Reading Lolita in Tehran_ A Memoir in Books - Azar Nafisi [88]
Her hair was thick and obstinately unmanageable: it would not succumb to comb, brush, gels, even perms. Yet she tamed it through hours of painstaking straightening and styling, giving her the appearance of an exacting and foreboding matron. I have to either shave my head or do it this way, she would tell me, her voice tainted with exasperation. Only her big black eyes, flickering with mischievous designs, belied her otherwise conservative appearance. Later, when she would climb the trees with my three-year-old daughter, I could see the amount of discipline it must have taken for her to control her wayward longings.
As it happened, she was forced to make a living from her sewing for almost two years. She was not granted a license to practice child psychology, her specialty, and she had refused to teach with the veil. So she took up sewing, a task she abhorred, and for a while I and our other friends would go around wearing pretty chintz skirts with beautiful flower patterns, until a friend asked her to work at her school.
Our appetites that day seemed insatiable: Laleh ordered a crème caramel and I two scoops of ice cream, vanilla and coffee, with Turkish coffee and a side of walnuts. I sprinkled my walnuts thoughtfully over the coffee-drenched ice cream. We brooded over the fact that in our department, Farideh had been expelled, and Dr. A had left for the States. Our more cautious colleagues, who had managed to remain unscathed, said that Farideh’s expulsion was more a result of her headstrong resistance, a certain mulishness as one colleague creatively put it, than the administration’s efforts.
4
A few days later I went to the University of Tehran for one more meeting with Mr. Bahri. He had asked for this meeting, hoping to convince me to comply with the new rules. I was fully prepared for a running contest at the gate, but to my surprise I was not accorded the same treatment as Laleh. The morose guard on duty was not the one she had described. He was neither lean nor fat; he did not even ask for my I.D. He simply pretended not to see me. I had my suspicions that Mr. Bahri had warned him not to interfere.
The conference room looked and felt just as it had when I first met Mr. Bahri to discuss the role of literature and revolution: large, cool and bare, with a dusty feel to it, although, except for the long table and twelve chairs, there were no surfaces to collect dust. Mr. Bahri and his friend were already sitting near the middle of the table, facing the door. They both stood up when I entered, and waited until I had taken a seat before settling back down. I chose to position myself opposite them.
Mr. Bahri did not take long to get to the point. He mentioned Laleh’s escapade and the administration’s admirable patience with “this sort of behavior.” All through the meeting his eyes appeared to be glued to a black fountain pen, which he kept turning around and around in his hands like a curious object whose mystery he was hoping to fathom. He and his friends were well aware that before the revolution, whenever Professor Nassri went to the poorer, more traditional areas of town, she wore a scarf. Yes, she did this out of respect for those people’s faith, I said coldly, and not because it was mandatory. All through this talk, Mr. Bahri’s friend remained almost completely silent.
Mr. Bahri could not understand why we were making such a fuss over a piece of cloth. Did we not see that there were more important issues to think about, that the whole life of the revolution was at stake? What was more important, to fight against the satanic influence of Western imperialists or to obstinately hold on to a personal preference that created division among the ranks of the revolutionaries? These might not have been his exact words, but they were the gist of his language. In those days, people really talked that way. One had a feeling, in revolutionary