Reading Lolita in Tehran_ A Memoir in Books - Azar Nafisi [176]
This was too much, even for an experienced evader like myself. Taking a sip of water, as we know from novels, is a good way of gaining time. What do you mean no better than the others? Which others?
My uncle was cruder, she said slowly. You know, more like Mr. Nahvi. Ramin was different. He had read Derrida; he had watched Bergman and Kiarostami. No, he didn’t touch me; in fact he was very careful not to touch me. It was worse. I can’t explain, it was his eyes. His eyes? The way he looked at people, at other women. You could always tell, she said. She lowered her head miserably, her fingers touching one another. Ramin thought there was a difference between the girls that you were sexually attracted to and the girls you married—a girl who’d share your intellectual life with you, a girl you’d respect. Respect, she said again, with a great deal of anger. Respect was the word he used. He respected me. I was his Simone de Beauvoir, minus the sex part. And he was too much of a coward to just go and have sex with others. So he looked at them. It got to the point where he’d look at my older sister while he was talking to me. He just looked. He stared at women in the way . . . in the way my uncle touched me.
I felt sorry for Nassrin and, oddly, for Ramin too. I felt that he too needed help—he too needed to know more about himself, his needs and desires. Couldn’t she see that he was not like her uncle? Perhaps it was too much to ask of her to sympathize with Ramin. She was quite ruthless to him; she had convinced herself she couldn’t afford any feelings there. She had told him they were through, had made it clear that in her eyes, he was no better than the men he criticized and despised. At least you know where you stand with Ayatollah Khamenei, but these others, the ones with all sorts of claims and politically correct ideas—they were the worst. You want to save mankind, she had told him, you and your bloody Arendt. Why don’t you start by saving yourself from your sexual problems? Find a prostitute. Stop looking at my sister.
Whenever I think of Nassrin, I always begin and end with that day in my room when she told me she was leaving. It was evening. Outside, the sky was the color of dusk—not dark, not light, not even gray. Rain was coming down in heavy sheets, the drops hanging from the bare brown leaves of the pear tree.
She said, “I am going away.” She said she was twenty-seven now and didn’t know what it meant to live. She had always thought that life in jail would be the hardest, but it hadn’t been. She brushed a few strands of hair from her face. She said, There, in jail, I like the rest of them thought we would be killed and that would be the end, or we would live, we would live and get out, and begin all over. She said, There, in jail, we dreamed of just being outside, free, but when I came out, I discovered that I missed the sense of solidarity we had in jail, the sense of purpose, the way we tried to share memories and food. She said, More than anything else, I miss the hope. In jail, we had the hope that we might get out, go to college, have fun, go to movies. I am twenty-seven. I don’t know what it means to love. I don’t want to be secret and hidden forever. I want to know, to know who this Nassrin is. You’d call it the ordeal of freedom, I guess, she said, smiling.
21
Nassrin had asked me to tell the class about her departure. She couldn’t face them—it was too intolerable. Better just to leave without good-byes. How should I break the news to them? “Nassrin won’t be coming to class anymore.