Reading Lolita in Tehran_ A Memoir in Books - Azar Nafisi [119]
I did think of you and of our classes, she said after he had left. After the initial interrogations, she had been assigned to a cell with fifteen others. There, she had met another student of mine, Razieh. Balancing the small cup of tea I had offered her in one hand, without letting her chador slip, she said, “Razieh told me about your classes on Hemingway and James at Alzahrah, and I told her about the Gatsby trial. We laughed a lot. You know, she was executed. I was lucky, she said. Less than a year after she was released from prison, Mahtab had married and had a baby; she was expecting another one. Three months pregnant. It doesn’t show from under the chador, she said, pointing shyly to her stomach.
There was nothing I could ask her about my murdered student. I did not want to know how they had lived in their cell, what other memories they had shared. I felt that if she told me, I might do something foolish and would not make it to my afternoon class. I asked her about her baby’s age but not about her husband. Could I ask her my favorite question: Did you two fall in love? I had heard about so many girls who had married soon after their release from jail, married because they could appease the suspicions of their jailers, who somehow thought of marriage as an antidote to political activities, or to prove to their parents that they were “good” girls now, or simply because there was nothing else for them to do.
“You know, I always thought Gatsby was so beautiful,” Mahtab told me as she was getting up to go. “And the scene you read to us about that day when Daisy meets Gatsby again for the first time in five years, her face wet under the rain. And the other scene, when she tells him he looks so cool and she means to say that she loves him. We had fun at Gatsby’s trial, you know?” Yes, I knew. The fact that they remembered Gatsby and even remembered having fun with him would have been gratifying under different circumstances, but then, I was thinking among other thoughts, how the joy of reading Gatsby would now be forever marred by being linked in my memory with Mahtab’s time in jail and Razieh’s execution.
I felt I had to open the window, to let the air in after they were gone. From my office I could see the yard, where snow almost caressed the trees. There was a heaviness Mahtab had left behind, a tangible atmosphere of pain and resignation. Was she the lucky one, the one who was released and got married to some guy, the one who reported to the prison guards every month, the one with a hometown in ruins and a two-year-old child? She was lucky and Razieh was dead. Nassrin had also called herself lucky; my students had developed a strange concept of fortune.
The other quotation from James on the pink index card records his reaction to the death of Rupert Brooke, the beautiful young English poet who died of blood poisoning during the war. “I confess that I have no philosophy, nor piety, nor patience, no art of reflection,” he wrote, “no theory of compensation to meet things so hideous, so cruel, and so mad, they are just unspeakably horrible and irremediable to me and I stare at them with angry and almost blighted eyes.”
Next to the last words, I added at some later point in pencil: Razieh.
25
What strange places my students met, from what dark corners did they bring me news! I could not travel, I cannot travel even now to those places, no matter how many times I hear about them. Yet there must have been something cheerful about Razieh and Mahtab in their cell, not knowing if they will live or die, talking about James and Fitzgerald. Perhaps cheerful