Reading Lolita in Tehran_ A Memoir in Books - Azar Nafisi [95]
I usually went to see him twice a week, once for lunch and once in the early evening. Later we added evening walks, around my house or his, during which we exchanged news, discussed projects, gossiped. Sometimes we went to a favorite coffee shop or restaurant with an intimate friend of his. Apart from that friend, we had two other friends in common who owned a bookstore that had become a meeting place of writers, intellectuals and young people. With them we enjoyed occasional lunches and excursions to the mountains. He never visited my house but often sent my family tokens of his regards, a box of chocolates, which they had come to identify with him, and even expect, on certain days of the week, videos, books and, sometimes, ice cream.
He called me “lady professor”—a term less odd and more often used in Iran than here. He said later that when friends asked him after our first meeting, What is the lady professor like?, he had said, She’s okay. She is very American—like an American version of Alice in Wonderland. Was this a compliment? Not particularly; it was merely a fact. Have I already mentioned that his favorite actress was Jean Arthur and that he liked Renoir and Minnelli? And that he wanted to be a novelist?
8
Turning points always seem so sudden and absolute, as if they have come bolt out of the blue. That is not true, of course. A whole slow process goes into their making. When I look back, I cannot trace the exact process that suddenly led me back into the classroom, against my own will almost, wearing the veil I had vowed never to wear.
The signs coalesced in all sorts of small events, like the sudden phone calls from various universities, including the University of Tehran, asking me to teach. When I refused, they would always say, Well, how about one or two classes, just to get a feel for how things are right now? Many would try to convince me that things had changed, that people like me were in demand, the atmosphere had become more “relaxed.” I did teach a course or two at the Free Islamic University and the former National University, but I never accepted to return as a full-time faculty member.
By the mid-eighties a new brand of Islamists were gradually coming into being. They had begun to sense that all was not right with the direction their revolution was taking, and decided it was time to intercede. The lack of progress in the war with Iraq was taking its toll. Those who had been ardent revolutionaries at the start of the revolution—people now in their late teens and early twenties—and the younger generation, who were coming of age, were discovering the cynicism and corruption of the leaders who had taken power. The government also had discovered that it needed the cadre it had so casually expelled from the universities to meet the growing demands of the student body.
Some within the government and some former revolutionaries had finally realized that there was no way the Islamic regime could make us intellectuals vanish. In forcing us underground, it had also made us more appealing, more dangerous and, in a strange way, more powerful. It had made us scarce and, because of this, also in demand. So they decided to have us back, perhaps partly to be more certain of their control, and they started to contact people like me, who had once been branded as decadent and Westernized.
Mrs. Rezvan, an ambitious teacher in the Department of English at the Allameh Tabatabai University, was one of the intermediaries between the more progressive Islamic revolutionaries and the alienated secular intellectuals. Her husband had been a Muslim radical at the start of the revolution, and she had connections with the progressive revolutionaries and the secularists—with the insiders and outsiders; she was determined to use both to her advantage.
This Mrs. Rezvan seemed to have cropped up out of nowhere, bent on changing