Reading Lolita in Tehran_ A Memoir in Books - Azar Nafisi [53]
Mr. Bahri wrote one of the best student papers I had ever read on The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, and ever since that day, for as long as I stayed at the University of Tehran, he somehow appeared beside or behind me all through the agitated meetings. He literally became my shadow, casting the weight of his lopsided silence upon me.
He wanted to inform me that he liked my classes and that “they” approved of my teaching methods. When I had assigned too much reading, the students at first reacted by considering a boycott of the class, but on later consideration they voted against it. He had come to ask or instruct me to add more revolutionary material, to teach more revolutionary writers. A stimulating discussion on the implications of the words literature, radical, bourgeois and revolutionary ensued, which proceeded, as I recall, with great emotion and intensity, though little substantial progress was made on the simple matter of definitions. All through this rather heated conversation, we were both standing at the end of a long table surrounded by empty chairs.
At the end of our talk, I was so excited I reached out to him in a gesture of goodwill and friendship. He silently, deliberately, withdrew both his hands behind his back, as if to remove them from even the possibility of a handshake. I was too bewildered, too much of a stranger to the newness of revolutionary ways, to take this gesture in stride. I recounted it later to a colleague, who, with a mocking smile, reminded me that no Muslim man would or should touch a namahram woman—a woman other than his wife, mother or sister. He turned to me in disbelief and said, “You really did not know that?”
My experiences, especially my teaching experiences, in Iran have been framed by the feel and touch of that aborted handshake, as much as by that first approach and the glow of our naÏve, excited conversation. The image of my student’s oblique smile has remained, brilliant yet opaque, while the room, the walls, the chairs and the long conference table have been covered over by layers and layers of what usually in works of fiction is called dust.
7
The first few weeks of classes were spent in a frenzy of meetings. We had department meetings and faculty meetings and meetings with students; we went to meetings in support of women, of workers, of militant Kurdish or Turkmen minorities. In those days I formed alliances and friendships with the head of the department, my brilliant and radical colleague Farideh and others from the departments of psychology, German and linguistics. We would all go to our favorite restaurant near the university for lunch and exchange the latest news and jokes. Already our carefree mood seemed a little out of place, but we had not yet given up hope.
During these luncheons we spent a great deal of time joking with or about one of our colleagues, who was worried he’d lose his job: the Muslim students had threatened to expel him for his use of “obscenities” in the classroom. The truth was that this man loved to worry about himself. He had just divorced his wife and had to maintain her, plus his home and swimming pool. We heard endlessly about this swimming pool. Somehow, inappropriately, he kept comparing himself to Gatsby, calling himself Little Great Gatsby. The only similarity, so far as I could see, was the swimming pool. This vanity colored his grasp of all great works of imagination. As it turned out, he was not expelled. He outstayed us all, gradually becoming intolerant of his brightest students, as I discovered years later when two of them, Nima and Manna, paid a high price for disagreeing with his viewpoints. As far as I know, he still teaches and repeats the same