Azar Nafisi by Reading Lolita in Tehran Page B

painting of yellow flowers in two blue vases, also on the floor.
    We were waiting for my mother’s Turkish coffee. My mother made fabulous Turkish coffee, thick, bittersweet, and this served as her excuse for periodic intrusions. At different intervals in the day, we would hear her calling us through the connecting door to our apartment. “Tahereh, Tahereh . . .” she would call, and she continued calling even when Tahereh and I answered her back in unison. Assured that we did indeed want our coffee, she disappeared, sometimes for over an hour.
    This was my mother’s way of communication for as long as I can remember. Curious about my class on Thursday mornings and too proud just to barge in, she used the coffee to gain admittance to our sanctuary. One morning she “accidentally” came upstairs and called me from the kitchen. “Do your guests want coffee?” she asked, glancing through the open door at my curious, smiling students. So another ritual was added to our Thursdays: my mother’s coffee hour. She soon formed her favorites among my students and tried to create separate relations with them.
    For as long as I can remember, she would ask perfect strangers to our house for coffee. One day we had to turn away an alarmingly athletic man in his late thirties, who had by mistake rung our bell asking for the lady who had told him to drop by and have coffee with her when he was in the neighborhood. The guards at the hospital opposite our house were her regular “customers.” At first they would stand reverently, coffee cups in hands; later, at her insistence, they sat down uneasily on the edge of chairs as they related all the gossip about the neighbors and the goings-on at the hospital. This was how we later learned the details of what happened that day.
    Yassi and I were waiting for our coffee, basking in the luxury of no special urgency, when the bell rang, sounding louder than usual because of the quiet of the street. As the bell rings one more time in my memory, I hear Tahereh Khanoom dragging her slippers along the floor, making her way to the front door of the apartment. I hear her footsteps fading as she slowly goes down the stairs to the street door. We hear a few words exchanged between her and a man.
    She returned rather startled. There were two plainclothes officers at the door, she explained, men from the Revolutionary Committee. They wanted to raid the apartment of Mr. Colonel’s tenant. Mr. Colonel was a new neighbor, whom my mother consistently ignored because of his newly rich ways and manners. He had destroyed a beautiful vacant garden next to our place and built an ugly, gray-stone three-story apartment. He lived on the second floor, his daughter was on the third and he rented out the first. Tahereh Khanoom explained that “they” wanted to arrest Mr. Colonel’s tenant, but they couldn’t gain admittance to the house. So they wanted to go into our yard and climb over our walls to get into the neighbor’s house. We obviously, or perhaps not so obviously, wished to deny them this permission. As Tahereh Khanoom wisely put it, What good is a Committee official who doesn’t have a search warrant and can only go into people’s houses through their neighbors’ yards? They needed no search warrant when it came to barging into decent people’s houses at all times, so why were they so helpless when it came to this one particular crook? We had our differences with our neighbor, but we were not about to hand him over to the Committee.
    As Tahereh Khanoom was relating all of this, there was a commotion in the street below. We heard the sounds of men talking hurriedly, feet running, a car engine starting. We hardly had time to wrap up our criticism of the Committee when there was another ring at the door. This time, it was more persistent. A few minutes later Tahereh Khanoom returned, accompanied by two young men in the khaki outfits that