by Azar Nafisi
At this point, in the summer of 1960, my father was rarely home. He was an ambitious young man, steadily on the rise in the civil service, and had been appointed by the Shah to the post of deputy mayor of Tehran. My mother and I were by now fighting almost every day. She refused to let me go out with my friends. My diary is filled with feelings of frustration, of being left out. In one entry, on the 21st of March, just before the Persian New Year, when we were supposed to go to a place called Sefid Rood for a vacation with Aunt Mina’s family, I wrote: “When I was brushing my teeth in the bathroom I heard Mother telling my brother, I can’t take it anymore, she’s ruining my reputation. I won’t go to Sefid Rood with her. She doesn’t love me, she’s waiting for me to die.”
CHAPTER 8
leaving home
IF AT HOME I WAS SUBDUED INTO COMPLIANCE, at school I quickly developed a reputation as a difficult child. My uniform was always ink-stained. My grades were good, but I liked literature, history, and algebra and paid little attention to the rest. A few friends and I created a secret group called the Red Devils, whose mission was to take revenge on teachers. I organized a walkout on the English teacher when, distracted by her own affairs, she insisted on talking all through class about her husband.
My friends and I made up songs about Dr. Parsay, the stern, pug-nosed principal, which we went around the school yard singing during breaks and at lunchtime. She would stand every morning in front of the entrance to the school and examine us as we came in. Those whose uniforms were too short, those who wore nylon stockings instead of white socks, or who had on makeup or nail polish, were reprimanded or sent home. We made fun of her appearance, and speculated as to whether she had a sex life to speak of with her husband. How could anyone love her? Once, when a friend was expelled from another class, I and three Red Devils boycotted the class. Our boycott did not last more than two days. My father was called to school almost every week, but this latest offense was serious. We were told that we could be suspended.
For a long time whenever I heard about Dr. Parsay, the same feelings of rancor were evoked. Like my mother she was an authority figure I was instinctively provoked to disobey. I was reminded of her stern expression, her uncompromising attitude, the commanding tone that made me want to disrupt class and stir others to rebellion. It was only with her death years later, in 1979, that I would become intrigued about her life. In time I learned that her mother had been among the first women to fight for women’s rights in Iran; for that she had been attacked and even exiled for a while. Dr. Parsay would be one of the first women to enter Parliament. She was a senator for several years and in the seventies became minister of education. She was credited with changing the schoolbooks, purging them of derogatory representations of girls and women. After the revolution she was arrested and, in a summary trial, she was found guilty of corruption on earth, warring with God, spreading prostitution, and working for the imperialists. Rumor had it that because she was a woman and was not to be touched, she was put in a sack. The method of her murder was not clear; some said bullets had been fired into the sack, others that she was stoned to death. According to a recent biography she was hanged along with a prostitute, but her death certificate cites “the reason for illness: gunshot wounds.” Was this to be the end in store for those intelligent women who did not go to waste?
Dr. Parsay.
LIKE SO MANY OF LIFE’S TURNING POINTS my parents’ decision to send me to England began as small talk. Father told me that Dr. Parsay had recommended that I go abroad, to protect me from “bad company” at school. Later he said he wanted to protect me from my mother’s hostility, from her endless anger and spite. In truth, there must have been a number of reasons for my parents’ decision to send me abroad. They wanted me to get the “best education,” but they insisted that their motives were different from those of the upper-class families who had begun to send their children to fashionable boarding schools in Britain and Europe. They made sure I understood that even if they had liked the idea, they just didn’t have the money for that sort of thing. They would be making a sacrifice as it was. Not having the money would become a symbol of worth in our family. I never really would find out how much money was enough money.
The subject of my studying abroad was first brought up when I was in eighth grade, and every day there was a new debate about where I should be sent. America was considered for a short time. My father liked the United States. He’d been sent to the American University in Washington, D.C., for a master’s degree in accounting and finance while he was working at the Ministry of Finance in the early fifties. He had been impressed by the good nature and hospitality of the people he had met, and, more than anything else, by their freedom to be who or what they wanted to be. He felt America was a good place for a girl like me.
Mother was against my going there: she said the people were rude, the distance too far. Switzerland was considered and rejected as too expensive. Every once in a while she would say, “It’s a shame Azi can’t speak French; my brother, Ali, could have looked after her.” He lived in Paris, where he got his medical degree. I had a feeling she didn’t actually want me to go to France or even to learn French because she felt it was her territory. “Please, not another word,” she would say when I finally took French in college, “Not with that accent. You either speak French with the right accent or you don’t speak it at all.” Then she would repeat what she had said so many times before: when she had visited Paris two years before, everyone had been so impressed with her command of the language that she had been taken for a native speaker. Ultimately, French became a citadel I never could conquer. Around the French I blushed and became a little gauche: I never did feel comfortable enough to respond to the simplest sentence.
The French were our superior relatives, especially men like Napoleon and de Gaulle, but it was the British she admired most. They were wily, polite but also sly, never revealing what was really in their minds. How else could they, from their small island, have conquered the world? I still remember an argument between my parents after a reception in honor of Lyndon Johnson, then vice president of the United States. My father was mayor of Tehran at the time and they were invited to the event by the foreign ministry. Mother asked Johnson if he could recommend any top schools in America where one could receive a solid British education. “Don’t you see that this is rather insulting to the vice president of the United States?” my father asked in exasperation. “He should feel privileged,” my mother shot back. “Most probably he himself was sent to a good British school.”
My mother’s passion for British correctness may have persuaded her that in Britain I would be bent back into shape. Finally it was Ameh Hamdam, a beloved cousin, who solved the problem. Her husband’s children had boarded at the house of a respectable Englishman, a Mr. Cumpsty, who had a large house in the town of Lancaster called Scotforth House. I could stay with him and be under his guardianship and go to a local school. It was agreed that my mother would accompany me for three months, to see that everything was in order, and decide if the place was suitable for me.
Father proudly told me one afternoon, as we were walking up and down the spacious terrace of Aunt Nafiseh’s house, that I was lucky, my mother and he had never had such an opportunity, they never had anyone who would worry about their future to the minutest detail. He wanted me to be educated and independent—both my parents were very keen on the idea of my education and independence. He reminded me again of his own decision to leave Esfahan, penniless and knowing no one. “Your position in society and the respect you will earn,” he said, “should have nothing to do with what you have inherited. You’re going there to get an education, but we expect you to come back and serve your country—your place is here, in this country that has given you so much.” Position in society, service to country—everything in our family was burdened with significance.
Amoo Said.
THE MONTH BEFORE I LEFT WAS SPENT IN A FLURRY OF GOODBYE PARTIES. We visited different rel
atives and family elders to pay our respects. On one particularly memorable eve ning, my parents took me to visit Ameh Hamdam’s older brother, Said Nafisi, whom we all called Amoo Said, or Uncle Said. Amoo Said had been schooled in Europe. He was well versed in both literature and history, and was one of Iran’s best-known modern intellectuals. In addition to his numerous works on Iran’s history and literature, he had several works of fiction, a French-Persian dictionary, and many translations, including Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, to his name. His main weakness was his prolific pen, for he could be simultaneously insightful and shallow, meticulous and careless.
My parents would often take me to his house, at the end of Nafisi Alley, a seemingly forsaken side street with a dry stream running down the middle. The house was a little cold and damp during winter. It had a sooty quality, as if no matter what the time of day, it was forever evening. The furniture seemed to fade into its surroundings, creating the illusion that the shabby couches and chairs were ghostly objects, as insubstantial as the secrets I imagined lingering in the shadows of that wonderful home.
The only bright room in the house was the library, where stacks of books filled the shelves and were piled precariously on the floor. The books seemed alive to me, like turtles with square backs and invisible legs. Whenever we visited, Amoo Said would at some point, with a rare smile partially hidden under his full beard, send me to his library with the exact location of a specific book that I was to bring to him. Perhaps it was because of this that I always imagined enchanted places not as glorious edifices but as penumbral ruins, their magnificence confirmed by the secrets hidden in their dark corners.
Amoo Said himself was suited to the role of wizard, commanding riddles that I hungered to discover. He was tall and slim, his body curiously elongated—he seemed to be almost elastic. His face was neither kind nor cold but receptive, with large brown eyes that appeared, from behind his horn-rimmed glasses, to be perpetually drawn to some unknown and invisible point or destination. Because he so seldom looked at anyone directly it always shocked me to see how attentive he had been.
Amoo Said was about twenty years older than my father. As a young man he had lived through the Constitutional Revolution, which had radically curtailed the power of the absolutist monarch and orthodox clergy, and he had seen the Qajar dynasty toppled by a Cossack officer later crowned as Reza Shah Pahlavi. Reza Shah set out to create a cohesive nation-state, building modern institutions, establishing a secular judicial system, centralizing power with the help of a network of railroads, and improving the military. Iran was thrust forward, but the old absolutism never completely disappeared: it reemerged in modified form as a modern political dictatorship that constantly undermined its own established institutions, especially Parliament and the judiciary.
In 1921, Amoo Said and a handful of fellow-writers and intellectuals founded Iran-e Javan (the Young Iran Club)—a group whose aim was to bring about a democratic Iran. It called for the cancellation of all legal and judicial privileges for foreign nationals; building railroads in various parts of the country; a ban on opium; compulsory public education; the easing of restrictions so that more young Iranians could study abroad; building museums, libraries, and theaters; women’s emancipation; what they called “the adoption of the progressive aspects of Western civilization;” and, finally, the establishment of a secular state and the separation of civil laws from religious laws. It is a measure of how things changed that the next generation of Iranians—my parents’ generation—were members of that same Young Iran Club, but it had by then been transformed from a vibrant cultural and political society into a fashionable social and gambling club.
Amoo Said was a constant source of controversy within our family. He gained a great deal of notoriety when he published a roman à clef, Halfway to Paradise, exposing the decadence and political incompetence of Iran’s elite and their dubious loyalties to foreign powers, especially the omnipresent British. The prominent Iranians who had been accepted into the order of Freemasons were portrayed as agents of the British government. The book strained relations with his brother, a minister of finance, whose friends (some quite unjustly) he had targeted in the novel. His views on this matter were at times exaggerated, bordering on paranoia.
Amoo Said was an impossible person to deal with. His family was proud of his literary reputation but constantly exasperated by his attacks on their friends and peers. Later he was forced to praise the Shah and retract his critical remarks so as to be able to write and earn his meager living. Despite this, and the fact that most of his years were spent in constant anxiety over financial difficulties (resulting in family conflicts and marital tension), Amoo Said was spoken of in our family with so much awe and reverence that his way of life presented itself as an alternative to the wealth and power my parents both coveted and shunned. Neither his financial, personal, or political problems took away from the image I formed of him as some kind of wizard.
That evening, when we went to pay our respects to Amoo Said, he turned to me, keeping his eyes cast down, and said, “You may not know this, but when I was sent to Europe only a handful of people had ever gone abroad. The world, our world here, was so much smaller. Education was what we hungered after. I hope you won’t take what you have for granted.” Not waiting for a response, he added, “Well, you’ll be on your own from now on. Have you thought of what you want to be?”
I wanted to say, I want to be like you, but that seemed too ingratiating, so I said that I didn’t know. “You must have some sort of a role model,” he said. I whispered that I had none. And immediately as I said it, even before having said it, I knew I was in trouble. “Well, there must be someone you admire, someone you want to be like?” “Rud-abeh,” I blurted out at last, thinking of my favorite heroine from the Shahnameh.
“Well, well, not Rostam but Rudabeh, not a bad choice,” he said. “Strange that you thought of her. Go to the library,” and he gave me the location of a particular book. “This is my going-away present,” he said, giving me the book. “One day, you will read this book and you might thank me for it. I am giving it to you because you admire Rudabeh.” The book he gave me was Vis and Ramin, by Fakhredin Gor-gani, who lived around the same time as Ferdowsi.
THAT EVENINGAS WE WALKED toward the car through the narrow curving alley with its dry stream, I could sense my mother’s displeasure. I should have said she was my role model. She never differentiated between great and trivial matters. In the car she was silent and so was I, she because of her anger and I because I knew I was the cause of that anger. My father tried to break the tension in his usual conciliatory manner.
“You should know,” he said, taking on his preaching tone, “that when Amoo Said was a child there were no proper schools in the country. Children of the upper classes were educated either at home or in maktabs, small rooms where students of different ages were crammed from early morning to evening and taught by a low-ranking cleric. Amoo Said was among the first to go to a modern school. In fact, his father, the king’s personal physician, was among the first to found such a school.” There was no response either from Mother or me, and he continued more casually, as if we were listening. “There is so much wisdom in your mother’s insight that you should know your country’s history. You’ve reached an age when you need to take these matters seriously. It’s not enough to know the Shahnameh; you’ll have to start paying more attention to real history.” I hated it when he took on that tone just to please her—and he seldom succeeded in pleasing her. She shot him a hateful glance and turned her head to the window. That night, when I tried to kiss her good night, my mother turned away, saying, “Go and kiss your imaginary role model, Rudabeh.” I walked to my room, resisting the tears and holding the book Amoo Said had given me in my hand. It was the tale of two star-crossed lovers, like Rudabeh’s story. What was I to do with several hundred pages of a poem written several hundred years ago? I tried to read it in bed. But it was difficult and soon I turned to another, more familiar one.
It took me two decades and a revolution before I realized what a rare gift he had given me that day.
CHAPTER 9
rudabeh’s story
I LISTENED CAREFULLY TO ALL my father’s stories, but with some I would hold my breath and remain very still in anticipation. That was how I felt—how I still feel—about the story of Rudabeh. I was not aware then of its deeper implications, but like certain recurring motifs Rudabeh would keep reappearing at different times throughout my life. I had forgotten until I started writing this book that I had chosen her name for my imaginary friend, whose memory suddenly leaped out reproachfully and irrelevantly, demanding full attention.
Rudabeh and Zal were the parents of Rostam, the main protagonist in the Shahnameh and perhaps the most important mythical hero in all of Persian literature. Rostam lives for four hundred years, is possessed of Achilles’ courage and Ulysses’ guile, and is far more important than the kings whose empires he defends and protects. And yet it was never Rostam who held my interest, but rather his parents, the white-haired Zal and Rudabeh.
In purdah, and unseen by anyone,
He has a daughter lovelier than the sun.
Lashes like ravens’ wings protect a pair
Of eyes like wild narcissi, hidden there;