Censoring an Iranian Love Story

by Shahriar Mandanipour; Sara Khalili

“What brand is our washing machine?”

  Sara cannot remember.

  “Think! You’ll remember.”

  Sara cannot remember. Dara teases:

  “Then you were lying when you said you are one of the top students at the university. Is this how you memorize your lessons?”

  Sara asks:

  “What brand is it?”

  “None. We don’t have a washing machine.”

  Sara, pretending to be angry, jabs Dara with her elbow. Suddenly scared, they look around to make sure no one is watching them.

  And now they are walking along the narrow and busy sidewalk of Lalehzar Street. The sidewalks here are always swarming with people. The small shops and street peddlers, with their wares spread out on the ground every few feet, attract not only people with limited means but loafers and idlers as well.

  More important, though, are the black marketers who stand alone and cater to their clientele. They have an uncanny sixth sense—envied by writers—with which they can tell by looking at the face of a passerby whether he is looking for black market merchandise or not and, if so, what exactly he is looking for. After pinpointing a potential customer, as that person walks past them, they whisper in his ear. For example:

  “Atashpareh’s latest album has arrived.”

  (That would be a minx called Fireball.)

  Or:

  “Wet … ?”

  Meaning alcohol. Or:

  “Dry … ?”

  Which most probably means opium.

  The inventory of black market goods could include:

  —Grocery coupons. (Families of seven or more who cannot afford to buy groceries even at the relatively low government prices sell their coupons on the black market so that families who do have money can use them in addition to their own coupons.)

  —Foreign cigarettes, drugs, alcohol.

  —Hard-to-find medications. (Iranian doctors, the likes of Dr. Farhad, know that certain medications cannot be found in pharmacies. Therefore, to prevent their gravely ill patients from having to wander around, when writing a prescription they will also tell them where on the black market to find that medicine.)

  —CDs or cassette tapes of banned music, particularly Los Angeles music. Don’t misunderstand, I don’t mean West Coast music. I am referring to a genre of so-called Iranian pop that in great quantity and shameful quality is produced in Los Angeles and smuggled into Iran. This hub of Iranian music production, right under Hollywood’s nose, was spontaneously established after the Islamic Revolution. A throng of good and bad singers, musicians, composers, and songwriters, who along with thousands of other Iranians had secretly escaped or legally migrated to the United States, started producing music for the state of California, which in just a few years had one hundred thousand Iranians added to its population. In Iran, on the other hand, where in the early postrevolution years the population had dropped by a few million (but further to recommendations by certain government officials had started passionately and tirelessly reproducing by night so as to benefit from extra grocery coupons meant for families of seven or more), music was declared forbidden. At the time, Iranian radio and television channels broadcast revolutionary anthems day and night. Yet a small group of Iranians was eager to listen to music. Therefore, a few entrepreneurs started copying Los Angeles–made music onto cassette tapes and sold them on the black market in Iran. Later, CDs were added to the offerings.

  Iran is one of the very few countries in the world that has music and films (especially Hollywood movies) favored by segments of its society produced overseas and delivered to its shores with no capital investment of its own, no shipping and insurance costs, and no copyright.

  On the crowded sidewalk of Lalehzar Street, Sara and Dara see a seemingly blind man trip over the box of the magic peddler. The peddler scoffs:

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

  Sara and Dara walk past this dialogue. They arrive in front of a very old theater that has been shut down. Years before the revolution, Iranian plays such as Khosrow and Shirin used to be staged here. Notices of death, smiling pictures of candidates running for the Tehran City Council, all of whom claim they will make Iran the world’s mightiest country, and advertisements for preparatory classes for college entrance exams are glued to the old theater doors. As Sara and Dara walk past the theater, a young man whispers to them:

  “Copies of Brokeback Mountain have arrived. Five hundred tumans.”

  Dara’s steps weaken. Sara says:

  “No, it’s too risky. Don’t stop.”

  The young man follows them, and as he walks past them he brings his head close to Dara’s ear and whispers:

  “I have the cool bedroom film of the series actress. Twelve thousand tumans.”

  Sara and Dara slow down to put some distance between themselves and the black marketer. Sara asks:

  “What did he have?”

  “The filthiest film in the world. The boyfriend of an actress who plays in an Iranian television series has filmed their lovemaking and has circulated the tape.”

  “Aah! That poor girl.”

  “Yes. That poor girl… She committed suicide.”

  For a few minutes they walk in silence. Toward the end of Lalehzar Street Sara asks:

  “I hope you’re not like that boyfriend.”

  “As if you and I are making love day and night. As if you and I are in the same room day and night.”

  And then Dara adds:

  “Not even in my dreams would I allow myself to touch you.”

  At this moment, the two who are walking side by side like strangers turn and stare into each other’s eyes. In each other’s eyes they read many unspoken and unthinkable words, words of repressed yearnings and desires. And in each other’s eyes they see images of forbidden words, words such as “kiss,” “pomegranate,” “milk and honey,” and “oyster.” …

  It is fortunate, and rare, that as they stare into each other’s eyes and stroll along that sidewalk, there are no street peddler’s wares in their path. Yet it seems great desire also reawakens bitterness and pain.

  Dara sarcastically asks:

  “What news of His Excellency, your gentleman suitor?”

  “His Excellency is well. So?”

  “How can you be with me and at the same time lead that man on?”

  Sara does not answer. It is now that, according to romance novels, black clouds seize the beautiful blue sky.

  Dara again asks:

  “How can you?”

  Sara replies:

  “How can you keep silent when they have forced this headscarf on my head?”

  With these words Dara is delivered a powerful punch in the mouth. For an entire thirty-seven minutes they walk in total silence until they finally arrive at a public park. Dara, with bloodshot eyes, asks Sara to keep herself busy for a few minutes by looking at the shopwindows on the other side of the street until he goes somewhere and returns. No matter how many times Sara asks him what has happened, she receives no response other than his hurry to leave. Dara, half running, enters the park. He has to get to a bathroom.

  No, don’t misunderstand. He really does have to pee. He has had to pee ever since they were at the museum, but that punch in the mouth from Sara has made it worse. In the dire state of almost losing control, with many apologies to the people standing on line, he rushes into a stall and shuts the steel door. On the top part of the door, meaning the upper third of the Rule of Thirds in visual arts, a large uneven hole has been cut out so that if someone is standing in the stall and peeing or doing something else, his head can be seen from the outside. In Iran, from a purely religious point of view, peeing while standing up is as unbecoming as participating in certain activities that take place in the bathrooms of bars and discos in the West.

  Dara, completely drained, returns. He finds Sara on the other side of the street in front of a bridal shop. In its large window, there is a mannequin wearing a
beautiful and regal wedding gown. The mannequin has no protruding breasts and no head. In just these few minutes, Sara’s face has grown very sad.

  She says:

  “Let’s go shopping.”

  “Shopping for what?”

  Sara points to the dress.

  “What… ? Do you know how expensive these dresses are?”

  “How do you know? How many times have you been married?”

  “I can guess … What’s more, I … to tell you the truth …”

  “You have no money?”

  Embarrassed, Dara nods.

  “But we’re not going to shop for real. We’re just going to play. We’ll act.”

  They enter the store. The middle-aged shop owner, who is wearing very heavy makeup, contrary to most Iranian shop owners, greets them with a smile.

  Although it is forbidden for men to enter such stores, the shop owner pays little attention to Dara’s shy and uneasy presence. She asks Sara:

  “Are you the bride?”

  “Yes.”

  “Oh! It’s been a while since a bride this beautiful walked into my shop … What style do you like?”

  She puts an English-language catalog in front of Sara. All the bare body parts of the models, including arms, legs, and hair, have been obscured by a black Magic Marker.

  I don’t like to constantly interrupt my story’s progress to offer explanations. But it seems I have no choice. Some things and certain actions in Iran are so strange and outlandish that without explaining them it is impossible for an Iranian story to be well understood by non-Iranians. These explanations are also important for young Iranian readers, because, for example, since the day an Iranian sixteen-year-old opened her eyes to the world, she has always seen fashion magazines with this same black Magic Marker treatment and she thinks that all magazines around the world look like this. Therefore, it must be said that:

  For years after the revolution, importing foreign periodicals and books to Iran was banned. Then the government decided to allow a slight opening in the country’s visual and scriptural contact with the world. Therefore, a special section was set up at all customs bureaus to censor Western publications entering the country. Agents would carefully leaf through journals and magazines that travelers brought from overseas and insisted on passing through customs—such as Burda, which is very popular in Iran—and they would tear out pages with pictures of bare-limbed women and women not wearing proper Islamic dress and throw them in the trash can. No matter how much a concerned traveler would plead that on the flip side of an advertisement in The New Yorker or Newsweek or National Geographic there was an important article, no one would listen. Imagine how many hundreds of thousands of models, Hollywood stars, and beautiful women in advertisements have been sent off to the trash cans of airports in Iran. Later, to prevent such mass executions, these same customs departments invented a new technique. Very sticky sticky tape, purchased not from China where glues are as weak as spit, but from the West, was supplied to all customs bureaus in mass quantities. At the sight of a bare arm or a pair of legs, the responsible agents would stick a piece of sticky tape on the limbs, and with a deftness that only Iranian handymen possess, they would swiftly rip it off, and the mighty sticky tape would lift those arms or legs off the page of the magazine. But this method was time-consuming and embodied a violence akin to Khosrow’s actions toward Shirin’s stepmother on the night of the nuptial consummation. At any rate, man was driven from heaven to earth so that he will forever have to invent. After a while, a new approach, which is this system of blackening with permanent markers, was invented. The method was later perfected when markers were purchased from overseas that, while blackening completely and mercilessly, compassionately did not leak through to the reverse side of the page.

  I must confess that after years of longing to see a current issue of The New Yorker, as I hungrily leafed through one that a friend had brought from overseas, before reading the short story, I was tempted to see what lay beneath the black. I held the page up to the light, but I could see nothing of the legs on that model lounging on a sofa with two black ribbons crossing each other below the hem of her skirt in the vein of Japanese brush paintings. I didn’t have the patience to try to wipe the ink off with water or nail-polish remover, but a friend who also liked The New Yorker told me that the black ink does not come off with either water or nail-polish remover.

  In the past few years, because of soaring demand, several fashion magazines have been published in Iran. In these magazines, photographs of the latest fashions from Paris and New York are printed in their actual form, but instead of the model, who should be wearing the clothes, there is only a pencil sketch of a woman. The pencil-sketched woman is, of course, wearing a headscarf.

  The magic peddler of Tehran, contrary to the character in that beautiful cartoon who sketched in pencil and whatever he drew came to life, specializes in transforming all real things into pencil sketches.

  Sara, however, does not browse through that black-inked Burda, and playing the part of the most serious bride in the world, she says:

  “We are planning to get married in five days. To be honest, it was a last-minute decision.”

  “You mean Mr. Groom is all fired up?”

  “Something like that … The day after the wedding we are flying to Paris.”

  The excited shop owner rubs her hands together.

  “Oh, that is so romantic. Honeymoon in Paris. Nothing beats that … and with such a handsome man … You will shine in Paris.”

  Sara points to the dress on the mannequin in the window.

  “Do you have that dress for me to try on?”

  “As a matter of fact, we have one just your size.”

  Sara goes to the dressing room. This is the perfect opportunity for Dara to savor the bitter taste of Sara’s tooth-shattering retort. Well, like many enlightened Iranian men, he is subconsciously ashamed of his own incompetence and inaction, when after the revolution, mothers, sisters, and wives, through coercion and by having pushpins stabbed into their foreheads, were forced to wear headscarves and chadors, and year after year, their human rights were taken away from them. And at this very moment, the stinging slap of a political inspiration lands on his ear. Dara discovers that during all the years that he and his generation fought for utopia in Iran, they were wrong, and they should have instead fought for this small and basic right.

  I am wondering whether this is Dara’s own discovery or not, when, flirtatiously, the shop owner turns to Dara and says:

  “Sir! Do you realize what a beautiful and attractive bride you have?”

  Embarrassed, Dara mumbles something. The shop owner points at him and laughs:

  “Wow! It’s been a while since a groom this shy walked into my shop. Lucky bride … Let’s see, do you know what to do on your wedding night?”

  All of Dara’s sweat is oozing out of all of his pores. The shop owner looks Dara over. She moves closer, and aware that she is sending the whiff of the latest Chanel perfume to his nostrils, she plays with the top silver button on her coverall.

  “If your bride shops from my store, as her bonus, come here alone on your wedding day. I have some magic American pills. I’ll give you a few, and I promise on your wedding night your sonbol will not buckle even for a second … Have you ever heard of Viagra?”

  As you may have surmised, sonbol is a colloquialism for the male organ, but in fact the word means “hyacinth.” Now, I know that the majority of Western scientists only invent things that are needed in their own country, and if at this moment Dara had not gone dumb with embarrassment, or if I was there in the shop with him, we would say to that lady shop owner:

  First of all, most of us Iranian men not only have no need for Viagra, but we in fact need pills to relieve us of our perpetually raised sonbols so that we can at last, peacefully, tend to more important tasks such as inventing things that our people really need. For example, a pill that would record a Western masterpiece such as Lord Jim on
our memory, or a pill that would stimulate comprehension of Kandinsky’s abstract art, or a pill that would infuse an understanding of the philosophical implications of Einstein’s theory of relativity or quantum physics in the minds of us Middle Easterners so that we become less dogmatic. Or even a pill that would download Mr. Microsoft’s acumen and entrepreneurship onto the genius minds of our youth for them to understand that, instead of inventing ways to break Microsoft’s software codes, they can develop software that breaks the ancient codes in the brains of us Iranians.

  Sara, wearing one of the most beautiful Iranian wedding gowns, walks out of the dressing room. With a playfulness that all women possess, and fully aware of the answer to her own question, she coquettishly swings her hips and asks Dara:

  “What do you think?”

  It is the first time Dara has seen Sara wearing anything other than a coverall.

  If at this very moment you were in Dara’s place, facing all that forbidden beauty clad in a magnificent dress, what sentence would you speak at the first sight of your beloved’s bare shoulders and cleavage nestled amid lace flowers?

  No words come out of Dara’s mouth. He simply stares in awe. Sara turns to face the large mirror. Now they see themselves side by side. Dara discovers how ugly and shabby his clothes are. He pulls himself out of the mirror’s reflection.

  The store lights reflect off of Sara’s young and radiant skin. Dara feels he has a fever and sweat trickles down his spine. He is dying to reach out and touch those shoulders. A gentle and delicate touch, with his trembling fingertips allowed only to move along the outer limits of that skin.

  Sara says:

  “Come, take my hand so that we can walk like a bride and groom.”

  In the mirror, they watch their graceful walk together.

  Then Sara smooths the satin folds of the dress on her chest and stomach and her eyes fall captive to the longing look in Dara’s eyes.

  What they say about the language of eyes being more compelling and intimate than the spoken word is not always and on all occasions true. It depends on the person and the circumstances. On a spring night, in a romantic restaurant in Paris where you can see the Eiffel sonbol from the window next to you, you may find yourself with a talkative woman, or an arrogant man who incessantly talks about his incredible financial feats, and while the candlelight shines in your beautiful eager eyes, you look into your partner’s eyes, and in those eyes you read nothing other than what is coming out of his or her mouth.