Censoring an Iranian Love Story by Shahriar Mandanipour

and conversations. They simply look at each other and read each other’s thoughts. Just that.”
    Sara likes what Dara has said. She thinks the same way. The world’s lovers may have created the most captivating and the greatest number of stories in the world, but they have no need for words.
    How about the need to meet? Precisely my problem. My lovers have to meet somewhere in order to read each other’s eyes and mind.
    In any case, Sara and Dara’s innocent conversation leads to a discussion of film, Dara’s favorite medium of art. Sara has no access to the black market for DVDs and videotapes and has therefore not seen many films.
    Dara reveals a small part of his life’s secret to Sara.
    “It was because of film that I lost everything, even my future.” Sara knows that to learn the secrets of this strange man’s life she has to be patient and to do away with superficial curiosities. Their conversation leads to films that they have recently seen on national television.
    Just last night, after an entire month of advertising, a very old production of Othello was aired on channel 2.
    Dara asks:
    “… But did you see Desdemona in the movie at all?”
    “… Just in the last scene. They showed her dead body on the bed for a few seconds.”
    “I guess she was wearing a sleeveless low-cut dress in all the other scenes.”
    Dara has guessed correctly. And that is precisely why I will not only make no mention of my Sara’s long black hair, but I will not even describe her without her headscarf and coverall—just like Iranian films that show women wearing a headscarf at all times, even in their homes. However, if one day an Iranian writer decides to describe the black cascade of his Sara’s hair, the best trick is that same defamiliarization envisioned by Russian formalists. The writer can, without mentioning the word “hair,” write: “Rippling nightlike strands that flow from the living marble and that the black wind ushers toward the light …”
    Dara talks to Sara about the happy times he had at the university and explains that because no company or business will hire him, he still lives with his parents … Sara explains that she is in her final year of studying literature at the university. Because she is familiar with the life of her author—me—she knows that with a degree in literature she shouldn’t have high hopes of finding a job either. In Iran, whenever someone asked me about my job and I replied that I am a writer, they would immediately say, “I mean your job. What do you do?” This is because unlike Mr. Petrovich and his superiors, ninety-nine point nine percent of Iranians do not perceive literature as serious work.
    Sara and Dara talk about chaste and saintly love, a love untainted by earthly lusts and desires. Together they voice the expression “Platonic love.” It doesn’t matter. Like many Iranians, they don’t know that in his philosophy of Platonic love Plato was mostly concerned with well-proportioned young boys. The misunderstanding is due to errors made in translating Plato’s writings, much the same way that another one of his works has been attributed to Aristotle and has been incorporated as such in the teachings at seminaries.
    I don’t know what the connection is between Plato and apples, but Sara is now talking about the apple tree in the garden at her parents’ house that is now, for the second time this season, full of blossoms.
    She wants me to give her a romantic sentence to speak. A sentence about the flight of the apple blossoms and their dance in the spring breeze of Tehran. But for different reasons, both Dara and I disagree with such a sentence.
    Dara bitterly says:
    “I really don’t like apples. One of my recurring nightmares is that I bite into a red apple and realize that my teeth are left behind in it.”
    Dara’s dislike of apples bears no association with the archetypal forbidden fruit, and I have told him time and time again that I am sick of using