Censoring an Iranian Love Story (34 page)

LIKE A FLY

S
omeone is trying to kill me.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean I’m supposed to get killed … and don’t think I’m afraid. To tell you the truth, in a way I want to be freed from this horrible life. But before I die, I want to know why they are trying to slice my vein.”

“Don’t torture me like this. Tell me what has happened.” Sara’s eyes, after having shed two tears, have grown narrow and misty.

They are sitting in a park on two benches facing each other.
When there is no one walking along the pathway between them, they talk, and every time a passerby draws near, they turn away from each other like two strangers.

Dara says:

“If I am to die because of you, it will be the best way to die.”

“Don’t you dare die for me. Tell me what has happened!”

“I have no enemies; I mean, to be honest, I am too much of a nobody for someone to even want to be my enemy … During the past two days I have thought a lot about it, and I have come to the conclusion that my only enemy is your suitor. Other than he, no one stands to gain from my death. Why did you give him my address and telephone number?”

“Sinbad doesn’t even know you exist.”

“Great! What good fortune!
But this guy you are keeping on the back burner belongs to a powerful group. They can find out about everything. They can do whatever they want. Why do you want to get me killed?
Just tell me to get lost and I will.”

“Stop yelling! For God’s sake, lower your voice. The Sinbad I know would never do such a thing. He is a good man. No … not Sinbad … It’s impossible.
Maybe they are trying to kill you because of your political past.
”

“
No, that’s impossible. I’ve been living like a sheep for years. All I do is paint houses. I’m not involved in any political activities at all. They know this very well. Even if they do want to get rid of me, they can do it much more easily and expertly.
Who would want to kill a nobody like me?”

“Don’t talk about my Dara like this. My Dara is a great man.”

“As great as your nice Mr. Sinbad?”

“You are being jealous. I don’t believe this story you are fabricating. You and I don’t need to make up such stories. We are together. Why don’t you understand?”

“I am starting to understand what togetherness means, but I will not allow your Sinbad to swat me like a fly. I will kill him.”

A man approaches them. Sara turns away. Dara too turns away. The man seems to be crazy.
His walk somehow resembles dancing.
He is singing, “When at night I hold the image of you in my arms, at dawn the scent of flowers rises from my bed …”

He looks at Sara and Dara, laughs out loud, and says:

“You devils! I’ve caught you red-handed. Be careful! You’re not as smart as you think.”

He walks away.

Sara, trying desperately to keep her voice down, says:

“I’m begging you, be smart. Don’t torture me like this.”

“You don’t want to be tortured, but you love torturing.”

“Shut up! You’re showing me a side of you that I have never seen.”

“It is what it is … Will you marry me?”

“I don’t want to marry anyone. You men are all idiots. You only think about yourselves.”

“You are lying. You want to sell yourself to rich Mr. Sinbad.”

“Is that what you really think of me? Selling myself?”

“I don’t care anymore. I’ll kill him—not because he’s going to be your husband, but because he wants to get rid of me. Give me his address.”

Sara’s eyes have grown even narrower. She frees herself from the bench and before leaving says:

“You have gone mad with jealousy. You shouldn’t do this.”

“I’ll kill him before he kills me.”

“The hell you will. You are going crazy.”

Sara walks away. Behind her, Dara, who has started walking in the opposite direction, yells:

“You have driven me crazy.”

And his shout resonates among the weeping willows and maple trees.

DAV
LP

I
have tried to dissuade Dara from what he is planning, but I have been no match for him. I see clearly how my love story is moving in a direction that I never intended. The story is falling apart. The characters are each playing a different tune without being able to collectively create symphonic harmony. I have to think of something. I have to do something.

The key point is that Dara cannot be allowed to kill Sinbad. He has to give me time to find out who is trying to murder him. But this brainless boy will not listen to me. Yes, clearly he is blinded by jealousy. I have never in my life felt this weak writing a story, and as far as I can tell, Dara has never felt this powerful. He cannot understand that right now a man named Petrovich is delighting in the fact that this story is being mired in shit. Therefore:

Some nights, without telling Sara, Dara prowls the streets around her house. He knows that one of these nights Sinbad will come to visit, and the only solution he has come up with is to find him here and to exact his revenge. He has a screwdriver is his pocket and has often imagined that, in the vein of Hollywood movies that teach the people of the world all methods of murder and assassination, he will stab this innocent object into the base of Sinbad’s throat with all his might, and he will give it a few sideways twists to really tear up everything in his head.

I say:

“With what you are intending to do, you will only make the enemies of Iranian literature happy. Let’s think together and help each other write a new and beautiful love scene for you and Sara, one that has never been written in any novel. In our country, blood is shed day and night; hatred and animosity are constantly advertised; people are at each other’s throats and want to delete each other. I mean censor each other. You and I should not fall into this trap. We must do something different. Let’s put our heads together and come up with something beautiful to do …”

“I am really fed up. I have to kill him.”

I can understand that after years of tolerating oppression, humiliation and pain, and suffocation, now, like an infected cyst, rage has burst open in Dara’s soul and leaked its poison into his blood, driving him insane. This is just the point dictators fail to understand, and even if they do, they have no alternative but to increase the ranks of their torturers and censors, until the day when the insanity of revolution floods the streets and burns and kills.

Dust from the passage of the Afghan troops who have gone to the conquest and looting of Isfahan lingers in the air and gently rains down on the city’s rooftops.

I tell Dara:

“But the Dara I have written and created sentence by sentence cannot commit murder. He is peaceful and loves mankind. He has learned from art and prison that the first rule of being human is to do no harm unto others. His talent in life is forgiveness and shunning violence.”

Dara grabs my throat. He shoves me back and slams me against the wall of his room. For the first time I realize how strong his right arm has become as a result of painting walls and ceilings. In my face he shouts:

“You shouldn’t have written me like this. You shouldn’t have written me as browbeaten and pathetic. You wrote me as an earthworm. You wrote me so that no matter what they do to me, all I can do is squirm and bear the pain. You wrote me like this to pass your story through censorship. I don’t want to be written as an earthworm that even when they cut it in two turns into two earthworms. You are my murderer too for having written me as so utterly miserable. All the torment and misery there is you have written for me. You are no different than the torturer who would flog me so that I would concede there is a God. I want to write my own murder.”

From the pressure of Dara’s powerful grip my air passage is constricted. Yet I struggle to say:

“Dara, this is just a story.”

He squeezes my throat even harder and growls:

“Even in your story the likes of Sinbad have pilfered this country’s oil money, they have taken all that me and my kind ever had, and I have just kept silent. What else do I have for them to take other than Sara? And her, too, he wants to take from me. I will not let him.”

In his eyes there is a wildness that I have never seen in my mind’s eye. He releases my throat. He turns his back to me and still growls:

“In my mind I have often whipped that interrogator who used to order them to flog me. You haven’t had the guts to write this. You haven’t even had the guts to write bluntly and openly about the wounds on the soles of my feet. You have not written how the feet swell, and the interrogator forces you to walk for the blood to circulate back into your body so that he can again whip your soles with a cable. And you are so proud of being a writer. The hell with your writing. The hell with all your words …”

Dara takes refuge in the corner of his room; he sits with his back to me, rests his head on his knees, and weeps. Ashamed, I walk out. On the first floor, I pass by his father’s fortress. As is his tendency, he is talking to someone in his sleep. I can’t understand what he is saying, but I want him to say: The motherfuckers didn’t tell us not to pull the bowstring.

I pass by the jasmine bush in its nocturnal sleep in the flower patch of Dara’s house. At his window, Brother Atta is observing my exit. From the end of the alley I think I see a burnoose-clad phantom at the head of the alley, but when I arrive there the street is empty of phantoms and humans. From near and far I hear a drumming sound
—tak, tak, tak, tak.
I don’t understand what is causing it, and I am in no mood to investigate. Dara has broken my heart with his broken heart. Now I wish I were worthy enough for one of the Hashashin to play one note of his dagger on my jugular. In the midnight of my office in Shiraz, I see myself aimlessly wandering along the dimly lit streets of Tehran. I am angry at Dara, but deep in my heart I know he is right. Only now am I starting to understand how great his love for Sara is. Far greater than my story writer’s imagination and images of my loves.

And on Tehran’s streets, the farther north I go the more beautiful the streets and the more plentiful the trees become, and the more concentrated the drumming sound
—tak, tak, tak.
I can’t understand what is happening. Windows open one by one, and people look out to see where this noise is coming from. Doors open one by one and sleepy men in grubby wrinkled pajamas walk out. They turn their ears in the direction from which the nearest
tak, tak, tak
is coming, and then from a location even closer, in the opposite direction, another
tak, tak, tak
starts and they turn their ears to that side. Then, dazed and confused, they stare at one another.

Someone says:

“Sir! I think America has launched an attack.”

Another replies:

“Sir, America doesn’t attack with
tak, taks.
Their bombs come suddenly, like an earthquake, and pulverize all that we have.”

Someone else says:

“If America hasn’t attacked, then this is a new plot by our own government; tomorrow either gas or bread will be more expensive.”

The drumming sounds have a strange reverberation; one can’t tell from which direction they are coming. They echo off the walls of the city’s houses and grow more intense. I see members of the Baseej volunteer militia and the Revolutionary Guard Corps hastily stationing themselves at intersections and setting up checkpoint barricades. They arm their Kalashnikovs and ready them to be fired.

A man whose large belly is sticking out from his pajamas, with the long hair around his navel swept in one direction like algae in street gutters, says:

“What if it’s Judgment Day?”

Another replies:

“Sir, it seems you have a few screws loose. In religious stories it is said that on Judgment Day Gabriel will blow his horn so loudly that we will all go deaf, and the sun will come so close that human brains will start to boil. What does this
tak, tak
in the middle of the night have to do with Judgment Day?”

I cannot say that they are frightened. Since the days when Saddam Hussein would aim Scud missiles at our cities, and suddenly three or four houses in our neighborhood would explode, and their bricks together with the flesh of their occupants would fly at our windows, and after the dust had settled we would see a deep crater instead of those houses, we Iranians are no longer all that afraid of bombardments. I cannot say that they are shocked either. During the thirty-some years since the revolution, we Iranians have seen and heard so many strange things that if from the skies of our cities earthworms pour instead of rain, rather than being shocked, we will argue whether this is a new conspiracy by the British or the Americans or our own government, and then we will return to our homes to find individual solutions—scientific and nonscientific—to protect our houses from earthworms.

Now the
tak, tak, taks
are coming from every corner of Tehran. At a police checkpoint at an intersection, the Baseej militiamen, who are angry at not having found the source of the noise, stop cars, drag the drivers out, and with the butts of their Kalashnikovs smash their car stereos. I assume by now the aggressive antiriot police have surrounded all the university dormitories in Tehran. And still, the
tak, tak, taks
reverberate in the streets and echo everywhere.

I have reached Liberty Street, that same place where Dara for the first time showed himself to Sara, and I arrive at the narrow tree-lined Sixteenth of
zar Street. I like this street very much. Thirty years ago, when I was a student at Tehran University, taking a stroll down this street was very comforting to me, especially in the fall when maple and sycamore leaves carpeted its sidewalks. Long ago and before the Islamic Revolution, on a sixth of December, Mr. Nixon traveled to Iran as vice president of the United States. At Tehran University, students demonstrated against American imperialism, and the army attacked the university and killed three students. University students and political activists named this day University Students’ Day, and every year on the sixteenth of
zar there were demonstrations and protests against the Shah’s regime. The students would break the windows of college buildings, and the university guards would attack them. They would beat them up and arrest some of them, and in jail they would flog them or sodomize them with Coca-Cola bottles. They would then release them so that on the next sixteenth of
zar the students could break even more windows. However, after the revolution, the Islamic Republic’s regime executed so many students and political oppositionists every day that no one could name a particular day for a particular occasion. Therefore, all our days became the sixteenth of
zar, meaning all our days became days on which a group of people were killed for freedom. The masterwork of the Islamic Republic was that it eradicated the importance of occasions. I, therefore, walk along Sixteenth of
zar Street, and the sycamore leaves that have dried like tortured hands crush beneath my untortured feet. Suddenly I hear a sound. The sound of the wings of a bird landing on a tree. I look up at the leafless branches, I don’t see anything, but I instantly hear the drumming with a six-eighths time signature—the rhythm of commonplace Iranian songs
— tak tak, tak tak tak …
It is nothing strange, just a woodpecker. It is this, all that it all was: woodpeckers. After years during which no city resident ever heard a woodpecker peck a tree, they have attacked Tehran’s trees, tens of thousands of them, and they are hammering away at the dry tree barks to extract worms and wake people up.