by Azar Nafisi
When Negar was exactly three months old, when I had just fed her and was changing her and she was lying on my bed, looking at me with a mixture of mischief and seriousness, it suddenly struck me that she had come to me as a gift. Opening up to her I opened up to myself—I could not be that bad if this miraculous creature depended on me and seemed to love me so. By the time my son, Dara, was born, on September 15, 1985, the bombings of Tehran had resumed. I spent the months before his birth in fear that something would go wrong with the baby. There were rumors of children being born retarded or paralyzed because their mothers had been overanxious. So I became overanxious about my anxiety. I stayed up at night during blackouts and I would read by candlelight, book after book, exchanging Raymond Chandler for Henry James, Sadegh Hedayat for Bahr am Sadeghi, with one hand on my stomach as if my hand could prevent the fetus from seeing or hearing what was going on in the world outside. Suddenly an unconquerable fear would overtake me. What if he is stillborn?
Bijan, Negar, and me at the Caspian Sea.
One night, I remember, I suddenly felt that I was having a heart attack. I couldn’t breathe and at that moment I did not think of my husband, who was sleeping next to me, but of my mother. I took a candle and walked down the stairs (her door to the internal staircase was always open when she was home). I did not knock, I just went in and woke her up. She did not protest or ask why I had woken her up at three in the morning. She called a heart surgeon who was a distant cousin, woke him up, and explained the symptoms. She came back with a glass of water and a Valium in her hand. “Now, now, you’ll be okay,” she said. “Just take this, one pill won’t hurt your baby, and you’ll feel better.” She sat by me, massaging my back. I said, “Mom, what if this child is harmed, what if he is already dead?” She laughed lightly. “Nothing will happen to the child unless something happens to his mother. Let’s take care of you first.” She made me sleep in her bed that night, while she slept on a light mattress at the foot of the bed.
Dara’s birth put an end to my fears. The war continued for another three years, and during the last year, when Tehran was the target of incessant bombings and many fled the city, we stayed on. Never again did I feel the same kind of fear or anxiety from the bombs that I had experienced in the years before he was born. Contrary to my morbid prognostications, Dara was not only healthy but exceptionally tender and calm (“Just like Mohammad,” my mother said, “such a good-natured baby”). He was so calm that his passionate persistence about certain things always took us by surprise. When he was barely two, almost every time he looked at a picture book he either wanted to enter the book or to catch certain objects in it. He loved the moon. He would not let me turn the page, and kept pointing at the moon, and saying, “Mah, Mah.” I think in fact they have not changed much, Negar with her infinite curiosity, and Dara with his quiet desire to catch the moon.
WHEN I THINK OF MY father’s dream of a happy marriage, I am often reminded of a recurring theme in fiction: how our dreams become tainted by reality, how we can turn them into desperate obsessions for which we sacrifice that essential sense of dignity and integrity that we yearn for when we indulge in a dream. Had he never left my mother, my father’s personal life might have been considered tragic, but now that he had taken this step—too late and not in the right way—he had lost his chance and with it his good name. Both my parents claimed they wanted their problems to remain private, but Mother’s outbursts in front of perfect strangers and my father’s protests and grievances made their relationship a matter of public gossip and speculation. “So many men leave their wives every day,” he would complain. “They remain friends long afterward, but I can never tear myself free of Nezhat; forever I am to be her slave.”
I remember the day he told me with excitement that he had a great surprise for me as we drove to the Independence Hotel—the Tehran Hilton before the revolution. When we arrived at the hotel, Shahin was sitting there, chic and upbeat. I was a little bewildered because I knew he had planned to marry Ziba Khanoom. Father explained that Shahin and her husband had been in London. He went on to say, in a tone filled with sympathy and understanding, that her husband was a horrible man who squandered his wealth on gambling and did not give her enough to live on because he was concerned that if she had enough money she would leave him. She lived in an apartment in Tehran while her husband spent most of his time abroad.
Almost twelve years had passed since I had last seen her; small talk about materialism and spirituality did not excite me anymore. I preferred the simple Ziba Khanoom, who had no such pretenses and whose possessiveness of my father was up-front and genuine. Ziba Khanoom had shown a certain regard for him. She had destroyed her own marriage, and when there was a danger that my father might be arrested by the revolutionary guards, she had given him shelter and driven him to the revolutionary court. I had heard her speak, her voice still filled with emotion, of the hours she had spent in the car with tears welling up in her eyes, waiting to know his fate. With Shahin I had seen no such emotion. “She seems altogether too pleased with herself,” Bijan said when he first met her, and he didn’t see much reason why she should be. Once, when Father was giving me a lift home, he casually asked me, “Which do you prefer, Shahin or Ziba?” It was a startling question, and I was rather dismayed that he would ask it of me. I said, “I don’t know, they are two different people.” I wanted to ask him why he asked me such a question, wasn’t he going to marry Ziba? But I said nothing and he did not pursue the subject. When a few weeks later he broke off with Ziba, I was amazed. Later I asked him the reason, and he said she was too jealous of his love for his children.
After that, Father would take me and the children to Shahin’s house while her husband was away—and he seemed to be away most of the time. We would eat, and inspect the clothes she had designed. Private trunk shows had become fashionable, especially of clothes designed with traditional Persian motifs. I bought some from her and felt slightly guilty. At first he paid for her trunk show, then she and her mother bought a small apartment and he paid for the bedroom furniture as a housewarming gift. He tried to convince me that she was oppressed by her horrid husband, who held her prisoner and did not allow her to use her talents. My father always seemed to need an excuse for his relationships. With my mother it was her dead mother, her terrible stepmother, her dead husband; with Ziba, her husband’s indifference; and now, with Shahin, we had the gambler husband, a profligate, uncaring father, a brother who was an addict, and a mother—like your own, he would say with a winning smile, you and Shahin are so alike—who loved her son far more than this dedicated daughter.
Mother drew up a long list of complaints. For starters she claimed that their divorce was not legal: she had never consented to it. “He has friends in high places,” she said, “he’s in cahoots with the government and he had them forge phony divorce papers.” My father insisted that she had been granted a divorce in absentia. The court had served her many notices and she had ignored them all, including the last notice, which informed her that if she did not appear in court the divorce would automatically go through. I can imagine her feeling of humiliation at being summoned to court by her own husband.
One thing my parents had never quarreled about was money. She had accused him of not standing up for her against her stepmother over her father’s inheritance and she gave him a hard time about money issues while he was in jail, but she did not question his integrity. She trusted him with her money, and never asked for deeds and documents. My parents’ apparent disdain for money had made my brother and me careless too. We vaguely knew that our mother had inherited land and that, as time went by, some of the land she had been left had sold well. We knew that our father had bought our villa near the Caspian Sea out of his own money, and later two islands which he shared with some friends and some acres of land by the Caspian with my uncle, some of which he had been forced to sell to pay his debts when he left jail. He made more money in business than he ever had in government, and my brother and
I knew that our parents had transferred most of the land and property they owned to our names, including a large apartment in one of the best locations in Paris. Mother believed that all of this should be in our names because it was all ours anyway. It amazed me that here was a woman who would not give me a favorite vase for fear I might break it, but who trusted us with all her property. After the revolution I think this was done out of prudence as well. My parents were unable to sell anything under their names and some of their property by the Caspian was appropriated by the Islamic regime.
My father had left my mother in an apartment which, she never failed to remind us, was not in her name. He also sent her a small monthly stipend. For her to be on such a stipend, dependent on my father’s generosity, was another humiliation. For the first time she demanded the deeds to the property. Father explained that he had been her accountant all his adult life and he had taken his share and given her hers. He sent in letters with detailed accounts of what had been purchased and what had been spent and insisted that he had not taken anything with him. But in the meantime he had us authorize him to sell the apartment in France and he had power of attorney over all the other property. She blamed me and my brother and, after my brother left Iran, me alone for not defending her, for conspiring with Father to take all her money. Despite my sympathy and the fact that for the first time I genuinely felt she was justified in some of her grievances, I could not bring myself to extract the power of attorney from him.
Father was careful to keep in constant contact with us. He called almost every day, usually from his office. Apart from his weekly visits to us, he would sometimes come by in the afternoon or on weekends, when we took the children to the park. He bought Negar a canary when she was three years old. She claimed that every time Babaii (their nickname for my father) visited, he whistled to the canary and the bird would start chirping in response. One morning she found the canary dead in its cage and that whole day and night she cried. It was a day after the Persian New Year and Father took Negar to the garden, where they buried the canary by his favorite rosebush. He promised to buy her a new one but she woke me up that night and said, “I don’t want another canary or any other animal, because they die.”
I remember one day, at the very start of spring, there is a chill in the air. Our son Dara is crying—very rare for him—and stamping his feet as I try to get him to put on a light jacket. Negar is in her red hand-knit jacket with small yellow flowers (courtesy of Maman Nessi—my children’s nickname for Mother) and is standing obediently, ready to go, looking at Dara as if to say, Look at me, here I am, making no fuss, ready to go. “What’s wrong with this child?” Father asks, “I’ve seldom seen him cry.” “He wants a Zorro cos tume,” Negar volunteers. Zorro? Ap parently one of the kids in his kindergarten class had come to school with one. Dara is an even-tempered child, he gives up his toys to others with equanimity, but every once in a while he is caught by passion for something—a football, red boots, his dad’s pipe, the moon—and then a little devil seems to take over, his soft chubby cheeks puff up with excitement, his eyes glow, and his entire body is focused on the object of his desire.
The cousins: Sanam, Dara, and Negar.
“He is being a spoiled brat,” I say. His nanny, Tahmineh, who cannot tolerate his tears, already has tears in her own eyes. “Here, here,” she says, as she gently buttons his jacket (another gift from Maman Nessi, dark blue with a red dog knitted on the right breast and two small pockets that Tahmineh joon has filled with candy). “I will make you a Zorro costume,” she says, “and a Superman costume. Just wait a few days, we’ll go shopping for the material together.”
Soon, Dara has calmed down and is talking to my father about Superman and Zorro. “I want to be like them,” he says, “when I grow up.” “Why Zorro?” my father says with disbelief. “There are so many great Iranian heroes, why don’t you want to be like Rostam, or Kaveh?” he asks. “You know who Kaveh is? He saved Iran from the terrible rule of Zahak. When you were born, I was hoping you would be named Kaveh.”
Dara says, “I don’t like Iranian heroes, they hurt my mother. They have guns and they want to kill us.” My father is visibly startled. “Things were not always like this,” he says quietly. “When she was a child, your mother could go anywhere and do anything.” “Then I want it to be then,” Dara says, and we leave it at that.
I believe Dara’s behavior was triggered by an incident a few weeks earlier. It had been a national holiday, and Bijan and I had decided to take the children to the mountains, near the village of Darakeh on the outskirts of Tehran, about twenty minutes from our house where there was an easy trail. We had a lovely day, the children sang, Bijan joked, we ate kabob, sitting outside despite the slight chill. We were the picture of a happy family.
On our way back down the mountain, Negar and I took the lead. My daughter was telling me a story about the misadventures of a vainglorious cock when suddenly a voice shouted out, “Hey, Hejabeto dorost kon” (Hey, adjust your veil!). I turned around and a young man was walking very close behind us. I ignored him, holding tightly onto Negar’s hand and walking faster. “Hey, didn’t you hear me? I told you to cover your hair.” Negar looked up at me with apprehension. “Don’t pay attention,” I said, “just walk on.” “Hey, hey you! Are you deaf?” he called. I stopped. “I am not deaf,” I said slowly. “It’s none of your business how I wear my scarf.” I don’t know what got into me. Sometimes I wondered what was the point of not wearing a scarf properly, and why I did not just shut my mouth and do as they said.
“We don’t want sluts in this country,” he said. “Haven’t you heard, there has been a revolution.”
That was when I started shouting. Bijan and Dara had now quickened their steps to catch up with us. Bijan is a very calm person, he always keeps his cool and his dignity. Time and again he has told me that I should accept where I live and voice my protests differently. We have had fights when I accused him of being insensitive, of not empathizing with my predicament as a woman, and he tells me, with a calm that makes me want to shout louder, that I am being unreasonable and childish, I never see the good side of things. He hates these thugs as much as I do, he says, with some desperation in his voice, and yet, Azi jan, this is our country. I love it, I take both the good and the bad, and I try to change it. But this time Bijan was not so philosophical. Turning to the young man, he shouted, “How dare you?”
“Why don’t you do something about your wife?” the man said scornfully. “It’s your duty to keep her in control.” (Unruly women were supposed to be kept in check by their men.) From that point on, Negar, Dara, and I stood to one side, watching my soft-spoken husband lose his cool.
“Let’s take this to the committee,” the man finally said. The regime encouraged upright citizens to perform their religious duty by reporting acts of immorality to the proper authorities. The local revolutionary committee was at the end of the trail, near the parking lot in the village of Darakeh. As the young man walked ahead with a belligerent swagger, Bijan and I trailed behind, each holding on to a child’s hand all through that interminable walk. At some point first Dara and then Negar burst into tears, dragging their feet reluctantly as we pulled them along. Bijan and I were arguing, while the customers in teahouses and restaurants along the way, who were quite familiar with such sights, came out to cheer us and boo our assailant.
As we walked down through the village, shop owners and passersby joined the protest: “Let ’em go, let ’em go,” they chanted, cheering us and cursing him. “Look what you’ve done to Islam. You call yourself a Muslim, treating God’s creatures in this manner!” Three or four young boys followed our procession, gleefully booing until we reached the committee door. To our great relief, there was no one inside.
We were lucky: everyone had gone to the city for the big demonstrations. The man said, “You stand here, I’ll be back.” We stood as instructed for a few minutes, and then bolted out the door and ran to our car. All through the drive back ho
me, the children sat tearfully in the backseat and Bijan and I kept repeating how lucky we were to get away. Others had spent days in jail or been flogged for lesser offenses. I turned to the children and asked Negar to sing her song about Khroos Zari. I said something silly to Dara, but unlike earlier, the children were very quiet.
Negar and Dara at kindergarten.
That day when Dara chose Zorro over Rostam and Kaveh, I believe he must have been thinking of our day in the mountains. My father said, “Your children were born in this land where you were born, and your father and your father’s father and those before them. We each have gone through hardships, through bad times and good times, but that has never made us turn our backs on this country. This regime can confiscate our possessions but we cannot let it take away our culture and our faith.”
THROUGHOUT THE EIGHT-YEAR WAR, when Tehran had been the target of Iraq’s off-and-on bombings and rocket attacks, Bijan went to work as regularly as possible, even after a rocket fell close to his offices, causing the building considerable damage and breaking all the windows. Under the circumstances, hanging on to normalcy seemed the most important imperative. It is easier now to see various events in relation to one another, but at the time everything seemed to happen in fragments, without the continuity implied by a routine.
I started teaching again around 1987. I had not taught since my expulsion from the University of Teh ran in 1982, spending the intervening years writing, mainly about fiction and modern Persian literature. I never returned to the University of Tehran (too many bad memories), and chose to teach at Allameh Tabatabai University, an amalgamation of twenty-three colleges and small universities that had been centralized after the revolution. This university was more liberal than others, and the head of the English department was a wonderful linguist, respected in his field and interested in keeping the quality of work high. During the war classes were held irregularly; I taught two days a week anyway and spent most of my time at home either writing or preparing for my classes.
