Reading Lolita in Tehran_ A Memoir in Books - Azar Nafisi [133]
When I arrived on campus, only a few people were inside the building. The silence was so deep that it drowned the mourning chants and marches from the loudspeakers. I climbed up to my office and picked up some books, and as I was coming down the hallway, I met Mr. Forsati and a friend of his from the Persian Department. They both looked solemn; their eyes were moist. I looked at them with an awkward sympathy, at a loss for the appropriate words. They had some leaflets with Khomeini’s picture that they were about to post on the walls. I took two and left.
Later, Khomeini’s book of Sufi poems, which he had dedicated to his daughter-in-law, would be published. In death there was a need to humanize him, an act he had opposed during his life. And there was, in fact, a human side to him, one that we seldom saw, in his regard for his beautiful young daughter-in-law, in whose notebooks he had written his last poems. In an introduction to this book of poems, she described how he had devoted time to talking to her and teaching her philosophy and mysticism and how she had given him the notebook in which he had composed the poems. It was reported that she had long blond hair and I imagined her walking with the old man in the garden, making circles around the flowers and bushes, and talking philosophy. Did she wear a scarf in his presence? Did he perhaps lean on her as they walked around and around those flower beds? I bought a copy of the slim volume and carried it with me to America, along with the leaflets, relics from a time whose reality seems so fragile at times that I need such hard evidence to prove its fugitive existence.
I am not good with dates and figures—I had to double-check the date of Khomeini’s death—but I remember feelings and images. Like bothersome dreams, images from those days mix with sounds in my memory as they did in reality: the announcer’s shrill and exaggerated voice, always on the verge of breaking, the mourning marches, the prayers, the messages from high-ranking officials and the chanting mourners, drowning all other sounds: “Today is the day of mourning! Khomeini, the breaker of idols, is with God.”
At dawn on Monday, Ayatollah Khomeini’s body was transferred from his residence in Jamaran, in Tehran, to a vast wasteland in the hills to the north, an area known as Mosalla, designated as a place of prayer. The body was set up on a temporary podium made of containers. Khomeini lay in an air-conditioned glass case covered in a white shroud, his feet pointing towards Mecca. His black turban, indicating his religious status as a direct descendant of the Prophet Muhammad, rested on his chest.
The events of that frenetic day come to me in fragments. The glass coffin I remember well, and the flowers arranged around the container were gaudy gladiolas. I also remember the swarms of mourners—it was reported that hundreds of thousands had started to pour into Tehran, a black-clad army waving black flags, the men tearing their shirts, beating their chests, the women in their black chadors wailing and moaning, their bodies writhing in ecstatic grief.
Now I remember the hoses: because of the heat and the size of the crowd, the fire department had brought out hoses, which they aimed at people, spraying them at intervals with water to cool them off, but the effect made the scene oddly sexual. As I re-enact it in my mind, I can hear the swish of water, each spray silhouetted against the sky. Every once in a while someone would faint and in the midst of that frenzy, with a shocking sense of order, as if it were all rehearsed, the mourners would lift the person over their heads and pass him along until he reached a point of safety.
When I heard that many had died that day and that tens of thousands