Censoring an Iranian Love Story (11 page)

In the 1930s, Moharram Ali Khan was responsible for censoring newspapers published in Tehran. Armed with his weapon of choice, meaning a pair of scissors that resembled the jaws of a Nag serpent, he would show up every morning and every evening before the newspapers went to press. He would carefully study the columns prepared for layout, and wherever he found a sentence or sentences that were contrary to the interests of the king, the government, the governor, or even small government departments, he would with great dexterity surgically remove them …

CENSORED TESTICLES

T
he sky above Tehran is filled with smoke from the factories in the outskirts of town and from the purple fires of alchemists in the tales of
One Thousand and One Nights.
Motorcycles that double as express taxis intricately weave their lone passenger through deadlocked traffic. On the sidewalk the scent of Clinique Happy lingers in the air in the wake of a beautiful woman clad in a coverall and headscarf… Sara and Dara, in the shadow of a postmodern high-rise, approach a street peddler. The man’s clothes are a blend of traditional Arab, Afghani, and Turkish garb …
The government of the Islamic Republic has coined this year the Year of Progress and Blossoming. Therefore, this year, we Iranians have a five-month-long spring. Consequently, Sara and Dara have ample time to carry on with their romance in this season.
Seeing a handsome couple, in a voice that seems to come from the pit of a magic lantern, the street peddler says:

“A talisman for bliss … A spell for love and compassion …”

Sara and Dara sit in front of his box and riffle through the small dark bottles, colorful powders, locks, plaques, and rusted metal talismans with strange designs etched on them.

Sara asks:

“Do you have a talisman for hate?”

Dara says:

“A talisman to free the mind, so that someone is not in your thoughts night and day …”

The spellbinding gleam in the old man’s eyes darkens. His eyes fill with sorrow, the sorrow of an aged lover remembering a love
Gone with the Wind …
He digs into his deep pockets and pulls out a roll of thin yellow paper. He tears off a piece. From his breast pocket he produces a Parker fountain pen and starts to draw strange signs. The ink spreads on the paper and makes the signs look even more ominous … Sara takes the magic paper.

“After the spell works, I ask that you tell your friends that the potions, talismans, and spells of medicine man Jafar ibn-Jafri are more potent than those of all other medicine men …”

Sara asks:

“How much should I pay you?”

“If I take money from you the magic of the spell will be undone.”

The magic seller turns to Dara. He stares into his eyes. Then, with the anguish of a father taking his son to the sacrifice altar, he says:

“Master! You have ninety-five tumans in your pocket. Offer it to me as a gift.”

Dara reaches into his pocket and takes out a few crumpled bills and a coin. He counts them and stares at the old man in amazement. The old man kisses the bills as he would a holy object, he touches them to his forehead, and closes his eyes … A few steps away, Dara tells Sara:

“Actually, I am the one who needs that spell. Let me have it so that I can be free of the agony of thinking of you day and night.”

Sara, with a mysterious smile on her lips, says:

“Why are you so sure that I am not the same way and that now that I have seen you I won’t get even worse … I have dropped most of my university credits this term …”

They are now crossing a bridge over an expressway. The river of cars, taking no notice of them, courses beneath their feet.

Dara says:

“I wish I had a car. In a car there is less risk of being caught.”

“Do you really want to stop thinking of me?”

“… Were you telling the truth when you said I have been on your mind?”

They are now two-thirds of the way across the bridge. Sara stops. She takes the magic paper from her pocket and holds it out toward Dara.

“What shall we do? Shall we get rid of it?”

Dara takes the other end of the paper and pulls. The paper rips in two. They each tear their half into pieces … The drivers passing under the bridge will never guess what spell the tiny pieces of paper falling on their cars like yellow snow have undone …

Mr. Petrovich will say:

You really are a bad writer … This is a nice scene. On a bridge, a young couple bid each other farewell. After their morally wrong correspondence, on the first day of their encounter, the wisest thing they could do was exactly what came to their minds, to part and to never think of each other again … If you separate them on this very bridge, it will turn out to be a nice story. Imagine. One walks to the left of the bridge, the other to the right… and neither one turns to look at the other.

I will say:

Sir, the parting of a young couple on a bridge isn’t as free of danger as you might think. Bridges are not endless. Even the longest bridges in the world, from the right and the left, lead to streets and neighborhoods. In these streets and neighborhoods there are plenty of girls and boys and men and women. In fact, it is possible for our beautiful Sara to get trapped by one of those gangs that have recently been kidnapping girls or by one of their good-looking members who makes an innocent girl fall in love with him and takes her home, and there they film the lovemaking or rape scene and sell copies of it on the black market. You probably are not aware that the most provocative American and Japanese porno films are sold on the black market for two or three thousand tumans, but these Iranian films, even though they are poorly made with no lighting and with the girl not being a real blond, are bought and sold for twelve thousand tumans. On the other side of the bridge, too, how do we know that Dara, who is a good-looking young man, and the sorrow of love has left a romantic look in his eyes, does not walk onto a street where a bad girl falls in love with him. Please allow this innocent girl and boy to walk together.

My predicament, however, is that Sara and Dara cannot walk together for very long. The patrols from the Campaign Against Social Corruption, armed with Kalashnikovs, could arrive at any moment and arrest them.

You will probably say:

Well, they can claim to be brother and sister.

I will reply:

No, they cannot.

Ask me why and I will explain:

If they claim to be siblings or even cousins, two patrols, a man and a woman, will take each of them aside and interrogate them separately. They will ask, for example, what their grandfather’s or brother-in-law’s name is. If Sara and Dara have previously exchanged these sorts of details, the questions will then extend to the color and brand of the refrigerator in their house, their neighbor’s last name, and similar basic questions. If their answers do not match, Sara and Dara will be taken to the detention center for the socially corrupt. There they will join homeless addicts, pimps, prostitutes, and other morally depraved people. In one of my stories, I led my protagonist and antagonist to a cemetery as their meeting place. They sat on the grave of the boy’s mother and quietly talked. At the time, the anticorruption officers’ imagination did not extend to a girl and a boy taking advantage of the grave of an unsuspecting and helpless dead mother to set the stage for their sin.

Dara asks:

“What color is the refrigerator in your house?”

“Why do you ask?”

“I don’t know. I don’t even know how it popped into my head … Tell me, what kind of flowers and trees do you have in your front yard?”

“We have geraniums and violets, and an apple tree. Why?”

Sara does not receive an answer. She thinks what a secretive character and complicated mind Dara has. Having a secretive character, being complicated and quiet, are good characteristics to have to pique a girl’s curiosity and interest. Of course, only up until marriage.

Now Sara and Dara are passing in front of Qajar Opticians. The store’s decor is no less stylish than the most fashionable boutiques in Paris.

Sara says:

“I have to buy a pair of large sunglasses.”

The store owner, Agha Mohammad, with a beardless face and feminine mannerisms, greets them.

Several centuries and many years ago, Agha Mohammad of the Qajar Dynasty was one of Iran’s warrior kings. After the conquest of an Iranian town, in one fell swoop he commanded that the eyes of the townspeople be censored from their sockets and piled up in the town square.

Sara tries on several designer sunglasses, most of which are Chinese made knockoffs, and walks out with a pair of large Ray-Bans covering her black eyes. Agha Mohammad follows her with his eyes as she passes in front of the store window and sighs:

“What a shame for those beautiful eyes
and that tantalizing face
to be hidden behind those glasses.”

In his youth, Agha Mohammad was held hostage in the court of another Iranian king who ordered Agha Mohammad’s testicles be deleted from his body with a pair of special scissors.

If you ask me why I have recounted this historic detail, which seems unrelated to our story, I will immediately respond:

Clearly, you are still not as familiar with Iranian symbols as you should be … My dears! The point of this historic detail is to remind you that in Iran scissors had uses other than their common utility and other than cutting out excess sentences from newspapers and manuscripts …

Sara and Dara arrive at an Internet café.

Ask me if there are Internet cafés in Tehran.

Of course there are. What image do you have of Iran? Are you like that person I once met at the literary festival in Stavanger, Norway, who after my long-winded talk on modern and postmodern literature in Iran asked:

“Have you heard of the Internet in Iran?”

Or like my son’s classmate in Providence, Rhode Island, who asked him:

“You don’t have cars in Iran, you ride camels; why do you want to make a nuclear bomb?”

Faced with such questions, many Iranians quickly point to the past glories of our land and explain that Iran is Persia, and they remind you that our country has more than twenty-five hundred years of history and civilization. But since I am a writer and have a bit of an imagination, I will not make this mistake, because I know that after my explanations you will say: Well, yes, you had a great empire with all this history and a civilization replete with culture, science, and architecture. Something, however, must have gone very wrong for you to have fallen on such pitiful times that today the Russians are building your nuclear power plant. If these Russians knew how to build a reactor, their Chernobyl wouldn’t have gone bust.

In response to this comment I will steadfastly keep my silence. Not because you are right, but because in Iran, as an Iranian, especially as a journalist or a writer or even a nuclear scientist, I am not allowed to express my opinions of our government’s nuclear energy policies. As it is, with this love story alone, I will have enough headaches to deal with.

Then come and let me take you, together with our protagonist and antagonist, to an Iranian Internet café.

Here too I prefer not to write that Sara and Dara secretly lock eyes. However, I am now obliged, as is customary in all love stories, to describe Sara and her feminine beauties. Otherwise, neither you nor Mr. Petrovich will read my story … Aside from her large black eyes, the first striking feature in Sara’s face is her luscious lips that are perpetually smoldering as though from thirst. Well, if I write such a sentence, Mr. Petrovich will immediately demand that it be deleted.

I therefore write:

Sara’s lips resemble plump ripe cherries with their delicate skin about to split from the heat of the sun.

So far our story has not progressed badly, although critic-approving tension has yet to build. Our next predicament surfaces in the dialogue that follows.

Sara says:

“They really hit hard with those batons.”

Dara says:

“Some of the batons give an electric shock. They paralyze you for a while.”

Ask:

Well, what is wrong with this?

I will answer:

These lines are appalling. I don’t mean politically … Don’t you get it? If you live in a country where its fourteen-hundred-year-old language contains thousands of symbols, metaphors, and similes that in addition to their mystical meanings and interpretations also whisper of amorous and sexual connotations, and if you are someone who from the crack of dawn until dusk has the job of vigilantly reading stories and poems lest there be sexually suggestive symbols and metaphors in them, then surely your mind will instinctively suspect every letter for fear that its connotations may together commit a sin in the shadows of the reader’s mind.

Now you’ve grasped the quandary of our story. Yes, the difficulty is with the name and the shape of a baton … Sara and Dara must therefore talk about something else. But I cannot even have one say to the other:

Let’s talk about something else …

Because “thing,” with its inherent ambiguity, can be interpreted as the most vile and libelous word in the Farsi language. In interpreting words for their sexual undertones, the Farsi language is exceptionally rich and clever. Yet I cannot put my pathetic protagonist and antagonist in an Internet café with no dialogue and no action. Let us picture them:

Sara wants to stir her hot chocolate, but she drops her spoon on the floor. Dara takes his spoon out of his teacup and offers it to her …

Not a bad scene for enriching a simple communication. Although this too could be labeled a sexual metaphor.

Ask me how, and I will say:

Years ago, in a friend’s novel, a motorcyclist runs out of gas on a dirt road in the desert. For miles around, there is no woman in sight, not even a peasant. Finally, the driver of a pickup truck stops to help … The sentence underlined by Mr. Petrovich for deletion was this: “The motorcyclist inserts a plastic hose in the gas tank of the pickup truck and sucks on it. As soon as gasoline begins to flow, he inserts the hose in his motorcycle’s gas tank …” If I and my novelist friend and all Iranian writers had put our heads together, we would never have consciously recognized the subtext of this modern, sexually explicit, gasoline-related, motorized scene. It is thus that the late Roland Barthes’s theory of the Death of the Author is, in my dear homeland, subconsciously practiced. We may therefore have to forgo the lending-of-the-spoon scene. To have the two characters of my story finally say something to each other, I give them a few watered-down lines.