Reading Lolita in Tehran_ A Memoir in Books - Azar Nafisi [130]
After the bomb, many people ran towards the site, while dozens, mostly women and children, bleeding, shouting, crying and cursing, were running in the opposite direction. When the Revolutionary Guards and the ambulances arrived, the cries became louder. Timidly, the guards set out to inspect the area. In the yard of the house where the missile had landed, two children were lying senseless. The guards dragged out two dead women from under the rubble; one was very young, wearing a colorful housedress. The other was middle-aged and fat; her skirt clung to her thighs.
The next evening, we went over to console our friends. It was raining gently; the air scattered the smell of fresh earth and spring blossoms. A small crowd had gathered near the devastated houses. Our hostess led us inside and, gracious as ever, served us fragrant tea and small, delicious pastries. She had somehow managed to fill the kitchen with big bowls of lilacs.
The windows were shattered. Shards of glass had pierced their valuable paintings, and they had spent the previous night removing glass from various parts of the house. Smiling, she took us to the rooftop. Behind us rose my beloved mountains and in front of us were the three demolished houses. In the least damaged one, a man and a woman seemed to be searching for things to salvage from what must have been the second floor of the building. The house in the middle was now mostly rubble.
32
The war ended the way it had started, suddenly and quietly. At least that is how it seemed to us. The effects of the war would stay with us for a long time, perhaps forever. At first we felt bewildered, and wondered how to go back to what had passed for ordinary life before the war. The Islamic regime had reluctantly accepted peace because of its inability to ward off Iraq’s attacks. Constant defeats on the battleground had left many within the militia and Revolutionary Guards in a disposition of despair and disillusion. The mood among the regime’s adherents was low. Ayatollah Khomeini declared that peace, for him, had meant “drinking the cup of poison.” This mood was reflected in the universities, especially among the militia, the veterans of the war and their affiliates: for them, peace meant defeat.
The war with the external enemy was over, but the war with the domestic one was not. Shortly after the signing of the peace agreement, Ayatollah Khomeini set up a three-man commission in the Iranian jails to decide on the political prisoners’ loyalty to the regime. Several thousand, including some who were in jail for years waiting for a trial and some who had served their terms and were to be freed, were executed summarily and in secret. The victims of this mass execution were murdered twice, the second time by the silence and anonymity surrounding their executions, which robbed them of a meaningful and acknowledged death and thus, to paraphrase Hannah Arendt, set a seal on the fact that they had never really existed.
When classes resumed at last, we picked up almost exactly where we had left off. A few of the desks had been moved and there were several mysterious absences and curious new recruits, but otherwise there was almost no indication that the university had been closed for over two months. There was no air of jubilation, only a general sense of weary relief.
This was the beginning of disillusion and disenchantment. The war was lost, the economy was in shambles and there were few jobs to be had. Those who had