by Azar Nafisi
“Is that right?” Amoo Said asked me lightly. “One would not expect it of such a cultivated young lady.” At this my mother made an almost imperceptible grunt. He went on to tell us how before the Qajar kings chose it as their capital in the eighteenth century, Tehran had been a small village full of beautiful gardens, whose inhabitants lived in underground caves to protect themselves from invaders.
“Not much of that old city remains,” Father said dryly, choosing to ignore the silent anger seething between my mother and me. “True enough,” Amoo Said rejoined. “It’s easier to boast of our glorious past than it is to preserve it. Not a century since the Qajars abdicated and most of the buildings from their time have already gone, part of the modernization project.” Father explained that until then there had been no real comprehensive plan for the city. It just grew haphazardly. He boasted that he had employed a conscientious German engineer to draw up a plan with a five-year target as well as a longer, twenty-five-year plan.
As Father and Amoo Said went on talking, occasionally addressing their comments directly to Mother, who nodded without evincing much interest, I drifted in and out of their conversation. At one point it turned to Tehran during the Constitutional Revolution of 1905 through 1911. “Every garden and park in this city carries mementos of that revolution,” Amoo Said told us. “Let’s hope the ghosts of our fathers have not abandoned this city.”
They talked a great deal that day about the gardens of Tehran—which had become places of both refuge and graves for the constitutionalists—but I was more focused on what I would be missing that night by not going to my friend’s house. By the time we were ready to leave, I had decided that I should leave Tehran at once, as soon as we were back home.
WE ARE ON THE TERRACE of one of Tehran’s more trendy restaurants, my father, Aunt Nafiseh, and I. Like most fashionable spots in Tehran the restaurant has a foreign name, Sorento. I don’t know where my mother is. These days Father and Aunt Nafiseh have become very chummy. Since he has taken on his position as mayor, they have developed a new and more intimate relationship. She enjoys parties and the admiration of powerful men, and is a great flirt.
Trapped between his desire to understand and help my mother and his resentment of her behavior toward him, my father confided his frustration to others. I believe that it was not deliberate on his part, but in this way he did get sympathy. He was charming and sociable and was more fun than my mother, who seemed to have made a pact never to enjoy herself. Aunt Nafiseh liked to laugh and drink and gamble and go to the movies and the theater. She enjoyed the good life that my father had hoped for when he married my mother, the good life that his austere family in Esfahan so vehemently denied. So while he empathized with my mother, telling us stories of how she had been robbed of her inheritance by her wicked stepmother, he also flattered my aunt and was in turn flattered by her attentions.
They sit opposite me. I feel honored to be spending the evening with two of my favorite people. I never warmed up to my step-grandmother, who was cold and mean by nature, but I loved going to Aunt Nafiseh’s house and I desperately wanted to please her. Their eyes are shining and focused on me as I bask in the light of their compliments. But in that repartee, something else is happening that has nothing to do with me. It implies a mute excitement that only relates to the two of them: a young, attractive and successful man and woman, having fun, admiring one another.
Although I do not think we are doing anything wrong, a sense of guilt clings to me afterward. Their relation did not go beyond a certain flirtatious camaraderie; what made it suspect was the deliberate omission of my mother from the occasion. Long before my father was unfaithful to her, my parents had already paved the path with emotional betrayal. Aunt Nafiseh would be replaced by faces of other women—my father’s secretary, a friend of the family—who would smile at me across the table, complimenting me on something or other. It is eerie how, in my memory, they all look alike, sitting opposite me, close to Father, smiling and talking about me in the third person, using my nickname, Azi. During these moments, although I tried to please my father and the woman beside him, I always felt the weight of my mother’s absence.
Father, Aunt Nafiseh, and me.
—
A FEW DAYS AFTER the dinner at Sorento, my mother, Aunt Mina, and skinny Monir joon gather in our living room. Mother is holding her small percolator over the gas fire and they are talking about Aunt Nafiseh. Aunt Mina is saying, “Nezhat, you never confronted Nafiseh about family matters, about the way she or her mother mistreated you. But now it is different. This is your husband and you should not remain silent.”
“It is beneath me even to acknowledge it,” Mother says. “The best response is to pretend not to notice.”
“Okay, okay,” Aunt Mina says impatiently, “but there’s no need to boast about your stubborn silence.”
Mother dismisses Aunt Mina’s comment with a wave of her hand and embarks on a story she has told us several times before. It is about her stepmother’s involvement in an alleged affair. Apparently her stepmother, Ferdows, was indiscreet in front of my mother and my grandfather’s youngest brother, who threatened to inform her husband. According to my mother, her stepmother turned the tables on her brother-in-law and claimed that he was spreading rumors because she had refused his advances. This accusation led to an estrangement between her husband and his younger brother.
Mother pours the coffee into three small cups and, as she hands one to Aunt Mina and the other to Monir joon, relates how, for a whole afternoon, her father walked up and down the garden with her asking her to tell him what she knew of these allegations, but she refused to say a word. She was so proud of this fact. I was silent, she says. I divulged nothing. She says this with the same boasting tone with which she would later claim to love the smell of smoke but never to have smoked a cigarette. Why? Why did she say nothing? If she kept it a secret from her father, why would she talk about it to others? Her pride was at times indistinguishable from her bitterness.
I wonder if, by writing about her now, by breaking this cherished silence, I am indulging in one last form of resistance to her. I now believe that we cannot keep silent about the truths we know. She did not really keep silent; in her own way she revealed their secret, by repeating time and again how she had kept silent about it. But what would have happened if she had confronted her stepmother and not felt the need to keep up appearances? What would have happened, for that matter, if I had confronted my father?
ONE PLACE SEEMED not to have been much affected by my father’s job: Esfahan. When we visited our relatives for a few days nothing seemed to have changed. Mohammad and I were feted and dined as we moved from one relative’s house to another. My cousins and younger uncles published their own magazines, which they wrote and illustrated by hand. They had established a sophisticated library system that had branches in our grandmother’s and two older uncles’ houses, and held weekly meetings at which literature and philosophy were discussed with great intensity. When we visited Esfahan, these meetings were convened almost daily. Over breakfast and lunch, in the streets going from one historical site to another, in the evenings on the cool terrace, at nights on the upstairs balcony under the stars, we talked, exchanged poetry, and debated. These are my memories of Esfahan: standing on the lower steps of the terrace that led to the garden with Cousin Mehdi; loudly reciting poems by Forough Farrokhzad; walking on the wide avenue along the river with Cousin Majid, talking about his poetry; standing by the breakfast table with Cousin Nassrin and, while her mother shuffles to and from the kitchen, talking of Sartre, Camus, and Dostoevsky, while I try to ignore a slight nagging guilt at not helping with the breakfast arrangements.
Two years later, on that same terrace, my uncle would summon a family meeting to address an article by Mehdi in their homemade journal. “In order to live, one must have hope,” Mehdi had written. “We have no hope …” He went on to complain about the stifling atmosphere in Esfahan, one that stunted the growth of y
oung people and deprived them of the joy of being young and the possibility of living differently. My uncle turned to me, and said with a hint of sarcasm, Let’s start with our modern lady from Tehran. Can a place where such writing is freely published and debated be suffocating?
My mother is mostly absent from these memories. She found it outrageous, my obsession with my father’s family. In a way she saw it as an affront to herself. Later she would complain that my brother and I never accorded her family the same kind of respect and love we showed our father’s family. But one scene in particular has remained with me. It was during a short visit to Esfahan that summer. After dinner my mother followed me from the dining room to the terrace, with a small plate full of sliced pears, stopping at intervals to push her fork with a pear at its tip into my mouth. I am aware of sideways looks by my uncles and my cousins. Finally, with a theatrical gesture, proclaiming, Please observe my predicament and sympathize! I surrendered and sat opposite her, as if in a staged play, while she forced slices of pear into my mouth. I remember her smile of triumph, and the small fork moving to and fro. In a diary that has miraculously survived over three decades, I have written for half a page:
I hate pears
I hate pears
I hate pears
I hate pears
I hate pears …
And for another half page:
I eat pears
I eat pears
I eat pears
I eat pears
I eat pears …
This memory is washed over with other memories: waves of sympathy and understanding from my uncles and cousins. We argue—about the veil, relations between men and women, love …
—
A WEEK OR SO BEFORE I leave to return to school in England my family pays a visit to a psychiatrist’s office. He is not really a psychiatrist, he’s a neurologist with knowledge of psychiatry—one of the best in the country, by all accounts, and a friend of my mother’s half brother, Uncle Ali. We chose him out of a need for discretion—first of all there is nothing wrong with anyone, and second, it is useless anyway, and third, why should one air one’s dirty laundry in public?
We are all at the office with Uncle Ali. It is after office hours and we ’re in a bit of a hurry (my parents have to attend an official function that evening). After desperate consultations, Father had reached the conclusion that medical advice might help my mother. I think his new position as mayor, his certainty that he could make a difference in the political arena, has given him the power to believe he can also change his domestic life. We are all four there because there is no way my mother would agree to see a psychiatrist on her own, and my uncle is there because he is the psychiatrist’s friend and my mother has asked him to be there. We have persuaded her to come along by putting forward the theory that talking to him might help solve our collective problems.
You know how teenage children are, my uncle says, awkwardly, leaving the rest to our imagination. In my time, teenagers did not exist, she says impatiently, taking a cursory look at the indifferent landscape paintings on the walls of the waiting room. We obeyed our elders no matter how old we were. And what with your husband so busy … You think he is busy? she says. What about me? He enjoys the fame and I get the criticism. Add to that the management of the house, and the children. All of this takes its toll, my kind uncle says in his calm, Zen-like manner; that’s why we are here. He calls her Nessi, the nickname he and Aunt Nafiseh use for her. My mother adores her half brother and he is very sweet. His attitude toward everyone is much the same: detached and sympathetic.
One by one we are called in by the doctor. Father goes in first. As soon as he comes out, she pulls him to a corner and I am called in. Like my father and my brother, I am there to enlighten the already enlightened doctor about our relations with my mother. It takes about ten minutes. I am immersed in the excitement of conspiracy. The secretive mission we have all embarked on makes me foolishly open with the doctor, counting all my grievances, sympathizing with Father. God knows what kind of marriage he himself has. Two illusions: that he could make a difference and that our trick would bear fruit.
When my brother emerges and the doctor calls Mother in, she asks the doctor to come out of his room. She says she has nothing to hide; unlike the rest of us, she has no secret. Now, she says, they may have problems they want to discuss, but not me. Well, Ahmad Khan is a very important public personage, she says with a sarcastic smile. After all, he has so much responsibility. Now this lady—meaning me—and her brother are at the start of their life. They have anxieties about their studies, their future, and they also have to think of their very important father—he has always been the center of their lives. But I, she says, I am a poor housewife. I am a nobody. I have no anxieties, nothing to worry about. And I never felt I had to complain to doctors about my problems. She extends her hand, thanks the doctor with a poisonously sweet smile, and goes out; we sheepishly follow her.
In the car my father seeks to justify his action in going to the doctor. He offers up all the usual reasons and excuses and tries to convince her she is wrong, that it would be good for the family to go. Every once in a while he turns to us for confirmation and we mumble something in assent. They have to drop us off at home before heading on to the reception. I expect her to make trouble but, unexpectedly, there is no fuss. She responds icily to our anxious, barely audible good-byes and they go on their way.
As a defense against Mother, Mohammad and I had developed a bantering tone, turning our frustrations into games, little jokes. Feeling close to Father made us feel closer to each other. That night during dinner we go over the visit to the doctor’s. That worked well, he says, as he fills his plate with as much crust from the rice as possible. I pull the plate out from under him. Hey, leave some for me! What now? he says. What now what? I snap back. What will we do about her now? he asks. That night we hatch several plans: we could drug her by dropping Valium into her coffee, invite the doctor to come for a social visit and have him diagnose her on the sly. He could hypnotize her… Poison, what about poison? I say. You want to kill her? No, we give her a little poison and then rescue her; that way she will appreciate life. Ah, she will say. I never knew how precious life was. Or what if the three of us, Father, you, and I, committed suicide. That would teach her a lesson, I say excitedly. Yes, that might be the best solution.
CHAPTER 13
rehearsal for a revolution
BY THE END OF THAT SUMMER, I had vowed never to return home for another vacation. In my last week, my mother and I fought almost every day, about my going out with friends or their visiting me, about trips to Esfahan, about my lack of respect at all times. But after a week back in Lancaster I was already planning my next trip home. Mother informed me in a loving letter that she had sent me a package with dried cherries, walnuts, wool socks (for those awful English winters), and a sweater (blue, my favorite color). Did I want anything else? A friend would be visiting England and she would send along a gold chain for my birthday.
The next summer I found myself in Tehran a little before the end of the school term. I don’t remember exactly why, but it must have had something to do with the turmoil raging across Iran throughout that winter and spring of 1962 and 1963, escalating in the holy month of Muharram, which started that year in mid-May The unrest was triggered by the passage of a new council election bill allowing women to vote for the first time and revoking the condition that all parliamentary candidates must be Muslim. The bill, announced on October 8, 1962, engendered a great deal of furor in the religious establishment, mainly instigated by Ayatollah Ruholla Khomeini.
Looking back at our history, what seems surprising to me now is not how powerful religious authorities have been in Iran but how quickly modern secular ways took over a society so deeply dominated by religious orthodoxy and political absolutism. The Pahlavis replaced the religious law with a modern judicial system, but the damage done to the religious establishment was far more substantial than this act a
lone would suggest. Before the Constitutional Revolution, the clerics had not only controlled the legal system, they had dictated the way of perceiving the universe. While some clerics wanted to preserve the old system and perhaps saw correctly in its demise their own dwindling influence, others among them opted for change and actively participated in the struggle.
From the time of the Constitutional Revolution to the days of upheaval in 1963 to the Islamic Revolution of 1979, the bloody and violent struggle that divided Iran was not just political but also cultural and ideological. In a sense it was existential. Opposition by the traditionalists stemmed from a revulsion, at once institutional and personal, at the modernizing moves that they perceived the Shah, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, and his father, Reza Shah, had set in motion. Now the truth of the matter was that the movement for modernization had been under way before the Pahlavis and never stopped after them. Women’s rights, minority rights, and culture became the main arenas of contention. Time and again in that fateful summer of 1963, Ayatollah Khomeini and his supporters linked political oppression and foreign domination to the Shah’s lifestyle, his father’s mandatory unveiling of women, the Shah’s love of nightclubs, his keeping dogs (considered unclean in Islam) as house pets. They railed against films, music, and novels and lampooned the idea of individual rights.
The government retreated in the face of the unrest and it repealed the bill that had passed in October. But the Shah was not about to give in. He soon came up with a new and more comprehensive proposal, called the White Revolution, which he decided to put to the test of a popular referendum.