Reading Lolita in Tehran_ A Memoir in Books - Azar Nafisi [35]
For as long as I can remember, she would ask perfect strangers to our house for coffee. One day we had to turn away an alarmingly athletic man in his late thirties, who had by mistake rung our bell asking for the lady who had told him to drop by and have coffee with her when he was in the neighborhood. The guards at the hospital opposite our house were her regular “customers.” At first they would stand reverently, coffee cups in hands; later, at her insistence, they sat down uneasily on the edge of chairs as they related all the gossip about the neighbors and the goings-on at the hospital. This was how we later learned the details of what happened that day.
Yassi and I were waiting for our coffee, basking in the luxury of no special urgency, when the bell rang, sounding louder than usual because of the quiet of the street. As the bell rings one more time in my memory, I hear Tahereh Khanoom dragging her slippers along the floor, making her way to the front door of the apartment. I hear her footsteps fading as she slowly goes down the stairs to the street door. We hear a few words exchanged between her and a man.
She returned rather startled. There were two plainclothes officers at the door, she explained, men from the Revolutionary Committee. They wanted to raid the apartment of Mr. Colonel’s tenant. Mr. Colonel was a new neighbor, whom my mother consistently ignored because of his newly rich ways and manners. He had destroyed a beautiful vacant garden next to our place and built an ugly, gray-stone three-story apartment. He lived on the second floor, his daughter was on the third and he rented out the first. Tahereh Khanoom explained that “they” wanted to arrest Mr. Colonel’s tenant, but they couldn’t gain admittance to the house. So they wanted to go into our yard and climb over our walls to get into the neighbor’s house. We obviously, or perhaps not so obviously, wished to deny them this permission. As Tahereh Khanoom wisely put it, What good is a Committee official who doesn’t have a search warrant and can only go into people’s houses through their neighbors’ yards? They needed no search warrant when it came to barging into decent people’s houses at all times, so why were they so helpless when it came to this one particular crook? We had our differences with our neighbor, but we were not about to hand him over to the Committee.
As Tahereh Khanoom was relating all of this, there was a commotion in the street below. We heard the sounds of men talking hurriedly, feet running, a car engine starting. We hardly had time to wrap up our criticism of the Committee when there was another ring at the door. This time, it was more persistent. A few minutes later Tahereh Khanoom returned, accompanied by two young men in the khaki outfits that were then fashionable with the Revolutionary Guards. They explained that they no longer needed our garden wall to jump over to the neighbor’s house: the culprit had now jumped into our garden and was armed and hiding there. They wanted to use our balcony, and the balcony of the third floor, to keep him busy by shooting at him while their colleagues sought to catch him. Our permission was not required, but they were considerate of “other people’s wives and mothers,” so they asked for it anyway. They let us know, by implication and gesture, that their prey was dangerous: not only was he an armed drug pusher, but he had other crimes to his name.
Three others, who proceeded to march upstairs, now accompanied our two intruders. What went through my mind then was, I