Reading Lolita in Tehran_ A Memoir in Books - Azar Nafisi [111]
Mina’s mother, a dignified woman in her late sixties, served us tea on a silver tray, with dainty glass teacups in silver filigree containers. Her mother was a wonderful cook, so going to her house was always a feast. But it was a mournful feast, because no amount of good food could bring cheer to that deserted mansion. Our hostesses’ gracious hospitality, their efforts to make us feel welcomed, only made their well-concealed loss more emphatic.
Realism in fiction was Mina’s obsession, and James her passion. What she knew, she knew thoroughly. We complemented each other, because my knowledge was impulsive and untidy, and hers meticulous and absolute. We could talk for hours on end. Before Farideh went into hiding and then joined her revolutionary group, escaping to Kurdistan and then to Sweden, the three of us used to talk about fiction and politics for hours, sometimes deep into the night.
Farideh and Mina were polar opposites when it came to politics—one was a dedicated Marxist and the other a determined monarchist. What they shared was their unconditional hatred for the present regime. When I think of how their talents were wasted, my resentment grows for a system that either physically eliminated the brightest and most dedicated or forced them to lay waste to the best in themselves, transforming them into ardent revolutionaries, like Farideh, or hermits, like Mina and my magician. They withdrew and simmered in their dashed dreams. For what good could Mina be without her James?
19
The air attacks on Tehran were resumed after a long period of calm in the late winter and early spring of 1988. I cannot think of those months and of the 168 missile attacks on Tehran without thinking of the spring, of its peculiar gentleness. It was a Saturday when Iraq hit the Tehran oil refinery. The news triggered the old fears and anxieties that had been lurking for over a year, since the last bombs had hit the city. The Iranian government responded with an attack on Baghdad, and on Monday, Iraq started its first round of missile attacks on Tehran. The intensity of what followed transformed that event into a symbol of all that I had experienced over the past nine years, like a perfect poem.
Soon after the first attacks, we decided to stick adhesive tape to our windows. We moved the children first to our own room, covering the windows in addition with thick blankets and shawls, and then, later, into the tiny windowless hall outside our bedrooms, the scene of my sleepless assignations with James and Nabokov. A few times we thought seriously of leaving Tehran, and once, in a frenzy, cleaned a small room that was later turned into my office near the garage, fortifying its windows; then we moved back up to sleep in our own bedrooms. I, who had been most frightened during the first round of attacks on Tehran, now seemed the calmest, as if to compensate for my former behavior.
On the first night of the missile attacks we watched with a few friends a German TV documentary commemorating the life of the late exiled Russian director Andrei Tarkovsky. In an attempt to appease the intellectuals, the annual Fajr (formerly Tehran) Film Festival presented a special screening of Tarkovsky’s films. Although the films were censored and shown in the original Russian with no subtitles, there were lines outside the cinema hours before the box office opened. Tickets were sold on the black market at many times the actual price, and fights broke out over admittance, especially among those who had traveled from the provinces for the occasion.
Mr. Forsati came to see me after one class to inform me that he had obtained two extra tickets to a showing of Tarkovsky’s The Sacrifice, a film I had expressed some desire to see. Since Mr. Forsati was the head of Islamic Jihad,