Reading Lolita in Tehran_ A Memoir in Books - Azar Nafisi [25]
One small compensation for the bad news was that I did not have to continue my Swiss education. That Christmas I went back home with a special escort to take me to the airport. The reality of my father’s imprisonment was established for me when I landed at the Tehran airport and did not find him waiting for me there. For the four years that they kept him in his “temporary” jail—in the jail’s library, adjacent to the morgue—we were told alternately that he was going to be killed or that he would be set free almost at once. He was eventually exonerated of all charges except one, insubordination. This I always remember—insubordination: it became a way of life for me after that. Much later, when I read a sentence by Nabokov—“curiosity is insubordination in its purest form”—the verdict against my father came to my mind.
I never recovered from the shock of that moment when I was pulled out of the security of Mr. Holmes’s—I think that was his name—stern classroom and told that my father, the mayor, was now in jail. Later, the Islamic Revolution took away whatever sense of security I had managed to re-establish after my father’s release from jail.
Several months into the class, my girls and I discovered that almost every one of us had had at least one nightmare in some form or another in which we either had forgotten to wear our veil or had not worn it, and always in these dreams the dreamer was running, running away. In one, perhaps my own, the dreamer wanted to run but she couldn’t: she was rooted to the ground, right outside her front door. She could not turn around, open the door and hide inside. The only one among us who claimed she had never experienced such fear was Nassrin. “I was always afraid of having to lie. You know what they say: to thine own self be true and all that. I believed in that sort of thing,” she said with a shrug. “But I have improved,” she added as an afterthought.
Later, Nima told us that the son of one of his friends, a ten-year-old, had awakened his parents in horror telling them he had been having an “illegal dream.” He had been dreaming that he was at the seaside with some men and women who were kissing, and he did not know what to do. He kept repeating to his parents that he was having illegal dreams.
In Invitation to a Beheading, on the wall of Cincinnatus C.’s jail, which is decorated like a third-rate hotel, there are certain instructions for the prisoners, such as: “A prisoner’s meekness is a prison’s pride.” Rule number six, one that lies at the heart of the novel, is: “It is desirable that the inmate should not have dreams at all, or if he does, should immediately himself suppress nocturnal dreams whose context might be incompatible with the condition and status of the prisoner, such as: resplendent landscapes, outings with friends, family dinners, as well as sexual intercourse with persons who in real life and in the waking state would not suffer said individual to come near, which individual will therefore be considered by the law to be guilty of rape.”
In the daytime it was better. I felt brave. I answered the Revolutionary Guards, I argued with them, I was not afraid of following them to the Revolutionary Committees. I did not have time to think about all the dead relatives and friends, about our own narrow and lucky escapes. I paid for it at night, always at night, when I returned. What will happen now? Who will be killed? When will they come? I had internalized the fear, so that I did not think of it always consciously, but I had insomnia; I roamed the house and I read and fell asleep with my glasses on, often holding on to my book. With fear come the lies and the justifications that, no matter how convincing, lower our self-esteem, as Nassrin had painfully reminded us.
Certain things saved me: my family and a small group of friends, the ideas, the thoughts, the books that I discussed with my underground man when we took our afternoon walks. He worried constantly—if we were stopped, what excuse could we give? We were