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In the fall of 1995, after resigning from my last academic post, I decided to indulge myself and fulfill a dream. I chose seven of my best and most committed students and invited them to come to my home every Thursday morning to discuss literature. They were all women--to teach a mixed class in the privacy of my home was too risky, even if we were discussing fiction.

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A couple of years after we had begun our Thursday-morning seminars, on the last night I was in Tehran, a few friends and students came to say good-bye and to help me pack. When we had deprived the house of all its items, when the objects had vanished and the colors had faded into eight gray suitcases, like errant genies evaporating into their bottles, my students and I stood against the bare white wall of the dining room and took two photographs.

I have the photographs in front of me now. In the first there are seven women, standing against a white wall. They are, according to the law of the land, dressed in black robes and head scarves, covered except for the oval of their faces and their hands. In the second photograph the same group, in the same position, stands against the same wall. Only they have taken off their coverings. Splashes of color seperate one from the next. Each has become distinct through the color and style of her clothes, the color and the length of her hair; not even the two who are still wearing their head scarves are the same.

The one to the far right in the second photograph is our pooet, Manna, in a white T-shirt and jeans.

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Next to Manna is Mahshid, whose long black scarf clashes with her delicate features and retreating smile.

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Yassi was the youngest in our group. She is the one in yellow, bending forward and bursting with laughter.

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I am the one in brown, standing next to Yassi, with one arm arund her shoulders. Directly behind me stands Azin, my tallest student, with her long blond hair and a pink T-shirt.

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On my other side is Mitra, who was perhaps the calmest among us. Like the pastel colors of her paintings, she seemed to recede and fade into a paler register.

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Sanaz, who, pressured by family and society, vacillated between her desire for independence and her need for approval, is holding on to Mitra's arm. We are all laughing.

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There was one more: Nassrin. She is not in the photographs--she didn't make it to the end. Yet my tale would be incomplete without those who could not or did not remain with us. Their absences persist, like an acute pain that seems to have on physical source. This is Tehran for me: its absences were more real than its presences.

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About a month after I had decided privately to leave Allameh Tabatabai, Yassi and I were standing in front of the green gate at the entrance of the university. What I remember most distinctly about the university now is that green gate. I passed through it at least twice a day on weekdays for a number of years, but I still an't quite conjure it properly. In my memory the iron gate acquires an elastic quality and becoms a magic door, unsupported by walls, guarding the university grounds. Yet I do remember its boundaries. It opened on one side to a wide street that appeared to lead straight into the mountains. On the other side it faced a small garden that belonged to the Faculty of Persain and Foreign Languages and Literature, a garden with Persian roses and other native flowers around a small, cracked ornamental fountain, a broken statue standing in its waterless midst.

I owe my memory of the green gate to Yassi: she mentioned it in one of her poems. The poem is called "How Small Are the Things that I Like." In it, she describes her favorite objects--an orange backpack, a colorful coat, a bicycle just like her cousin's--and she also describes how much she likes to enter the university through the green gate. The gate appears in this poem, and in some of her other writings, as a magical entrance into the forbidden world of all the ordinary things she had been denied in life.

Yet that green gate was closed to her, and to all my girls. Next to the gate there was a small opening with a curtain hanging from it. It was an aberration that attracted attention, because it did not belong there: it gaped with the arrogant authority of an intruder. Through this opening all the female students, including my girls, went into a small, dark room to be inspected. Yassi would describe later, long after that first session, what was done to her in this room: " I would first be checked to see if I have the right clothes: the color of my coat, the lenght of my uniform, the thickness of my scarf, the form of my shoes, the objects in my bag, the visible traces of even the mildest makeup, the size of my rings and their level of attractiveness, all would be checked before I could enter the campus of the university, the same university in which men also study. And to them the main door, with its immense portals and emblems and flags, is generously open."

That small side opening was the source of endless tales of frustration, humiliation and sorrow. It was meant to make the girls ordinary and invisible. Instead, it brought them into focus and turned them into objects of curiosity.

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What could she do? She did not believe in politics and did not want to marry, but she was curious about love. That day, sitting opposite me, playing with her spoon, she explained why all the normal acts of life had become small acts of rebellion and political insubordination to her and to other young people like her.

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Could she ever live the life of someone like me, live on her own, take long walks holding hands with someone she loved, even have a little dog perhaps? She did not know. It was like this veil that meant nothing to her anymore yet without which she wuold be lost. She had always worn the veil. Did she want to wear it or not? She did not know. I remember the movement of her hand as she said this--flitting in front of her face as if to ward off an invisible fly. She said she could not imagine a Yassi without a veil. What would she look like? Would it affect the way she walked or how she moved her hands? How would others look at her? Would she become a smarter or a dumber person? These were her obsessions, alongside her favorite novels by Austen, Nabokov and Flaubert.

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There was nothing in realty that I could give her, so I told her instead about Nabokov's "other world." I asked her if she had noticed how in most of Nabokov's novels--Invitation to a Beheading, Bend Sinister, Ada, Pnin--there was always the shadow of another world, one that was only attainable through fiction. It is this world that prevents his heroes and heroines from utter despair, that becomes their refuge in a life that is consistently brutal.

Take Lolita. This was the story of a twelve-year-old girl who had nowhere to go. Humbert had tried to turn her into his fantasy, into his dead love, and he had destroyed her. The desperate truth of Lolita's story is not the rape of a twelve-year-old by a dirty old man but the confiscation of one individual's life by another. We don't know what Lolita would have become if Humbert had not engulfed her. Yet the novel, the finished work, is hopeful, beautiful even, a defense not just of beauty but of life, ordinary everyday life, all the normal pleasures that Lolita, like Yassi, was deprived of.

Warming up and suddently inspired, I added that in fact Nabokov had taken revenge against our own solipsizers; he had taken revenge on the Ayatollah Khomeini, on Yassi's last suitor, on the duogh-faced teacher for that matter. They had tried to shape others according to their own dreams and desires, but Nabokov, through his potrayal of Humbert, had exposed all solipsists who take over other people's lives. She, Yassi, had much potential; she could be whatever she wanted to be--a good wife or a teacher and poet. What mattered was for her to know what she wanted.

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What a great book.

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