by Azar Nafisi
Even Cinderella must act in a certain way to attract her prince, and my mother did not have such talents. As time went by her bitterness about the past faded into a more general dissatisfaction with the pres ent. Somehow we had failed her. Her ghosts would become more real with time and we, her family, would become more inaccessible and remote.
I am not sure what would have happened if I had not spent those three months in Lancaster with my mother. I did not realize it then, but the experience would remain with me, opening up a new feeling, a soft spot, if you will, that would later on shape my whole assessment of her. It was like a tiny rivulet, promising a large and bountiful river whose potential, once revealed, could never be forgotten.
CHAPTER 10
at scotforth house
WE ARRIVED AT THE LANCASTER train station on a deceptively sunny day. I was soon to discover that what would keep me forever homesick in England, the constant rain and gray skies, was also responsible for the dazzling green meadows and magical bluebells. We were greeted at the station by a large round man on crutches, accompanied by his housekeeper, Ethel.
It was said that Mr. Cumpsty, who was known as Skipper, had been injured in an accident as the captain of a ship, possibly during the war. But the more interesting story was that of his romance with the original owner of Scotforth House, a wealthy woman who fell in love with him and he with her, leading him to abandon his wife and family. When she died, she left him the house and her money. The only time I saw Skipper’s previous family was when he died, three years later, and left everything he had to Ethel. His rather questionable moral rectitude might have aroused a few doubts as to his suitability as a guardian for me were it not for the fact that he had been recommended by Amoo Said’s sister, the impeccable Ameh Hamdam.
Mother had come to help me settle down, but from the moment we arrived she wreaked havoc in that house in order to provide me with the kind of comfort she imagined I needed. She was as scandalized by conditions in Scotforth House as its inhabitants were by her behavior. Mother had a criticism for everything: the bath had no shower, the dishes were never washed properly. She followed Christine, the timid maid, into the kitchen, taking the dishes from Christine’s almost trembling hands and forcing the poor woman to rinse and re-rinse every one without letting them once come into contact with the sink. Skipper kept promising to do something about the bathtub but clearly he had no intention of installing a shower for his temporary tenant, so in the end Mother bought a plastic hand shower that she made me use, forbidding me to take a bath.
Mr. Cumpsty, “Skipper.” Mother entrusted me to his care while I was at school in England.
Ethel brings our breakfast and afterward Christine clears the table. Cereal, two eggs sunny-side up that I immediately squash on the toast, plus butter, mar malade, and tea. On the first day of school, as we settle into our chairs for breakfast, my mother looks at me and breaks into a laugh. I am wearing my uni form: navy skirt, white shirt, navy sweater and blazer with the school insignia on the pocket, and a navy beret that I hate. She takes the beret, which keeps sliding off my head, and puts it on the chair beside my schoolbag. You really don’t need that at the breakfast table, she says, but you might as well get used to this. She puts on my school tie, takes one look at me, and again bursts into laughter. Poor Azi, she says with uncommon sympathy. She so seldom laughed or smiled—we knew mainly bitter smiles, reminders of our wrong doings—that I am caught off guard. What? I say a little crossly. Tears well up in my eyes and she pats my hand. There, there, she says, still laughing. Later I learn how to take advantage of my “foreignness,” forgetting my beret one day, misplacing my tie, or accidentally coming to school without the blazer.
My mother was an avid believer in exercise. Ever since I can remember, she skipped an imaginary rope in the mornings. In Lancaster the only place she could perform this ritual was on a small paved space in the garden below my second-story bedroom window. Every morning before breakfast she would go down and start skipping on her imaginary rope—a thousand skips a day, she would boast. I sometimes stood by the window watching her and she would look up at me and smile, happy to perform to an audience. This image overlaps with another, when I was about three or four years old, sitting by the French window of my parents’ bedroom, watching my mother skip rope on a sunny wintry morning on the terrace. For a moment her eyes caught mine and she smiled. I can still see her smile as my eyes follow the imaginary rope going up and down, up and down.
Scotforth House, in Lancaster.
In the evening I returned to my immense room where, without fail, Mother would offer me a plate of peeled oranges, chocolates, and pistachio nuts, her face glowing with purposeful determination. At night I left her a list of English words and by the next day she would have their meanings, which she looked up in the dictionary, ready for me at my desk. She helped me memorize words for one or two hours after dinner. In later years, she would bitterly remind me that if it weren’t for her I would never have learned En glish. And it was probably true. When I first started to learn English, in first grade, she didn’t know a word (her second language was French). Yet every day she would study the assigned pages in my English textbook with Aunt Nafiseh, and she would test me every night. When she wanted something for us, she went after it with amazing energy and focus.
Her fixations, her energetic drivenness, was not directed toward any specific goal—although it might have appeared purposeful to the untrained eye. She seemed always compulsively motivated by a firm sense of who or what she did not want to be. She loved smoking but never smoked; she loved playing cards but almost never played; she was a talented dancer but never danced. She made us feel that no one did their jobs as well as they should.
This negative urge at times pushed her to take up projects, none of which bore any relation to the other. To each task, however trivial or important, she devoted herself wholeheartedly. For a few years when I was young her principal goal was to become fluent in English. She even went to London for five months, staying at a bed-and-breakfast and spending almost all her waking hours in language classes and studying at home. For a while after that she went to flower-arrangement classes and filled the house with her precarious creations—until one day she grew tired of this activity and we never heard of it again. She applied the same energy to getting a driver’s license, which, for some now-forgotten reason, my father was opposed to. (She was not hallucinating when she claimed that he tried to use his influence to prevent the issuing officer from giving her a permit.)
Of all her projects, perhaps her main ambition was to create a model family. No one had paid attention to her well-being as a child: to what she ate, whether she exercised, what she wore. All of this now she wanted for us. Mother was in the perfection business: perfect family, perfect friends, perfect country. A totalitarian mind-set destroys you not just with its impositions, but with its unexpected acts of kindness. Had she been persistent in her cruelties it would have been easy to cut the relationship. But we felt trapped because, although she ruled our lives, she was also terribly vulnerable, and although she hated me at times, she also sacrificed so much for me. She wanted me to be beautiful, polished, sophisticated, intelligent, an obedient daughter, a successful and educated career woman. I was perhaps her greatest disappointment.
It pains me now to realize that when she looked at me, she might have seen the young woman she had been—neglected and unwanted. This may explain why in some rare moments she would glance at me, her eyes almost brimming with tears, and say, with a shake of her head, Poor Azi, poor, poor Azi!
ON THE THIRD DAY OF SCHOOL, when I got back to my room and saw the plateful of oranges and pistachios, I started crying. I felt helpless. The first class of the day was English literature and the book we were to read was Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing. I could not follow the husky Mrs. Weaver’s lecture. And it wasn’t just Shakespeare. The lovely biology teacher, the ill-tempered music teacher, and the bus conductor, all were equally incompre
hensible. Did I not have the highest grade in English back home? Why couldn’t I understand these people? My mother sat me down and murmured soothing words. She smoothed my hair, helped me take off my clothes and put on new ones, and as she placed the peeled oranges in my mouth, she said, “You know, you really don’t have to do this if you don’t want to. I can let your father know and you’ll be back in Tehran next week.”
“I thought you wanted me to come here, to make something of myself,” I said. Her eyes were soft as she continued, almost mechanically, to put oranges and pistachios into my mouth. “I wanted for you what I couldn’t have,” she said. “You know I was first in my class. My teacher Ozra Khanoom loved me more than any of her other students. She expected me to continue my education, like some of the other women in our family, like Ameh Hamdam or Mah Monir …”
She talked mainly to calm me down but then, I think, she talked also to revisit the ghosts of her own past. Ameh Hamdam was one of my mother’s heroines. She was among the first Iranian women to be sent to Europe for an education in the 1920s. After her return she did not marry but went to work right away, first as a teacher and later as provost at a well-known girls’ high school in Tehran. I remember her well, because she looked so different from the other women who came to our house. She wore little makeup and always dressed in soft browns. Sometimes, when we visited her house, as I sank into her soft, light-brown armchair and listened to the soothing drone of her calm and authoritative voice offset by my mother’s harried interjections, I wondered what it was that excited me about her. Was it her stories about the women my grandmother’s age who had carried guns under their black chadors to help the constitutionalists? She told me I owed a lot to these women because they were the ones who had built the first public schools for girls in Iran. They were beaten, ostracized, and sometimes even banished from their hometowns for their efforts. “Women,” she would say in her quiet drone, “have to fight for what they want, always. And not just in this country. It wasn’t so long ago that British women had to hand over all their money and property to their husbands.” She kept telling Mother, “This child has to appreciate the opportunities she has, she can’t take them for granted.”
Ameh Hamdam’s wedding. The bride, who did not get married until she was in her forties, is standing in the center in the white dress, with my mother’s father, Loghman Nafsi, to her right. Mother and I are in the front row.
It was only later that I came to understand what was genuinely romantic about her: in a society where “femininity” was so over-defined, her refusal to comply with conventional notions of womanhood was both courageous and exceptional. Women like her were pioneers—highly educated, usually unmarried—who dedicated themselves to their work and developed a style that was deliberately unfeminine.
And yet, Ameh Hamdam was pitied. Some felt she belonged to the category of women who had gone to waste, because they were unwomanly. Although her achievements were duly noted, she was not considered physically attractive. As in any puritanical culture, in the case of women, sex and respect did not mix well. When there was talk of sending me abroad for schooling, some of my mother’s friends reminded her that she should not encourage me to become like Ameh Hamdam, who finally, in her early forties, married a pharmacist with four children. This was the fate of overeducated women, we were told: to have to look after someone else’s children. I could never find much to pity in her condition. Her husband loved and respected her and she was devoted to her stepchildren, who in turn were devoted to her. It was not until much later that I realized how much better off she must have been than all those wagging tongues and nagging bores.
Allow me to return to that day in Lancaster, when my mother and I sat in the enormous room with its cheerful floral wallpaper, faded carpet, stately bed, and colorful duvet. She told me that her most ardent desire in life had been to become a doctor—like her brother, like her uncles, like so many in our family. But her father did not let her complete her studies after high school. I have often thought that I owe my education to my father, to his storytelling and to the intellectual space he and his family created for us. But that day, if it weren’t for my mother, for her understanding and the stories she told me, I would not have been able to continue. I began to believe that becoming an educated woman had little to do with being a good Iranian or making your family proud. Instead, here was a gift I could offer her. I wanted to become the woman she claimed she had wanted to be.
The trip to England and our shared three months became for me the embodiment of all that I loved and came to grieve for in my mother. When Mohammad and I needed her she turned soft and caring, as if her good genie had suddenly woken from a long sleep. In so many ways my mother saw and treated me as she herself had never been treated as a child and a young woman. She paid me all the attention that had been denied her. The irony is that, in order to become what she wanted me to be, I had to distance myself from her. I could not be her puppet. She never realized when I later learned to fend for myself how much she had accomplished.
Mother and me, saying good-bye in the Lancaster train station, that first December.
She left Lancaster early one afternoon in late December. It was a cold and cloudy day, a fact of which I am reminded by a picture of the two of us at the train station. I am wearing the brown raincoat she bought me, which we were both very proud of, and she a black-and-red overcoat. She is leaning toward me, smiling. Although neither one of us is looking at the camera, it is obvious that we are both very conscious of it. She is looking at me, with her hand on my back, as if for protection. Both her gesture and her expression are typical of how she appears in photos when she is expected to radiate family love and intimacy.
“I don’t want you to feel sad,” she said. She looked at me in such a piteous way, as if I had a terminal illness. “Before you know it, you will be back home for the summer. There, there,” she said with a smile. What would you have done had you been in my place?
CHAPTER 11
politics and intrigue
FOR A LONG TIME AFTER Mother left, I felt so displaced. It was not just the differences in language, culture, and environment that separated Lancaster from Tehran, or homesickness for family and friends, it was the shock of a sudden change in lifestyle, as different as the constant gray skies and rain in Lancaster were from the blue sunny skies of Tehran and its snow capped mountains. My life in Tehran had been framed and protected; almost every move was accounted for: my mother monitored what I ate, and I was always driven to and from school and attended no outings without my parents or their consent. Now I was all alone, with a guardian who did not know or care what I did. I was left pretty much to my own devices.
Most other young Iranians who were sent abroad went to boarding schools, but I was sent to an ordinary day school in a small town where most people had never heard the name Iran. I was the only foreigner in my school. The teachers were patient and cautious with me, and my classmates’ attitude was mainly one of amusement. They asked me questions tinged with some curiosity, in a tone that was both indulgent and mocking: How many camels do your parents own? Ever been kissed? It amused them to no end that I did not know what a hickey was or that I had once seriously asked a girl what a kiss tasted like. But soon I became one of them—almost. There were many eccentrics in the class and I was simply one of them. I had a number of friends: Sheila the sensitive artist and Elizabeth the joker, Dianna the studious one, and my best friend, Barbara. I believe Barbara and I became so close not just because of what we shared but because of our differences. Barbara: blue-eyed, short brown hair, always on the verge of a smile. Her friendship was soothing, because on the surface—and I believe to a great extent in reality—her life was so much less complicated than mine. She knew what she wanted. She had kind parents who lived modestly, enjoyed each other’s company, and seemed to be on the best terms with themselves and with their children. She was very intelligent but at fourteen had already found a steady boyfriend who proposed to her; he was kic
ked out by her father. With no forced sense of obligation to her family and country, she was happy in a carefree manner that I never was. I always felt a little guilty about being happy, a little anxious. There was an uncomplicated straightforwardness about Barbara that I loved. Of course no life is straightforward, but that is how she appeared to me then.
During the daytime, I was busy with school and my friends, but the nights were so lonely. I would usually retire to my room after dinner, around six thirty. The room was huge. I drew the curtains and left the light on even when I went to sleep. I often felt terribly alone, sad, and somewhat scared. So I read, I read every single book that I could get my hands on. The room was very cold and in order to heat it I had to drop shillings into the heater, which burnt you if you sat too close to it and never warmed you if you sat at a distance. So I started reading in bed, feeling secure and warm under the duvet with the hot water bottle next to me (around that time I read a book called How to Be an Alien. I still remember the line where it said that the Continental people have sex lives, the British have the hot water bottle). Two books were always by my bedside—the poems of Hafez and the poems of Forough Farrokhzad, the contemporary feminist poet. But mostly I read novels. That was how I made my home in this beautiful, gray, and damp place, populating my empty room by reading Dickens and Dostoevsky, Austen and Stendhal.
