The Republic of Imagination: America in Three Books by Azar Nafisi Read Free Book Online Page B

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 agowhen we first read
Huckleberry Finn.
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    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 maternalgrandmother 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