Things I've Been Silent About

by Azar Nafisi

  If I could close my eyes and imagine myself in a place where I can relax and feel truly at home, I would choose that house, that garden. I would resurrect the smell of the sea and the sand, the different shades of green, the moisture in the air, my father’s triumphant smile as he showed off his latest discoveries, a flame-colored flower called Fer-dowsi, another, with small, fragile blossoms hanging like grapes, named the bride’s braids. And that is where we went, my husband and I, for our honeymoon. It was the worst place we could have possibly chosen.

  Since then I have erased most memories of our first two nights together. I remember that I could not make love with him. I was scared and I was lonely and suddenly I felt as young as I was and not at all worldly. I wanted to go home. I thought of my parents and my brother and I could not do anything. He was not tender, nor was he rough. I don’t remember exactly what he was. He just wanted what he felt, with some justification, was his to claim.

  Mohammad and me, holding a picture of my father, who could not attend my wedding.

  I was afraid and genuinely sad, but he did not understand this. He took my reluctance to have sex with him as a sign that I might not be a virgin. Had he been misled? I see in my imagination one clear scene in black and white: the air is moist, his figure distinct, in a white terry-cloth robe, standing pensively by the door, smoking a cigarette. Where was I? I must have been standing next to him, explaining something, reassuring him that I really was a virgin. The next night at dinner, over the sound of laughter and festivity, he said to his youngest sister, “Tell her what to do.” She turned to me sweetly—and she was ever so sweet—and said, “Just close your eyes and let yourself go. Imagine you are somewhere else. Imagine anything, imagine you are eating an omelet.”

  I did as she said. I pretended I was somewhere else, although I could not bring myself to think of omelets. I don’t think I quite succeeded in being somewhere else in the way I could when my mother said or did things that hurt me. But I did absent myself from my body. From then on, for decades, sex was something you did because it was expected of you, because you could not say no, because you did not care, could not care, and so you would be coy about it to undermine the seriousness of comments you made, such as Please don’t hurt me. None of the experiences of abuse I had suffered as a child made me feel as dirty and guilty as this experience of sleeping with my husband. In choosing to marry Mehdi, I had lied to myself, and in a sense betrayed my own ideals of the kind of woman I aspired to be—my passion for Rudabeh and Farrokhzad now seemed a little hollow.

  The first time I visited my father after the honeymoon I wore dark sunglasses and refused to take them off, and for a long time I took to wearing them inside. I was deeply ashamed. It was a shame that would not wear off for a very long time.

  CHAPTER 19

  married life

  IN SEPTEMBER, when we arrived in Norman, where I enrolled as a freshman at the University of Oklahoma so that Mehdi could finish his engineering degree, quite a few surprises awaited me. Certain things he had not explained—for instance, that he had lived for four years with an American woman who people thought was his wife. I’d always had contempt for men who studied abroad, lived with American women, and enjoyed not just sex but a kind of intimacy they never would know with the wide-eyed virgins they married, but who wouldn’t think of marrying these foreign concubines because they were, as my mother would say, “a girlfriend and not a wife.” I had never thought of myself as that kind of wide-eyed Persian girl, and the fact that I did not only made things worse.

  Our first obvious disagreement was over money. Mehdi was obsessively preoccupied with the things money could buy, and he doubted my assertions that Father had not stashed away a great fortune, stolen from the public coffers. Finally Father had to disclose to Mehdi’s father and uncle the state of his financial affairs and let them know that far from having stolen vast sums, he had been living partly off loans from his brothers ever since he’d been in jail. “General Mazhari apologized, he had tears in his eyes after we finished talking,” Father wrote in his diary after their conversation. In part their complaint was legitimate. My mother had agreed to pay for my share of living expenses, but she resented the arrangement and made things hard for me by never sending the money on time.

  Mehdi played poker at least twice a week, sometimes until dawn. He had me dye my hair black, made me go to hairdressers every week (a woman, he said, should always look her best), and banned me from smoking or drinking (women should not smell of cigarettes or alcohol). He himself, of course, both smoked and drank. One night, I accepted a glass of wine as I was talking to a friend: he walked toward us, took the glass from my hand, and poured the wine into the sink. I discovered he had been telling the truth when he said that he was jealous. Of course he did not, as he had suggested, hide a gun under his pillow, but he did make a scene when I showed up at the library with a male classmate.

  Photos of that period show me dancing merrily with my husband, my jet-black hair perfectly coiffed. Who was that woman? It was as if I had created a parallel personality whom I watched from a distance with curiosity and dismay. The melodramatic gesture I had adopted soon after the honeymoon, wearing dark sunglasses indoors, like a spy hiding my true identity, or perhaps my sense of guilt, would soon be internalized. I wrote notes to myself that I still have with me: “Do not hurt his pride by constantly disagreeing with him,” I wrote. “When you disagree, begin by saying something complimentary and then suggest your own ideas.” Or, “Don’t make fun of his ideas or fight with him every time he plays poker.” Perfect advice, worthy of the Ladies’ Home Journal. But I never did listen to my own advice.

  I hated being cooped up in a corner of someone’s living room with the other women, gossiping, while the men played poker until six a.m. I was bored with his ideas and distrusted his taste for black-gloved chauffeurs, and probably I wasn’t as compliant as he might have hoped when it came to wearing the pants in the family.

  DESPITE MY PIOUS NOTES TO MYSELF, I did not become the kind of wife Mehdi wanted me to be. Not really. Farrokhzad’s book of poetry, Another Birth, was constantly by my bedside. She had come to replace Rudabeh in my affections. I had marked several passages from “The Green Illusion,” about a woman who sat by the window watching the world go by. The first line I had underlined several times.

  All day I cried in the mirror.

  All day I fixed

  My life’s eyes

  On those two anxious fearful eyes

  Which avoided my stare

  And sought refuge in their lids’ safe seclusion

  Like liars.

  I had become obsessed with Forough’s portrayal of herself as an intimate but frightening stranger, a pair of reproachful eyes judging and condemning her. Rejecting domestic life, abandoning her husband and child, leaving the security of marriage, was not an easy choice, but an inevitable one. Her attitude was not self-congratulatory but one of tortured guilt. She realized that her triumph as a liberated woman could also be perceived as “this fraud, this paper crown.”

  She believed that staying in a loveless marriage was a sin, but leaving her home and her responsibilities filled her with guilt and made her feel alone. In this and in another poem, “The Awful Visage,” she talks of her other self, the self reflected in the mirror that stares back at her, accusingly and without compassion. Later, I discovered the literary progenitor of this reflected image in the poems of Alam Taj, a housewife almost two generations older than Farrokhzad who had been forced to marry a man twice her age whom she found physically repulsive. She hid the poetry she wrote—denouncing the hypocrisy of religion, loveless marriages, wasted lives—among the pages of books by her favorite classical poets: Hafez, Saadi, Nezami. After her death these poems were discovered by her son. In poem after poem she rails against the condition of women like herself, married without their consent, never allowed to experience love, against the religious hypocrisy that denies women the freedoms it so liberally bestows on men. In a
poem called “Predicting Women’s Freedom,” she dreams of a time after her death when women in her country will be free. She says that “tomorrow’s freedom” is like a newborn child, resting on her lap. She calls religiously sanctioned marriage a form of adultery, she hates herself because she sleeps with a man she does not love, because she raises a child from a loveless marriage “not with love but with instinct,” like an animal. And she too wrote a poem about the experience of staring at a stranger, at her other, damaged self, in the mirror. Hating the conditions imposed on her, conditions beyond her control, she hates herself. This image of an accusing face, reflected in the mirror, stayed with me after my marriage.

  BY THE TIME WE returned to Tehran the next summer, I was ready to ask for a divorce, but I felt I could not complicate my parents’ life and add to their worries. Father’s case had not progressed much. Every once in a while he was interrogated, sometimes promises were made, hopes raised only to be deflated, and I was not about to trouble him with my personal problems. From championing Mehdi, Mother became his worst nightmare. His pressure for money was reason enough for her displeasure. Now, she said, she realized his family’s “greed” and accused him of “lack of respect.” How could she expect Mehdi to respect her when her own daughter never defended her? “You went and married against my will, but now I am the one who has to pay the price,” she said. The suggestion was so preposterous that I could not think of anything to say. She treated Mehdi coldly and with condescension, quarreled with him ferociously, and then gave me an ultimatum: choose between me or your husband. It was silly—in essence it would have meant divorcing him right there and then. She told me that if I chose him I should pack up and leave the house.

  If I could relate the emotion I felt that day to something tangible—the color of the dress I wore; how, when she told me to leave, I was in the drawing room with my back to the window; or how, going up the stairs to my room, her voice gradually diminishing in volume, I felt a sudden pain in my legs—if I could remember this and attach my emotional memory to more concrete circumstances, if I could thus give my feelings some sort of flesh and blood, then perhaps they would not be, even now, quite so raw. But all I can really say is that I went upstairs to my room, packed my bag, and meekly followed my husband out of my mother’s house and went to stay with his parents. I don’t remember what Mehdi and I said after that. He came from such a different world, and we never learned to speak one another’s language. He asked questions for which I had no answer (Why was my mother allowed such liberties? Why was my father so weak?) and others that made me resent him (Why did I need to visit my father every day in prison? Why did I take books so seriously?). But it was not easy to move in with his parents. Although they would not say anything directly about my expulsion from my own home, I felt humiliated and rather forlorn.

  “Monday, June 6, 1966. Today near noon Azar and her husband came to visit,” Father wrote in his diary the week of our return. “That happy and hopeful girl has been transformed into a bewildered, anxiety-ridden young woman.” A few days later I had gone to visit him on my own and the first thing he asked was: “Are you unhappy with Mr. Mazhari? I don’t want you to be trapped in an unhappy marriage. It’s better to get out of it now.” He leaned toward me in that earnest way he had when he wanted to drive a point home. He held his two hands close, the fingers tapping against one another. “You should get out,” he said again, “before you have children.” My mother, in her usual arbitrary manner, had already visited him and expressed how worried she was about me and that at night she cried for me. Father writes, “I said that it is not enough that parents should cry for their children and in the meantime make their children cry!”

  I told him that I’d married Mehdi to escape home, but that I had hopes, I wanted to try to make it work. “I will turn him around,” I said. “I’ll make him understand.” This is how he reports our conversation in his diaries. He adds that despite my reassurances, he is concerned about me. He wrote: “I am afraid there is no happy ending to this story.”

  —

  AROUND THIS TIME, my brother took to questioning my father about the existence of God. (He had been reading Bertrand Russell and talking to my cousin Majid, who had been immersed in Jean-Paul Sartre.) Father asked himself why his son should believe anything he said. His whole career had been devoted to bettering the country he loved. He had always told us that however vexing the setbacks, in the end justice would prevail, but now we could see perfectly clearly that justice did not in fact prevail. In his diaries for that year, scattered between thoughts about America’s blunders in Vietnam, the constant bickering between Iran and Iraq, the merits of poetry, and the stupidity of his interrogator, a line would sometimes surface: “I hate myself and do not wish to remain alive.” He was increasingly haunted by feelings of despair. “My wife treats me in such a way that I am scared of her,” he writes another time. “I am scared of asking her a favor and she performs it with such delay and so much condescension that one loses the joy. I told Nafiseh today that maybe God had decided to use my wife in order to test me.” After a meeting with one of the municipal contractors, who offered to lend him money, he writes, “I have reached the point where the contractor whose offer of millions in bribes I refused now offers to loan me five thousand tu-mans”—about seven hundred dollars—“because he knows I have no money. Damn this life! Why should I have to put with up with such dishonor? I can’t take it anymore. God spare me such scenes and just kill me.”

  Suddenly, in July of 1966, the tone of his diaries changes. There is talk that he might be freed on bail. Before that, a number of people had tried to persuade him to write a letter asking for forgiveness. They felt that this way the government could save face and speed up his release. He of course refused. He suspected that the government wanted to find a way out, and he was not about to provide them with an easy escape—and then there was the matter of his pride.

  It started when a prominent reporter for The Washington Post, Alfred Friendly, published a long piece on Iran in which he mentioned my father’s case. “Yesterday the translated version of Alfred Friendly’s article in The Washington Post was published,” Father wrote in his diary in the summer of 1966. “It is an interesting article. While it praises the Shah and considers his projects to be the cause of progress, he is not very optimistic about Iran. He is even terrified of its future… His worries are confined to two areas: the economic situation and likelihood of a crisis and the problems with the implementation of justice, and he mentions my name in this regard. Although what he says is brief within the context of this long article, it is still central.” Friendly wrote a series of articles on Iran. In the one published on July 6, 1966, he wrote:

  SMELL OF A FRAME-UP

  The most notorious case at the moment is the 32 month’s imprisonment without trial of the former Lord Mayor of Tehran, Ahmed [sic] Nafisi. Once highly regarded and favored by the Shah, Nafisi was accused (justly or otherwise, depending on whom one listens to) of corruption in connection with certain municipal contracts. The case smells of a frame-up by his personal and political enemies. A few weeks ago, after 2000 pages of interrogation were taken down, the prosecuting attorney found no case against him. But instead of his release, the consequence was the initiation of a new interrogation. Nafisi may remain in jail for years without trial.

  Mr. Amirani published a translation of Friendly’s article in Khandanyha. It was said that the secret police had banned its publication but Amirani complained to the Shah, who, pleased by the compliments to his reform agenda, ordered its release. The article created a great buzz in political circles. In a culture dependent on gossip and in-nuendos, the fact that permission had been given to reprint the article was taken as a sign that my father’s case would soon be reactivated. He was visited by excited friends and well-wishers, all of whom speculated that he would soon be free. Despite his own pessimism, these confident predictions had an effect. Sometimes they threw him into panic. What would he do? Where wou
ld he go from here? All his life he had worked in the government, climbing one ladder and then another. What now? Would he be forever in debt to my mother now that he had lost his job?

  Mr. Jahanbani, a friend of Father’s and a close associate of Prime Minister Amir Abbas Hoveyda, visited my father to say that “Amir Abbas” sent his regards and suggested that since the “misunderstanding” had now been resolved, the government would like to close his file and invite him to return to his job. “If they had kept me for only ten days or a month,” Father writes in his diary, “if they had produced only some twenty or thirty files against me, if over 300 municipal workers and staff had not been persecuted, threatened, and forcibly interrogated by the justice department, some arrested and their names dragged through the mud, if the amount of money the government claims to have been involved was not six hundred million tumans, perhaps the prime minister’s proposal would have had some meaning.” A month later Jahanbani visited Father again to say that the Shah had ordered the justice department at long last to follow the letter of the law: he would be freed on bail and would be granted a trial where he could defend himself. My mother told him excitedly that she heard from the Shah’s mother-in-law that the Shah had ordered the prime minister to wrap up the investigation. Rahman returned from a visit to Esfahan around this time and claimed that he had communed with my grandfather’s spirit, who said that this jail term would be beneficial to my father. According to Rahman, Grandfather’s spirit recommended that he pay more attention to his mother.