Reading Lolita in Tehran_ A Memoir in Books - Azar Nafisi [147]
“I’m thinking of going,” Azin said suddenly. “If Sanaz had an inkling of sense, she’d just go, or marry the guy, go there and then divorce him. What?” she asked defensively, confronted by the others’ startled look, nervously fishing a cigarette out of her bag. “What did I say now?”
She did not light the cigarette—she never did during class sessions—but she held it between her long white fingers, with their tomato-red nails. Suddenly she noticed our silence and, like a child caught stealing a chocolate, she looked at her unlit cigarette and crushed it in the ashtray with a disarming smile.
How do you get away with those nails? I asked her, to change the subject. I wear gloves, she said. Even in summer I wear dark gloves. Polished nails, like makeup, were a punishable offense, resulting in flogging, fines and up to one year imprisonment. Of course they know the trick, she said, and if they really want to bug you, they’ll tell you to take off the gloves. She babbled on, talking about gloves and fingernails, and then she came to a sudden halt. It makes me happy, she said in a thin voice that did not suggest any trace of happiness. It’s so red it takes my mind off things.
“Off what things?” Nassrin asked, gently for once.
“Oh, things. You know.” And then she burst into tears. We were startled into silence. Manna grudgingly, with an obvious attempt to resist Azin’s tears, passed her the box of tissues. Mahshid recoiled into her shell, and Nassrin leaned forward, her hands locked together in a ferocious grip. Yassi, who sat closest to Azin, leaned towards her, gently pressing her right shoulder.
5
I will never now discover the real wounds Azin hid, and the unreal ones she revealed. I look for some answer in the photograph we took on my last night in Tehran, my eyes diverted by a glint in Azin’s round, gold earrings. Photographs can be deceptive, unless, like my magician, one has the gift of discovering something from the curve of a person’s nose. I do not possess such gifts.
As I look at that photograph, none of Azin’s troubles can be imagined. She looks carefree; her blond hair suits her pale skin and dark-honey eyes. She loved to seem outrageous, and the fact that she had been married three times supported her claims to this title. She had married her first husband before she’d turned eighteen and had divorced him within a year. She never explained what had happened with her second husband. Perhaps she married so often because marriage was easier in Iran than having a boyfriend.
Her husband, she told us, seemed to be frustrated by all that interested her. He was jealous of her books, her computer and her Thursday mornings. With a fixed smile, she related how he felt humiliated by what she called her “independent spirit”; he beat her up and then tried to placate her by swearing his undying love. I was almost physically hurt by her account. More than the beatings, it was his taunts that disturbed me—how he shouted that no one would marry her, that she was “used,” like a secondhand car, that no man would want to have a secondhand wife. He would tell her that he could marry an eighteen-year-old girl; he could marry a fresh, firsthand eighteen-year-old any old time. He would tell her all this and yet he could not leave her. I remember not so much her words but how, as she continued her terrible story, her smile was belied by the shine of tears. After she told us her story, she said, And now you know why I am so often late for class. Later, Manna would say, without much sympathy, Trust Azin to try to get something cheap even out of her own troubles.
Soon we were all involved in Azin’s marital problems. First I recounted them to Bijan after dinner, and then I talked to my best friend, a great lawyer with a weakness for lost causes, and convinced her to accept her case.