Things I've Been Silent About

by Azar Nafisi

  PEOPLE ARE COLLECTORS for different reasons, but usually there is some specific purpose or focus—an obsession with matchboxes, for example, or ashtrays, or art. They tend to target specific objects. My mother seemed to hoard more than to collect, and what she hoarded was of no use. When I was younger she would sometimes use her old fabrics to make clothes for herself or for me, but gradually she just stored them in trunks, folded meticulously, one on top of the other.

  Her storage rooms were the heart of the house, its secret pulse: trunks filled with fabrics, clothes, presents she had bought for my father, my brother, and me, two trunks filled with silver, the china from her first marriage. Then, after the revolution and my father’s departure, she started hoarding basic staples. She boasted that she had preserved rice and sugar from prerevolutionary times. She stockpiled butter, which she almost never used. The storage rooms must have given her a sense of security, but until the day she died she never knew how to integrate these things into her life: display the silver, eat off the best china, wear the fur coats, allow us children to lose or destroy our toys. Sometimes, suddenly and for no reason, she would give away the precious objects she had guarded for many years, not to us, as might seem natural, but to relative strangers. She had developed a tendency to deny me any object I was interested in; if anything, she tried to take back what she had previously given me.

  She hoarded people as well as things. In the last years she took to collecting most avidly the stories of crimes committed by the Islamic regime. With these she was always generous. So many mornings we woke up to her knocking, or we found her at night when we returned home from a party, in the stairway. “Have you heard?” she would say, and then she would invariably tell us a tale of woe. Like the Goddess of Bad News, she worried lest we forgot. As soon as I glimpsed that sparkle in her eyes and heard the suppressed excitement in her voice, I knew we would soon be regaled with the tale of another murder. She was meticulous in her descriptions: in the ritual of stoning, men would be buried up to their waists, women to their necks; the stones had to be neither too large nor too small. One man had escaped and been forgiven because if you escape you will be pardoned. She reported with horror of street hangings where they hanged the culprit from a crane in order to make an example of him. Imagine Negar and Dara, she would say, coming upon such a scene on their way to school. And then there was the story of the man and woman who had been found beheaded in their garage (the woman’s name has somehow stayed in my mind, Firoozeh Sanaii) and of the older woman robbed and murdered—a hint of her own situation, alone when we left for a few days’ vacation, alone once we were gone for good.

  All through the nineties, alongside the political openings, there was also a systematic harassment of dissidents and secular intellectuals. One by one writers, poets, and translators would be murdered as they went about their business, shopping, visiting friends. My mother had listened carefully to our dinner conversations about the mysterious disappearances of Ahmad Mir Alaii, one of our best translators, and of a wonderful colleague at the University of Tehran, a professor of ancient Persian languages and culture, Ahmad Tafazoli, and about the burning down of the bookstore Morghe Amin by Islamic vigilantes who objected to a book published by the novelist Shahrnoosh Parsipur. Have you heard? she would exclaim, barging in in the early morning, Have you heard Mr. Golshiri has been arrested? We already knew, had been woken up early in the morning to hear that the night before, Golshiri and five other writers had been arrested at the house of the German consul.

  Every time I left Iran for a conference my mother would start a campaign a few days before my departure. Usually there would be a knock at the kitchen door and without waiting for an answer she would come in. “Don’t forget to tell them,” she’d say. “You must tell them everything.” She wanted me to relate all the crimes committed by the regime. She avidly listened to foreign broadcasts, the BBC and the Voice of America, and reported their news back to us. “The British are at it again, muddying the waters,” she would say. “They are in cahoots with the regime, never telling the truth.” She even had a list of those assassinated by the regime outside Iran: the former prime minister Bakhtiar, his close associate Abdolrrahman Borou -mand, Forough Farrokhzad’s brother, Fereydoun. Sometimes she invited me for coffee and commanded me to listen carefully to what a friend or a perfect stranger had to say about the goings-on in the country. The first time she said tell them, I said, “Tell who, Mom?” “Those who invited you. Tell Mahnaz.” Mahnaz Afkhami was the former minister for women’s affairs under the Shah. We were related. Her younger sister Farah, who later, like me, became active in the Confederation of Iranian Students, had been a childhood friend. At one point both Farah and I would have demonstrated against Mahnaz, but now the sisters shared the same fate: Mahnaz having been responsible for initiating projects and implementing the laws protecting women in the seventies, was near the top of the regime’s blacklist. Mahnaz lived in exile in the U.S., where Farah fled to, eight months pregnant and with a three-year-old daughter, after her husband, Fara-marz, was executed. Every time I left for a conference my mother would ask me to give her regards to Mahnaz and to tell her that people knew about her good work and how they appreciated her. “You used to jeer at people like Mahnaz,” Mother would say reproachfully, “you didn’t appreciate her.” I wanted to remind her that she herself did not approve of Mahnaz at the time. This feeling of admiration was relatively new. “They will listen to her,” my mother would say.

  I can still picture Mother early in the morning, standing by the garage door, ready to perform the parting rituals, holding a tray on which she had placed a copy of the Koran and a small bowl of water with a single flower floating in it. Before sprinkling the water after me for good luck and a safe journey, she takes a semi-crumpled piece of white paper out of her dressing gown pocket and hands it out to me. “I have written down a list of names of the people who are in jail or were killed. Give it to your friends. Make sure you do,” she says, almost pleading. “Okay, Mom.” “I hope this is not one of those okays you give when you have no intention of carrying out what I ask you,” she says, as I get into the car and close the door.

  SOMETIMES I FELT GRATEFUL that we lived in such close proximity to Mother. When Dara and Negar were small Mother often told them stories when they went to take their afternoon nap. She would spread a large blanket on the floor with three pillows and the three of them would lie in a row. I walked past their room and through the open door I could see Negar lying on her back, her thumb in her mouth, eyes focused on the ceiling, listening with that look of abstraction that children have when they leave the present reality for that other world. Dara, as usual, demanded his favorite objects from the picture books: “That moon,” he would say, “that moon is what I want.” When they grew up she taught them how to play cards. In the evening she would call them downstairs for a hand of passur, or rummy, or twenty-one. She would tell them how her father, a great gambler, would sometimes play with her and because there were only two of them, each would double as an absent partner—a complicated process I never really understood. She always made sure to lose and she paid the children with chocolates and money. I would often come home from visiting friends or meetings to the sound of laughter and find Mother, Negar, and Dara sitting around the kitchen table.

  She bought them gifts, usually small jewelry for Negar and toys for Dara. I have in my drawer a long gold chain with little medallions: a tiny heart, a pomegranate, a slipper, keys, and several emblems of the winged Zoroastrian deities so much in demand after the revolution. She knit the children colorful socks, mittens, and scarves, and in the morning she would come halfway up the staircase and shout their names. “Come down and feed the birds!” she ’d say. After we left Iran to live in the U.S. in 1997, every time I called, she would say, “Tell Dara I am taking care of his birds,” her voice breaking as she spoke.

  She loved both children, but Dara, our son, was her favorite. She often accused us of taking advantage of hi
s good nature. She thought he looked like my brother, and that Negar looked like me, only of course her children were better looking. These were the light moments—their times together usually were light, except when she allowed her wrath toward my father to extend to them. I still have Negar’s diaries from when she was eight: “Today Maman Nessi told us we should not visit her anymore,” she wrote. “She said she is not our grandmother, someone named Shahin the Turk is our grandmother now. I cried, but she said, ‘That’s what your mother wants.’”

  Sometimes she would come upstairs when we were not home and collect their “good toys”—presents from birthdays and other occasions—and hide them so they would not destroy them. I am still amazed as I write about this at how alien the concept of pleasure and play was to her; she was so threatened by it, as if it would inevitably lead to loss and sorrow. Once Tahmineh Khanoom, who knew every nook and cranny in my mother’s apartment, as she helped her every once in a while, took Negar, Dara, and me downstairs when my mother was out. She opened a closet door and, lo and behold, the whole closet was filled with large teddy bears and stuffed animals, Barbie dolls, cars, and trucks Bijan’s sisters had sent the children from America. This was so strange that it made the children laugh as we paid her in kind by reappropriating a few of their favorite toys—we didn’t have the heart to take them all and leave her with nothing. “And you blamed us,” Negar said, as we sneaked back upstairs, our hands full to overflowing, “for losing our toys!”

  IN HER LATER YEARS my mother spent most of her time in a drawing room next to her bedroom. The room depressed me, despite the fact that it was sunny, with wide French windows opening onto a balcony facing the garden. This cheerful sunniness was overshadowed by photographs, which seemed to proliferate alarmingly on tabletops and all available surfaces and on the walls. They were arranged without regard for size or shape and almost none of them hung straight; they leaned toward one another like drunk strangers at a bar.

  In this room she served her legendary coffee to guests, chosen as haphazardly as her photographs. Alongside the guards from the neighboring hospital, Saifi’s relatives, my students, and our neighbors, were strangers she had come across at a friend’s house, or, in two or three cases, met in a cab or on a bus. These assorted individuals could be found perched precariously on the edge of their chairs, as if wary of the stranger occupying the seat next to them. Sometimes she paid heavily for this indulgence, such as when, for a while, a shady character who looked like a handsome Kojak, named Ahmad Agha, was her favorite. For a long time Ahmad Agha visited her on a daily basis, supposedly reporting on clandestine activities by opponents of the regime. He had introduced himself to her as a political activist, and fed her fantastic stories about secret activities in the bazaar, mysterious uprisings in clerical schools, and grisly murders committed by the militia and revolutionary guards.

  Mother in her final years, among her photographs.

  Every day Mother would repeat Ahmad Agha’s stories, her expression brimming with excitement, with such heartbreaking trust that it was impossible for us to openly question the authenticity of his tales. We tried to find diplomatic ways to warn her, but she was, as she’d always been, deaf to criticism of the people she favored. Ahmad Agha coaxed money out of her, in the name of donations to victims of the regime and freedom fighters, and when he disappeared as suddenly as he had appeared, he took off with her silver, which included precious souvenirs from her mother and first husband, and two of her antique carpets. Like others who stole from her, he knew where she kept her good things, in the basement near the garage. It was easy to cheat her of her belongings, all you had to do was say the right things. If you were unconditionally and irrevocably against the Islamic regime, you were high on her list of favorites. If you took her side against my father, then you could get almost anything out of her. She felt she could trust people who agreed with her. It was to our credit—my brother’s and mine—that we did not acquiesce in this arrangement, despite the personal cost of our sedition.

  LONG AFTER AUNT MINA had a falling-out with my mother, I continued to visit her. By the mid-eighties Aunt Mina was ill. I remember one day in particular, she was in a reminiscing mood and for the first time she decided to tell me her side of the story. “Your mother is a funny person,” she said, getting up from her chair to bring me her photograph album. “She will accuse you of the worst crimes and break off all relations, and a few weeks later she ’ll expect you to act as if nothing has happened. I sometimes think she thrives on creating scenes and stirring emotions.

  “The trouble with Nezhat,” Aunt Mina went on, “is that she goes to extremes in everything she does. She is so kind and helpful that you know you can never repay her and then suddenly she becomes so overbearing, and demanding.” Aunt Mina told me that they often quarreled about my mother’s treatment of me. “So many times when you went back to England or America after your summer vacations, Nezhat was so mad at you that she would curse you and say she hoped your plane would crash.

  “I don’t know which was worse,” Aunt Mina said, “her mother’s suicide or her discovery that Saifi had a fatal disease on her wedding night.” “Suicide?” This was the first time I had heard any suggestion that my grandmother’s death had been from suicide. Surely someone would have mentioned it. She waved away my question. “I’m not sure what it was, there were rumors—childbirth, infection, even that your grandfather had killed her, there was also some speculation that she had been unhappy and committed suicide. You know that there were problems with her niece Fakhri, she suffered from some sort of mental illness, depression, I believe. I don’t think Nezhat wanted to know the truth, and it’s all water under the bridge now.” I was as shocked by this piece of information as by Aunt Mina’s casual way of mentioning it. It was one stray piece of a puzzle I had long been struggling to put together.

  “I sometimes think that Saifi was very bad for your mother,” Aunt Mina said. “She never recovered after his death. She wore black for a long time” (my father had written that when he first saw her, Mother was wearing black, “waves” of grief still crossing her face). “She never found her bounce again.” The absence of love, my student had called it—perhaps that was my mother’s illness. So many women seem to suffer from it. Aunt Mina herself, come to think of it, my grandmother, even some of my young students. “She turned that man into a god; no man deserves that,” Aunt Mina said, with a mischievous smile. “I hope you have learned something from your mom.”

  There was no way that I could ask my mother if my grandmother had committed suicide, but I asked my father. “I don’t know what it was,” he said. “There were so many rumors. No one paid enough attention to the poor woman to find out.” Over the years I asked my mother’s cousins, but no one knew anything about her. So the only way I can deal with the fact that no one knew or remembered anything about my grandmother’s life is to record what we do know about her for certain—and the fact that everyone forgot her. A friend once asked me why I thought truth mattered. “Truth,” he said, “is not comforting, certainly not nearly so much as lying or forgetting.”

  Less than a year after that visit, Aunt Mina died. For a long time she had been suffering from cancer of the stomach. She had become very thin, which somehow made her look even more elegant and lady like. Despite her illness she was always perfectly dressed and was very much in command and control of her beautiful apartment furnished with antiques. Unlike Mother’s apartment, hers had order and harmony. My mother did not object to my visits to Aunt Mina, but she did not warm up to her when she was sick. Usually the way to make Mother forget her animosities was to inform her of someone’s misfortune. But Aunt Mina was ill and dying, and Mother revealed no curiosity or sympathy. “I have heard,” she’d say in a neutral tone, “that she cheats at rummy. I defended her,” she added matter-of-factly, “but that is what they say, that she cheats and no one likes to play with her.”

  She used to pride herself on how she was “always there” for friend
s and relatives in times of grief, irritating me when she boasted that she seldom attended weddings but was always present at funerals. Yet when her stepmother died, although she was concerned for Aunt Nafiseh and spent most of her time with her, she showed little actual grief. At the mourning ceremonies she talked loudly and even laughed. Aunt Nafiseh’s friends took great pleasure in shushing her, saying, “Nezhat Khanoom, please …”

  When Aunt Mina was in the hospital I visited her regularly. The last few days they took her to the ICU I remember standing behind the window of the ICU with her daughters, watching her. She was restless, she kept moving, and we stood there helpless; she was already beyond our reach. After she died, I went to the cemetery with Layla, her younger daughter, and we watched from behind a window as she was washed and prepared for Muslim burial. When I told my mother, she was sitting on the couch in her faded pale-green dressing gown. She said nothing. “Layla was always a good girl,” she said finally “I like her.”

  After a while Mother got up, and as she walked toward the door, she said, “Would you like a cup of coffee?”

  CHAPTER 29

  facing the world

  FATHER HAD ACTED AS AN INTERMEDIARY between Mother and the world. Problems with the plumbing, the house or garden, the servants, whatever it was she would interrupt him at his office, in the middle of a meeting, and expect him to resolve the issue. If she wanted to travel, he secured her passport and tickets. If she felt insulted by a friend or acquaintance at a party she was furious if he did not “defend her.” At the start of the revolution, when the new regime announced that former parliamentarians had to report to the courts and pay back their wages, Father went to the preliminary meetings on her behalf and paid the dues. The act of defending and protecting her, a woman so furiously in love with the idea of independence, was left first to my father and then to my brother and me.