by Azar Nafisi
Razieh had an amazing capacity for beauty. She said, You know, all my life I have lived in poverty. I had to steal books and sneak into movie houses—but, God, I loved those books! I don’t think any rich kid has ever cherished Rebecca or Gone with the Wind the way I did when I borrowed the translations from houses where my mother worked. But James—he is so different from any other writer I have ever read. I think I am in love, she added, laughing.
Razieh was such a strange mixture of contradictory passions. She was bitter and determined, stern and tough, and yet she loved novels and writing with a real passion. She said she did not wish to write but to teach. She was an inarticulate writer. She said, We envy people like you and we want to be you; we can’t, so we destroy you. After I left that college, I saw her only once. I think she felt that by leaving their small college to teach at the University of Tehran I had abandoned them. I asked her to come to my classes, to keep in touch. But she never did.
A few months after the bloody demonstration in the summer of 1981, I was walking down a wide, sunny street near the University of Tehran when, coming from the opposite direction, I saw a figure wrapped in a black chador, a small figure. The only reason I paid attention to her at all was that she paused for a second, startled. It was Razieh. She did not say hello, and in her look I could see a denial, a plea not to be recognized. We glanced at each other and passed. I will never forget that glance on that day, and her so very thin small body, her narrow face and large eyes, like an owl’s, or an imp’s in some invented tale.
26
In memory of my student Razieh, I will now digress and talk about her favorite book. I shall consider this an in memoriam.
What was it about Washington Square that had so intrigued Razieh? True, there had been identification—she did see something of herself in its hapless heroine—but it was not that simple.
Washington Square seems straightforward enough, yet the characters cheat you: they act contrary to expectation, beginning with Catherine Sloper, the heroine. Catherine is trapped by her clever and materially successful father, who ignores her with contempt. He never forgives his devoted and shy daughter for the loss of his beloved wife, who died in childbirth. Moreover, he cannot get over his disappointment at Catherine’s failure to be brilliant and beautiful. Catherine is also entrapped by her love of Morris Townsend, the “beautiful” (her word) young spendthrift who woos and courts her for her money. Mrs. Penniman, her shallow, sentimental and meddling widowed aunt, who tries to appease Catherine’s romantic aspirations by proxy through matchmaking, completes the evil triumvirate.
Catherine is an exceptional heroine, even for James. She is the inverse of our ideas of what a heroine should be: hefty, healthy, plain, dull, literal and honest. She is squeezed in between three colorful, clever, egocentric characters, who abuse and underestimate her while she remains loyal and good. One by one, James strips away from Catherine the qualities that make a heroine attractive; what he takes away from her he distributes among the other three characters. To Morris Townsend he bestows “beauty” and brilliance; to Mrs. Penniman, a Machiavellian love of intrigue; and to Dr. Sloper, he gives irony and judgment. But at the same time he deprives them of the single quality that distinguishes his heroine: compassion.
Like many heroines, Catherine is wrong; she has a gift for self-deception. She believes that Morris loves her, and refuses to believe her father’s protestations to the contrary. James did not like his heroes and heroines to be infallible. In fact, they all make mistakes, harmful mostly to themselves. Their mistakes, like the tragic flaw in a classical tragedy, become essential to their development and maturity.
Dr. Sloper, the most villainous of the three, is also the most correct. He is correct in his professional and in his private life and he makes all the right prognostications about his daughter, or almost all. He correctly, and with his usual touch of irony, predicts that Mrs. Penniman will try to persuade his daughter that some “young man with a moustache is in love with her. It will be quite untrue; no young man with a moustache or without will ever be in love with Catherine.” From the beginning, Dr. Sloper doubts Morris Townsend’s honorable intentions towards his daughter, and does his best to prevent their marriage. But what he can never penetrate is his daughter’s heart. She constantly surprises him, because he does not really know her. He underestimates Catherine, but he does something worse: his failure is a failure of the heart. For Catherine’s heart must be broken twice, once by her alleged lover, and then by her father. He is guilty of the same crime of which he accuses Morris, namely, lack of love for his daughter. Thinking of Dr. Sloper, we are reminded of one of Flaubert’s insights: “You should have a heart in order to feel other people’s hearts.” And I was immediately reminded of poor Mr. Ghomi, who missed all these subtleties—or, rather, fortunate Mr. Ghomi, for whom no such scruples existed: in his book, a daughter must obey her father, and that was the end of the story.
Dr. Sloper never sees his daughter’s needs. He complains about her lack of accomplishment yet never observes her hidden yearnings for music and theater. He sees her foolishness but misses her intense longing to be loved. It is not an accident that in her first meeting with Morris Townsend, at her cousin’s wedding, Catherine, who has “suddenly developed a lively taste for dress,” wears a red satin dress. The narrator informs us that “her great indulgence” was “really the desire of a rather inarticulate nature to manifest itself; she sought to be eloquent in her garments, and to make up for her diffidence of speech by a fine frankness of costume.” The dress is a disaster; the color does not suit her, and makes her look ten years older. It is also the subject of her father’s wittiest remarks. That same night, Catherine meets Morris and falls in love. Twice, her father misses his chance to understand and help her.
Thus, Dr. Sloper commits the most unforgivable crime in fiction—blindness. Pity is the password, says the poet John Shade in Nabokov’s Pale Fire. This respect for others, empathy, lies at the heart of the novel. It is the quality that links Austen to Flaubert and James to Nabokov and Bellow. This, I believe, is how the villain in modern fiction is born: a creature without compassion, without empathy. The personalized version of good and evil usurps and individualizes the more archetypal concepts, such as courage or heroism, that shaped the epic or romance. A hero becomes one who safeguards his or her individual integrity at almost any cost.
I think most of my students would have agreed with this definition of evil, because it was so close to their own experience. Lack of empathy was to my mind the central sin of the regime, from which all the others flowed. My generation had tasted individual freedom and lost it; no matter how painful the loss, the recollection was there to protect us from the desert of the present. But what did this new generation have to safeguard them? Like Catherine’s, their desires, their yearnings, their urges to express themselves, were manifested in bizarre ways.
As she is shunned by her father, manipulated by her aunt and finally deserted by her suitor, Catherine Sloper learns, painfully, to stand up to each and every one of them—not in their way but in her own, quietly and humbly. In all respects, she maintains her own style of dealing with events and with people. She defies her father even on his deathbed by refusing to promise that she will never marry Morris, although she has no intention by now of doing so. She refuses to “open her heart” to her aunt and appease her sentimental curiosity, and in the last pages of the book, in a quietly magnificent scene, she refuses the hand her fickle lover has now extended to her after twenty years. She surprises them with her every act. In each of these instances her actions arise not from a desire for revenge but from a sense of propriety and dignity, to use two outmoded terms much favored by Jamesian protagonists.
Only Catherine has the capacity to change and mature, although here, as in so many of James’s novels, our heroine pays a dear price for this change. And she does take a form of revenge on both her father and her suitor: she refuses to give in to them. In the end, she has her triumph
.
If we can call it that. One can believe James’s claim to an “imagination of disaster”; so many of his protagonists are unhappy in the end, and yet he gives them an aura of victory. It is because these characters depend to such a high degree on their own sense of integrity that for them, victory has nothing to do with happiness. It has more to do with a settling within oneself, a movement inward that makes them whole. Their reward is not happiness—a word that is central in Austen’s novels but is seldom used in James’s universe. What James’s characters gain is self-respect. And we become convinced that this must be the hardest thing in the world when, as we come to the end of the last page of Washington Square, after Catherine’s exasperated suitor leaves, we learn that: “Catherine, meanwhile, in the parlour, picking up her morsel of fancy-work, had seated herself with it again—for life, as it were.”
27
I rang the bell to his apartment one more time, but again there was no response. I stepped back from the door and looked at the window of his living room: the curtains were closed; all was cream-colored and quiet. I had an appointment with him that afternoon, after which Bijan would pick me up and take me to a friend’s house for dinner. I was thinking of finding a phone to call him when a neighbor with a bag of fruit appeared, opened the front door and invited me in with a welcoming smile. I thanked him and ran up the stairs. The door to his apartment was open, but there was no response to my repeated calls, so I went in.
The apartment was in tip-top shape, everything in its place: the rocking chair, the kilim, the day’s newspapers neatly folded on the table, the bed made. I wandered from room to room looking for some sign of disorder, some clue to this break in the routine. The door was open. He must have gone out for something—say, coffee or milk—and left the door open for me. What else could explain his absence? What else could it be? Could they have come to get him? Could they have taken him away? Once that idea entered my mind, it refused to leave. It kept reverberating like a mantra: they’ve taken him away, they’ve taken him away, they’ve . . . It was not unknown—they’d done it before to others. Once, a writer’s apartment was found unlocked. His friends had found on the kitchen table the remnants of his breakfast, the yolk of an egg streaming across the plate, a piece of toast, butter, some strawberry jam, a half-empty glass of tea. Every room seemed to describe an unfinished act: in the bedroom, an unmade bed; in the office, piles of books scattered on the floor and over the big stuffed chair; on the desk, an open book, a pair of glasses. Two weeks later they discovered that he had been whisked away by the secret police, for questioning. These questionings were part of our everyday lives.
But why? Why should they take him? He had no political affiliations, wrote no inflammatory articles. But then, he has so many friends. . . . How do I know he isn’t secretly involved in some political group, an underground guerrilla leader? The thought seemed absurd, but any explanation was better than none at all: I had to find a reason for the sudden absence of a man bound to routines, conscious of his obligations, always exactly five minutes early to his appointments, a man, I suddenly realized, who had deliberately created an image of himself out of his routines, bread crumbs for us to follow.
I went to the phone by the couch in the living room. Should I call Reza, his best friend? But then I’d worry him too—better wait for a while; maybe he’d return. And what if they come back and find me here? Shut up, shut up! Just wait, he’ll be back any minute. I glanced at my watch. He’s only forty-five minutes late. Only? I’ll wait for another half hour, then I will decide.
I went to the library and scanned the rows of books, all organized by subject and title. I picked up a novel, put it back. I picked up a book of criticism and then I noticed Eliot’s Four Quartets. Yes, not a bad idea. I opened it the way we used to open Hafez, closing our eyes, asking our question and letting our finger rest somewhere at random. It opened to the page in the middle of “Burnt Norton,” beginning with the lines “At the still point of the turning world. Neither flesh nor/fleshless;/Neither from nor towards; at the still point, there the dance/is.”
I closed the book, moved back to the couch and felt exhausted.
The phone rang. If it’s a friend, he’ll hang up after the third ring. And if not? What if it’s him? He left the door open, he called my home and found no one there, he’s calling me here. But then why no note? If it had been me, I probably would have forgotten to leave a note, I with my untidy mind, but not him—he’d remember. But what if he didn’t have time to write, or couldn’t write? If they had come to take him away, would he say, Wait, let me write a note to this friend, whom you can come and pick up later: Dear Azar, Sorry, couldn’t wait for you. Stay where you are; they’ll be back for you soon.
Suddenly I panicked. I have to call Reza, I thought. Better call him than die of anxiety. Two heads are better than one and all that. I called Reza and explained the situation. His voice was soothing, but did I sense a sudden panic rimmed around his soothing words? He said, Give me a half hour and I’ll be there.
As soon as I put the receiver down, I regretted having called him. If something bad is going to happen, why involve someone else, and if he is okay. . . . I went back to Four Quartets, and this time turned to the beginning, the lines I used to read aloud to myself when I first studied Eliot in college:
Time present and time past
Are both perhaps present in time future,
And time future contained in time past.
If all time is eternally present
All time is unredeemable.
How had I missed that point about the unredeemability of the present when I had read it so many times before? I started to read aloud, walking in circles around the room:
What might have been is an abstraction
Remaining a perpetual possibility
Only in a world of speculation.
What might have been and what has been
Point to one end, which is always present.
Now I came to a favorite part, and felt myself on the edge of tears:
Footfalls echo in the memory
Down the passage which we did not take
Towards the door we never opened
Into the rose-garden. My words echo
Thus, in your mind.
But to what purpose
Disturbing the dust on a bowl of rose-leaves
I do not know.
I repeated the last two lines, feeling tears, to my dismay, running down my cheeks. His friend finally arrived. I let him in, and immediately received his comfort and transferred to him my anxiety and fear. He held my hand and patted me on the back. Don’t worry, he said. He’s nuts—maybe he had to go to an emergency editing session. He’s been known to disappear on one of those assignments for days. But when he makes an appointment the day before? Couldn’t he have left a note? After a while we both sat down on the couch, holding hands, feeling forsaken and intimate with our doubts and fears.
We didn’t notice the door open, we heard a key in the lock. He had forgotten he’d left the door unlocked. He came in and his first words were, I’m so sorry. I was out with the Kid. He looked very pale and, if arched eyebrows could sag, I would say that his had sagged. Fatigue fought with regret, with his realization of the anxiety he had put us through. Well, the least you could have done is get yourself arrested or come in with your interrogators, I said feebly. You say you were out with the Kid?
The Kid was his name for a grown-up man, eighteen and a high school senior when he first met him in one of his classes that year of the revolution. My magician had a special affection for the Kid, who wanted to go to medical school but was fascinated by his talk of Aeschylus and Chaplin. He passed the entrance exam with a first, only to be denied a place because he admitted to being a Baha’i. During the Shah’s reign, the Baha’is were protected and flourished—one sin for which the Shah was never forgiven. After the revolution, their property was confiscated and their leaders murdered. Baha’is had no civic rights under th
e new Islamic constitution and were barred from schools, universities and workplaces.
The Kid could easily have taken an ad in the paper, like so many others did, denying that he belonged to the decadent and imperialist sect, disowning his parents—who, luckily, were out of harm’s way in Europe—and claiming to have been converted by some ayatollah. That’s all it would have taken and the doors would have been opened to him. Instead, he had admitted to being a Baha’i, although he was not even a practicing Baha’i and had no religious inclinations, denying himself in the process a brilliant career in medicine, for there was no doubt that he would have been a brilliant doctor.
Now he lived with his old grandmother and did odd jobs—he couldn’t hold any one of them for long. He was currently working at a pharmacy, the nearest he would ever come to being a doctor. I had never met him, but I’d heard of him, of his devastating good looks, his love for a Muslim girl, who would soon forsake him to marry a rich older man and would later try to make up with him as a married woman.
The Kid had called just before lunch. His grandmother, who had been ill for a long time, had died and he was calling from the hospital, half-choked. He kept repeating he didn’t know what to do. So my magician had left in a hurry. He thought he’d be back soon, long before my visit.
He’d found him standing in front of the hospital, beside a soft and boneless woman: the aunt. The Kid had almost cried, but crying in front of a godlike mentor was impossible, so he had been grown-up, his dry eyes worse than tears. There were no burial places for Baha’is; the regime had destroyed the Baha’i cemetery in the first years of the revolution, demolishing the graves with a bulldozer. There were rumors that the cemetery had been turned into a park or a playground. Later, I found out it had become a cultural center, called Bakhtaran. What were you supposed to do when your grandmother died if there was no cemetery?