Reading Lolita in Tehran_ A Memoir in Books - Azar Nafisi [132]
It had become a habit with us, a permanent aspect of our relationship, to exchange stories. I told them that listening to their stories, and through living some of my own, I had a feeling that we were living a series of fairy tales in which all the good fairies had gone on strike, leaving us stranded in the middle of a forest not far from the wicked witch’s candy house. Sometimes we told these stories to one another to convince ourselves that they had really happened. Because only then did they become true.
In his lecture on Madame Bovary Nabokov claimed that all great novels were great fairy tales. So, Nima asked, do you mean to say that both our lives and our imaginative lives are fairy tales? I smiled. Indeed, it seemed to me that at times our lives were more fictional than fiction itself.
33
Less than a year after the peace agreement, on Saturday, June 3, 1989, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini died. His death was not officially announced until the next morning at seven A.M., although many Iranians, in fact the majority, already knew or suspected it by then, and thousands had gathered outside his house on the outskirts of Tehran waiting to hear the news. Before the announcement, the government had taken the precaution of shutting down the airports, the borders and the international telephone lines.
I remember the morning we heard the news of Khomeini’s death. Our whole family had gathered in the living room, lingering in that state of dull shock and bewilderment that death always brings with it. And this was no ordinary death. The radio announcer had broken down and sobbed. This would be the way with every public figure from then on, whether they appeared in mourning ceremonies or were interviewed individually; weeping seemed to be a requirement, as if there was no other way of expressing the magnitude of our grief.
It gave us all a feeling of unity and closeness to be sitting in the living room, with the inevitable smell of coffee and tea, speculating about that death: desired by many, feared by many, expected by many and, now that it had occurred, oddly anticlimactic to both friends and foes. Ever since Khomeini’s first heart attack and hospitalization in the early eighties, rumors of his impending death would crop up like persistent weeds, only to be rooted out again. Now the event itself was less stupendous than the anxious expectations its possibility had created. The overwhelming mourning ceremonies that swept the country could not make up for this sense of disappointment.
The event had brought together a strange mix of people in our living room. My father, who had been separated from my mother for a few years but was living temporarily, after an accident, in my brother’s vacant apartment, was present and so was my brother’s ex-mother-in-law, who had also taken up temporary lodging in his apartment. She and my mother did not get along and had not been on speaking terms for several days now. But on this day a provisional truce was called due to the extraordinary nature of the occasion.
My son was in my lap, sprawled in a posture that is peculiar to very young children. His utter comfort in my lap transferred his sense of ease to me as I unconsciously stroked his fine, still-curly hair and every once in a while touched his soft skin. As we grown-ups talked and speculated, my five-year-old daughter looked intently out of the window. Suddenly, she turned around and shouted, “Mommy, Mommy, he is not dead! Women are still wearing their scarves.” I always associate Khomeini’s death with Negar’s simple pronouncement—for she was right: the day women did not wear the scarf in public would be the real day of his death and the end of his revolution. Until then, we would continue to live with him.
The government announced five days of national mourning and forty days of official mourning. Classes were canceled and universities shut. But I felt