The Republic of Imagination: America in Three Books (5 page)

My conversation with Ramin and subsequent conversations over the years with those who have felt homeless in their own home—those who have carried their ghosts with them while in some way believing in and relying upon that other home, the portable one—inspired the writing of this book. Later my thoughts were reshaped by conversations with other readers, those I like to call intimate strangers, the ones who create an invisible, almost conspiratorial society, bound by the books they read. This book is for them. My hope is that they will find a home in its pages.

PART I

The books that the world calls immoral are books that show its own shame.

—Oscar Wilde,
The Picture of Dorian Gray

I muse upon my country’s ills—

The tempest bursting from the waste of Time

On the world’s fairest hope linked with man’s foulest crime.

—
Herman Melville, “Misgivings”

“‘Huck Finn’s Progenies’” is not a good subtitle for your book. ‘Children’ would be better, but not much. Find something easier on the ear,” Farah said with finality. “And now, tell me all about it.”

Farah was my best friend from childhood. She always wanted to know what I was up to, and she wouldn’t stop needling me about my book. “Tell me all about it,” she would say, “from start to finish.” I told her it was impossible, that I seldom if ever showed my writing to anyone other than my editor. And besides, how could I tell her all about a book I had not yet written? She’d just have to wait.

“I can’t afford to wait,” she said with a smile. “I might not be around to read it.”

I couldn’t offer the usual platitudes—“Of course you’ll be around. You have beaten the cancer so far; you will beat it this time, too.” Because we both knew this time was different.

She kept smiling, with no trace of self-pity or pain, just pure mischief—she had me where she wanted me. It was a typical Farah gesture, letting on that she was manipulating you into doing what she wanted, making you complicit in a conspiracy against yourself. This was what made it possible for her to transcend and resist what her daughter would later call the “hurdles” in her life. Farah herself once good-naturedly complained that the gods above must have known her tolerance for hardship, because they kept “blessing” her with all manner of nightmares. She had survived a revolution and a war, had been smuggled across the border from Iran into Turkey, seven months’ pregnant, her two-and-half-year-old daughter in tow while her husband was being tortured in a Tehran jail—to name just one example among many.

“I want to know,” I said, “just how low you will stoop.”

Ignoring me, she said, “And don’t forget I am an editor. Pretend I am
your
editor.”

She was a senior editor at the International Monetary Fund, not exactly the kind of editor I had in mind. But Farah and I had a long history.

We were driving back to Georgetown from Chevy Chase, where we had spent over two hours at a Borders bookstore that no longer exists with Farah’s older sister, Mahnaz, jumping from heated discussions of the presidential race in America (this was 2008, and despite Obama’s victory in the primaries, we were still debating the comparative merits of Obama and Clinton) to gossip, shopping, the Iranian government’s machinations and my upcoming interview for U.S. citizenship. Because after eleven years in Washington, I had finally applied to become an American citizen. Farah took this as a cue to proselytize for her latest obsession, a passionate enchantment with U.S. history.

Before she became too ill to drive, the three of us would meet regularly in bookstores dotted around Georgetown and Dupont Circle, or at the Cheesecake Factory in Chevy Chase, or Leopold’s in Cady’s Alley, to talk and talk. We would be giddy with excitement, too impatient to let one another finish our sentences, childishly interrupting with a chaos of allusions and shortcuts understandable only to ourselves. Even at the hairdresser (because we three would meet there, too, when one of us needed a haircut or a blow-dry), we would be so raucous that soon the polite and considerate owner relegated us to a back room, serving us cappuccinos while we tried in vain to keep our voices down.

Farah and Mahnaz had both majored in English literature—rare for Iranians even now, and more so then—and our discussions were always peppered with exchanges about books. We were related, but blood alone was not responsible for this intimacy. Long before I was called into a drab office at Immigration Services to answer a few questions and take an oath as a newly minted American citizen, we shared the complicity of being citizens of two countries, straddling two such different worlds. We belonged to two languages, simultaneously reminding us of the country we had left behind and the one we had chosen to make our new home. More than anything else, it was that ready access to two languages, to their poetry and fiction, to their cultures, vague as that term might seem, that provided us with a temporary feeling of stability.

I have always believed it was that initial sense of kinship, the sharing of the same dreams and our love of literature, that sustained our friendship—that led us to take that car ride and so many others like it, when Farah and I would often get so involved in conversation that we would inevitably lose our way, miss an exit on Rockville Pike and almost always be late for our meetings with Mahnaz, who sat like patience on a monument, trying to find something funny in our schoolgirl excuses and suppressed giggles.

“You must bring more U.S. history in your new book, the way you did with Iran in
Reading Lolita,
” Farah said, turning toward me instead of keeping her eye on the road. “How else can you write about American fiction?”

Farah was never shy about telling me what to do. I started to complain that when I once mentioned Tocqueville in a graduate seminar,
one of my students had raised her hand and asked, “Who is Tocqueville?”

“Can you believe it?” I said, with mounting indignation. “At a school for international studies, for heaven’s sake!” I would soon discover that most of the class did not know about the Frenchman who had written
Democracy in America
. “I bet quite a few of my students in Iran would at least have heard of him.”

“All the more reason,” Farah said, seemingly unperturbed, “why you should read Joseph J. Ellis’s
Founding Brothers
.”

Two years later, I would accompany Mahnaz to Farah’s bedroom to choose a keepsake from a pile of books randomly stacked against the wall, like a group of orphaned children waiting for a new parent. I did not hesitate in picking
Founding Brothers
. I could not think of any book that reminded me more of the intimately joyous times Farah and I spent together—any book, that is, other than
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
.

It so happened that Farah’s prediction came true; she didn’t get a chance to read my book. Five years after that conversation, I had not yet finished writing it. The main hurdle was the chapter we talked so much about, the one on Huck Finn. It took me more than two years to write it, and then I set it aside for another year because it didn’t feel right—too much analysis, too little heart. Looking over my notes in frustration, I kept coming across my conversations with Farah. Then it hit me that she had left me the key to the chapter in our exchanges, when Huck became so central to our musings about becoming American, about the meaning of exile and home. Farah had made peace with what it meant to live with a divided heart.

I had not thought seriously of writing about those conversations until I received an e-mail from Farah’s daughter in response to my inquiry about how a dog Farah had adopted in the last months of her life had come to be called Huck. “There was something about Huck Finn in the air in our house that last year,” Neda wrote back. “Mom started talking about your project and was entranced. Imagination and the journey-quest is at the heart of every life well-lived. Sometime in the months before she died, she asked me to get a book on tape for her and download it to her iPod. I borrowed
Huck Finn
from the library and put it on her iPod and while she was listening to it with earbuds, I was listening to it at work during the long, long hours of watching Congress grind to a halt. And I still haven’t been able to return the original. Yes, I am effectively a thief.”

Huck came to mean more to Farah as she sorted through her memories and sought to tell herself and her daughter the story of her own journey—her “adventure,” if that is the right word for all manner of bad luck. In fiction, every treachery and setback appears to serve some end: the characters learn and grow and come into their own. In life, it is not always clear that the hijacking of our plans is quite so provident or benign.

When Farah and I met in those last eighteen months of her life, we seldom talked about anything other than
Huck Finn
—like two teenage best friends in love with the same elusive boy. Our conversations took place in different parts of Washington, usually somewhere between Foggy Bottom (my home) and Georgetown (hers), at her house or in various coffee shops and restaurants, and sometimes, when she felt well, on walks around the waterfront or along the canal. In every one of these places, our conversations would take us to familiar landscapes as sudden windows opened up, framing vistas of our past lives. So many things were happening then—two wars halfheartedly and desultorily waged, the economy going from bad to worse, heated election campaigns, and new hopes forming the seeds of new disillusionment both in Iran and in the United States. Farah was elated at the prospect of Obama and gave dinners and talks that she would rope me into, mobilizing everyone she knew between bouts of chemotherapy and radiation. She was in and out of the hospital for ever more painful operations, trying new treatments, until finally there was no treatment and I would find her bicycling to the clinic to get vitamin C shots, and then she had a new dog, small and mischievous—Huck.

Throughout that dreadful year, the original Huck was our guide, our inspiration, the thorn in our side who reminded us to be true to ourselves and who goaded us when we became too complacent, too conventional in our preoccupations, whenever we seemed too comfortable with our lot. He gave us vital clues as to the kind of Americans we wanted to be. He reminded us—and this was something I kept coming back to—that at their best, American heroes are wary of being overcivilized, that they carve out their own path and look to their heart for what is right and just. How far we seemed to be, I would confide complicitly to Farah, from that America, the one we had both discovered so many years ago
when we first read
Huckleberry Finn.

Memories, like actual experiences, leave a feeling, a certain mood, behind, and my recollections of Farah still evoke sparkles and tingles, akin to the tingle of excitement I felt as a child as I impatiently waited for her visit or when I ran up the narrow staircase to her grandmother’s apartment to find her. During family gatherings we were always together, whispering and giggling over the most insignificant things, happy with our sense of superiority over all others. I have a photo of Farah, my brother and me (I must have been six or seven at the time) standing by a birthday cake, our smiles conspiratorial, our bodies leaning very slightly toward one another, aware of our proximity. We are oblivious of the chubby one-year-old birthday girl, restless in her mother’s arms, standing directly behind us.

Farah’s mother was a Nafisi, and my maternal
grandmother was, like Farah’s father, an Ebrahimi. The collective recollections of our families mix and mingle with the history of our friendship. Nafisis were known for being bookish and somber, with the weight of the world on their shoulders, and Ebrahimis were the carefree, fun-loving characters that each Nafisi secretly desired to be but publicly shunned. I was Nafisi on both sides, and she had just the right doses of Nafisi and Ebrahimi to preserve the balance.

In telling a story, we impose order on chaos, the narrative is always more coherent, more “logical” and structured than the mess of life, and yet our relationship appeared to have been structured like a story: over a period of four decades, Farah and I would meet, separate and reconnect at crucial points in our lives in Iran and America. Looking over the computer file I’ve named Farah, I notice how often during our talks we would move from Huck to the startling parallels in our own lives, our rediscovery of each other at different stages, moving to the beat of the political and social upheavals in our country of birth, Iran, and our adopted country—or, rather, the one that adopted us—America. It was as if we were fated to meet every decade or so and to take it from there: Tehran, Chicago, Oklahoma City, Tehran, Washington, D.C. Who knew that Tehran would someday be part of that irretrievable landscape to which Farah herself has now migrated? She once remarked that it was eerie, the way our relationship seemed to be based on a “harmless” version of Edgar Allan Poe’s “William Wilson.” “Only you are not my evil double,” she said, “but a double.” We were each other’s clarifying shadows, or distorted mirrors, I thought.

Our first separation came when, at ten, she left Iran to live with her strikingly beautiful mother, Ferdows, who had divorced her handsome and wayward husband, leaving an opulent life in Iran to start a new one in the United States, with barely a cent to her name. Why did she leave? Farah, Mahnaz and I would periodically return to this question, without ever agreeing on a satisfactory answer. People talked about Ferdows when she left. “Why couldn’t she tolerate a little fickleness?” they would ask. “Don’t all men have a roving eye? But not all men are as kindhearted and generous as Majid Khan!” (“My father,” Farah later said, “was a distant figure with whom there was little contact and no conversation. My mother moved about in beautiful robes, smelling of powder and perfume, a bundle of keys to various storage trunks and closets tinkling in her pocket.”)

My mother admired Farah’s mother and always spoke of her with respect tinged with envy. According to one persistent family rumor, my mother was infatuated with Ferdows’s husband, but I think the real reason for her fascination was that she instinctively grasped Ferdows’s audacity and courage. She had taken the kind of step my mother would have liked to and never had, leaving behind security, comfort, beloved friends. For a woman who had never worked in her life, who had always had servants and cooks to take care of the household, to begin a new life with little money, waitressing at tables in an alien country and working her way up—that was courage, something all of her children, including Farah’s brother, Hamid, the beloved but unacknowledged
male in the family, inherited.

The women in that family all turned out to be exceptional and audacious, each in her own headstrong and independent way. The grandmother chose to become a Baha’i, a banned sect, inviting all manner of persecution, and later Mahnaz became a women’s rights activist and the first minister for women’s affairs in the shah’s government, and had the honor of being on the Islamic Republic’s blacklist of people who were to be executed for “warring with God” and “spreading prostitution.” (Later, in exile, when the rulers of the Islamic Republic tried to silence her, Mahnaz continued in the same vein, as an innovative and dedicated champion of women’s rights.) Farah, the youngest, the baby of the family, never did appreciate her own courage, her stamina, in the face not just of human cruelties but of those more inevitable and immutable ones.