Censoring an Iranian Love Story by Shahriar Mandanipour

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