by Azar Nafisi
I was not prepared for the scene I would encounter at the airport that summer, when I finally went home on vacation. Among the sea of faces were a number of eerily welcoming strangers. At last I spotted my mother and Aunt Nafiseh standing by a shabby, cheerful-looking middle-aged man holding a huge bouquet of shocking-pink gladiolus. Mother’s hairdresser, Goli, was standing a little behind this man, waving and smiling, but my gaze kept returning to that man with the gladiolus, who beamed in the manner of a stranger who so badly wants to be your best friend. “Let me introduce you to Mr. Zia,” Mother said as she kissed me on both cheeks. “He works with your father.” Aunt Mina and her daughter Layla stood by my father and brother and I spotted Uncle Reza, one of my father’s younger brothers, who had recently enrolled at the University of Tehran and was staying with us, but there were many others I didn’t recognize, all of whom appeared to share some sort of secret. You could see it as much in my mother’s gestures as in the sycophantic smile of Mr. Zia, who was, it turned out, my father’s chief of staff. This was to be our life, infected by my father’s new position as the youngest mayor of Tehran. From then on, everywhere I went, I would be surrounded by strangers acting as if they were close friends, up until my father was jailed, in the winter of 1963, when the process would be almost exactly reversed. “Welcome to your father’s Tehran!” my uncle Reza whispered sarcastically in my ear.
“Your mother,” Father had written me, “misses you so terribly that she constantly accuses us of callous indifference to your plight. She objects to keeping the house warm because ‘Poor Azi’ is there in England, shivering in that big house from cold, day after day.” My mother had written me commiserating letters, full of anxious questions about my health and happiness, and she had pressed Father to send me cuttings from women’s magazines about the benefits of grape juice and of cleaning the soles of your feet with pumice stone. She had sent dried cherries, plums, and apricots, along with hand-knit woolen socks, mittens, and sweaters that were usually either too small or too big. This set a pattern for the years ahead: while we were separated my mother and I pined for each other, and after a few days or at most a week together, we reverted to our old habits.
—
Firoozeh-e Bu-eshaghi Khosh Derakhshid vali dowlatash mosta-jaal bud. When I entered the living room on that first Friday after my return from England, I heard a familiar voice uttering this line from our classical poet Hafez, a reference to Eshagh, a king whose reign was brief, thanks to the machinations of his enemies. Hafez laments Eshagh’s bright but short-lived star.
Many of the old regulars were there that morning: my father’s old friend Mr. Khalighi; mother’s hairdresser, Goli; the well-heeled colonel; as well as Uncle Reza, who whispered that he was so ashamed of my father’s new job he denied being related to him. For many Iranians, having a high position in the government meant selling your soul to the devil. Aunt Mina was there too, and, when I entered the room, she gestured for me to sit by her side.
There were a few new faces: Mr. Zia, he of the shocking-pink gladiolus, sat on an upright chair, which did not prevent him from managing to slump. Next to him was a young, thin, dark man whom I later discovered to be Mr. Meshgin, a reporter; and an unassuming man with a submissive smile whom my father introduced as Mr. Esmaili, one of his deputies in charge of the parks and green spaces.
The voice I had heard quoting Hafez belonged to Mr. Khalighi, who, after greeting me warmly, went on to say, “Hafez lived over seven hundred years ago, but what he says about Eshagh, the star-crossed king, still applies. Our dear Ahmad is young and ambitious. His aspirations are all very good and well-intentioned. But he doesn’t know that in this government good intentions have no place. You can’t survive on goodwill.”
“You give me too much credit,” my father said, laughing. “My ambitions are modest and I pose no threat to those gentlemen surrounding the Shah. Nor am I answerable to them.” I listened with mixed feelings, mulling over my uncle’s hushed aside. “What’s more,” Father continued, “the Shah knows it. He has no reason to feel threatened by me.”
“The Shah, my dear man,” Mr. Khalighi shot back, “feels threatened by everyone. And perhaps with good reason. After Mossadegh, the Shah lost what little trust he had in others’ loyalties. Now he’s convinced that anyone articulate and popular is out to get him. So you see,” he said, leaning toward my father, “you cannot put your fate in the hands of a man who has no confidence in himself.”
This was a reference to Mossadegh, Iran’s stubborn prime minister in the early fifties, who was best known for resisting the Shah and pushing for the nationalization of Iran’s oil industry, which was then controlled by the British. This led to a hysterical and tension-filled international confrontation, mainly between Iran and Great Britain, and to a boycott of Iranian oil instigated by Britain that exacerbated Iran’s troubled economy. The Shah was forced to leave the country for a brief period. The Soviet-backed communist Tudeh Party, which had representatives in Parliament and had infiltrated the army ranks, took advantage of the crisis to foment unrest. One of Ayatollah Khomeini’s mentors, Ayatollah Kashani, initially backed Prime Minister Mos sa degh, but then turned against him and made peace with the royalists who backed the Shah. All this culminated in the 1953 military coup against Mossadegh, supported by the Americans and the British, and the Shah’s return. Mossadegh and the coup that overthrew him remains ever raw, a topic of endless debate—who was wrong and who was right, who betrayed whom and what price did we pay for these betrayals?
Mossadegh was, and by most accounts still is, Iran’s most popular political figure. My parents sympathized with him and Mother loved telling the story of the day of the coup leading to his controversial trial and exile to Ahmad Abad, a village he owned. His aborted premiership came to embody Iran’s as-yet-unrealized democratic aspirations. He carried with him the corrosive charm of unfulfilled dreams. And yet, years later, in 1978, when we had the chance to choose a follower of Mossadegh, Shahpoor Bakhtiar, a well-known liberal nationalist figure, as the Shah’s last appointed prime minister, the majority of people opted not for Bakhtiar but for Ayatollah Kho meini, a figure far more despotic than the Shah. One can ask, at least in hindsight: how far should we trust people who would lament Mossadegh but vote for Khomeini?
Mossadegh at his trial.
Much speculation followed on that first morning of my return about the fate of the Iranian people. It was suggested that all of our misfortunes were due to our stubborn attachment to a cult of personality, created around the Shah. No one can drink a glass of water without the Shah’s approval, someone said. “It isn’t his fault,” objected Mr. Meshgin, the dark-featured reporter. “It’s in our blood; this is how we respond to our leaders. We call them King of Kings, Shadow of God on Earth. How long before even the most mild-mannered of men starts believing what he hears? Mossadegh himself had many autocratic tendencies.” He turned to my father. “You, my friend, are building castles in the sky if you rely on the Shah. You know your Fer-dowsi. Keep in mind how often his kings betray their advisors.” Before Father had a chance to reply, Mr. Khalighi said to my mother, “Nezhat Khanoom, I hope you agree with me. Many good men in your family have already paid dearly for their services to the Shah.”
Mother, who had been oddly silent throughout this conversation, nodded and glanced up with a bitter grin. “I am not listened to,” she said. “I only pay the price. Amoo Said has been trying to tell him the same thing.” No matter how much my mother enjoyed her new status as the mayor’s wife, at no time did she forget the injustices against a whole host of other Nafisis, known for their stubbornness, who had at one time or another fallen out of favor, either going to jail for a short time or being forced out of government jobs and sent into exile. These incidents were alluded to with pride, despite the hardships they brought to our lives, so that a stranger overhearing our discussions would have been forgiven for believing that we were talking about honors and promotions.
“Things are m
ore complicated than that,” my father said defensively. “I’m not Mossadegh, times have changed, we have to do what we can.”
IN MY FATHER’S PRIVATE DIARIES from that period I find the same muted excitement that I sensed in him at the time. As I discovered later, this excitement came not from the fact that everything was going well, but that so many things could be done so much better and he had been entrusted with the power and responsibility to fix them. In such a situation, I would in time learn, you feel needed, and elated, as if your own possibilities are endless, like a child with an infinite number of LEGOs, gratefully overwhelmed by the promise of all of the castles needing to be built. That, of course, is a mirage. And responsibility for the disillusionment that followed cannot solely be blamed on the Shah, or on Khomeini.
Father’s diaries abound with breathless descriptions of the plans he set in motion for the city of Tehran—building parks and creating the first comprehensive map of the city, initiating local city councils, fighting corruption—and of his countless conversations with the Shah, who sounds attentive and charming. The text brims with activity: the verbs are positive and the prose energetic and concrete. This is how I remember him in those years. He was filled with an energy that I would glimpse only occasionally in later years when he puttered around in the garden with his plants. He put his trust in the Shah’s trust in him. With each gesture of intimacy from the Shah he seemed to gain confidence, priding himself on being frank in what he dismissed as a sycophantic court. I remember his boasting about how he had refused a favor from the Shah, the offer of a piece of land near the Caspian Sea, for example. “I don’t shirk from voicing criticism,” he said. “I’m open in my disagreements.”
From the very start there was discord between Father and other high officials, especially the prime minister, Assadollah Alam, and the minister of the interior, Seyyed Mehdi Pirasteh. “Sly as a fox,” my mother said of Alam; “I could never trust that man.” He had a reputation for ruthlessness. Many dark stories circulated about the way he disposed of his enemies and the favors he bestowed on those who toed the line.
Although Father was sincere in his insistence that he was not ambitious in the usual sense, he was in fact far more so than the prime minister or the prime minister’s cronies. I think on some level he wanted to prove to them how insubstantial they were, that what they craved—position, wealth—meant nothing to him. Every time he refused a favor from the Shah, he undermined their status in the Shah’s eyes. Yet he was also undermining his own position, which he both loved and despised. My mother also boasted of the way she snubbed some members of the royal family and hostile officials. And that was the problem with my family: they wanted the power to fulfill their ideals but they didn’t want to be stained by politics. This partly explains my parents’ obsessive affection for those who were out of favor with the ruling elite, even when they themselves were part of that elite.
Despite my father’s confidence, throughout this euphoric phase I detected an undercurrent of deep anxiety, which extended into my dreams. Every once in a while, when political disagreements became particularly confrontational, he would tell us, “I handed in my resignation, but the Shah refused it.” Although Mother would later claim time and time again that she had foreseen the disastrous turn my father’s career would take, he kept her in the dark about his problems and she was in fact too wrapped up in a general state of apprehension to be able to predict any real threat. My father’s arriving home ten minutes late, an unexpected phone call, a certain expression of concern, and she would immediately ask What? What has happened? with such intensity that her anxiety seemed to be almost a matter of pride.
Her old rivalry with my father and her basic dissatisfaction with life did not allow her to fully appreciate her new circumstances, but she did enjoy the power that came with them. Even during this time she did not forget to remind us of her charmed life with Saifi in his father’s house—as if any admittance of satisfaction in her life with Father would be a sign of disloyalty to Saifi. “In Saham Soltan’s house there was always some hustle and bustle,” she would say. “Politicians were different back then, they had backbone.” Once Father, in a good mood, said lightly, but with unmistakable bitterness, “Have you noticed that every time your mother talks of her past glories, Saifi is absent? What exactly were his accomplishments? Except for being his father’s son, did he ever achieve anything? To hear her talk it would seem my greatest fault has been not being at death’s door!”
I sometimes think we become so dependent on the images we create of ourselves that we can never discard them. My mother from the start had decided that her marriage to my father had been a mistake, a poor second to her life with Saifi, and despite all evidence to the contrary she would never revise that first assumption. Aunt Mina claimed that Mother really did love my father but didn’t know how to demonstrate her love and so it manifested itself in anxiety for his safety, a distemperate defense of his political actions, and constant concern about his health. Only her anger was deep and incontrovertible.
CHAPTER 12
mayor of tehran,
ALMOST EVERY MORNING my father left home around five. Before going to his office he liked to tour the city, paying occasional visits to the fire stations and sanitation crews and checking in more regularly on Tehran’s large fruit and vegetable market and on its unofficial boss, Haji Tayeb, who had a reputation for fixing prices through a combination of bullying and intimidation. My father was proud of the way he handled Tayeb, making him work within the municipal rules and regulations.
Mother had her own set of spies with whose help she managed to meddle in the affairs of a city that, in many ways, she knew more intimately than my father did. Throughout her adult life she had stalked the streets of Tehran, finding the best quality material, the fairest prices, bargaining, cajoling, quarreling, and making friends with shopkeepers. She knew how the fruit vendors would hide their best fruit to sell at inflated prices to their wealthier customers and she would field calls from friends and acquaintances reporting on such and such a butcher or baker. What sensuality she lacked in her personal relations came out in her daily forays to the market, where she would create a row one moment and flirt and coax the next. It was not unusual for her to spend half an hour at a time talking to the fruit vendor, with an orange or apple in hand, smelling it, inspecting the skin, guessing at its taste. Accompanying her on these adventures, I felt somehow closer to her, as I had as a young child when, absentmindedly holding my hand, she would walk from shop to shop seeming so much at home in this world of chocolates, leather, and spices.
So much of my parents’ idea of Iran was encapsulated by their differing visions of Tehran. My father loved the city and was curious about its past, but he was also eager to push it forward and to leave his mark. Mother loved the idea of Tehran, its customs and rituals and dusty alleys, all pregnant with traditions that she felt compelled to preserve at all cost. Sometimes, when she went from shop to shop, eyeing and touching the merchandise, I felt she was in some way making sure things were as she imagined them to be. Sure, she made enemies and people talked behind her back, but here at least, unlike at home, she was obeyed and respected.
She enjoyed undermining Father’s rules and regulations, and often invited her favorite shopkeepers to our house. On Friday mornings, alongside reporters, one might find the grocer or the Armenian baker, sitting politely on the edge of his chair. My father, exasperated, would remind her that this might be taken as a sign of favoritism. “They will accuse me of bribing and being bribed,” he would say. “You cannot do this.” It got to the point where he had to ask them without her knowledge not to come to our house, much as he would bribe the servants to stay on and not mind the mistress’s temper tantrums.
ABOUT THREE WEEKS AFTER my return from Lancaster my parents and I went to visit Amoo Said. Mohammad insisted on coming along. His passion for chemistry was over and he had a more ambitious project in mind: he had begun to set up a library. He already ha
d a seal and a name for it, Prosperous Iran, after a magazine founded and edited by my father when he was working in the Planning and Budget Organization. Mohammad, shamelessly from my point of view, solicited contributions from relatives and friends. In this he was generally encouraged. Mother, who constantly nagged us both for reading too much, had concluded that his project was very clever and boasted about it everywhere she went. It is one thing to sprawl across the floor engrossed in a book and quite another to build a library, where books are organized and categorized. Mohammad had decided to come with us to solicit Amoo Said’s support—and from Amoo Said he would receive two novels and a book on Persian mysticism for his effort, plus a great deal of attention and encouragement.
That day, not even the magic of Amoo Said’s house could deflect my bitter and self-pitying mood. I had quarreled with my mother over something all morning. I wanted to go to a close friend’s house that night. The friend was leaving in a week and had invited me and two other friends to spend the night with her. “It’s not a party,” I told my mother, “just girls.” But suddenly she wanted me home. She missed me. It was not right, children neglecting their family, returning home on vacation and never spending a moment with them. “Please, Mom, please,” I had begged. “I said no,” she shot back, “that’s final. Not another word.” It ended as it so often did: with cries, recriminations, and a long, brooding silence.
No sooner had we had taken our seats in the living room than Amoo Said started teasing me about my recent appearance on television. A few days earlier I had accompanied my father on a tour of Tehran with some Americans who were visiting the city with USAID. It was reported in the news and I was picked up on camera. “Usually when foreigners visit they are shown the best parts of the city,” Father said, “but we started with the poorest areas, to give these Americans something to think about. They were a little surprised to see how young a city Tehran was. My own daughter,” he said, “also did not appreciate this, so I think she needs a history lesson as well.”