Censoring an Iranian Love Story

by Shahriar Mandanipour; Sara Khalili

  Perhaps as a small point in creative writing lessons, it may be interesting to note that prior to writing this scene I had no personal experience or knowledge of how a woman sees a ceiling and a window when she is lying under an eager and invading body and repetitive movement and pressure are exerted on her. I wanted to know if when force is applied to the middle section of a woman’s body and moves her, does the window frame in her vision also move? Therefore, I lay down on my office floor and tried to imagine myself as that woman, and I started to rock my body up and down and focused my eyes on the window and the cloud.

  There is no need for you to undergo this scientific experiment. After all, one of the advantages of reading stories is that the experiences of the characters and the writer are transferred to the reader. Therefore, I will tell you that the conclusion was disappointing. Lying down on my back, no matter how much I swayed my body, I realized that the window relative to the sky, and the patch of cloud relative to the window, did not appear to move.

  But in my story I really needed that window to move in the woman’s vision. I told myself, What do I care if in reality the window doesn’t move; it moves in my story. And I boldly wrote that it did. It is in such cases that fictional reality parts from the reality of the world out there. Nabokov has, in his brilliant lectures and lessons on literature, said, “Literature was born on the day when a boy came crying wolf, wolf, and there was no wolf behind him.”

  But this is simple. I would say that the best stories are those in which the lying shepherd boy, or the writer, comes crying wolf, wolf, and a wolf that was not there appears behind him.

  Therefore, the window still moves and the earth e pur si muove and Gregor Samsa still wakes up to find he has turned into a roach.

  Mr. Petrovich will say:

  “Do you really think that if writers write about the wolf it will show up behind them?”

  “It depends. If they write really well and creatively, somehow some sort of a wolf will appear behind them and before the eyes of the reader.”

  “But this is very dangerous. What you are saying is that writers can write about hundreds of antiregime guerrilla groups and thousands of counterrevolutionaries, spies, and malfeasants, and they will all appear.”

  I have to kick myself really hard. What have I done? I have not only made matters worse for myself and my colleagues, but …

  “In reality, you story writers are like Aaron, who made a golden calf and misled the Israelites. You deserve whatever trouble comes your way.”

  “Sometimes your imagination works harder than any writer’s.”

  “Don’t try to fool me. In other words, you can write in your story that at night I fall asleep and dream that I am dead and I wake up to see that in reality too I am dead. I must write a new report and a new plan of action concerning you writers.”

  “No. No. You should only write a story.”

  “You have a story in which a lonely clerk returns to his rented room and sees the corpse of a stranger in his bed. What did you mean by this corpse?”

  “Just a corpse.”

  “You have portrayed that poor clerk as cowardly, conservative, and calculating. A man who in my opinion is a model citizen, someone who tries to do his job well, who does not interfere and meddle in matters that do not concern him, who always carries his identity card in his pocket, and who does not do anything that would have him crossing paths with the police. And you have put a stranger’s corpse in his bed. Why? To punish him? To say that cowardly people all have a corpse in their home? But it is you who is the coward.”

  “Yes. Well, I saw this corpse in my own bed first, and then I wrote the story.”

  “So you confess that you have committed murder, too. What did you do with the corpse? Where did you dump it?”

  During a semibrave midnight telephone conversation, when the desire to hear the voice of one’s beloved has stifled all fears and precautions, Sara asks Dara:

  “Was it you who scratched Sinbad’s car?”

  “No … I find it shameful to even look at such cars.”

  “How are you feeling?”

  “Bad.”

  “Why?”

  “You know.”

  “Do you miss me?”

  “You know.”

  “Then why don’t you make plans to meet me?”

  “I’m not sure you will have time for me in between all your other dates.”

  “Let’s meet somewhere tomorrow afternoon. I have a class, but I won’t go.”

  “Where can we go? I see how you are always terrified of being arrested when we are together. I hate myself for having put you in such a difficult position.”

  “It doesn’t matter. These fears and excitements are somehow sweet. It’s some sort of an adventure in my monotonous life. I like it.”

  “Where?”

  “Three o’clock, Vanak Circle.”

  “No, it’s a hangout place and full of patrols … Let’s go to the Museum of Antiquities.”

  No, it doesn’t work. This segment of Sara and Dara’s conversation is not real at all. Given Dara’s political past and the possible wiretapping of his telephone, they will plan their meeting differently.

  Sara says:

  “I was really missing The Blind Owl today. I read it again. I discovered new things in it.”

  “What?”

  “Chapter seven, the scene on the third page is a masterpiece of symbolism. It illustrates fear in a very succinct and real way. I think it is more powerful than Kafka.”

  “The pages that follow are also powerful.”

  “No, the scene he has developed on this page is the peak of his strength. Do you remember we talked about Hedayat’s nostalgia for ancient Iran? I think he has reflected all his nostalgia on this page. It is as if he has pressed all the pieces in the Museum of Antiquities like a cluster of grapes and has dripped their syrup on this one page. Read it again and you’ll see what I mean. Chapter seven, page three.”

  Deciphering the code in this dialogue is as follows:

  “I missed you a lot today. I went over all my memories of you. I want to see you again.”

  “When?”

  “On the seventh day, at three o’clock.”

  “Can we meet at a later hour?”

  “No. At this time. We’ll meet at the Museum of Antiquities which we have discussed. Do you understand what I’m saying? On the seventh day at three o’clock.”

  Of course, The Blind Owl does not have a chapter seven.

  “Now tell me the truth, did you scratch Sinbad’s car?”

  “No.”

  “I wish it were you who scratched it, because then I would know you really love me.”

  Sara’s statement and the repetition of the car-scratching subject are starting to worry me. In my mind, without the aid of any time machine, I can see the future:

  Mr. Petrovich will throw the typeset manuscript of my story on his desk, he will for a long moment stare at me with his probing and condemning eyes, and finally he will say:

  “Hmm … One other instance is added to the list of your book’s immoral teachings. You encourage your readers to go and scratch innocent people’s cars. Instead, Sara could say, I am happy to hear that it wasn’t you who scratched the car, because if you had said it was you, I swear I would despise you so much that I would scratch out your name and all my memories of you … It is a beautiful literary sentence, isn’t it? I have used the metaphor of scratching very well, haven’t I?”

  “What can I say … The truth is that all this scratching is making me sick to my stomach.”

  Mr. Petrovich will stand up. In a dry and formal tone he will say:

  “I have to be at a very important meeting in a few minutes. I advise you to work on your story very carefully, both with respect to these minor details and to the major problems it has.”

  In that future that has now become my present, I walk out of the Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance. My head is about to explode. I begin to wa
lk aimlessly. All I know is that… I don’t know anything and I don’t know at all what I should do. I tell myself, “You are not all that different from Dostoyevsky’s Idiot, except that you are more naïve. If instead of all those years when you spent the hopes and dreams of your adolescence, youth, and middle age to write stories, if instead of all that danger you put yourself into to experience life and to write better stories, if… if… if instead of all this foolishness you had spent only a little time on your father’s assets, you would have been a wealthy man by now, and instead of writing a miserable love story, you could have invited not only Sara but any other beautiful woman to your villa in Spain and at night you could have read love stories by French writers to her …”

  Lost and confused, tears have welled up in my eyes. I can’t see my surroundings very well. All I know is that I am on a narrow and crowded sidewalk. I am pushed and shoved by people rushing by. Sometimes they call me names.

  I wipe away the tear that is not permitted to flow and I see that I am on the sidewalk of the old Lalehzar Street. I think, What an excellent and appropriate setting!

  I trip over the wares of a street peddler. If it were any other street peddler, he would have sent a few vulgar obscenities my way, but the man who sells talismans and magic smirks and says:

  “For your troubles and pains I have problem-solving spells … You are really blind.”

  “Yes. I am really blind.”

  I walk away. From the realization that I have been really blind all my life, again tears fill my eyes. But a few steps farther, I discover that from behind the veil of tears, Lalehzar is a timeless street. The street that eighty years ago was in a way Tehran’s Broadway and a place for entertainment and shopping for the wealthy and the aristocrats is now a strange and compelling setting for a scene in a story. I tell myself, “This sidewalk, with its old stores where the poor now shop, with its old theaters, with its burned-down cinemas and its street peddlers, is a really safe place for Dara and Sara to take a walk!”

  I no longer need to pull the curtain of tears away from my eyes. I tell myself:

  “Hey, you! Blind or seeing, yes, you are an idiot. An idiot for writing stories. But you like this idiocy …”

  THE BRONZE MAN

  We Iranians take great pride in the empires we have built. If you read our extraordinary history, our country has been occupied time and again, we have been massacred time and again, our cities have been reduced to dust, and then, with diplomacy, intelligence, cunning, and patience, we have introduced our invaders, who were often of savage tribes, to our culture and, as the saying goes, we have made human beings out of them.

  The problem with us Iranians, however, is that because we have all these past glories, it is no longer very important for us to make a name for ourselves and to be of benefit to the world today. It seems we don’t care at all how the world will judge our current circumstances.

  At the Museum of Antiquities, side by side but without their arms brushing against each other, Sara and Dara are strolling along and looking at the beautiful and majestic artifacts of ancient Iran; they are exchanging private words and talking to each other. Here too they are careful of their actions because they know museums have guards who, instead of guarding priceless and rare artifacts, pay more attention to the conduct of the visitors. Regardless, this place is far safer than the streets and parks.

  Sara and Dara are spellbound by the gold plates, jewel-encrusted arms, inscriptions, and golden ornaments that are at least two thousand years old. They silently gaze at each item and forget their own conversation.

  Finally, they arrive at the statue of the bronze man. The statue of a commander from the Parthian Dynasty. The dynasty that revived the Persian Empire by overthrowing the government that Alexander had instituted after his conquest of Persia. The bronze man, with his mysterious bronze color, with his herolike stature, wearing a metal costume that still bears the fineries of aristocratic Parthian dress, stares at them with his unique Aryan eyes. He stands as confident of his own eternal existence as did the statues in the museum of Baghdad before it was pillaged. Awestruck, Sara stands staring at the majesty of that statue. Dara dolefully whispers:

  “His arms!”

  The arms of the statue are broken off at the forearms, but his bearing is so stately that it seems he holds all the power in the world in his hands.

  Sara whispers:

  “This is what they call a real man.”

  “What does he have?”

  “If he falls in love, he will trust his love.”

  “His hands …”

  “Yes, his hands …”

  “At least we still have these. Those scoundrel Western archaeologists have taken the bulk of our ancient treasures, and they are now in museums in London, Paris, and New York.”

  “Perhaps it is for the best. At least there they are safe. No one will steal them.”

  Sara is referring to the disappearance of one of the two gold treasury tablets that were discovered beneath the foundation of the palace at Persepolis during an excavation. The story of Persepolis’s construction was engraved on them, and now only one remains in Iran. The fact that at the command of Darius, ruler of a great empire in the fourth century B.C., a documented account of his palace’s construction was buried in its foundation is itself intriguing. It is said that at the height of his power, Darius wisely realized that his empire would one day be plundered by invaders and destroyed by fire. He had therefore hidden the two tablets for a professor named Ernest Hertzfeld.

  But this is only part of the story. At one point, news of the disappearance of one of the gold tablets from the Museum of Antiquities spread throughout our country. Sometime later, newspapers reported that a museum manager had been arrested and accused of its theft. Later, it was reported that the thief had confessed that he had melted the gold tablet and had sold the gold for four thousand dollars.

  I don’t know about my fellow countrymen’s sentiments, but in my heart, I hope that the confession was a lie and that the tablet was sold to one of countless Iranian antique dealers and taken out of the country, and that years from now it will resurface in some private collection. For me, an Iranian who loves his country, this may be a bitter hope, but sadly it is one that may be more attainable than any other.

  Dara says:

  “This bronze man is the symbol of us Iranians … The world has cut off our hands.”

  “Perhaps we cut them off ourselves.”

  “No. We are a great nation. We have a rich culture.”

  “We had.”

  “I really don’t like you being so anti-Iranian. If you think like this, you will end up like those Iranians who prospered in this country, used its opportunities, and when they made a name for themselves, they went to the West and put their brains to work in the service of Westerners.”

  “Maybe this country drove them out.”

  “Even if what you say is true, they should have stayed and taught this country not to sacrifice its good Isaacs.”

  “Have you yourself ever managed to teach this to an Iranian?”

  “How could I teach anyone anything when before I even became an Abraham they battered and beat me?”

  I’m not sure whether you will make out the Iranian metaphors of this dialogue. But all I can say is that other than a U.S. attack on Iran—which the American media stir up whenever they run short of breaking news— there have been hundreds of other major attacks on Iran, and each time one of our empires suffered a defeat, the gates to its fortresses were opened to its enemies from the inside, with no Trojan horse involved. I don’t mean there are many traitors among us. What I mean is that there is no shortage of opportunists among us. These opportunists, with innocent smiles, have pushed the best offspring of Iran toward destruction— people who truly could save the country from plunging down the cliff of backwardness. And following their assassination or suicide while exiled in the West, the rest of us Iranians, even those of us who benefited from the evenhanded and
reformist actions of those people, have not uttered a single word in protest and have in fact tried to justify that their deaths or suicides were deserved.

  This subject is somewhat complicated, and unfortunately there is no more room in my love story to dedicate to it. Let us go see Sara and Dara at the museum.

  Sara asks:

  “Do you think this bronze man was ever in love?”

  “If he weren’t in love he would not have survived for two thousand years. Perhaps I will turn into a mud statue after I die.”

  After leaving the security of the museum walls, Sara’s anxiety returns. On these occasions the poor girl starts to sweat and feels nauseated. They start reviewing some of their personal information that they have memorized for occasions of arrest and interrogation.

  Dara asks:

  “What is my aunt’s name?”

  “Roya.”

  “What is her son’s name?”

  “Rostam.”

  “Where is their house?”

  “Liberty Street.”

  “How many rooms do we have in our house?”

  “One living room downstairs and two bedrooms upstairs.”

  “What flower do we have in our garden?”

  “Jasmine.”