Reading Lolita in Tehran_ A Memoir in Books - Azar Nafisi [55]
In the later months and years, every once in a while Bijan and I would be shocked to see the show trials of our old comrades in the U.S. on television. They eagerly denounced their past actions, their old comrades, their old selves, and confessed that they were indeed the enemies of Islam. We would watch these scenes in silence. Bijan was calmer than me, and would rarely show any emotion. He’d sit on the couch, his eyes glued to the television screen, seldom moving a muscle, while I fidgeted and got up to fetch a glass of water or change places. I felt I needed something to hold on to, and would dig harder into the armchair. When I turned to look at Bijan, I would encounter his placid expression; sometimes a whirling of resentment would well up inside of me. How could he be so composed? Once I moved and sat on the floor by his couch. I don’t think I have ever felt such utter loneliness. After a few minutes, he rested a hand on my shoulder.
I turned around and asked Bijan, Did you ever dream that this could happen to us? He said, No I didn’t, but I should have. After we all helped create this mess, we were not doomed to have the Islamic Republic. And in a sense, he was right. There was a very brief period, between the time the Shah left on January 16, 1979, and Khomeini’s return to Iran on February 1, when one of the nationalist leaders, Dr. Shahpour Bakhtiar, had become the prime minister. Bakhtiar was perhaps the most democratic-minded and farsighted of the opposition leaders of that time, who, rather than rallying to his side, had fought against him and joined up with Khomeini. He had immediately disbanded Iran’s secret police and set the political prisoners free. In rejecting Bakhtiar and helping to replace the Pahlavi dynasty with a far more reactionary and despotic regime, both the Iranian people and the intellectual elites had shown at best a serious error in judgment. I remember at the time that Bijan’s was one lone voice in support of Bakhtiar, while all others, including mine, were only demanding destruction of the old, without much thought to the consequences.
One day, opening the morning paper, I saw pictures of Ali and Faramarz and other friends from the student movement. I knew instantly they had been killed. Unlike the generals, these were not photographs taken after the executions. They were old pictures, passport photos and student I.D.’s. In these insidiously innocent photos they smiled, with a conscious pose for the camera. I tore out the pages and for months hid them in my closet, using them as shoe trees, taking them out almost daily to look again at those faces I had last seen in another country that appeared to me now only in my dreams.
8
Mr. Bahri, who was at first reserved and reluctant to talk in class, began after our meeting to make insightful remarks. He spoke slowly, as if forming his ideas in the process of expressing them, pausing between words and sentences. Sometimes he seemed to me like a child just beginning to walk, testing the ground and discovering unknown potentials within himself. He was also at this time becoming increasingly immersed in politics. He had become an active member of the student group supported by the government—the Muslim Students’ Association—and more and more often I would find him in the hallways immersed in arguments. His movements had gained an urgency, his eyes purpose and determination.
As I got to know him better, I noticed he was not as arrogant as I had thought him to be. Or perhaps I grew more accustomed to his special kind of arrogance, that of a naturally shy and reserved young man who had discovered an absolutist refuge called Islam. It was his doggedness, his newfound certainty,