Reading Lolita in Tehran_ A Memoir in Books - Azar Nafisi [54]
In between these lunches we went to the Film Club, which had not yet been closed down, and watched Mel Brooks and Antonioni movies, marched off to exhibitions and still believed that the Khomeini crowd could not succeed, that the war was not yet over. Dr. A took us to a photo exhibition of protests and demonstrations during the Shah’s time. He walked ahead of us, pointing to various pictures from the first year, saying, “Show me how many mullahs you see demonstrating, show me how many of these sons of . . . were out in the streets shouting for the Islamic Republic.” Meanwhile, plots were being hatched, assassinations carried out, some through the novel approach of suicide bombings. The secularists and liberals were being ousted, and Ayatollah Khomeini’s rhetoric against the Great Satan and its domestic agents was growing more virulent every day.
It is amazing how everything can fall into a routine. I seemed not to notice the unexpected and breathless quality of everyday life that belied every form of stability. After a while even the revolution found its rhythm: the violence, the executions, public confessions to crimes that had never been committed, judges who coolly talked about amputating a thief’s hand or legs and killing political prisoners because there was not enough room for them now in jail. One day I sat watching the television, mesmerized by the image of a mother and son. The son belonged to one of the Marxist organizations. His mother was telling him that he deserved to die because he had betrayed the revolution and his faith, and he agreed with her. They both sat there on what seemed to be an empty stage except for their two chairs. They sat opposite each other, talking as they might have of arrangements for his forthcoming marriage. Only they were casually agreeing that his crimes were so heinous that the only way he could atone for them and save his family’s honor was to embrace death.
In the mornings, with The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn under my arm, I would make my way through the wide, leafy streets leading to the university. As I approached the campus, the number of slogans on the walls and the violence of their demands increased. Never once was there a protest against the killings: the demands were almost always punctually for more blood. I, like others, went about my business. It was only at night and in my diary that my growing desperation, my nightmares, poured out uninhibited.
As I look over the pages of my diary, written in different colored inks in a notebook with a black plastic cover, I find the despair that never impinged upon the surface of my life. In that diary I have registered the deaths, which we seldom talked about, though they dominated the newspapers and the television.
One night at home I went to the kitchen for a glass of water and saw on television the battered and bruised face of the former head of the dreaded Ministry of National Security and Information, a general known for his cruelty. He had been one of the officials involved in framing and imprisoning my father. It must have been a rerun of his confession scene, for he had been killed a few months before. I can still remember, when my father was in jail, the number of times my mother would curse this general and his fellow conspirators. And now here he was, in civilian clothes, pleading for forgiveness from judges whose stern brutality even he could not fathom. There was not a shred of humanity in his expression. It was as if he had been forced to negate his former self and in the process he had abdicated his place alongside other men. I felt strangely connected to him, as if the complete surrender of his dignity had also diminished me. How many times had I dreamt of revenge on this particular man? Was this how one’s dreams were to be fulfilled?
The government dailies published his and several other pictures after the next round of executions. These photographs were also published in a cheap pamphlet with yellowing