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When the Revolutionary Guards entered the coffee shop, they started going from table to table. A few young people had slipped away in time; others were not so lucky. A family of four, my magician, two middle-aged women and three young men were left behind. When my order was ready, I rose, tipped the waiter extravagantly, dropped my parcel of books, which broke open and spread all over the floor, waited for the waiter to fetch me a bag and left without looking at my magician.

In the taxi, I felt confused and angry and a little repentant. I am going to leave, I told myself. I can’t live like this anymore. Every time something like this happened, I, like many others, would think of leaving, of going to a place where everyday life was not such a battleground. Recently, the thought of leaving Iran had become more than a defense mechanism and incidents like this were slowly tipping the scales. Among friends and colleagues some had tried to adjust to the situation. We are not with the regime in our hearts and minds, one had said, but what can we do but comply? Should I go to jail and lose my job for the sake of two loose strands of hair? Once Mrs. Rezvan had said, By now we should be used to all of this; these young girls are a little spoiled—they expect too much. Look at Somalia or Afghanistan. Compared to them, we live like queens.

“I can’t get used to it,” Manna had said one day in class. And I couldn’t blame her. We were unhappy. We compared our situation to our own potentials, to what we could have had, and somehow there was little consolation in the fact that millions of people were unhappier than we were. Why should other people’s misery make us happier or more content?

When I arrived home, Bijan and the children were downstairs in my mother’s apartment. I put the napoleons I had brought for them in the refrigerator and left the carrot cake out to take to my mother. Then I went straight to the freezer, made myself a big bowl of ice cream, poured coffee and walnuts over it, and by the time the kids and Bijan had come upstairs, I was already in the bathroom throwing up. All evening and all night, I threw up. My magician called at some point. I am very sorry, he said. One feels so tainted. I’m sorry, too, I said back. We’re all sorry—don’t forget to date and autograph my book.

I could not keep anything in my stomach that night, not even water, and in the morning when I opened my eyes, the room started to rotate; tiny specks of light formed brightly spiked coronets, dancing in the dizzying air. I closed my eyes, opened them again and the deadly coronets reappeared. I held on to my stomach, went to the bathroom and vomited nothing but bile. All day I stayed in the luxury of my bed, my skin sensitive to the touch of the sheets.

17

You could not shock her more than she shocks me;

Beside her Joyce seems innocent as grass.

It makes me most uncomfortable to see

An English spinster of the middle class

Describe the amorous effect of “brass”,

Reveal so frankly and with such sobriety

The economic basis of society.

A girl is raped, carried in the trunk of a car and murdered. A young student is killed and has his ears cut off. There are discussions of prison camps, of death and destruction in Bellow, in Nabokov we have monsters like Humbert, who rape twelve-year-old girls, even in Flaubert there is so much hurt and betrayal—What about Austen? Manna had asked one day.

Indeed, what about Austen? Austen’s comedies and her generosity of spirit sometimes led my students to share the common belief that she was a prim spinster, at peace with the world and unaware of its brutality. I had to remind them of Auden’s “Letter to Lord Byron,” in which he asks Byron to tell Jane Austen “How much her novels are beloved down here.”

Austen’s heroines are unforgiving, after their own fashion. There is much betrayal in her novels, much greed and falsehood, so many disloyal friends, selfish mothers, tyrannical fathers, so much vanity, cruelty and hurt. Austen is generous towards her villains, but this