Censoring an Iranian Love Story (28 page)

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.

I mean if you really want romance, instead of Paris, which sells kit and caboodle and even memories of Montparnasse to tourists, come to Tehran. Your optical romance begins the moment you leave the airport.

An even more important aspect of the dialogue of eyes is its speed. If hours of conversation are required to reach an end, all those words can be exchanged in a one-minute dialogue between eyes, and the man and woman can take each other’s hand and, rivaling a final scene in a Charlie Chaplin movie, quickly and merrily walk down a road toward a bright horizon and their point and purpose.

Therefore, in their eye dialogue, Sara says:

Make up your mind! Do you have the courage to want me or not?

Dara forgets all the religious, moral, and ideological ethics that have been hammered into his head since childhood and with his eyes he whimpers:

I do. I do. I want you.

What does “I want you” mean?