by Azar Nafisi
At this point, General Nassiri, the head of the hated secret police, who had played an active role in framing Father, came to visit him in jail. He said that Father was in jail because of his own stubborn inflexibility. He then told Father to write a letter of contrition addressed to the Shah, implying that such a letter alone could bring about his freedom. In his book, my father published the letter he ultimately wrote to the Shah. In it he reviews every charge brought against him and refutes them. Then he writes: “I would like to apologize for whatever crimes I have not committed, or whose nature I am not aware of, because I have perturbed His Majesty’s peace of mind. I leave the true criminals to the wrath of God, for as the Koran says, ‘Those who deceive should know that there is no authority higher than God, who will return to them the fruits of their own deceit.’”
General Nassiri told my father that this letter was obviously no apology and would not solve the problem. Rather than apologizing, he had accused the government, and by implication the Shah himself. When Father was finally released on bail, the general sent him a message saying Father’s letter was responsible for the extra time he had spent in jail.
General Nassiri was one of the people most hated by our family, right there next to Pirasteh, the minister of the interior. When Nassiri became the head of the SAVAK, our hatred went beyond personal reasons. I never thought of him as a man with a heart. Yet in my father’s diary he appears as a naïve and simple man who sheds tears to see my father in jail. I was learning how things were more complicated than I thought, that men who shed tears can also be cruel and unjust. After the revolution, when I saw his battered face on the television screen and later came across photos of his cadaver, alongside those of other executed officials, I felt, to my surprise, an immense sorrow. For years I had dreamed of revenge, not just for my father, but for those dissidents who had been arrested and tortured, for the fear that SAVAK had incited in the hearts of the people. For years I had thought of this man as a vile oppressor and I had waited for some sort of retribution. And when I saw him on television, I began to realize how easy it was for us to be as vengeful and brutal as those we had denounced.
FATHER WAS SET FREE on bail in late August of 1966. The court, to make things as difficult for him as possible, set the bail at 55.5 million tumans (roughly 6.5 million dollars). Father writes with excitement and evident pride that he was shocked to see how many people flooded the justice department to put up his bail. “I feel like crying,” he writes. “I did not know the Tehranis to be so kindhearted.
The newspapers enthusiastically announced Father’s release.
This nation is very strange. It watches tyranny in silence and in time it proves its own will—the fact of its existence—through passive resistance. Among those here today to bail me out there were people from different walks of life and different religions: the grocer up the street as well as the owner of the Iran Super Market, a Jewish man with hundreds of millions in capital. Friends, colleagues, relatives close and distant were here. By noon they had offered nearly one hundred and twenty million tumans.” In his diary, he lists the names of the people who helped him so that we children would later show them our gratitude.
He was finally released on bail, pending trial. No trial date was set. My husband and I were due to return to Oklahoma any day and I could neither sleep nor eat out of the fear that I might have to leave before seeing my father’s release. I had made up with Mother and returned home. Our telephone rang day and night and people came in at all hours. Aunt Nafiseh spent most of the daytime hours at our house and Rahman kept trying to get hold of my hand, which he would pat and say, “Mark my word, you’ll see your dad before you go. And what will you give me if that happens?”
A rumor circulated that the new head of the fruit and vegetable market had organized all the vendors and shopkeepers to greet my father on his release. The justice department was overrun with supporters. We had waited so long for this moment that when it happened it seemed like a figment of my imagination. I was filled with nervous energy and could not stay in one place. But I also felt curiously numb and drained, the result of three years of anxious waiting. Phone calls, flowers, running to the door. When will he be here? We were all bumping into one another, like spectators at an overcrowded show. It was not until eleven at night that he was finally released from jail. Despite the fact that it was late and people had been discouraged from waiting for him, Father writes that he saw the shadowy faces of expectant supporters lining the street outside the jail. He had been told by government sources that he should not go straight to our house because it might attract crowds. So his first stop was Aunt Nafiseh’s house. This must have cost my mother some pain. She resented her half sister and at the same time craved her favor like a younger, blundering sibling. They would quarrel and not talk for months, but when they made up, my mother would assume an almost sycophantic attitude toward my aunt that made my brother and me feel angry and almost ashamed.
Three days after my father’s release I left Tehran. The first night he spent at Aunt Nafiseh’s and the next day was spent with crowds of visitors and flowers, but he went home that night. I spent my last night at home to be close to my father. “Thursday morning Azar left for the U.S.,” Father wrote in his diary. “In the airport Nezhat and her son-in-law had some confrontation. Unfortunately this young man is in love with money and anxious to get his hands on it, exactly the opposite of Azar. I am afraid these two will separate in the end.”
MOST SERIOUS CONFRONTATIONS in life are not political, they are existential. One can agree with someone’s political stance but disagree in a fundamental way with how they came to that position. It is a question of attitude, of moral configuration. My husband and I had plenty of grievances, but it all boiled down to a fundamental difference in the way we perceived life, the context within which we defined ourselves and our world. For that, there was no reconciliation or resolution, there was only separation or surrender.
At some point I could not take it anymore. It was not that I could not take him, but I could not take myself. If I did not leave immediately it was partly out of guilt, because I felt I was the one who had been untrue. When we married I knew a lot about the kind of person he was. He had not hidden his ambitions from me. It is true that he had never told me about the woman he had lived with and so easily discarded, but otherwise, I had made my choice with open eyes, although they were the eyes of a girl still in her teens, and under great pressure.
He told me he wanted to return to Tehran after graduating, because his parents were old and he wanted to be close to them. He didn’t want me to stay and finish my degree on my own, nor would he wait until I graduated. The truth was that whether we stayed in Norman so that I could finish my studies, or went someplace else, I was tired of the role I had been playing. I had started to cultivate friends of my own who did not go to hairdressers—mostly classmates studying philosophy and English literature. These friends were hip, they read poets like Ferlinghetti and Ginsberg. I, like most of the girls in the group, was infatuated with a classmate named Charley, who had fashioned himself after the hero in Robert Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land. My husband disliked my friends and did not want me to visit them. So I did what I had learned to do with Mother: when he came for me, they would tell him I was not there.
And then we fought. I wanted to have the freedom to wear jeans and long dresses. My private notes had gone from Ladies’ Home Journal to Betty Friedan, in part under the influence of a professor who had become a friend and mentor. I will always remember her litmus test for love. You know you love him if you love even his dirty socks, she said with a smile that was genuinely sweet. If you can’t tolerate the dirty socks then you should get out.
Mehdi refused to consider divorce. At first he would say, You came into my house in a white gown and you will leave it in a white shroud (in fact it was not his house, but a rented apartment, for which I paid half the rent). And so I took revenge. I did what I wanted. I wore moccasins
and jeans instead of the prim and proper little dresses he liked. I did not go to the hairdresser, and I had a glass of wine whenever I felt like it.
One evening, in the midst of a fight, he slapped me. After that I left the house. I had said that we could never live together if we raised our voices against each other and now our relationship had deteriorated far beyond that. So without telling my parents the real reason for leaving Norman, I packed my bags and followed my professor friend to a ranch in New Mexico, where she had moved to start a new career as head of the philosophy department at a small college.
In some ways I felt sorry for Mehdi. He did not get what he had bargained for, while I had the advantage of not having expected anything. “You were never going to be a good housewife,” he said, “so it was not for those qualities that I loved you, but for yourself.” And the terrible thing is that I believed him.
I WAS IN NEW MEXICO when my father’s trial started in earnest, in September of 1967, one year after his release on bail. It was a closed session, although the government had announced that it would be open; not even my father’s brother was allowed to attend. The evidence presented in court was mostly laughable. The prosecutor offered up a fabricated tape of my father with his greatest detractor, Seyyed Mehdi Pirasteh, the minister of the interior, having a conversation in which Father insulted the Shah. The purpose of this recording was to prove one of the allegations against him: that of insubordination. Pirasteh’s voice was his own but Father’s was clearly fake; the tone and his manner were all phony. The tape was representative of the case against him.
Father composed and delivered his own defense. It is one hundred and twenty-eight pages long. It starts with a quotation from Ferdowsi and is interspersed with anecdotes from Rumi, Saadi, and other classical Persian poets as well as from Imam Ali, the Koran, Voltaire, and Dante. Later my father told me his decision to draw from the classics was deliberate: he chose the best of Iran’s heritage, in order to show his enemies that they were not the true sons of this country, that Iran did have other traditions, other values, and that he, my father, represented them.
Early on in his defense he cited an anecdote from Mullah Nasred-din, the popular fictional satiric figure. One day the Mullah was invited to give a sermon. When he got to the pulpit, he asked his audience if they knew what he was going to say. They said no. He was offended—what good would it do to speak to such ignorant people? The next day he repeated his question. Some in the audience said yes and others no. This time the Mullah said, “Those of you who know what I am going to say can tell those who don’t.” The third day he repeated his question again, and all said that they knew what he would say. “Why am I wasting my time telling you what you all already know?” he asked as he stepped down from the pulpit. My father told the court that this was his story: “I don’t know why I was arrested. If no one else knows either, then we are all in the same boat. If, however, there are some who know they should inform the rest of us who don’t.” Father denounced the court and accused certain officials by name, including Pirasteh, of malicious conspiracy. He went over every single charge and refuted them one by one and closed with a poem he had written for the occasion.
The trial ended on November 27, 1967. Father was exonerated of all but one charge, insubordination, as a result of which he was banned from government service. That decision would eventually be reexamined and overturned by the High Court, which exonerated him of all charges. The press was overwhelmingly on his side; three major publications, Sepid Seyah, Khandanyha, and Omid Iran, published the introduction to his defense. After his exoneration the prime minister offered him a job, which he refused. He had decided never to enter government service again.
I was in New Mexico when Father called to tell me the news. I congratulated him and after we had talked for a while, I suddenly said, “I want to divorce Mehdi.” My tone was neutral and formal. I was afraid of becoming too emotional. I think Father realized this. He paused. “Are you sure?” “I am,” I said. “I am sorry, I didn’t want to bring this up now.” He said, “I would have asked you what you were doing in New Mexico anyway. Don’t worry, we’ll talk about everything later. Don’t worry,” he repeated.
I was surprised that neither my father nor my mother asked me to reconsider. The next summer, when Mehdi and I returned to Tehran, my parents did everything in their power to make the process easy for me. At first Mehdi would not grant me a divorce. My father reminded my husband of my power to ask him for alimony at any time, even if we were not divorced. Alimony in Iran was the money both sides agreed on at the time of marriage to be paid to the wife in case of divorce, but that she could claim at any point during the marriage. Many women used this to get out of terrible marriages. In the end, an agreement was reached that if he would grant me a divorce I would waive all requests for alimony. It worked. My parents were so supportive that I could almost forget I had been married and divorced. “My poor Azi, you never enjoyed your life,” Mother said, looking at me, her eyes filled with pity. “I could tell from the start this match wouldn’t work,” she said. “He was not our type. No one would listen to me.”
THOSE FOUR YEARS my father spent in jail changed our lives forever. For the first time we realized the fragility of life, how easy it is to lose everything, and that changed the way we looked at all that we had taken for granted. My mother was a changed person. Over the following months, as life settled down to our new routine, she would read, with tears in her eyes, my father’s poems to her. She even tried to watch his favorite television shows with him, although more often than not she would fall asleep in the middle of a program. Her fears and anxieties remained: she worried if he came home a little late, if the phone rang late at night or the doorbell early in the morning. It took the machinations of several of the most powerful men in our country to make my father’s dream of a happy marriage come true. He could now look back with some satisfaction on that day when, at eighteen, he fled his parents’ home with its traditions and their demand that he marry a girl of their choice in order to start a brand-new life for himself.
Let me start again:
I can say in all honesty that my father’s imprisonment brought on a new era in our lives. I married and divorced, losing my faith in marriage and marital fidelity. I believe that was when my father decided to be seriously unfaithful to my mother. He had lost all hope of a desirable public life. He was still young—not yet fifty. Mohammad and I had grown up. When he was released he must have decided that since politics were out of the question, he would try to fulfill his dream of a happy domestic life. But my mother did not change at all. And as it turned out, there would be certain personal as well as political consequences to my father’s imprisonment, but it took us eleven more years to find that out.
CHAPTER 20
a happy family
AFTER MY DIVORCE I APPLIED to and was accepted at the University of California at Santa Barbara. I thought it had a great English department and for some reason had set my heart on going there before I married Mehdi. I was lying on my bed reading the letter of acceptance when my father came in. He sat by the bed and told me that if I went to a new college in the middle of my studies I would lose too many credits and it would delay my graduation. He wanted me to finish up at the University of Oklahoma. I protested that I had always wanted to go to Santa Barbara, but he went on to say that he had been hoping he’d have a chance to spend time with me before he got too old, that he wanted me to graduate early and come home as soon as possible. Remember, he said, you didn’t want to leave us in the first place. I had drawn the curtains and there was no light except the bedside lamp. He had positioned himself at the foot of the bed and I half sat, resting on one elbow. An intimate portrait, father and daughter, illuminated by the artificial light from the lamp.
So I stayed at the University of Oklahoma. I do not regret it. But I probably would have returned home sooner had I gone to U.C. Santa Barbara, where there was no nascent Iranian students’ movement to get involved i
n, and where I would have focused more on my studies than on organizing demonstrations.
I started life over in Oklahoma, as if I had never married—that at least was my perception, though it wasn’t what others felt. Not some of our old friends and acquaintances, who either tried to pick me up or kept their wives away from my bad influence. Not the young American men who equated a young divorcée with an easy lay. Not even my former husband, who would write me loving letters from Iran, advising me how to behave, where to go, what to do, how to preserve my integrity.
When I returned home the following summer, my father introduced me to the woman he had fallen in love with. “Nezhat is looking for her own unknown and invisible self,” he wrote in his diary just before his release from jail. “Something she lost from day one and doesn’t know how to find. I might have been that thing, but I am not. It might have been the children, but they’re not. It could have been position, wealth, or fame. I don’t know what it is. She is always anxious, tense, and restless. She thinks of herself as the center of the world! What should I do?” Of all his siblings, he had taken the greatest risk by rejecting his father’s worldview. It was essential to him, to that dream of success that had propelled him to leave Esfahan at eighteen, that he find a woman to love. “I wish I had a beloved,” he wrote that fall, “a space to be alone with her, loyal to one another and joyous together, but regrettably I am getting old and am afraid that these few remaining days will also pass and the imaginary happiness I dreamed of will always be inaccessible.”