Reading Lolita in Tehran_ A Memoir in Books - Azar Nafisi [30]
The time for break was over, but Nassrin’s story had drawn us in, and even Azin and Mahshid seemed to have come to a temporary truce. When Mahshid stretched her hand to pick a cream puff, Azin handed the dish over to her with a friendly smile, forcing a gracious thank-you.
“My mother remained faithful to my dad. She changed her whole life for him, and never really complained,” Nassrin continued. “His only concession was that he let her make us weird food, fancy French food my father would call it—all fancy food for him was French. Although we were brought up according to my dad’s dictates, my mother’s family and her past were always in the shadows, hinting at another way of life. It wasn’t just that my mother could never get along with my father’s family, who considered her uppity and an outsider. She’s very lonely, my mother is. Sometimes I think I wish she would commit adultery or something.”
Mahshid looked up at her, startled, and Nassrin got up and laughed. “Well,” she said, “or something.”
Nassrin’s story, and the confrontation between Azin and Mahshid, had changed our mood too much for us to return to our class discussion. We ended up making desultory conversation, mainly gossiping about our experiences at the university, until we broke up.
When the girls left that afternoon, they left behind the aura of their unsolved problems and dilemmas. I felt exhausted. I chose the only way I knew to cope with problems: I went to the refrigerator, scooped up the coffee ice cream, poured some cold coffee over it, looked for walnuts, discovered we had none left, went after almonds, crushed them with my teeth and sprinkled them over my concoction.
I knew that Azin’s outrageousness was partly defensive, that it was her way of overcoming Mahshid’s and Manna’s defenses. Mahshid thought Azin was dismissive of her traditional background, her thick, dark scarves, her old-maidenish ways; she didn’t know how effective her own contemptuous silences could be. Small and dainty, with her cameo brooches—she did actually wear cameo brooches—her small earrings, pale blue blouses buttoned up to the neck and her pale smiles, Mahshid was a formidable enemy. Did she and Manna know how their obstinate silences, their cold, immaculate disapproval, affected Azin, made her defenseless?
In one of their confrontations, during the break, I had heard Mahshid telling Azin, “Yes, you have your sexual experiences and your admirers. You are not an old maid like me. Yes, old maid—I don’t have a rich husband and I don’t drive a car, but still you have no right, no right to disrespect me.” When Azin complained, “But how? How was I disrespectful?”, Mahshid had turned around and left her there, with a smile like cold leftovers. No amount of talk and discussion on my part, both in class and with each of them in private, had helped matters between them. Their only concession had been to try and leave each other alone inside the class. Not very malleable, as Yassi might say.
16
Is this how it all started? Was it the day we were sitting at his dining room table, greedily biting into our forbidden ham-and-cheese sandwich and calling it a croque monsieur? At some point we must have caught the same expression of ravenous, unadulterated pleasure in each other’s eyes, because we started to laugh simultaneously. I raised my glass of water to him and said, Who would have thought that such a simple meal would appear to us like a kingly feast? and he said, We must thank the Islamic Republic for making us rediscover and even covet all these things we took for granted: one could write a paper on the pleasure of eating a ham sandwich. And I said, Oh, the things we have to be thankful for! And that memorable day was the beginning of our detailing our long list of debts to the Islamic Republic: