Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books

by Azar Nafisi

  What are we all listening to, those of us sitting on the carpet, playing with our wineglasses, leaning back against the cushions? Our host is recounting the bus story. It is fresh from the oven. Many of us have heard bits and pieces of it in the past two days, but the story is too incredible even for us, with our seasoned knowledge of so many stories unbelievable to believe. Our host is a reliable source, and what is more, he has heard it from the horse’s mouth, or at least from the mouth of one of the horses involved in the incident.

  About two months earlier, the board of the writers’ association received an invitation to participate in a conference in Armenia. The invitation was extended to all the members. At first, many received phone calls from the intelligence service threatening them and instructing them not to go, but later on, the regime seemed to relent, and even to encourage the trip. In the end, twenty-odd members accepted the invitation. They decided to hire a bus for their journey. Accounts differ here as to the details—some claim to have suspected something fishy was going on from the start; others accuse one another of being complicit in the plot. But what all agree is that on the morning of the trip, twenty-one writers made their way to the bus station. Some found it a little odd that the bus was not on time and that the driver had been changed. Others noticed that certain colleagues had reneged and decided not to go, on the very morning of the trip.

  Finally, they were on their way. The journey went smoothly until after midnight, or some say until around two in the morning, when all of the passengers were asleep—all but one single insomniac, who noticed that the bus had stopped and the driver had disappeared. He glanced out the window and saw that the bus had stopped at the tip of a very high precipice. At this point, he ran—all the time shouting to wake up the others—to the front of the bus, got behind the wheel and turned the bus around. The other passengers, waking startled from their sleep, filed off the bus in a certain commotion, only to be met by members of security, who were there with their Mercedes-Benzes and helicopters. The passengers were taken to different interrogation outposts, and after being detained and expressly advised not to say a word, they were released. The next day, the whole of Tehran had heard the news. Apparently there had been a plot to push the bus over the cliff and claim it was an accident.

  There were many jokes about this incident, as there were about similar events. Later that night, on our way home, Bijan and I discussed the writers’ terrible ordeal. It’s so strange, he said. Usually when you talk about most of these writers, it’s because of your frustrations with their ideological stance towards literature, but something like this makes all that irrelevant. No matter how much you might disagree with some of these people or think of them as bad writers, compassion will ultimately overtake all other considerations.

  Not long after that, we were awoken early one morning by a friend who was married to one of the founders of the writers’ association. Her voice was frightened. She wanted to know if we could call the BBC and let them know what was going on. She and her husband had been forced to leave Tehran for a while until things cooled down, and she wanted to know if their son could stay with us for a few days.

  This incident was preceded by many others: the attack on a small party given by a German consul at his house for intellectuals and writers, and their arrest; the disappearance of a well-known leftist journalist, the editor of a popular magazine who had been arrested with others and kept after they were released. Later it was said that he had left for Germany, where his wife and family lived, but he never arrived there. The Iranian government claimed he had left Iran and that the Germans were keeping him. The German government denied the allegations. The international hue and cry surrounding his disappearance helped keep the matter in the public eye. Then one day he appeared in the Tehran airport with a strange story about having gone to Germany and from there to a third country. A few days later, he wrote an open letter in which he described his tortures at the hands of the regime and he was promptly rearrested. Finally, he was released after much international pressure. Shortly afterward, an Iranian publisher who had helped him and other dissident writers left his home and never returned. His body was dumped in a deserted place on the outskirts of Tehran, like those of so many other dissidents.

  In the mid-nineties, in an effort to reach out to Europe, a number of Western intellectuals were invited to Iran. Paul Ricoeur came for a series of lectures. He gave three talks; for every one of them, audiences spilled out into the hall and stairs. Some time afterward, V. S. Naipaul came to Iran. In Isfahan, he was taken around by a well-known translator and publisher, Ahmad Mir Alai. I can still see Mir Alai in his bookshop in Isfahan, which had become a place for intellectuals and writers to gather and talk. He was a pale man; his skin seemed oddly faded. He was pudgy and wore round-rimmed brown glasses. Somehow, the combination of paleness and pudginess made you trust him and want to share your stories with him. He had a sharp wit and was the kind of man who seemed to listen and empathize. This came partly from the fact that, unlike his more militant friends, he was not a confrontational person. I could call him a victim because he was not political—he was caught in the cross fire and at times had to take radical political stances despite his nature. He had excellent taste in his translations, choosing Naipaul and Kundera and a host of other writers.

  A few months after Naipaul left Iran, Mir Alai’s body was found in a street, near a stream. He had left the house in the morning and had not returned. Late that night, his family was informed of his death. A small bottle of vodka was found in his pocket. Vodka had been spilled all over his shirtfront in an attempt to make it look as if Mir Alai, in the middle of the day, had gone off on a drunken binge and had a heart attack in the middle of the street. No one believed the story. A big bruise had been found on his chest and the mark of an injection on his arm. He had been interrogated and either accidentally or deliberately killed by his interrogators.

  Shortly afterward, Jahangir Tafazoli, the best-known expert on ancient Iran, was found murdered. I knew him well. He was very shy and slight and had a shock of black hair and large eyes that looked huge under his glasses. Tafazoli was not politically involved, although he had written for the Encyclopedia Iranica, a project that was overseen by a prominent Iranian scholar at Columbia who was greatly denounced by the Iranian government. His area of expertise—pre-Islamic Iran—was hated by the Islamic regime. He had left the University of Tehran to go home and had made a suspicious phone call en route from a car to his daughter at home. His body was found alongside a road far from his home and from the university. It was claimed that he had been trying to change a tire and was hit by a car.

  Time and again in memorial services, in parties and gatherings, I went over these deaths with friends and colleagues. We obsessively resurrected and evoked the manner of death as reported by the officials and then we remurdered them, trying to envision the way they had really died. I still imagine Tafazoli sitting in a car between two thugs, forced to make a call home to his daughter, and then I draw a blank and ask myself, When and where did they kill him? Was it with a blow inside the car? Or did they take him to one of their safe houses, kill him there and then throw him on the deserted road?

  16

  If you promise you’ll behave, my magician said on the phone, I have a nice surprise for you. We arranged to meet at a popular coffee shop that opened into a restaurant and had its own pastry shop in the front. The name eludes me, although I am sure, like so many other places, it must have been changed after the revolution.

  When I arrived with my bag of books, I found my magician sitting at a corner table, surveying a stack of his own. You were looking for an English edition of A Thousand and One Nights, he said. I’ve found you an Oxford edition. We ordered a cappuccino for me, an espresso for him and two napoleons, the pastry for which the café was famous. I also brought you that Auden poem you were looking for, though I’m not sure why you want it, he said, handing me a typed sheet of paper with Auden’s “Letter to Lord Byron.
”

  We had a really interesting discussion in class the other day, I said. We were talking about The Dean’s December and Lolita and other books we’d covered in class. One of my girls, Manna—you remember my Manna? Yes, I remember Manna, he said, your poet. Yes, well, Manna asked how we could relate these other authors to Jane Austen, who is so much more optimistic about the world and its people.

  Most people make that mistake about Austen, he said. They should read her more carefully.

  Yes, that’s what I told her—Austen’s theme is cruelty not under extraordinary circumstances but ordinary ones, committed by people like us. Surely that’s more frightening? And that’s why I like Bellow, I said with a flourish, thinking of my new flame.

  How fickle you are, he said. What happened to Nabokov? One book and he’s old news! No, but really, I said, trying to ignore his mocking tone. Bellow’s novels are about private cruelties, about the ordeal of freedom, the burden of choice—so are James’s, for that matter. It’s frightening to be free, to have to take responsibility for your decisions. Yes, he said, to have no Islamic Republic to blame. And I’m not saying they’re blameless, he added after a brief pause—far from it.

  Look here, I said, rummaging through More Die of Heartbreak, which I had brought along for the sole purpose of quoting my favorite passages to him: “The meaning of the Revolution was that Russia had attempted to isolate itself from the ordeal of modern consciousness. It was a sealing off. Inside the sealed country, Stalin poured on the old death. In the West, the ordeal is of a new death. There aren’t any words for what happens to the soul in the free world. Never mind ‘rising entitlements,’ never mind the luxury ‘life-style.’ Our buried judgment knows better. All this is seen by remote centers of consciousness, which struggle against full wakefulness. Full wakefulness would make us face up to the new death, the peculiar ordeal of our side of the world. The opening of a true consciousness to what is actually occurring would be a purgatory.”

  I love this “poured on the old death,” I told him. He talks somewhere about the “atrophy of feeling”—the West is gripped by an “atrophy of feeling . . .”

  Yes, he said. Mr. Bellow, Saul as your students call him, is highly quotable. I don’t know if that’s a virtue or a fault.

  Who started me on this? Who gave me The Bellarosa Connection? I asked him accusingly. I think this is important for my class. They tend to look at the West too uncritically; they have a rosy picture of the West, thanks to the Islamic Republic. All that is good in their eyes comes from America or Europe, from chocolates and chewing gum to Austen and the Declaration of Independence. Bellow gives them a truer experience of this other place. He allows them to see its problems and its fears.

  Look here, I said. This is the whole point. This is what we’re going through. . . . He was not looking at me. You’re not listening, I said impatiently. He was looking behind me and making motions to the waiter, who was soon at our table. What’s going on? he asked. What’s all the commotion about? For there was a commotion behind us, which I had missed in my eagerness to propound the virtues of Mr. Bellow.

  The waiter explained that this was a raid. Guards were standing at the entrance door, monitoring those who had started to leave. He delicately suggested that if we were not related, my magician should move to another table and I could explain, were I asked what I was doing there, that I was waiting for my order from the pastry shop.

  I said, We are not doing anything wrong—I am not going to move—and, turning to my magician, added, Nor are you. Don’t be stupid, he said. You don’t want to create a scandal. I’ll call Bijan right now, I said. What good will that do? he shot back. Do you really think they will listen to him, since he has no control over his wife? He rose with his coffee cup in his hands. You forgot something, I said, handing him the copy of A Thousand and One Nights. He said, in English, Now you’re being childish. I think you need something to keep you busy, I said, and besides, I already photocopied the other one you gave me. He walked to a distant table with his coffee and the books, and I sat alone, trying to eat my napoleon, ferociously leafing through More Die of Heartbreak, as if cramming for the next day’s exams.

  When the Revolutionary Guards entered the coffee shop, they started going from table to table. A few young people had slipped away in time; others were not so lucky. A family of four, my magician, two middle-aged women and three young men were left behind. When my order was ready, I rose, tipped the waiter extravagantly, dropped my parcel of books, which broke open and spread all over the floor, waited for the waiter to fetch me a bag and left without looking at my magician.

  In the taxi, I felt confused and angry and a little repentant. I am going to leave, I told myself. I can’t live like this anymore. Every time something like this happened, I, like many others, would think of leaving, of going to a place where everyday life was not such a battleground. Recently, the thought of leaving Iran had become more than a defense mechanism and incidents like this were slowly tipping the scales. Among friends and colleagues some had tried to adjust to the situation. We are not with the regime in our hearts and minds, one had said, but what can we do but comply? Should I go to jail and lose my job for the sake of two loose strands of hair? Once Mrs. Rezvan had said, By now we should be used to all of this; these young girls are a little spoiled—they expect too much. Look at Somalia or Afghanistan. Compared to them, we live like queens.

  “I can’t get used to it,” Manna had said one day in class. And I couldn’t blame her. We were unhappy. We compared our situation to our own potentials, to what we could have had, and somehow there was little consolation in the fact that millions of people were unhappier than we were. Why should other people’s misery make us happier or more content?

  When I arrived home, Bijan and the children were downstairs in my mother’s apartment. I put the napoleons I had brought for them in the refrigerator and left the carrot cake out to take to my mother. Then I went straight to the freezer, made myself a big bowl of ice cream, poured coffee and walnuts over it, and by the time the kids and Bijan had come upstairs, I was already in the bathroom throwing up. All evening and all night, I threw up. My magician called at some point. I am very sorry, he said. One feels so tainted. I’m sorry, too, I said back. We’re all sorry—don’t forget to date and autograph my book.

  I could not keep anything in my stomach that night, not even water, and in the morning when I opened my eyes, the room started to rotate; tiny specks of light formed brightly spiked coronets, dancing in the dizzying air. I closed my eyes, opened them again and the deadly coronets reappeared. I held on to my stomach, went to the bathroom and vomited nothing but bile. All day I stayed in the luxury of my bed, my skin sensitive to the touch of the sheets.

  17

  You could not shock her more than she shocks me;

  Beside her Joyce seems innocent as grass.

  It makes me most uncomfortable to see

  An English spinster of the middle class

  Describe the amorous effect of “brass”,

  Reveal so frankly and with such sobriety

  The economic basis of society.

  A girl is raped, carried in the trunk of a car and murdered. A young student is killed and has his ears cut off. There are discussions of prison camps, of death and destruction in Bellow, in Nabokov we have monsters like Humbert, who rape twelve-year-old girls, even in Flaubert there is so much hurt and betrayal—What about Austen? Manna had asked one day.

  Indeed, what about Austen? Austen’s comedies and her generosity of spirit sometimes led my students to share the common belief that she was a prim spinster, at peace with the world and unaware of its brutality. I had to remind them of Auden’s “Letter to Lord Byron,” in which he asks Byron to tell Jane Austen “How much her novels are beloved down here.”

  Austen’s heroines are unforgiving, after their own fashion. There is much betrayal in her novels, much greed and falsehood, so many disloyal friends, selfish mothers, tyrannical fathers, s
o much vanity, cruelty and hurt. Austen is generous towards her villains, but this does not mean that she lets anyone, even her heroines, off easy. Her favorite and least likable heroine, Fanny Price, is in fact the one who also suffers the most.

  Modern fiction brings out the evil in domestic lives, ordinary relations, people like you and me—Reader! Bruder! as Humbert said. Evil in Austen, as in most great fiction, lies in the inability to “see” others, hence to empathize with them. What is frightening is that this blindness can exist in the best of us (Eliza Bennet) as well as the worst (Humbert). We are all capable of becoming the blind censor, of imposing our visions and desires on others.

  Once evil is individualized, becoming part of everyday life, the way of resisting it also becomes individual. How does the soul survive? is the essential question. And the response is: through love and imagination. Stalin emptied Russia of its soul by pouring on the old death. Mandelstam and Sinyavsky restored that soul by reciting poetry to fellow convicts and by writing about it in their journals. “Perhaps to remain a poet in such circumstances,” Bellow wrote, “is also to reach the heart of politics. The human feelings, human experiences, the human form and face, recover their proper place—the foreground.”

  18

  Our decision to leave Iran came about casually—at least that is how it appeared. Such decisions, no matter how momentous, are seldom well planned. Like bad marriages, they are the result of years of resentment and anger suddenly exploding into suicidal resolutions. The idea of departure, like the possibility of divorce, lurked somewhere in our minds, shadowy and sinister, ready to surface at the slightest provocation. If anyone asked, I would recount the usual reasons for our departure: my job and my feelings as a woman, our children’s future and my trips to the U.S., which had once more made us aware of our choices and possibilities.