Reading Lolita in Tehran_ A Memoir in Books - Azar Nafisi [152]
Sanaz’s reaction on the whole had been calm and collected. She was almost relieved. In the back of her mind, she had always thought it couldn’t work, not in this way. But the hurt remained: why had he rejected her? Had she become too provincial for him in comparison with other girls, say, a fine English girl, not coy, not afraid of staying the night? Heartbreak is heartbreak, I reasoned. Even English or American girls are jilted by their lovers. We had read some fine stories—“The Jilting of Granny Weatherall,” remember? And then of course there was “A Rose for Miss Emily.” Sanaz later joked that she was thinking of making herself more memorable by imitating Miss Havisham, her heroine of the moment. Only she had not even bought a wedding dress, she added wistfully.
How had we digressed from Sanaz’s predicaments to life in the Islamic Republic? We had somehow managed to end our discussions with anecdotes about the regime: the number of clerics and high-ranking officials with green cards, the ruling elite’s inferiority complex, burning the American flag on the one hand and being obsequious to Westerners, especially American journalists, on the other. And then there was Faezeh Rafsanjani, the president’s daughter, with her blue jeans and Reeboks and her bleached hair peeking out from under her chador.
I had explained all this in detail to my magician, drawing for him vivid and heartrending pictures of Sanaz’s heartbreak and Azin’s grief. I had concluded, dramatically, that this regime had so penetrated our hearts and minds, insinuating itself into our homes, spying on us in our bedrooms, that it had come to shape us against our own will. How could we, under such scrutiny, separate our personal woes from the political ones? It felt good to know where to put the blame, one of the few compensations of victimhood—“and suffering is another bad habit,” as Bellow had said in Herzog.
There was a raising of the right eyebrow, followed by a quizzical ironic look. “Tell me,” he said sardonically. “How exactly does the jilting of a beautiful girl relate to the Islamic Republic? Do you mean to say that in other parts of the world women are not abused by their husbands, that they are not jilted?” I felt too petulant and perhaps too helpless to react reasonably, although I could see the logic of his argument; so I kept my silence.
“Because the regime won’t leave you alone, do you intend to conspire with it and give it complete control over your life?” he continued, never one not to drive his point home. “Of course you are right,” he said a little later. “This regime has managed to such an extent to colonize our every moment that we can no longer think of our lives as separate from its existence. It’s become so omnipotent that perhaps it isn’t so far-fetched to hold it responsible for the success or failure of our love affairs. Let me remind you of Mr. Bellow, your latest beau.” He paused on the word beau for a few seconds. “Remember that sentence you were quoting from him—one of the many we have been regaled with in the past two weeks—’first these people murdered you, then they forced you to brood over their crimes.’
“Are you listening?” he said, bringing his quizzical eyes closer to my face. “Where have you wandered off to?”
“Oh, I’m here all right,” I said. “I was just thinking.”
“Right,” he said, remembering his British training.
“Really, I was listening,” I said. “You’ve just clarified something for me, something I’d been thinking of a lot lately.” He waited for me to continue. “I was thinking about life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, about the fact that my girls are not happy. What I mean is that they feel doomed to be unhappy.”
“And how do you propose to go about making them understand that it is their right?” he asked. “Surely not by encouraging them to act like victims. They have to learn to fight for their happiness.