Reading Lolita in Tehran_ A Memoir in Books - Azar Nafisi [100]
When Mrs. Rezvan heard a report of our conversation she told me with a laugh that I was not the only one afraid of being “compromised.” The university officials were also worried about me. In asking me to join the faculty, they had taken certain risks.
The next thing I knew, I was preparing for my first class. In my first semester I was loaded with three undergraduate introductory courses, ranging from introduction to the novel to drama and criticism, and two graduate courses, one on eighteenth-century fiction and the other a survey of literary criticism. My undergraduate classes each had between thirty and forty students, and the graduate seminars were crowded, some of them with more than thirty students. When I complained about the workload, I was reminded of the fact that some of the faculty taught over twenty hours a week. For the administrators, the quality of the work was of little consequence. They called my expectations unrealistic and idealistic. I called their indifference criminal.
As it turned out, neither one of us kept our promises. I always wore my veil improperly, and that became their prime excuse for constantly harassing me. And they never gave up on trying to force me to teach and act more acceptably. But for a long time we lived under a sort of truce. Mrs. Rezvan became a buffer between the administration and me, trying to smooth things over like a mediator in a bad marriage. Like all mediators, she did not forget her own advantages—persuading people like me into more active participation gave her leverage with the university officials—and for as long as she remained at the university, for better and for worse, the marriage somehow lasted.
She would tell me in that ironic tone of hers how we should mount a united front to save literature from the clutches of ignoramuses in the faculty who had no knowledge of literature. Did you know that the woman who taught the twentieth-century novel before you assigned only Steinbeck’s The Pearl and one Persian novel? Or that a professor at Alzahrah University thought that Great Expectations was written by Joseph Conrad?
11
“Attention, attention! The siren you hear is the danger signal. Red alert! Leave at once and repair to your shelters!” I wonder at what point in my life, and after how many years, the echo of the red siren—like a screeching violin that plays mercilessly all over one’s body—would cease in my mind. I cannot separate the eight years of war from that shrill voice that several times a day, at the most unexpected hours, would intrude into our lives. Three levels of danger had been established, but I never managed to differentiate between the red (danger), yellow (possibility of danger) and white (danger has stopped) sirens. Somehow, in the sound of the white siren, menace still lurked. Usually the red siren sounded too late, after the bomb had already been dropped, and in any case, even at the university we had no real shelters to repair to.
The air raids over Tehran were memorable for so many different reasons, not least for the sudden friendships and intimacies they inspired. Acquaintances who came to dinner would have no choice but to stay the night, sometimes over a dozen of them, and by morning it was as if they had known you all their lives. And those sleepless nights! In our house I was the one who slept least. I wanted to sleep close to my children so that if anything happened, it would happen to all of us. My husband slept or tried to sleep through the raids, but I would take two pillows, a few candles and my book to a small hall that separated the children’s bedroom from ours and station myself by their doorway. I seemed to think that somehow, by keeping awake, I might throw a jinx and divert the bomb from harming our house.
One night I awoke suddenly at three or four in the morning and discovered that the house was in complete darkness. I knew at once there had been another blackout, because the small light in