Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books

by Azar Nafisi

  I was not about to put another novel on trial. I told her it was immoral to talk about a great novel in this manner, that characters were not vehicles for pedantic moral imperatives, that reading a novel was not an exercise in censure. She said something about other professors, their delicacy in censoring even the word wine out of the stories they taught, lest it offend the Islamic sensibilities of their students. Yes, I thought, and they have been stuck teaching The Pearl. I told her she could drop the class or take the matter to higher authorities, that this was the way it would be in my class and that I would continue to teach what I taught. I left her there in the darkened corner of that very long hallway. Though I saw her afterward, in my mind I left her there forever. And now she had excavated herself and polished up her image.

  She had also objected to Daisy Miller: she found Daisy not only immoral but foolish and “unreasonable.” But then, despite our differences and her obvious disapproval of the novels I taught, she had enrolled in my class again the following year. There were rumors that she was having an affair with one of the big shots in the Muslim Students’ Association. Nassrin was always bringing these rumors to my attention, trying to prove how hypocritical “these people” were.

  She said now that she missed college. It didn’t seem like much at the time, but later she noticed how much she missed it. She missed the films we watched together and the class discussions. Do you remember your Dear Jane Society? I was puzzled—how did she know about that? It was a joke shared by me and a handful of my students. She said, I always wanted to be in on it. I always thought it would be a great deal of fun. I really liked Jane Austen—if you only knew how many girls swooned over Darcy! I said, I didn’t know you were allowed to have a heart in your group. She said, Believe it or not, we fell in and out of love all the time.

  She had tried to study Arabic and had translated some short stories and poems from English into Persian—for herself, she added as an afterthought. She used the Persian expression “for my own heart.” After a pause she added, And then I got married and now have a daughter. I wondered if she had married the man of our rumors; he was a man I had no fond memories of.

  I asked her how old her daughter was. She said, Eleven months, and, after a pause, with a playful shadow of a smile: I named her after you. After me? I mean, she has a different name on her birth certificate—she is called Fahimeh, after a favorite aunt who died young—but I have a secret name for her. I call her Daisy. She said she had hesitated between Daisy and Lizzy. She had finally settled on Daisy. Lizzy was the one she had dreamed of, but marrying Mr. Darcy was too much wishful thinking. Why Daisy? Don’t you remember Daisy Miller? Haven’t you heard that if you give your child a name with a meaning she will become like her namesake? I want my daughter to be what I never was—like Daisy. You know, courageous.

  Daisy was the character my female students most identified with. Some of them became obsessed. Later, in my workshop, they would go back to her time and again, speaking of her courage, something they felt they had lacked. Mahshid and Mitra spoke of her with regret in their writings; like Winterbourne, they felt they were bound to make a mistake about her. When she rose to say good-bye, I looked at her with some hesitation and said, May I ask you a rather personal question? You said you were married. And your husband? I married someone outside the university, she said. He is in computers. And open-minded, she added with a smile.

  She had to go, she had an eleven-month-old daughter with a secret name waiting for her at home. You know, I didn’t think about it then, but we did have fun, she said. All the fuss we made over these writers, as if what they said was a matter of life and death to us—James and Brontë and Nabokov and Jane Austen.

  24

  Certain memories, like the imaginary balloons Yassi made with her delicate hands when she was happy, rise from somewhere in the depths of what we call memory. Like balloons, these memories are light and bright and irretrievable, despite the “air sadness” (Bellow’s term) surrounding them. During my last weeks in Iran, my girls and I met, in addition to Thursdays, on other days in different parts of town. We even went shopping together, as I had decided I had to buy presents for friends and family in America.

  I went into my favorite café one afternoon, looking for my girls, but could not find them. I waylaid a waiter, an ancient one, his black trousers a little too short, carrying a tray of pastries and two steaming cups of coffee, and asked him if he had seen a handful of young girls come through. Are they unaccompanied? he asked. I looked at him in surprise. Why, yes. I suppose they are unaccompanied. Well then, they must be in the back room. He nodded to my left, where the main restaurant was. You know the rules, he said. Unaccompanied women cannot sit in this section.

  My girls were sitting near the window. The only other table in this vast space that was occupied was a small one near the wall, where two women were drinking coffee. “No men, no privileges,” Manna exclaimed merrily. “This is one time when Nima might have been of some use.” Nassrin’s absence was more obvious in those last weeks when we were all together. I asked Mahshid for news of her. She had no news. And, she added with some bitterness, no news is good news, anyway.

  Both Manna and Azin had brought their cameras—café memories, said Manna. As my departure drew closer, I became obsessed with taking pictures of all the details of our life. When I did not have an actual camera with me, I became a camera myself, writing feverishly about the flight of birds in Polur, our mountain resort near Tehran, the quality of air that was so tactile, especially early mornings around sunrise and all the beloved faces that surrounded us during those last weeks.

  Mitra was subdued. Before I arrived, she had been telling the others about her problems at home and now she continued. Hamid’s mother was strongly opposed to their going to Canada, and her disapproval was causing Hamid to vacillate constantly in his decision. What makes me resent this, Mitra said, is not just that she doesn’t want us to leave but that she always meddles in our affairs. Before, it was her wanting us to have children—she wanted a grandson before she was too old to enjoy him—and now this. Both Mitra and Hamid were also wavering. He had a good job and financial security and in Canada they would have to start from scratch. She said she felt she was changing—she had become more anxious, more sensitive; she had started having nightmares. One night she woke up feeling that the whole house was shaking, but it was only her shaking the bedside table. Sometimes I think men just can’t relate to how difficult it is to be a woman in this country, she said with frustration. For them it’s easier, said Yassi. In a way, this place can be a man’s paradise. Hamid tells me, said Mitra, that if we make a good living, we can always take our vacations abroad.

  Things are definitely better for men, said Azin. Look at the marriage and divorce laws; look at how many so-called secular men have taken second wives. Especially some of the intellectuals, said Manna, those who make the headlines with their claims about freedom and all that.

  Not all men are like that, Sanaz objected.

  Azin, suddenly brightening up, turned to Sanaz. Well, yes. Some men, like your new beau . . .

  He’s not a beau, Sanaz objected, giggling now, clearly enjoying herself after a long period of depression. He’s a friend of Ali’s. He’s here on a visit from England, she informed me, feeling that an explanation was in order. We knew each other before—we were sort of friends, she said, through Ali. He was supposed to be our best man, you see. So he came to pay me a visit, just to be nice.

  Mitra’s dimples and Azin’s knowing smile suggested that there was more to “nice” than met the eye. What? said Sanaz. He’s not good-looking. Actually, she said, narrowing her eyes, he’s sort of ugly. Perhaps more like rugged? suggested Yassi hopefully. No, no, more like, well, more like ugly, but a very nice man, considerate and kind. My brother keeps making fun of him, she said, and you know sometimes I feel like going with him or something. The other day, he was saying how he can’t wear short sleeves or go swimming over here. After he left,
my brother kept mimicking him and saying, Very clever new method of seduction and my silly sister is just the kind of girl to fall for it.

  The waiter came in to take my order. I ordered a café glacé, and then, looking at Manna, said also, Could you bring all of us some Turkish coffee a little later? Ever since my mother had established the ritual of serving our class Turkish coffee, we had gotten into the habit of telling our fortunes from the dregs. Manna and Azin always vied for the privilege of fortune-telling. The last time Azin had told mine, and I had promised Manna that she would get her turn soon.

  After the waiter left, Azin said, Boy I’d love to take a picture of him. Why don’t you guys divert his attention and I’ll take the picture. How can we divert his attention? said Manna. You don’t want us to go to jail for flirting with this decrepit creature!

  When the waiter returned with my order, I saw Azin bring up her camera, making signs to Yassi, who was sitting beside me, and idly move the camera in my general direction, as if focusing on the wall. Could I have my coffee without sugar? Yassi asked the waiter. I don’t know; it’s usually already mixed in, said the waiter peevishly. He turned around sharply at the sound of a click, glanced suspiciously at our innocent expressions and left. I don’t know how it will come out, said Azin. We’ll see. In the photograph he’s standing over me, but his face is turned towards Yassi; only we can’t see his face from the chin up. His headless torso is slightly bent and he has an empty tray in one hand; both Yassi and I are looking in his direction and I am holding on to my frosted glass protectively, as if it might be snatched from me at any moment.

  Later, I showed the pictures we’d taken in those last few weeks to my magician. You get a strange feeling when you’re about to leave a place, I told him, like you’ll not only miss the people you love but you’ll miss the person you are now at this time and this place, because you’ll never be this way ever again.

  The waiter brought us our coffee in small different-colored cups, and while drinking, we pondered the trials and tribulations of being a writer in Iran, having so much to say but not being allowed to say it. I looked at my watch; I was already behind schedule. Let’s hear Manna’s reading of my fortune and then I’ll have to go, I said. I told Manna as I took up my pencil and diary, ready to write, that I would record every word and that she would be beholden for what she was telling me. Remember what Cary Grant said in that fabulous film: a word, like a lost opportunity, cannot be taken back once it has been uttered.

  Manna took up my coffee cup and starting telling my fortune: “I see a bird like a cock, which means good news, but you yourself are very agitated. A road that looks bright. And you are on the first step. You are thinking of a hundred things at the same time. One road is closed and dark, and the other is open and full of light. Both could happen; it is your choice. There is a key; a problem will be solved. No money. A small ship that is still in the harbor and has not yet started to set sail.”

  25

  Does every magician, every genuine one, like my own, evoke the hidden conjurer in us all, bringing out the magical possibilities and potentials we did not know existed? Here he is on this chair, the chair I am in the process of inventing. As I write, the chair is created: walnut, a brown cushion, a little uncomfortable, it keeps you alert. This is the chair, but he is not sitting on that chair; I am. He sits on the couch, the same brown cushions, softer perhaps, looking more at home than I do; it is his couch. He sits as he always does, right in the middle, leaving a vast empty space on either side. He does not lean back but sits up straight, his hands on his lap, his face lean and sharp.

  Before he talks, let me have him go to the kitchen, because he is a very hospitable person and would definitely not leave me talking for so long without some offer of tea or coffee, or perchance some ice cream? Today, let it be tea, in two mismatched mugs, his brown, mine green. His graceful, aristocratic poverty, his mugs, his faded jeans, his T-shirts, his chocolates. While he is in the kitchen, let me be silent and consider how meticulously he has created his rituals—reading the paper at a certain hour after breakfast, the morning and evening walks, the answering of the phone after two rings. I am overtaken by a sudden tenderness: how tough he seems to us, yet how fragile is his life.

  As he carries in the two mugs of tea, I tell him, You know, I feel all my life has been a series of departures. He raises his eyebrows, placing the mugs on the table, and looks at me as if he had expected a prince and all he could see was a frog. Then we both laugh. He says, still standing, You can say this sort of crap in the privacy of these four walls—I am your friend; I shall forgive you—but don’t ever write this in your book. I say, But it is the truth. Lady, he says, we do not need your truths but your fiction—if you’re any good, perhaps you can trickle in some sort of truth, but spare us your real feelings.

  He’s back in the kitchen, rummaging through the refrigerator. He comes back with five pieces of chocolate on a small plate. He sits opposite me, almost on the edge of the couch. We are out of everything, I’m afraid. Just a few chocolates is all I have in the fridge.

  I said to him that I wanted to write a book in which I would thank the Islamic Republic for all the things it had taught me—to love Austen and James and ice cream and freedom. I said, Right now it is not enough to appreciate all this; I want to write about it. He said, You will not be able to write about Austen without writing about us, about this place where you rediscovered Austen. You will not be able to put us out of your head. Try, you’ll see. The Austen you know is so irretrievably linked to this place, this land and these trees. You don’t think this is the same Austen you read with Dr. French—it was Dr. French, wasn’t it? Do you? This is the Austen you read here, in a place where the film censor is nearly blind and where they hang people in the streets and put a curtain across the sea to segregate men and women. I said, When I write all that, perhaps I will become more generous, less angry.

  So we sit, eternally weaving stories, he on his couch, I in my chair; behind us, the oblong circle of light in front of the rocking chair becomes narrower and smaller, and now it disappears. He turns on the lamp and we continue our talk.

  26

  “I have a recurring fantasy that one more article has been added to the Bill of Rights: the right to free access to imagination. I have come to believe that genuine democracy cannot exist without the freedom to imagine and the right to use imaginative works without any restrictions. To have a whole life, one must have the possibility of publicly shaping and expressing private worlds, dreams, thoughts and desires, of constantly having access to a dialogue between the public and private worlds. How else do we know that we have existed, felt, desired, hated, feared?

  “We speak of facts, yet facts exist only partially to us if they are not repeated and re-created through emotions, thoughts and feelings. To me it seemed as if we had not really existed, or only half existed, because we could not imaginatively realize ourselves and communicate to the world, because we had used works of imagination to serve as handmaidens to some political ploy.”

  That day when I left my magician’s house, I sat on the top steps of the apartment house and wrote those words in my notebook. I dated the entry June 23, 1997, and wrote beside the date: “For my new book.” It took me another year after that day to think again about writing this book, and another before I could bring myself to take up my pen, as the saying goes, and write about Austen and Nabokov and those who read and lived them with me.

  That day, when I left my magician’s house, the sun was fading and the air was mild, the trees a verdant green, and I had many reasons to feel sad. Every object and every face had lost its tangibleness and appeared like a cherished memory: my parents, friends, students, this street, those trees, the withdrawing light from the mountains in the mirror. But I was also vaguely elated and, to paraphrase Muriel Spark’s heroine in her wonderful novel Loitering with Intent, I went about my way rejoicing, thinking how wonderful it is to be a woman and a writer at the end of the twentieth ce
ntury.

  Epilogue

  I left Tehran on June 24, 1997, for the green light that Gatsby once believed in. I write and teach once again, on the seventh floor of a building in a town without mountains but with amazing falls and springs. I still teach Nabokov, James, Fitzgerald, Conrad as well as Iraj Pezeshkzad, who is responsible for one of my favorite Iranian novels, My Uncle Napoleon, and those others whom I have discovered since I arrived in the United States, like Zora Neale Hurston and Orhan Pamuk. And I know now that my world, like Pnin’s, will be forever a “portable world.”

  I left Iran, but Iran did not leave me. Much has changed in appearance since Bijan and I left. There is more defiance in Manna’s gait and those of other women; their scarves are more colorful and their robes much shorter; they wear makeup now and walk freely with men who are not their brothers, fathers or husbands. Parallel to this, the raids and arrests and public executions also persist. But there is a stronger demand for freedom; as I write, I open the paper to read about the recent student demonstrations in support of a dissident who was sentenced to death for suggesting that the clergy should not be blindly followed like monkeys and calling for a revision of the constitution. I read the writings of young students and former revolutionaries, the slogans and demands for democracy, and I know now as much as I will ever know anything that it is this dogged desire for life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness by young Iranians today, the children of the revolution, and the anguished self-criticism of former revolutionaries that will determine the shape of our future.

  Since I left Iran, respecting his wishes, I have not talked or written to my magician, but his magic has been so much a part of my life that sometimes I ask myself, Was he ever real? Did I invent him? Did he invent me?