Reading Lolita in Tehran_ A Memoir in Books - Azar Nafisi [96]
It was mid-morning in the winter of 1987. My daughter, who was now three, and my one-and-a-half-year-old son and I were alone at home. Tehran had been hit by two rocket attacks earlier that morning, and I was trying to divert my children’s attention by playing a favorite song involving a rooster and a fox on a small tape recorder—I was encouraging my daughter to sing along. It sounds too much like a sentimental movie: brave mother, brave children. I did not feel brave at all; the seeming tranquillity was due to an anxiety so paralyzing that it translated itself into calm. After the attacks we went to the kitchen, and I made them lunch. We then moved to the hall, where we felt more secure, because there were fewer windows. I built for them houses of cards that they destroyed with a touch of their small hands.
Right after lunch, the phone rang. It was a friend who had been one of my graduate students the previous year. She wanted to know if I could come to her place on Wednesday night. Mrs. Rezvan, a colleague of hers, really wanted to meet me. She liked me, had read all of my articles. Anyway, my friend concluded, Mrs. Rezvan is a phenomenon in her own right: if she didn’t exist, we would have to invent her. So could you come, please?
A few nights later, in the midst of another blackout, I set off to my friend’s house. When I got there, it was already dark. As I entered the large hall, from the depth of darkness I could see, flickering in the light of a kerosene lamp, a short, stocky woman dressed in blue. Her physical appearance is perfectly clear and alive in my mind. I can see her plain face, the sharp nose, short neck and dark cropped hair. But none of this captures the woman who, at the height of our intimacy, after we had visited each other’s houses, once our children had become almost friends and our husbands got to know each other, remained always Mrs. Rezvan. What I cannot describe is her energy, which seemed to be caged inside her body. She appeared to be in constant motion, pacing her small office, my living room, the halls of the university.
She always seemed determined: determined not only to do certain things herself, but to make others, whom she targeted carefully, perform specific tasks that she had outlined for them. I have seldom met anyone whose will was so physically imposing. It was not the plainness of her features but the determination, the will and the half-ironic tone of her voice that remained with you.
Sometimes she would come to my house unexpectedly, in such an anxious state that I would think some disaster had befallen her. Yet it would only be to inform me that it was my duty to participate in some meeting or another. She always framed these requests as matters of life and death. Some of these “duties” I am grateful for, like forcing me to meet with a handful of progressive religious journalists—who are now fashionably called the “reformists”—and to write for their journals. They were fascinated by Western literature and philosophy and I discovered, to my surprise, that there were many points on which we could agree.
It is such a privilege to meet you, she told me that evening, the first time we met. I want to become your student. She said this with a perfectly serious expression, without a trace of humor or irony. This threw me off balance so violently that I immediately disliked her; I became shy and could not respond.
That night she did most of the talking. She had read my articles; she knew about me from certain friends and students. No, she was not trying to flatter me; she really