Reading Lolita in Tehran_ A Memoir in Books - Azar Nafisi [49]
I met many people that day who appeared and disappeared like characters in a cartoon. Was it there that I saw Farideh? She belonged to an extremely radical leftist group—my brother, who knew some of her comrades, had introduced her to me, thinking she could help me settle in. I saw her for a vague second, busy as always, on the verge of attacking someone or something: I saw her and lost her.
I stood in the middle of the whirlpool, struggling to find a familiar face. Always in these demonstrations I would lose sight of those who’d come with me. Now I had lost my husband, and for a while I kept looking for him. The crowd pushed towards me. Voices appeared to be echoing out of different loudspeakers. Posters of Taleghani had mushroomed everywhere: on the walls, on the doors and windows of the bookshops, even on trees. The wide street in front of the university contracted and expanded to accommodate our movements and for a long time I moved senselessly, swaying to the beat of the crowd. Then I found myself beating my fists against a tree and crying, crying, as if the person closest to me had died and I was now all alone in the whole wide world.
5
Before the new term began in September 1979, I spent most of my time hunting for the books on my syllabus. In one bookstore, as I was rummaging through a few copies of The Great Gatsby and A Farewell to Arms, the owner approached me. “If you’re interested in those, you’d better buy them now,” he said, shaking his head sadly. I looked at him sympathetically and said smugly, “There’s too much demand for them. They can’t do anything about that—can they?”
He was right. In a few months’ time, Fitzgerald and Hemingway were very difficult to find. The government could not remove all of the books from the stores, but gradually it closed down some of the most important foreign-language bookstores and blocked the distribution of foreign books in Iran.
The night before my first class I was very nervous, like a child on her first day of school. I had chosen my clothes with unusual care, and also went over my meager stock of books. I had left most of them in the U.S. with my sister-in-law, along with an antique mirror: my father’s present. I thought I would bring them back later, not knowing that I would not return for another eleven years, by which time my sister-in-law had given away most of my books.
That first day, I went to the university armed with my trusty Gatsby. It was showing signs of wear: the dearer a book was to my heart, the more battered and bruised it became. Huckleberry Finn was still available in bookstores, and I bought a new copy in anticipation. After some hesitation, I also picked up Ada, which wasn’t on the syllabus, and threw it in as a security blanket.
The university was built during the reign of Reza Shah, in the thirties. The main buildings on campus had very high ceilings, propped up by thick cement columns. They were always a little cold in winter and dank in summer. Memory has given them gargantuan proportions they probably didn’t have in reality, but those expansive buildings of the thirties had a strange feel about them. They were made for crowds: you never felt quite at home.
On my way to the English Department, I absentmindedly registered the different stands set out in the big hall at the foot of the over-wide staircase. There were long tables—more than ten of them—filled with literature belonging to various revolutionary groups. Students were standing in clusters, talking and sometimes quarreling, ready to defend their territory at a moment’s notice. There were no visible enemies, but a sense of menace lingered over the room.
Those were crucial days in Iranian history. A battle was being fought on all levels over the shape of the constitution and the soul of the new regime. The majority of people, among them important clerics, were in favor of a secular constitution. Powerful