Things I've Been Silent About

by Azar Nafisi

  Mother and me, at a relative’s wedding.

  At least twice a week she invited her female friends over around ten o’clock to share gossip, stories, and fortune-telling. Being a day person, she crammed as much social activity into her mornings as possible. In these forums there was little trace of the dictator I knew. Mother’s coffee sessions had a carnivalesque aura about them, as if all assembled had gathered to reveal momentous secrets. “She can’t actually be sleeping with him?” “Does she really deserve to marry so well?” “How could men be at once so cruel and so stupid?” It was all in the tone: a spouse’s vicissitudes, a nasty divorce, news of a death, was shared in a way that made the pain and scandal seem remote, or at least conquerable. At times they would throw warning glances in my direction and lower their voices. One, pointing to me, would repeat a Persian proverb—Let’s not forget that the walls have mice and little mice have ears—signaling that they should be careful what they said in front of me.

  Some of the sharpest memories I have of my mother are of her knitting. She and Monir joon, a friend and former neighbor, would exchange gossip and patterns in the same breath and with equal zest. She would knit in all seasons, even in summer, though the results of these endeavors were always uncertain. She seldom followed patterns, preferring to choose her own colors and invent her own designs, which added to the unpredictability of the results.

  My mother’s hairdresser, a young divorcée called Goli, was often part of this entourage. One of her functions was fortune-telling, a skill Mother dabbled in. When the coffee had been drunk, the women would turn their cups down—toward the heart—and leave them in the saucers until the grounds began to dry. Goli picked each up in turn and, with immense concentration, she transformed the lines and swirls formed by the coffee grounds into amazing tales of past, present, and future woes and conquests. She had a square-shaped face, big eyes, and thin lips; as she turned the coffee cup in her hand she had a way of pursing her lips that made them disappear into the flesh around her mouth. I liked to watch this disappearing act, waiting for her lips to return.

  My glance rapidly passes over Monir joon, a thin spinster with a sharp nose, blue eyes, and faded, frizzy red hair who speaks in short, clipped sentences. I see the indolent, overweight Fakhri joon, herself a remarkable fortune-teller, who would turn and turn the coffee cup between her plump hands with their surprisingly long fingers, and the pious Shirin Khanoom, whose presence usually provoked hostility, as few could abide her self-righteous pronouncements. I want to pause on my aunt Mina, who always chose a chair in the least conspicuous place and seldom offered up a comment. Usually, when the others left, she would stay behind for lunch. My brother and I called our parents’ close friends and relatives aunt or uncle, but Aunt Mina was the most special, “The real sister I never had,” Mother would say. As it happened, she did have a real sister—at least a half sister, Nafiseh—with whom she carried on a precarious love-hate relationship.

  Aunt Mina and my mother had been classmates at Jeanne d Arc, one of the few schools for girls in Tehran, managed by French nuns. They were both top students, and fiercely competitive. This, over time, morphed into a begrudging respect; they started to study together and became inseparable friends. For many years, until they had a falling-out, we would see Aunt Mina almost every day. Dinner was either at her house or ours, and on most weekends and holidays we planned shared activities.

  Aunt Mina was slightly overweight, making the rest of her body incongruent with her legs, which were elegant and slim. Mostly she kept her hair long, neatly gathered at the back of her neck in a bun or a French roll. But none of this makes tangible the aura she created around her. She seemed as if she were constantly recoiling from unexpected blows. As a child she lost both her parents and was taken in, with her sister and two brothers, by an older uncle, a formidable politician who had been an influential ambassador to Russia and who had two daughters of his own. Every once in a while my mother would say, with sympathy, that Mina was plagued by bad luck. Her cousins went to university and became prominent academics, but she was unable to pursue her education beyond high school. At the time, she had no money. She was married off to a man much like her uncle: ambitious, inflexible, and unapproachable. What he lacked was her uncle’s stamina and that ineffable quality that goes by the name of backbone. Two of her siblings—her older sister and brother—died very young, in their early twenties, and the third died twenty years later of a heart attack. With her younger brother’s death, Aunt Mina inherited everything. Only by then it was too late.

  Mother (front, center) in her school picture. Ozra Khanoom is seated behind her, in a white sweater. Mother was sent to school without the proper covering for the photo, and she had to borrow a jacket from the girl at the end of her row.

  Aunt Mina’s husband’s ambitions were only half realized and, perhaps because of this, he chose to exercise his authority at home. My mother admired him a great deal and, despite his condescending manner toward my father, hung on his every pronouncement, an attitude that did not escape Aunt Mina, who would mock Mother’s sympathies for authoritative men. “Nezhat is blind to their weaknesses,” she would say. Personally, I disliked him because he had far too great a liking for me. Whenever he found me alone, taking an afternoon nap or talking on the phone to a friend in the hall, he tried to embrace me and tell me what a wonderful girl I was and how much he liked me. I could not complain about his attentions to my parents; I merely tried to avoid him. At times I felt a strange satisfaction in knowing how wrong my mother was in her admiration for him.

  Years later, this strong authority figure would one morning go to the garage, put a gun to his head, and kill himself. In the note he left behind for his startled wife and children he explained that he could no longer tolerate the burden of their financial difficulties. He had in his last years come to rely on my father and confide in him. After his death it was my father who took care of the funeral arrangements and tried to use his influence as mayor to keep the suicide out of the papers.

  Despite her orphaned state, Aunt Mina had a better childhood than Mother, whose own mother died when she was quite young, leaving her at the mercy of the capricious will of her stepmother and the careless attentions of a father who confused discipline with affection. While her half siblings lived in great comfort and luxury, Mother was relegated to an attic room and made to brush her teeth with soap and water. What made life intolerable for her was being treated like a poor relative in her own home. The only way she could cope with her deep resentment and bitterness against her family was to develop an inordinate sense of pride. Aunt Mina once told me that she and my mother shared her books (my grandfather forgot to give Mother money for them) and they got into a habit of studying together. “That is how we became so close,” she said. “Nezhat was always first in the class, she was so competitive. She couldn’t compete with others in terms of clothes or things. The only area in which she could compete—and one at which she excelled—was her studies, especially mathematics.” While her siblings were sent abroad to study, Mother was forced to stop her schooling after high school.

  “I wanted to be a doctor,” my mother would say. “I was the most brilliant pupil in class, and the most promising.” Time and again Mother reminded my brother and me of how she had sacrificed her career to stay at home. She seemed to pride herself on the fact that I was not a “housewife type,” and when I married boasted to my husband that I couldn’t even make my own bed. “My daughter,” she announced on their first meeting, “was brought up to be an educated woman, not a drudge.” But she never stopped reproaching me for working and not spending more time at home with my children.

  After Mother’s death I was surprised to learn from the same Austrian lady who had been present at her wedding that my mother had worked for a while as a bank clerk. The Austrian lady told me how impressed she had been with my mother, who seemed to be so unlike other women of her class. Nezhat was intelligent, eloquent, spoke fluent French, and most im
pressive of all, she worked in a bank. In those days if girls from her background worked it was mainly as a teacher, sometimes as a doctor. Apparently, after Saifi’s death, my mother, unwilling to be solely dependent on her father and hated stepmother, had chosen to work. But she who so proudly talked of her ambitions to be a doctor, and her desire for independence, never once mentioned this. Instead, time and again she talked about how a family friend, Mr. Khosh Kish, who later became head of Iran’s Central Bank, was one of her ardent suitors and admirers.

  I think my mother’s constant restlessness was partly due to a sense of deep homelessness. Not just because she was never made to feel at home, but also because she belonged neither to the category of women who were content to stay at home, nor to that of career women. Like many women of her time she was an in-between woman who felt that her capabilities and aspirations were stifled by her condition. When she told us stories about her grades and the bright future her teachers predicted for her, she would often end up shaking her head and saying, “If only I were a man!” The Alice James syndrome, I would call it, thinking of Henry James’s intelligent and sickly sister—her capabilities and aspirations were far ahead of her actual condition.

  Aunt Mina was brilliant too. She didn’t have the means to continue her studies, so instead she married; “another intelligent woman gone to waste.” Aunt Mina never raised her voice, laughed loudly, or displayed emotions. Unlike my mother, she did not pick fights or engage in open rebellion. She withdrew even from those closest to her, as if to hide something precious from a world that had denied her so much. She chose her outlets deliberately: she gambled obsessively, and she smoked. Mother, who boasted that she enjoyed both but had chosen to abstain because they were wrong (although she did dabble in the occasional game of gin rummy), engaged in an ongoing crusade to make her friend give up these vices. Aunt Mina would smile her ironic half smile and say, “I’m not a masochist like you, Nezhat.” She was a little irritated when Mother sided with Mahbod, Aunt Mina’s husband, in these matters. She avoided open confrontations and went her own way, even if it meant hiding her actions from the two people who were closest: her husband and her best friend.

  A bond grew between my father and Aunt Mina, based on common concerns and common resentments. Yet Father could not lure her with his charm. “Ahmad Khan, I am not one of those women you would want to win over!” she would say. She liked him very much and later she too would turn to him for support, but she never gave much heed to his complaints.

  As I was growing up, Mother repeated time and again how in “those days” the popular wisdom had been that only girls who were not marriageable continued their education. Educated women were considered ugly and were generally picked on. Some families claimed that reading and writing would “open a girl’s eyes and ears” and turn her into a “loose woman.” My grandfather was progressive enough not to heed such nonsense. Mother’s younger half sister, Nafiseh, was sent to America to study, but Mother herself was never offered such an opportunity. “I had no one to defend me,” she would say, “no mother who cared about what happened to me.” Mother and Aunt Mina never got over their unrealized potentials, what Emily Dickinson called “a dim capacity for wings.” Perhaps this is what made them stay together for so many years, despite their enormous differences in temperament and despite the fact that, in some respects, they very much disapproved of or, more accurately, could not tolerate each other.

  Mother liked to make a scene. She prided herself on being “completely frank and open.” Sometimes, in utter frustration, she would call Aunt Mina sly. “It appears to be part of Mina’s nature,” she would say, “for her to hide things. She knows how much I value honesty, and yet she lies or simply won’t tell me the truth.” “Your mother has her head in the clouds, she has no idea how to live her life,” Aunt Mina would say. “This woman is an idealist through and through. She’s as naïve as a two-year-old child.”

  Aunt Mina had no patience for my mother’s indulgent recollections of her more perfect first husband. “To think of how Saifi treated me,” Mother would say, “from that very first moment he had eyes for no one but me. And now …” her voice trailed off. “And now what?” Aunt Mina would snap back with a half-ironic, half-indulgent smile. “Now you have a good husband and two healthy, wonderful children. Nezhat, will you forever live with your head in the clouds?”

  EVERY FRIDAY A DIFFERENT kind of crowd gathered in our living room. These were more serious affairs. Guests usually began to convene in the late morning, and these sessions were presided over by both my parents. The numbers varied, but some people were fixtures. Aunt Mina sometimes attended but seldom spoke. I think she came partly out of curiosity, and partly out of loyalty. Every once in a while she would drop a word or two, usually to oppose and contradict a statement or claim.

  I remember Mr. Khalighi, a colleague of my father’s in the civil service, his senior both in rank and years. He had watched Father rise while he himself remained in the same position, as a minor government functionary, until his retirement. I believe they had met when Father was a director at the Ministry of Finance and kept their friendship when Father moved on to become the deputy head of the Planning and Budget Organization. He celebrated my father’s public successes with a rare generosity of spirit. Mr. Khalighi was in the habit of writing humorous bits of poetry for different occasions, which he insisted on reading aloud whenever he visited us. He usually came earlier than the others and seldom missed a session. It seemed to me that he never aged—he just gradually shrank and shriveled until one day he disappeared and I was told that he had died.

  Another fixture of those Friday sessions was an army colonel who retired early because he wanted to enjoy life. He was good-looking in an old-fashioned movie-star way, with a Clark Gable mustache, which he dyed black along with his hair. Unlike Mr. Khalighi, the colonel was usually silent, a permanent smile lurking under his mustache. He listened to the sometimes heated arguments without much apparent interest in participating.

  Shirin Khanoom, the colonel’s wife, started coming too, first to make sure the colonel wasn’t off with some “slut,” as she put it, and later because she was engaged by the discussions. Unlike her husband, she took a strong interest in all the discussions. She was a big woman—big boned, as they say—much larger than her husband. She had a low voice, and every time she spoke it seemed to boom, perhaps because, burdened with such an overflow of energy and personality, her large body could not contain her urges and demands. The colonel was not well-off and Shirin Khanoom had to work. She had a sewing school, where she bullied the poor young women who came to her to learn a craft and make a living. Some doubled as her maids, though as far as I know they were never paid for this honor. Shirin Khanoom and Aunt Mina did not like each other and, both being frank in their own way, took little trouble to hide their feelings.

  There were always a few young ambitious men in attendance on Fridays, distant relatives hoping to cultivate high connections and former functionaries who had fallen from grace. All of this mixing of have-beens and not-yet-arriveds made Shirin Khanoom uncomfortable. She mistrusted everyone and claimed that Mother was too kind, too unsuspecting of other people’s evil intentions. Loafers, she called them, with a finality that even my mother did not challenge. “Nezhat Khanoom,” she would say, “has too good a heart. Trouble,” she added knowingly, “is what she is asking for.”

  CHAPTER 5

  family ties

  FOR YEARS MY FATHER WORKED ON HIS MEMOIRS. The first draft was interspersed with anecdotes about his childhood. He described how his four-year-old sister was killed while resisting a man who was tearing a pair of gold earrings off her ears. To stifle her cries, the man knifed her. This event led my father, at a young age, to rebel against the basic injustice of life. It was a heartbreaking story, told poignantly, but when it came time to publish his memoirs he was advised to delete the personal parts—after all, what is important about a life is not the murder of your sister but what grea
t deeds you have achieved in the public domain. When, later, I read his book, which was published in the nineties, I noticed how empty and contrived it seemed without those personal stories. The book, filled with important political developments, is devoid of the voice that dominates his unpublished memoirs. It gives much information about his political career but few of his deeper insights.

  I so regret not having paid more attention to my father’s memoirs when he was alive. He gave me an early draft after the revolution. At the time I mainly ignored it, feeling a slight condescension toward his literary efforts. It was only after his death, when my brother sent me his diaries and copies of the original manuscript, that I realized how much I had missed. In his unpublished manuscript he is surprisingly frank about the vagaries of his upbringing, including his sexual dalliance at the age of eight with the neighbor’s daughter. Later, he unabashedly recounts his many flirtations with women who, despite social and religious restrictions, were open in their urges and desires.

  The book begins with a genealogy tracing the family back six hundred years to Ibn-Nafis, a physician, a man of knowledge, a hakim. For fourteen generations the men in the family were physicians trained in philosophy and literature, some of whom wrote important treatises. My father gives a detailed account of our various ancestors’ accomplishments in the realms of science and literature. (When I first started to teach at the University of Tehran he suggested that a portrait of Ibn-Nafis hanging on the wall at the Faculty of Law and Political Science should remind me of my own difficult task as a teacher and a writer.) I never knew quite what to do with these distinguished ancestors. My brother and I belonged to a generation that shrugged off the past and considered ancestry more of a burden and cause for embarrassment than a point of privilege. Only after the revolution did my family’s past suddenly become important to me. If the present was fragile and fickle, then the past could become a surrogate home.