Reading Lolita in Tehran_ A Memoir in Books - Azar Nafisi [181]
She was dressed in black, but not in a chador, and had curled a long black scarf around her neck, fastened with a silvery pin that seemed to quiver like a spider’s web against the black cloth. Her makeup was pale, and a few strands of dark brown hair showed from under the scarf. I kept remembering her other face, the austere one, so withdrawn that her lips seemed constantly pursed. I noticed now that she was not plain, as I had believed her to be.
She lingered by my table. I asked her, since she had lost her coveted place in the line, to sit down and have a coffee with me. She hesitated and then perched herself precariously on the edge of the chair. After college, she had become active in one of the militia organizations, but she’d left it after a short while. They didn’t care much for English literature, you know, she said with a smile. . . . And then she had been married for two years. She said she missed her college years. At the time, she had often wondered why she continued with English literature, why she didn’t find something useful—here she smiled—and now she was glad she had continued. She felt she had something others did not. Do you remember our discussions of Wuthering Heights?
Yes, I remembered them, and as we talked I remembered her more clearly too; images chased away her present unfamiliar face and replaced it with another, now also unfamiliar. I returned in my mind to that classroom, on the fourth floor, to the third—or was it the fourth?—row near the aisle. I can just about pick out two faces, almost identical in their bland disapproval, taking notes. They were there when I entered the class and would linger after I left. Most of the others looked on them with suspicion. They were quite active in the Muslim Students’ Association and did not mix well even with the more liberal elements in the Islamic Jihad, like Mr. Forsati.
I remember her. I remember that particular discussion of Wuthering Heights, because I remember how Miss Ruhi had unglued herself from her friend and followed me out of the classroom, pushing me almost into a corner of the hall. She leapt at me and spluttered out her indignation over the immorality of Catherine and Heathcliff. There was so much passion in her words—I had been taken aback. What was she talking about?
I was not about to put another novel on trial. I told her it was immoral to talk about a great novel in this manner, that characters were not vehicles for pedantic moral imperatives, that reading a novel was not an exercise in censure. She said something about other professors, their delicacy in censoring even the word wine out of the stories they taught, lest it offend the Islamic sensibilities of their students. Yes, I thought, and they have been stuck teaching The Pearl. I told her she could drop the class or take the matter to higher authorities, that this was the way it would be in my class and that I would continue to teach what I taught. I left her there in the darkened corner of that very long hallway. Though I saw her afterward, in my mind I left her there forever. And now she had excavated herself and polished up her image.
She had also objected to Daisy Miller: she found Daisy not only immoral but foolish and “unreasonable.” But then, despite our differences and her obvious disapproval of the novels I taught, she had enrolled in my class again the following year. There were rumors that she was having an affair with one of the big shots in the Muslim Students’ Association. Nassrin was always bringing these rumors to my attention, trying to prove how hypocritical “these people” were.
She said now that she missed college. It didn’t seem like much at the time, but later she noticed how much she missed it. She missed the films we watched together and the class discussions. Do you remember your Dear Jane