by Azar Nafisi
By evening Mother was becoming visibly nervous. She had received no call from my father, and this was not in character. The doorbell rang and a few minutes later Mr. Rahman came in, pushing the servant aside, eyes bulging, his eternal gray suit crumpled. He caught me in the hall with a book in my hand, walking lazily to my room. “Stop!” he said, hurrying forward and holding my hand in both of his. His attention always made me panic. Mohammad he ignored, but he always managed to trap me. “I have to work,” I said. “You have no work,” he said. “You are reading some mumbo jumbo, I can tell. But I need your help,” he confided in my ear. “Your father sent me here to reason with your mother and I need you.” I said, not untruthfully, “She never listens to me.” “It isn’t for her sake but for mine,” he said. “Your presence brings me luck. It will help me with my powers.”
At this point my mother opened the living-room door. “Oh, Rahman,” she said, looking pleased, “what are you doing here?” “Ahmad Khan sent me,” he said. “I come from him. How lucky you are not to have seen the goings-on today!” Mother was now smiling and Rahman, without relinquishing my resistant hand, followed her to the drawing room. “Nothing a good coffee won’t take care of,” she said with a smile.
“My dear Nezhat Khanoom,” he began, once he had settled in his chair, “dark days are ahead. You have a brave husband …” Seeing my mother’s disapproving expression, he added, “but a foolish husband. My heart goes out to you. Your mother,” he said, turning to me, “is the backbone of this family. What would you do without her?”
Head down, frantically focused on my book, I did my best to ignore him. He turned toward Aunt Mina with the same question, but she was in no mood for this and, mumbling something about it getting late, she swiftly said good-bye and left.
“He can’t call,” Rahman explained, “because the phones aren’t safe. So many wounded. The clerics came prepared. This protest, my dear Nezhat Khanoom, was a calculated and carefully orchestrated event. The clerics had their own group of vigilantes with clubs and knives. They set fire to so many places. They have allies in the bazaar and among the people. Hundreds of men in white shrouds have started to walk from Varamin village toward the city. They’ve already attacked the police station there, and the military is preparing to receive them with guns. I want you to know he’s safe—for the time being,” he added cryptically. “How many times have you and I asked him to resign his post?”
Mother murmured that she had never wanted him to take the job in the first place. “Yes, that’s what I told him today. Danger everywhere, I see danger.”
Mother handed me a cup of coffee and shook her head. “Have you seen it in the Book?” she asked, referring to the Koran, from which Rahman ostensibly received his messages from beyond.
“I have seen it in the Book, yes, but I have also talked with people in the know. Thank God one person in this family has her head in the right place. I told your husband today that you, at least, have the good sense not to run for Parliament.”
My mother gave him a bitter look, and I at this point became more interested. “This has nothing to do with me,” she said coldly. “I was born into a political family. My father ran for Parliament and was defeated because his so-called friends betrayed him. My husband … my husband, Saifi,” she stammered, “was the son of the prime minister. I was in the company of people like Doctor Millspaugh since I was …” there was a pause, and then she continued, “since I was a mere nineteen-year-old girl. I could have become a doctor, but that’s now impossible.”
“I know,” he said, “I know. But these are dangerous times. We need you, believe me, we need you. Your husband belongs to no group. He is alone.”
“Should I always pay for his mistakes?” she said indignantly. Then she added more quietly, “Did you find out about what I asked you?” They both turned to me, and I, by now very interested in hearing what would come next, pretended to read my book. “Azi,” my mother said, “I need to talk to Mr. Rahman alone.” “I’m not bothering anyone,” I said. But I knew I had no choice but to leave. I picked up my book, dragged my feet slowly, dodged Mr. Rahman, and left the door open behind me.
By the time Father returned home, around ten that night, we were all so exhausted that one might have been forgiven for imagining that we had been participating ourselves in the events of the day. I had been worried sick, but I went out of my way to make sure Mother didn’t know it. Every once in a while I would go to the door and look out. I drank coffee with every new person who came in. When Father finally entered the drawing room, Mr. Rahman said reproachfully, “Well, Ahmad Khan, it’s about time. This poor woman has almost gone out of her mind with worry.” The poor woman looked at my father with a stony glare, as if he had just returned from an all-day assignation without bothering to call and say he would be late for dinner.
That summer it was agreed that Mother would run for Parliament along with five other women. She took office in the fall of 1963. My parents decided to send me to the posh and trendy Ecole Internationale in Geneva, a decision that made me long for shabby, gray Lancaster and my mocking British friends. On that day, June 5, 1963, the first page of my father’s secret-service file was written. In the file, it was claimed by anonymous agents that my father had collaborated with the opposition to the Shah and with the clerics. At the time, none of us would have been able to predict what effect those few pages would have on our lives, transforming them in ways we never could have dreamed of.
CHAPTER 14
a common criminal
IN DECEMBER OF 1963, I was pulled out of my history class and taken to the principal’s office, where I was told in solemn tones that a Swiss radio station had just reported that my father was in jail. “Has there been a revolution?” I asked. There seemed to be no reason, despite our habitual anxiety, for him to be imprisoned under any other circumstance.
Everything seemed to be going well for him. That whole fall I heard glowing reports about Father hosting different heads of state. Three weeks earlier I’d seen a two-page spread of my father standing alongside General de Gaulle in Paris Match. No other dignitaries were in the photo, not even the Shah. De Gaulle had taken a liking to him, perhaps on account of Father’s welcoming speech, which he delivered in French with various allusions to French literature. De Gaulle rewarded him with the medal of the Legion of Honor. When I excitedly mentioned the photograph to Father on the phone, he said, “Well, that will cost me, so let’s not be too quick to celebrate.”
At my school in Geneva we lived a secluded life. I had no access to Persian newspapers, and contact with the outside world was limited to monitored visits from relatives and friends. When I called home to ask Mother about the arrest, I was assured it was just a rumor, that Father was in between jobs and was at our place by the Caspian Sea for a much-needed rest. Aunt Mina wrote to say that he had been offered the job of interior minister and she looked forward to seeing me back home for the holidays. I was supposed to spend my Christmas vacation in France but I was told that plans had changed and I would be going home. Otherwise all seemed much the same.
Father meets with French president Charles de Gaulle.
My cousin Reza (Aunt Nafiseh’s son), who was enrolled at the Le Rosey school in Switzerland, was on the same flight back to Tehran.
As soon as we settled into our seats, I told him I wasn’t sure why I’d been summoned home (sudden changes had been made to his plans as well), and suggested it might have something to do with my father. Indeed, he said, casually waving his newspaper in my direction. On the front page was a picture of Father under a big headline about his arrest.
The article enumerated a list of charges, including bribery and mishandling of funds. Some forty other people—mainly contractors—had been arrested with him. In reports filed by SAVAK, the secret police, my father was reported to be consorting with the opposition, and was accused of being on good terms with the clerics and of “insubordination.” Two prime ministers, Assadollah Alam and his soon-to-
be-successor, Hassan Ali Mansour, who was the same age as my father and ostensibly his friend, had considered him a “problem.” One could not forgive my father’s arrogance and the other, young and very ambitious, saw him as a serious rival.
The morning after my arrival the familiar sounds and the smell of coffee made me feel for a moment that nothing had changed, that walking into the living room I would find Father smiling indulgently at our guests. Aunt Mina was there and Mr. Khalighi, who had brought a poem to welcome me back, in which he lamented the fact that Father could not greet his beloved daughter at the airport. Mr. Meshgin’s gloomy expression was offset by a rare and forced smile. Goli gave me a warm smile as Shirin Khanoom freely vented her anger at the decadent Pahlavis and their godless ways.
Mr. Rahman sat close to Mother, fixing his eyes on me. I was sure he did it just to make me feel uncomfortable. He was now officially part of Mother’s entourage, a fixture both at home and in my father’s diaries. Rahman warned that Mansour seemed all-powerful now, but who could say what fate might have in store for him? Mother was less charitable. How could one forget, she said, that his father, the Shah’s father’s last prime minister, had handed Reza Shah over to the British? “His son has a less reliable protector in the Americans, and we see how he chooses to betray his country.”
Mr. Behdad, a prominent lawyer who later took on my father’s defense, had come that morning, along with Mr. Esmaili, the director of parks and green spaces, one of Father’s colleagues who had taken to visiting regularly. Every day Father spent in jail there was always a vase of fresh flowers in his room; after his release he discovered that they were sent anonymously by Esmaili. In the months and years ahead I would come to appreciate the loyalty of unlikely people like him and Zia, father’s chief of staff, whom I had marked as a mere sycophant.
Father during his incarceration.
Zia was saying that perhaps if Nezhat Kha-noom could see the prime minister and convince him of Mr. Mayor’s innocence (he never stopped calling my father Mr. Mayor) he might soon be released. “My good man,” Mr. Khalighi said with some exasperation, “the prime minister, of all people, knows full well that Ahmad is innocent. You seem to forget that they fabricated those charges. What we should do is find out the real reason he is in jail.”
Such idle speculation was interrupted by the arrival of Aunt Nafiseh, who made an entrance, evincing no concern that she might be interrupting and accepting the sudden silence as an homage to herself. Aunt Nafiseh had embarked on a campaign in my father’s defense. She called on government officials on his behalf and made fireworks of her benevolence, visiting him regularly, sending him his favorite food, even offering to lend him money to see us through the hard times. After acknowledging the company with a general nod and offering me her cheek, she turned toward my mother and Rahman, who followed her out of the room. Her arrival cast a gloomy silence on all assembled.
—
WHILE MOTHER AND AUNT NAFISEH waited at the gate of the Police Detention Center, the temporary abode for ordinary criminals, I stood a little apart, wearing what could have been interpreted by sympathetic observers as a brave little smile. In the car Mother and I had already begun our war—I started mumbling about staying in Tehran and doing my A levels with the help of private tutors and she, for some reason best known to her, wanted me to leave as soon as possible. Only when the car deposited us in front of that huge metal gate, which seemed to stretch beyond the walls into another kingdom, did I suddenly panic.
We did have one privilege: we met Father in the office of the prison director, a long and rather narrow room painted a shiny blue-gray, with a darker blue border. On one side, close to the wall, was the director’s desk, and behind the desk a balding man in a blue uniform got up anxiously to greet us. Against this dull background his good-natured round face shone with an expression of frank humility. Opposite his desk, next to the wall, was a row of small chairs and two tables.
My mother and aunt embarked on a polite conversation with Colonel Khorami, the prison director, while I sat in the corner, pressed against the slippery wall, glancing out the window. A pause in the conversation: I turned toward the colonel and, from the corner of my eye, saw my father, looking thinner and younger, standing by the open door with a smile. I lurched forward, stumbling over the narrow metal table. The colonel politely averted his gaze. A small exclamation from my aunt, perhaps a look of disapproval from my mother. I stood there until he walked to me and held me in his arms and as he kissed me he whispered, “It’s okay, I’m so happy to see you.”
At first they talked grown-up talk while I sat beside him holding his hand, as I had so many times before as a young girl. I am struck in old photographs of my father and me by the way I try to create some form of physical contact between us: I lean toward him, rest my head on his shoulder, or place my hand on his arm.
The first thing he said after he kissed me was, “Never show any sign of weakness, any sign that you are hurt or ashamed. You aren’t ashamed, are you? These are just tests of our endurance. This is the time to be proud.” This is the time to be proud. I would hear this many more times from him and my mother over the years. While my father was a promising young mayor who had the ear of the Shah, we were all a little wary of being proud of him. To be proud you had to become a victim of injustice.
My mother, a family friend, Father, and me.
“Remember how I used to tell you that you could always rely on me?” Father whispered as my mother and aunt continued to exchange pleasantries with the prison director. “That you could light a feather, like the one Simorgh gave Zal in the Shahnameh, and I would come to your rescue? Well, I will still be there for you, no matter where I am. But now, I need your help. You have to take care of your mother. You need to be kind and gentle to her.” He said he had asked the same thing of my brother. “You are the man in the family now,” he had told him, something my eleven-year-old brother took very seriously. “You know your mother has no one but you and your brother now,” he said to me, looking at me intently. “You have to promise me that you will look after her. I have failed her, and I need you to compensate for that. I need you to promise that you will not hurt her or in any way disobey her.” I promised I would look after my mother and said I would do my best not to hurt her. It was a promise that I would make and break many times.
Father told me to act as if nothing had happened. We did our best to act normal, so much so that we almost came to believe it ourselves despite the fact that nothing in the world seemed normal. Had we acted with more humility, we would have been lying, because we did not believe in his guilt. We were not at all humbled. And yet acting as if this situation did not affect us was also a lie. Publicly we chose this second lie, but in our private lives we tried both and neither one worked.
I am still grateful to my aunt, who held my hand all through the journey home and pressed it in a friendly manner when the tears started streaming down my face while my mother averted her gaze. Perhaps she felt she could not spare any sympathy for others, even her own daughter, because, after all, was not she the real victim? However much she mistreated Father, she never doubted his public honesty. Only later would she repeat the rumors against him which she herself had once vehemently denied while reminding us of Saifi, his honesty, his family’s integrity. That she, Saham Soltan’s daughter-in-law, had to suffer such public humiliation! How amazing is the capacity of human beings for self-deception: my father’s hope for domestic bliss, my mother’s illusions about her lost husband, and my brother and I, believing that we could make our parents happy, could protect them from each other.
CHAPTER 15
the prison diaries
THE ADJECTIVES WE ATTRIBUTE TO OUR CIRCUMSTANCES—“tragic,” “ironic,” “humorous”—always come to us with a delay, after we have gained objectivity. When I think of those days now some of these words come to my mind, certainly both “tragic” and “ironic,” but mostly I was bewildered, as if walking in a fog. No one had any ide
a what would become of my father. There were endless rumors that he would be freed the next day, followed by ominous warnings that he would be sentenced to fourteen years (why fourteen, I wonder now—why not thirteen, or fifteen?) or worse, that he would be murdered in jail and his murder would be presented as suicide. This constant vacillation between two extremes was repeated at home, where my mother, brother, friends, relatives, and sympathetic strangers wove stories of hope and despair.
Nine months after his arrest, my father began writing in his diary again: he had stopped writing when he went to jail because every day he hoped that he would be freed. “Today it is exactly nine months since they put me in jail,” I read in the first entry. “From the first day they arrested me on trumped-up charges, the worst catastrophe has been that they promised they would set me free. This situation has worsened since the new government took over.”
The new government he refers to is that of his old friend Hassan Ali Mansour, who had replaced Alam. Mansour’s rise to power had been meteoric: chief of staff to the prime minister at thirty, then chairman of the Economic Council and vice prime minister in 1957, when he was about thirty-four. I remember him as tall and balding, hazel-eyed and tanned. My father spoke with a tinge of envy about Man-sour’s wife, Farideh Emami, who in my mind’s eye appears as a petite woman with long straight brown hair. She seemed to be always hanging from an invisible string connected to her husband. Whenever Mansour’s name came up Father managed to mention Mansour’s wife’s devotion to her husband and his career. Other, less charitable observers saw her as a clinging, ambitious woman who never left her poor husband alone.