Censoring an Iranian Love Story (13 page)

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 …

After I write these lines, Dara’s perspiring and provoked stream of consciousness cuts to an image of grueling march exercises at the military base. To the sound of masculine heaves, muscular booted legs rise in unison, and with the power that raised and ruined the Tower of Babel and the towers of Metropolis, they pound against the belly of Mother Earth. Now,
Dara’s mind, in
Remembrance of Things Past…,
travels to a childhood memory of his grandmother. The old woman tells a seven-year-old Dara to stick his fingers in his ears.

“What do you hear, my boy?”

“It sounds like the wind …”

“No, press your fingers deeper into your ears. Listen! What do you hear?”

“It sounds like the roar of fire.”

“Excellent! This roaring fire is that same hell into which we descend for our sins. There are snakes there as long as streets from fear of which sinners take refuge with the dragons. Pits filled with boiling pungent water, our bodies blister, we burn to a crisp.”

Suddenly Dara feels a burning sensation in his hand. He jerks his arm away from its proximity to Sara’s bare arm which he has seen in his mind’s eye. Dara’s stream of consciousness continues, and here I must be able to write with even greater creativity than James Joyce, because the last effort made by Joyce, his Iranian translator, and his publisher to obtain a publishing permit for the Farsi translation of
Ulysses
met with failure. At the time, Mr. Petrovich, who tried to be lenient with Iranian writers and translators and wanted to somehow work out their problems, suggested that the stream of consciousness voiced by Molly, the female character who has visions of adultery, be printed in Italian in the Farsi translation. Thus, not only would the book not suffer heavy censorship, but the Iranian reader would not suffer sexual provocation … In Italian, not in English, because Italian is not a widely known language in Iran, and curious readers would not be able to quickly find a dictionary to translate the sentences and become sexually aroused.

Still, I have too many problems of my own to worry about Joyce’s publishing predicaments in Iran. One of my current problems is that
in his room, as on so many other nights, Dara is suffering from insomnia. Sara’s voice still echoes in his ears and in his thoughts.
He remains in a dreadful struggle with himself, so that other than Sara’s ankles, he imagines the rest of her body only in a coverall and headscarf. Not only because his sexual abstinence will otherwise be compromised, but because
he believes that if he imagines Sara in any way other than what she herself has allowed, he will have betrayed her … and he finally concludes that to avoid being unfaithful to Sara’s image, he must try to drive her out of his mind. Therefore, as on so many other sleepless nights, Dara lies down on his back and stares at the white ceiling. If he can slowly forget the weight of his body, if he can concentrate, if he can stop himself from blinking even when his eyes begin to tear, after about an hour, little by little, magical colors will begin to emerge on the white of the ceiling like water stains, they will connect, and a full-color image will appear before his eyes.
The image of a blind Al Pacino dancing with that beautiful stranger in
Scent of a Woman.
The scene has always brought tears to Dara’s eyes. Years ago, one of his dreams was to see this film, and his other favorite films, on a large screen with surround sound so that he could enjoy the full frame of the film and the director’s work. Yet, in the past twenty years,
Dances with Wolves
has been one of the very few American films that has been screened in movie theaters in Iran. Of course, after having been censored. Therefore, it is impossible for Dara to see the beautiful dance of a blind man with a stunning woman on a movie screen. However, one of Dara’s secrets is that he doesn’t need to go to the cinema ever again. For him, the magic of cinema, not the magic that you see on IMAX screens around the world but the real magic of cinema, started several years ago. It started when he served seven months in solitary confinement.

You most likely have no concept of the agony and horror of a solitary prison cell, and by no means do I want to reproach you for this. In fact, I want to congratulate you for having led such a civilized life that you have no understanding of what solitary confinement is like. Anyhow, as I write these sentences, I find it likely that at some point in time I will be confined to a solitary cell for having written them. I don’t know whether I can find a way to survive and not to break in a windowless cell so small that one cannot sleep with outstretched legs.

Dara was arrested for renting and selling videotapes of banned and immoral films.

Now you may say:

So your story’s Dara is not as squeaky clean and as upstanding a character as you have described, because he used to deal in porno films.

You are wrong. Dara was renting out and selling copies of cinematic masterpieces, and only films by his favorite directors, such as John Ford, Hitchcock, Orson Welles, Antonioni, Bergman, Kubrick, Polanski, Oliver Stone, Jarmusch, David Lynch, and …

Now ask:

Do you really mean to tell us Dara was thrown in solitary confinement for selling and renting artistic masterpieces of the cinema?

So that I can answer:

No. In my beloved land no one is sentenced to solitary confinement for distributing banned films, unless he is believed to be an agent of the CIA or MI5 and on a mission to destabilize the moral, cultural, and religious values of the Iranian society, and particularly if he has previously been implicated in antirevolution activities. Please don’t say anything. I know the plot has become more snarled. We must therefore visit the past. As I mentioned earlier, the story is that, years ago, Dara was arrested for being a member of a leftist political party, and he was sentenced to two years in prison. While in prison, he had signed several sworn statements that after his release he would no longer participate in any political or antirevolution activities. On his second day of freedom, Dara visited the Fine Arts College of Tehran University to see what his status as a student was. Prior to his arrest, he had completed all the required credits for film direction. To earn his degree, he had only to hand in his thesis, a comparative and semiotic study of
The Trial,
directed by Orson Welles, and
The Trial,
written by Franz Kafka.

At the college, no file or record belonging to a former student named Dara M. can be found. After searching for some time, the impatient newly hired clerk returns to his desk, looks suspiciously at Dara, and asks:

“What did you say your name was?”

“Dara … Dara M., … brother.”

In those days, it was quite common and highly advisable for a man to be addressed as “brother” and a woman as “sister,” instead of “sir” or “madam.”

The clerk behaves as though he is dealing with a deranged lunatic.

“Are you sure that is your name?”

“Yes, brother.”

“What kind of a name is Dara? You should go to the General Register Office tomorrow and change it. They have a list of all the good names there. In case you don’t already know, Dara was the name of a tyrant, pagan, idolater king who used to attack Arabia and capture Muslims seven hundred years ago. He used to pierce a hole in their shoulders and run a rope through it so that they wouldn’t escape.”

Dara, trying to mask his anger, says:

“First of all, Dara was king about two thousand years ago. Second, at the time, the Prophet of Islam had not even been born. Third, Dara was not a pagan, and as a matter of fact, Alexander, who attacked Iran and brought about Dara’s death, is the one who was the idolater. Fourth, the king who pierced holes in the Arabs’ shoulders was Shapour. And if only he had not done so, the Arabs would have escaped, tasted freedom, and later a group of them would not have created the Baath Party and Al Qaeda …”

Dara stops himself. The new clerk is glaring at him with a look that suggests:

Kid, your words are bigger than your mouth.

Still, Dara continues:

“Fifth, when I was born, the name Dara was in first-grade textbooks.”

The clerk bursts into laughter:

“So, little Dara, you’re still in first grade. Why are you here saying you were a university student. Get out of here and don’t bother me again.”

Dara protests:

“Sir, why are you making fun of me? I was a student at this college two years ago.”

The clerk raises his voice:

“Listen, boy, you dimwit, how many times do I have to tell you, we did not and do not have a student named Dara M. I spent a lot of time looking for your name in the computer system, and then I searched through all the archived files.”

He shows Dara his dust-covered hands. From his pocket, Dara pulls out his transcripts, all with excellent grades, and shows them to the clerk.

The clerk glances at the documents and throws them down on his desk.

“I will do you a favor and ignore these scraps of paper.”

“Brother, I don’t need you to do me any favors. These are documents that this very college gave to me.”

“Now I’m sure you’ve lost your mind. Look here, I can simply call security and have them arrest you.”

“On what charge?”

“On the charge of forging confidential university documents.”

“But these documents are authentic. Look, they have the seal and signature of the university president.”

The clerk carefully examines the seal and signature of the university president.

“Forget it! The brother who used to be the university president was dismissed last year, and now he’s a ticket agent at some cinema. Go see him, maybe he’ll give you a job.”