Reading Lolita in Tehran_ A Memoir in Books - Azar Nafisi [182]
She had tried to study Arabic and had translated some short stories and poems from English into Persian—for herself, she added as an afterthought. She used the Persian expression “for my own heart.” After a pause she added, And then I got married and now have a daughter. I wondered if she had married the man of our rumors; he was a man I had no fond memories of.
I asked her how old her daughter was. She said, Eleven months, and, after a pause, with a playful shadow of a smile: I named her after you. After me? I mean, she has a different name on her birth certificate—she is called Fahimeh, after a favorite aunt who died young—but I have a secret name for her. I call her Daisy. She said she had hesitated between Daisy and Lizzy. She had finally settled on Daisy. Lizzy was the one she had dreamed of, but marrying Mr. Darcy was too much wishful thinking. Why Daisy? Don’t you remember Daisy Miller? Haven’t you heard that if you give your child a name with a meaning she will become like her namesake? I want my daughter to be what I never was—like Daisy. You know, courageous.
Daisy was the character my female students most identified with. Some of them became obsessed. Later, in my workshop, they would go back to her time and again, speaking of her courage, something they felt they had lacked. Mahshid and Mitra spoke of her with regret in their writings; like Winterbourne, they felt they were bound to make a mistake about her. When she rose to say good-bye, I looked at her with some hesitation and said, May I ask you a rather personal question? You said you were married. And your husband? I married someone outside the university, she said. He is in computers. And open-minded, she added with a smile.
She had to go, she had an eleven-month-old daughter with a secret name waiting for her at home. You know, I didn’t think about it then, but we did have fun, she said. All the fuss we made over these writers, as if what they said was a matter of life and death to us—James and Brontë and Nabokov and Jane Austen.
24
Certain memories, like the imaginary balloons Yassi made with her delicate hands when she was happy, rise from somewhere in the depths of what we call memory. Like balloons, these memories are light and bright and irretrievable, despite the “air sadness” (Bellow’s term) surrounding them. During my last weeks in Iran, my girls and I met, in addition to Thursdays, on other days in different parts of town. We even went shopping together, as I had decided I had to buy presents for friends and family in America.
I went into my favorite café one afternoon, looking for my girls, but could not find them. I waylaid a waiter, an ancient one, his black trousers a little too short, carrying a tray of pastries and two steaming cups of coffee, and asked him if he had seen a handful of young girls come through. Are they unaccompanied? he asked. I looked at him in surprise. Why, yes. I suppose they are unaccompanied. Well then, they must be in the back room. He nodded to my left, where the main restaurant was. You know the rules, he said. Unaccompanied women cannot sit in this section.
My girls were sitting near the window. The only other table in this vast space that was occupied was a small one near the wall, where two women were drinking coffee. “No men, no privileges,” Manna exclaimed merrily. “This is one time when Nima might have been of some use.” Nassrin’s absence was more obvious in those last weeks when we were all together. I asked Mahshid for news of her. She had no news. And, she added with some bitterness, no news is good news, anyway.
Both Manna and Azin had brought their cameras—café memories, said