by Azar Nafisi
I remember all we had in the refrigerator were eggs and tomatoes, and we made a tomato omelette. Two weeks later we had a feast. Each one of my girls had cooked something special—rice and lamb, potato salad, dolmeh, saffron rice and a big round cake. My family joined us, and we all gathered around the table, joking and laughing. Madame Bovary had done what years of teaching at the university had not: it created a shared intimacy.
During the years they came to my house, they knew my family, my kitchen, my bedroom, the way I dressed and walked and talked at home. I had never set foot in their houses, I never met the traumatized mother, the delinquent brother, the shy sister. I could never place or locate their private narrative within a context, a locality. Yet I had met all of them in the magical space of my living room. They came to my house in a disembodied state of suspension, bringing to my living room their secrets, their pains and their gifts.
Gradually my life and family became part of the landscape, moving in and out of the living room during the breaks. Tahereh Khanoom would sometimes join in and tell us stories about her part of town, as she liked to call it. One day my daughter, Negar, burst in crying. She was hysterical. Between tears she kept saying she couldn’t cry there; she didn’t want to cry in front of them. Manna went into the kitchen and came back with Tahereh Khanoom and a glass of water. I went to Negar, held her in my arms and tried to calm her. Gently I took off her navy scarf and robe; under that thick scarf her hair was damp with sweat. Unbuttoning her uniform, I asked her to tell us what had happened.
That day in the middle of her last class—science—the principal and the morality teacher had barged in and told the girls to put their hands on their desks. The entire class had been escorted out of the classroom, without any explanation, their schoolbags searched for weapons and contraband: tapes, novels, friendship bracelets. Their bodies were searched, their nails inspected. One student, a girl who had returned from the United States the previous year with her family, was taken to the principal’s office: her nails were too long. There, the principal herself had cut the girl’s nails, so close that she had drawn blood. Negar had seen her classmate after they were dismissed, in the school yard, waiting to go home, nursing the guilty finger. The morality teacher stood beside her, discouraging other students from approaching. For Negar, the fact that she couldn’t even go near and console her friend was as bad as the whole trauma of the search. She kept saying, Mom, she just doesn’t know about our rules and regulations; you know, she just came back from America—how do you think she feels when they force us to trample on the American flag and shout, Death to America? I hate myself, I hate myself, she repeated as I rocked her back and forth and wiped the mixture of sweat and tears from her soft skin.
This of course diverted the whole class. Everyone tried to distract Negar by joking and telling her stories of their own, how once Nassrin had been sent to the disciplinary committee to have her eyelashes checked. Her lashes were long, and she was suspected of using mascara. That’s nothing, said Manna, next to what happened to my sister’s friends at the Amir Kabir Polytechnic University. During lunch three of the girls were in the yard eating apples. They were reprimanded by the guards: they were biting their apples too seductively! After a while Negar was laughing with them, and she finally went with Tahereh Khanoom to have her lunch.
18
Imagine you are walking down a leafy path. It is early spring before sundown, around six P.M. The sun is receding, and you are walking alone, caressed by the breezy light of the late afternoon. Then, suddenly, you feel a large drop on your right arm. Is it raining? You look up. The sky is still deceptively sunny: only a handful of clouds linger here and there. Seconds later, another drop. Then, with the sun still perched in the sky, you are drenched in a shower of rain. This is how memories invade me, abruptly and unexpectedly: drenched, I am suddenly left alone again on the sunny path, with a memory of the rain.
I have said that we were in that room to protect ourselves from the reality outside. I have also said that this reality imposed itself on us, like a petulant child who would not give his frustrated parents a moment to themselves. It created and shaped our intimacies, throwing us into unexpected complicity. Our relations became personal in many different ways. Not only did the most ordinary activities gain a new luminosity in the light of our secret, but everyday life sometimes took on the quality of make-believe or fiction. We had to reveal aspects of ourselves to one another that we didn’t even know existed. I constantly felt I was being undressed in front of perfect strangers.
19
A few weeks ago, while driving down the George Washington Memorial Parkway, my children and I were reminiscing about Iran. I noticed with a sudden misgiving the alien tone they had adopted when talking about their own country. They kept repeating “they,” “they over there.” Over where? Where you buried your dead canary by a rose-bush with your grandfather? Where your grandmother brought you chocolates we had forbidden you to eat? They did not remember many things. Some memories made them sad and nostalgic; others they dismissed. The names of my parents, Bijan’s aunt and uncle, our close friends, they evoked like magic mantras joyfully taking shape and disappearing with each utterance.
What triggered our reminiscences? Was it the Doors CD that my children were so accustomed to hearing in Iran? They had bought it for me for Mother’s Day, and we were listening to it in the car. Jim Morrison’s seductively nonchalant voice purred from the stereo: “I’d like to have another kiss . . .” His voice stretched and curved and twisted while we talked and laughed. “She’s a twentieth-century fox,” he intoned. . . . Some memories bore them, some excite them, like when they make fun of their mother, dancing all over the place from the hall to the living room, singing, “C’mon baby light my fire . . .” They tell me they have already forgotten so much; so many faces have become dim. When I ask them, Do you remember this or that? most often they don’t. Now Jim Morrison has moved to a song by Brecht: “Oh show me the way to the next whiskey bar,” he sings, and we accompany him on the next line, “Oh, don’t ask why. . . .” Even while we lived in Iran, they, like most kids of their background, had little affection for Persian music. For them, Persian music was identified with political songs and military marches—for pleasure they turned somewhere else. I was shocked to realize that their childhood memories of songs and films in Iran would be the Doors, the Marx Brothers and Michael Jackson.
They liven up to one memory. This one is surprisingly clear; they fill in all the details I had forgotten. As it comes back to me and images form in my mind, their voices interrupting one another, Jim Morrison fades into the background. Yes, Yassi was there that day, wasn’t she? They remember my whole class, but Yassi is the one they remember most, because at a certain point she became so much a part of our family. They all did: Azin, Nima, Manna, Mahshid and Nassrin were frequent visitors. They used to spoil my children, bringing them gifts, despite my disapproval. My family had accepted these intruders as another one of my eccentricities, with tolerance and curiosity.
It happened in the summer of 1996, when my two children were home from school. It was a lazy morning. We had puttered about the house and prepared breakfast late. Yassi had stayed over the night before. She did that regularly now, so we came to expect her. She slept in a spare room next to the living room that was supposed to be my office, but it was too noisy for me; I had moved my office downstairs, to a basement room with windows opening onto the small garden.
It was an odds-and-ends room, with a desk and a very old laptop, some books, my winter clothes and Yassi’s makeshift bed and lamp. Sometimes she spent hours in that room, with the lights turned off, because of her headaches. Almost every time she came from a visit to her hometown, she had these headaches. That morning she looked radiant, I remember. This is how I see her: in the kitchen or in the hall, standing or sitting. I imagine her mimicking some comical professor, doubling over with laughter.
That summer there were many days when Yassi would follow me
around the house, telling me stories. Our place was mainly in the kitchen or the hall, and I enjoyed the fact that, unlike the grown-ups and like my own children, she actually liked my cooking. She loved my so-called pancakes and French toast, my concoctions of eggs, tomatoes and vegetables. Never once did she smile the indulgent smile that my grown-up friends gave me, as if to say, When will you learn? As I cooked or chopped, she would move with me and spin stories, mostly about her classes. Negar, who was eleven by then, would join us and the three of us would talk for hours.
That day Yassi was holding forth on her favorite subject: her uncles. She had five uncles and three aunts. One uncle had been killed by the Islamic Republic, and the rest lived in the United States or Europe. The women were the backbone of the family, the ones on whom everyone depended. They worked at home and they worked outside the home. Their marriages had been arranged, at a very young age, to much older men, and apart from one of the sisters—Yassi’s mother—they all had to put up with spoiled, nagging husbands, inferior to them intellectually and in every other way.
It was the men, the uncles, who always held the promise of the future for Yassi. They were like Peter Pan, descending every once in a while from never-never land. When they came to her city, there were endless gatherings and celebrations. Everything the uncles said was enchanting. They had seen things no one else had seen, done things no one else had done. And they would bend down and play with her hair and say, Hey, little one, what have you been doing?
It was a quiet and peaceful morning. I was in my long housedress, curled on a chair in the living room, listening to Yassi’s tale about a poem one of her uncles had sent her. Tahereh Khanoom was in the kitchen. From the open dining room door we could hear different noises, the sound of running tap water, the thin clink of pots and pans, half a sentence addressed to the children, who were in the hall by the kitchen, alternately laughing and quarreling. I remember yellow and white daffodils; the whole living room was filled with vases of daffodils. I had put the vases not on the tables but on the floor, beside a painting of yellow flowers in two blue vases, also on the floor.
We were waiting for my mother’s Turkish coffee. My mother made fabulous Turkish coffee, thick, bittersweet, and this served as her excuse for periodic intrusions. At different intervals in the day, we would hear her calling us through the connecting door to our apartment. “Tahereh, Tahereh . . .” she would call, and she continued calling even when Tahereh and I answered her back in unison. Assured that we did indeed want our coffee, she disappeared, sometimes for over an hour.
This was my mother’s way of communication for as long as I can remember. Curious about my class on Thursday mornings and too proud just to barge in, she used the coffee to gain admittance to our sanctuary. One morning she “accidentally” came upstairs and called me from the kitchen. “Do your guests want coffee?” she asked, glancing through the open door at my curious, smiling students. So another ritual was added to our Thursdays: my mother’s coffee hour. She soon formed her favorites among my students and tried to create separate relations with them.
For as long as I can remember, she would ask perfect strangers to our house for coffee. One day we had to turn away an alarmingly athletic man in his late thirties, who had by mistake rung our bell asking for the lady who had told him to drop by and have coffee with her when he was in the neighborhood. The guards at the hospital opposite our house were her regular “customers.” At first they would stand reverently, coffee cups in hands; later, at her insistence, they sat down uneasily on the edge of chairs as they related all the gossip about the neighbors and the goings-on at the hospital. This was how we later learned the details of what happened that day.
Yassi and I were waiting for our coffee, basking in the luxury of no special urgency, when the bell rang, sounding louder than usual because of the quiet of the street. As the bell rings one more time in my memory, I hear Tahereh Khanoom dragging her slippers along the floor, making her way to the front door of the apartment. I hear her footsteps fading as she slowly goes down the stairs to the street door. We hear a few words exchanged between her and a man.
She returned rather startled. There were two plainclothes officers at the door, she explained, men from the Revolutionary Committee. They wanted to raid the apartment of Mr. Colonel’s tenant. Mr. Colonel was a new neighbor, whom my mother consistently ignored because of his newly rich ways and manners. He had destroyed a beautiful vacant garden next to our place and built an ugly, gray-stone three-story apartment. He lived on the second floor, his daughter was on the third and he rented out the first. Tahereh Khanoom explained that “they” wanted to arrest Mr. Colonel’s tenant, but they couldn’t gain admittance to the house. So they wanted to go into our yard and climb over our walls to get into the neighbor’s house. We obviously, or perhaps not so obviously, wished to deny them this permission. As Tahereh Khanoom wisely put it, What good is a Committee official who doesn’t have a search warrant and can only go into people’s houses through their neighbors’ yards? They needed no search warrant when it came to barging into decent people’s houses at all times, so why were they so helpless when it came to this one particular crook? We had our differences with our neighbor, but we were not about to hand him over to the Committee.
As Tahereh Khanoom was relating all of this, there was a commotion in the street below. We heard the sounds of men talking hurriedly, feet running, a car engine starting. We hardly had time to wrap up our criticism of the Committee when there was another ring at the door. This time, it was more persistent. A few minutes later Tahereh Khanoom returned, accompanied by two young men in the khaki outfits that were then fashionable with the Revolutionary Guards. They explained that they no longer needed our garden wall to jump over to the neighbor’s house: the culprit had now jumped into our garden and was armed and hiding there. They wanted to use our balcony, and the balcony of the third floor, to keep him busy by shooting at him while their colleagues sought to catch him. Our permission was not required, but they were considerate of “other people’s wives and mothers,” so they asked for it anyway. They let us know, by implication and gesture, that their prey was dangerous: not only was he an armed drug pusher, but he had other crimes to his name.
Three others, who proceeded to march upstairs, now accompanied our two intruders. What went through my mind then was, I later discovered, exactly the same thing that occupied Tahereh Khanoom’s. Upstairs, on a corner of the big terrace, we had hidden our large and forbidden satellite dish. Later, we all wondered how it was that our concern was not so much for our lives or for the fact that five armed strangers were using our house for a shooting match with a neighbor who was also armed and hiding somewhere in our garden. We, like all normal Iranian citizens, were guilty and had something to hide: we were worried about our satellite dish. Tahereh Khanoom, who was more coolheaded than I and knew their language better, was assigned to go upstairs. Yassi was in charge of looking after my two bewildered children, and I accompanied the two men to our balcony, which opened into our bedroom and gave onto the garden below. I remember in the midst of all the confusion, at one point I thought, What a good story for Yassi’s uncles. I bet even they can’t top this.
The events of that day, even after my children and I thoroughly inspected every detail, are somewhat confused. As I remember it, I seem to be in all places simultaneously. Like the genie in the Aladdin cartoon, one moment I was on the balcony in the middle of cross fire, listening to the Committee men threatening the culprit while relating in bits and pieces his sinful history, intimating that he was supported by “people in high places,” which explained why they had no official search warrant; next, I was upstairs, assured by Tahereh Khanoom that the guards were too busy to pay attention to our satellite dish. Later she told me that the guards had tried to use her as a shield, saying that this man would shoot at them but not her.
In between the shootings, my interpreters of these strange proceedings revealed that were they to succeed in their pres
ent enterprise, our neighbor would probably be released by his high-powered patrons. He warned me insistently about the evil nature of this criminal, who had now taken cover at the farthermost corner of our garden, under the generous shade of my favorite willow. With comical despair, they took to bewailing the hopeless nature of their mission to us—we, who considered both sides equally criminal and intrusive and wanted them both out of our lives as soon as possible.
The game now shifted to our other neighbor’s house, as his two frightened children and their baby-sitter took refuge in the street. One of their windows was shattered by the gunfight. The culprit hid for some time in a small toolshed at the end of their garden by the swimming pool, but by now the guards had approached him from several sides. He threw his gun into the swimming pool—why, I cannot say—and the scene shifted to the street. We brought the neighbor’s two sons into our house. The children—the neighbor’s and mine—and Yassi and I leaned out the window to watch the Committee men as they dragged their prey into the back of a white Toyota patrol car, he shouting all the while, calling out to his wife and son and warning his wife that under no circumstances should she open the door to the house.
We did have our coffee in the end that day, as all the participants—Yassi, Tahereh Khanoom, the children and I—and the guards at the hospital all gathered in my mother’s parlor to exchange stories. The guards gave us the inside scoop on Mr. Colonel’s tenant. He was in his early thirties. His arrogance and rough manners had earned him the hatred and fear of the hospital staff. For the past six weeks, our street had been under observation by the Committee members who had just made their move.