Reading Lolita in Tehran_ A Memoir in Books - Azar Nafisi [44]
As we were leaving the customs area, a morose young man stopped us: he wanted to search me. We’ve already been searched, I reminded him. Not the carry-on bags, he said curtly. But why? This is my home, I wanted to say, as if this should have offered me protection against suspicion and scrutiny. He needed to search me for alcoholic beverages. I was taken to a corner. Bijan, my husband, observed me anxiously, not knowing whom to fear most, the morose guard or me. His face took on a smile that later became very familiar to me: complicit, reconciling, cynical. Do you argue with a mad dog? someone later asked me.
First they emptied my bag: lipstick, pens and pencils, my diary and glasses case. Then they attacked my backpack, from which they extracted my diploma, my marriage license, my books—Ada, Jews Without Money, The Great Gatsby . . . The guard picked them up disdainfully, as if handling someone else’s dirty laundry. But he did not confiscate them—not then. That came sometime later.
2
During my first years abroad—when I was in school in England and Switzerland, and later, when I lived in America, I attempted to shape other places according to my concept of Iran. I tried to Persianize the landscape and even transferred for a term to a small college in New Mexico, mainly because it reminded me of home. You see, Frank and Nancy, this little stream surrounded by trees, meandering its way through a parched land, is just like Iran. Just like Iran, just like home. What impressed me most about Tehran, I told whoever cared to listen, were the mountains and its dry yet generous climate, the trees and flowers that bloomed and thrived on its parched soil and seemed to suck the light out of the sun.
When my father was jailed, I went back home and was allowed to stay for a year. Later, I was insecure enough to marry on the spur of a moment, before my eighteenth birthday. I married a man whose most important credential was that he wasn’t like us—he offered a way of life which, in contrast to ours, seemed pragmatic and uncomplicated; and he was so sure of himself. He didn’t value books (“the problem with you and your family is that you live more in books than in reality”), he was insanely jealous—jealousy was part of the image he had of himself as a man in command of his destiny and property—he was success-oriented (“When I have my own office, my chair will be higher than those of the visitors, so they’ll always feel intimidated by my presence”) and he admired Frank Sinatra. The day I said yes, I knew I was going to divorce him. There were no limits to my self-destructive urges and the risks I was prepared to take with my own life.
I moved with him to Norman, Oklahoma, where he was getting his master’s in engineering at the University of Oklahoma, and in six months’ time I had reached the conclusion that I would divorce him as soon as my father was out of jail. That took another three years. He refused to divorce me (“A woman enters her husband’s home in her wedding gown and leaves it in her shroud”). He had underestimated me. He wanted his wife to dress smartly, do her nails, go to the hairdresser every week. I defied him with my long skirts and tattered jeans, wore my hair long and sat on the campus green with my American friends while his friends passing by threw sly glances in our direction.
My father was all in favor of divorce, and threatened to sue for alimony, a woman’s only protection under Islamic law. My husband finally consented when I agreed not to sue for alimony and let him have the money in our bank account, the car and the carpets. He returned home while I stayed on in Norman, the only foreign student in the English Department.