Censoring an Iranian Love Story (41 page)

The old man laments:

“Oh dear! This is bad. The bastards are …”

The agent who has arrested the guitarist is now smashing the man’s guitar with his feet. The three other agents return empty-handed. Men who have been drinking, looking pale, hide in the corners. Others, including the groom, his parents, and other relatives, gather around two of the agents. One by one they plead for them to turn a blind eye to the party and not to spoil that joyous occasion. The old man takes a cucumber from the fruit tray and, thinking that it will get rid of the smell of alcohol on his breath, nervously bites into it. Then he rubs his hands together and says:

“The way the groom is begging, he’s only going to make matters worse. This is a job for me. You, young man, don’t go anywhere until I go negotiate with them and come back.”

He stands up and immediately starts to stagger. He straightens his back, takes a deep breath, swallows the cucumber butt, and bravely heads toward the agents. By the time he reaches them, he is walking perfectly straight. He shouts:

“Well! Well! I smell the scent of rose water from the battlegrounds of truth against the unrighteous.”

He breaks through the crowd gathered around the agents, opens his arms, embraces the ranking officer, and lays a few sopping kisses on the man’s cheeks.

“Welcome! You honor us. Mr. Kaaji, bring some pastries for our brothers … Gentlemen! Gentlemen! These brothers are only doing their job. We must not argue with them … Someone go after those dandy musicians and bring them back. They should pledge to our brother right here that they will never repeat such abomination … Mr. Kaaji, did you bring the pastries?”

The ranking officer is looking at the old man with suspicion. The old man kisses another officer on both shoulders.

“Excellent! I feel alive again. Brothers, don’t you recognize me?”

The officers look at each other and shake their heads.

“Huh! Really! It’s obvious you brothers are new on the job. All the guys at the Campaign Against Social Corruption, from the lowest ranking all the way up to the commanders, know yours truly and know all about my revolutionary deeds before the revolution. Everyone present here knows that I have donated all my wealth to buy homes for the brothers of the revolution. If you don’t believe me, ask your base commander, Colonel Salman. Every Friday, he and I walk barefoot to Friday prayers. I am devoted to all the brothers of the revolution. I am Haji Karim … Who went after that damned singer and his musician?”

With the air of a commander he points to a few young men.

“You, you, and you, go find those two and bring them back here.”

There is such authority in his voice that the three young men obediently run toward the garden. The others, wide-eyed and openmouthed at the old man’s performance, stand around staring. He just about forces each one of the agents to take a plate of pastries and sits them down on chairs. Little by little he has quelled their anger at seeing that decadent party. All of a sudden, the old man kicks the drum, and while trying to extract his foot from its middle, he slyly goes on to say that he himself will take command of the party, he will not allow the women to come out of the villa without their heads covered, he will get rid of the musical paraphernalia, and even if they don’t find the singer and his friend tonight, tomorrow he will himself deliver them hands tied to the revolutionary brothers. In old Iranian tradition, he plucks a strand of his beard and puts it in the palm of the commander’s hand as guarantee of his promise. Half an hour later, the agents have lost their harsh and brusque expressions. They amicably explain that they do not like disrupting such joyous gatherings, but that some families really carry things too far.

The incident is coming to a happy end and the old man is walking the agents to the garden gates when the ranking officer’s two-way radio goes on. He reports that Haji Karim has pledged and attested for everyone at the party and that they are returning to the base … The shout of the base commander blasts out:

“Who the hell is Haji Karim?”

“Colonel! Haji Karim, your friend. He says all the brothers know him … The guy you walk barefoot to Friday prayers with.”

And only he grasps the implication of his commanding officer’s shouts. And only the old man grasps the implication of the ranking officer’s furious glare.

The officers arrest the phony Haji Karim, the guitarist, the father of the bride, the bride, and the groom and take them all away.

The guests, dumbstruck, flop down on the chairs. No one has the energy to talk, and no one knows what to do.
Now the gentle one-thousand-and-one-year-old rippling of the stream can be clearly heard. Dara chooses his path so as to walk past Sara. He inhales her scent and whispers:

“Good-bye.”

Sara mumbles:

“I’m sorry.”

Dara walks toward the garden gates. Suddenly, like a miracle in Tehran, high above the brokenhearted
and graveyardlike
silence
of
the people
, high above the glow of the colorful lamps that now seem unsightly,
and high above a broken guitar,
the familiar song of a night-singing nightingale rises from somewhere in the garden. A nightingale that in this season of cold should not be in the garden, a nightingale that in a thousand verses of Iranian poetry, in the hours of darkness, for the love of a red rose and in sorrow of its separation from it, has forever sung and will forever sing.

“AT DAWN THE SCENT OF FLOWERS
FROM MY BED …”

T
he next scene of our story begins in Dara’s house.

Dara’s parents have gone on a three-day trip.
In Iran, this is a golden opportunity.
Therefore, after much mumbling, stage setting, and pangs of conscience and shame, Dara has invited Sara to his house. And Sara, after much mumbling and pangs of conscience and shame, has accepted his invitation. But she has repeatedly insisted:

“Only for half an hour. Just to sit and have a cup of tea together, and then I will leave. Only half an hour.”

In fact, after the incident on that snowy night, they have become more cautious and conservative. In other words, more intelligent.
Mr. Petrovich will like my last sentence.
Of course, to get to know each other better and to protect their pure and chaste love, they would have preferred to go for a walk in a beautiful park in northern Tehran.

Our story’s two lovers have extensively discussed and planned the method by which Sara would approach the front door and the manner in which she would quickly enter. Like two urban guerrillas hunted by the secret police, they have tried to foresee all the unforeseeable incidents and problems that could arise. In truth, their greatest fear is of nosy neighbors who know Dara’s parents are traveling, and if they see a girl entering the house, they will immediately conclude that soon none other than the sin of fornication will be committed in that house. It is likely that Brother Atta will call one of the many bureaus of the Campaign Against Social Corruption and request that their agents come as quickly as possible, before a sin is committed under that city’s sky. If the agents are delayed or are negligent, Atta, who believes himself responsible for all of Iran’s sexual organs, will bombard them with telephone calls until they finally raid that house and arrest the two guilty parties.

As planned, Dara has left the front door ajar since five minutes before the designated time. At nine in the morning, Sara, looking petrified, enters Dara’s house. She dashes past the jasmine bush in the front yard and throws herself into the building.

Mr. Petrovich tolerates this scene, hoping that at the end of my novel the guilty characters will suffer such remorse, misery, and ruin that my story will at least take on a morally educational aspect and that it becomes a lesson to boys and girls who, according to an old Iranian proverb, are like cotton and fire, and if left alone they will destroy not only themselves but their house and home as well. Perhaps I too, as a writer who for years has written under government censorship and cultural censorship of the people of my land, will subconsciously arrange a dark ending full of repentance and shame for my protagonist and antagonist so that my story receives a publishing permit. Anyway, as far as I can remember, with the exception of a few old stories, for centuries all Iranian love stories, in verse or prose, have ended with the parting of the two lovers, the laughter of death, and the sneer of Satan.

In the house, Dara takes Sara to his room. He has carpeted Sara’s path from the front door all the way to the middle of his room with flower petals … Sara, looking pale, leans against the wall. Dara, from the corner of the drawn curtain, inspects the houses across the street to see if anyone, from the corner of a drawn curtain, is inspecting their house. Both their hearts are beating wildly and are about to explode.

Sara wants to ask, Are you sure no one comes to your house unannounced? But she doesn’t, because if I write this sentence, Mr. Petrovich will ask, What do they want to do that they are scared of someone showing up unexpectedly? Even if he doesn’t ask this question, he will become more acutely sensitive toward my story’s characters.

Dara offers Sara something to drink.

Of course a real drink, not the kind he has gulped down two glasses of since this morning.

Sara is still gasping for air. She takes the handwritten book of
Khosrow and Shirin
out of her handbag and throws it down in front of Dara.

“I used to leaf through it every day. I really liked it. But it is of no use to me anymore.”

“How come?”

“Look at it!”

Dara opens the book. All the bright and vibrant colors of the miniatures and illuminations have faded. A dark shadow has spread over the unveiled and exposed hair, arms, and legs of the women, and it seems a coarse eraser has scraped and smudged certain words and sentences. The book’s pages reek of mold. Dara throws it aside. He wants to speak that sentence which most Iranian men are accustomed to telling their wife, lover, sister, or mother, I told you so. But he keeps his silence. He doesn’t smirk either. He only says:

“Thank you for coming.”

Sara moans:

“What have I done? I shouldn’t have come.”

Now Sara’s eyes are brimming with tears. Dara, without asking, knows why his beloved is in tears.

Ask me what Mr. Petrovich thinks of this scene, and I will say:

He has now fully engaged all his faculties and his sixth sense as well.

I will therefore write:

There is no strength left in their knees. Sara in this corner of the room, and Dara in that corner of the room, cower down …

In a trembling voice Sara asks:

“Why?”

This “why” that Sara has asked is a historic “why” that reveals itself not only in our literature, which is fraught with longing, sorrow, and partings, but even in our folk songs. My favorite folk song, awash with sadness and desire, is:

The breeze that comes from your tresses,
is to me more pleasing than the scent of hyacinth.
When at night I hold the image of you in my arms,
at dawn the scent of flowers rises from my bed …

We Iranians seem never to tire of these poems and songs.

The “why” that Sara has asked is the “why” that forlorn lovers in the land of Iran have for centuries asked the land of Iran. And none of the great Iranian thinkers and intellectuals—who the world has yet to discover— has ever taken the trouble to find an answer to this question.

An old song is playing on Dara’s dilapidated stereo. The singer laments, “When at night I hold the image of you in my arms … At dawn …” And Sara and Dara, each in a corner of the room, sit staring into each other’s tearful eyes.

You may have noticed that since Sara’s entrance into the room, I have not written that she has removed her headscarf, and I will not write that from fear she is wet with perspiration and that she has unbuttoned her coverall, and I will not write what a sheer and low-cut camisole she is wearing under it. The Iranian reader knows very well what some Iranian girls wear under their coveralls. Sara runs her fingers through the hair that has fallen loose on her forehead and combs it back. Dara sees her underarm and the pale shadow of its shaven hair. The musky scent of her underarm floats in the room.

But to inform the reader of how Dara has panicked at the sight of all that beauty within his reach, and how with his eyes he is devouring the abundance of Sara’s long black hair, I will write a few sentences in a stream of consciousness with images of a cold and dark winter night when wind and thunder, like evil ghosts, knock on doors and windows and a marble statue trembles in the house.

Then I will write:

Dara and Sara’s hearts beat like the hearts of two caged sparrows in a magnificent tale. Not only from the fear of being discovered and disgraced
, but also from the flight of their sparrowlike fancies to those acts that can be performed in private
…

I hate likening a rapidly beating heart to the heart of a sparrow, because I think it is an old cliché. But at this point in my story, other than such a simile, I cannot think of a more creative sentence, and both you and Mr. Petrovich know why. Truth be told, in this scene my heart too is beating like the heart of a caged sparrow, because I want Sara and Dara, after a thirty-minute silent conversation with their eyes, to exchange a smile. Then I want Dara to get up, walk over, sit next to Sara, and I want them to kiss. The very first kiss of their lives—clumsy scared, drenched with saliva, and yet unforgettable for the rest of their lives. But in their souls a force stronger than the desire for a kiss has awakened. A force that numbs and weakens them, that through all the nightmares they have had, threatens them and brings them tidings of terrifying punishment.

Sara
, hating her own and her lover’s fears,
with a quick kick throws her sandals to the other side of the room. One of the sandals lands in front of Dara. Dara picks it up. He touches it and …
smells it, kisses it.

I am sure the kissing of the sandals will not receive a publishing permit, and I am forced to resort to ancient metaphors of Iranian literature and to seek the assistance of Omar Khayyám. Although Khayyám was the greatest mathematician of his time, he preferred to sit beside the stream in his garden and, with one eye on life flowing by and the other on his jug of wine, compose quatrains about the death of lovers and beauties and the transformation of their bodies into dust, about jug makers who make jugs from that dust, and about lovers and beauties who sit beside the stream and drink wine from those jugs. Thus, Khayyám’s dusty ecosystem comes to my aid and I write:

Dust from the sole of that sandal on Dara’s hands … He rubs that dust, which heralds divine unity, between his fingers … The chill that dawns in the body of the dead creeps onto his hands. The
lustful
words ready in his mind to be spoken to Sara become words etched on gravestones. He tastes the dust. It tastes sharp
, it tastes of Shiraz wine
. All the paths and places on which Sara has walked, and all the gardens and riverbanks of life, all are within this dust and all will someday return to this dust and unite with the dust of Khayyám’s sandals, and a stream will flow over that dust and from it plants will grow and a lover ignorant of the glaring eyes of death will sit beside that stream and write an ode to the eternal beauties of his beloved.

Mr. Petrovich will quite likely appreciate this piece because it will make the readers think of death and hell. But this segment could also be written like this:

Dara kisses the sole of Sara’s sandal. The dust has the sharp taste of the old wines of Shiraz in earthen decanters that the
shahnehs
have broken and offered to the parched earth.

Two veins on Sara’s ankles, the rivers Tigris and Euphrates, that have taught the agony of man’s separation from man to the silver flamingos … Two violet veins that on the peak of the ankles come together and flow
to that place where all the torments and joys of man are born
…

Sara does not hear Dara’s stream of consciousness, but having seen his caress and passionate kiss on her sandal, she sighs, a sigh that I am afraid Mr. Petrovich will hear from the white between the lines of my story.

Sara says:

“Well, why are you sitting so far away, come closer.”

Dara, who is in an unnatural state from having tasted the dust of the broken earthen decanters of wine and the plants along the riverbank, like a tame and harmless sheep moves toward Sara on all fours. This is the first time in Sara’s life that a man with fire in his eyes, with a breath scented with wine and a tongue tainted with death, moves toward her like this—like a sheep that can quickly transform into a wolf. Stronger and saltier still, sweat seeps from her pores. As he approaches his prey, the sheeplike wolf glares at the fresh and succulent flesh on Sara’s shoulders in which virgin blood flows.

In the depths of Sara’s ears, the voices of mothers, grandmothers, and aunts rise like the dead on the day of resurrection—a day that lasts three hundred thousand days—all the words of wisdom and words of warning that from childhood until a few days ago have been spoken in her ears.

“My girl, don’t you ever let the boys touch your flower! If one of them says let me see your flower, quickly come and tell me so that I can cut off his ear.”

“My girl, you are ten years old now, you shouldn’t be playing with the neighbor’s boys.”

“Sara, if God forbid one of the boys in the neighborhood ever asks you to go to some quiet corner with him, don’t you be fooled. You will be ruined for the rest of your life, and on Judgment Day, God will punish you. In hell guilty women and girls are hung by their breasts from hooks and roasted on fire.”

“Sara, you are all grown up now, you shouldn’t go to the door in short sleeves.”

“Sara, your uncle Javad is a letch, don’t wear skirts when he comes over to our house.”

“My girl, now that you will be going to the university on your own, you have to be very careful. Don’t forget that men only want one thing from women. No matter how many nice things they say, the minute they get what they came for, they will throw you away like a used tissue. No matter how many promises they make, they will never marry you, because they think a girl who gives herself to them before marriage does not deserve to be their wife.”

“You see these men! They’re all wolves. Some of them in sheep’s skin, some of them in dog’s skin, some even in mouse’s skin, they know a thousand different ploys and poems. The moment they learn what type of man you like, they will become that man. You will end up in a whorehouse.”

“Sara, don’t be duped by the lewd boys and girls at the university who fool you and say let’s go to the movies, let’s go for some ice cream. One ice cream and you’ll be disgraced in this town. My girl, be very careful. Don’t bring shame to yourself and to your family.”

But that wolf that was once called Dara, guised in mouse’s skin, has now moved close to Sara. She can hear the mouse’s uneven breaths and senses the heat of his body against her own. She sees a drop of sweat fall onto the floor from Dara’s temple.