Censoring an Iranian Love Story (33 page)

A COBRA AT THE WINDOW

A
t night, house windows in many cities around the world look alike, their curtains and the shadows behind those curtains. Yet there are cities where the windows are not only unlike those anywhere else, but at night bear no resemblance to their daytime appearance. Tehran is one of these cities. For Dara, the most marvelous moments come during his nightly study of windows whose curtains are often drawn. He likes to discover those with a gentle light shining through their colorful curtains, and to imagine poetic scenes of the tender deeds of the home owners.

Tonight, on his way back from work, he has found three such windows. But there is something particularly special about the third one. Its rich brown velvety curtains have given it an aristocratic air …
It has somehow reminded him of the windows of the lovemaking house of Anna Karenina and her lover.
Today he finished painting a house and collected his pay. When he arrives home, he will put three-fourths of it next to their old television set for his mother, and he will go up to his room proud that he has been a good son to his family. So now, until he reaches home, he can watch the windows and bear the welcome weight of his pride, that same pride which over the past week he has repeatedly broken. Time and again he has e-mailed Sara and not received a reply, and then, going against the promise he has made to himself,
and despite his fear of wiretapping,
he has repeatedly called Sara’s house. Contrary to other nights, instead of Sara, her father has answered the telephone, and when he has heard Dara’s silence on the other end of the line, he has showered this crank caller with the worst obscenities.

And Dara’s imagination enters the house through the velvet curtains and sees a man and a woman who without any fear, with all the freedom in this world and the nether world, are kissing each other.

How do they kiss in Dara’s imagination?

I know you expect me as a writer to introduce a new method of kissing to you with my storytelling inventiveness. But I can’t, because before this story, all the kissing schemes have been written and shown in stories and films. Even, for example, when the man is hanging upside down from the ceiling and the woman has her feet planted on the ground. Therefore, you will not find any new manner of kissing in this story other than that same old clumsy way Adam kissed when his lips accidentally brushed against Eve’s and he discovered that there is something to this act. This kissing style is completely in tune with Dara’s personality, because, as you know, he has never kissed any lips.

Therefore, despite all the cinematic kisses he has seen, he pictures that man and woman’s kiss behind the window in the same way that his lips’ imagination picture it. A fig-flavored Adam and Eve kiss in Tehran.

I am terribly sleepy. I feel like my head is about to explode. I have wasted three entire hours trying to find a new method of kissing, and now dawn is near. In about two hours, Iranian sparrows, unaware of all the bombs, terrorists, kisses, Anna Kareninas, Saras, and Petroviches, will start chirping in the bitter orange trees. I know splashing cold water on my face will no longer force sleep to leave my eyes, and my lips sting because I have bitten them so much. I must allow my eyes to take a nap.

Dara, with tired arms that no longer have the strength to bear the burden of a paintbrush for even a single stroke on a wall, yet proud of the weight of the money in his pocket, walks into a narrow alley that is a shortcut to his home. Halfway down the alley, he senses a phantom following him. A powerful, ruthless, and terrifying phantom. A phantom that can destroy any creature with the wave of an arm. Terrified, Dara turns and looks behind him, but there is no one there. The alley is in one of the old neighborhoods of Tehran that with the passage of time has become home to the poor. The two-hundred-year-old houses along its winding path have tall brick walls surrounding their yards, and the specter of two-hundred-year-old eucalyptus and locust trees looms above them. The windows of the houses are dark. The alley is crowded with old shadows. Dara walks faster. Now he can clearly hear the phantom’s footsteps. Again he abruptly stops and looks back. The sound of his pursuer’s footsteps also stops. Dara feels his legs weakening. His instincts cry out for him to run but he doesn’t have the power. And suddenly, he sees the glint of a dagger like the silver flash of a cobra’s strike …

No, this won’t do. Let’s leave this chapter entirely unread. I don’t understand why I have dragged Dara down that terrifying alley, and I don’t know why that phantom is following him. My only guess is that the phantom is a professional thief who has somehow learned that Dara has his wages in his pocket and he therefore wants to kill him and take his money. Ridiculous! I don’t need such a chapter in my love story. Please go ahead and delete this chapter that only a novice writer could perpetrate.

THE HASHASHIN IN TEHRAN

O
n this cloudy day in Tehran, those people who have enough leisure time to occasionally take notice of the sky will observe the flight of a bittern above the city. The bittern is a bird that lives in northern Iran, far from Tehran, alongside lakes and swamps, and its presence in Tehran, which has no lakes and no swamps, is very unusual. According to villagers who live up north, along the coast of the Caspian Sea, the world’s largest lake, the bittern is a mourning bird. It always cries, and if it does ever sing, its song only denotes suffering and separation. Therefore, if you and I or one of the residents of Tehran see this bird flying in the city sky, we should expect an ominous event. Perhaps today, in one of the city squares, before hundreds of eyes, they have hung someone from a crane to teach people a lesson. Perhaps in a different square they have cut off the right hand and left leg of a thief, or perhaps in Evin Prison a student prisoner, after suffering four months in solitary confinement, has been forced to confess before television cameras that he was paid by the CIA to instigate antigovernment demonstrations. I don’t know whether this bittern is aware of these incidents or not. All I know is that it will fly over Tehran until the sun finally sets.

Dara is lost in one of the suburbs of Tehran. This morning a stranger has called him and said that he was given his telephone number by someone whose house Dara had painted, and because he was told that Dara is an honest and conscientious painter, he would like to hire him to paint his newly constructed house. This is how Dara has always found work. A former client who has been pleased with his painting has given his address or telephone number to someone else. But this time, he has been walking around this poor neighborhood since three in the afternoon, and he cannot find his way to the stranger’s house. He has asked many people for directions, and each person has sent him down a different path. He has wandered down dirt roads lined with small humble houses, and now that the sun is setting for Tehran, from a winding alley he has suddenly arrived at one of the wastelands where the city’s garbage is dumped and incinerated.

Dara walks toward the mounds of trash. Smoke billows from them. Smoke from waste is a blend of all the world’s darknesses. And this smoke that rises from the bowels and peaks of the tall mounds of refuse has, like a fog, dimmed and darkened the air. Suddenly, from the heart of the darkness of this foul-smelling vapor, a man wearing a black burnoose appears. He has pulled the burnoose’s hood so low on his brow that his face cannot be seen. Or perhaps he has concealed his face with a dark scarf. With an unwavering gait the man walks toward Dara. Dara thinks he is imagining this phantom that belongs to centuries ago. He asks himself, “Who is this guy? Why am I seeing such a thing?” And the man with stonelike strides, with clusters of smoke accompanying him, walks toward him. Dara whispers, “Something is at hand. Why is he walking toward me like that?” The man in the hooded burnoose is now one step away from him, and it is in this one-step distance that Dara sees the glint in the man’s eyes and the flash of the dagger that has emerged from his sleeve. The dagger, with the swiftness of a cobra’s strike, slashes through Dara’s jugular. The man, as if he has merely swatted a fly from around his face, walks away. In his wake, blood gushes from Dara’s neck, and in the final moment of his life he learns the answer to the final question of his life. That phantom was none other than one of the Hashashin—a member of the Order of the Assassins founded in the eleventh century by Hassan Sabbah. A bittern hovers above the wasteland; smoke from the mounds of garbage gather around Dara and hide him from the eyes of the world.

No, no … Not again.

Tonight, when I turned on my computer to continue writing my novel, I realized that last night I wrote this scene. What is going on? I have no recollection at all of having written such a scene. Why did I kill the central character of my story right in the middle of the novel? And in such weak prose. I had no such intention. To the contrary, I have been meaning to write a tender love story without any gloom and darkness. Am I Dara’s murderous phantom? How is that possible? The problem is that, unlike the Hashashin, I don’t believe that if I kill someone I will go to heaven. These people belonged to a secret sect who from the eleventh to the thirteenth century assassinated important people in Islamic lands, including one of Iran’s most famous ministers and even the Patriarch of Jerusalem during the Crusades. I cannot believe that in the corners of the mind of someone like me, someone who has been in touch with the arts all his life, a murderer of the Hashashin ilk could lie in wait.

On the other hand, I am somehow taken with the notion of one of the Hashashin appearing in twenty-first-century Tehran. Not because these people have been the inspiration for terrorist groups and even suicide bombers in our times, but because the presence of this olden-times phantom with his face concealed could perhaps be appealing to my readers.

I will therefore not delete this chapter. Instead, I will rewrite its last sentences in this manner:

With a flick of his wrist the phantom of the assassin whisks the hidden dagger out from the sleeve of his burnoose. The vapor of the joy and sorrow of release from this world rises from him. Dara sees the glint of hatred for his own and the others’ existence in the phantom’s eyes and hears the wail of the dagger that rises to his murder. In such horrifying circumstances, anyone else would have frozen in place for the dagger to slash through his jugular, but
the quick thinking that comes from years of being a political activist and
the hundreds of action movies he has seen save Dara, and he leaps back. And then, conforming to an Iranian proverb, he has two legs, he borrows two more, and runs. But the phantom, as if he too has borrowed two additional legs, chases him. Dara passes between two smoldering mounds of trash. He runs behind the truck that is dumping the city’s new garbage and rams into three boys who are nervously collecting plastic containers from among the trash. The boys are each thrown to a different side.
Together all three shout, “Fuck your sister and mother.”
Ignoring them, Dara runs toward the nearest houses he can see through the thick smoke. Still, he feels the phantom’s heavy gait behind him. He runs into a narrow alley. He is hoping that by being among people the phantom will disappear. But halfway down the alley he turns and looks behind and sees the phantom still chasing him. At the greatest speed he can muster, Dara runs through the barefoot boys playing soccer and past their obscenities; the phantom, too. He passes by the women sitting in front of the steel doors of their homes gossiping. He is gasping for air.
He runs past a wall with the graffiti DAMN THE FORE-FATHERS OF HE WHO PEES HERE, and past the yellow and brown urine stains on the wall and the ground that somehow resemble Pollock’s paintings; the phantom, too.
His lungs are stiffening, but the Hashashin phantom, as if he is now standing on a flying carpet, steady and steadfast, is behind him. At the end of his energy, Dara is rescued
by the Islamic Republic
. He sees a long line of men and women outside a grocery store and throws himself in the middle of it. People start shouting in protest:

“Mister, don’t cut in line!”

“Get out!”

“Hey, someone shove this guy out!”

And the phantom passes by. Well, he is right to do so. At no time in history has a member of the Hashashin ever assassinated a man in such a setting.
These lines are remnants of the protracted Iran-Iraq War. During the war, because the price of rice, meat, and cooking lard was rising daily, the government had distributed coupons among the people, and every so often on the radio and television they would announce the number on one of the coupons, which could then be used to buy a few kilos of rice or half a kilo of cooking lard at subsidized prices; and holding their coupons, people would line up in front of designated stores. Long after the war, as year after year a greater number of Iranians unknowingly plunge below the poverty line, the government continues to occasionally announce the number on one of these coupons for the purchase of a few kilos of rice or frozen beef from Australia, and this makes people very happy.

Objections against Dara who has cut in line continue, and he barks back:

“For God’s sake, I don’t even have a coupon.”

“Then get out of line.”

Dara, still bent over with his hands on his knees trying to catch his breath, moves slightly to the side.

The third person ahead of him, ignoring the incident farther back, says to another man:

“Do you see what’s become of us? Our country is sitting on a sea of oil, and we have to stand on line like beggars for five or six hours for a handful of rice.”

The second person ahead of Dara, who looks like he too is disgruntled, but who also looks like he is sure the third person on line is an agent of the secret police who wants to identify the disgruntled, says:

“Brother, we must endure until the revolution achieves its goals. We must punch America hard in the mouth. Our standing on this line is a hard punch in the mouth of the Great Satan, Britain, France, Germany, Russia, Israel, and everyone else.”

The fourth person on line, who also looks disgruntled, but who seems to have realized that the second person ahead of Dara is a staunch member of the Party of God, says:

“Yes, our Party of God brother is absolutely right. We must make sacrifices to save the world.”

Someone from the middle of the line yells:

“Mister! Are you going to get out of line or not?”

Dara straightens his back and says:

“Sir! I’m not standing on line. I am not even a human being to stand on line.”