Things I've Been Silent About

by Azar Nafisi

  There was no woman. We had gone in secret to see one of my father’s close friends who had recently married a woman my mother disliked. My mother had decided that she did not wish to interact with them anymore. But my father loved this friend, and continued to see him on the sly.

  Mohammad and me, when he was about two years old.

  For a few days after this she would not talk to me. I remember that they were fighting for the first time in a new way. They would shout and didn’t care about me or the servants overhearing. I listened at the doors. I listened to her hushed conversations with her friends, her conspiratorial telephone calls. The “woman” she suspected us of having seen was in fact married to my father’s friend. This woman, Sima Khanoom, was very attractive, sexual in an obvious way that my mother never was. She had apparently been half-engaged to my father at one time and then, suddenly, while he was away on a business trip, she got engaged to and later married his best friend—it was Father’s first real heartbreak. My mother, suspecting my father’s secretary as a go-between, kept asking me about her too, and wanted to know whether I had ever been out with my father and Sima Khanoom.

  I hear the venom in my mother’s voice without understanding what it means. I am five. I don’t know, even now, if I understood what this betrayal she had accused my father of entailed. What concerns me is their open quarrels, my mother’s hostile glances, my father’s absentminded patting of my hair and his stressed voice at night when he tells me bedtime stories. Then she suddenly picks up my brother and leaves home, leaving me with Father and the detested Naneh. I feel left out and neglected. My father is distracted and sometimes when he talks to me I feel as if he is talking to himself. Some days he takes me to his office, where I look at the wicked secretary with new eyes.

  That, I think, is when I told Mother my first lie. It was a simple lie, but it took some ingenuity on my part. She was staying at a friend’s house and I was there on a visit. There was no anger anymore. In a sense it was worse. She peppered me with questions, determined to gather evidence. Her questions were not direct, but sly. Every once in a while she and her friend exchanged glances. I felt miserably lonely and distant. Her attempt to drag things out of me, her conspiratorial glances, were more frightening than the direct accusations in that cold, dark room. I so much wanted her to be my mother again, to smile at me, to hold my hand, that I decided to lie and bring her back home. I invented a story about my father confronting Mrs. Jahangiri—his secretary—at the office, telling her he wanted her never to mention her friend again. Did she not realize that he only tolerated Sima Khanoom because of his friendship with her husband?

  IT IS AMAZING HOW we predict our own futures, especially in relation to others—how often we determine their behavior toward us. When my mother accused me of lying and of complicity with my father, I was innocent. But it would not be long before what she said became true. In a sense, she left us no choice. No amount of loyalty was ever enough. In reality she desired something we could not give her. She soon returned home, but nothing was ever the same again. I would go with my father to his friend’s house, and later I would accompany him on his assignations. I became his most trusted accomplice, our relationship cemented by the mutual misery we felt we suffered at my mother’s hands.

  That first time she took me aside, that day has stayed with me. I did not resent her—I think I was too young for that. She never laid a hand on me, but I felt bruised all the same. I remember wanting so badly to cry. I didn’t know how to defend myself and had a vague sense that I was somehow guilty. Also that if I admitted to what she wanted me to say, if I started to bad-mouth my father, saying, for example, that he had forced me to visit Sima Khanoom, I would be okay. But I didn’t. Later I stopped listening to her—it became a practice. I simply pretended to listen and nodded and never heard a word. Her voice would come in and I would push it back and start a conversation with an imaginary friend, retelling the stories I had heard or read or making up new stories. I had found in my imagination one place where I could be the queen of my own vast and variable kingdom.

  I AM ABOUT FIVE YEARS OLD. It is early evening. Father is just home from the office. He and my mother are arguing in the living room behind a closed door and I lurk in the hall but I know their argument is about me. My mother and I had an argument of our own earlier today. The devil that grown-ups often claim tempts children seemed to have taken residence in me, egging me on as I sat there on the swing and refused to go in for lunch when my mother told me to. I knew I was wrong and I knew I would pay for it, but I could not help myself.

  I can still savor the taste of those few moments of disobedience as I leaned back on the swing and enjoyed the mild breeze on my face, swinging back and forth, back and forth. When I finally went in, washed my hands, and appeared at the lunch table, my mother was furious. She would not allow my playmate, our neighbor’s son, to eat with me, although she had given permission before. She sent him home. Humiliated, I sat at the table and refused to eat. The more she insisted on my eating, the more unable I was to comply. I played with the spoon and the fork. I made shapes out of the bread. When I made for the door, she ordered me back and told me to go to my room. “Wait until your father comes home,” she said, “and we will solve this problem once and for all, since your highness will not listen to me. Who am I to tell you what to do and not to do?”

  All day I stayed in my room. I tried to make up stories to cheer myself up: Once upon a time there was a girl who was unhappy … then what? Once upon a time … I soon gave up. Instead, I cried and cried and looked at my picture books.

  When my father emerges from the living room, his face is full of thunder. But I can sense, as I always do on such occasions, that his heart is with me, that he is putting on this face in order to appease her. Why did you disobey your mother? he says. I say nothing. You must apologize, he says. Still I remain silent. Do as I tell you or you will be confined to the cellar. Mother does not appear but the door is ajar and I know she is listening. I say nothing. So he marshals me toward the stairs. I don’t want a rebel in my home, he says loudly and a little lamely. After all your mother has done for you… Why, he asks, why? On our way down the stairs his voice becomes softer, almost pleading. If you apologize, then that is another matter, he says quietly. Come on, Azi, be reasonable.

  He knows how scared I am of the cellar. It is damp and dank, with very little light. We use it for storage, and during winter there is a rope from which the laundry is hung. On the far side is the coal cellar, where I imagine there is a presence, malignant and threatening, lying in wait for me. Father makes me stand there with my back to the coal cellar. I keep feeling that the creature is watching me while I have no power to see him. You will stay here until I come for you, he says. I stand frozen in place and some part of me registers his incomprehensible abandonment, as it will future instances of betrayal.

  MY BEST MEMORIES of my mother are of our wandering about the streets of Tehran. There is one street in particular that will always represent the Tehran I love and long to return to, even now as I sit at this desk in a city that has been far more generous to me, and, by the same token, is emptier of memories. As I remember it I am struck by the irrelevant fact that the name of that street is the same as my husband’s last name: Naderi.

  Most of my childhood seems to have been spent on Naderi Street and on the network of side streets that branched off from it. There was the piroshki store and the place for nuts and spices, the fish market, a perfume store called Jilla where my mother would buy Nina Ricci’s L’Air du Temps and where the shopkeeper always kept a few free samples for me (échantillons we called them: such things were always French). And the coffee shop, which had a foreign name (in a sudden leap of remembrance it comes to me: Aibeta), where Mother bought her chocolates. Of all the smells and fragrances of that enchanted street, what has remained most imprinted in my memory is that of chocolate, which we pronounced like the French, chocolat. There was a small chocolate factory next to the cl
inic where I got my vaccinations, and after each visit my mother would reward me with chocolates from the factory. That was where I first discovered white chocolate, which I loved not because it tasted better but because it was so unexpected.

  The intersection of Lalehzar Avenue and Istanbul Street, in the 1940s.

  Naderi Street changed into Istanbul, which branched off on the left to Lalehzar—Avenue of the Tulips. During the Qajar kings’ rule in the late nineteenth century, this strip of land had been an immense tulip garden. The government cut a boulevard across the garden and turned it into one of the busiest business sections of Tehran, interspersed with theaters and movie houses. What a name for such a commercial street! Lalehzar was always filled with the smell of leather. My mother and I would step in and out of overcrowded lingerie shops, fabric stores, and purveyors of leather goods. In each place she exchanged pleasantries and gossiped with shopkeepers while I wandered around and peered into the back rooms, eager to catch a glimpse of those dim workshops where strips of fabrics and leather were transformed into bras, negligees, shoes, and bags.

  Once a month we would make a trip to a toy store called Iran, on Naderi Street, which my mother thought was the best toy store in Tehran. She selected a new toy or a doll for me, which would then be locked in the closet back home with the other toys. I remember vividly the neon sign above the door of the toy store: a big, jolly Santa Claus, driving his reindeer. This did not surprise us, nor did the names of so many of the restaurants and movie houses: Riviera, Niagara, Rex, Metropole, Radio City, Moulin Rouge, Chattanooga. For me Santa Claus was as familiar as Iran; we called him Baba Noel. We accepted all this as part of modern Iran—“modern” being another adopted foreign word. My father, with a hint of sarcasm, used to call it the surprising flexibility of the Persian language, which he likened to the unfortunate flexibility of its people. But how flexible were we really, and what price would we pay for all this flexibility?

  On Naderi Street and in the surrounding area, most shopkeepers were either Armenian, Jewish, or Azeri. Many Armenians were forcibly removed to Iran in the sixteenth century, during the reign of the powerful Safavid king Shah Abbas. Some Armenians and Jews migrated from Russia after the revolution; some came from Poland and other Soviet satellites after the Second World War. Just as it was natural to buy sweets and ice cream from Armenian shopkeepers, or fabrics and perfume from Jewish stores, it was also natural for some families to shun the minorities because they were “unclean.” The children knocked on their doors, singing “Armenian, the Armenian dog, the sweeper of hell.” The Jews were not just dirty, they drank innocent children’s blood. Zoroastrians were fire worshippers and infidels, while the Baha’is, a breakaway Islamic sect, were not just heretics but British agents and spies who could and should be killed. Mother was hardly touched by these matters; despite a vast array of other prejudices, she obeyed the rules of her own universe, where people were judged mainly by the degree to which they acknowledged her mores and fantasies. Most people seemed to accept their place in the stratified scheme of things, although every once in a while tensions erupted to the surface, until the bloody nature of this hidden discord was fully revealed several decades later, after the Islamic Revolution, in 1979, when the Islamists attacked, jailed, and murdered many Armenians, Jews, and Baha’is and forced restaurants to carry signs on their windows announcing “religious minority” if their owners were not Muslims. But we cannot blame everything on the Islamic Republic, because in some ways it simply brought into the open and magnified a preexisting bigotry.

  On Thursday nights—the start of our weekend—I roamed the same streets with my father. We usually paid a visit to the huge deli next door to the leather shops, where we would pick up sausages and sometimes ham or mortadella for our special Friday morning breakfast. Afterward, we strolled around in search of a film or a play The sights and sounds of those streets changed at night. All across Naderi, Istanbul, and Lalehzar were a number of restaurants, theaters, movie houses, and Persian-style cabarets, each with its own special clientele that varied in class and cultural background. The one we frequented most was Café Naderi, run by an Armenian. It had a beautiful garden, and in summer there was always music and dancing in the garden. That was one place my parents took us to frequently, even as small children. I don’t ever remember my parents dancing, although at times my mother would remind us of what a perfect dancer she used to be. But sometimes I and other children joined the grown-ups onstage, moving to the music of the cha-cha or of slower dances like the tango.

  A few blocks away there was a more traditional café whose name I have forgotten; its clientele was mainly men, and the music was Persian, sometimes Azeri or Arabic, far more erotic than the cha-cha or tango of the Café Naderi. This café and others like it were always full, serving mainly beer and vodka with kabob. Men who frequented them were devotees of certain favorite female singers, some of whom became legendary in their own right, their images now beckoning to us from YouTube, reminders of a vanquished but not vanished past. Yet a few streets southward there was another Tehran—religious, pious, and resentful of what it perceived as excesses of a heathen culture.

  The enticing cacophony of the street would gradually fade into the quiet drone of my father’s voice, as he told me one of his tales. I was taken to that other world where Ferdowsi’s heroes and demons, his raven-haired heroines, lived alongside the naughty Pinocchio, Tom Sawyer, La Fontaine’s animals, and Hans Christian Andersen’s poor little match girl, whose specter still lives after so many years because I could never accept that all her pain and suffering on earth would be rewarded only by death.

  Once, when I was about four years old, I lost my mother on the way back from my ballet class. We paused by different shops and somehow, during one stop, I walked on and when I turned around she was gone. I continued to walk, crying quietly. I knew the street well, each shop a bread crumb leading me to safety: the toy shop, the chocolate shop, the fishmonger, the shoe shops, the movie houses, the jewelry stores, until I reached my favorite place of all, the pastry shop, called Noushin. I loved everything about Noushin, especially its chocolate-covered ice cream, which was called Vita Crème. Every time we entered the shop, we were greeted by the jolly Armenian owner, who liked to tease me by saying that he had his eye on me as a future bride for his son. This time, before he had a chance to greet me, I blurted out that I had lost my mother and started to cry. He tried to calm me and offered me a free Vita Crème, but I was a polite girl and never accepted anything without my parents’ permission, and anyway I was too frightened to want even ice cream.

  The expression of anxiety in my mother’s eyes canceled the excitement in her voice as she sighed my nickname: “Azi!” I will never forget that look of panic because, over the next decades, it would return in the context of much smaller incidents: when my brother or I stayed out a little late, when Father did not call exactly on time, or we were not home when she returned from a party. Later, her grandchildren were subjected to the same anticipation of tragedy, which I unconsciously internalized and made my own.

  After the revolution, when I went back to Tehran, one of my first pilgrimages was to those streets. I felt as if I had stepped into the pages of Ferdowsi’s Shahnameh—one of those recurring scenes in which the protagonist, anticipating a hospitable feast, finds himself instead in a witch’s snare. I could never have imagined in my wildest dreams that one day Naderi and Lalehzar would become the scenes of bloody demonstrations and that I would find myself running away from the militia and vigilantes, past the toy shop, the chocolate shop, the nut and spice shops, the corpse of the cinema where I saw my first film, with no time to pause for reminiscences.

  CHAPTER 4

  coffee hour

  OVER THE YEARS, EVER SINCE I can remember, my mother invited a medley of people to our house in Tehran, sometimes to eat at her table but more often just for coffee and pastries. She had several collections of cups, which she chose according to the occasion: solid colors with
thicker rims for intimate friends and family, and more delicate ones—cream with floral designs, or white porcelain with golden rims—for more formal events. Journalists, society types, taxi drivers, her hairdresser—all were ushered in at different times of the day as Mother presided with majesty over her small coffeemaker. Discussions would vary according to the company in a ritual that mesmerized me as I sat in a corner of the room, watching my mother deliver coffee to everyone present, including me. Later she served my children when they were as young as four, dismissing my vehement protests with a shrug. “Please, please,” she would say. “Don’t you teach me how to feed the children.” She would then turn to my amused offspring with coffee, which they did not like, and chocolate, which they did, and say, “Don’t listen to your mother. Go on, go on. Drink your coffee and eat your chocolate.”

  As a child I lurked in the background, sometimes playing with my paper dolls, later amusing myself with a book or magazine. On days when Mother was pleased with me, every once in a while she would throw a smile my way, or offer up a pastry, telling me how unnatural it was for a young girl to spend her time reading. Even when I was in her ill graces I was not banished from these sessions. In fact, I think she took a certain pleasure in having me there. Her anger was of the type that needed a constant audience. It thrived on demonstration.