Reading Lolita in Tehran_ A Memoir in Books - Azar Nafisi [128]
The place where the regime tried to keep its hold, ironically, was in the realm of our imagination. Television was saturated with documentaries on the two world wars. As the now almost empty streets of Tehran became livelier and more colorful, on television we saw Londoners searching for food in garbage cans or huddled together in underground shelters. We were told about how the people of Stalingrad and Leningrad had survived the harsh siege of their cities on a diet of their comrades’ flesh. This was not only to justify an increasingly unpopular and desperate war, whose end the regime had refused to contemplate until it had “liberated” the whole of Iraq. It was also aimed at intimidating and controlling a restive population, by holding up the prospect of even greater misfortune, and by reminding us that all had once not been so well on the Western front.
We had come to believe in rumors. A new one began to spread that spring: Iraq had in its possession new and far more powerful missiles that could land on any part of the city without any prior warning whatsoever. So we told ourselves to be content with the ordinary bombs, and prayed to be spared the missiles. Finally, in April, we were attacked by the dreaded missiles. Soon after that, the Iraqi chemical bombing of a Kurdish town inside Iraq heralded an even more horrifying prospect. The newest rumors were that Iraq planned to use chemical bombs against Tehran and other major cities. The regime used the news to create a massive panic. The daily papers came out with extras on how to combat a chemical attack; a new alarm signal—green this time—was introduced. A few green-signal practices, apart from causing general panic, also convinced us that nobody would escape the paralyzing effects of the new threat. A special “Combat the Chemical Bomb Day” was announced, during which the Revolutionary Guards paraded up and down the streets with their own gas masks and vehicles, bringing the traffic in much of the city to a standstill.
Soon after this, a missile hit a bakery in a crowded section of Tehran. People who were gathered at the scene began to see clouds of flour rising in the air. Someone shouted, “Chemical bomb!” In the ensuing scramble, many were injured as people and cars crashed into each other. And to be sure, the Revolutionary Guards, with their gas masks, arrived sometime later, to the rescue.
By now, most districts carried some inescapable sign of having been hit by missile attacks, which continued unabated. Rows of ordinary houses and shops gave way to broken windows; then a few houses where the damage was more extensive; then the ruins of a house or two, where only the barest structure could be discerned in the rubble. Going to visit a friend or a shop or supermarket, we drove past these sights as if moving along a symmetrical curve. We would begin our ride on the rising side of the curve of devastation until we reach the ruined peak, followed by a gradual return to familiar sites and, finally, our intended destination.
30
I had not seen Mina for a long time, and the festivities surrounding the Iranian New Year offered a good excuse to renew our relations. I remember the day I went to her house well, because it coincided with two important events: a former colleague was getting married, and Tehran was hit with seven missiles. The first explosion sounded as I came out of a flower shop. A worker from the shop, some passersby and I stood to watch the cloud rising on the western horizon of the city. It looked white and innocent enough, like a child who has just committed a murder.
Mina was happy to see me. In many ways, I was by then her only contact with academia. Her family had sold their mansion