Things I've Been Silent About

by Azar Nafisi

Not long after he left jail, he accepted the executive directorship of a private textile factory that had been owned by a dear friend who had recently died. At the textile factory he met Shahin, who was his secretary, and later, when he left to become vice president of the Iranian Bank, she left with him.

  I had been in Tehran for a few days when he took me to meet her. We had tea and discussed the virtues of modern poetry, especially Ahmad Shamlou—perhaps the most influential living poet in Iran—and the twin vices of hypocrisy and materialism. It was a commonplace conversation full of platitudes and big words, a way of affirming the other person as your kind of person. Whether consciously or not, we both wanted to like one another and to please my father. And pleased he was, basking in this mutual bonding.

  She was not as beautiful as my mother, only younger and more confident. Perhaps poised is the right word. What attracted my father to her, I believe, was the fact that she appeared to share his interests: she gathered his poems, empathized with his plight, offered seemingly wise remarks gleamed from books of psychology. “I talked about this to my beloved friend who is both beautiful and wise,” my father wrote. “She said, from a psychological point of view, women who reach an age when they are no longer attractive, will do anything to draw attention, even if it means wishing their husband’s death.”

  It is too obvious an irony that my father’s women were at first welcomed by my mother. She adopted them. They tolerated her extreme attentions because of their interest in him. None of my father’s women had much in common with my mother and yet she tried to form personal bonds with them. The fact that by constantly bringing up Saifi she had openly demonstrated her own emotional infidelity never occurred to her. So it was with Shahin. Mother, who could not keep away from Father’s office, had taken a liking to Shahin during her regular visits. She found her charming, a serious and well-mannered girl, and often invited her to lunch or coffee. In my mind’s eye I see it all again, sitting in our bright, spacious living room, my father, Mother, Shahin, and me. Shahin sets her porcelain coffee cup on the table, politely listens to my mother, murmurs something appropriate in response. She is wearing a simple brown suit, her hair pulled back severely in a tidy chignon. Large round gold earrings gleam against her black hair: ladylike, attractive, attentive. My mother has on the friendly smile she reserves for her protégés. Instead of empathizing with my mother, I am embarrassed for Shahin for having to tolerate this. Every once in a while she averts her eyes and looks sideways, not toward my father, but to a point away from him. I catch their glances, as he looks toward the same point and smiles awkwardly—happily.

  I WENT BACK TO OKLAHOMA in mid-August, after yet another big and bloody fight with my mother. I vowed never to return to Tehran, and wrote my father a loving letter in which I called Mother a lunatic and said that she should be committed. Mother discovered the letter, opened it without his knowledge or permission, and all hell broke loose. What was extraordinary about these incidents was not so much the extent of the emotions on display as the fact that we went on without breaking contact for good, without ever really taking permanent offense. Mother seemed to find these discoveries uplifting, providing proof, as they did, that she had been right all along. Years later she still had a copy of that letter, which every once in a while she would wave in front of my eyes with an expression of bitter satisfaction, or refer to with acid neutrality.

  Not long after that, she discovered the truth about Shahin. Father constantly vacillated between his urge to start a new life and his fear of it. He kept threatening to leave and never followed through. At different points he left the house for a while and made my mother consent to a divorce, but at the last minute she reneged or he was persuaded to return. “My wife says she would never consent to a permanent separation,” he writes in his diary, “because that would bring me happiness and she does not want me to be happy!” Later Father told me over lunch at a restaurant that Rahman had informed my mother of the liaison after Shahin had refused Rahman’s sexual advances. He told me this after Rahman’s sudden death in the summer of 1973. Father grieved for his death and felt that had he not abused his extraordinary powers Rahman would perhaps have been useful for himself and those close to him.

  Aji maji, latrajii: I hear Rahman utter these nonsensical words, supposedly magical invocations, as he laughingly tries to grab hold of my hand. He was such a physical presence, when he entered the room one could almost feel his bulky body fill the space around him, so that even I in some strange way missed him—or felt his absence, the emptiness, as if space itself had bulk, and a piece of it, in the shape of Mr. Rahman, had been scissored out.

  My parents stayed together for another decade. Shahin married a wealthy suitor who she later claimed was a gambler who refused to give her access to money because he feared that once she had it she would leave him. Father told me they spent most of their time abroad.

  CHAPTER 21

  demonstrations

  BACK IN THE UNITED STATES I FELL IN LOVE with Ted, who read Beckett and played the classical guitar. He gave me my first book by Nabokov, Ada. In the mornings we marched against the Vietnam war and ROTC, Ted carrying his camera to document the proceedings. I can still picture those young men our own age who looked so vulnerable as they tried to ignore our jeering. In the evenings we drank wine and went to Ingmar Bergman and Fellini movies. Ted helped me make a film for a class based on my unhappy marriage—my teacher said it was truly Bergmanesque and gave me an A. Such were the times. When Ted and I broke up I had fully matured into believing that relationships do not, perhaps should not, last.

  In 1971 I watched on American television the lavish twenty-five-hundredth-anniversary celebrations of the Persian Empire near the ruins of Persepolis, to which Alexander had set fire after his conquest of Persia in 330 b.c. Celebrities and royalty, including Prince Philip and Prince Charles of Britain, Prince Rainier and Princess Grace of Monaco, and King Haile Selassie of Ethiopia, participated in the sumptuous extravaganza in a tented city near the ruins designed for the occasion by a group of French architects. Food and wine were imported from France, and the city was walled off from ordinary Iranians. A procession of men dressed as ancient Achaemenid soldiers paraded by the assembled grandees. The Shah, in an address to Cyrus, the great Achaemenid king, that became a joke among Iranians, declaimed, “Cyrus, sleep well, for we are awake!”

  Earlier that year opposition to the Shah had taken on a new urgency as it shifted from the mainly peaceful methods of the old groups to the more militant means of the two new armed revolutionary groups, one Marxist and another Muslim. In an armed uprising in the village of Siahkal, a group of Marxist guerrillas, called the Organization of Fedaian-e Khalgh—all young, educated, middle-class men and women—were either killed in a clash with the police or apprehended and later executed. Meanwhile a militant Muslim organization named Mojahedeen-e Khalgh called for an armed struggle against the regime.

  The tents for the 2,500th-anniversary celebrations at Persepolis.

  All through the early seventies the country was living a paradox: it enjoyed an economic boom thanks to the skyrocketing cost of oil (which soon would lead to numerous economic problems) but was deeply divided by the socially liberalizing measures initiated by the Shah. At the same time it became more polarized and closed politically. The middle class, which had benefited most from the political and social transformations, was alienated by this increased repression. In March of 1975 the Shah eliminated the nominal two-party system and asked the whole nation to merge into one party, called Rastakhiz (meaning resurgence, or resurrection). Those who advised him to do this hoped that the different forces and factions would come together. The Shah’s new party was unpopular from the start, as was his terse statement that whoever opposed it was free to leave the country. The following year he quixotically decided to shift from the Islamic calendar, which starts with the prophet’s flight from Mecca to Medina, to a new one based on the establishment of the Persian Empire by Cyrus the Great, br
inging the year from 1355 to 2535. Iran’s history was being divided by two polarized political powers: the Shah, who more and more identified his rule with ancient pre-Islamic Iran, and the religious establishment, who defined Iranian history as beginning only after the Arab Conquest.

  In this context our campus activities in the U.S. and Europe became more militant and polarized. In the seventies it was easy for a young Iranian abroad to be antigovernment—inside Iran, of course, it was a different story. Gradually I found myself drawn into the Confederation of Iranian Students, one of the most active campus movements in the United States. There I was not treated as a young divorcée, but was invited to participate in reading groups on Engels’s The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, Marx’s Eighteenth Brumair, and, later, Lenin’s State and Revolution. Strange bedfellows for Tom Jones, Tristram Shandy, The Rise of Silas Lapham, Persuasion, and Winesburg, Ohio, books I devoured so quickly that by the time classes started I had finished most of them.

  The Confederation was an umbrella organization, composed of groups with different ideological viewpoints, but with time, especially in the U.S., the most militant and radical ideologies became dominant. In our group it seemed as if everything could fall into place, all questions could be answered: the world could be controlled, polished, purged, and purified. There was a clear line between the bad guys—the Shah and his imperialist masters—and the good guys, those like us who were the champions of the oppressed. We were consumed by the inflexible ideological trends of the time, turning the teachings of Che Guevara, Mao, Lenin, and Stalin into romantic dreams of revolution.

  The Iranian student movement in the U.S. was on the whole militant and as time went by increasingly puritanical: family ties and sexual intimacy were denigrated, and in some cases driven underground. A far cry from the liberating poetry of Forough Farrokhzad! The feminist movement was called bourgeois by the more militant segments of the Confederation; women were comrades, and the desexed images on posters from China were our ideal. But since man cannot live by ideology alone, I, like others, gave in to relationships, and like them I hid those relationships and told myself that it was all for the good of the movement. And so the problems that had started with childhood and intensified with marriage found a haven to fester without a challenge.

  Every once in a while Father would ask me to take Mother off his hands for a few months, so that he could “breathe a little.” She would descend on me in Oklahoma with suitcases full of nuts, dried cherries, Turkish coffee, woolen scarves, and sweaters, and would immediately start cleaning my apartment and making me food. She mixed and mingled with my friends, offering them coffee and mocking our activities. I was at this point a teaching assistant in the English department. Mohammad had enrolled at the University of Oklahoma for a year; he then transferred first to Paris and then to the University of Kent, where he got his degree before returning to the U.S. for graduate studies at the New School for Social Research.

  Somewhat surprisingly, Mother did not make a scene about my political activities, despite the fact that they had already caused trouble at home. Father had been summoned by the secret police and forced to make promises about my future conduct that were not his to keep. I was active in a group called the Third World Committee, organized by a Chinese student who was at once quiet and persistent. We were all in love with Chairman Mao, or at least with the romance of his legend. When Mao died, in 1976, Mother was in the U.S. on one of her visits. We made quite a to-do about his death, vocally mourning him and staging memorial meetings. I remember the scornful expression on my mother’s face when I came home teary-eyed and inconsolable. She said, with incomprehension, “You cry as if one of your parents has died!”

  WHEN I MET BIJAN NADERI, he was the leader of a student faction headquartered in California with which we had chosen to associate ourselves. His group was more cerebral and less ferociously self-assured than most of the other factions. It also had few members in the U.S. With other men I was not challenged. I had somehow abdicated responsibility by hiding my relationships. But from the very start there was no evasion and concealment with Bijan. He was not shocked by my fear of monogamy, or my secret affairs. Our relationship was the first I avowed in public since I had broken up with Ted. By then I was convinced that marriages did not last and that those that did were very unhappy. At no point in our courtship did he ever really tell me why he had decided to marry me. “Isn’t it obvious?” he would say. He knew very little about my background and circumstances, nor was he particularly interested. To my annoyance, he was not even much interested in my first husband. According to family lore his father, a kind and temperamental man, picked up one day and left home, never to return, leaving behind a short note addressed to Bijan, in which he asked Bijan to take care of his mother and sisters. All he took with him was a small suitcase and the suit he wore. He had waited for his eldest daughter, Mani, to marry and arranged for Bijan, at the age of seventeen, to join her in America. Bijan’s younger sister, Taraneh, was put under the guardianship of her maternal uncle. Bijan’s father was never found, and although he was always mentioned with kindness, no one ever discussed his strange vanishing act.

  Me with Bijan Naderi, my second husband.

  Mother met Bijan in 1976, on her last trip to Oklahoma. She liked him: she said he seemed responsible and far more “together” than my cousin Mehdi, who was then involved in the same student movement. It helped that her main priority was to protect me from my father’s family, and being overly cordial to Bijan meant snubbing Mehdi. “He is just a friend,” I said. She very much wanted him to be more, or at least that is what she implied when we were alone. Over dinner it was more difficult to deflect her. “He has a job,” she would drop casually as I focused on my plate, examining each morsel with great interest. “He is not like all those vagrants who are sent here to study and become useful members of society and what do they do? They wear patched-up trousers and act like illiterate hoodlums. He does have a job, doesn’t he?” she would continue, following me to the kitchen with the dishes. “No, no,” she ’d say with a sense of urgency, “first wash the sink.” “Mom, why do I need to wash the sink?” “Is it a good job?” she asked.

  I had by now a whole new armament to help me shut out her voice—Fielding, Lenin, Wharton. Later, as I sat, book in hand, she asked again, peeling an orange: “He does have a job, doesn’t he?” “Yes, Mom,” I finally said, holding the book closer to me as if for protection. “He is a civil engineer and I don’t like engineers.” “What do you like?” she asked in exasperation. “Are you waiting for another Chairman Mao?”

  AFTER A SHORT ENGAGEMENT, we announced our wedding date—September 9, 1979. My parents flew to Washington, D.C., and Mohammad and his girlfriend, Janet, came from New York. Mother arrived full of plans and energy, pushing me aside to such an extent that one might have been forgiven for imagining that it was her wedding. She wanted everything I didn’t: the customary alimony, a proper wedding dress and ceremony, a proper diamond ring. She brought with her all the material for a traditional Persian wedding—rosewater; huge sugar cubes, a staple of traditional wedding ceremonies; jewelry—and fell into arranging everything with a vengeance. It did not take me long to understand that wedding ceremonies are the exact opposite of what they are made out to be: joyous and harmonious celebrations of love and family.

  Almost from the start I had developed a loving and flirtatious relationship with Bijan’s family, especially his two sisters. I was almost dazzled by their unpretentious generosity and sense of moral integrity.

  During these warlike preparations, Bijan’s mother and sisters treated me as a beloved eccentric. They begged me to comply with my mother’s demands. My mother-in-law, justifiably distressed by the ultimatums my mother and I exchanged, designated Mani and Taraneh to act as emissaries of peace. I hear Mani’s footsteps coming down the stairs, I sit up straight and prepare to confront her requests with strong counterarguments. Her voice is gentle and cautious. �
��Azi jan?” Behind her I see Taraneh, smiling and saying nothing. “All mothers are like this, look at Afahg joon,” says Mani, who is known to throw herself and those closest to her to the wolves in order make peace. Her husband, Kioumars (whom we call Q), is the best husband in the world, but if a friend complains about the indifference or cruelty of her spouse, Mani will say, with all the sympathy in the world, “I know exactly what you mean,” provoking Q to good-humored exasperation. Taraneh interrupts: “Let’s go shopping for a dress and we’ll get away from of all this.” “We can get a coffee at White Flint Mall,” Mani adds, perhaps trying to bribe me into joining them. Half an hour later, like the defeated generals of a losing army, they head back upstairs.

  Bijan begged me to let Mother have her way—he pointed out that my obstinacy only resulted in making a bigger deal out of not wanting to turn the event into a big deal. “What,” Mother would ask him sarcastically, “do you have to say to all of this? You and I need to have a serious talk.” He would nod his head, concede with a smile that she was right, yes, they should have a serious talk, and then he would disappear. Finally I gave up, more out of exhaustion than anything else, and she won on all counts. “We will anoint you a saint,” Bijan said with a smile, “for all your sufferings, but now please be a good girl and let us get on with our lives.”

  For three days, Bijan’s patient sisters dragged me from Montgomery Mall to White Flint and all around D.C. in search of shoes and an appropriate wedding dress. What we found was not ideal, too cute for my taste, but that was not the point. The wedding went on as planned. Despite the bloody battles preceding it, the ceremony itself was warm and intimate.

  The morning before the wedding we went to the State House for a civil ceremony and, in the middle of it all, I suddenly plunged into irrepressible laughter. To this day I still don’t know why, but at least it was better than the tears at my previous wedding. Mani was embarrassed on my behalf. Bijan gave me a dirty look, and Mohammad’s girlfriend, Janet, who was one of the witnesses, started laughing with me.