Censoring an Iranian Love Story (30 page)

DAMASK ROSE’S STAMEN

O
n this same night, in the small living room of their house, Dara is sitting beside his mother on a thirty-year-old sofa and appears to be watching an Iranian film series on television. His mother likes these melodramatic programs. During scenes in which a mother, wife, or sister cries, she too readily cries. And she glances at her son and her tears flow even more freely.

But Dara, after a quarter of a century of watching these Islamic films in which mothers, wives, and sisters appear in their hijab even at home, has still not grown accustomed to them and finds them shallow and insulting. He looks at his mother and observes her gray hair that at home uninhibitedly shines black and white and looks at the actress in the film whose bed must never be occupied by her husband even when the story line sends her to go and sleep.

Dara’s mother has turned down the volume on the television set as much as possible because its sound infuriates Dara’s father, so much so that from his fortress he suddenly yells:

“Shut these lies up! Madam, why don’t you understand? These things will make you more stupid … Shut it off!”

Dara’s father is a defeated Communist. I know at this point in the story you don’t need to ask what “defeated Communist” means. You know better than I do. But you don’t know this man’s story. Then ask me, so that I, like Shahrazad the storyteller, can try to tell you.

Dara’s father was a Communist even before the 1979 revolution, meaning during the Shah’s regime. In those days, he was a high-ranking customs officer at Mehrabad International Airport, an important position in which, with a little bit of moral and financial corruption, he could have demanded the heftiest bribes from importers of Western products to clear their merchandise through customs without collecting the requisite duties. However, from the condition of his house, the family’s sole possession in that poor neighborhood of Tehran, you can guess what label those bribe-taking, bribe-giving Iranians who deem themselves quite clever pinned on him.

Two years before the revolution, the secret police discovered that Dara’s father was a Communist. They arrested him in front of his colleagues and took him to Evin Prison, Iran’s most famous penitentiary. Evin Prison is similar to the Bastille but with two distinct differences. In a very modern way it is more terrifying and harrowing than the Bastille, and while the Bastille entered the annals of history and was shut down after the French Revolution, Tehran’s Evin Prison was expanded following the Iranian revolution, and the number of its political prisoners and their torturing increased substantially.

When the revolution triumphed, when the Shah with tearful eyes was forced to leave the country, when the revolutionaries broke down the prison gates, Dara’s father walked out of Evin Prison like a national hero. People cheered for him, and one emotional Iranian hoisted him up on his shoulders, just like other emotional Iranians did with other prisoners, and carried him for a long distance. Then, because he had no money, he had to walk a long distance home. Of course, his wife and his young boy too embraced him like a national hero. A month later, Dara’s father, who was still a national hero, returned to his job, until six years later when he was again arrested for the crime of being a Communist and sent back to Evin Prison. This postrevolution Evin Prison was very different from what it was prior to the revolution. It was not even comparable to Guantánamo. In this prison, consistent with the constitutional law of the Islamic Republic, any form of torture is forbidden—the same way that the constitution forbids any form of censorship. However, when an interrogator determines that a political prisoner is not confessing as he should, he finds the prisoner guilty of lying, which is a crime in Islam, and sentences him to be whipped. Dara’s father, on several occasions, had the pleasure of such floggings. His problem, however, was that he had nothing to confess to. He was only a simple supporter of the Communist Party. Every Friday night he would find the party’s newsletter in his front yard, and his task was to make copies of it in any way he could and to distribute the copies among others. His mistake was that he was using the photocopy machine at his office, an agency of the Islamic Republic, to make copies of the Communist Party newsletter, and he did so in a country where almost every day, out on the streets, some group of demonstrators chanted “Death to the Communist who says there is no God.”

A few months after the fall of the Berlin Wall, Dara’s father was released from prison, because for a Communist such as he, whose party for almost half a century had heeded the call of Big Brother and the Communist Party in the Soviet Union, no punishment or whipping was as bad as having to return home and to learn that the world’s Communist parties were one after the other regretting and denouncing their past Stalinesque ways. In other words, the wisest and cruelest punishment for Dara’s father and others like him was to discover that all the years they had endured prison and torture and all the years they had mourned the execution of their party’s heroes and lamented their own survival had almost overnight become worthless. Therefore, this time, Dara’s father returned home broken and dejected and not as a national hero, but as a man accused of having spied for the Soviet Union. He had been dismissed from his job and did not have a penny of income. The first thing he did was to find a fortress for himself in his house, and this fortress was nothing other than a small storage room on the first floor. In keeping with the habit he had developed at Evin Prison, he spread a blanket on the floor to make up his sleeping place, although the storage room was not large enough for him to sleep with his legs stretched out. Then he took a radio to this cell and started listening to Farsi news broadcasts on foreign radio stations such as Voice of America, Radio Israel, BBC, Radio France, and others that had started the overseas-based opposition to Iran. Since the founding of the Islamic Republic of Iran, these stations had promised their listeners that this regime would fall in a matter of months; and the stations’ listeners, at parties in homes that day by day had grown more similar to the palaces of the
One Thousand and One Nights,
or in homes that had day by day become more ramshackle, or on the old-age benches in parks, had repeated this news to one another until the present time in our story when Dara’s father, after more than thirteen years in his Communist fortress, looks twenty years older than his sixty years of age.

Contrary to him, Dara’s mother, who is a religious woman, has no interest in world politics and no interest in whether an Islamic regime, a monarchist regime, or a Communist one rules in Iran. Every day she observes the seventeen segments of her requisite daily prayers, she fasts during the entire month of Ramadan, unbeknownst to her husband she saves a portion of the measly household income and gives it to the cleric at the neighborhood mosque as her Islamic duty, and strives every day to cook the most delicious meal at the least cost for her husband and son.

Their meager income comes from Dara’s work painting houses and the small carpets his mother weaves. And every day, in her prayers, Dara’s mother thanks God that their circumstances have not gotten any worse and that she still has her husband and son at home. So many Iranians have lost family members in the execution of those opposed to the Islamic Republic, in the war, in the bombings of Iranian cities by Iraq and … and … and there are many who have had their homes confiscated by the government.

Tonight, Dara’s mother, after her protracted chore of daily cooking and after her evening prayers and expressions of gratitude to God, is sitting with her son to watch this evening’s television series about a mother who has lost two sons to war. Because of Dara’s father’s sensitivity, she has kept the volume as low as possible. In this part of the film, the doorbell rings in the mother’s house. The mother dons her chador and goes to the door. An elderly man dressed in a Revolutionary Guard uniform is standing at the door holding a box of pastries. He offers the box to the mother. Then he begins to deliver a lengthy speech about how God has been kind to the people of Iran by having bestowed upon them the gift of the Islamic Republic, and about how the iron hand of this holy regime, which will soon topple the tyrannical governments of the world and bring salvation to the people, is strengthened with the blood of its martyrs. Then he says:

“Sister, congratulations. Your son has been martyred at the front.”

Hearing this news, the middle-aged woman who plays the part of a Party of God mother, with a smile on her lips and her eyes consciously or unconsciously somewhat tearful, rings the doorbell of the neighboring homes to offer them pastries and to tell them that her third son too has been martyred.

From the corner of his eye Dara notices that his mother is watching him from the corner of her eye. He is not used to sharing his private thoughts with his mother, but tonight, for the first time, he is looking for an excuse to talk to her about the idea of marriage. Mother provides him with that excuse when she asks:

“Dara, I have noticed that you are very preoccupied these days. Has something happened?”

“No, nothing special.”

“I’m a mother, I know when my son is happy or when he is sad, even when he is not in front of me. You have been very unhappy these days. Tell me. Have you gotten involved in politics again? Don’t go destroying yourself and us again!”

Dara’s father shouts from his small fortress:

“Woman, what do you want from this boy? Leave him alone. He knows better than you and me.”

Dara’s mother lowers her voice and says:

“You see? He won’t even let me watch a film in peace or have a simple conversation with my son. I have to be deaf and dumb in this house for him to be happy. God bless him, after eighty years his hearing is better than mine.”

Ever since the start of their marriage, Dara’s mother has been in the habit of adding twenty years to her husband’s age.

Dara’s father yells:

“Madam! If you had been slapped around in prison as much as I was, by now you would either be completely deaf or you could even hear the cockroaches whisper.”

And he turns up the volume on his radio.

Dara says:

“One of my old friends is getting married tomorrow night. I was wondering whether I should go or not.”

He is lying. In fact, he has contrived this story after thinking for hours about how to bring up the subject of his desire to get married.

“Why shouldn’t you go? You definitely should. You need to have some fun. God willing your turn will come, too. I hope I will see you in your groom’s suit before I die. At the end of all my daily prayers I pray for God to improve conditions in this country; I pray for your father and me to be freed from this misery and for you to find a high-paying job, to buy a house for yourself, to take your bride’s hand, and to take her to your home.”

Dara’s father yells:

“Madam! You’ve spent a lifetime praying for these things and your God has shown us nothing but more of his wrath, the situation in this country has gotten worse. When are you going to get it? You pray for rain and it floods, you pray in thanks and the earth quakes. Why won’t you accept that something is amiss in what you do?”

Dara’s mother, as is the habit of some Iranian women when they hear blasphemous words, bites the soft stretch of skin between her thumb and index finger and mimics spitting on it twice, and she says:

“God forbid. May the devil’s ear be deaf. Do you see how he reviles God? May God rain flames on the grave of he who planted the seed of these Communists who say there is no God.”

And she shouts:

“Sir! If it weren’t for my prayers, you would have long been dead, and you would have rotted through a hundred shrouds by now.”

Dara’s father shouts back:

“Madam! Why can’t you understand? Our poor son wants to talk about himself. He wants to know whether he can get married or not. This poor boy is being duped just like me. Son! According to the latest scientific research, only twenty percent of the men in the world have brains, the rest have wives. But it doesn’t matter if you want to ruin your life with your own hands the way I did. Go get duped! But for the love of God, marry someone who is neither a bourgeois nor like your mother. Marry someone who at least has a few drops of Communist blood in her so that she will be patient and not too demanding, so that she’ll come to this house and live with you in your room.”

Dara’s mother loses her temper.

“Sir! Are you suggesting that I was impatient and demanding? Who was it that during all those years you spent in prison, in the cold of winter and the heat of summer, put her head down to sleep alone every night hoping for the day that you, sir, would walk through the door?”

“Madam, I was thrown in prison and suffered torture for trying to free this country from superstitions such as yours.”

“Sir, you paid for your denial of God and your blasphemies. It is people like you who have brought this country to ruin. If you had any pride and honor you would think of your wife and child. For all these years that you have supposedly been the man of this house, you have not managed to bring in even a single penny. You just lie there day and night listening to that radio. I am the one who has kept you fed with the little I make and the pittance this boy brings home.”

The screaming parents suddenly grow silent. It is the first time that such a frank and cruel exchange has taken place in this house. Dara gets up and shouts:

“Stop it. It was my mistake. It was my mistake for saying that I want to go to a wedding.”

With his eyes darker than ever, he pounds his fist on his thigh and heads for the stairs to go up to his room.

The television series has reached a scene in which the mother has washed her sons’ gravestones with rose water and is now sitting beside the last grave talking to her last son.