Censoring an Iranian Love Story by Shahriar Mandanipour Read Free Book Online Page B

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