Things I've Been Silent About

by Azar Nafisi

  My paternal grandfather, Abdol Mehdi Nafisi.

  My father’s father, Abdol Mehdi, was a doctor who displayed no political or worldly ambitions. Family lore had it that upon the death of his first patient he gave up his practice, tried to teach for a while, and then made a disastrous choice: he went into trade. He was said to be a good doctor and a terrible businessman, and barely made enough to support his large family. He married a young girl, my grandmother, from a strict religious background who was nine at the time and gave birth to her first child at the age of thirteen.

  Abdol Mehdi was a stern man. His somber attitude toward the world seems to have been shaped by his unrelenting demands on himself. In a photograph I have of him he is withdrawn and impenetrable: a man who will reveal nothing of himself to the world. Father’s family were Shaykhis, members of a dissident sect that challenged the orthodox Shiism, Iran’s official religion. My grandfather was the group’s intellectual mentor in Esfahan. His connection to the sect marginalized the family, which as a result shaped itself into a tight-knit and seemingly self-sufficient intellectual community, fostering the illusion that through this they would be immune to the decadence and wiles of the outside world.

  My grandfather’s Esfahan was an austere place, full of fear and pent-up emotions, but in his unpublished manuscript my father unveils another Esfahan, with a pageant of surprising sexual transgressions. A high official sleeps between his two beautiful wives; another seduces young boys, including my father, taking them swimming in his garden. Father pauses here to digress on the impact of sexual deprivation in Iran, especially among young men, which, as he sees it, ultimately leads to pedophilia.

  He describes with affection the colorful religious festivals, especially that of Muharram, when the Shia Muslims mourn the martyrdom of Imam Hussein at Karballa in Iraq. During these rituals, people would crowd the streets to watch the processions, those hundreds, perhaps thousands, of men parading through the streets, flagellating their backs with thin chains in empathy with the martyred Imam and his followers. Some wore black shirts with slits on the back where the chains had come down. Others wore white shrouds. It was one of the rare times when men and women could mix and mingle in public without fear of punishment. Mourning a man who has been dead over thirteen hundred years may seem an unlikely forum for the expression of aborted desires, but everyone crowded the streets to watch the ceremonies and theatrical reenactments of the martyrdom of Hussein. Father’s cousin Yusuf insisted that this was the best time to flirt with girls, and regaled my father with tales of conquest, sometimes no more than a stolen touch of hands. Until the early years of the twentieth century, my father would tell us, the clerics were guardians not just of religion and morality but also of our senses and private lives.

  How could we foresee, he would ask, what would happen when other sights, sounds, smells, and tastes, when wine and restaurants, dance and foreign music and open relations between the sexes, came to compete with and even overtake the old rituals and traditions?

  My paternal grandmother, talking with Uncle Hassan, in the 1980s.

  In his manuscript, Father describes those who populated his world—his shy and kind young mother, who seldom looked her own children in the eye; his fanatical uncle, constantly trying to save his wayward nephew from the fires of hell; the pious pedophiles who preached modesty in public and molested their own nephews and nieces in secret. What amazes me now is not so much that a city like Esfahan contained so many contradictions—what city doesn’t?—nor even the hypocrisy of religious fanatics, but the fact that my father seriously contemplated publishing these stories. It took a certain courage—or innocence, call it what you will—for a public man of his generation to wish to expose himself in this manner.

  Had my mother paid more attention to my father’s stories, she might have found in him some of what she yearned for. His life seemed to me far more romantic than what I knew of Saifi’s. Father was the rebel in that large family. His older brother, Abu Torab, brilliant and much indulged by his parents, went into the medical profession, married appropriately, and loved his wife, Batoul, a good pious woman from his mother’s side of the family. My father was the second child, caught between Abu Torab and Karim, who was obedient and obsequious as a child, and who grew up to be the most devout and inflexible of the nine children. My father was the wayward son, endlessly punished for small transgressions. In his unpublished memoirs he describes rebelling against his ultrareligious uncle, his strict teacher, even his father, and later against the government. He somehow came to associate a good conscience with rebellion. He told us that when he decided to leave Esfahan, at age eighteen, he was tired of the closed society there and of his father’s narrow teachings. He wrote to his fanatically religious uncle that he could not believe in a God who allowed only the few hundred Shaykhi Muslims into heaven. Nor did he want to marry a woman in an arranged marriage. Perhaps his views of marriage developed when he tried to reconcile his puritanical religious upbringing with his own more romantic aspirations. His parents had already found a “suitable” wife for him. He refused to consider her and later she married his younger brother.

  Ironically, it was thanks to my mother’s father, Loghman, that my father’s life was radically transformed. My paternal and maternal grandfathers were second cousins and had the same last name. Loghman Nafisi visited Esfahan as the head of a special governmental agency on official business. At the time, Father was working in his father’s shop and the family was going through a period of financial difficulties. Impressed by my father’s intelligence and energy, my grandfather encouraged him to apply for a job at the local branch of his agency. Unlike my paternal grandfather, Loghman was a sociable man, if temperamental, wealthy, and ambitious, with a beautiful young wife. He gambled and drank but considered himself a devout Muslim who paid his religious dues and performed his prayers. His way of life must have presented a welcome alternative to the sober and ascetic life in Esfahan. Father took his advice, much to his own father’s displeasure. It wasn’t long before he was persuaded by his colleagues that his future lay not in Esfahan, but in Tehran. Father applied for a transfer, hoping both to work and to continue his studies in Tehran. At eighteen he left home, against the wishes of his parents, with no money, rejecting a safe way of life and not knowing what he would find to take its place.

  In Tehran he lived at first with his mother’s aunt. He worked full time to support himself and taught himself both French and English. He studied at nights, pushing himself to the edge of his physical capacity. To stay awake, he would sometimes sit in a shallow pool in his aunt’s house, holding the book up high, reading by the dim light in the yard. Eventually Loghman invited him to his house. But that was not where he courted my mother. After Saifi’s death, Mother left Saifi’s father’s house but, feeling unwelcomed by her stepmother, she moved in with some relatives, a childless couple who adopted her. It was in their house that my father first met my mother. He was taken by her beauty and her sadness, and perhaps by the potential that a match between them might offer a young and ambitious man such as himself.

  Both families were unhappy about my mother and father’s decision to marry. His parents had hoped for a more traditional girl and Loghman, who could be unpredictable, also opposed the match—perhaps on account of his wife, or perhaps he did not consider a penniless cousin the best match for his daughter. In the end he refused to attend the ceremony, which was held at the house of Ameh Turi, the relative who had introduced them.

  Father’s brother Abu Torab sent a telegram from Esfahan saying that their father had consulted the Koran about the wedding and the answer had come back against the marriage. My uncle added that, despite this, their family would be content with whatever decision Father reached and they gave him their blessings. The telegram arrived on the day of the wedding. For the marriage to be legal, the bride’s father had to give his written consent, and since they could not get Loghman’s signature, my father pretended that the telegram—also s
igned by a Nafisi—was from Loghman. And so their life together started with a lie.

  CHAPTER 6

  the holy man

  HAJI AGHA GHASSEM WAS SO holy that his name was a testament to his zeal. Everyone in Esfahan knew him as Haji Agha, an honorific bestowed on those who have made the pilgrimage to Mecca. He was a distant relative, a close associate of my father’s uncle in the city of Shiraz. Ascetic and thin, like a scholar, he had a way of talking that seemed to impart meaning to the most insignificant utterance. He stated things with finality and with some contempt for his interlocutor. He was not an intellectual like my many uncles who analyzed Islam and sought to relate their faith to philosophy and life. Haji Agha had no time for recondite knowledge and reserved his energy for frequent terse pronouncements: There is to be no music at home. Baha’is are the spawn of the devil. The Constitutional Revolution was a British plot.

  Thin-lipped, with a slight stubble (a staple of pious Muslim men), he wore muddy brown suits with a white shirt that buttoned up to the neck. He disapproved of my father and never looked my mother in the eye, another mark of piety Once, when we went to the bazaar with him and my cousins saw some silver spoons they wanted to buy, he sternly reminded them that to eat from silver is banned in Islam. Despite his extreme piety he seemed—perhaps was—deceptively sweet.

  I can picture him now as he was when we first met him on one of our visits to Esfahan. He speaks to Mother about religion, about Fa-timah, the Prophet’s daughter, her obedience to her father and husband, her tragic death at the age of eighteen, and her modesty. You will agree, he says softly but with finality, that modesty does not prevent a woman from being useful, or important. A woman’s duty is sacred in Islam. My mother is surprisingly receptive. It is the mixture of attentiveness and inflexibility that appeals to her—that and a stifled urge to spite my father, who cannot help but show his disdain for such nonsense. She agrees with Haji Agha: no one appreciates the burden of a wife’s responsibilities these days—especially not her children. Not your children, I hope, he says with ingratiating concern. She shakes her head. At the time I was six, my brother one, yet already she foresaw a bleak future.

  The Mother’s King madrasa, Esfahan.

  My father cynically teases Haji Agha. If religion is about the love of mankind, then why are Jews, Christians, Zoroastrians, Baha’is, Buddhists—even atheists, for that matter—why are they considered unclean? Is it really true that we Shaykhis are the only ones who will be allowed in heaven? He is almost childish in the way he goads the pious man. But he cannot shake him. My younger uncles chime in, while Mother tries to silence Father with her eyes. Before we leave Es-fahan, to my father’s surprise, she invites Haji Agha to stay at our house the following month, when he will be in Tehran for business.

  WHEN I WAS A SMALL CHILD, Esfahan loomed large in my imagination. Even now I remember its wide and dusty tree-lined streets and the magnificent filigreed bridges over the Zayandeh Rood—the River of Birth, as it is known. Esfahan was once the capital of the Safavid dynasty and the home of its most powerful ruler, Shah Abbas, who built magnificent monuments, mosques, and bridges, and the wide leafy avenues for which the city is still famous. A testament to Safavid power and glory, the city was known as Esfahan, Half of the World. It was the Safavids, to distinguish themselves from the Ottoman foe, who decided in the sixteenth century to change Iran’s official religion from Sunni to Shia.

  Esfahan was as different from Tehran as my father’s side of the family was from my mother’s. In Esfahan, layers of the ancient past existed side by side in a sort of asymmetrical harmony: ruins of a Zoroastrian temple, the perfect blue dome of a mosque, monument to the glorious Safavid kings. Unlike Tabriz, Shiraz, or Hamedan, Tehran could boast of little history. It was a small village known for its fruit orchards and fierce citizens until the founder of the Qajar dynasty, Agha Mohammad Khan, chose it for his capital in the eighteenth century. Tehran had little memory of ancient conquests or defeats and was only developed into a modern city in our time by Reza Shah Pahlavi and his son Mohammad Reza. Tehran was free of the weighty magnificence of Esfahan, creating the illusion that because it had no past to compete with, it could be transformed according to anyone’s imagination. It played the reckless rogue to Esfahan’s austere beauty.

  Six of my father’s seven brothers lived in Esfahan (his one sister was in Shiraz). We were closest to Abu Torab, who had nine children, five sons and four daughters, and we moved back and forth from his house to my grandmother’s small house, with its grapevines and pomegranate trees. I had no memory of Grandfather, who died in 1948. I remember a blue-tiled fountain in my uncle’s cool basement where, in summer, we were forced to take afternoon naps.

  My father’s family indulged in an elaborate asceticism, as intimidating in its own way as my mother’s family’s insistence on manners and social prestige. My mother was never completely accepted by my father’s family, who had a way of being meek and hospitable while remaining aloof. She was not treated badly—in fact, she was accorded a great deal of courtesy—but there was no escaping their silent disapproval. She, in turn, treated them with dutiful condescension. She entered their domain a little gingerly, and with some defiance.

  You share the same rotten genes, my mother liked to remind Mohammad and me when she was displeased with us, or with Father. And in Esfahan it was obvious which genes we had chosen to identify with. The sheer number of uncles and cousins—it was not unusual for twenty to be at any given lunch or dinner—diminished her authority. Over time my mother’s visits to Esfahan became increasingly rare while ours, despite her protests, grew more frequent.

  I AM SIX YEARS OLD when Haji Agha Ghassem first visits us in Tehran. He follows me around the house with his eyes. You have to excuse my insolence, he says, cautiously and politely to my mother, but I think of you as my own sister. My mother smiles obligingly, handing him a cup of Turkish coffee. This child, he says, turning to me, is at a dangerous age and many are not like us, God-fearing men. I see you have men servants about, and perhaps this child, he says, should wear more modest clothes, to cover herself.

  My mother is visibly surprised. Had it been anyone else she would not have tolerated such conduct, but she tells Haji Agha not to worry, to rest assured that the first thing she taught me was how to look out for myself (“Be careful of strange men. Don’t let them touch you. Ever”). My parents are both on their best behavior. Father, as host, maintains a polite attitude punctuated by an occasional sardonic glance as Haji Agha serenely utters his pronouncements. Mother is surprisingly docile. “I like a person who is honest about what he is,” she tells my father that evening over dinner. “I wish everyone were as firm in their beliefs.” She mistakes inflexibility for strength, and confuses zeal with principle. Even Abu Torab, deeply religious but with a scientific turn of mind, does not meet with her complete approval.

  He stands behind me as I am trying to do my homework and bends down to look at my notebook. What are you writing? he asks, and as he reaches down and picks up the book he rearranges my skirt, his hands casually brushing my thigh.

  That night my parents go to a party. Haji Agha retires to his room early. My one-year-old brother is sleeping in Naneh’s room and I, as is my habit when my parents are out, sleep in their bed. I developed this routine after my brother’s birth. He always slept in Naneh’s room when they were out and I felt left out and alone. Somehow sleeping in their room and being carried to my room when they returned gave me a sense of security. I like their big roomy bed, and enjoy pushing my bare legs across the cool places on the sheet.

  I am woken up by the sound of irregular breathing at my side. Someone is holding onto me lightly from behind, touching me below the waist. Soft pajamas touch my bare legs. More than the touch I am frightened of the breathing, which seems to gain momentum, and the panting that accompanies it as he grips me tighter. I try to keep very still, almost holding my breath, and press my eyes shut. Maybe if I keep them shut and don’t move, he ’ll go aw
ay. I am not sure how long he holds onto me but I don’t move when suddenly he gets up. I can hear him walking for a while very softly as if in circles on the thick carpet, and then leaving the room. I don’t open my eyes even then, afraid that I will conjure him back.

  Ever since that night I cannot sleep alone in the dark. My parents think I am trying to draw attention to myself and make sure the lights are turned off in my room at night. I sleep badly. He stays at our house one more night. I cannot tell my parents but I try to avoid him. When he asks me if I have more homework, I pretend not to hear. When it is time for him to leave, my mother calls for me to come and say goodbye but I go to the bathroom and lock the door. She rebukes me for my rudeness. What have I taught you? she says, exasperated. Haji Agha Ghassem is a very nice man. He said to say good-bye to you. He said you are a bright child.

  He came to our house two more times after that. I always tried to escape him, even when others were present in the room. What is amazing to me now is how he never acknowledged his actions with a look or gesture. He always had the same remote and kindly expression. Once he caught me unawares. I was in my usual haunt at the back of the garden by a small stream. I loved the small wildflowers that grew on the banks of the stream. That day I was busy with a favorite pastime: picking up pebbles and watching them change colors as I put them in the water. He came silently and squatted behind me, saying softly, “What are you doing? Shouldn’t you be studying?” I was startled and made a move to get up, but he held me by the waist, stretching his hands to touch the pebbles, “Oh, how pretty,” he said, as his hands moved to and fro over my bare legs. When I finally got up he rose with me, still groping me with gestures too painful to describe even now. At first I thought, I will invent an imaginary character to whom this happened who isn’t me. But the game my father and I had invented was too light for such a story. The shame would remain. Later I learned that it is not unusual for a victim to feel guilty, mainly because she becomes complicit through her silence. And then there is the added guilt of feeling some vague sense of sexual pleasure out of an act that is imposed and feels reprehensible.