Reading Lolita in Tehran_ A Memoir in Books - Azar Nafisi [125]
We didn’t notice the door open, we heard a key in the lock. He had forgotten he’d left the door unlocked. He came in and his first words were, I’m so sorry. I was out with the Kid. He looked very pale and, if arched eyebrows could sag, I would say that his had sagged. Fatigue fought with regret, with his realization of the anxiety he had put us through. Well, the least you could have done is get yourself arrested or come in with your interrogators, I said feebly. You say you were out with the Kid?
The Kid was his name for a grown-up man, eighteen and a high school senior when he first met him in one of his classes that year of the revolution. My magician had a special affection for the Kid, who wanted to go to medical school but was fascinated by his talk of Aeschylus and Chaplin. He passed the entrance exam with a first, only to be denied a place because he admitted to being a Baha’i. During the Shah’s reign, the Baha’is were protected and flourished—one sin for which the Shah was never forgiven. After the revolution, their property was confiscated and their leaders murdered. Baha’is had no civic rights under the new Islamic constitution and were barred from schools, universities and workplaces.
The Kid could easily have taken an ad in the paper, like so many others did, denying that he belonged to the decadent and imperialist sect, disowning his parents—who, luckily, were out of harm’s way in Europe—and claiming to have been converted by some ayatollah. That’s all it would have taken and the doors would have been opened to him. Instead, he had admitted to being a Baha’i, although he was not even a practicing Baha’i and had no religious inclinations, denying himself in the process a brilliant career in medicine, for there was no doubt that he would have been a brilliant doctor.
Now he lived with his old grandmother and did odd jobs—he couldn’t hold any one of them for long. He was currently working at a pharmacy, the nearest he would ever come to being a doctor. I had never met him, but I’d heard of him, of his devastating good looks, his love for a Muslim girl, who would soon forsake him to marry a rich older man and would later try to make up with him as a married woman.
The Kid had called just before lunch. His grandmother, who had been ill for a long time, had died and he was calling from the hospital, half-choked. He kept repeating he didn’t know what to do. So my magician had left in a hurry. He thought he’d be back soon, long before my visit.
He’d found him standing in front of the hospital, beside a soft and boneless woman: the aunt. The Kid had almost cried, but crying in front of a godlike mentor was impossible, so he had been grown-up, his dry eyes worse than tears. There were no burial places for Baha’is; the regime had destroyed the Baha’i cemetery in the first years of the revolution, demolishing the graves with a bulldozer. There were rumors that the cemetery had been turned into a park or a playground. Later, I found out it had become a cultural center, called Bakhtaran. What were you supposed to do when your grandmother died if there was no cemetery?
I got up and started pacing around the room. You sit down, he said, pointing to a spot on the couch beside him. Sit here and be quiet. Don’t fidget—that’s a good girl. I said, Before you start up again, let me make a phone call. I rang up Bijan and told him to go to the party without me, I would join him later. When I returned, I heard Reza saying, It’s amazing, this obsession with taking possession not just of the living but also of the dead. At the start of the revolution,