Censoring an Iranian Love Story by Shahriar Mandanipour Page B

offensive. Our argument dragged on to other phrases in the book. In those too there was either the word “breast” or words used to describe the beauty or ugliness of the lips, arms, or thighs of a woman … By then my face was drenched with sweat and I was swearing to God and to the Prophet that for a reader familiar with these stories, such descriptions would not be sexually arousing at all, and that if someone is looking to be aroused, he is far better off looking elsewhere. I mean instead of reading the word “breast,” he can just go out onto the street where there are plenty of breasts and thighs …
    After an hour of heated discussion, neither I nor Mr. Petrovich had been convinced. Finally, Mr. Petrovich, who perhaps still wanted to avoid breaking the heart of a young writer, fed up and exhausted, said:
    “No. No matter what I say, you come up with ten justifications for it.”
    And without any apparent forethought he blurted out:
    “As an impartial observer, let’s ask this gentleman’s opinion.”
    And he offered my book with the underlined sentences to the dignified gentleman.
    “As a fair-minded reader, you be the judge.”
    The dignified gentleman began pensively reading those thirteen notorious lines … Ten minutes … fifteen minutes went by. My heart was pounding in my chest. I knew the moment of the verdict was at hand. Drops of sweat, like drops of water dripping off a wrinkled thigh, dripped onto the floor. My publisher was still sitting there quiet and meek, and the dignified gentleman had gone back yet one more time to reread from the very first instance … Twenty-three minutes … I couldn’t figure out what he was doing with the breasts and thighs of my story … And all the while, Mr. Petrovich sat there looking at me with an air of victory. The ice in his glass melted … Half an hour … Finally the dignified gentleman spoke:
    “What can I say … It is not easy to judge … In any case, perhaps … I don’t know … Perhaps for men of our age it would not be arousing, but for the young … What can I say?!”
    Impulsively, I said:
    “Dear sir, you are still young. Were you really aroused by those sentences?”
    This was one of those rare moments in my life when I was shrewdly clever … It was obvious that the dignified gentleman, even if he had been aroused, could not confess to three men that he was sexually stimulated by reading a few sentences. Hence he said:
    “No.”
    And I in turn said to Mr. Petrovich:
    “You see, sir …”
    Now in an environment awash with mutual understanding, our discussion continued for another twenty minutes. Mr. Petrovich agreed to forgo censoring several sentences. I did not want to give in on the others, but my publisher whispered that I had gone far enough and that I should not make him any angrier and any more tired.
    We left the Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance. I climbed up behind my publisher on his motorcycle and we rode off. Small drops of water from the wrinkled thighs of the clouds above Tehran rained on our faces. The drivers of hundreds of polluting motorcycles and cars were blowing their horns, cutting one another off, and cursing at one another. On the crowded sidewalks people were going about their daily headaches and responsibilities. No one paid any attention to the noisy passage of one of the greatest and most honored publishers and one of the future’s greatest writers of their country. In those days, many middle-class and working-class people were forced to take on two jobs just to make ends meet, and they hardly gave a damn if in some scene, in some story, a man’s gaze moved across his fiancée’s breasts or not, or whether the man’s manhood was intact or not, or even whether his fiancée had any breasts or not. And for this reason, the pithy three thousand print run of books was shrinking even further. But still, I felt as though I had lost some part of my soul, as though parts of my body had been stripped naked,