Shahriar Mandanipour: Censoring an Iranian Love Story

The next day, the same young man was sitting in the exact same spot. Of course he had fewer books. The same was true of the days that followed.

In Iran, book lovers distrustful of the entire world sometimes think that the street peddlers who sell banned or rare books are agents assigned to identify and track readers.

On the seventh day, Sara finally stopped at the peddler’s spread and browsed through the books and, suddenly, she saw The Blind Owl. She asked its price. Contrary to the general practice of selling rare or banned books at a much higher price than the list price on the back cover, the young man asked for very little money. And in a trembling voice he added:

“… The price of one Winston cigarette, miss. On the condition that you read it carefully. Please cherish this book … Read it very carefully, much more carefully than you would other books … Carefully, accurately …”

No street peddler or bookseller had ever spoken to Sara in this manner. She thought, Here’s another one of those mentally disturbed people whose numbers are growing in Iran. She happily bought the book and put it in her handbag. The book was transmitting a mysterious energy to her. During her first class at the university, while the professor was busy explaining and explicating a lengthy poem composed seven hundred years ago that was replete with complex and unfamiliar Arabic words, Sara opened the book under her desk and started to read that surrealist story which in Iran is famously believed to make its young readers lose hope in life and commit suicide — the same way that years ago its writer, Sadeq Hedayat, committed suicide in Paris. However, aside from the strange power of the opiate and carnal words, the book seemed to hold another secret, a secret that Sara thought she had seen in the book peddler’s eyes. That day, Sara went home from the university far more quickly than usual. She closed the door to her room, lay down on her bed, and began reading the book from the beginning.

I guess by now you have realized that the crossed-out words in the text are my own doing. And you must know that such fanciful eccentricity is not postmodernism or Heideggerism. In fact …

And by now you have surly grasped the significance of “ … ” in Iran’s contemporary literature.

On page seven, Sara noticed several purple dots. She paid no attention to them and continued reading voraciously. The Blind Owl is a novel that begins with the nightmarish incidents in the life of an Iranian artist who paints on ewers. One day the artist goes to the storage alcove in his house to fetch a bottle of old wine that he has inherited from his mother — an Indian dancer who danced with a Nag serpent in a Linga temple. As he reaches for the wine, he sees a hole in the wall to the wasteland behind the house. He sees a stream. There is an old bent man sitting under a willow tree, and on the opposite side of the stream there is a beautiful woman, as beautiful as the women in Iranian miniatures, leaning forward and holding a single black lily out toward the old man. The next day, the artist realizes that in fact there is no hole in the wall of the storage alcove. But he has fallen in love with that ethereal woman and now spends his days wandering across the wasteland around his secluded house searching for her, for the stream, and for the willow tree … On page seventeen, Sara thinks whoever the previous owner of this book was had either not valued it or was a book abuser to have marked and defiled its pages with purple dots … And the blind owl who cannot get that ethereal woman out of his mind continues to search for her. One night, returning from a disappointing search, he sees the woman sitting next to the front door of his house. He takes her home and gives her some of that old wine. A wine that we learn is laced with poison from the fangs of a Nag serpent. The woman dies with a taunting look in her eyes, leaving the mysterious image of her gaze forever etched on the artist’s mind. The blind owl cuts up her body, which is surrounded by golden bees, and puts the pieces in a suitcase. Outside, it is as if the world has transformed into a nightmare. In the dark, an old man with a rickety horse-drawn hearse is waiting for him. The cart travels to the ancient ruins of the city of Rey. While burying the suitcase there, they discover a centuries-old clay pot with the mysterious eyes of a woman painted on it… The same image that the blind owl will for the rest of his life paint on clay ewers …

On page sixty-six Sara realized that the purple dots were not random and that in fact they had been placed with great precision under certain letters in certain words. She went back to the first dots on the first page of the book. They appeared under the letters S, A, R, A, H, E, L, L, O. It did not take her long to realize that the first four letters spelled her name and the rest spelled the word “hello” … The mystifying tale of The Blind Owl had a maddening lure, but Sara had fallen captive to the marked letters on the pages of the book. She flipped through page after page and carefully found them. She wrote them all down on a sheet of paper and began connecting them together. At times she would connect one or two letters too many, and at times too few … But finally, eight hours later, the complete letter sat before her.

“Hello Sara,

“As I mark these purple dots, I pray that you will discover my secret code. That day when you were asking the librarian for The Blind Owl, I was there. For a long time now, whenever you go to the library, I am there, too. The card catalogs don’t allow me to see your face, but from between their legs I can see your shoes. I know all your shoes very well. I have given each pair a name. For example, your brown shoes that have a scratch on them, perhaps from a barbed wire or the thorn of a rosebush, are Rainy, because you wear them on rainy days. That library doesn’t have The Blind Owl. It doesn’t have many of the other great novels either. According to the new librarian, they have weeded out all the immoral novels from the shelves. I had a small library of my own at home which I treasured. But then I started peddling books near your house so that I could give you The Blind Owl. To make sure people believed I was really a street peddler, I had to sell many of my books. I sold my One Hundred Years of Solitude, I sold Anna Karenina, The Great Gatsby, and Slaughterhouse-Five … They even bought Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities from me. I sold the collected poems of Lorca, Neruda, and Forough. But I put such a high price on The Blind Owl that people laughed at me. If this letter is of no value to you, at least value this book. To break free from our hypocrisy, its writer fled to Paris and committed suicide there. I wish I was as powerful a writer as he was, so that I could write a beautiful and extraordinary letter to you. If I could write a letter to you that no man in love has ever written, I would want nothing more of my life, and death would be easy for me … Please don’t be scared. Just as I have been in love with you for a very long time and you have never noticed me, trust that you will never sense my presence unless you yourself allow it. Next Thursday, when you go to the public library, borrow The Little Prince if you like …”

Sara tried to remember the young man’s face, or at least his voice. But strangely, she had no image of him in her head. It was as though a hand had erased it.

Sara borrowed The Little Prince. In her first reading she didn’t grasp much of the beautiful story because her entire attention was focused on breaking the code of the letter contained in the book. That letter read:

“Hello Sara,

“Why have you started to suddenly turn around and look behind you ever since you read my letter? You will never recognize me among the people on the sidewalk. I have studied makeup. The day you bought the book from me I had really changed my face.