by Azar Nafisi
AS THE TIME FOR OUR departure grew near I became almost frantic in my attempts to spend time with her. Long hours would elapse, sitting in that drawing room, as I tried to draw stories out of her. I would walk around the room and ask her about the photographs. “Mom, who is this?” “Oh, look at you and Aunt Mina.” “Do you have any pictures of Saifi after you were married?” Her responses were perfunctory, and when I asked her about my grandmother or Saifi she repeated the same stories she had always told me, almost word for word.
One morning she brought out a small suitcase from the storage room. It was filled with old photographs, and we scattered them on the floor. I could hear Negar and Dara laughing out on the balcony. The French window was open and they were playing some nonsensical word game. Every once in a while one of them would say something particularly preposterous and they would break into peals of laughter. My mother would not sit down by me. As I went through the suitcase, she drifted in and out of the room, occasionally tossing off a comment about a photograph. I put some photos aside. I knew that there was no way I could preserve that moment: my children out on the balcony, my mother almost at peace with me, a feeling of comfort and intimacy I hadn’t felt in so many decades. “Negar, Dara,” she called as soon as she came in, carrying a tray in her hands, “your coffee and chocolate is ready.” “Mom,” I was going to say, “don’t give them coffee, they are too young.” But I knew she would only say, “You of all people don’t need to tell me what is good or not good for the children!”
I had become obsessed with her past. I wanted to know her, to feel what it was that had made her so distant from us and yet so very close and vulnerable. It was difficult to communicate with her, to talk to her. I could never find the right words. I could not say, “Mom, I understand why you feel this way, and I am grateful to you for Lancaster and for other things, but I love Father as well.” I could not tell her that most of all I had wanted her to love me. I wanted her to touch me, not out of pity but because she wanted to. “What do you want, Mom?” I wanted to ask. But there were so many things we left unsaid.
THOSE LAST MONTHS BEFORE we moved from Tehran had the texture of nostalgia, as if the present had already faded into the past. I remember one morning in particular, she had called me down for a cup of coffee. When I arrived in her apartment I found her in the kitchen and she told me to settle into the drawing room while she finished making coffee. Waiting for her, looking around me, I noticed certain changes about the room to which I had not paid much attention. She always liked to have a smaller room for casual entertainment. At first she had moved everything to her bedroom and turned the adjoining room, which had been my father’s bedroom, into her drawing room. Then she had moved her bed into the new drawing room, turning it into a couch during the daytime and a bed at night. By now she practically lived all hours of the day and night in that room. The photographs on the walls had also undergone a transformation. Ever since I could remember she’d had pictures of the four of us—one of my father with the mayoral key and chain—together on one wall. There were other photos of us, a typical family portrait with my brother still in his teens. The photographer had tried to improve us and made my eyes so light they looked green. But now I noticed that my mother had removed all of the photos with my father in them. The room was full of photographs of her children and grandchildren. Among the color snapshots of Negar, Dara, and Sanam, I spotted a black-and-white photo. It was of a young bride, sober and serious, and her light-haired, smiling groom. My mother and Saifi. On her bedside table were two books, both from my library. They were among my childhood favorites. One was a book I had been in love with when I was around eleven. Layla had given it to me for my birthday and I used to boast that I had read it twelve times. It was called Désirée. Written in diary form, it was a romanticized version of the life of Bernardine Eugénie Désirée Clary, the daughter of a wealthy merchant from Marseille who was befriended by Napoleon, to whom Napoleon was allegedly engaged when he was still poor, and whom he later betrayed to marry Josephine. She ended up marrying one of Napoleon’s generals and later became the queen of Sweden. This book was adorned with pictures from the movie with Jean Simmons, Marlon Brando, and Merle Oberon; not surprisingly I forever identified them with their historical counterparts. The first sentence went something like this: “I think women with a prominent bosom are more attractive, so tomorrow I intend to stuff mine with handkerchiefs.” My mother had picked up this book and another one of my childhood favorites, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, and she read them as real history. I started telling her—as was obvious—that these books were novels, but she was determined to believe otherwise and I desisted. I told her about Harriet Beecher Stowe and women like her and their fight for women’s rights and against slavery, and how I felt these women’s struggles were so close to our own. I also told her about how when I first went to Paris I tried to find the bridge where Désirée ’s future husband found her contemplating suicide after she had discovered that Napoleon would marry Josephine.
I told her I was planning to write a book and dedicate it to her. “What will you call it?” she asked. “Shameless Women,” I said. “And you think I will like a book with such a title?” “No, Mom, what I mean is that I remember you and Aunt Mina told us how they used to say that teaching women to read and write would make them worldly and would encourage them to write love letters to men and to be shameless. I want to write a book about that, about how frightened some people are of educating women.” I told her about a story by Shahrnoosh Parsipur set near the end of the nineteenth century. One day, as the heroine’s father, an adib, or poet-scholar, is walking down the street, deep in thought and oblivious to the world around him, a foreigner on horseback, probably an Englishman, runs him down.
The insolent foreigner, angry at the adib’s inattention, whips him across the face. This incident creates a big scandal. It is arranged that the foreigner should go to the scholar’s house and apologize. This simple confrontation is probably a footnote in the life of the Englishman, but it transforms the scholar’s life forever. The change is presented at first through small details. At that time very few Persian homes had chairs and furniture; even the well-off sat on the carpeted floor, leaning against huge cushions. In order to properly receive the foreigner, the scholar has to borrow Western-style furniture. This is the first sign of the foreign invasion. The Englishman breaks another rule. In most Persian houses it is still the custom to take one’s shoes off when entering the house. The foreigner, ignorant or heedless of this custom, enters with his boots on. Thus the act of apology turns into a gesture of his superiority. The most important result of the encounter is the scholar’s startling discovery of the roundness of the earth. Before, he had been vaguely aware of the earth’s roundness but had preferred to ignore it. For several days he contemplates what his discovery means for him. Instinctively realizing the connection between the foreigner’s presence, the roundness of the earth, and future changes and upheavals, he finally announces: “Yes, the earth is round; the women will start to think, and as soon as they begin to think, they will become shameless.”
I told my mother, “That is what I mean when I talk about shameless women—women like you, Ameh Hamdam, your teacher Ozra Khanoom, how they fought to be educated. I want to write about this and about the fictional women in our literature.”
I did not tell her that I also wanted to write about the hardheaded women like Rudabeh, Vis, and Forough, like Alam Taj, women who persisted in taking risks, in … how can I say it? Women who are not afraid of being sensual. I wanted to ask her if there was any discrepancy between being an educated woman, a medical doctor, say, and being a woman who loved to dance.
She was following her own train of thought. “I always wanted you to be educated,” she said, “useful for your country. At least I achieved that. The parent who disciplines a child is always the one who is disliked. It is the indulgent one they want to spend time with.” I should have said, “Yes, you did give me that, you gave us
education, and where I am now I owe to you. You wanted your dreams for me.” I should have acknowledged that. But somehow it was all a bit too late.
I would have liked to think that from that day on this was how our relationship would be. But the next day, or the day after, we resumed our normal relationship. She would open the door to my kitchen and start hurling insults at me, while in the living room my guests would try to continue their conversation as if they could not hear her. After she had caught me talking to Father on the phone, for the umpteenth time, she would ask for the documents to the lands she and my father had owned together and I would remain silent. And then she would remind me that she didn’t expect much from me anyway, because I was made of those same rotten genes.
One day, about a week before we left Iran, she came up to our apartment early in the morning. She said there was something she wanted to show me. She looked irritated and handed me a big fat file. “You never thought of showing these to me,” she said. She had all my articles, almost every single one of them. She even had a Xerox copy of the introduction I had written to the Persian translation of Richard Wright’s American Hunger. She had framed letters and poems by my students. “The ones you threw away,” she said. The copies I now have of my articles from Iran mainly comes from the file she gave me then. She said, “Your new book about this Russian, I don’t understand. I don’t understand why you have to write about him. But I am happy that you are doing what you want. This is my last contribution,” she said. “I have no more money, thanks to that gentleman and his concubine, but I am glad I have left my children with something no one can take away from them.”
THE LAST MORNING, as she came to the garage in her familiar faded, pale-green dressing gown to say good-bye, she looked angry and barely responded to our greetings. When I tried to kiss her good-bye, she turned away. She performed all the farewell rituals to ensure the traveler has a safe journey, bringing out, as she always did on such occasions, her small bowl of water with a single flower in it and the Koran. She poured the water behind us, in our footsteps as we left, for good luck. But what I remember most clearly is that expression of bitterness and hurt.
As the car drove off I reimagined my mother, a trick I had learned when I was very young—look at the view, close your eyes and reimagine it, and then open your eyes and look again. I turned and looked at her again, in her pale-green dressing gown, obscured by the shadows in the dark garage, and I was struck by how old she looked, the spots on her face, the still beautiful gray hair, the high cheekbones, and the lusterless eyes … Our parents’ old age shocks us in the same manner that our children’s growth to maturity does, but without the joy; there is only sadness. I thought suddenly how vulnerable she was and alone. Then a thought crept in and took root. I will soon lose her, I thought, but loss presupposes ownership. She and my father had both given me something to lose. I felt sorry for her—not so much for Father, who had in a broken way fulfilled his dream. But I felt sorry for her, because she had nothing to lose, she had lost her mother too early, and with my father’s departure she had lost what was left of her home. This thought lurked for five years in a corner of my mind, until it suddenly hit home after her death.
We had left a little earlier than necessary. My father was waiting at the airport to see us off, and to help us with the luggage. He knew people at customs who could help in case something came up, and I constantly worried that something might come up. But nothing happened: no one harassed us. I kept thinking that all my life I have worried about my father’s death, and now probably this was the last time I would see him.
Father had given me the stories, my portable home. With Mother it was more complicated. I had come to my books and my vocation and even my family both because of her and in spite of her. It was ironic that in the end I had become what Mother wanted me to be, or what she had wanted to become: a woman content with her family and her work. My daughter, Negar, became what Mother had aspired to: she went to medical school and is studying to be a doctor. She said, “Mom, I will be the first girl in our family to become a doctor. Maman Nessi would have loved that.”
People need to be acknowledged for who they are, they need to be seen and loved as they are, in order to come fully into their own. How could we acknowledge her? My father’s sins and his virtues were concrete and specific. We could love him, be mad at him, and acknowledge him. Not so with her. It was as if when she looked into the mirror she saw only a void. She turned us into mirrors, desperate to find an image she could not see. Sometimes I caught myself looking in the mirror and seeing my mother’s face. I had never thought I looked like her, and when people told me I did, I would almost vehemently deny it. I looked like my father, I would tell them. Yet as the years went by I heard this remark more often, from my own daughter, in fact, who friends said looked like me. It was not that I was like my mother in coloring or the slant of my eyes; it went deeper than that. There was an expression, a ghostlike intimation, as if a shadow had passed over my face. There she was in the mirror, not kind or generous, but cold and relentless.
WHEN I LEFT IRAN I took with me a decaying piece of green cloth with the flourishing inscriptions of Mozafaredin Shah, the Qajar king. It had belonged to my mother’s mother, a descendant of this Shah, and it would tear at the touch. More than the antique fabrics she had given me this decaying green cloth reminded me of the grandmother I had never seen. I also raided the old suitcase in the storage room and greedily took all the photographs I could get my hands on. When our family settled into our new life in the U.S. I got into the habit of taking them out and gazing at them for long stretches of time. I memorized each gesture, the kind of shoes my mother wore, the shape of her earrings, the way she had of leaning back in some photos.
—
A FEW YEARS AGO the colleague of Bijan’s who rented our apartment in Tehran told us on a visit to D.C. how my mother would invite him and his family to have coffee with her. “It was interesting,” he said. “Nezhat Khanoom kept telling us stories about her first husband and her family, about how kind her father was, preferring her to his other children. The strangest thing of all was that she kept saying, ‘Don’t believe anyone who tells you my stepmother mistreated me. My stepmother loved me like her own daughter, she treated me very well.’”
She was talking to a voice inside her own head. Now that Father had left her she needed to prop up her old mythology. She needed to know that she was wanted if not by the living, at least by the dead. I had wanted to know what made my mother stop dancing after that first dance with Saifi. I had my answer: she never let go of that first dance, just as she never let go of Saifi. What was it that Aunt Mina used to say: “Let go, Nezhat. Let it go.” The first step in dancing is letting go, and she never did.
I had to let go as well, let go of her, stop resisting her at every turn. I impulsively turned to tell Bijan’s colleague, as I had done under similar circumstances before, “No, it wasn’t the way she told you, she was fantasizing again.” But I said nothing. I began to think that perhaps at this stage the only way she could survive was to travel to that past which she loved, this time to rearrange and shape the world according to her liking. Let her live in this world where her father is kind to her, where her stepmother acts like a mother, where her sister is a friend, and where her husband forever dances with her. Round and round the room they go, in a house that no longer exists.
CHAPTER 30
the last dance
WHEN MY MOTHER DIED, on January 2, 2003, I was writing the acknowledgments to my last book. I had already dedicated it to my parents and to my own family, and in a conventional way I had dutifully recognized my mother’s encouragement and enthusiasm for my endeavors. Now I felt I had to change everything. How should I acknowledge my mother? If asked, what could I truthfully say about her?
For months before her death I had been mourning her as if she had already died. My friend Pari had called me from Tehran one day to say that she had been hospitalized. Pari’s tone on the ph
one had sounded deliberately casual. “Everything’s okay now,” she said. “Mrs. Nafisi is her old self again, inviting the nurses to have Turkish coffee and chocolates with her. Would you believe it,” she added, “we had to bring her coffeemaker and cups to the hospital, otherwise she threatened not to stay.”
I was not consoled. As soon as I put down the receiver I thought, “She’s dying.” For a few days I roamed the house crying, and looked at the photographs I had taken with me when we left Tehran. My family became alarmed. They tiptoed around me and made no reference to the solitary hours I spent sitting on my bed, propped up against pillows, photographs scattered all around me while, magnifying glass in hand, I gazed at the old black-and-white pictures of my mother.
This is how the past comes to us, not neatly but like a knife, always unexpected. And it comes in fragments. You try to put the pieces together, but you can only really understand it if you accept its irretrievable and fragmentary nature.
THAT DAY I MOURNED my mother’s death, although she was not yet dead, and every day I would call or be called from Tehran where I heard a report of her condition in the hospital. X-rays were taken, then she was transferred home. Someone was with her day and night. In her final days she was moved to the house of Tahmineh, our children’s former nanny, who was now a good friend. I spoke to all manner of different people, all of whom tried to reassure me. I made impossible suggestions about returning home, getting her a passport, and bringing her to D.C. When I spoke to her on the telephone sometimes she recognized me and at other times she did not know whom she was talking to.