Censoring an Iranian Love Story (6 page)

Years before Sara and Dara’s first meeting, I had the honor of meeting Mr. Petrovich. In those days I was a young writer who in his solitude had spent years carefully reading novels and stories. I had even extracted the styles and techniques of all sorts of classical and modern writers from their books and had noted them on index cards. I had then concluded that every writer must have his own particular worldview and philosophy. I therefore read as many books on philosophy as I could. To successfully analyze my characters, I read the equivalent of a university degree in psychology. I had Freud and Jung and their followers in one hand, and Pavlov and his followers in the other, until I arrived at American psychology. Next, I told myself that a great writer will never become a great writer if he is not well versed in world history and politics. Therefore, as a social and literary responsibility, and despite my family’s trepidations, I chose political science as my field of study at the university. Before I left Shiraz for Tehran and Tehran University, my father, who was a wealthy self-made man, pulled me aside and said:

“Look here, son, there’s no future for you in political science. The best jobs for political science graduates are at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. But positions like ambassadorships and director generals and whatever else belong to the relatives of the Shah and his royal court. They won’t even make you a mere clerk.”

My father was absolutely right, and that is why I disagreed with him. He went on to say:

“What’s more, if you study political science, because you are a very emotional person, there is a good chance you will end up joining some antigovernment political group, you’ll become a Communist, an urban guerrilla, and you’ll end up having to deal with the secret police. By the time they’re done with you, if you are not executed or sentenced to life in prison, because of the hot baked potatoes and the Coca-Cola bottles they have shoved up your ass, you’ll be walking funny for the rest of your life … Go to America, study engineering or medicine, and become the pride of your family and your country.”

At the time, I could not tell my father that I did not want to become a Communist, nor did I want to be an ambassador … Therefore, against his advice, I went and studied political science. I wanted to go as far as a doctorate degree, but first came the revolution, then the war, and I who wanted to become a great writer told myself that many of the world’s great writers have experienced war, and so I signed up for military service and volunteered to go to the front. The first outcome of the Iran-Iraq War was millions of dead and disabled; the second outcome was that right after peace was established we realized that we were two Muslim countries and therefore brothers. It seems the war also wanted to offer the world another great writer, and for this reason, after eighteen months, it sent me back to my hometown, Shiraz, alive and well. And I, who even in the trenches had spent my time reading novels from the farthest reaches of the world
—The Soul Enchanted, David Copperfield, Moulin Rouge, Resurrection,
and … and … and had not stopped the exercise of writing, was fully armed and ready to write my first masterpieces and to present them to the world.

Ask me:

Was all this self-praise, as with other bigheaded writers, just to claim you are a great writer?

And I will answer:

You are wrong again. No, I didn’t say all this to suggest that I am a great writer. I said it all to explain why I have not become a great writer. In other words, I want to say that I was just another young man with
Great Expectations
of my future as a writer. In 1990, I was thrilled to learn that on the advice of Hooshang Golshiri, one of Iran’s great writers, a reputable private publisher had agreed to publish the second collection of my short stories, titled
The Eighth Day of the Earth.
Every day I sat waiting for the telephone to ring so that I could hear my publisher’s voice telling me that my book had been printed. I waited for almost a year, until one day I finally heard his voice on the telephone.

“Shahriar! We’re screwed! I’m ruined … The Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance has complained of thirteen separate points in your book—all sexy words and phrases … You have to come to Tehran. What a mistake I made investing in a young writer. My capital … I’m ruined!”

I kept thinking, When did I ever write sexy stories? I could not come up with an answer, so I quickly got on the bus and headed for Tehran. The six-hundred-mile road between Shiraz and Tehran passes by the two-thousand-five-hundred-year-old ruins of Persepolis, it passes by Isfahan, one of the most beautiful cities in Iran which some five hundred years ago served as the capital city of the Safavid Dynasty, it passes by the religious city of Qom, which is the center for educating and producing clergymen, and it passes by two great deserts as well. During the night, when the two opium-addicted bus drivers would change shifts somewhere in the divide between the two deserts, I had ample time to calculate how many pages of the book had to be replaced in order to revise thirteen sentences on thirteen different pages. I concluded that approximately one hundred ninety thousand pages had to be replaced.

You will likely say:

Don’t ridicule us! Like all bad writers, some of whom even become best sellers, you too take your readers for fools! What is this? You who claim to have prepared and armed yourself to become a great writer, didn’t you know anything about mathematics?

As a matter of fact, not only had I studied mathematics, but I had even hammered into my head
The Meaning of Einstein’s Theory of Relativity
by Russell. It is you who lack knowledge of mathematics … Look here! These were the early postrevolution days when publishers would request a permit for a book to leave the print shop after it had actually been printed, and three thousand copies of this sinister book had been printed and bound and were waiting for their exit permit from the print shop. My publisher had explained that to change one word or one sentence on one page, sixteen pages of a book had to be replaced because books are printed in sixteen-page forms. Now let’s assume that to revise thirteen sexy phrases, four sixteen-page forms had to be extracted from the book.

Four multiplied by sixteen makes sixty-four. Now sixty-four multiplied by three thousand.

It is your turn to calculate. Even without accounting for the cost of ink and the salaries of the print shop employees, figure out how much oil must be extracted from the belly of my beloved motherland and sold and its oil dollars sent to Brazil to purchase paper, and how many trees in Brazil have to be sacrificed to make all this paper.

A book for which so much damage is inflicted on nature, whether a masterpiece or trash, is a murderer.

Now I understand why I was inspired to name the book
The Eighth Day of the Earth.
And now I understand that if God had not stopped to rest after he created the world and had instead taken on the toil of writing stories and novels himself, there wouldn’t be so much damage done to the beauties of the nature he created.

In any case, on an autumn day when the air in Tehran was a mix of carbon monoxide, the scent of rain, and the fleeting perfume of a girl who years later would be named Sara, I, with all my ambition, climbed on the back of my publisher’s dilapidated motorcycle and together we headed for the Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance. The rain had just stopped. Mud and slime flew at us from the wheels of passing cars. We rode past Tehran University. There were no demonstrations in front of its main entrance because by then all antigovernment students had been purged, and the preferred students had already enrolled. Of course, much later, they too would become opponents of the government.

On our perilous journey through the terrifying jungle of Tehran’s traffic, my publisher was thinking that if instead of publishing literature and supporting stupid young storytellers he had published guidebooks for wise young people on passing university entrance exams, especially for the engineering and medical schools, he would have been rich by now, and instead of riding this ten-year-old Yamaha, he would be driving a brand-new Mercedes. And I was telling myself that if instead of all this labor for literature, I had listened to my father and studied engineering or medicine in the United States, instead of this dilapidated motorcycle, I would be driving a Porsche, and I would have stopped in front of this publisher’s bookstore, and just to make him happy, I would have bought precious yet unpopular books for my private library. But the truth is, I was ashamed. It was no small sin that in an Islamic country thirteen sexy phrases had been discovered in a one-hundred-forty-page book. At last, with such thoughts of
Fathers and Sons
and
Crime and Punishment,
in an office in the grand and majestic headquarters of the Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance, like two Joseph K.’s we sat facing Mr. Petrovich.

Mr. Petrovich, part detective, part criminal court judge, and quite imposing, was sitting behind a large desk. He was about thirty-five years old, with sharp eyes and a closely trimmed stubble. He ordered his secretary to find and bring the file for
The Eighth Day of the Earth.
During the thirty minutes it took to produce it, Mr. Petrovich was discussing advancements in print technology in the West and the unbelievable speed of new printing machines with a bearded middle-aged man sitting in an armchair next to his desk. The middle-aged man’s composure suggested that he was someone important and someone whom Mr. Petrovich held in high regard. At the time, I foolishly hoped that the man would leave before the file containing the sexy phrases lay open on that desk. Luckily, he did not. Mr. Petrovich handed a sheet of paper to my publisher with a list of page numbers and lines that were problematic. Then, like a father who has seen his newborn child for the first time, I lay eyes on my book. However, just like the dark-skinned father who suddenly sees that his child is white, I too was shocked. My book had no cover.

The first sentence that was underlined as sexy and provocative was this: “My eyes shift from her face to her neck and then move farther down, and I am disgusted by the feelings her breasts do not awaken in me …” You probably think the sentence is obviously sexy. Ask me if the breasts are naked, and I will say no. The sentence is in a short story titled “Thursday’s Sara,” I mean it was. In the story, a young officer, wounded at war and paralyzed from the waist down, as he does all his other days and nights, lies on a bed in his mother’s house. It is raining and his sad fiancée who has come to visit him is standing beside the window drawing lines on the fogged-up glass. The man’s spinal cord has been severed and he has told his fiancée that it is over between them. But his fiancée, a nurse at a mental hospital, continues to visit him every Thursday and talks to him about a girl named Sara—Sara’s first appearance in my stories. Sara is a lively, emotional, and playful girl who can awaken the courage to fall in love in any man. But it seems Sara has no memory. Every Thursday, the nurse recounts one of Sara’s escapades for her paralyzed fiancé. At the end of my story, the young man suspects that if Sara really exists, she exists only in his fiancée’s fantasies, and that, in fact, the young woman is only articulating her own lost dreams …

It is in such a setting that the man looks at his fiancée’s face, neck, and torso.

The argument between Mr. Petrovich and me began. I said:

“Sir! What is sexy about this sentence? It is just the opposite. The man is paralyzed. He has lost his manhood. That is why the sight of his fiancée’s breasts disgust him … Please pay attention to the word ‘disgust.’ Who in the world is going to be aroused by reading this sad story and the description of a feeling of disgust?”

Mr. Petrovich had his own reasoning and was particularly sensitive to the word “breast.”

The next sentence, in another story, was something like this:

“… Suddenly the woman, as though she had gone mad from thirst and the hellish heat, wildly ripped off her clothes and poured the remaining water in the ewer—their only reserve for the next few days—over her head. Her husband, weak with dehydration, was sprawled out in the corner of the hut. Passively, he watched as the drops of water trickled down the wrinkles and lines on the woman’s pale thighs and plunged onto the thirsty earth …”

With a look of reproach Mr. Petrovich said:

“What about this? It is truly a vile and filthy scene.”

And I, as though defending the rights of the woman in Hawthorne’s
The Scarlet Letter,
with passion and literary conjecture, actually legal conjecture, in defense of every single word of that story, said:

“My esteemed sir, you have read the story. There is a drought. There is a shortage of water in this southern village. Misery and death have befallen the people. One night the villagers all have the same nightmare, a nightmare as black as tar; and it happens on the night when the American coup d’état succeeds in Tehran, and Mossadeq is arrested for the crime of nationalizing oil, and the Shah is supposed to return to the country. What’s more, the woman in the story is at least sixty years old …”

I apologize to all the beautiful sixty-year-old ladies. In those days, there were no Internet sites to post photographs of the ten sexiest Hollywood stars over fifty.

Tirelessly I argued:

“Sir, imagine the wrinkles on dehydrated skin, the white lines underneath withered skin, the filth and grime of not having bathed for months … Greasy, gross … What is so sexy about all this? The only beautiful woman in the story, as you have read, has been compared to a flower with absolutely no description of her face or figure.”

Unconvinced, Mr. Petrovich said:

“I just don’t understand why you writers insist on depicting such filthy scenes and presenting them to the reader’s imagination.”

“Sir! It is not about insisting. It is life. Believe me, to make a story believable, its characters have to be portrayed, otherwise the reader will not find them credible … You yourself have read how the location of the village is described in detail. Its surrounding deserts have been illustrated in many sentences, even the animals and the men.”