by Iyer, Pico
This time, he sat down at the desk, and thought back on what McCarthy had just said. Indirectly, it seemed another way of describing what he had encountered in Damascus: the impermeable wall that separates those inside the community from those outside. Not just because they see things differently—he’d made it his vocation to see the world in a Sufi light—but because their very sense of north and south was different. He’d come all the way here to live differently: but what use was any of it if he changed only his circumstances, not his eyes?
When he woke up the next morning, it was to find the light on his machine blinking with its customary ferocity: a call from London, he assumed. He pushed the button and heard a voice almost, but not quite, the one he’d been dreading and hungrily awaiting. “Johno, it’s Dominique. Chancellor. I find I’m going to be in L.A. a few weeks from now. On business. Any chance you might be free for a day of sightseeing in Santa Barbara? I’d love to come up and look in on you.” “Look in” meant “look at,” he knew, and “I’d love” meant “I will”: he hadn’t forgotten England in his time here. Clearly Martine was sending her older sister to check up on him.
“Anyway, when you get this, could you call my office, please, to confirm? It’d be wonderful to come over and make sure you’re up to no good, as it were.”
He flipped through his address book to find her number, and when he did, he saw her sister’s, with the “June 10, 1967” scrawled above it in a handwriting that still had the capacity to touch him: the night of Hugh’s party, in the dead of winter, when she’d come down to his room on the pretext of looking up some Richard and Linda Thompson record and, during the long night that followed, in the innocence of youth, he’d written down her birthday, with all the plans he could weave around it already beginning to form in his head. As he went on, dialing Nicki’s number almost absently, he suddenly remembered: he’d gone to all the trouble of buying Martine a present in Aleppo, and now, somehow, he’d forgotten to unpack it. Everything she’d said about him borne out—“So lost in those bloody poets of yours that you hardly notice whether I’m in the room or out of it.”
He told the emissary he’d be glad to see her, and went over to the closet to search for the present. It must be in the suitcase, he thought, sifting through the clothes still neatly stacked and folded, maps of Palmyra, and hard-to-acquire copies of Sufi texts he’d brought back. At the very bottom of the case, in the shopping bag he’d taken pains to put them in, were the two boxes he’d brought home, one of them containing the bracelet that the Armenian had packed for him so carefully, the other whatever it was Khalil was sending to his “friend.” At the time, he’d written “P” on one, for “present,” but now, of course, he couldn’t remember whether this referred to his present for Martine or Khalil’s for his acquaintance. Why did every shop in Syria have to wrap its booty in the same copy of the party newspaper?
He felt the boxes in his hand, peered around the covering for marks, and then gave up: he’d have to open one up, as carefully as he could, and then reseal it later. He picked the fresher of the two offerings, gently pulled against a flap—tearing the whole thing in the process, of course—and then just ripped it apart to see what was lying inside. A small black-and-white box, one of those geometrical puzzles and talismans that make the suqs of the Middle East seem to spin. The visual equivalent of a mantra, he sometimes felt: a pattern so dizzying that just to look at it was to step outside your daily self. He opened its top—it groaned a little, the mother-of-pearl glinted— and saw a small blue perfume bottle, with verses from the Quran in gold around its sides; next to it, a tiny envelope on which someone had written, with an equal sense of ceremony, “Kristina.” He started to open the envelope, and then held himself back: a message from a stranger to a stranger, handed to him in trust. He put the box back on the chest of drawers, pulled out some wrapping paper he’d kept in the closet for such occasions, and then went back to call Martine.
Her voice on her machine had the sound of someone walking out the door and closing it firmly behind her. “Hello, it’s John. I just wanted to say that I’m looking forward to seeing Nicki next month. And I didn’t forget your birthday. I actually went to the trouble of getting you something, in a place that would have meaning to you, and then, of course, forgot to send it. But it’s on its way now, with my apologies and”—he paused to measure the words precisely—“my fondest wishes. California is very strange for somebody like us. Like a scene some child has drawn on the beach, which gets washed away every morning. Anyway, I hope you had a lovely birthday, and celebrated in high style.”
Then, wrapping up the other present in his gold paper, he suddenly realized that he didn’t have the number of Khalil’s friend, in Santa Monica, or Barbara, or wherever it was. He went back to the suitcase, pulling things out in the same order as before—postcards of the Citadel, bottles of shampoo, names of professors Sefadhi had given him—and came at last upon the business cards he’d collected. On the back of one—it happened to be for a rare-book dealer, in the suq—he’d scribbled down the number of the woman.
“Hello?” came an uncertain voice when he dialed the number.
“Hello. Is that Ms. Jensen?”
“Yes. Can I help you?” She spoke demurely, with a curious formality: there was California in her voice, but also something farther away, more cautious.
“Yes, I think you can. I was just in Damascus, and I met a friend of yours, and he gave me a present to deliver to you, and I was wondering how best I might get it to you. Professor Khalil.”
“In Damascus?” she said, as if the name were strange to her. “In Syria?”
“Yes. He said he knew you from an Islamic conference in Scandinavia, I think.”
“Oh, you must be looking for Kristina. She’s not here.”
“Will she be back soon?”
“No. I don’t think so.” The voice didn’t sound very sure of anything: he saw someone small, a little tentative, looking out from behind a barely opened door, and waiting for it to close again.
“Will she ever be back?”
“Yes. In a few weeks, I think.”
“Maybe I could drop it off, then, and you could give it to your roommate—”
“Sister.”
“. . . your sister when she returns.”
“Sure. Anytime.”
“How about tomorrow, in the afternoon? I feel terrible hanging on to this for all these days.”
“Sure, anytime is fine.”
“Would three o’clock be okay? Tomorrow.”
“Three would be perfect,” she said, and then gave him some instructions for getting off at Mission, and following the parks and the schools till he came to the “blue house on the corner.”
“I’ll see you then,” he said.
“I hope so,” came the far-off voice.
The next afternoon, threading his way through the narrow streets that lie just behind downtown—the shadows that give it substance— he tried to make sense of her somewhat whimsical directions: “right one block after the oak tree, and then straight when you see the church, and then past the place where the girls are wearing green plaid skirts, till you see a white camper under a tree.” There was no sign of the camper, but he found a blue house, and the numbers matched, so he parked on the street and walked to the door. There was no answer to his knock, so he tried again. He waited, looked around—we are never less ourselves than when waiting for a door to open, he thought, never more at loose ends. But the door never opened, and there didn’t seem to be a bell.
“Hello?” he called out. “Anyone home?”
But there was no sound from within, not even a whisper. He walked around to the side of the house, knocked on a window, tried to see what he could make out through the sliding doors: just boxes heaped up, in a distant room, and books and papers everywhere. “Hello?” he called again. “Anybody home?”
There was not even the sound of someone trying not to be seen. He walked around some more, just in case she w
as in the bathroom, knocked once more on the front door, and then gave up. The driveway was deserted, and if he continued circling the house, some suspicious neighbor would no doubt summon the police. The perfume bottle didn’t look expensive; he could surely leave it outside the door.
He put it beside the welcome mat, so she would see it when she returned, and then went back to his car, looking over his shoulder to make sure it was safe from the rain. As he got into his car and started up, suddenly there was a kind of clattering behind him, and a large white tank, as it seemed to him, so smeared with dust that it was turning grey, labored into the open driveway. At its wheel, he could tell from where he sat, was a young woman.
He got out and waited by the driveway, to make sure it was her, and for a long time heard nothing but someone struggling through the debris of the car. From where he stood he could see sweaters, newspapers, old dresses, and boxes piled up so high in the back that it was a miracle she could look out.
At last a small figure stepped down from the vehicle—it was a long way down for someone her size—and came up to him, flushed. “I’m sorry,” she said. “You’ve been waiting. You must be the person who called?”
“I am. John Macmillan. I actually left the present on your doorstep—I wasn’t sure you were coming.”
“I’m sorry. I was running late, so I canceled the bank and gave up on the flowers and came back here, so I wouldn’t miss you. And then . . .” For whatever reason, she looked bereft.
“No harm done. I’ll give it to you now.” He went over to the door, picked up the box, and brought it over.
“Camilla,” she said, extending her hand. “We talked on the phone.”
“I know.” He looked at her—the long fair hair falling to her waist, the pale, clear face, and, more than that, the sense her hair gave her of someone taller than she really was—and said, “Sorry, I know this sounds stupid, but you look familiar. Might I have seen you somewhere before?”
“At the lecture maybe? I was there with my friend.”
He thought of the woman alone with her plate of snacks and the unmet “friend” she’d come with—who was now, apparently, standing before him. Strange that she’d made the connection so instinctively.
“So—would you like an orange juice or something?” She brushed a few stray hairs away from her forehead, and he saw someone flustered, a little, as if she’d mislaid something, just when the telephone rang, and couldn’t now put her hands on it again.
“Why not?”
She fumbled with the key for a few seconds, leading him round to the side of the house, and then into a small, too-typical Californian kitchen. There were counters on all sides, boxes of tea bags by the sink, a calendar with a picture of the Moorish courthouse. She had, in the current fashion, magnetized letters on her refrigerator, waiting to be turned into words.
“Would mango juice be okay? I seem to have run out of everything else.”
“Fine. Excellent,” he said, as she extended two dirty glasses that looked as if they’d recently been excavated from Pompeii.
“So you’re a student of religion?” she said, to be saying something.
“Whatever that means. But, yes, here for a few years of graduate work. And you?”
“I’m a kept woman,” she said, and again he sensed something strange in her, withdrawn: the answer came trilling out so easily he felt it was a standard ruse.
“Funny. I’d have thought you were an actress.”
She looked up suddenly. “How did you know that? Have you been making inquiries?”
“No. It was just a lucky guess, I think. A joke.” But she was looking away again, and he was reminded of how often conversations in California went like this: as if you were going through the lines of a play, which everyone knew and was used to performing, and then suddenly somebody fell through a trapdoor, and her words came back to you from very far away.
“That’s so weird,” she went on, alone in her own world. “Because I had this friend once, an old boyfriend, and one day I was writing down his name, and he called me at that very moment—from Chicago! And this other time, I was in England, this was years ago, and I walked into a room, and there was the same person I’d met a year before. Somewhere completely different.”
“England’s a small world.”
“Not that small.” An unexpected sharpness.
“You were a student there?” he said, to bring them onto safer footing.
“Nineteen eighty-five,” she answered with pride. “At Oxford. It was the most beautiful experience of my life.” He kept quiet: clearly they were moving in opposite directions.
“And you?”
“The same. But that’s what I’ve come here to get away from.”
“We were probably there at the same time!”
“We probably were. Anyway, I should be off: I’ve taken up enough of your time.”
“It changed my life,” she said, and again he had the sensation of having tripped some wire so that suddenly she became a deeper version of herself. She went in and out of focus like the sun behind clouds. “It was the first place I’d ever been where they had real respect for the past. Where they valued where they came from.”
“I’m sure,” he said, and got up as a way to go. He’d learned long ago that the people here who longed for the Old World were the ones with whom he’d have least in common.
“And you’re from Denmark originally?”
“How did you know?” Again, she looked startled. “Are you telepathic?”
“I don’t think so. Jensen’s a Danish name, isn’t it?”
She nodded, obviously not satisfied by this. “Usually people say ‘Norway.’ But, yes, I’m the usual California mix-up: half Danish, half . . . something else.”
“Well, I really appreciate your help. When you see your sister, please tell her she has a big fan in Damascus. Professor Khalil wanted me to pass on his warmest regards.”
“They always do,” she said strangely, and he was thrown off-balance once again.
“Thanks for the juice. Maybe we’ll bump into one another.”
“Maybe,” she said, not sounding very confident. “Thank you for the telepathy.” And somehow, as she sat in the kitchen, letting him show himself out, leaving him with the unmistakable feeling that he was abandoning her in some way.
That night, when he returned home, he found himself thinking about Martine. He took his glass of wine into the study, as usual, and looked out to sea, and all he could hear, for whatever reason, was her voice, the last night on the train. The couple next door was playing an old Dead album, very loud, and there were the usual shouts and barkings from the beach below, but all he could see was her eyes, pleading with him in that way that said she was so scared she’d prick him if he came any closer.
It was three, four in the morning now, in his head, and they were on the bench by the river, under the trees, with all the punts moored up, banging now and then against the bank. The sound of a live band far away, under the tent, and only a few couples straggling across the lawns or stealing, periodically, through the great iron gates, into the quiet and privacy of the trees.
She was stretched out as she liked to sit, her feet in his lap, he playing with the straps of her sandals. They’d both drunk too much, and when he moved his fingers under her dress, she giggled and squeezed and said, “Don’t!” in a way that meant she didn’t want him to stop.
He ran his finger under the bottom of her legs, and then along the inside of her thigh, across the warm expanses, and she relaxed as she could never do indoors, and when the moment was over, she kissed him gently, and then they were farther apart than ever. The creakings on the lawns, the bottles scattered around the Cloisters, she pulling her legs sleepily back as soon as it was light, and saying, “I ought to go.”
“Me, too.”
“Of course,” she said. “That’s what you’re good at.”
“The scholarship stipulates . . .”
“I know what it st
ipulates: I’m the one who helped you fill out the application, remember? I just wish you had the decency to acknowledge the real reason why you’re going.”
He walked out into the night, to try to put the distant moment away—to come back to California—but all the memories now closed everything else out: the long, long evenings in the country when the sun just rested on the horizon forever, and the whole world dwindled into a murmurous quiet; cows on the hill, the two of them stretched out on the grass somewhere, a bottle on the blanket, and she, occasionally, saying, “How can you want anything but this? Aren’t you happy?”
No past and no future: just the suspended quiet of a summer evening that annulled a sense of direction and of self. Her eyes alight as it got dark, the bleary taste of wine upon her lips, the long nights when they never seemed to sleep. Until, of course, the past was so enormous that the only thing they shared was the sense of what they both wanted to avoid: it was as if the house they were building was coming apart, piece by piece, and brick by brick, and each day brought more packed boxes stacked up by the door. “If you mean there’s no patient Penelope to put it all together again in the morning,” she’d said, when he’d mentioned the feeling, “you’re probably right. I never was very interested in sewing.”
As he walked, a couple suddenly ran, singing, down the wooden steps of their home and out onto the beach. He watched them in the distance, running into the waves, hand in hand, and thought of the first letter he’d written her after he arrived. “Loneliness is a good thing, don’t you think?”
The next morning it was clear—none of the coastal fog that usually enveloped them till one, two in the afternoon—and when he went to his desk, his mind started to run in every direction except the one he wanted it to go in. Something in the trip had left him unsettled, not himself; not anything Khalil had said exactly, but all he hadn’t said. His reticence was so absolute, it gave the impression he had something to hide.
The scholar’s fear—he was reminded every time the latest issue of the Journal of Islamic Studies appeared inside his box—is the scholar’s dream, in a different key: that suddenly someone, somewhere, will make a discovery that turns the whole field on its head. If the discovery is his own, he can claim a victory of sorts, but even then it is a partial victory: every new development can turn years, even decades of research upside down. Like seeing a woman across a room, Alex had said, and throwing over your wife of twenty years.