Censoring an Iranian Love Story (35 page)

When they discover the source of the noise, the Baseej militiamen aim their Kalashnikovs at the upper branches of the trees and shoot. But the woodpeckers are greater in number than their bullets, and the never-ending
tak, tak, taks
echo in the city of Tehran.

Dara, prowling around Sara’s house, mutters:

“What have I ever done to Sinbad? I know they will finally squash me like an insect. It’s better that I take my revenge on one of them before I am snuffed out.”

He walks and walks
and the minutes of the nights pass slowly, more slowly than the drops of vodka dripping from a homemade still into a bottle
. And the more nights and the more hours he walks around Sara’s house, the greater his rage and hatred become.

I shout:

“Dara, go home! You are ruining everything. I am a censored writer. I can easily delete you from my novel if I choose. I’ll send you down a street, and suddenly a truck will crash into you and you will die.”

He doesn’t hear me, and he walks. I regret my own words. I realize that I too have easily contemplated murder.

At last, one night, around ten o’clock, when Dara in his continuous back and forth is near Sara’s house, the front door opens, and a man walks out.

Dara vents:

“I finally have him.”

He walks faster to catch up with the man.

I yell:

“No, Dara! Don’t!”

The man heads down the sidewalk. Dara follows him and in the darkest corner of the street claws at his hair from behind and puts the screwdriver at the base of his throat.

“You murderer, I will kill you.”

Contrary to his expectations, his prey is a feeble creature with no resistance in his muscles. Still, Dara presses the screwdriver against the soft skin under the man’s throat, but the moment he feels skin tearing he unconsciously eases the pressure. Terrified sounds burst out of the man’s mouth.

Dara roars in his ear:

“Why do you want to kill me
, you motherfucker
?”

The man is shaking violently.

“How much have you paid them to kill me, Mr. Sinbad?”

The man moans:

“Ha … Ha … Haji…”

The weakness and terror of his prey make Dara angrier and more fearless. Contrary to the murder plot he has time and again imagined, still standing behind the man, he locks his arm around his neck and presses the screwdriver against his left ribs so that its blade nestles in the soft skin between the two ribs closest to the man’s heart. The man has started rasping.

“Now do you understand what dying feels like?”

From the man’s larynx diarrhealike sounds spurt out. From among those broken syllables Dara only understands:

“I … I … Ha … Haj … Haji Ka …”

And Dara’s prey faints. Despite his scrawny body, the man’s mass now weighs heavily on Dara’s arm. Dara releases him. The man falls to the ground. A car drives by, and in the light of its headlights Dara realizes that he has hunted a skinny old man whose mouth has foamed from fright; he is convulsing, and instead of blood, urine is spreading on the sidewalk. Dara runs. He runs past Sara’s house. He throws the screwdriver at the front door and runs for several miles. He runs until he runs out of breath. Drenched in sweat, he takes cover in a dark corner. One hundred feet away, the flashing lights of several police cars are just the shock he needs. The cars have surrounded a house and police officers are dragging handcuffed girls and boys out, and while slapping and kicking them they are throwing them into the police cars. Clearly, they have discovered a nighttime revelry.

Dara changes his route, and like a sensible young laborer heads home. He is only now realizing what he was on the verge of doing.

He moans:

“Oh God, I was about to kill a man. I was so blinded by jealousy that I was about to kill a man. Sara, what have you done to me? What sort of an animal have I turned into?”

The closer he gets to his house, the more terrified he becomes of himself. And the closer he gets to the southern part of Tehran, the smaller, humbler, and more tightly crammed the houses become. There is a slice of moon in the sky, but it doesn’t bear the moon’s customary complexions. It resembles the wrinkled remnant of a burst balloon.

Finally, Dara leaves behind the streets with their streetlamps lit and those with their lightbulbs burned out and arrives at his neighborhood. At the corner of the last intersection a man calls out to him. He is sitting on the ground, leaning against the traffic light. In a weary voice he pleads:

“Young man! May God grant you long life. Help me. Carry me on your back to the other side of the street.”

In the green light of the traffic signal the man’s legs can be seen. Skinny and long, boneless, twisted around each other, and seemingly completely crippled. The light turns red. Dara says:

“Tonight when everything is a nightmare, the last thing I need is you … Get lost!”

Terrified, he quickly crosses the street and thanks God that he had a storytelling grandmother who had told him the tale of the Dav
lp
.

In Iranian fables, Dav
lp
was a creature with two long legs, like two long strips of leather, who would sit on riverbanks and beg passersby to hoist him up on their back and carry him to the other side of the river. If a passerby pitied this seemingly crippled man and lifted him onto his back, the two strips of leather would quickly wrap around his neck and torso, and he would be forced for the rest of his life to carry the Dav
lp
to wherever he wanted to go.

Dara opens the front door of his house and before going in looks down the alley. He thinks he sees a phantom draped in a black burnoose standing there.

Dara decides not to go out in the dark of night and not to frequent secluded areas in the light of day and, as of tomorrow, to leave his house only when he has made sure the phantom is nowhere nearby. But times will come when he, despite all caution, will be caught off guard by the phantom of the assassin, and he will escape. Until at last, defeated and worn by the pursuits and escapes, he will whisper: “You want to kill me? Go ahead, kill me.
To my right ball!
”

Transferring anger and frustration to one’s testicles is an Iranian expression that basically translates into “I don’t give a fuck.” This manner of capitulating and no longer caring happens not only to fictional characters but most likely to everyone in real life, too. For example, at some point in time you suspect that your telephone is being tapped. Well, during the first few months you will be quite nervous and cautious. You will not talk about politics with your friends on the telephone, the minute one of them starts to tell you the latest joke about the country’s president you will quickly change the subject, and if you live in a country like Iran, you will never call in an order for black market films or alcohol. In fact, the sound of your telephone ringing will start to pierce your ears like a thorn. And this is only if you are an average person. If you are a political activist, there will be far greater precautions and self-censorships. The interesting point, however, is that after a few months or a year, depending on your emotional state and your personal tenacity, you will gradually grow accustomed to the person in charge of tapping your telephone. Little by little you will feel that he is a member of your family and an even greater confidant of your secrets. Sometimes you will perhaps indirectly talk to him during your telephone conversations or tease him with a wisecrack. It is in this same manner that one gets used to the fear of being followed and the threat of being killed. At some point, one finally transfers this fear to an anatomical organ, which would vary depending on one’s culture, and then together with that anatomical organ one goes prancing down the street.

And Mr. Petrovich will say:

“What do you mean by bringing that assassin and Dav
lp
into your novel? You have planted these synbols in your story to suggest that there are terrorists in Iran and that there are creatures here that once they climb up on people’s backs they will never climb back down. Right?”