Reading Lolita in Tehran: Part III

Was it the arrogance of the new Islamic revolutionaries, who kept provoking what they deemed to be reactionary and heretical regimes in the Middle East and inciting the people of those countries to revolutionary uprisings?

I mean, this guy was flabby but not jovial, one of those dour, mirthless overweight men who don’t even enjoy their food—you know the type.

Could you please lay off the guard of the mournful countenance, I pleaded with her, and get on with your story?

They saw hands, faces and pink lipstick; they saw strands of hair and unruly socks where I saw some ethereal being drifting soundlessly down the street.

What do people who are made irrelevant do? They will sometimes escape, I mean physically, and if that is not possible, they will try to make a comeback, to become a part of the game by assimilating the characteristics of their conquerors.

I have to be precise in terms of the day, month and year of their births, details that twinkle and tease every time I think of their blessed births, and have no compunction in becoming sentimental over their coming into this world.

I used the material culled from my dissertation on Mike Gold and proletarian writers of the thirties in America to write my first article in Persian.

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.

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.

Most of my friends merely confused me by posing the dilemma back to me: is it better to help the young people who might otherwise not have a chance to learn or to refuse categorically to comply with this regime?

Then somehow I managed to divert my own emergency meeting into a discussion of the book I was immersed in at the moment, Dashiell Hammett’s The Continental Op, and Steve Marcus’s marvelous essay on Hammett in which he cited a line from Nietzsche that struck me as pertinent to our situation.

As for your qualms about submitting to the regime, none of us can drink a single glass of water without the grace of the moral guardians of the Islamic Republic.

We intellectuals, more than ordinary citizens, either play scrupulously into their hands and call it constructive dialogue or withdraw from life completely in the name of fighting the regime.

He was religious, but not ideological and not a sycophant.

He was surprised, but decided to accede, at least in principle, to my requirement for freedom.

He thrust his hand up at every opportunity and asked, or rather stated, his strident objections.

Daisy, defying all caution and decorum, has gone to watch the moonlight with Mr. Giovanelli, an unscrupulous Italian who follows her everywhere, to the chagrin of her correct countrymen and -women.

Miss Ruhi had imbibed the same dregs as Mr. Nyazi and so many others.

Mr. Nahvi, his silent older friend, wrote neat philosophical treatises on the dangers of doubt and uncertainty.

There was a sense of fatalism about her, about what she had accepted as her lot, that I could not bear.

We moved the children first to our own room, covering the windows in addition with thick blankets and shawls, and then, later, into the tiny windowless hall outside our bedrooms, the scene of my sleepless assignations with James and Nabokov.

He said the Tarkovsky mania was so pervasive that even the oil minister and his family had gone to a screening. People were starved for films.

I cannot honestly say what I thought of the film—the experience of sitting in a movie house, ensconced in the deep, cool leather, with a full-size screen in front of me, was too amazing.

Then Nassrin jumped in with a screed about one of the female guards.

If I were not privileged, she said with rancor, if I were not blessed with a father who shared their faith, God knows where I would be now...

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.”

He was aware, as many were not, of the toll such cruelty takes on emotions and of the resistance to compassion that such events engender.

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.”

“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.”

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.”

They had transcribed seemingly word for word what I had said about A Farewell to Arms, including my “you know”s and my digressions about Hemingway’s personal life.

He is correct in his professional and in his private life and he makes all the right prognostications about his daughter, or almost all.

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.

We would bet on when, where and how many missiles would hit the city. It helped reduce the tension, however lugubrious some of our victories may have seemed.

People were tired and seemed not to care about the government’s edicts anymore.

It was also aimed at intimidating and controlling a restive population, by holding up the prospect of even greater misfortune, and by reminding us that all had once not been so well on the Western front.

But I felt restless sitting in the living room and ruminating, so I decided to go to the university anyway.

The crowd surged towards the helicopter, and as it took off, a golden dust rose up from the ground, like a flying skirt, and gradually all that remained were particles of dancing dust, whirling like minuscule dervishes in a bizarre dream.

Last time we talked about certain traits in James, how they appear in different characters and within different contexts, and today I want to talk about the word courage, one that we bandy about a great deal these days in our own culture.

Resentment had erased all ambiguity in our encounters with people like him; we had been polarized into “us” and “them.”