Things I've Been Silent About

by Azar Nafisi

  “Nezhat asked me today to tell Azar not to visit me so often,” he writes at one point. “Has anyone heard of anything so ridiculous?” He wondered how he had become “not just her husband, but her friend, consultant, accountant, in fact her servant.” He would write her poems, which she ignored. I read them avidly and collected them.

  I WAS FIFTEEN when Behzad Sari’s mother asked for my hand in marriage. Her husband, who had recently died, had been a respected judge, and she, unlike us, had a very orderly family. She was a true matriarch, ruling over her family with an iron fist. My mother had her men friends, and father had his women friends, whom he admired for their character and strength. Parvin Dowlatabadi, a well-known poet, was one of these; Mrs. Sari, Behzad’s mother, was another. She was very ladylike and something of a character, too pushy for my taste, perhaps because I detected in her what I saw in my own mother: a will to control—only she was far more successful than Mother. She was the kind of person who was difficult to oppose or resist. The Saris were devoted to their social position, perhaps too much so, but were basically good people.

  When she proposed on her son’s behalf my father was still mayor of Tehran. Our families had recently grown closer and we saw them regularly, once or twice a week. Behzad was twenty-seven, neither good-looking nor ugly, sober, a hard worker. My parents thought that he would treat me with what was called respect. I had no tangible complaint, except that I thought he was dull and I did not love him. Yet my parents did not discourage the match, perhaps because of our close relations with his family. They left it up in the air, which meant that they politely told Mrs. Sari it was up to me and I was as yet too young to decide, but they encouraged her to think that my will could be changed with time.

  When my father went to jail it was a point in Behzad’s favor that his family still wanted me to marry their son. Behzad’s steadfastness had become a recommendation now that my father was out of favor. I was invited to their house, where small gifts were exchanged and I was subjected to extreme flattery “I used to think it was her lips, but look at that nose,” Mrs. Sari would tell her daughter, scrutinizing me. I felt like a cadaver in anatomy class. Whenever Behzad approached I busied myself with his one-year-old nephew. Everything about them bored me, except for that nephew and the juicy stories about Behzad’s sister, who could have easily played the role of a naughty nun. She had an innocent air about her, with her round face, enormous pale blue downcast eyes, and porcelain skin, offset by a generous display of cleavage. Rumors circulated that she had eloped with a Don Juan type, but that her mother had brought her back to the fold through a hasty, well-connected marriage.

  Her brother had none of these exciting qualities. He was a successful engineer, stable and straightforward. That is why my parents liked him. When he came to our house one day with a bunch of roses to ask me for my final answer, I panicked and said, “I don’t want to marry yet. It’s not you, I’m just not ready for it.” He stopped me as if he had not heard me and said, “I am getting old. I can’t wait any longer, I need to know now. Soon.” The longing in his eyes alarmed me.

  Before my father’s arrest, my parents were content to say that I was too young to marry. They both told Behzad and his family that were I to marry, the one condition was that I should be allowed to continue my education. But suddenly the shock of my father’s continued imprisonment made everything plausible. If we lived in a world where fortunes could be made and unmade so arbitrarily, then girls who were supposed to continue their education could also marry at sixteen or seventeen or eighteen, not because they were in love but because there was a decent guy from a good family offering the promise of security. No one would force me, but no one would allow me to go out with boys my own age, either. It was not long before I announced my refusal, which both he and his family reacted to with some disappointment but also with good grace. And the truth was that I was attracted to another man, completely the opposite of Behzad. He was tall, handsome, romantic, and confident. He spoke with a mellow voice about poetry and philosophy. More important, this man was also in love with someone else, which made him more intriguing and desirable.

  MOST WOMEN ARE TURNED ON BY LOOKS OR CHEMISTRY, BUT YOU CAN BE SEDUCED BY CONVERSATION. When a friend told me this a long time ago—we were sitting on bar stools at a café in Tehran after the revolution eating ham sandwiches, which were now forbidden and secretly sold to trusted clients, and discussing A Night at the Opera and Johnny Guitar—the conversation was so intriguing that at that moment I was prepared to vote him, who was normal-looking in the extreme, the most seductive man in the world. “I’ve never met a woman who could be so turned on by a conversation about Woody Allen,” he said.

  He had a point. I had a strong attraction to men who stirred my intellect. In one sense I could say I had inherited this trait from my parents. There was Father’s love of philosophy and literature and Mother’s appetite for stimulating political conversations with her “men friends.” Reading my letters from England, written when I was in my early teens, I am amazed at how much I try to impress my father by pontificating and talking about books.

  My conversion to Woody Allen had taken some time. Between ten and thirteen my favorite movie star was Yul Brynner, whom I yearned for in part because of his unrequited love for Deborah Kerr—apparently both on- and offscreen. I used to collect his pictures. My father hated this and one afternoon, as one fell from a book I was reading, he made me bring him all my pictures of Yul—as I affectionately called him—and he tore them up. For a while I was (sometimes I think I still am) infatuated with Dirk Bogarde, with that cryptic smile of his and eyes that looked beyond you even as they fixed you. The heartbreaking discovery that he was not interested in women did not deter me from my affection. And then, sometime in my early twenties, I fell in love with Woody Allen. My classmates would look at me with shock and a bit of pity, but I felt superior; at any rate I couldn’t help it, the heart does what the heart feels, as the master himself stated decades later.

  When I fell for Mehran Osuli, I was in transition between Yul Brynner and Dirk Bogarde. I think that Mehran may have hastened my move toward Woody Allen, though they looked nothing alike. He was good-looking and tall, with light-brown hair and eyes, and a beautiful soothing voice. He looked a little like an American football player, the kind with a secret urge to become a great writer or philosopher. My infatuation began when I was fifteen and he was twenty-one, a second-year law student at the University of Tehran. The wife of one of my younger uncles, Hussein, had four handsome brothers, all very popular with the girls. Mehran was the most serious. He showed little interest in the games played by love-struck girls. I can pinpoint the night I fell for him. We were at his house with Uncle Hussein and his young wife, engaging over dinner in a heated discussion about The Nature of Love. At first Mehran seemed detached. While the rest of us interrupted one another constantly, he sat back and dropped a few choice comments. His beautiful voice took my breath away. As the night progressed, it suddenly seemed as if he and I were the only ones talking. I brought up Rudabeh and Zal from the Shahnameh, Mathilde and Julien Sorel from The Red and the Black, and suddenly he quoted a well-known Persian proverb. “You have not suffered hunger to forget love,” he said, meaning love is for the satiated idle.

  Then he turned to leave. To me this most mundane utterance was full of hidden meaning. I was convinced that he addressed it to me and that what he meant was the reverse of what the proverb implied.

  Mehran did relish his role as a romantic hero. He led me to believe that he was hopelessly in love with his best friend’s older sister. That is how our relation began: with his telling me in detail about her. He loved the idea of unrequited love. I was so docile and easily impressed by his wise remarks. In time he would tell me about the first time he told her that he loved her. What I remember is not so much his recounting of the story as the incident itself, as if I had been there, observing their every move from behind the dining-room curtain. After lunch, everyone leaves
except for the two of them. A popular love song is playing—one that I remember to this day. They are standing by the dining-room table and she is about to leave when he says, “Wait, I have something to tell you.” In my imagination she turns her head, perhaps surprised, perhaps not, with a silent smile. In these accounts his fickle beloved is always silent, always the recipient of his passionate courtship.

  It seems to me now that his stories did more to attract me to him than his handsome features did. For a while I saw him regularly; we met on weekly mountain-climbing expeditions organized by my uncle Hussein. During these few hours every Friday we would walk and talk a little apart from the others. As I scrambled up a difficult rock he would hold his hand out to help me up. At first I refused, feeling brave and independent, but after a while I accepted and he held my hand longer than necessary. Sometimes he would gaze into my eyes as he let go of my hand with an expression of infinite tenderness and concern, as if I were a stray creature from some impossible fairy tale. Pausing at a high point to gaze at a magnificent view of Tehran, he would write her name in the dirt with a stick and then wipe it out with his boots. I stood beside him, distracted, feeling for him and pretending a lack of concern. I never quite knew why he loved this woman. He never described her as beautiful, or intelligent, or possessing any special qualities. She was just the older sister of his best friend.

  Gradually the hand-holding became more frequent and we talked less and less about her. Instead we spent hours talking about my “situation.” For I did have a situation with my mother. I acted like his little sister and he would give me advice and write me cute little notes. Then at some point I replaced the older sister in his affections, a shift which he demonstrated by becoming highly jealous and possessive and by giving me the Persian translation of Hemingway’s worst and most sentimental book, Across the River and into the Trees. He addressed me as Aye Hija Mia (O my girl). But that came much later.

  SOME FAMILIES try to cover up their tensions in front of strangers, but for Mother, a woman otherwise so insistent on social etiquette, no such niceties existed. She gave in to her emotions regardless of where she was. I tried not to let her know about my interest in Mehran but she had a hunter’s instinct, alert and sensitized to my secret hideaways. Her instinct was helped, in this instance, by daily intrusions into the most private corners of her children’s lives. She listened in on my phone conversations, read my letters and diaries, and walked in and out of my room whenever she felt like it. I could never be certain which I resented more, the fact that she read my diary and letters or that she never allowed me to feel indignant about her actions: she would use her new evidence as proof of my betrayals.

  Let us pause on one particular day. It is late fall, when the dry cold of Tehran settles on the still-tender leaves. My feelings and emotions are in harmony with the change of season. Fall in Tehran is beautiful, but I loved the winters with their mixture of sun and snow, when one can almost smell the crisp air. I am being driven from Father’s jail to another location, to Shahpour Avenue. Parliament is in session, but Mother has sent the car to pick me up. Against my better judgment I tell the driver to take me to Mehran’s house. I say, casually, “You need not wait for me, I’m picking up some stuff here and will go straight on to my class afterward.” Mother is very much against my visiting Mehran or any of my uncles, but it is something I do regularly. Once, when she discovered I had gone to Mehran’s family’s house without telling her, she came to their door and demanded that I follow her home. That first time was embarrassing, but afterward, having witnessed my predicament, everyone became actively sympathetic. How to solve Azar’s problems with her mother became a topic of endless discussion. They were now not just friends but also co conspirators.

  My heart pounds in the late autumn chill. I am wearing my light red coat and pull the collar up, so that it rubs against my skin. The whole situation is exciting and romantic. I tell the driver to drop me off in front of a narrow alley. This is the old part of Tehran, with small spice shops, dusty narrow alleys with dry streams winding into houses with tall protective walls. As I near their house I take out my small bottle of perfume and pat Nina Ricci’s L’Air du Temps on my wrists, behind my ears. I ring the bell. The door opens and I walk a few steps down to the cobbled yard with its ancient tree and small round pool and cool ground-floor rooms.

  About an hour later the bell rings and there is a pounding on the door. My heart stops. I know it must be my mother; she would have interrogated the driver as to my whereabouts. “Where is she? I know she’s here,” she shouts. “She’s not here,” says Morad, Mehran’s youngest brother, “you can come in and look for yourself.” We have become more savvy and this time she cannot find me. After she leaves I wait for about ten minutes before heading out. I walk a maze of winding alleys into the main street—where I am confronted by my mother.

  I lie (I am now good at lying). I tell her I went to the house to borrow some books—I show her the books and say that as soon as I pressed the bell they told me she had been there, looking for me, so I hurried back. “I must have just missed you,” I say innocently. “And what were you doing before that,” she says, acting unconcerned. “I … I went for a long walk!” That did not help me, but the trick was to persevere. Even if she knew I was lying, and she did, I had to stick to my story. After a while the most absurd lie would take on the color of truth. Such encounters were not about facts, anyway: they had their own logic and at some point, when our emotions had run their course, the original reason for the flare-up would be forgotten. Years later, after the Islamic Revolution, I would experience a similar dynamic on a far larger scale. We would play their game. We invented the most preposterous stories to account for why our breath smelled of alcohol, why our lips were stained with makeup, what that tape by a banned popular foreign singer was doing on the dashboard of our car, and, with the offer of a smaller or larger bribe depending on the circumstances, we would be let off. For weeks after that, at different parties, our pathetic victory would become a topic of jokes.

  The first thing she does before letting me off at the British Council for my English class is to inform me that I cannot go mountain climbing that Friday. I can’t complain to Father, whom I try to shield from our confrontations, though I know she will make a point of bringing up my transgression when she next visits him. (“Why does Nezhat think that I’ve had this daughter by another wife?” he asks several times in his diary.) But even in jail, despite the private complaints and public fights, my father never forgets to remind me of Mother’s hardships, her need for love, and of my duty to understand and support her.

  When I get up the next morning I find her busy arranging her coffee session. I follow her from the dining room to the kitchen to her bedroom, begging her to let me go mountain climbing, but she won’t budge. Then she turns around and says, “In fact, never again will you go on this ridiculous expedition.” I tell her I will go with or without her consent. “What do you want from me?” she starts to shout, “Will you not rest until I die?” I look at her blankly and say nothing. But my mind is not blank. I feel I want to do something terrible—throw a glass at a wall, cry hysterically until my whimpers give way to helpless mumblings and she melts and comes toward me. “There, there,” she will say, “stop crying.”

  “You’re not my daughter,” she says angrily. Already in my mind a faded image takes hold, of Mathilde in Stendhal’s The Red and the Black holding Julien Sorel’s severed head on her lap. “You and your father …” she screams as the image in my mind gains color and detail. Mathilde is in the carriage and the sound of horses’ hooves grows louder and louder—I hear my mother’s voice, the horses’ hooves, and Mathilde’s silence. Gradually I control my urge to shout and cry. But since she has not achieved her purpose, which is to reduce me to hysterical tears, she will not speak to me for the next two days.

  I say, “I am going, you can’t stop me.” Now both of us are shouting. The doorbell rings, but we don’t pay attention. She says
she has not brought me up to be a tramp. “Is this,” she says with fury, “why you wanted to stay in Tehran? Not because of your father, not because you feel anything for him, but to go prancing around the city with God knows who?” At this I finally burst into tears. “I can’t live in this house anymore,” I say. “I can’t stand it.” We don’t notice my brother emerging from his room, standing in the middle of the hall, nor do we hear the sound of the front door opening.

  A few minutes later Aunt Mina comes in. I am still crying. Mother kisses Aunt Mina, who takes hold of my hand. “I can’t stand it,” I say, “I don’t want to stay here anymore.” Aunt Mina says, “It’s okay, don’t worry,” and softly moves me toward my room and sends my brother for a glass of water. I can hear my mother’s angry voice fading as she walks down the stairs toward the kitchen. Aunt Mina sits down and talks to me like a grown-up, as if she is sharing a confidence. “I don’t know,” she says, “how Nezhat can be so cruel to herself and to those she loves.” “She calls me names,” I stammer. “She says I’m waiting for her to die.” “She doesn’t mean it,” Aunt Mina says gently, handing me the glass of water and sending my brother away. “Yes, she does. She says I’m like the rest, after her money.” “She says that,” Aunt Mina tells me, “because she can’t say it to those who actually hurt her.”

  Mother brought out the best and worst in us. By taking away our private spaces, we were forced to create other secret realms of our own, often by engaging our imagination. My father escaped into his garden, his poetry, and his work. I can still picture his expression in the mornings, when he would bring a plateful of aromatic jasmine petals to the table, or when, on trips to our villa by the Caspian, he would suddenly stop the car and plunge into the woods in search of wildflowers to plant in the garden. From time to time he would call me—deep into some novel I was reading, lying lazily on the couch—and summon me outside to see some amazing flower in bloom. I escaped into stories: Rudabeh was my role model, Julien Sorel my lover, Natasha Rostova, Elizabeth Bennet, Catherine Earnshaw, and numerous other heroines of literature my ladies-in-waiting, who would help me find that elusive self I hoped to become. How various and wonderful that imaginary world was compared to the one in which I lived!