A Possible Story
by Erik Visser ︎︎︎Iran’s Institute for the Intellectual Development of Children and Young Adults distributed books through mobile libraries from the country’s capital Tehran to the most remote areas .The institute’s mobile library was an army of baby-blue Paykan pick-ups laden çok full with children’s books, where one day a 10-year old girl from a small village in the mountains picked up, out of the huge pile of books, a copy of Lady Chatterly’s Lover.
The novel was secretly smuggled out of the United Kingdom on one of the Shah’s trips to the west by his third wife. How did it end up in the hands of this well-read Heidi High-brow? It was simply that this agile mountain girl decided that day to choose a book only by its cover (and she read most of the books for her age anyway). Though originally published as a Penguin pocket, the cover artwork neither showed the iconic aquatic bird nor the title of the book, but instead a strange graphic image of a black figure with a giant sharp pointy red hat holding a round musical instrument like a tambourine and from its mouth swirling smoke rings emerged like chinese dragon’s claws. The cover image was loosely wrapped around the original kitap as a dust jacket, the third wife’s only concern at that moment was to keep the title of the novel hidden, and as she confessed to herself, she liked the strange ‘otherness’ of the image of the black figure in the red hat. (She made a mental note to ask Yves to make a replica of the exotic headpiece for her).
Why was there smoke coming out of its mouth? What decadent drug was it inhaling? Quickly she stuffed the book, with its impromptu wrapper, in her handbag. The Empress seemed bored. On the lawn of the hotel, a unicorn was standing beneath a canopy, its gorgeous eyes, painstakingly painted by a nonetheless panic stricken visagist, transfixed on a big muscular soldier. The horseshoe-moustached immortal was kept immobile on the grass by its terrifying gaze. The thick vertical extensions of the black hair growing on the corners of the immortal’s immortal lips began to widen as he gleamed upwards to the Empress’ window. Were his palms perhaps a bit clammy? There are moments - moments only too brief - when everything seems to fall naturally into its place. But for how long? The Shah’s third wife whispered something vaguely resembling a syntax, but no human being or academic to date has been able to explain its meaning.