Things I've Been Silent About

by Azar Nafisi

  I remember a garden party with beautifully dressed men and women, lights around the swimming pool: Mansour strides across the lawn, gracefully pulls my father from the small group he is talking to, and leads him away with one hand encircling his shoulder. I watch them, two young men, confident and sure of where they stand and where they will be going, an intimate pose, almost conspiratorial. A short while later Mrs. Mansour joins them with a serious and busy expression, her gaze hanging adoringly on her husband as she clings to his arm.

  Mansour was to become one of my father’s obsessions. He writes more about him in his prison diaries than his other “enemies”: it was far more difficult to tolerate a stab in the back by a friend. “I have known him for twenty-five years,” he writes on page 312. “We had become very close over the past few years. He was a man of taste, talented, polite, humble, but a liar, a flatterer, and extremely ambitious. He would sacrifice everything to advance himself. He constantly dreamed of becoming the prime minister and would do anything to get there. I used to have a great deal of affection for him but soon I discovered his duplicity and dishonesty. In more recent years he considered me his only real rival, despite the fact that I lacked his connections and means.”

  Later Father reports that an acquaintance who had spies in high places told him that Mansour had seen Father as a rival. By this account Mansour and a contact at the American Embassy, a Mr. Rockwell, cooked up some lies which they fed to the Shah. The Americans would ensure Mansour’s success. What were the chances, my father reflects, that a man like him, with no powerful allies and no foreign backing, could survive in such circumstances? This question would come up in numerous conversations my father had with friends and family, as well as in the pages of his diary. Mr. Rockwell resurfaces again some pages later, as Father wonders if the rumors about Man-sour’s connections to him are true. Could this be why the Iranian government had insisted on Rockwell’s transfer before the American ambassador’s return from his vacation?

  Other friends reported that the Shah had been told that Father had given the list of parliamentary candidates to the Americans (the list was not made public until the Shah approved of it), or else that he had revealed to them the content of a secret conversation with the Shah. “Ahmad Khan, just among friends, tell us the truth,” the good-natured Safipur, owner and editor of the popular magazine Omid Iran, teased my father. “Are you in jail for supporting the parliamentary candidates that the Americans couldn’t stomach or for leaking the list to the Americans? If it is the former we will start contacting our anti-American friends in high places; if the latter, we will lobby the Americans, but if neither is true,” he said with a laugh, “then your case is truly hopeless!”

  Why was he in jail? Had he offended the Shah? Was it petty rivalry? His own ambition? Few believed the charges against him, not even his enemies. Political dissent in Iran is treated as a form of criminality: most offenders are tried on bogus charges and there is little room for defense. The fact that the charges were not taken seriously made the whole situation unreal, almost a little comic. I was learning my first lesson in Iranian politics and public life: truth mattered very little.

  High officials would visit him and wonder aloud as to the “real reason” for his arrest, or send messengers to let him know they believed he was innocent and they didn’t know why he was in jail. His prison diaries are filled with reports of these visits. “Around evening, Dr. Jamshid Amuzegar”—a cabinet minister and later prime minister—“came to visit me with Safipur,” he writes early on. “We talked about a great many things and he too wanted to know the real reason for my arrest. He said that both in and out of the cabinet, everyone knows for sure that I am not a thief or an embezzler. On the contrary, I’ve been a great servant to the people. He thinks my problem must be political. Amuzegar and I considered and analyzed whatever came to mind, but God knows we couldn’t figure out the nature of my crime!” A few pages later he writes, “At night, when I am alone, I cry a lot. For myself, my children, and this cursed country. Now that we have an opportunity to do something for the poor people, the government has fallen into the hands of prejudiced and feckless youth.”

  Eager to convince some invisible interlocutor of his innocence, Father details why it would be impossible for “them” to believe that he had stolen from the government coffers. First, they had access to his accounts. They would know about his debts and also that his own personal possessions, after twenty-five years of civil service, setting aside his wife’s inheritance, did not amount to much. He gives a meticulous account of his spending and quotes a judge who said that if Nafisi wanted to steal money, he would have done so when he was the vice president in the Planning and Budget Organization, which regulated the country’s budget. To the notion that the Shah was displeased with his ambitions, he countered the fact that the Shah knew full well that he had no desire ever to be prime minister. He would have been happy to remain mayor of Tehran, to finish what he had started. He mentions a tape in which his enemies had faked a conversation between him and a woman at a party speaking condescendingly of the Shah.

  Where do we go when no amount of careful consideration can provide the answer? The world he lived in was unreal and unreasonable. His highest satisfaction came from responding curtly to his interrogator, not yielding, turning the tables around and pointing out the pitfalls in his arguments. At times the frustrated interrogator seemed to plead with my father to help him find a clue that might justify the charges.

  Try as he might, he cannot answer the two most important questions: Why is he in jail and what will happen to him? At some point he takes refuge in the world of dreams. Like a novelist who, having just written a book revealing the most intimate secret of his best friend, states that none of the characters bear any resemblance to real people, Father poignantly writes that he has no belief in superstition, sorcerers, or fortune-tellers, while filling his notebooks with his own and other people’s dreams. In these ridiculously symbolic and wish-fulfilling dreams, a world emerges that is far saner and more believable than reality itself. We find a Shah who is forced to see reason, officials who do the decent thing, and my father is able at last to present his case forcefully, logically, and convincingly. Exchanges that have become impossible in reality become the norm in these fantasies. A more equitable world is established in this parallel universe, where all sorts of people are open and independent-minded. They can warn, advise, and even command the Shah to do the right thing. And he does: he listens, he is convinced.

  I AM WRITING THIS first for myself and then for my daughter and son,” my father writes some two hundred pages into his prison diaries. “When they have more time than now, and the power to analyze, maybe these writings will be a source of counsel and guidance for them.” Five volumes and almost fifteen hundred pages remain of my father’s diaries, recording his life in jail until his release and ultimate exoneration four years later. My father used to say half-jokingly that his years in jail were among his most fruitful. Sometimes he said this in reference to the jail he believed my mother had created for him at home. But there was another side to his claim, one that comes out in his diaries, and in his numerous poems and paintings. He had a talent for performing well under difficult circumstances. Something was triggered, something that made him resist whatever was in his way. And so he blossomed in the most unexpected places.

  Seeing him on our short weekly visits in a room that was not his own, detached from all objects and places that I associated with him, it was difficult to imagine his actual experiences in the many hours when we were not there. Reading his diaries now, another world leaps off the page, a planet with its own routines and laws and unlikely inhabitants. What seems to have sustained him, other than hope and the love of family and friends, is his enormous zest for life. It is as if jail has squeezed all his love of life into moments of exquisite intensity, so that he learns new languages, writes and reads, ponders history, paints, and sheds over twenty pounds.

  Father in j
ail, with one of his paintings of a bird.

  In his diary he describes an insane daily routine. “I wake up at 4:30, after washing up I walk around my room until about 7 and while walking I read Nahj ol Balagheh”—the writings of Imam Ali—“or books on the interpretation of the Koran or history or religion. At 7 I eat breakfast with the detention center’s officers and read until 8. From 8 to 10 I walk around my room, studying German. Between 10 and noon I usually have visitors, or officers and other prisoners visit me. Then until 1 p.m., which is lunchtime, I either read or write. After lunch I rest, read, and sometimes take a nap until three. From three to five I take a shower and read in French while walking. From five to six I take a bath, read the papers, have dinner, and engage in conversation with whoever visits me. From then on until I fall asleep around midnight I listen to the radio or read.”

  He moves seamlessly from his own feelings of frustration, his sense of betrayal and grief, to conversations with the prison staff, other prisoners, visitors, family, and friends, to comments on the country’s political situation and events in other parts of the world—Churchill’s death in 1965, the war in Vietnam. He celebrates the freedoms of the American people, their amazing capacity to re-create themselves, and at the same time he bemoans American foreign policy. At one point he writes an open letter to President Johnson in which he quotes John Quincy Adams, Franklin Roosevelt, Daniel Webster, and Abraham Lincoln. He explains that he writes as a person who has witnessed “the anxiety and fear in the faces of striking workers in Detroit whom I have seen in the depths of despair lying on the sidewalks with bottles of whisky … the ruined and smoky buildings in Harlem and Chicago, the unhappiness and hunger in New Orleans and Baltimore … as well as the beautiful new buildings with their automatic doors, the endless blessings of individual freedoms and the beauty, comfort and culture of the country …” He talks about the need to acknowledge America’s debt to other nations and asks Johnson “not to be deceived by the tyrannical politicians in other countries, not to consider those who think differently from him as his enemies, not to make the mistakes America was making in Vietnam, and not to give condescending charity to other nations—if you are going to help them you should do it based on principle and as equals.”

  He writes poetry addressed to his children, to his wife, to beloved friends and relatives. He falls in love with Socrates, Voltaire, and the Buddha, and translates Paul Eluard’s poem “Liberté,” Victor Hugo, and, oddly, a book on the human body, which seems to fascinate him. He creates a collection box to help other prisoners post bail, learns how to paint, polishes his German, and starts to learn two new languages, Russian and Armenian, from another inmate.

  In jail he works on the three children’s books that he will publish decades later: a translation of La Fontaine’s stories, complete with beautiful illustrations copied from the original, a selection of stories by Ferdowsi, and a selection of stories by the great Persian poet Nezami. He describes how he taught me and my brother these stories when we were three or four years old, and how important they are. In most cases his tone is reflective, but in the case of Ferdowsi he becomes at times tongue-tied. “I loved Ferdowsi from the start,” he writes at one point. “In my opinion he is the greatest Iranian on earth, and his Shahnameh is incomparable. It reflects his love of country, candor, truthfulness. No one teaches humanity, kindness, and goodness better than he does… Every Iranian should honor him. I want my children to learn the love of country, humanity, and to understand the values of the ancient Iranians. Ferdowsi’s heroes were all Godfearing and humane. He never praised a tyrant, and did not bestow any evil traits on his heroes.”

  For a while he gets to discuss Ferdowsi for long hours with another prison mate, a General Baharmast, who was known as General Ferdowsi. The general was arrested on charges of molestation, but, according to my father, his real crime was that he was legal counsel for Haji Tayeb, the boss of Tehran’s vegetable market, who was executed for supporting Ayatollah Khomeini during the June 5th uprising.

  Strange people keep popping in and out of the pages: a gifted painter who becomes Father’s teacher, a young man with four hundred girlfriends who is accused of killing one of them, the frustrated prisoner who hangs himself, the American arrested for killing his wife. He mentions a man who suddenly came to life in the morgue; instead of tending to him the prison officials gloated over the “miracle” until the poor man died of the cold. He remembers how, in the very room where he was confined, next door to the morgue, he had, years before, visited another prominent prisoner. He often complains of how people keep telling him—sometimes by way of consolation—that he is lucky to be in jail. (“Nezhat tells me I am lucky I am in here and that I don’t have to work with the new government!” “Rahman tells me I’m lucky to be in prison, otherwise I would have been killed!”) He himself used to tell us how lucky he was not to be a member of the radical opposition or like some of the other inmates, without a prominent name and money, whose hope rested on God and God alone. Reading his prison diaries I cannot help but think—with the same feeling of irony and desperation—how jail for him might indeed have been a blessing in disguise.

  CHAPTER 16

  a career woman

  HOWEVER MUCH FATHER WAS ON OUR MINDS—and he was almost always on our minds—we had to live our own lives, and soon the new reality became part of our routine. We would visit him and then leave him behind, like a terminal patient. A great deal of our activity was centered around him, but we each in our own way went about our lives. Life Without Father would be a poignant title for this part of my story. In one sense I felt orphaned, or practically orphaned, because his fate, like ours, dangled on a thread. “I feel sorry for Azar,” he writes early in his diary. “At this age when she is in need of a sympathetic soul and a guide, she has been left alone. She does not get along with her mother. From the time she was six or seven I tried very hard to make peace between them, but it didn’t work. The truth is that I have imposed a lot on Azar and pressured her a great deal. Nezhat unfortunately does not know that a child needs to act childishly and a youth needs to act young. She treats her daughter the same way her stepmother treated her. If you didn’t know better you would think she wasn’t her mother.”

  That winter I was forced to leave Tehran again. Mother sent me back to school despite my pleading, Father’s objections, and the fact that I could have studied for my A levels with the help of private tutors in Tehran. The only satisfaction I got was that instead of the snobbish Swiss school with its high-class clientele, I was shipped back to shabby, gray Lancaster. Two or three months after my return I fractured my spine trying to climb down from the second-story bedroom—my room was directly above Skipper’s living area and I loved to see my guardian’s surprised expression as he saw me climbing down in front of his window. I had to lie in bed at first in the hospital, and then at home, for about three months. When I returned home that summer, it was to stay.

  I had persuaded Skipper not to alarm Mother by giving her news of the accident directly. Instead, he contacted Aunt Nafiseh or Aunt Mina—I don’t remember which. Rahman claimed that before the news reached him he already knew about the accident. “I will tell you something about Azi,” he apparently told my mother, appropriating my nickname. “Something has happened to her, but I don’t want you to be alarmed.” Which naturally made her very alarmed indeed. He picked up her handbag and let it fall to the floor, saying, “What happened to her is like this bag falling. She ’ll be okay, but you must bring the child back home. She needs her mother,” he added, quite cunningly—he did not say her parents, but her mother. “She needs her mother’s wise supervision.”

  And so I returned, but that hardly meant everything would go according to my plans. Without my father as intermediary, Mother and I would be living together in undiluted proximity. If I wanted to go out, I had to plead and beg. It helped if I became hysterical, or even fainted—something to prove the depth of my misery. Then she would let me go. Once, when she had re
fused to let me go to a party, I told her that the host was an orphan who would feel slighted if I missed his good-bye party. It was true that he was an orphan but he never harbored such petty jealousies and in fact enjoyed the story of how my mother softened and let me go not to have fun but to appease the sensitive feelings of an orphaned child. Sickness and misery always gained me extra points.

  By this time my brother and I had grown accustomed to Mother’s proclivities: like drug users, we needed a shot of drama to get by. When she shouted and accused us of our various crimes we became hysterical, cried, tore up our clothes, and in some cases even tried to hurt ourselves physically. While we were genuinely worried about my father, she seemed to thrive on his incarceration. She had the satisfaction, so beloved of dictators, of a permanent state of emergency. Later, after the Islamic Revolution, I used to joke that we had prepared ourselves for a time like this by living with Mother. The problem with such a state of affairs was not that you did not get to do what you wanted—sometimes you did—but the effort to appease or resist the reigning deities left you so exhausted that it prevented you from ever really having fun. To this day having fun, just plain enjoying myself, comes at the cost of a conviction that I have committed an undetected crime.

  But, as in most cases, there was another side to the story. My mother must have been riddled with anxiety about my father’s fate. For all her stubborn refusal to worry about Father, she was constantly distressed by imagined disasters that could befall me and my brother. I couldn’t go mountain climbing because I might break my neck, Mohammad could no longer ride buses or go to the football games he adored because he might be kidnapped by Father’s enemies. Then there was the matter of her job. She was now in Parliament, and for the first time in her life she had a job (except for the short period when she had worked in the bank), something to prove that her life’s ambitions had not altogether gone to waste. But her moment of triumph was eclipsed by my father’s situation. All her activities in Parliament were restricted by the knowledge—on her part and everyone else’s—that my father was a hostage in jail. Everyone, including my former school principal Dr. Parsay, now herself a senator, advised my mother to be careful, to keep out of the limelight. She complained about such recommendations, and hardly listened to them. In fact, whenever she found the opportunity she was the most outspoken member of the opposition. Was this another sign of her selfish disregard for my father’s situation, as so many friends and relatives claimed? Or was it a reflection of her sense of integrity, her insistence in doing the right thing, no matter what the cost? I think perhaps it was both.