Censoring an Iranian Love Story

by Shahriar Mandanipour; Sara Khalili

  A hunchback midget is sitting on the floor, leaning against the door with his legs spread apart. His head is hanging down on his chest, and his lifeless eyes are fixed on his thighs.

  THE BOTTOMLESS WELL

  In the next scene of our story, it is midnight. A crescent moon, resembling the Joker’s sneering lips, shines in the brown sky above Tehran. Sara, in her room, under the sheets, is whispering quietly and having a computer chat with Dara. Because she has no prior experience, she is especially cautious. Although she may later become more daring. Her parents are both well educated, but they are terrified that an evil hand may pluck their beautiful sheltered flower. As a result, they strictly monitor her relationships. Mr. Petrovich will probably appreciate this segment, and he may pardon one of our story’s future censor-worthy sentences.

  Dara too is in his room whispering.

  Ask me what they are whispering about, and I will say:

  They are discussing “A Cliff Somewhere,” a story by Shahriar Mandanipour.

  Dara says:

  “It is a cowardly story. Even if the man and woman cannot walk together on the street, even if they are too scared to sit in a café and talk, now that they are on top of a mountain, why don’t they talk openly to each other? There are no patrols from the Campaign Against Social Corruption and no informers to call them.”

  Sara says:

  “Remember that they are sitting beside an old, perhaps ancient, well.”

  “I haven’t forgotten. The well actually exists on top of a mountain in Shiraz.”

  “A well that the townspeople believe is bottomless.”

  “Sara, I know all this. My question is why do a man and a woman who were once in love now constantly talk in codes and metaphors. They can talk frankly about their problems. For example, the man can say that he realizes they are no longer in love. They were together for a certain period of time and used each other’s bodies as much as they could, they secretly made love wherever they could. Maybe that is why their love was ruined.”

  “But that is not the point. The point is whether that well is really bottomless or not. The writer wants to tell you and me, his readers, that the physical relationship between a man and a woman is like that well. Perhaps at times it has a bottom and perhaps at times no matter what you throw in it you will never hear it hit the bottom.”

  “No, you’ve misunderstood. Their problem is that they have gone too far in their physical relationship, so far that when making love they even bring images of other people to their bed. This is reaching the bottom of the well. But what I’m questioning is why the writer dragged this poor couple to the top of a mountain if even there he has not had the guts to put frank and honest words in their mouths. There on top of the mountain, instead of talking, the two sit and throw stones in the well and listen to hear them land at the bottom … Who in the world does that?”

  “Well, if they spoke openly, the story would not have received a publishing permit.”

  “Excellent. That’s why I say it’s a cowardly story. The writer has played tricks to pass censorship. I don’t like a writer who plays tricks. A writer who can trick the censorship apparatus can trick his readers, too.”

  “But if they had not sat next to that well, if they had not talked as though they did not need to say much, then there wouldn’t be a story.”

  “Do you think it is a story?”

  “I don’t know. But it has somehow become mysterious. It makes me think.”

  If you think I am going to fit this dialogue in my love story, you are wrong. But the self-censorship is not because Dara did not like my story; it is because I don’t want to give away a story that I happen to like and that I hope will one day receive a reprint permit. Therefore, I write:

  Dara says:

  “I believe people in love don’t need words, letters, and conversations. They simply look at each other and read each other’s thoughts. Just that.”

  Sara likes what Dara has said. She thinks the same way. The world’s lovers may have created the most captivating and the greatest number of stories in the world, but they have no need for words.

  How about the need to meet? Precisely my problem. My lovers have to meet somewhere in order to read each other’s eyes and mind.

  In any case, Sara and Dara’s innocent conversation leads to a discussion of film, Dara’s favorite medium of art. Sara has no access to the black market for DVDs and videotapes and has therefore not seen many films.

  Dara reveals a small part of his life’s secret to Sara.

  “It was because of film that I lost everything, even my future.” Sara knows that to learn the secrets of this strange man’s life she has to be patient and to do away with superficial curiosities. Their conversation leads to films that they have recently seen on national television.

  Just last night, after an entire month of advertising, a very old production of Othello was aired on channel 2.

  Dara asks:

  “… But did you see Desdemona in the movie at all?”

  “… Just in the last scene. They showed her dead body on the bed for a few seconds.”

  “I guess she was wearing a sleeveless low-cut dress in all the other scenes.”

  Dara has guessed correctly. And that is precisely why I will not only make no mention of my Sara’s long black hair, but I will not even describe her without her headscarf and coverall—just like Iranian films that show women wearing a headscarf at all times, even in their homes. However, if one day an Iranian writer decides to describe the black cascade of his Sara’s hair, the best trick is that same defamiliarization envisioned by Russian formalists. The writer can, without mentioning the word “hair,” write: “Rippling nightlike strands that flow from the living marble and that the black wind ushers toward the light …”

  Dara talks to Sara about the happy times he had at the university and explains that because no company or business will hire him, he still lives with his parents … Sara explains that she is in her final year of studying literature at the university. Because she is familiar with the life of her author—me—she knows that with a degree in literature she shouldn’t have high hopes of finding a job either. In Iran, whenever someone asked me about my job and I replied that I am a writer, they would immediately say, “I mean your job. What do you do?” This is because unlike Mr. Petrovich and his superiors, ninety-nine point nine percent of Iranians do not perceive literature as serious work.

  Sara and Dara talk about chaste and saintly love, a love untainted by earthly lusts and desires. Together they voice the expression “Platonic love.” It doesn’t matter. Like many Iranians, they don’t know that in his philosophy of Platonic love Plato was mostly concerned with well-proportioned young boys. The misunderstanding is due to errors made in translating Plato’s writings, much the same way that another one of his works has been attributed to Aristotle and has been incorporated as such in the teachings at seminaries.

  I don’t know what the connection is between Plato and apples, but Sara is now talking about the apple tree in the garden at her parents’ house that is now, for the second time this season, full of blossoms.

  She wants me to give her a romantic sentence to speak. A sentence about the flight of the apple blossoms and their dance in the spring breeze of Tehran. But for different reasons, both Dara and I disagree with such a sentence.

  Dara bitterly says:

  “I really don’t like apples. One of my recurring nightmares is that I bite into a red apple and realize that my teeth are left behind in it.”

  Dara’s dislike of apples bears no association with the archetypal forbidden fruit, and I have told him time and time again that I am sick of using repetitive symbols, especially symbols that since the early days of Eve have all too often been manhandled. But my own opposition to the white apple blossoms dancing is more pragmatic than this. I remember years ago, in a story written by one of my friends, Mr. Petrovich censored the sentence “The leaves fall dancing from the trees” because the
word “dancing” is deemed vulgar and is forbidden.

  It is now one o’clock in the morning. Sara says good-bye to Dara and quickly goes to sleep to have beautiful dreams …

  Earlier than her, many people in Tehran, this city that once had one of the most beautiful and light-filled aerial views in the world, hoping for beautiful dreams, have turned out their lights and gone to sleep. The new government has decreed that all restaurants and food sellers must close at eleven o’clock at night so that citizens do not stay up late unnecessarily and harm their health. I remind you that for people in Iran the only after-dark entertainment is to roam around the streets and to eat. Those who are wealthy go to restaurants, and the middle class and below go to hamburger joints. For a family or a few friends going out for a hamburger, by the time they make their way through the traffic from downtown to uptown and to a hamburger joint that looks like McDonald’s, it takes three or four hours and kills the tedious evening. (Have you noticed the contrast between the philosophy underlying the concept of the hamburger in the West and the course of action required for eating a hamburger in Iran?) Now ask the question that is on your mind. Don’t be timid. Ask.

  And I will answer:

  Fortunately, McDonald’s does not exist in Iran. The daring ingenuity of the person who installed an M on the neon sign of his hamburger joint lasted all of one day. On the second day, a group of people raided his eatery, burned it down, and proclaimed that McDonald’s was a symbol of the globe-devouring, McDonald’s-eating America. The incident took place years before Mr. Morgan Spurlock’s experience in Super Size Me. You are therefore free to think that these people were concerned about Iranians gaining weight. Given this reasoning, we can be grateful for restaurants and food sellers having to close at eleven o’clock.

  What do you suppose the imposed closing hour of restaurants has to do with literature?

  Actually, there is a very subtle connection. What else is there to do for people who have nothing in particular to occupy their time with from seven to eleven in the evening? People who, incidentally, are too tired and stressed to engage in the task of increasing the Muslim population of the world, as has been implicitly suggested by the government. Yes, reading and taking refuge in Iranian literature await them.

  By enforcing the directive to close restaurants, the government is in fact supporting literature … Mr. Petrovich right away disagrees with our conclusion.

  “It is impossible for the government of Iran to support a corrupt and immoral literature that merely has its eyes on the West and its decadent sexual freedoms. Don’t kid yourself …”

  Mr. Petrovich is right. To occupy the Iranian population’s leisure time, the government has invested, and continues to invest, in television programs and film series that, more often than not, portray writers, poets, and intellectuals as wimpy, bungling, unprincipled crooks and addicts, much in the same manner that Western spies are always portrayed as well-dressed men wearing neckties. Perhaps the banning of neckties in Iran—which I will elaborate on later—was because they can be perceived as an arrow pointing to a man’s lower organ.

  The clock hands in Tehran have just killed the hour of two in the morning. Sara is deep in sweet sleep. She is dreaming of the romantic poem Khosrow and Shirin. She sees herself standing beside a beautiful pond. The pond is like a mirror. Sara sees her reflection on the water. She is wearing a magnificent white dress, like a princess’s dress, and around her beautiful neck a string of pearls glistens like the moon. Sara looks around to make sure no man is hiding behind the bushes ogling her. Then she slowly steps into the pond. When she is waist deep in the water, the folds of her skirt, like the petals of a water lily, float and spread around her. She wades deeper into the pond. It is as if the water is purifying her body. Now the pearls on her necklace are floating around her neck, and their luster has intensified. Their shimmer brightens the water and deepens Sara’s delight. With every step that she takes, she first sees the determined three dimensional darts of her breasts, then the beautiful oval of her knees and her shapely calves… Her pleasure is short-lived. She feels the weight of lecherous eyes on her shoulders. With a deep sense of foreboding she looks back at the dark bushes; fireflies are flickering around them. Suddenly she feels the water directly touching the nakedness of her body, she sees her white dress, like a blossoming water lily, float toward the opposite shore. She reaches out to it. But the dress floats beyond her reach. She takes a step forward. The water reaches her thirsty lips, but her dress has floated even farther away. Panicked, with her hand reaching out toward her dress, she takes a long step forward. Contrary to her expectation, her foot does not reach the pond floor. It is as though a dragon has opened up its jaws underneath her. She is sucked into a bottomless abyss. She looks up. The silvery surface of the pond is moving away from her. Terrified, she realizes that the end of her dream has reached the beginning of her death. She feels the gaping maw and the repulsive stroke of the dragon’s tongue against her calves … She struggles to pull herself up. The surface of the pond has changed to a murky green. As if she has inhaled flames, the cavities of her nostrils burn all the way up into her forehead. She can no longer hold the air caged in her lungs. She hears the sound of the bubbles bursting out. The dragon’s scorching tongue is coiled around her body … Her eyes grow dark.

  In that final moment when she has surrendered to drowning, she feels her head surface the water on the other side of the world. She opens her burning eyes. She sees herself chest deep in the sea. Around her in the water, there are fully dressed women wearing headscarves. Shocked and terrified, they stare at her. A wave strikes against Sara’s back. Seawater flows down her shoulders and onto her hardened breasts that like the noses of two ships want to slice their way through the sea … The wave ebbs and the water sinks below Sara’s breasts. The women point their fingers at her and scream in horror. Sara covers her floating breasts with her hands. Only then does she realize that she is in the women’s section of the sea. Not far away, on either side, the area is closed off by green tarpaulin screens. The sun and salt water have corroded the fabric and it has ripped in several places. The rushing waves pull the torn sections back and forth, and half a mile away she can see fat and hairy bodies in the men’s section of the sea.

  I am pleased with the last sentences of this scene. While writing them, I reached a state of mind that I have named “the first lovemaking of writer and words.” Every writer has met with his words time and again. They have had frequent conversations. They have even flirted with each other. But there are those rare moments when the shadows and the naked bodies of the writer and the words, in one time frame of the story, in one setting of the story, are coupled. They become two lovers who have long known each other and who in their clandestine meetings have frequently concealed their longing for one another. And now, for the first time, the writer and the words begin a strange lovemaking, like two ambisexual creatures that have created a new composition.

  I am certain Mr. Petrovich cannot find fault with Sara’s Freudian nightmare, but he will surely dislike the scene where she emerges from the sea. Therefore, with my own hand, I have crossed out the scene to which I have briefly made love …

  Do not pity me, dear reader! Wherever you are in this world, if you are lying in your bed in a high-rise in New York and reading before sleep, do not pity me. If on a pleasant sunny day you are sitting in the Bois de Boulogne in Paris and reading, do not pity me. If in a bookstore, searching for a book to offer your lover, you have by chance opened this book and are reading these lines, do not pity me. Even if you have just ended your first carefree lovemaking with your new lover, and he has been lulled into serene sleep, and beside his bed you have found and opened this book, you have no right to pity Sara, Dara, or me! Because the scenes and sentences that I cannot publish in my book, I will write in my mind, and given that until now no one has been able to read my thoughts and fantasies to punish me for them, I will make love to these words in the same way that Dara lives
for the magic of cinema and falls in love and for his beloved he dreams up romantic novelties …

  How?

  This is just the story I now want to tell:

  While Sara is swimming in the pond and the sea, on the other side of town, Dara is lying on his bed drowned in manly thoughts. To communicate his forbidden thoughts to my reader, stream of consciousness is the best trick. This time, however, I have not chosen this narrative ploy to meet the requirements of the story’s form. Instead, I want to write seemingly confused lines, sentences without verbs, phrases in different tenses, all surfacing from the zigzagging of memory, and I want to write them in such a way that the images they produce, like Russian Matryoshka dolls, fit snuggly inside one another. With this method, I hope to softly tiptoe around the walls of Mr. Petrovich’s cleverness and arrive at the wide-open plains of my reader’s imagination and intelligence. Dara is contemplating Sara’s white ankles—a sockless feminine ankle that peeks out from below pants worn under a coverall is the sexiest image one can perceive on the streets of Tehran. On each of Sara’s white ankles Dara has seen two cerulean veins that start below the ankles’ projection, and after their rise and descent on the other side, they come together to create a pale purple vein that disappears under the hem of her pants. Like two narrow streams that, after traveling a winding and twisting course, somewhere on the map meet, and their course often continues beyond the edge of the map.

  Then, in Dara’s stream of consciousness, I write:

  Step by step, white, reflection of light from the whiteness of two ankles on the blackness of the asphalt… Step by step, white, two cerulean veins on the whiteness of ankles, inspiration for the inventors of script amid the reed beds cradled by the Tigris and Euphrates … The flight of a dry autumn leaf alongside two cerulean rivers that remind autumn of the greenness of spring … Two rivers part and give birth … Two connected lines in the palm of my hand, one the line of my life, one the line of my death, one the line of my solitude, one the line of your solitude, Sara … And I fall upon the shores of a coppercolored pond. On the far side, a flamingo with crimson flames licking beneath its wings stands on one leg and dreams of migrating. On the horizon I see the dark cylinder of the Tower of Babel against the light, erect and solid it has risen toward the sky, and from its peak a creamcolored cloud pours down, the fountain of blind men’s fantasies, the fountain of inspiration for flamingos that migrate with purgatories beneath their wings … Sara … Sara …