Reading Lolita in Tehran_ A Memoir in Books - Azar Nafisi [115]
Later, I told Nassrin that as I watched them mocking the dead student, a poem by Bertolt Brecht kept running through my mind. I don’t remember it well: “Indeed we live in dark ages, where to speak of trees is a sort of a crime,” it went. I wish I could remember the poem better, but there is a line towards the end, something like “Alas, we who wanted kindness, could not be kind ourselves.”
Nassrin was quiet for a moment after that. “You don’t know what we have suffered,” she said at last. “Last week they dropped a bomb near our house. It fell on an apartment building. The neighbors said that in one of the flats there was a birthday party and some twenty-odd children were killed.
“Immediately after the bombs fell and before the ambulances came, six or seven motorcycles arrived from out of nowhere and started circling the area. The riders all wore black, with red headbands across their foreheads. They started shouting slogans: Death to America! Death to Saddam! Long live Khomeini! People were very quiet. They just watched them with hatred. Some tried to go forward to help the wounded, but the thugs wouldn’t let anyone go near the place. They kept shouting, ‘War! War! Until victory!’ How do you think we all felt as we stood there watching them?”
This was a ritual: after the bombings, these emissaries of death would prevent any sign of mourning or protest. When two of my cousins were killed by the Islamic regime, some of my relatives who were now on the side of the government called my uncle to congratulate him on the death of his son and daughter-in-law.
We exchanged stories as we walked that day. Nassrin told me more about her time in jail. The whole thing was an accident. I remember how young she had been, still in high school. You’re worried about our brutal thoughts against “them,” she said, but you know most of the stories you hear about the jails are true. The worst was when they called people’s names in the middle of the night. We knew they had been picked for execution. They would say good-bye, and soon after that, we would hear the sound of bullets. We would know the number of people killed on any given night by counting the single bullets that inevitably came after the initial barrage. There was one girl there—her only sin had been her amazing beauty. They brought her in on some trumped-up immorality charge. They kept her for over a month and repeatedly raped her. They passed her from one guard to another. That story got around jail very fast, because the girl wasn’t even political; she wasn’t with the political prisoners. They married the virgins off to the guards, who would later execute them. The philosophy behind this act was that if they were killed as virgins, they would go to heaven. You talk of betrayals. Mostly they forced those who had “converted” to Islam to empty the last round into the heads of their comrades as tokens of their new loyalty to the regime. If I were not privileged, she said with rancor, if I were not blessed with a father who shared their faith, God knows where I would be now—in hell with all the other molested virgins or with those who put a gun to someone’s head to prove their loyalty to Islam.
23
On August 4, 1914, Henry James added an entry to his journal: “Everything blackened over for the time blighted by the hideous Public situation. This is (Monday) the August Bank Holiday but with horrible suspense and the worst possibilities in the air.” In his last two years of