Censoring an Iranian Love Story

by Shahriar Mandanipour; Sara Khalili

  Mr. Petrovich, part detective, part criminal court judge, and quite imposing, was sitting behind a large desk. He was about thirty-five years old, with sharp eyes and a closely trimmed stubble. He ordered his secretary to find and bring the file for The Eighth Day of the Earth. During the thirty minutes it took to produce it, Mr. Petrovich was discussing advancements in print technology in the West and the unbelievable speed of new printing machines with a bearded middle-aged man sitting in an armchair next to his desk. The middle-aged man’s composure suggested that he was someone important and someone whom Mr. Petrovich held in high regard. At the time, I foolishly hoped that the man would leave before the file containing the sexy phrases lay open on that desk. Luckily, he did not. Mr. Petrovich handed a sheet of paper to my publisher with a list of page numbers and lines that were problematic. Then, like a father who has seen his newborn child for the first time, I lay eyes on my book. However, just like the dark-skinned father who suddenly sees that his child is white, I too was shocked. My book had no cover.

  The first sentence that was underlined as sexy and provocative was this: “My eyes shift from her face to her neck and then move farther down, and I am disgusted by the feelings her breasts do not awaken in me …” You probably think the sentence is obviously sexy. Ask me if the breasts are naked, and I will say no. The sentence is in a short story titled “Thursday’s Sara,” I mean it was. In the story, a young officer, wounded at war and paralyzed from the waist down, as he does all his other days and nights, lies on a bed in his mother’s house. It is raining and his sad fiancée who has come to visit him is standing beside the window drawing lines on the fogged-up glass. The man’s spinal cord has been severed and he has told his fiancée that it is over between them. But his fiancée, a nurse at a mental hospital, continues to visit him every Thursday and talks to him about a girl named Sara—Sara’s first appearance in my stories. Sara is a lively, emotional, and playful girl who can awaken the courage to fall in love in any man. But it seems Sara has no memory. Every Thursday, the nurse recounts one of Sara’s escapades for her paralyzed fiancé. At the end of my story, the young man suspects that if Sara really exists, she exists only in his fiancée’s fantasies, and that, in fact, the young woman is only articulating her own lost dreams …

  It is in such a setting that the man looks at his fiancée’s face, neck, and torso.

  The argument between Mr. Petrovich and me began. I said:

  “Sir! What is sexy about this sentence? It is just the opposite. The man is paralyzed. He has lost his manhood. That is why the sight of his fiancée’s breasts disgust him … Please pay attention to the word ‘disgust.’ Who in the world is going to be aroused by reading this sad story and the description of a feeling of disgust?”

  Mr. Petrovich had his own reasoning and was particularly sensitive to the word “breast.”

  The next sentence, in another story, was something like this:

  “… Suddenly the woman, as though she had gone mad from thirst and the hellish heat, wildly ripped off her clothes and poured the remaining water in the ewer—their only reserve for the next few days—over her head. Her husband, weak with dehydration, was sprawled out in the corner of the hut. Passively, he watched as the drops of water trickled down the wrinkles and lines on the woman’s pale thighs and plunged onto the thirsty earth …”

  With a look of reproach Mr. Petrovich said:

  “What about this? It is truly a vile and filthy scene.”

  And I, as though defending the rights of the woman in Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, with passion and literary conjecture, actually legal conjecture, in defense of every single word of that story, said:

  “My esteemed sir, you have read the story. There is a drought. There is a shortage of water in this southern village. Misery and death have befallen the people. One night the villagers all have the same nightmare, a nightmare as black as tar; and it happens on the night when the American coup d’état succeeds in Tehran, and Mossadeq is arrested for the crime of nationalizing oil, and the Shah is supposed to return to the country. What’s more, the woman in the story is at least sixty years old …”

  I apologize to all the beautiful sixty-year-old ladies. In those days, there were no Internet sites to post photographs of the ten sexiest Hollywood stars over fifty.

  Tirelessly I argued:

  “Sir, imagine the wrinkles on dehydrated skin, the white lines underneath withered skin, the filth and grime of not having bathed for months … Greasy, gross … What is so sexy about all this? The only beautiful woman in the story, as you have read, has been compared to a flower with absolutely no description of her face or figure.”

  Unconvinced, Mr. Petrovich said:

  “I just don’t understand why you writers insist on depicting such filthy scenes and presenting them to the reader’s imagination.”

  “Sir! It is not about insisting. It is life. Believe me, to make a story believable, its characters have to be portrayed, otherwise the reader will not find them credible … You yourself have read how the location of the village is described in detail. Its surrounding deserts have been illustrated in many sentences, even the animals and the men.”

  “Well, I never said we are against descriptions. What we say is that you should describe the beauties of nature, the glory of the sky and the galaxy, meaning all the beauties that God has created. Writing of such images you will be blessed in the hereafter as well, because if your readers are intelligent, from your writings they will discover the greatness of God and their faith will be strengthened.”

  I blurted out:

  “Sir, it isn’t the writer’s fault if there are also ugly things and unbathed women in the world … By the way, aren’t they also God’s creations?”

  Mr. Petrovich glared at me. His knotted eyebrows were saying, You’re getting too big for your boots. His angry eyes were saying, You’re running off at the mouth.

  But perhaps because I was a young writer and he didn’t want to drive me toward the antirevolution camp, he masked his anger and continued.

  “Well, in this section, if you had not described the woman’s body your story would not have suffered at all.”

  “It certainly would have suffered. I think the scene where the water drips onto the dirt is good literary imaging. I think stories are written so that such images can be created.”

  “As a matter of fact, these lengthy illustrations make the story dull and boring. In a story, events have to take place one after the other. For example, you should have just written, ‘She empties the ewer over her head.’ ”

  “That’s not possible, sir. Then the reader will wonder whether the woman has gone mad.”

  “Well, in your story you want to show that the woman has in fact gone mad.”

  “Sir, these two madnesses are completely different. In a weak story, characters go mad without logic and literary sense, in which case, it will seem as if all the bones in the story are broken. To write a good story, we have to try and make sure that even characters who go mad have a rational reason for it…”

  Mr. Petrovich walked out of the room and returned with a glass of water filled with ice. To quell the flames of his rage, he drank it all in one gulp. Mr. Petrovich is not alone; many of us Iranians are terribly angered when someone teaches us something we don’t know. But my excitement and passion in defending my stories were so great that I didn’t realize I was being offensive. Our argument dragged on to other phrases in the book. In those too there was either the word “breast” or words used to describe the beauty or ugliness of the lips, arms, or thighs of a woman … By then my face was drenched with sweat and I was swearing to God and to the Prophet that for a reader familiar with these stories, such descriptions would not be sexually arousing at all, and that if someone is looking to be aroused, he is far better off looking elsewhere. I mean instead of reading the word “breast,” he can just go out onto the street where there are plenty of breasts and thighs …

  After an hour of hea
ted discussion, neither I nor Mr. Petrovich had been convinced. Finally, Mr. Petrovich, who perhaps still wanted to avoid breaking the heart of a young writer, fed up and exhausted, said:

  “No. No matter what I say, you come up with ten justifications for it.”

  And without any apparent forethought he blurted out:

  “As an impartial observer, let’s ask this gentleman’s opinion.”

  And he offered my book with the underlined sentences to the dignified gentleman.

  “As a fair-minded reader, you be the judge.”

  The dignified gentleman began pensively reading those thirteen notorious lines … Ten minutes … fifteen minutes went by. My heart was pounding in my chest. I knew the moment of the verdict was at hand. Drops of sweat, like drops of water dripping off a wrinkled thigh, dripped onto the floor. My publisher was still sitting there quiet and meek, and the dignified gentleman had gone back yet one more time to reread from the very first instance … Twenty-three minutes … I couldn’t figure out what he was doing with the breasts and thighs of my story … And all the while, Mr. Petrovich sat there looking at me with an air of victory. The ice in his glass melted … Half an hour … Finally the dignified gentleman spoke:

  “What can I say … It is not easy to judge … In any case, perhaps … I don’t know … Perhaps for men of our age it would not be arousing, but for the young … What can I say?!”

  Impulsively, I said:

  “Dear sir, you are still young. Were you really aroused by those sentences?”

  This was one of those rare moments in my life when I was shrewdly clever … It was obvious that the dignified gentleman, even if he had been aroused, could not confess to three men that he was sexually stimulated by reading a few sentences. Hence he said:

  “No.”

  And I in turn said to Mr. Petrovich:

  “You see, sir …”

  Now in an environment awash with mutual understanding, our discussion continued for another twenty minutes. Mr. Petrovich agreed to forgo censoring several sentences. I did not want to give in on the others, but my publisher whispered that I had gone far enough and that I should not make him any angrier and any more tired.

  We left the Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance. I climbed up behind my publisher on his motorcycle and we rode off. Small drops of water from the wrinkled thighs of the clouds above Tehran rained on our faces. The drivers of hundreds of polluting motorcycles and cars were blowing their horns, cutting one another off, and cursing at one another. On the crowded sidewalks people were going about their daily headaches and responsibilities. No one paid any attention to the noisy passage of one of the greatest and most honored publishers and one of the future’s greatest writers of their country. In those days, many middle-class and working-class people were forced to take on two jobs just to make ends meet, and they hardly gave a damn if in some scene, in some story, a man’s gaze moved across his fiancée’s breasts or not, or whether the man’s manhood was intact or not, or even whether his fiancée had any breasts or not. And for this reason, the pithy three thousand print run of books was shrinking even further. But still, I felt as though I had lost some part of my soul, as though parts of my body had been stripped naked, stared at, and severed. I said to my publisher:

  “Mr. Petrovich forgave us three breasts and two thighs.”

  He did not answer, and to escape the traffic he turned onto a side street. Perhaps he was wondering why, instead of publishing troublesome books by young writers, he didn’t publish instructive books on religion or books on the writs and principles of Islam in laymen’s language that millions of people seeking government jobs and admission to universities would buy to prepare for the multiple-choice questions of the Islamic selection process …

  If that is indeed what he was thinking, then I would have had to be thinking: In addition to the millions of job seekers and university applicants, thousands of Communist Tudeh Party followers purchase these books and memorize them far more scrupulously than any non-Communist, so that they can infiltrate government offices and universities.

  We rode past a beautiful modern high-rise with elements of ancient Greek and seventeenth-century Iranian architecture. The motorcycle’s groans suddenly stopped. The startled publisher cursed at the raindrops. We climbed down. He started fiddling with the spark plugs.

  Next to the front stairs of the high-rise with its postmodern façade, a street peddler wearing clothes reminiscent of eight hundred years ago was sitting on the sidewalk with a box in front of him. We Iranians are used to such characters. In their boxes they have magic for sale. Talismans for rendering the enemy mute … Potions to pour in front of a foe’s door so that the sound of laughter will never again emanate from it … Snake’s eggs to make someone fall in love … Hyena’s pussy to be mixed with the bones of a hundred-year-old cadaver and fed to a husband so that he does not fancy taking another wife … Scraps of paper with spells written on them in strange script to be steeped in water as a cure for the ailing … Rings for becoming rich … The peddler raised his head. Our eyes met. I thought, One day I will write your story, too. And I heard his voice somewhere deep in my ear, Write! I also have Indian elephant’s testicle powder dissolved in syrupy Ganesha potion. Any writer who drinks it will win the Nobel Prize … If you win it, write in your story that the potions, talismans, and spells of medicine man Jafar ibn-Jafri are more potent than those of all other medicine men …

  Miraculously, the motorcycle engine started. We climbed back on. We were moving away from the witchcraft-selling medicine man. I turned around and stared at the path of his dark gaze and said to my publisher, “It didn’t turn out too badly … Three breasts and two thighs …”

  My publisher still didn’t express any joy. We passed in front of a hospital affiliated with Tehran University. Above its main entrance, on a huge thirty-foot-by-six-foot banner, in large beautiful calligraphy, was written:

  MEDICAL SEMINAR ON THE CAUSES AND PREVENTIONS

  OF BREAST CANCER

  Let us return to Tehran University …

  The students are still being beaten up …

  No, this sentence will not appeal to Mr. Petrovich at all. What’s more, from the standpoint of Iranian literature, it is not at all exciting, because in my country, since the founding of the first university, getting beaten up and thrown in jail have always been among the required credits for students … Therefore, this is how I will transition back to my story: Let us together return to that beautiful spring day on Liberty Street …

  The efforts of the antiriot police to disperse the students continue. There are exactly three minutes and three seconds left until the moment when Sara will be thrown to the ground and her head will hit against a cement edge. To escape the terrifying face of that timeless hunchback, she moves a few steps closer to the conflict, not knowing that she has moved a few steps closer to the location of her death. Sara, with eyes still brimming with tears, raises her sign with its strange slogan even higher, and by doing so attracts even greater attention and graver danger. In Iran, any action, innovation, or even noncliché art that is not based on our traditions or on our so-called modern traditions attracts the greatest threats, attacks, and hatred from all fronts. It is at this very moment that Sara again hears:

  “Sara! Leave this place …”

  Aggravated by the pestering hunchback, Sara once more peers behind the fence. There is nothing there but the trunks of the old sycamore and cypress trees of the university campus … Then she hears:

  “I’m Dara …”

  Sara looks to her left and sees a young man standing three steps away leaning against the short stone wall and looking in the opposite direction from her. Dara, without turning to face her, says:

  “What are you doing? Everyone here belongs to some political group. They’re looking out for one another. You on your own are in more danger than anyone else …”

  Now our love story is slowly approaching its first incident.

  Dara co
ntinues to talk to Sara in a way that no one will notice.

  “Please throw away your sign. Let’s leave this place.”

  Sara, confused, with her eyes brimming with tears, has still not clearly seen Dara’s face. She sees him pass in front of her. She realizes that as he walks by he takes the sign from her hand and throws it behind the university fence. And then she hears:

  “Please follow me at a distance …”

  Mesmerized, Sara begins to walk ten steps behind Dara. She’s not scared of losing him in the crowd; she is certain he is keeping an eye on her. They leave behind the anger and chaos of Liberty Street. The dust of decay from flying carpets hovers in the sky above Tehran …

  Finally, Dara stops in front of the ruins of a movie theater that years ago, during the days of the revolution, was burned down. Sara involuntarily stops next to him. Dara has a brand-new beautiful handkerchief that his late grandmother had given him as a keepsake. He doesn’t know why he always carries it with him. And all I know is that this handkerchief will play a key role in my story, just like Chekhov’s gun hanging on the wall. The edge of the white silk handkerchief is embroidered with delicate red roses. Sara dries her eyes with it, and in this magnificent moment, for the very first time, she sees Dara’s face … which in our story is a kind and gentle face. A high forehead, thick eyebrows, large black eyes, thirsty curved lips, teeth as lustrous as pearls from Bahrain, and ebony-colored hair with locks tousled on his brow.