Reading Lolita in Tehran_ A Memoir in Books - Azar Nafisi [24]
No fact is more touching than Lolita’s utter helplessness. The very first morning after their painful (to Lo, putting on a brave show) and ecstatic (to Humbert) sexual encounter, she demands some money to call her mother. “Why can’t I call my mother if I want to?” “Because,” Humbert answers, “your mother is dead.” That night at the hotel, Lo and Humbert have separate rooms, but “in the middle of the night she came sobbing into mine, and we made it up very gently. You see, she had absolutely nowhere else to go.”
And this of course was the whole crux of the matter: she had nowhere else to go, and for two years, in dingy motels and byways, in his home or even in school, he forces her to consent to him. He prevents her from mixing with children her own age, watches over her so she never has boyfriends, frightens her into secrecy, bribes her with money for acts of sex, which he revokes when he has had his due.
Before the reader makes his judgment about either Humbert or our own blind censor, I must remind him that at some point Humbert addresses his audience as “Reader! Bruder!”—a reminder of a well-known line by Baudelaire, the preface to his book of poems Les Fleurs du Mal:—“Hypocrite lecteur,—mon semblable,—mon frère!”
14
Reaching for a pastry, Mitra says that something has been bothering her for some time. Why is it that stories like Lolita and Madame Bovary—stories that are so sad, so tragic—make us happy? Is it not sinful to feel pleasure when reading about something so terrible? Would we feel this way if we were to read about it in the newspapers or if it happened to us? If we were to write about our lives here in the Islamic Republic of Iran, should we make our readers happy?
That night, like many other nights, I took the class to bed with me. I felt I had not adequately answered Mitra’s question, and was tempted to call my magician and talk to him about our discussion. It was one of those rare nights when I was kept awake not by my nightmares and anxieties but by something exciting and exhilarating. Most nights I lay awake waiting for some unexpected disaster to descend on our house or for a telephone call that would give us the bad news about a friend or a relative. I think I somehow felt that as long as I was conscious, nothing bad could happen, that bad things would come in the middle of my dreams.
I can trace my nightly tremors back to the time when, in my sophomore year, while studying at a horrible school in Switzerland, I was summoned in the middle of a history lesson with a stern American teacher to the principal’s office. There I was told that they had just heard on the radio that my father, the youngest mayor in Tehran’s history, had been jailed. Only three weeks earlier I had seen a large color photograph of him in Paris Match, standing by General de Gaulle. He was not with the Shah or any other dignitary—it was just Father and the General. Like the rest of my family, my father was a culture snob, who went into politics despising politicians and defying them almost at every turn. He was insolent to his superiors, at once popular and outspoken and on good terms with journalists. He wrote poetry and thought his real vocation should have been writing. I learned later that the General had taken a special liking to him after my father’s welcoming speech, which was delivered in French and filled with allusions to great French writers such as Chateaubriand and Victor Hugo. De Gaulle chose to reward him with the Legion of Honor. This did not go over well with the Iranian elite, who had resented my father’s insubordinate attitude