Censoring an Iranian Love Story (25 page)

If you are curious, ask:

What in the world is the story of this Iranian film director?

For me to answer:

Several years ago, when on the night of the awards ceremony this Iranian director’s name was announced and he was invited to go and receive his Golden Palm, up on the stage he came face-to-face with none other than Catherine Deneuve, who even at her present age is beautiful and enchanting.

Catherine Deneuve held out her hand to shake hands with the Iranian director. The Iranian director, in observance of social courtesy, shook her hand. Then Catherine Deneuve, as is customary, kissed him on the cheek. That night the happy Iranian director either did or did not go back to his hotel room. In any case, the next day he was told that he had been harshly criticized in a few government-owned newspapers in Iran for having shaken hands with a woman outside the circle of immediate kin and, even worse, for having made his cheeks available to the lips of a woman who in her films has revealed her naked body. The criticisms were growing stronger by the day, and it was claimed that this director makes films to the liking of Westerners and intentionally portrays the Iranian public as miserable, destitute, and suicidal, and that he has humiliated Iran. The rebukes had their effect. On the night that the now-famous director was returning to Iran, a group of fervent Muslims gathered at the airport in Tehran so that, instead of welcoming him with flowers for having achieved this international honor for their country, they could punish him with punches and kicks and perhaps shove a totally Iranian palm up his ass.

However, the ending of this story, unlike most Iranian stories, is a happy one. The Iranian police, aware that if this director was beaten up, the next day media worldwide would make fun of Iran, secretly took him out of the airport and escorted him home. As a result of this rescue mission, a few years later this director invited Juliette Binoche, the beautiful French actress with hidden sparrowlike charms, to Iran. Ms. Binoche gladly accepted the invitation and arrived in Tehran wearing a coverall and a headscarf, and she gave tens of photographs to Iranian photographers as gifts. The chance that the lady has read André Malraux’s
Anti-Memoirs
is far less than the chance that you, my dear readers, have read it. In this book Malraux has an amazing and even maddening description of the Lascaux caves in France and the paintings by prehistoric men on their walls. He so expertly illustrates the fantastical paintings that we the readers truly see the prehistoric hunters shooting their arrows at the mammoths, and we fall captive to the magic of those drawings and Malraux’s words. In another section of the book, Malraux describes the occasion of a speech he gave in one of the French colonies. In this scene, Malraux, as France’s minister of culture and not as a writer active in the resistance movement to free France from the yoke of the Nazis, stands facing the outcry of those opposed to French colonialism and stubbornly continues delivering his speech. Then, from here and there, arrows are shot at him. But the French Malraux is brave enough to ignore the deadly arrows and to finish his speech. Therefore, when the French transform a great writer such as Malraux into a minister of culture, it should not come as any great surprise to see Juliette Binoche don a headscarf and coverall and get introduced in Iranian media as an actress’s actress.

With the aid of your intellect, connect these two illustrations of Malraux with my remarks about Ms. Binoche’s trip to Iran and draw your own special conclusion.

Where were we?

Sinbad apologizes for not shaking hands with the headscarf-clad Sara. Just then, Sara sees the end-to-end scratch on Sinbad’s BMW.

“Oh! Who did this?”

“I don’t know. The night I came to your house some obsessed moron did it.”

“You see all kinds of people in this day and age … It looks really bad.”

Sinbad sighs and thinks, I wish this were my only problem that night.

Given that she knows Dara wanders around her house, Sara thinks this must be his handiwork. She thinks, I didn’t know Dara was this obsessed.

Sinbad takes Sara to a revolving restaurant on the top floor of a high-rise office building.
People like Sinbad who belong to the nouveau riche class of Iranian society and, because of their government-granted import monopolies, have amassed wealth that no Western industrialist could ever dream of have no fear of the patrols from the Campaign Against Social Corruption. Even if they commit murder and are arrested, with a single telephone call to a government official their record will be cleared. At the most, they will be obliged to pay blood money to the victim’s family, which will be no more than a few hours’ income for them. Therefore, they do as they wish, of course, while fully adhering to the codes of Islamic dress and appearance.
After the recent snow and rain, Tehran’s chronically smoggy air is clean, and from the floor-to-ceiling windows the lights of the city’s tall and short buildings and the river of headlights along its streets can be seen. To start, Sara orders a real orange juice–colored orange juice and Sinbad orders a Coca-Cola also in its original color.

Sinbad says:

“Until a few months ago, this restaurant only had a few customers because it is so expensive. But ever since it was rumored that some of the waiters serve bottles of mineral water filled with vodka to special clients, every night there are ten new customers.”

“Do they really bring it to the tables?”

“Bring what? Orange juice?”

Sara laughs.

“Oh, stop playing with me! I mean what you mentioned.”

“No, dear, it’s just a rumor.”

But apparently the rumor is so widespread that the poor waiters look really frustrated and sweaty. Each time they pass by certain tables, the customers stare at them and wink …

Sara says:

“Maybe the owner started the rumor himself to attract more customers.”

“I hope not, because they will shut down the restaurant, and we won’t be able to come here anymore.”

So far, Sinbad has not revealed to me when and how he learned his subtle and witty approach to women. Like all Iranians, he also always has a few new jokes about government leaders up his sleeve and makes Sara really laugh.

The restaurant slowly turns—of course, with the occasional clanking of its worn-out engine, which is probably among the items embargoed by the United States and which cannot be purchased on the black market as easily as one can purchase centrifuges for enriching uranium. Now the snow-covered Damavand Peak in the north of Tehran is in Sara’s view. Not the poet who died seven hundred years ago, but the poet who died some one hundred years ago, has likened this conic volcanic peak to a beast in chains above Tehran.

Sinbad is talking about the beauties of his villa on top of a tall hill facing the turquoise Mediterranean Sea. Sara sees herself standing next to the pool of that villa looking out at the horizon across the sea. From somewhere, like a film score, a guitar is playing Fernando Sor’s Étude 22. A white bird, with the blue of the sea reflecting under its wings, flies closely by.
The wind blows in Sara’s long hair. It caresses the naked skin of her arms and thighs. And from the other side, from deep within the young flesh of her body, the pleasant and suppressed sense of freedom and intoxication flows toward the pores of her skin.
But
at the height of this euphoric sensation,
Sara feels she is missing something. Suddenly she knows what; it is floating in the sky above the Mediterranean. A white cloud that looks just like Dara’s head … Sara fixes her eyes on Dara’s cloudy eyes and feels how much she wants him to be standing there beside her on that hilltop.

Sinbad walks out of the glittering white villa and asks her a question. The villa disappears. A frustrated waiter walks by.

“Did you say something?”

Sinbad stares intently at Sara’s face.

“I asked you what you were thinking about.”

I am beginning to suspect that perhaps Sinbad keeps company with Mr. Petrovich, because he is constantly asking Sara what she is thinking.

“Nothing.”

“Stop it, girl. It’s impossible for someone to not think about anything … Tell me. I promise I will not tell your parents.”

“I was thinking of one of Lorca’s poems.”

“Is this Lorca Kurdish?”

“No.”

“His name sounds Kurdish.”

“He is Spanish. I really like his poems. They are filled with sun and love and blood.”

“I’ll go and buy all his books tomorrow. I want to learn and like everything you like.”

“You won’t find any of them.”

“Why?”

“For years translations of his poetry have not received a reprint permit.”

“No problem. I have friends at the Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance. If this Mr. Lorca writes an application letter, I could perhaps speak to my friends and get the reprint permit for his books.”

Sara smiles and turns to the window. Now she sees the southern part of Tehran with its tight clusters of light from the small beehivelike houses of the poor and its patches of dark from the immigrant villagers’ hovels. Near the horizon a few flames from Tehran’s oil refinery lick toward the sky.

At eleven o’clock, Sinbad takes Sara home. The streets of Tehran are slowly emptying of their maddening traffic. On one of these streets, Dr. Farhad is driving back from the free clinic he runs in the poor section of town. Unlike other nights when he would return home tired but with a deep sense of satisfaction, tonight his entire body is stiff with fear and drenched in sweat. The corpse of that hunchback midget is in the trunk of his old car. Someone had secretly left the corpse in the waiting room at his clinic and run off. Dr. Farhad knows that no one, not even the clever Iranian detectives, will believe his innocence. These are terrifying and breathtaking moments for the noble doctor. He can, at any moment, run into a police checkpoint.

I am not suggesting that the police at checkpoints on Tehran’s streets are searching for the hunchback’s corpse. However, in the process of searching all the exposed and concealed parts of a car, they sometimes ask the driver to get out and they smell his breath; if he has consumed any alcohol they can arrest him, and if the driver has not consumed any alcohol, but happens to have a woman in the car with no documents proving his immediate kinship with her, they can arrest him, and if he has no woman in the car, but they discover cassette tapes or CDs of forbidden Western music, they can arrest him, and if …

Let us see how Dr. Farhad plans to rid himself of that corpse.

Dr. Farhad is convinced that he must get the corpse to the northern part of Tehran. He doesn’t want to create any problems for the poor people who live in the southern part of the city—they have neither the means to hire a lawyer nor any contacts in the judicial system. From fear, his heart at times pounds like mad, and at times, nearing a complete freeze, it slows down. As if one of his patients has suffered a heart attack on the operating table, his brain frantically considers hundreds of probabilities and possibilities hoping to find a suitable place to dispose of the corpse that has been bestowed upon him. At this very instant, a brilliant idea sparks in his mind. He remembers one of his close friends, Dr. D….

I will tell you in secret that Dr. Farhad does not want to leave the hunchback at the front door of a dedicated doctor like himself and run away. He remembers that last year Dr. D., who has a subspecialty in surgery, wanted to publish a book on prostate surgery—the fruit of his years of experience—but a man called Mr. Petrovich did not issue a publishing permit for the book because of one fundamental problem: the image of a pair of surgical scissors on the cover.

As you can see, our story is at a crossroads. One road leads to Dr. D.’s house and the other to Mr. Petrovich’s office. In the censor-approved text, we have ignited a spark in Dr. Farhad’s mind, and we have sent him in the direction of Dr. D.’s house, but in our confidential pretend text, Dr. Farhad decides instead to drive his old car to the Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance. Unfortunately, our story’s events do not unfold as easily as this.

Dr. Farhad is driving along the dimly lit Bahar Street. Suddenly, he sees the taillights of two cars standing in the middle of the road some two hundred feet ahead, and he sees the shadows of checkpoint officers. He stops breathing. With eyes half blinded by fear, he looks at both sides of the street hoping to find a road or an alley he can turn onto. But the checkpoint police have been wisely handpicked. For a moment he considers turning the steering wheel and going back, but that would be a grave mistake. If he is lucky and the police don’t riddle his car tires with bullets, they will immediately pursue him, and his car is not a red Ferrari for him to have any hopes of escaping.

It is too late for any thought or action. He reaches the checkpoint and stops. On the poorly lit sidewalk, two officers armed with machine guns are standing on the lookout. Three other officers have taken the driver of the car up front out of his car, two of them are searching under the car seats, and the third one is carefully inspecting the trunk. Dr. Farhad desperately whispers:

“It’s over … I have reached the end point of my life … It’s all over.”

And he sees himself: On one side of destiny, like many Iranian specialists he has migrated to the United States and is now driving his red Ferrari from a large and expensive hospital in Los Angeles, in which he is a major shareholder, to his villa on Mulholland Drive … On the other side of destiny, he sees himself in a prison uniform, sitting in a small cement cell with ten murderers, smugglers, and addicts, who in general do not look kindly upon doctors and who are now sneering at him with toothless mouths and waiting for the prison lights to go out.