Reading Lolita in Tehran_ A Memoir in Books - Azar Nafisi [89]
It was ironic that Mr. Bahri, the defender of the faith, described the veil as a piece of cloth. I had to remind him that we had to have more respect for that “piece of cloth” than to force it on reluctant people. What did he imagine our students would think of us if they saw us wearing the veil when we had sworn never to do so? Would they not say that we had sold out our beliefs for a few thousand tumans a month? What would you think, Mr. Bahri?
What could he think? A stern ayatollah, a blind and improbable philosopher-king, had decided to impose his dream on a country and a people and to re-create us in his own myopic vision. So he had formulated an ideal of me as a Muslim woman, as a Muslim woman teacher, and wanted me to look, act and in short live according to that ideal. Laleh and I, in refusing to accept that ideal, were taking not a political stance but an existential one. No, I could tell Mr. Bahri, it was not that piece of cloth that I rejected, it was the transformation being imposed upon me that made me look in the mirror and hate the stranger I had become.
I think that day I realized how futile it was to “discuss” my views with Mr. Bahri. How could one argue against the representative of God on earth? Mr. Bahri, for the time being at least, derived his energy from the undeniable fact that he was on the side of Right; I was at best a stray sinner. For a few months I had seen it coming, but I think it was that day, after I left Mr. Bahri and his friend, that it first hit me how irrelevant I had become.
When I left the room, I did not make the mistake of trying to shake his hand. Mr. Bahri walked with me like a polite host seeing an honored guest to the door, his hands firmly clasped behind his back. I kept repeating, Please don’t bother, and almost toppled down the stairs in my eagerness to get away. When I had nearly reached the first floor, I looked back. He was still standing there, in his frayed brown suit, his Mao shirt buttoned up to the neck, hands behind his back, gazing down at me with a look of perplexity. A lover’s good-bye, Laleh would later mischievously say as I told her my story over another dish of ice cream, this time in the cool of her living room.
When I left Mr. Bahri that afternoon, I walked for about forty-five minutes and stopped by my favorite English bookstore. I went in there on a sudden inspiration, fearful that I might not have the opportunity to do so in the near future. And I was right: only a few months later, the Revolutionary Guards raided the bookstore and closed it down. The big iron bolt and chain they installed on the door signified the finality of their action.
I started picking books up with a greedy urgency. I went after the paperbacks, collecting almost all the Jameses and all six novels by Austen. I picked up Howards End and A Room with a View. Then I went after ones I had not read, four novels by Heinrich Böll, and some I had read a long time ago—Vanity Fair and The Adventures of Roderick Random, Humboldt’s Gift and Henderson the Rain King. I picked up a bilingual selection of Rilke’s poems and Nabokov’s Speak, Memory. I even lingered for a while debating over an unexpurgated copy of Fanny Hill. Then I went after the mysteries. I picked up some Dorothy Sayers and, to my utter delight, found Trent’s Last Case, two or three new Agatha Christies, a selection of Ross Macdonalds, all of Raymond Chandler and two Dashiell Hammetts.
I didn’t have enough money to pay for them all. I took the few I could afford and refused the bookstore owner’s very gallant offer to take the rest on credit. As he placed the books I had put on hold in two large paper bags, he smiled with amusement and told me, Don’t worry; no one is going to take these away from you. No one knows who they are anymore. Besides, who wants to read them now, at this time?
Who indeed? People like me seemed as irrelevant as Fitzgerald was to Mike Gold, or Nabokov to Stalin’s Soviet Union, or