside. They were shown a few plots with headstones; two freshly dug plots were ready. Families of the dead had to perform the final ritual of washing the corpse and putting it in the shroud. The Kid and his aunt went into a small building, and my magician sat there holding a small bouquet of daffodils and narcissus he had bought along the way. The rest went by quickly, like a dream: placing the body in the ground, throwing earth over it, standing by the freshly dug grave for a few moments and leaving the flowers behind. The Kid paid the old man. They got back into the car and drove straight to his apartment, and now here I am, at your service. Looking at me, a sudden kindness blossomed in his eyes. And I apologize, he said. How thoughtless of me not to have thought of what you would feel.

  We sat there for a little while longer. If we talked, I don’t remember. Then I got up and said, Could you call me a taxi please, and he did. When the doorbell rang, it took me a while to put on my robe and then the scarf and to find my bag and say good-bye. We had not talked about the object of my visit—it all seemed rather pointless. Of course, there would be tomorrow and I would call again and arrange another visit and we would talk. For now, I kissed both of them on the cheek, thanked Reza and hurried down the stairs to the waiting car.

  28

  Two nights before the announcement of the first cease-fire in the war of cities, a few friends came over to watch John Ford’s Mogambo. Mr. Forsati by now was in the habit of bringing me videos. One day, out of the blue, he followed me to my office, carrying a small parcel in his hands. It turned out to be a video of Big. From then on, he brought me films, mostly second- or third-rate American releases. It was said that the Islamists procured them from the sailors on duty in the Gulf, who were allowed to watch forbidden films, and smuggled them onshore. After a while, I began to make requests. I asked for classics, like Jules and Jim and Modern Times, or films by Howard Hawks, John Ford, Buñuel or Fellini. These names were new to him, and at first it was more difficult for him to find them, perhaps because they were of little interest to sailors. One day he brought me Mogambo. He said it was a gift. He never thought he’d fall in love with an old film, but there it was: he had, and he had a hunch I’d like it.

  That night there was a blackout for several hours, obliterating the whole city. We sat by candlelight and talked and drank Vishnovka, a homemade cherry vodka, a few fairly distant explosions interrupting the otherwise calm flow of conversation. The next night it was announced that Iraq would accept a cease-fire if it could fire the last missile. It was like a game played between two children—what mattered most was who would get the last word.

  The cease-fire lasted only two days. Many people, believing it would hold, had returned to Tehran. The shops were open late and the streets were overcrowded with people catching up on their New Year’s shopping. A few hours before the cease-fire was broken, I made a bet with a friend about how long it would last. These wagers had become a regular habit. We would bet on when, where and how many missiles would hit the city. It helped reduce the tension, however lugubrious some of our victories may have seemed.

  The attacks were resumed on Monday at 10:30 P.M. By early Tuesday morning, six missiles had hit Tehran. Many who had just arrived back began almost immediately to leave again. The sudden hush that fell over the city was intermittently broken by military marches blasting out into the streets from mosques, government offices, Revolutionary Committee buildings and private houses. They were interrupted by “important announcements” about missile attacks on Baghdad and new victories over the “imperialist-Zionist enemy.” We were to rejoice over these victories of “light over darkness” and console ourselves with the thought that the Iraqis were suffering the same fate.

  29

  The universities were closed down before the Iranian New Year on March 21, 1988, and remained closed until the cease-fire. People were tired and seemed not to care about the government’s edicts anymore. Weddings and parties went on, heedless of the militia and the Revolutionary Guards. The black-clad men on motorcycles—death’s cupbearers, as they were called by some—disappeared from the scenes of bombings, where people increasingly shouted out their despair and anger, cursing both Saddam and our own regime. Much of daily life came to a standstill in those days, and we sought ever more active means of escape. Going on climbs in the mountains circling Tehran or taking long walks became a daily fixture, through which we struck many new, if rarely lasting, friendships.

  The Iraqi dictator was by now a household name, almost as familiar as Khomeini, for he had nearly as much control over our lives. His tremendous power over our destiny had turned him into an intrusive presence. No key decision could be arrived at without taking him and his future moves into consideration. His name was mentioned frequently and casually. A major character in children’s games, his every move, past, present and future, was a favorite topic of conversation.

  Because of Iraq’s continual and concentrated bombing of major cities, especially Tehran, the regime was forced to relax its reign. For the first time, the Revolutionary Guards and Committees became less visible; the vice squads were almost totally withdrawn from the streets. At a time when T
ehran was in deepest mourning, it was able to put on its gayest face. Women, in growing numbers, shunned the prescribed dark colors to put on their brightest scarves; many wore makeup, and their nylon stockings became more visible under their robes. Parties featuring music and alcohol were thrown without much concern for the raiding squads, without having to bribe the local committees.

  The place where the regime tried to keep its hold, ironically, was in the realm of our imagination. Television was saturated with documentaries on the two world wars. As the now almost empty streets of Tehran became livelier and more colorful, on television we saw Londoners searching for food in garbage cans or huddled together in underground shelters. We were told about how the people of Stalingrad and Leningrad had survived the harsh siege of their cities on a diet of their comrades’ flesh. This was not only to justify an increasingly unpopular and desperate war, whose end the regime had refused to contemplate until it had “liberated” the whole of Iraq. It was also aimed at intimidating and controlling a restive population, by holding up the prospect of even greater misfortune, and by reminding us that all had once not been so well on the Western front.

  We had come to believe in rumors. A new one began to spread that spring: Iraq had in its possession new and far more powerful missiles that could land on any part of the city without any prior warning whatsoever. So we told ourselves to be content with the ordinary bombs, and prayed to be spared the missiles. Finally, in April, we were attacked by the dreaded missiles. Soon after that, the Iraqi chemical bombing of a Kurdish town inside Iraq heralded an even more horrifying prospect. The newest rumors were that Iraq planned to use chemical bombs against Tehran and other major cities. The regime used the news to create a massive panic. The daily papers came out with extras on how to combat a chemical attack; a new alarm signal—green this time—was introduced. A few green-signal practices, apart from causing general panic, also convinced us that nobody would escape the paralyzing effects of the new threat. A special “Combat the Chemical Bomb Day” was announced, during which the Revolutionary Guards paraded up and down the streets with their own gas masks and vehicles, bringing the traffic in much of the city to a standstill.

  Soon after this, a missile hit a bakery in a crowded section of Tehran. People who were gathered at the scene began to see clouds of flour rising in the air. Someone shouted, “Chemical bomb!” In the ensuing scramble, many were injured as people and cars crashed into each other. And to be sure, the Revolutionary Guards, with their gas masks, arrived sometime later, to the rescue.

  By now, most districts carried some inescapable sign of having been hit by missile attacks, which continued unabated. Rows of ordinary houses and shops gave way to broken windows; then a few houses where the damage was more extensive; then the ruins of a house or two, where only the barest structure could be discerned in the rubble. Going to visit a friend or a shop or supermarket, we drove past these sights as if moving along a symmetrical curve. We would begin our ride on the rising side of the curve of devastation until we reach the ruined peak, followed by a gradual return to familiar sites and, finally, our intended destination.

  30

  I had not seen Mina for a long time, and the festivities surrounding the Iranian New Year offered a good excuse to renew our relations. I remember the day I went to her house well, because it coincided with two important events: a former colleague was getting married, and Tehran was hit with seven missiles. The first explosion sounded as I came out of a flower shop. A worker from the shop, some passersby and I stood to watch the cloud rising on the western horizon of the city. It looked white and innocent enough, like a child who has just committed a murder.

  Mina was happy to see me. In many ways, I was by then her only contact with academia. Her family had sold their mansion and moved to a new house, a smaller, ghostly version of their old home. Mina was still dressed in black. She seemed faded and unhappy. She told me she kept going through bouts of depression and was on medication.

  I asked her, with a certain persistence, about her unfinished book on James. I had the simplistic and wishful notion that once she started to work on the book, everything would fall into place. She said she would never resume her work. She needed time to breathe, she added later, to enable her to concentrate on her work again. In the meantime, she had translated Leon Edel’s The Modern Psychological Novel and was in the process of translating Ian Watt’s The Rise of the Novel. She said, Of course, these books aren’t so fashionable these days. Everyone has gone postmodern. They can’t even read the text in the original—they’re so dependent on some pseudo-philosopher to tell them what it says. I told her not to worry, that nobody taught James anymore either, that he too was unfashionable, which was a sign that we must be doing something right.

  Mina was a meticulous and literal translator. This created difficulties with her publisher, who wanted her to make the text “accessible” to the public. She was contemptuous of the existing translations of Virginia Woolf. She refused to use the Iranian translation of Mrs. Dalloway for the quotations in the Edel book, and this had caused her more trouble.

  She asked me about my classes. I told her my students and I were having a hard time with James, especially with his prose. She smiled. Then your students are in good company, she said. Some of the best-known critics and writers have complained about it. Yes, but here our problem is different, you know. I assigned them more obviously difficult novelists—Nabokov and Joyce—but somehow they’re having a harder time with James. The surface realism gives them the illusion that he should be easier to understand, and baffles them all the more. Look here, I said. What’s the deal with this word fuliginous? He uses it in The Bostonians—“fuliginous eyes”—and in The Ambassadors, to describe Waymarsh’s face. What does the blasted word mean? You know it cannot be found in the American Heritage Dictionary?

  Mina could not let me continue; her loyalties would not allow it. She, like Catherine Sloper, had an “undiverted heart” and, despite her brilliant mind, sometimes took things awfully literally. She said, with evident emotion, How else but by giving volume to his words could he create the illusion of life? Are you thinking of dropping him?

  She had asked me this question a long time ago, and every once in a while that anxiety returned to her. I said, No, of course not. How could I drop a novelist who in describing a brilliant woman says not dazzling or incandescent but “unobscured Miss B”? I wish I could steal his intricacies of language. But give my kids a break—remember, most of them were fed on Steinbeck’s The Pearl.

  I told her what fun we had the day we chose our best and worst passages. Mahshid pointed to the “bird haunted trees,” and Nassrin read a passage from The Ambassadors describing a lunch by the waterside: “—the mere way Madame de Vionnet, opposite him over their intensely white table-linen, their omelette aux tomates, their bottle of straw-coloured Chablis, thanked him for everything almost with the smile of a child, while her grey eyes moved in and out of their talk, back to the quarter of the warm spring air, in which early summer had already begun to throb, and then back again to his face and their human questions.”

  These talks with Mina, seemingly so irrelevant to the events around us, were a great source of satisfaction to us both. It is only now, when I try to gather up the morsels of those days, that I discover how little, if ever, we talked about our personal lives—about love and marriage and how it felt to have children, or not to. It seemed as if, apart from literature, the political had devoured us, eliminating the personal or private.

  31

  One of the last missiles to land before the cease-fire hit a nearby house, in an alley where two of our friends, a couple and their youngest daughter, lived. They had a publishing house and bookstore not far from their home, where many Iranian writers and intellectuals gathered and where debates raged late into the evening. The night before, a few of my friends, including Laleh, had stayed with us watching films until almost dawn. In the cozy confusion of a sleepover, we fixed a breakfast of b
read, fresh cream, homemade jam and coffee. I was in the kitchen when I felt the house go down with a shudder. It had been too close. Soon we discovered just how close.

  After the bomb, many people ran towards the site, while dozens, mostly women and children, bleeding, shouting, crying and cursing, were running in the opposite direction. When the Revolutionary Guards and the ambulances arrived, the cries became louder. Timidly, the guards set out to inspect the area. In the yard of the house where the missile had landed, two children were lying senseless. The guards dragged out two dead women from under the rubble; one was very young, wearing a colorful housedress. The other was middle-aged and fat; her skirt clung to her thighs.

  The next evening, we went over to console our friends. It was raining gently; the air scattered the smell of fresh earth and spring blossoms. A small crowd had gathered near the devastated houses. Our hostess led us inside and, gracious as ever, served us fragrant tea and small, delicious pastries. She had somehow managed to fill the kitchen with big bowls of lilacs.

  The windows were shattered. Shards of glass had pierced their valuable paintings, and they had spent the previous night removing glass from various parts of the house. Smiling, she took us to the rooftop. Behind us rose my beloved mountains and in front of us were the three demolished houses. In the least damaged one, a man and a woman seemed to be searching for things to salvage from what must have been the second floor of the building. The house in the middle was now mostly rubble.