How is it that you can make people stay somewhere they want to leave, and make people leave who want to be there? (p. 111)
In 1979, when Shida Bazyar brings her novel, I was a senior in high school. I was not concerned with politics, or religion, or being oppressed by my government. I knew little of the terror under which other people in the world were living by the so-called leaders of their country, although I did know of the Shah. Of the Iranians holding 52 Americans hostage for 444 days, under Jimmy Carter’s presidency.
The Nights Are Quiet in Tehran begins with the perspective of Behzad. He is a young revolutionary in Iran, working against the Shah’s regime with his friends Peyman and Sohrab. He is in love with beautiful Nahid, who will only look down, demurely, when he tries to make a connection with her.
When I look at her, because I can’t help it, because there is no other face in this room and in this country that I want to look at so much, she quickly looks elsewhere, as if her head had never been turned to this corner of the room where I am sitting and waiting, and there is a little smile on her lips, as intelligent and proud as the rest of her. (p. 55)
When Peyman is arrested, Behzad knows it is time for him as well; surely his name is on some list, too.
We follow the story to 1989, this time from Nahid’s perspective. She is a young mother now, living in East Germany, an Iranian in exile. How ironic, I think, to go from the oppression in Iran to the oppression of communism in East Germany. (I lived in Germany when the Berlin Wall was still up. I know what it was like there.) But there, at least, she has freedom to dress as she chooses, to make friends with the neighbors and mothers of her children’s school friends. Yet freedom has a price. What if her daughter chooses to sit in boys’ laps, to sit laughing on a wall, wearing bright colored leggings?
Then I think that I never want to walk down here and see my Laleh sitting by the fountain. My Laleh on a boy’s lap, without the love from Hafez’s words. It’s lucky that my Laleh will never be an adult here, and I’ll never lose her to a fountain and brightly colored leggings; by the time she’s that age, we’ll be back, Khomeini will be dead, everything will be different, everything better, and until then I will keep saying no when she asks for chewing gum - that might be how it all starts, first she starts chewing gum, and in a few years she’ll want to sit by the fountain in brightly colored leggings. (p. 102)
And now this daughter, Laleh, is telling us of taking a trip back to Tehran in 1999. Her little sister moves her head to the sound coming from her Sony Walkman; her brother puts down his Game Boy to have his passport photo taken. She tucks her hair back under the hajib she must wear now that she is no longer living in the “freedom” of East Germany. Freedom…what a relative word.
The nights are quiet in Tehran. The days, so loud. The people in the house so loud, talking so loudly about unimportant things and hesitating so loudly about unimportant things. Their laughter so loud, the names they call out so loud, the way they say those polite sentences so loud, throwing them out like breathing, their presence so loud, fabric-swathed bodies in a protected space, the clatter of crockery so loud, as they cook, eat drink tea - a constant silvery, dry clatter of one thing against another. (p. 141)
It is Mo’s turn to continue the story, in the year 2009. He is living a college student’s life in Germany: drinking too much, sleeping too little, while unrest abounds. He witnesses the upheaval arising from the Iranian presidential election, during which protesters demand Mahmoud Ahmadinejad be removed from office because they see it as a fraudulent election. (Is there any country which doesn’t accuse the leader of being fraudulently elected?! We face it ourselves, in America, which I had once believed to be fair and true…almost above reproach.)
It has taken me several days to read this book of only 266 pages, for the concepts of oppression and freedom, family and individuality, are so familiar. They are themes so applicable to any of the decades which have gone before us, and they will be applicable to those yet to come. We have much to learn from our mistakes, and it is difficult to hope that peace is attainable.
Thank you to Scribe Publications for sending me this gorgeous book. I’m so glad you brought it to us, to me.
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