Reading Lolita in Tehran_ A Memoir in Books - Azar Nafisi [162]
“About your being ten years old?” I asked, in an awkward attempt to lighten her mood.
“No, no, about”—she put her spoon down—“about how all of us—girls like me, who have read their Austen and Nabokov and all that, who talk about Derrida and Barthes and the world situation—how we know nothing, nothing about the relation between a man and a woman, about what it means to go out with a man. My twelve-year-old niece probably knows all about this, has probably gone out with more boys than I have.” She spoke furiously, locking and unlocking her fingers.
In a sense she was right, and the fact that she was prepared to talk about it made me feel tender and protective towards her. Nassrin, I told her, none of us are as sophisticated in these matters as you think. You know I always feel, with every new person, as if I am starting anew. These things are instinctive. What you need to learn is to lay aside your inhibitions, to go back to your childhood when you played marbles or whatever with boys and never thought anything of it.
Nassrin did not respond. She was playing with the petals of the wax flowers, caressing their slippery surface.
“You know,” I said, “with my first husband . . . Yes, I was married before Bijan, when I was barely eighteen. You know why he married me? He told me he liked my innocence—I didn’t know what a French kiss was. I was born and bred in liberal times, I grew up in a liberal family—my parents sent me abroad when I was barely thirteen—and yet there you are: I chose to marry a man I despised deep down, someone who wanted a chaste and virginal wife and, I am sorry to say, chose me. He had been out with many girls, and when I went to Oklahoma with him, where he went to college, his friends were surprised, because right up to the day he returned to Iran for the summer, he had been living with an American girl he had introduced to everyone as his wife. So don’t feel too bad. These things are complicated.
“Are you happy?” I asked her anxiously. There was a long pause during which I picked up the vase and pushed it to the side, next to the wall.
“I don’t know,” she said. “No one ever taught me how to be happy. We’ve been taught that pleasure is the great sin, that sex is for procreation and so on and on and forth. I feel guilty, but I shouldn’t—not because I am interested in a man. In a man,” she repeated. “At my age! The fact is I don’t know what I want, and I don’t know if I am doing the right thing. I’ve always been told what is right—and suddenly I don’t know anymore. I know what I don’t want, but I don’t know what I want,” she said, looking down at the ice cream she had hardly touched.
“Well, you’re not going to get an answer from me,” I said. I leaned over, wanting to touch her hand, to provide her with some consolation. Only I didn’t touch her. I didn’t dare; she seemed so distant and withdrawn. “I’ll be here for you when you need me, but if you’re asking for my advice, I can’t give it—you’ll have to find out for yourself.” Enjoy yourself, I pleaded lamely. How could one be in love and deny oneself a little joy?
Nassrin’s young man was called Ramin. I had seen him on several occasions, the first time at a gathering for my book on Nabokov. He had a master’s degree in philosophy and taught part-time. Nassrin had met him at a conference where he was presenting a paper and they had started talking afterward. Was it love at first sight? I wanted to ask her. How long had it taken them to confess their feelings? Did they ever kiss? These were some of the details I badly wanted to know, but of course I did not ask.
As we were leaving the coffee shop, Nassrin said hesitantly, Would you go to a concert with us? A concert? Some of Ramin’s students are playing. We could get you and your family some tickets . . .
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I should put the word concert in quotation marks, because such cultural affairs were parodies of the real thing, performed