Reading Lolita In Tehran Part 11

It was not just the very loud noise-if one could call it a noise-of the explosion: more than the sound, we felt felt the explosion, like the fall of a ma.s.sive weight on the house. The house shook, and the gla.s.s trembled in the window frames. After this last explosion I got up and went upstairs to the terrace. The sky was blue and pink, the mountains capped with snow; at a distance the smoke curled upwards from the fire where the missile had landed. the explosion, like the fall of a ma.s.sive weight on the house. The house shook, and the gla.s.s trembled in the window frames. After this last explosion I got up and went upstairs to the terrace. The sky was blue and pink, the mountains capped with snow; at a distance the smoke curled upwards from the fire where the missile had landed.

From that day on, we resumed the routine that had been imposed on our daily lives during the bombing and missile attacks. After each explosion there would be numerous phone calls to and from friends and relatives to find out if they were still alive. A savage relief, one of which I always felt a little ashamed, was inevitably triggered by the sound of familiar greetings. The general reaction in those days was a mixture of panic, anger and helplessness. After eight years of war, the Iranian government had done virtually nothing other than expand its propaganda effort to protect the city. It could only boast of the Iranian people's eagerness for martyrdom.

After the first attack, the notoriously overpopulated and polluted city of Tehran had become a ghost town. Many people fled to safer places. I recently read in an account that over a quarter of the population, including many government officials, had deserted the city. A new joke making the rounds was that this was the government's most effective policy yet to deal with Tehran's pollution and population problems. To me, the city had suddenly gained a new pathos, as if, under the attacks and the desertions, it had shed its vulgar veil to reveal a decent, humane face. Tehran looked the way most of its remaining citizens must have felt: sad, forlorn and defenseless, yet not without a certain dignity. The adhesive tape pasted on the windowpanes to prevent the implosion of shattered gla.s.s told the story of its suffering, a suffering made more poignant because of its newly recovered beauty, the fresh green of trees, washed by spring showers, the blossoms and the rising snowcapped mountains now so near, as if pasted against the sky.

Two years into the war, Iran liberated the city of Khorramshahr, which had been captured by the Iraqis. In the context of other noticeable defeats, Saddam Hussein, encouraged by his worried Arab neighbors, had shown serious signs of reconciliation. But Ayatollah Khomeini and some within the ruling elite refused to sign a truce. They were determined now to capture the holy city of Karballa, in Iraq, the site of martyrdom of Imam Hussein. Any and all methods were used to achieve their purposes, including what became known as "human wave" attacks, where thousands of Iranian soldiers, mainly very young boys ranging in age from ten to sixteen and middle-aged and old men, cleared the minefields by walking over them. The very young were caught up in the government propaganda that offered them a heroic and adventurous life at the front and encouraged them to join the militia, even against their parents' wishes.

My vigils at night with Dashiell Hammett and others resumed. The result was that four years later I added a new section to my cla.s.s-the mystery tale, beginning with Edgar Allan Poe.

21.

With the resumption of the bombing, we moved our cla.s.ses to the second floor. Every time there was an attack, people impulsively ran to the door and down the stairs; it was safer to move the cla.s.ses downstairs. The new emergency had emptied the cla.s.srooms, so most were now half-full. Many students went back to their hometowns or to towns and cities that were not under attack; some simply stayed home.

The renewal of bombing had made people like Mr. Ghomi more important. They came and went after this with a new sense of urgency. The Islamic a.s.sociations used every opportunity to disrupt the cla.s.ses, playing military marches to announce a new victory, or to mourn for a member of the university community who had been martyred in the war. Midway through a pa.s.sage from Washington Square Washington Square or or Great Expectations, Great Expectations, suddenly the sound of the military march would take over, and after that, no matter how hard we tried to continue, all attempts at discussion were conquered by the march. suddenly the sound of the military march would take over, and after that, no matter how hard we tried to continue, all attempts at discussion were conquered by the march.

This boisterous cacophony was in marked contrast to the silence of the majority of the students and staff. I was actually surprised that more students didn't use these events as an excuse to cut cla.s.ses or to refrain from doing their homework. Their seeming docility reflected a larger mood of resignation in the city itself. As the war raged on, with no victories, into the eighth year, signs of exhaustion were apparent even among the most zealous. By now, in the streets and in public places, people expressed anti-war sentiments or cursed the perpetrators of the war, while on television and radio the regime's ideal continued to play itself out undeterred. The recurrent image in those days was that of an elderly, bearded, turbaned man calling for unceasing jihad to an audience of adolescent boys with red "martyrs' " bands stretched across their foreheads. These were the dwindling remainders of a once vast group of young people who had been mobilized by the excitement of carrying real guns and the promise of keys to a heaven where they could finally enjoy all the pleasures from which they had abstained in life. Theirs was a world in which defeat was impossible, hence compromise meaningless.

The mullahs would regale us with stories of the unequal battles in which the Shiite saints had been martyred by infidels, while at times breaking into hysterical sobs, whipping their audience into a frenzy, welcoming martyrdom for the sake of G.o.d and the Imam. In contrast, the world of the viewers was one of silent defiance, a defiance that was meaningful only in the context of the raucous commitment demanded by the ruling hierarchy, but otherwise permeated, inevitably and historically, by resignation.

Life in death, the death wish of the regime and the obliging missiles of Iraq, could only be tolerated when one knew that the missile would deliver the final message at a moment exactly predetermined and that there was no point in trying to escape it. It was during these days that I realized what this silent resignation meant. It reflected the much maligned mysticism that we all held responsible, at least in part, for our country's historical failures. I understood then that this resignation was perhaps, under the circ.u.mstances, the only form of dignified resistance to tyranny. We could not openly articulate what we wished, but we could by our silence show our indifference to the regime's demands.

22.

I can still hear the mourning and victory marches that disrupted so many cla.s.ses to announce the death of a student or staff member in the line of duty or some victory of the army of Islam over its heathen foe. No one bothered to point out that the heathen foe in this warfare were fellow Muslims. The day I have in mind, the march was playing to commemorate the death of one of the leaders of the Muslim Students' a.s.sociation. After cla.s.s, I joined a few of my girls who were standing together outside in the yard. They were making fun of the dead student and laughing. They joked that his death was a marriage made in heaven-didn't he and his comrades say that their only beloved was G.o.d? This was an allusion to the last wills and testaments made by the martyrs of the war, which were given a great deal of publicity. Almost all claimed that death by martyrdom was their highest desire, because it promised them ultimate union with their true "Beloved."

"Oh yeah, sure, G.o.d." The girls were laughing. "G.o.d in the guise of all the women he devoured with his eyes before he filed complaints against them for indecency. This was how he got his kicks! They are all s.e.xual perverts, the whole lot of them!"

Na.s.srin started to tell a story about a teacher of religion in her twelve-year-old cousin's school. This teacher instructed her students to cover themselves and promised them that in paradise they would get their just reward. There, in paradise, they would find streams running with wine and would be wooed by strong, muscular young men. Her fat lips seemed to be drooling when she spoke about the muscular young men that, like prize lamb, she could already see cooked to perfection.

I think something in my rather shocked expression stopped the flow of their mirth. I had not known the young martyr, and if I had, I would most likely not have been fond of him, but this air of jubilation was still shocking.

They felt some explanation was necessary. You don't know him, Mojgan told me. Next to him, Mr. Ghomi is an absolute angel. He was sick, s.e.xually sick. You know, he got a friend expelled because he said the white patch of skin just barely visible under her scarf s.e.xually provoked him. They were like hounds. Then Na.s.srin jumped in with a screed about one of the female guards. Her searches were like s.e.xual a.s.saults, she insisted. One day she squeezed and fondled Niloofar until she became hysterical. They expel us for laughing out loud, but you know what they did to this woman when she was discovered? She was reprimanded, expelled for a semester and then she was back at her job.

Later, I told Na.s.srin that as I watched them mocking the dead student, a poem by Bertolt Brecht kept running through my mind. I don't remember it well: "Indeed we live in dark ages, where to speak of trees is a sort of a crime," it went. I wish I could remember the poem better, but there is a line towards the end, something like "Alas, we who wanted kindness, could not be kind ourselves."

Na.s.srin was quiet for a moment after that. "You don't know what we have suffered," she said at last. "Last week they dropped a bomb near our house. It fell on an apartment building. The neighbors said that in one of the flats there was a birthday party and some twenty-odd children were killed.

"Immediately after the bombs fell and before the ambulances came, six or seven motorcycles arrived from out of nowhere and started circling the area. The riders all wore black, with red headbands across their foreheads. They started shouting slogans: Death to America! Death to Saddam! Long live Khomeini! Death to America! Death to Saddam! Long live Khomeini! People were very quiet. They just watched them with hatred. Some tried to go forward to help the wounded, but the thugs wouldn't let anyone go near the place. They kept shouting, 'War! War! Until victory!' How do you think we all felt as we stood there watching them?" People were very quiet. They just watched them with hatred. Some tried to go forward to help the wounded, but the thugs wouldn't let anyone go near the place. They kept shouting, 'War! War! Until victory!' How do you think we all felt as we stood there watching them?"

This was a ritual: after the bombings, these emissaries of death would prevent any sign of mourning or protest. When two of my cousins were killed by the Islamic regime, some of my relatives who were now on the side of the government called my uncle to congratulate him on the death of his son and daughter-in-law.

We exchanged stories as we walked that day. Na.s.srin told me more about her time in jail. The whole thing was an accident. I remember how young she had been, still in high school. You're worried about our brutal thoughts against "them," she said, but you know most of the stories you hear about the jails are true. The worst was when they called people's names in the middle of the night. We knew they had been picked for execution. They would say good-bye, and soon after that, we would hear the sound of bullets. We would know the number of people killed on any given night by counting the single bullets that inevitably came after the initial barrage. There was one girl there-her only sin had been her amazing beauty. They brought her in on some trumped-up immorality charge. They kept her for over a month and repeatedly raped her. They pa.s.sed her from one guard to another. That story got around jail very fast, because the girl wasn't even political; she wasn't with the political prisoners. They married the virgins off to the guards, who would later execute them. The philosophy behind this act was that if they were killed as virgins, they would go to heaven. You talk of betrayals. Mostly they forced those who had "converted" to Islam to empty the last round into the heads of their comrades as tokens of their new loyalty to the regime. If I were not privileged, she said with rancor, if I were not blessed blessed with a father who shared their faith, G.o.d knows where I would be now-in h.e.l.l with all the other molested virgins or with those who put a gun to someone's head to prove their loyalty to Islam. with a father who shared their faith, G.o.d knows where I would be now-in h.e.l.l with all the other molested virgins or with those who put a gun to someone's head to prove their loyalty to Islam.

23.

On August 4, 1914, Henry James added an entry to his journal: "Everything blackened over for the time blighted by the hideous Public situation. This is (Monday) the August Bank Holiday but with horrible suspense and the worst possibilities in the air." In his last two years of life, Henry James was radically transformed by his intense involvement in the First World War. For the first time, he became socially and politically active, a man who all his life had done his best to keep aloof from the actual pa.s.sions of existence. His critics, like H. G. Wells, blamed him for his mandarin att.i.tude towards life, which prevented him from any involvement with the social and political issues of the day. He wrote about his experience of World War I that it "almost killed me. I loathed so having lived on and on into anything so hideous and horrible."

When still very young, James had witnessed the Civil War in America. Physically, he was prevented from partic.i.p.ating in a war in which his two younger brothers fought with courage and honor by a mysterious backache, acquired on a mission to rescue a burning barn. Psychologically, he kept the war at bay by writing and reading. Perhaps his frenetic activities to support and aid the British in World War I were partly to compensate for his earlier inactivity. It is also true that the war that had evoked his horror mesmerized him. He wrote to a friend, "But I have an imagination of disaster-and see life as ferocious and sinister."

In his youth, James wrote to his father that he was convinced of the "transitory organization of the actual social body. The only respectable state of mind is to constantly express one's perfect dissatisfaction with it." And in his best works of fiction this is what he did. In almost all of his novels the struggle for power is central to the way the plot moves and is resolved. This struggle for power is rooted in the central character's resistance to socially acceptable norms and in his desire for integrity and recognition. In Daisy Miller, Daisy Miller, the tension between the old and the new leads to Daisy's death. In the tension between the old and the new leads to Daisy's death. In The Amba.s.sadors, The Amba.s.sadors, it is Mrs. Newsome's almost awesome power and pressure over her amba.s.sador and her family that creates the central tension in the plot. It is interesting to note that in this struggle the antagonist always represents worldly concerns, while the protagonist's desire is to preserve a sense of personal integrity in the face of outside aggression. it is Mrs. Newsome's almost awesome power and pressure over her amba.s.sador and her family that creates the central tension in the plot. It is interesting to note that in this struggle the antagonist always represents worldly concerns, while the protagonist's desire is to preserve a sense of personal integrity in the face of outside aggression.

During the Civil War, when James was discovering his own powers, he wrote in part to compensate for his inability to partic.i.p.ate in the war. Now, at the end of his life, he complained about the impotence of words in the face of such inhumanity. In an interview on March 21, 1915, with The New York Times, The New York Times, he said: "The war has used up words; they have weakened, they have deteriorated like motor car tires; they have, like millions of other things, been more overstrained and knocked about and voided of the happy semblance during the last six months than in all the long ages before, and we are now confronted with a depreciation of all our terms, or, otherwise speaking, with a loss of expression through increase of limpness, that may well make us wonder what ghosts will be left to walk." he said: "The war has used up words; they have weakened, they have deteriorated like motor car tires; they have, like millions of other things, been more overstrained and knocked about and voided of the happy semblance during the last six months than in all the long ages before, and we are now confronted with a depreciation of all our terms, or, otherwise speaking, with a loss of expression through increase of limpness, that may well make us wonder what ghosts will be left to walk."

Despite his despair, he turned to words again, this time to write not fiction but war pamphlets, appeals to America to join the war and not to remain indifferent to the suffering and atrocities in Europe. He also wrote poignant letters. In some he expressed his horror at events; in others he consoled friends who had lost a son or a husband in the war.

He fell into a round of activities, visiting wounded Belgian soldiers, and later British soldiers, in hospitals, raising money for Belgian refugees and the wounded and writing war propaganda from the fall of 1914 until December 1915. He also accepted the post of honorary head of the American Volunteer Motor-Ambulance Corps and joined the Chelsea Fund for Belgian refugees. All these were whirlwind activities for a shy and reclusive writer whose most ardent pursuits and pa.s.sions had previously been reserved for his fiction. As his biographer Leon Edel would later say: ". . . the world seemed to find too much comfort in him and he had to often protect himself against its weeping too profusely on his shoulders." While visiting the hospitals, James likened himself to Whitman visiting the wounded during the Civil War. He said it made him feel less "finished and doddering when I go on certain days and try to pull the conversational cart uphill for them." What inner horror and fascination drove this man, who all his life had shied away from public activity, to become so actively involved in the war effort?

One reason for his involvement was the carnage, the death of so many young men, and the dislocation and destruction. While he mourned the mutilation of existence, he had endless admiration for the simple courage he encountered, both in the many young men who went to war and in those they left behind. In September, James moved to London. "I can hear and see and have informational contact," he wrote; "I eat my heart out alone." He lobbied the U.S. amba.s.sador to Britain and other high American officials and reproached them for their neutrality. And he wrote pamphlets in defense of Britain and her allies.

James emphasized in his many letters one important resource to counter the senselessness of the war. He was aware, as many were not, of the toll such cruelty takes on emotions and of the resistance to compa.s.sion that such events engender. In fact, this insensitivity becomes a way of survival. As in his novels, he insisted on the most important of all human attributes-feeling-and railed against "the paralysis of my own powers to do anything but increasingly and inordinately feel."

Years later, on a pink index card I carried across the oceans from Tehran to Washington, D.C., I found two quotations about James's wartime experiences. I had written them out for Na.s.srin, but I never showed them to her. The first was from a letter he wrote to Clare Sheridan, a friend whose husband-they were newly married-had gone to war and been killed. "I am incapable of telling you not to repine and rebel," he wrote, "because I have so, to my cost, the imagination of all things, and because I am incapable of telling you not to feel. Feel, feel, I say-feel for all you're worth, and even if it half kills you, for that is the only way to live, especially to live at this terrible pressure, and the only way to honour and celebrate these admirable beings who are our pride and our inspiration." In letters to friends, again and again he urges them to feel. Feeling would stir up empathy and would remind them that life was worth living.

One of the peculiarities of James's reaction to the war was the fact that his feelings and emotions were not aroused for patriotic reasons. His own country, America, was not at war. Britain, the country where he had lived for forty years, was, but in all those forty years he had not asked for British citizenship. Now, he finally did. In June 1915, a few months before his death, Henry James was granted British nationality. He had written to his nephew Harry that he wished to make his civil status compatible with his moral and material status. "Hadn't it been for the War, I should certainly have gone on as I was, taking it as the simplest and easiest and even friendliest thing; but the circ.u.mstances are utterly altered now."

His more immediate reason for this sudden reversal was that, because of wartime conditions, he had been categorized as a "friendly alien" and needed police permission every time he traveled from London to his home in Suss.e.x. But the more important and symbolic reason was his disenchantment with America's distance from the war. He wrote to a friend, Lilly Perry, that "the immediate presence of the Enemy transforms it from head to foot when one's own nationality does nothing for one that keeps pace with transformation."

The truth is that James, like many other great writers and artists, had chosen his own loyalties and nationality. His true country, his home, was that of the imagination. "Black and hideous to me is the tragedy that gathers," he wrote to his old friend Rhoda Broughton, "and I am sick beyond cure to have lived to see it. You and I, the ornaments of our generation, should have been spared this wreck of our belief that these long years we had seen civilization grow and the worst became possible." He had written to Edith Wharton of "this crash of civilization. The only gleam in the blackness, to me, is the action and the absolute unanimity of this country." James's idea of home was bound up with the idea of civilization. In Suss.e.x, during the war, he had found it difficult to read and impossible to work. He described himself as living under "the funeral spell of our murdered civilization."

When, in September 1914, the Germans attacked and destroyed the Rheims cathedral in France, James wrote: "But no words fill the abyss of it-nor touch it, nor relieve one's heart, nor light by a spark the blackness; the ache of one's heart and the anguish of one's execution aren't mitigated by a shade, even as one brands it as the most hideous crime ever perpetuated against the mind of man."

All his life had been a struggle for power-not political power, which he disdained, but the power of culture. For him culture and civilization were everything. He had said that the greatest freedom of man was his "independence of thought," which enabled the artist to enjoy the "aggression of infinite modes of being." Yet in the face of so much carnage and destruction he felt helpless and impotent. His affinity with England, and with Europe in general, came from that sense of civilization, a tradition of culture and humaneness. But now he had also seen Europe's depravity, its fatigue with its own past, its predatory, cynical nature. It is no wonder he used all his powers, not least the power of words, to help those he believed to be in the right. He was not insensitive to their curative potential, and wrote to a friend, Lucy Clifford, "We must for dear life make our own counter-realities."

24.

A few days after my talk with Na.s.srin, I found two girls standing outside my office just before cla.s.s. One was Na.s.srin, with her usual pale smile. The other was dressed in a black chador that covered her from head to foot. After staring at this apparition for a while, I suddenly recognized my old student Mahtab.

For a second all three of us stood there, frozen in place. Na.s.srin seemed almost detached; detachment had become her defense against unpleasant memories and uncontrollable realities. It took me a few moments to digest this new Mahtab, to make a shift in my mind and transform that Mahtab, the leftist student in her trademark khaki pants whom I had last seen on the grounds of a hospital hunting for her murdered comrades, to this Mahtab, standing with a rueful smile and begging recognition outside my office. I made an uncertain gesture as if to embrace her, but then checked myself and asked her how she had been all these years. Only then did I remember to invite them into my office. I had very little time before my next cla.s.s.

Mahtab had kept in touch with Na.s.srin, and when she'd heard I was teaching again at Allameh, she'd plucked up the courage to come and visit. Could she attend my cla.s.s? And then perhaps after cla.s.s, if I had time, if it wasn't a problem, she could tell me a little about herself. Of course, I said, she should absolutely come to cla.s.s.

During the two hours of my lecture on James's Washington Square, Washington Square, my eyes often strayed to Mahtab in her black chador, sitting very straight, listening with a sort of alert nervousness I had never seen in her before. After cla.s.s she followed me to my office, with Na.s.srin trailing in after her. I asked them to sit down and offered them some tea, which they both refused. Ignoring their refusal, I left to order tea and came back and closed the door, to ensure our privacy. Mahtab sat on the edge of a chair, while Na.s.srin stood beside her staring at the opposite wall. I told Na.s.srin to take a seat because she was making me nervous and turned to Mahtab and asked her, in as casual a tone as I could muster, what she had been doing all these years. my eyes often strayed to Mahtab in her black chador, sitting very straight, listening with a sort of alert nervousness I had never seen in her before. After cla.s.s she followed me to my office, with Na.s.srin trailing in after her. I asked them to sit down and offered them some tea, which they both refused. Ignoring their refusal, I left to order tea and came back and closed the door, to ensure our privacy. Mahtab sat on the edge of a chair, while Na.s.srin stood beside her staring at the opposite wall. I told Na.s.srin to take a seat because she was making me nervous and turned to Mahtab and asked her, in as casual a tone as I could muster, what she had been doing all these years.

She looked at me at first with docile resignation, as if she had not understood my question. Then she fiddled with her fingers, half hidden under the folds of her chador, and said, Well, I have been where Na.s.srin was. Shortly after the day I saw you at the demonstrations, I was arrested. They gave me only five years, which was lucky-they knew I was no big shot in our organization. And then I was let off early. I got out after two and a half years, for good behavior. She left me to guess what good behavior meant to the kind of people who had put her in jail. There was a knock at the door, and Mr. Latif entered with the tea. We all paused until he had left the room.

I did think of you and of our cla.s.ses, she said after he had left. After the initial interrogations, she had been a.s.signed to a cell with fifteen others. There, she had met another student of mine, Razieh. Balancing the small cup of tea I had offered her in one hand, without letting her chador slip, she said, "Razieh told me about your cla.s.ses on Hemingway and James at Alzahrah, and I told her about the Gatsby Gatsby trial. We laughed a lot. You know, she was executed. I was lucky, she said. Less than a year after she was released from prison, Mahtab had married and had a baby; she was expecting another one. Three months pregnant. It doesn't show from under the chador, she said, pointing shyly to her stomach. trial. We laughed a lot. You know, she was executed. I was lucky, she said. Less than a year after she was released from prison, Mahtab had married and had a baby; she was expecting another one. Three months pregnant. It doesn't show from under the chador, she said, pointing shyly to her stomach.

There was nothing I could ask her about my murdered student. I did not want to know how they had lived in their cell, what other memories they had shared. I felt that if she told me, I might do something foolish and would not make it to my afternoon cla.s.s. I asked her about her baby's age but not about her husband. Could I ask her my favorite question: Did you two fall in love? I had heard about so many girls who had married soon after their release from jail, married because they could appease the suspicions of their jailers, who somehow thought of marriage as an antidote to political activities, or to prove to their parents that they were "good" girls now, or simply because there was nothing else for them to do.

"You know, I always thought Gatsby Gatsby was so beautiful," Mahtab told me as she was getting up to go. "And the scene you read to us about that day when Daisy meets Gatsby again for the first time in five years, her face wet under the rain. And the other scene, when she tells him he looks so cool and she means to say that she loves him. We had fun at was so beautiful," Mahtab told me as she was getting up to go. "And the scene you read to us about that day when Daisy meets Gatsby again for the first time in five years, her face wet under the rain. And the other scene, when she tells him he looks so cool and she means to say that she loves him. We had fun at Gatsby Gatsby's trial, you know?" Yes, I knew. The fact that they remembered Gatsby Gatsby and even remembered having fun with him would have been gratifying under different circ.u.mstances, but then, I was thinking among other thoughts, how the joy of reading and even remembered having fun with him would have been gratifying under different circ.u.mstances, but then, I was thinking among other thoughts, how the joy of reading Gatsby Gatsby would now be forever marred by being linked in my memory with Mahtab's time in jail and Razieh's execution. would now be forever marred by being linked in my memory with Mahtab's time in jail and Razieh's execution.

I felt I had to open the window, to let the air in after they were gone. From my office I could see the yard, where snow almost caressed the trees. There was a heaviness Mahtab had left behind, a tangible atmosphere of pain and resignation. Was she the lucky one, the one who was released and got married to some guy, the one who reported to the prison guards every month, the one with a hometown in ruins and a two-year-old child? She was lucky and Razieh was dead. Na.s.srin had also called herself lucky; my students had developed a strange concept of fortune.

The other quotation from James on the pink index card records his reaction to the death of Rupert Brooke, the beautiful young English poet who died of blood poisoning during the war. "I confess that I have no philosophy, nor piety, nor patience, no art of reflection," he wrote, "no theory of compensation to meet things so hideous, so cruel, and so mad, they are just unspeakably horrible and irremediable to me and I stare at them with angry and almost blighted eyes."

Next to the last words, I added at some later point in pencil: Razieh. Razieh.

25.

What strange places my students met, from what dark corners did they bring me news! I could not travel, I cannot travel even now to those places, no matter how many times I hear about them. Yet there must have been something cheerful about Razieh and Mahtab in their cell, not knowing if they will live or die, talking about James and Fitzgerald. Perhaps cheerful cheerful is not the right word. I mention this because it is not where I had imagined they would take my favorite novels, my golden emissaries from that other world. I think of Razieh in that jail, and of Razieh facing the firing squad on some night, perhaps the same night I was reading is not the right word. I mention this because it is not where I had imagined they would take my favorite novels, my golden emissaries from that other world. I think of Razieh in that jail, and of Razieh facing the firing squad on some night, perhaps the same night I was reading The Long Goodbye The Long Goodbye or or The Bostonians. The Bostonians.

I remember now, as I did then, that one of the most surprising things about Razieh was her love of James. I remember the cla.s.s I taught at Alzahrah University and all its frustrations. The distinguishing feature of this so-called university was that it was the only all-girls college in Iran. It had a small campus with a beautiful and leafy garden and I taught two courses there while also teaching at the University of Tehran, in the first year after my return. I was shocked when, grading the midterm exams, I noticed that most of the cla.s.s, rather than respond to the questions, had simply repeated my cla.s.sroom lectures. In four cases this repet.i.tion was amazing. They had transcribed seemingly word for word what I had said about A Farewell to Arms, A Farewell to Arms, including my "you know"s and my digressions about Hemingway's personal life. Reading these exam papers, I felt I had been given a bizarre parody of my own lectures. including my "you know"s and my digressions about Hemingway's personal life. Reading these exam papers, I felt I had been given a bizarre parody of my own lectures.

I thought they had cheated; it was inconceivable to me that they could have re-created my lectures so precisely without notes. My colleagues, however, informed me that this was regular practice: the students memorized everything their teachers said and gave it back to them without changing a word.

At the next cla.s.s after that exam, I was furious. It was one of the only times in my teaching career that I got angry and showed it in cla.s.s. I was young and inexperienced, and I thought certain standards were expected and understood. I remember I told them it would have been better if they had cheated-at least cheating required a certain ingenuity-but to repeat my lecture word for word, to include not so much as a glimmer of themselves in their response . . . I went on and on, and as I continued, I became more righteous in my indignation. It was the sort of anger one gets high on, the kind one takes home to show off to family and friends.

They were all silent, even those who had not committed the sins I had attributed to them. I dismissed the cla.s.s early, although the culprits and a few others stayed behind to plead their case. They were docile even in their pleas: they wanted to be forgiven, they did not know any better, this was what most professors expected. Two were in tears. What could they do? They had never learned any better. From the first day they had set foot in elementary school, they had been told to memorize. They had been told that their own opinions counted for nothing.

Razieh stayed until they had all left. Then she told me she wanted to talk to me. "It isn't their fault," she said. "I mean, it is in a way, but I always thought you were one of those who cared." The echo of reproach in her voice startled me. Would I have been so angry if I didn't care? "Yes, that is the easy way," she said quietly. "But you must think about where we are coming from. Most of these girls have never had anyone praise them for anything. They have never been told that they are any good or that they should think independently. Now you come in and confront them, accusing them of betraying principles they have never been taught to value. You should've known better."

There she was, this small girl, my student, lecturing me. She couldn't have been more than twenty, but somehow she managed to look authoritative without being impertinent. They love this cla.s.s, she said. They even learned to love Catherine Sloper, though she isn't pretty and lacks everything they look for in a heroine. I said, In these revolutionary times it's hardly surprising that students wouldn't care much about the trials and tribulations of a plain, rich American girl at the end of the nineteenth century. But she protested vehemently. In these revolutionary times, she said, they care even more. I don't know why people who are better off always think that those less fortunate than themselves don't want to have the good things-that they don't want to listen to good music, eat good food or read Henry James.

She was a slight girl, slight and dark. Her seriousness must have been a burden to her fragile frame. Even so, she was not frail; how a person this fragile looking could give an impression of such solidity I do not know. Razieh. I don't remember her last name, but her first name I can use without having to worry about security, because she is dead. It seems ironic that I should only be able to use the real names of dead people. She had the respect of her cla.s.smates and, in those deeply ideological times, was listened to by girls from both ideological extremes. She was an active member of the Mujahideen, but this didn't keep her from being suspicious of their cant. She had no father, and her mother earned her living as a cleaning woman. Both Razieh and her mother were deeply religious, and it was her religious belief that attracted her to the Mujahideen: she felt contempt for the Islamists who had usurped power.

Razieh had an amazing capacity for beauty. She said, You know, all my life I have lived in poverty. I had to steal books and sneak into movie houses-but, G.o.d, I loved those books! I don't think any rich kid has ever cherished Rebecca Rebecca or or Gone with the Wind Gone with the Wind the way I did when I borrowed the translations from houses where my mother worked. But James-he is so different from any other writer I have ever read. I think I am in love, she added, laughing. the way I did when I borrowed the translations from houses where my mother worked. But James-he is so different from any other writer I have ever read. I think I am in love, she added, laughing.

Razieh was such a strange mixture of contradictory pa.s.sions. She was bitter and determined, stern and tough, and yet she loved novels and writing with a real pa.s.sion. She said she did not wish to write but to teach. She was an inarticulate writer. She said, We envy people like you and we want to be you; we can't, so we destroy you. After I left that college, I saw her only once. I think she felt that by leaving their small college to teach at the University of Tehran I had abandoned them. I asked her to come to my cla.s.ses, to keep in touch. But she never did.

A few months after the b.l.o.o.d.y demonstration in the summer of 1981, I was walking down a wide, sunny street near the University of Tehran when, coming from the opposite direction, I saw a figure wrapped in a black chador, a small figure. The only reason I paid attention to her at all was that she paused for a second, startled. It was Razieh. She did not say h.e.l.lo, and in her look I could see a denial, a plea not to be recognized. We glanced at each other and pa.s.sed. I will never forget that glance on that day, and her so very thin small body, her narrow face and large eyes, like an owl's, or an imp's in some invented tale.

26.

In memory of my student Razieh, I will now digress and talk about her favorite book. I shall consider this an in memoriam.

What was it about Washington Square Washington Square that had so intrigued Razieh? True, there had been identification-she did see something of herself in its hapless heroine-but it was not that simple. that had so intrigued Razieh? True, there had been identification-she did see something of herself in its hapless heroine-but it was not that simple.

Washington Square seems straightforward enough, yet the characters cheat you: they act contrary to expectation, beginning with Catherine Sloper, the heroine. Catherine is trapped by her clever and materially successful father, who ignores her with contempt. He never forgives his devoted and shy daughter for the loss of his beloved wife, who died in childbirth. Moreover, he cannot get over his disappointment at Catherine's failure to be brilliant and beautiful. Catherine is also entrapped by her love of Morris Townsend, the "beautiful" (her word) young spendthrift who woos and courts her for her money. Mrs. Penniman, her shallow, sentimental and meddling widowed aunt, who tries to appease Catherine's romantic aspirations by proxy through matchmaking, completes the evil triumvirate. seems straightforward enough, yet the characters cheat you: they act contrary to expectation, beginning with Catherine Sloper, the heroine. Catherine is trapped by her clever and materially successful father, who ignores her with contempt. He never forgives his devoted and shy daughter for the loss of his beloved wife, who died in childbirth. Moreover, he cannot get over his disappointment at Catherine's failure to be brilliant and beautiful. Catherine is also entrapped by her love of Morris Townsend, the "beautiful" (her word) young spendthrift who woos and courts her for her money. Mrs. Penniman, her shallow, sentimental and meddling widowed aunt, who tries to appease Catherine's romantic aspirations by proxy through matchmaking, completes the evil triumvirate.

Catherine is an exceptional heroine, even for James. She is the inverse of our ideas of what a heroine should be: hefty, healthy, plain, dull, literal and honest. She is squeezed in between three colorful, clever, egocentric characters, who abuse and underestimate her while she remains loyal and good. One by one, James strips away from Catherine the qualities that make a heroine attractive; what he takes away from her he distributes among the other three characters. To Morris Townsend he bestows "beauty" and brilliance; to Mrs. Penniman, a Machiavellian love of intrigue; and to Dr. Sloper, he gives irony and judgment. But at the same time he deprives them of the single quality that distinguishes his heroine: compa.s.sion.

Like many heroines, Catherine is wrong; she has a gift for self-deception. She believes that Morris loves her, and refuses to believe her father's protestations to the contrary. James did not like his heroes and heroines to be infallible. In fact, they all make mistakes, harmful mostly to themselves. Their mistakes, like the tragic flaw in a cla.s.sical tragedy, become essential to their development and maturity.

Dr. Sloper, the most villainous of the three, is also the most correct. He is correct in his professional and in his private life and he makes all the right prognostications about his daughter, or almost all. He correctly, and with his usual touch of irony, predicts that Mrs. Penniman will try to persuade his daughter that some "young man with a moustache is in love with her. It will be quite untrue; no young man with a moustache or without will ever be in love with Catherine." From the beginning, Dr. Sloper doubts Morris Townsend's honorable intentions towards his daughter, and does his best to prevent their marriage. But what he can never penetrate is his daughter's heart. She constantly surprises him, because he does not really know her. He underestimates Catherine, but he does something worse: his failure is a failure of the heart. For Catherine's heart must be broken twice, once by her alleged lover, and then by her father. He is guilty of the same crime of which he accuses Morris, namely, lack of love for his daughter. Thinking of Dr. Sloper, we are reminded of one of Flaubert's insights: "You should have a heart in order to feel other people's hearts." And I was immediately reminded of poor Mr. Ghomi, who missed all these subtleties-or, rather, fortunate Mr. Ghomi, for whom no such scruples existed: in his book, a daughter must obey her father, and that was the end of the story.

Dr. Sloper never sees his daughter's needs. He complains about her lack of accomplishment yet never observes her hidden yearnings for music and theater. He sees her foolishness but misses her intense longing to be loved. It is not an accident that in her first meeting with Morris Townsend, at her cousin's wedding, Catherine, who has "suddenly developed a lively taste for dress," wears a red satin dress. The narrator informs us that "her great indulgence" was "really the desire of a rather inarticulate nature to manifest itself; she sought to be eloquent in her garments, and to make up for her diffidence of speech by a fine frankness of costume." The dress is a disaster; the color does not suit her, and makes her look ten years older. It is also the subject of her father's wittiest remarks. That same night, Catherine meets Morris and falls in love. Twice, her father misses his chance to understand and help her.

Thus, Dr. Sloper commits the most unforgivable crime in fiction-blindness. Pity is the pa.s.sword, says the poet John Shade in Nabokov's Pale Fire. Pale Fire. This respect for others, empathy, lies at the heart of the novel. It is the quality that links Austen to Flaubert and James to Nabokov and Bellow. This, I believe, is how the villain in modern fiction is born: a creature without compa.s.sion, without empathy. The personalized version of good and evil usurps and individualizes the more archetypal concepts, such as courage or heroism, that shaped the epic or romance. A hero becomes one who safeguards his or her individual integrity at almost any cost. This respect for others, empathy, lies at the heart of the novel. It is the quality that links Austen to Flaubert and James to Nabokov and Bellow. This, I believe, is how the villain in modern fiction is born: a creature without compa.s.sion, without empathy. The personalized version of good and evil usurps and individualizes the more archetypal concepts, such as courage or heroism, that shaped the epic or romance. A hero becomes one who safeguards his or her individual integrity at almost any cost.

I think most of my students would have agreed with this definition of evil, because it was so close to their own experience. Lack of empathy was to my mind the central sin of the regime, from which all the others flowed. My generation had tasted individual freedom and lost it; no matter how painful the loss, the recollection was there to protect us from the desert of the present. But what did this new generation have to safeguard them? Like Catherine's, their desires, their yearnings, their urges to express themselves, were manifested in bizarre ways.

As she is shunned by her father, manipulated by her aunt and finally deserted by her suitor, Catherine Sloper learns, painfully, to stand up to each and every one of them-not in their way but in her own, quietly and humbly. In all respects, she maintains her own style of dealing with events and with people. She defies her father even on his deathbed by refusing to promise that she will never marry Morris, although she has no intention by now of doing so. She refuses to "open her heart" to her aunt and appease her sentimental curiosity, and in the last pages of the book, in a quietly magnificent scene, she refuses the hand her fickle lover has now extended to her after twenty years. She surprises them with her every act. In each of these instances her actions arise not from a desire for revenge but from a sense of propriety and dignity, to use two outmoded terms much favored by Jamesian protagonists.

Only Catherine has the capacity to change and mature, although here, as in so many of James's novels, our heroine pays a dear price for this change. And she does take a form of revenge on both her father and her suitor: she refuses to give in to them. In the end, she has her triumph.

If we can call it that. One can believe James's claim to an "imagination of disaster"; so many of his protagonists are unhappy in the end, and yet he gives them an aura of victory. It is because these characters depend to such a high degree on their own sense of integrity that for them, victory has nothing to do with happiness. It has more to do with a settling within oneself, a movement inward that makes them whole. Their reward is not happiness- happiness-a word that is central in Austen's novels but is seldom used in James's universe. What James's characters gain is self-respect. And we become convinced that this must be the hardest thing in the world when, as we come to the end of the last page of Washington Square, Washington Square, after Catherine's exasperated suitor leaves, we learn that: "Catherine, meanwhile, in the parlour, picking up her morsel of fancy-work, had seated herself with it again-for life, as it were." after Catherine's exasperated suitor leaves, we learn that: "Catherine, meanwhile, in the parlour, picking up her morsel of fancy-work, had seated herself with it again-for life, as it were."

27.

I rang the bell to his apartment one more time, but again there was no response. I stepped back from the door and looked at the window of his living room: the curtains were closed; all was cream-colored and quiet. I had an appointment with him that afternoon, after which Bijan would pick me up and take me to a friend's house for dinner. I was thinking of finding a phone to call him when a neighbor with a bag of fruit appeared, opened the front door and invited me in with a welcoming smile. I thanked him and ran up the stairs. The door to his apartment was open, but there was no response to my repeated calls, so I went in.

The apartment was in tip-top shape, everything in its place: the rocking chair, the kilim, the day's newspapers neatly folded on the table, the bed made. I wandered from room to room looking for some sign of disorder, some clue to this break in the routine. The door was open. He must have gone out for something-say, coffee or milk-and left the door open for me. What else could explain his absence? What else could it be? Could they have come to get him? Could they have taken him away? Once that idea entered my mind, it refused to leave. It kept reverberating like a mantra: they've taken him away, they've taken him away, they've . . . It was not unknown-they'd done it before to others. Once, a writer's apartment was found unlocked. His friends had found on the kitchen table the remnants of his breakfast, the yolk of an egg streaming across the plate, a piece of toast, b.u.t.ter, some strawberry jam, a half-empty gla.s.s of tea. Every room seemed to describe an unfinished act: in the bedroom, an unmade bed; in the office, piles of books scattered on the floor and over the big stuffed chair; on the desk, an open book, a pair of gla.s.ses. Two weeks later they discovered that he had been whisked away by the secret police, for questioning. These questionings were part of our everyday lives.

But why? Why should they take him? He had no political affiliations, wrote no inflammatory articles. But then, he has so many friends. . . . How do I know he isn't secretly involved in some political group, an underground guerrilla leader? The thought seemed absurd, but any explanation was better than none at all: I had to find a reason for the sudden absence of a man bound to routines, conscious of his obligations, always exactly five minutes early to his appointments, a man, I suddenly realized, who had deliberately created an image of himself out of his routines, bread crumbs for us to follow.

I went to the phone by the couch in the living room. Should I call Reza, his best friend? But then I'd worry him too-better wait for a while; maybe he'd return. And what if they come back and find me here? Shut up, shut up shut up! Just wait, he'll be back any minute. I glanced at my watch. He's only forty-five minutes late. Only? I'll wait for another half hour, then I will decide.