Censoring an Iranian Love Story (32 page)

Dara, blushing and embarrassed, has mumbled:

“No. We were just going to study … Forget it. Don’t argue.”

And he has headed for the yard.
His father has yelled after him:

“Dara, you dimwit! Make sure to invite her. Go ahead and invite them over in pairs so that you won’t leave this world deprived like me.”

Outside in the front yard, Dara has sat next to the flower patch and thought about his uncertain future, about Sara not having given him an answer to his proposal, about his financial difficulties should he ever get married, and then, all by himself, he has come up with another narrative suspense. He has not sought my advice. Even if he had, I would not have been able to come up with anything. It was therefore his own unadulterated idea to invite Sara to their home at ten o’clock at night when his parents are asleep and to quietly sit with her here in this yard, or perhaps to even sneak her up to his room. Just for an hour, or an hour and a half, no more, because Sara will have no excuse and no permission to spend the night away from home. After much mumbling he has told Sara about his plan and, contrary to his expectation, Sara has readily agreed. In fact, she herself has solved the problem of being out until midnight. She has said:

“I will say I am going to Jasmine’s house to study and I will call a taxi to take me back home. The problem is I can’t leave home at nine o’clock at night pretending to want to go and study. I have to leave late in the afternoon and wait around somewhere until nine o’clock. I’ll figure it out. What will you do?”

“I will die waiting for you.”

And I, instead of all this, will write in my story:

Dara, sitting next to the flower patch, has come to the conclusion that he must make greater sacrifices for his family, and if today he is beset by poverty and despair, it is only because he has not sacrificed enough, and that if at some point he manages to suppress his desires and yearnings, the day will come when the world’s positive energies will come to his aid and he will have the means to get married.

Contrary to this idiotic sentence that can only come from the pen of a writer who has been chewed to the bone by censorship, it is now nine o’clock at night. This afternoon, Dara bought seven sacred stems of damask rose and hid them in a corner in the house. Before Sara arrives, he will pluck their petals and spread them in a circle in the shelter of the jasmine bush, so that he can sit his Sara down in a floral circle. He has tested the various locations in the front yard from the vantage point of the apartment windows across the alley and has found the best spot. Yes, the jasmine bush will hide them from the neighbors’ probing eyes.

Dara spreads the petals in a circle the diameter of Sara’s backside, and with his heart pounding like that of a captive sparrow, he opens the front door and peeks at the end of the alley. It is too early for Sara to arrive. He drinks a glass of water and returns to the front door. Five minutes later, when for the third time he opens the front door and looks down the alley, he hears Mr. Atta’s voice:

“How are you, brother?”

Dara looks up, and across the alley he sees Brother Atta’s head and torso in the window of his apartment. The second-floor window has full view of the entire alley and key sections of Dara’s house.

“Not bad, Brother Atta. How are you?”

“Thank God, I’m well. What’s new?”

“Nothing.”

“I saw you constantly coming to the door, I thought something bad may have happened.”

“No. Do we always have to expect bad news? I was just bored and came to the door. It seems you’re bored, too.”

“No. A pious man is never bored. He has his God to talk to.”

“Then I should say good-bye and let you talk to your God.”

Dara has sensed that Brother Atta has grown suspicious, but he can’t control his anger. He slams the front door shut and goes back into the house. The familiar voice of the Farsi-speaking radio announcer on Voice of America flows from the fortress of an Iranian Communist, but the light in the kitchen is turned off, and Mother has gone up to her bedroom on the second floor. The primary danger has been removed. The minute he sees his son, Dara’s father says:

“In this world you are either a winner or a loser. Sometimes, deep in your heart, you are glad that you are a loser, and sometimes deep in your heart you are sad that you are a winner. I mean it’s all one big pile of crap. Do you understand?”

“Yes, Father. Don’t you want to sleep?”

“I have no sleep. But I’ll sleep if you want me to.”

The sound of the radio is silenced. Father, with his knees bent by sheer force of habit, lies down on the floor of his fortress. In keeping with solitary confinement regulations, the light in his fortress must stay on. Dara, sitting on the thirty-year-old sofa, not knowing why, asks his first intimate and un-self-censored question of his father:

“Father. Have you ever been happy in your life?”

“In this crappy life there are times when you think you are happy with the things you have done, even in a solitary cell, and there are times when you have doubts and you think you are unhappy. But then the time comes when you wonder what being happy really means. I pray to God you never come to ask this question. It’s really bad … Good night, son.”

Two minutes later the snoring begins. Dara can’t tell whether this is natural snoring or whether his clever father is pretending to be asleep. It is 9:40. Dara drinks another glass of water. He cannot resist the temptation of going to the front door. At 9:44 he crosses the front yard, opens the door, and looks down the alley to where Sara should appear.

Brother Atta, having materialized at his window again, says:

“Brother Dara, it seems you really are bored tonight.”

“What can I say Brother Atta. It seems you too are really bored to have glued yourself to the window.”

“No, brother. My duties include guarding this alley and people’s homes.”

The residents of the alley all know that three nights a week Brother Atta serves in the neighborhood Baseej volunteer militia and that at police checkpoints along the streets in the area, he stops cars with a Kalashnikov, smells the drivers’ breath to make sure they haven’t been drinking, searches the car trunks and under the seats in case they have stashed bottles of spirits or narcotic drugs there, and if there are any women in the cars he interrogates them to see how they are related to the driver.

Dara quips:

“Brother Atta, go get a good night’s sleep. I seem to have insomnia tonight, I’ll guard the street.”

Brother Atta laughs out loud and says:

“There are people in this country who are waiting for me and my brothers to fall asleep so that they can uproot us and Islam. But because I know you have repented your past sins, I’ll believe you. I’m off to bed.”

He shuts the window and draws the curtains.

It is 9:53. Dara thinks, Another seven minutes … In another seven minutes Sara will be here … Oh God! At last Sara and I, alone together … Is it really possible … ?

He glances up at the window of Brother Atta’s apartment. He thinks he sees a shadow at the edge of the curtain. He thinks perhaps it is the shadow of a statue. At 9:55 it occurs to him that it is impossible for Brother Atta to have a statue in his apartment because fervent Muslims consider statues and paintings of people to be forbidden. And the shadow behind the curtain moves … “It’s him. He’s keeping an eye on me. That scoundrel!”

Dara goes back into the yard and slams his fist into the wall. Everything is falling apart. If Atta sees Sara sneaking into their house he will definitely report it, and the patrols will raid the house. Dara looks at his bleeding knuckles. He must do something. It is 9:58. In a moment of madness and rage he walks toward the front door to go out and shout up at Brother Atta’s window those words that he must shout out. But at the last moment—I don’t know whether it came from me or from his own Iranian intelligence—he shuts his mouth. He walks to the end of the alley. There, he paces up and down like a caged wolf until six minutes past ten, when Sara climbs out of a taxi.

“The situation has gotten a bit complicated. Our nosy neighbor is standing at the window spying. Please go take a walk around the streets here and come back in half an hour.”

Sara agrees. Dara returns home and turns out all the lights so that perhaps Brother Atta’s mind will be put at ease and he’ll go to bed. From the edge of the drawn curtain in his room Dara keeps an eye on the drawn curtain in Atta’s room. There doesn’t seem to be a shadow behind it. At 10:30 he quietly opens the front door. Brother Atta’s shadow appears behind the curtain. Dara again walks to the end of the alley. At 10:35 Sara returns.

“Well?”

Dara has no energy or words left to speak. All he can manage is:

“The guy … He is still at the window.”

“At least ten cars stopped and solicited me in the half hour I was walking around. Do you know what torture that is for a girl like me?”

Dara pounds his other, uninjured fist against the wall. The sound of skin splitting and blood spurting out is as loud as the sound of the army of Arab ghosts returning from their conquest of Khorasan, bringing with them a plunder of gold and jewels equal to all the riches of Arabia.

The vertebrae along Dara’s spinal cord are splintering. He pleads:

“Can you … another half an hour … the guy will finally sleep … half an hour …”

Sara raises her hand to slap his face. I grab her wrist. She brings her face close to his, and into Dara’s breath she growls:

“You are treating me like a prostitute. You will make a prostitute of me.”

To Dara, the sound of the door slamming shut on the first taxi that arrives is like that slap in the face he did not receive.

Brother Atta’s shadow is still behind the window. But to him, the sound of the front door of Dara’s house slamming shut is not at all like a slap in the face.

And Dara’s father mutters in his sleep:

“Ah … h … h … h! My wasted life, those prisons and tortures! Was it all a mistake, Comrade Gorbachev?”

MIRDAMAD AVENUE

S
ara is sitting in one of the classrooms in the Department of Literature at Tehran University and appears to be listening to the professor. The boys are sitting on the seats up front, and the girls are occupying the seats in the back of the classroom. The professor is discussing a poem by the poet who died six hundred years ago. Sara inspects the backs of the boys’ heads one by one and selects the one that resembles Dara’s head to look at. A week has passed since the night when she went as far as the perilous frontier of Dara’s house, and during this time she has neither replied to his e-mails nor answered his nightly phone calls. Ever since she saw Shirin bleeding, resentment and fear of men has lingered in her mind. But on the other hand, she finds their scent and ruggedness enticing. From the back, the head of the boy sitting in the first seat of the second row is very similar to Dara’s head, and Sara now feels she misses him terribly. The words “You will make a prostitute of me” keep echoing in her mind. This sentence that she has spoken to Dara somehow seems erotic to her. That night, after leaving Dara, she had felt wet while riding in the taxi. The taxi driver, looking at her in the rearview mirror constantly, had fondled himself.

In the classroom, the boy whose head resembles Dara’s head, as if he has felt the weight of Sara’s eyes, suddenly turns around and smiles at her. He has a large and long Arab nose and sloping Mongol eyes. Sara turns to the window. The smog over Tehran is so thick that it is hard to tell whether it’s sunny or cloudy. Sara smells a blend of ambergris and sandalwood rising from her body and she imagines herself as a prostitute. The professor is saying:

“The key point in this poet’s work is the term ‘boy-servant.’ His depictions of the boy-servant’s beauties and the fact that from the desire of copulating with him the poet has no sleep and no appetite, should not mislead you. All his poems have profound mystical significance. The poet’s lover is in fact his bridge to God. He is in love with God, not with a boy-servant with fuzz scarcely sprouting above his lips. The fact that the poet has composed many verses in describing this fuzz is actually an allusion to the freshness and the coming-of-age of his love for God …”

The only image Sara has of prostitution is that of the women she has seen on certain streets in Tehran who ignore taxis and old cars, but the moment an expensive car breaks in front of them they stick their head in the window and after a brief conversation quickly jump into the back of the car and leave. Sara imagines herself standing on Mirdamad Avenue— an avenue like the Champs-Élysées in Paris, with some of the most expensive boutiques in Tehran. The first passing car to break in front of her is that same taxi. The driver shouts:

“If you have an empty house, hop in, you hot piece of ass.”

Sara walks a few steps away from the taxi. A late-model BMW pulls up in front of her. Sara, in her titillating fantasy of being a prostitute, sticks her head in the car window. Sinbad is at the wheel, and Dara is sitting next to him. They offer her lascivious grins.

And the professor is saying:

“See how beautifully the poet has described the seven stages of love in this poem. In the desert he has lost the caravan of camels; he has lost his shoes too and now he is walking barefoot. The desert thorns pierce his feet, and he is gratified by this torture. It is not important for him whether he reaches his mystical destination. What’s important for him is to walk in the desert toward his beloved for as long as he can. The thorns are a symbol of the agonies we must endure in this material world until we reach God and arrive in heaven.”

Sara does not get into the BMW. She kicks the car door and shouts:

“You trash!”

In her mind she has imagined herself sandwiched between Dara and Sinbad. One from behind, one from the front, so that they will later switch places. Of course, up to this moment in the story, Sara has never watched a pornographic film and does not know how she has managed to conjure up such an image. The boy whose head resembles Dara’s has again turned around and is smiling at her. He has Afghan teeth. Sara impulsively raises her hand to ask a question.

“Do you have a question, sister?”

“Yes. Why do we only study works from a thousand years ago in the Department of Literature? Why can’t we also study something from Iran’s contemporary literature?”

“What do you mean by Iran’s contemporary literature?”

“For example,
The Blind Owl.”

“Sister, you call
The Blind Owl
literature? Such rubbish is not literature. You want me to put aside the beauties of our mystic literature and have you study works that are nothing more than sexual deprivation, surrender to the West, and promotion of ungodliness? You want to relinquish the beauties of the language of our literature and read ridiculous prose full of errors—prose called the contemporary literature of Iran? The people you students know as today’s writers and poets fall into three groups. They are either spies for the West, drug addicts, or homosexuals. It is every Muslim’s duty to spill the blood of such people. Reading their writings is a capital sin. Reading their drivel will lead you astray. You will burn with these poets, with these so-called writers, in hell’s inferno.”

Now Sara, in her imagination, sets out along Mirdamad Avenue. She sees herself free to be a prostitute or a boy-servant or a woman who will scream at stupid Iranian men:

“Damn all your political slogans. When you wanted to be modern, you beat us over the head for us to take off our chadors, and when you found religion you beat us over the head for us to cover ourselves with chadors. Damn you! I will walk down Mirdamad Avenue any way I like. All you know is how to start revolutions and coups d’état. I will walk down this street, and you, in your dilapidated cars or your expensive cars, stop in front of me because you want me only as a prostitute. The hell with you. I’ll walk wherever I want.”

I don’t know how these rallying cries have ignited in the mind of my story’s Sara. I have never in my life had the courage to so bluntly and openly plant such thoughts in the mind of one of my stories’ characters. I am sure Mr. Petrovich will go crazy if he reads Sara’s thoughts. First, he will forbid his sister and mother from frequenting Mirdamad Avenue, and second, he will do his utmost for the government to pass a law so that no Iranian woman will have the right to step onto this fashionable street.

The boy whose head resembles Dara’s again turns around and smiles at Sara. She notices that his eyes have changed from dark Mongol eyes to un-Eastern blue eyes. A sort of icy English blue. Sara glares at him with such venom that the boy realizes he has to turn around and to allow only the back of his head to be seen by her. The professor is explaining that for the final exam everyone has to memorize seventy verses of an ode by the poet who died six hundred years ago and that they will have to write them down on their exam paper. Sara wants to walk out in protest, but she is not brave enough. Yet now she knows that she is after all brave enough to answer Dara’s phone call or e-mail tonight.

Meanwhile, Mirdamad Avenue is empty of Sara’s presence, and the prostitutes whose numbers are increasing daily are walking along its sidewalks. The moment they are certain that the patrol cars from the Campaign Against Social Corruption are not nearby, they will step onto the street and quickly get into the first expensive car that stops for them.

And the mysterious scents of the perfumes that have been brought to Iran’s empires by way of the Silk Road wander the streets of Tehran searching for a nose that likes them.