The Republic of Imagination: America in Three Books (15 page)

We felt a great deal of frustration over Obama’s hesitation to support the uprising. It had been only a few months since his election, which so many thought of as a turning point, not just for America but for the world. I remember, at the time of the inauguration, a friend sent me a photograph of Barack Obama published in a Persian paper, with a caption reading, “Why can’t we have someone like this?” The paper was promptly shut down, and now, less than a year later, Iranians protesting their own presidential elections were chanting, “Obama, Obama, are you with them or are you with us?” It was a question Obama could never fully answer, no matter what he might have felt in his heart of hearts.

Farah had participated energetically in the American election campaigns. She was especially excited about Obama and had convinced me, despite the fact I could not vote, that I should participate in fund-raising events in his honor. She asked me to tell her in minute detail about one of these, a meeting organized by Jonathan Safran Foer, with Toni Morrison, Samantha Power, Tony Kushner and Jhumpa Lahiri. And so I dutifully related Samantha Power’s story of how Obama had called to praise her book on genocide and then offered her a job in his office. “This is going to be a new era,” Farah whispered in excitement. As always, I was far more skeptical of politics and politicians, and therefore less surprised when neither Obama nor the uprising turned out in our favor, although in Iran, at least, I knew that the regime would not have the last word forever.

I believe that Farah never recovered from the defeat of that uprising, though despite her disappointment in America’s lukewarm support, she still harbored a great deal of hope for Obama. Her cancer spread like wildfire soon after that, as if she had lost her will to fight. I have not, as yet, wiped out her phone numbers and e-mail address from my computer, and every once in a while I visit her Twitter account and hover over her last message: “Iranians in Wash. DC support our brave country men and women inside fighting for all of our rights. Our hearts and minds are w/ you.”

“Whatever the literary establishment might think, a good story always has a good ending.” So says Jessica Fletcher, that knowing and wise fictional murder mystery writer and amateur sleuth of the television series
Murder, She Wrote
who has never failed at solving a crime. And she is right about this particular good story. Only the good ending is not quite what we would expect it to be. Unlike many readers, including Hemingway, who have found the last ten chapters of
Huckleberry Finn
unnecessary, I believe the trip to the Phelps farm is central to the main theme of the book: the triumph, as Twain would put it, of the “sound heart” over a “deformed conscience.”

From the moment Huck steps onto the Phelps farm, all of the movement, the variety, the dangerous magic of the river disappear, and we find ourselves once again in the oppressive atmosphere of the opening pages. Phelps farm is a reentry into the real world, where attempts will be made to make Huck complicit in recapturing Jim.

Huck’s description of the farm exudes melancholy and boredom. When he gets there, the air is “still and Sunday-like.” His mood and the tone of his voice, even his words—“lonesome,” “dead,” and “spirits”—echo his description of the widow’s house. This feeling is reinforced when, a paragraph later, he informs us that he “heard the dim hum of a spinning-wheel wailing along up and sinking along down again; and then I knowed for certain I wished I was dead—for that
is
the lonesomest sound in the whole world.”

The Phelps farm is a place where reality and illusion are tested. This becomes clearer when Tom arrives and, since Huck has been mistaken by Aunt Sally for Tom, disguises himself as his younger brother, Sid. When Tom finds out that Jim has been sold to the owner of the farm, he devises an elaborate scheme to free him, ignoring Huck’s repeated protests, deriving inspiration from various adventure novels he has read. He ends up treating Jim in a most cruel manner and terrifying the people at the farm by playing pranks on them. When Tom’s plans go awry and he is wounded, Jim decides, at great personal cost, to stay on and help. Only then does the reader realize the consequences of Tom’s frivolous and self-indulgent desire to impose his fantasies on other people, when the violent words he uses are not games anymore.

Then we learn that Tom
knew
Miss Watson had already freed Jim. It is conceivable that a highly religious person such as Miss Watson, when preparing to meet her maker, would set Jim free, perhaps in a moment of sudden charity, perhaps to earn more points in heaven. But her pardon does not count for much. It is, as the saying goes, too little too late. It does nothing to erase the deeper prejudice bolstering the whole institution of slavery. Twain knew only too well that slavery could be abolished and blacks would still be deprived of their rights. For as long as the attitude that condoned and justified slavery remained, there would be lynching and segregation and the Ku Klux Klan, and, as our own more recent experiences show, that same attitude can reappear clothed in different guises: as fascism, communism or Islamism—or patriotism, for that matter, when it is wielded like a cudgel.

Tom is the only white character in the book who has any hold on Huck. He reads books, he uses big words, he knows all the formulas. He is not a religious fanatic and does not seem to be really bothered one way or the other about slavery. He is, in a sense, more dangerous than an outright racist. He is the ultimate sinner, a dangerous fantasizer who acknowledges no consequences. The difference between Huck and Tom becomes clear in these last chapters: what distinguishes Huck is not just his regard for Jim, but his innate repulsion to cruelty. Yet this does not mean that he is not influenced—or perhaps a better word is intimidated—by authority, especially Tom’s authority. Huck feels himself inferior to Tom in terms of knowledge and learning. His courage is rooted in his heart, and he responds to an inner authority he does not know how to define.

Tom is the only one who knows that Jim is a freeman, that Miss Watson freed him on her deathbed, and yet he is prepared to add to Jim’s suffering by playing games in order to entertain himself. Huck is the exact opposite. He cannot bear for others to suffer, even if they are murderers or charlatans. All violence is based on blindness, on a lack of reflection and empathy. Miss Watson, Pap and Tom offer up variations on this theme, which I would go so far as to say is a not just a central theme of
Huck Finn
but a structural element of the novel since its very inception.

Huck wondered all along why Tom, with his respectable upbringing, would commit such a “wicked” act as freeing a slave. He discovers that Tom did in fact act according to his “upbringing,” as he knew that Jim was a freeman. And yet in the end it appears as if Tom, who has inflicted so much pain, is also the happiest character. He has learned nothing from his own or others’ experiences. Left to his own devices, he tells Huck, he would do the same thing over again, only more elaborately. Before we say goodbye to him, Huck informs us that “Tom’s most well now, and got his bullet around his neck on a watch-guard for a watch, and is always seeing what time it is.”

Parallel to Tom’s unpardonable cruelty, there is Jim and his unforgettable generosity. Although we see Jim mainly as a captive of his white masters and Tom’s whims and fantasies, he takes over the story by refusing to act as they do, by refusing to be blind toward others or to be motivated by self-interest. When Tom is wounded and Huck leaves the two of them to fetch a doctor, Jim has a chance to run for freedom. Instead he remains with Tom and, at great risk to his own life, helps the doctor save him. This is where hope lies: not in a rosy future for Jim, whose next step, like everything else in the novel, is left unresolved, but in his refusal to act vindictively, thereby gaining true freedom from his oppressor. Freedom, like happiness, has to be pursued. There is no end to this struggle, so there can be no end to this story. In fiction, as in life, what matters most is not the beginning or the end but the path that leads from one to the other.

In the end, Huck is not yet completely cleansed of his racist conscience, nor is his future necessarily brighter than it was at the start of his adventures. But whatever might happen, no one can erase the bond between Huck and Jim.

In the morning, I stepped out onto the balcony for a few minutes. The air was crisp and fresh, the sun hovered over the water, the boats silently made their way up the river and a jogger ran by, her body in a determined pose, as if slashing through some invisible obstacle, like a swimmer pushing through water. I heard the sounds of cars, motorcycles, a plane. . . . Life was out there, and I wanted to join in. I wanted to become a part of it all. Soon I would dress and go to Borders to meet Farah, who of late had been feeling pretty good. She’d said we should take advantage of it until the next round came. The next round!

I was impatiently making my way through
The
Washington Post
when I heard her familiar voice behind me saying, “What’s up?” She was late, as usual, and smiling. She looked good, with her very short hair, her bright lipstick. She used to turn around for us to show off her figure and say, “Look how thin I have become, model thin!”

As soon as she sat down, she said, “Tell me, Azi!” Almost every time I saw her she would say, “Tell me, Azi, tell me!” She wanted to know about my classes, my talks, my travels. More than once she told me she had no public ambition of her own, that she lived vicariously through Mahnaz and me. In fact, she was much more social than either one of us. Farah was one of the most active people I knew. She had what you might call an amazing appetite for life. Cancer had spurred her to take trips with the people she loved—to Northern California with Neda, to Paris and Spain with Habib, to St. Michaels with Mahnaz, Hamid and the family. All of us in her close circle would confide our stories to her, and she participated in our personal dramas so energetically that at times we forgot that she was the one who was facing real obstacles and fighting real demons.

I told her about my morning experience and the fact that, in order to feel at home in a city, I need to have some connection to nature as a point of contact, some mental image to take away with me. In Tehran, it had been the Elburz Mountains, and now, today, I felt I had finally entered a new stage with D.C.: the Potomac River! Every morning when I wake up now, I walk out onto the balcony and pay homage to the river.

“Huck’s influence,” she said with a twinkle.

“No,” I said, “his river is so different, and he lives not by the river but
on
the river. I am a far more domesticated creature.”

“Oh, I don’t know about that. Now tell me,” she said again, “tell me all about it.”

That’s how it was in that last year. Every time I gave a talk, went to an event or traveled, I had to give her a full account. It was the same with Mahnaz: she was curious about the minutest details of her sister’s activities and would interject as if she herself had been present. “Your lives are public, and they are exciting. I cannot live that kind of life, so this is how I experience it,” she said. It didn’t matter that she could have, at any point, lived that kind of life had she chosen to.

I so miss the girlish enthusiasm and giggles that accompanied our serious discussions on human rights, civic duty and literature, always literature. Farah attended all of Mahnaz’s conferences and participated in her workshops, for which she was at times herself a presenter. “Can you imagine,” she used to say, “my sister’s organization has a branch in Kyrgystan, for heaven’s sake!” After the conferences we would spend hours dissecting the meetings and discussing our favorite participants: the legendary civil rights leader Marianne Wright Edelman, Mary Robinson, Rose Styron, Grace Paley. “This abundance of riches!” Farah would say with a sign of satisfaction.

At first reluctantly, and later eagerly, I told her about my own “adventures,” as she called them. I would recount the minute details of my travels, meeting writers in different parts of the world. This time she wanted to hear about my first trip to the Mantova book festival, where my old heroine Muriel Spark had adopted me. She had invited me to her hotel, and all the time her mantra was “Poor Doris.” Doris was Doris Lessing, who’d somehow had her flight canceled in Zurich or Lausanne and was sent to Italy on a bus with no toilet, all her luggage lost. And Muriel kept saying, with relish, “Oh, I feel so sorry for Doris. If only I could lend her my slacks, but we are not the same size.” Coming down the stairs of the hotel, we saw her, like a patient and stoic bag lady, with a brown cardigan and a brown paper bag that must have contained all of her possessions, holding a toothbrush and toothpaste and a few other essentials, looking so dignified, so utterly patient, without any anger or bitterness. . . . Well, Muriel loved it; she appeared to enjoy every moment of it, still at that age.

Another time I told Farah how Salman Rushdie, who had been a popular writer in Iran until the notorious fatwa, had come to my table at a PEN Gala to graciously compliment me on my book, and I, in my zeal to tell him how much I admired his courage, fumbled and said something so convoluted that he thought I had said, “You deserved to die.” (What I had meant to say was that in Iran, those targeted by the regime were particularly revered, and so with its fatwa the regime had in effect conferred on him Iran’s highest honor.) At the Hay Festival, the writer Lisa Appignanesi laughingly asked me if it was true that I had told Salman he deserved to die, and the question was repeated by others until I saw Rushdie again and swore I’d never said any such thing, and he kindly and mischievously put his arm around my shoulder and said, “Yes you did, yes you did, but it’s okay . . .”

Farah always laughed. “Are you having fun?” she would ask, almost anxiously, in the same tone as she would tell me that she worried I was not taking care of my health. I wasn’t really having fun—I didn’t know why I should be having fun. “For heaven’s sakes, woman!” she would say. “Have some fun! It’s okay, you might even deserve it.” It was not until much later, when she was gone, that I realized how telling her these stories had become a way of remembering, a way even of enjoying events that I had been too preoccupied, too self-conscious, to give in to and simply enjoy, as Farah kept advising me to do.