Reading Lolita in Tehran_ A Memoir in Books - Azar Nafisi [118]
When, in September 1914, the Germans attacked and destroyed the Rheims cathedral in France, James wrote: “But no words fill the abyss of it—nor touch it, nor relieve one’s heart, nor light by a spark the blackness; the ache of one’s heart and the anguish of one’s execution aren’t mitigated by a shade, even as one brands it as the most hideous crime ever perpetuated against the mind of man.”
All his life had been a struggle for power—not political power, which he disdained, but the power of culture. For him culture and civilization were everything. He had said that the greatest freedom of man was his “independence of thought,” which enabled the artist to enjoy the “aggression of infinite modes of being.” Yet in the face of so much carnage and destruction he felt helpless and impotent. His affinity with England, and with Europe in general, came from that sense of civilization, a tradition of culture and humaneness. But now he had also seen Europe’s depravity, its fatigue with its own past, its predatory, cynical nature. It is no wonder he used all his powers, not least the power of words, to help those he believed to be in the right. He was not insensitive to their curative potential, and wrote to a friend, Lucy Clifford, “We must for dear life make our own counter-realities.”
24
A few days after my talk with Nassrin, I found two girls standing outside my office just before class. One was Nassrin, with her usual pale smile. The other was dressed in a black chador that covered her from head to foot. After staring at this apparition for a while, I suddenly recognized my old student Mahtab.
For a second all three of us stood there, frozen in place. Nassrin seemed almost detached; detachment had become her defense against unpleasant memories and uncontrollable realities. It took me a few moments to digest this new Mahtab, to make a shift in my mind and transform that Mahtab, the leftist student in her trademark khaki pants whom I had last seen on the grounds of a hospital hunting for her murdered comrades, to this Mahtab, standing with a rueful smile and begging recognition outside my office. I made an uncertain gesture as if to embrace her, but then checked myself and asked her how she had been all these years. Only then did I remember to invite them into my office. I had very little time before my next class.
Mahtab had kept in touch with Nassrin, and when she’d heard I was teaching again at Allameh, she’d plucked up the courage to come and visit. Could she attend my class? And then perhaps after class, if I had time, if it wasn’t a problem, she could tell me a little about herself. Of course, I said, she should absolutely come to class.
During the two hours of my lecture on James’s Washington Square, my eyes often strayed to Mahtab in her black chador, sitting very straight, listening with a sort of alert nervousness I had never seen in her before. After class she followed me to my office, with Nassrin trailing in after her. I asked them to sit down and offered them some tea, which they both refused. Ignoring their refusal, I left to order tea and came back and closed the door, to ensure our privacy. Mahtab sat on the edge of a chair, while Nassrin stood beside her staring at the opposite wall. I told Nassrin to take a seat because she was making me nervous and turned to Mahtab and asked her, in as casual a tone as I could muster, what she had been doing all these years.
She looked at me at first with docile resignation, as if she had not understood my question. Then she fiddled with her fingers, half hidden under the folds of her chador, and said, Well, I have been