by Iyer, Pico
“As I say, I’m sorry.”
“No. It’s much better you tell me now. I could have gotten hurt otherwise.”
It was better; but he saw her packing away her things with the exaggerated efficiency of a girl told that the expedition’s over, and it’s time to go home. He looked out to sea, to where the dark sky showed off the lights, and she followed his gaze.
“Is she very far away?”
“Far enough.”
“Then we’re okay?” And there was a hopefulness in her voice.
He said nothing, so she went on, “I understand. Really. I wouldn’t expect you not to be claimed.”
“Good.”
“I appreciate your honesty.”
“Good.”
They sat there, at something of a loss, and he did what he could not to look at where the lip gloss was wearing off, and the natural glow that had replaced the blusher was starting to fade. It was beginning to grow chilly—a wind coming in from the sea—and he remembered the evening appointments they’d both made up.
“I think we should be going.” Leaning over to kiss her lightly for goodbye.
They didn’t say anything as they drove back into town, but when he got off the freeway and started to approach her house, she said, “Thank you for giving me all this time. It means a lot.”
“It’s no problem. I’m happy to.”
“Maybe I’ll see you sometime at the university?”
“Maybe. I seem to spend all my life there these days.”
He pulled up to her driveway, easy to find now thanks to the dusty white car that looked as if it had driven across continents to arrive here. She sat in the passenger seat, making no movement towards the door.
“Well, I think my eight o’clock meeting summons.”
“Thank you for a perfect day,” she said, with more seriousness than he’d expected, and then got out.
As he turned round and drove away, he saw her standing in the driveway, in her white dress, looking for all the world like a child dropped off against her will after a custody weekend.
What is it about the Sufis that attracts you?” It was one of the many questions that he took to his desk the following morning, from the unexpected drive, unable to settle to the work he’d promised himself. He thought, for some reason, of winter afternoons in England, the sky so low and grey that it felt as if he were being conveyed to a tunnel that would never end. He thought about the Department, and the endless talk of careers and papers and openings and tenure tracks. He thought, for no reason he could formulate, of the men in the great hall in Damascus, their hands extended at their side, palms cupped as if to receive whatever the heavens sent down.
“You realize he’s the best-selling poet in America,” Sefadhi had said, the very first time they met, at the interview. “I’m drawn to him in spite of that,” he’d answered, and clearly it was the correct response, for six months later he was the professor’s prize pupil, working on Rumi. “Our mission,” the older man had said, in the slightly conspiratorial tone he favored, “is to smuggle a little of the Sufi light into the smog of California.” Neglecting, for the moment, the fact that Tehran is said to have the most polluted skies on earth.
“Keep it simple” was Sefadhi’s only advice for the presentation. “The point of the exercise is not to show off the details and originality of your research. It’s the opposite. Make these poets live for people who know very little about them.”
Outside his window, the ocean was foaming and pooling around the rocks, and the summer fog erased almost everything: it gave a forlorn air to the strip of beach, as if the world had left it behind somehow and would never come back to collect it. He looked out into the mist and tried to recover the person who’d known nothing of the poets until Martine gave him the book of Rumi translations the last night in Istanbul, an undergraduate’s token of love.
“The Sufis,” he wrote quickly, “so-called for the rough woollen gown they wear, or suf—emblem of their austerity, their voluntary poverty, their anonymity—were a small group of Moslems who began to gather in groups, often secretly, at the beginning of the eighth century, soon after the Prophet’s death. Their aim, quite simply, was to find a direct path to the divine, without the mediation of any Imam or cleric. Their goal was not to conquer the world, but to conquer themselves.”
It was the most agonizing thing in the course, after all these years, to try to reduce the figures he’d been studying into formulae: whatever had stirred him, years ago, had had nothing to do with the Islamic history he’d known nothing about. But the point of the seminar, as Sefadhi had stressed, was to keep all real knowledge out of it—“pretend as if you’re meeting them for the first time.”
“Because they opposed everything around them, they always had the air of a secret group: in Shia countries, such as Iran, they are a minority group in a minority sect that has always defined itself by its opposition to the norm—the word ‘Shiite,’ as you know, means ‘partisan.’ And so I might best present them to you by telling you what they are not. For the Sufi, God exists not only in the mosque or madrasa; He is everywhere, not least inside our hearts. The jihad that all good Moslems undertake (and, as you also know, I’m sure, the word means ‘struggle’ or ‘aspiration,’ with none of the associations of ‘holy war’ the networks always mention), the Sufi sees as internal: his goal is to suppress the infidel within. The Sufi ideal is one of love, but it is not the love of the compassionate mother, or of Jesus, he speaks of; it is the ravenous, consuming eros of the lover inflamed.”
How does one begin to describe fire? Describe its effects, perhaps, the light it throws off in the dark. He thought of the blackened hills they’d driven through the day before, and the houses bravely coming up in the mist; he thought of her, recovering hope enough to run into the surf as if she were a child again.
“All of this doubtless sounds strange at first; but, really, it’s not so different from everything we read in the Kabbalah or Plato. Even from the visions of Blake and Coleridge. The soul is an abandoned girl, lost in the wilderness, and crying out for the home that she has lost.
“The cry of the Sufi is, quite simply, the cry of abandoned love. The drive of the Sufis is to find the hidden self, the secret soul, that has the capacity to take us back. They do not care whether you call the destination God or Truth or Reality or Emptiness. For the Sufi, man is not fallen, just fallen asleep; we are not lost, just temporarily obscured. Like stars that can’t be seen in mid-afternoon.”
He stood up and stretched. The fog was beginning to rise up the cliffs and dissipate as it reached the town; the impression he had— the drive still inside him—was of grey eyes and blue, one light giving way to another.
“In many ways, indeed, the Sufis are closer in spirit to the mystics of other traditions than to the mainstream of Islam. That is one of the things that make them seem so subversive. We know them mostly through their poems, short, enigmatic outpourings that are thrown out like hand grenades to explode our every assumption. Their goal, deep down, is to take us into a space outside of space, as you could call it, where time as we know it is stilled, and everything that is beyond time comes to light.”
He imagined himself, thirty years from now, another McCarthy, fumbling for his notes and reading from them in the wrong order as he tried to expound the beauties of making sense of what you don’t know.
“That is the reason, too, why they so famously use images of madness and drunkenness and love. They take the notion of surrender— the literal meaning of ‘Islam,’ as you know—and push it to its furthest extreme. Hence, too, their love of jokes and riddles, eccentric stories about the lovable bumpkin Nasruddin.
“In that spirit, I leave you now with a short example. Many of us, when we were young, heard stories of the Three Wise Men, who followed a star to the manger where they found the infant Jesus. But recent scholarship suggests that the men were in fact Zoroastrians, from Persia, star-watchers who’d been following the heavens from a moun
taintop. And for a good Sufi, their story is a near-perfect allegory of the soul. The Magi follow a distant star to a forgotten, unprepossessing place, and inside it they find, not just a divine baby, but an image of their unfallen selves. To the Sufis at least, the tale of the Virgin Birth is, as much as anything, a tale of a new birth inside the watching visitors.”
The next day, he went for his biweekly session with Sefadhi— Tuesdays at 4 p.m., they’d decided years before—and when he arrived, it was to see his adviser standing at his window, dark eyes keen, and such hair as he still had impeccably in place. Even after all these years, his professor was still the subject of constant rumors, some people saying that he had once been sentenced to death by Khomeini, others that he was actually an emissary from the Revolution: how better to bring the wisdom of Khomeini to the West? When anyone questioned him outright, the man himself would say only that he’d come to California “to protect our poets from what they might otherwise become in the land of the spiritual makeover.”
As soon as he heard the knock on the door, the older man turned around—his ears were famously sharp—and picked up the thread of himself as if they had been interrupted only a moment before.
“Forgive me, please; I was somewhere else.”
“I can see that. Sorry to have brought you back.”
“Not at all. Duty calls.” He motioned his visitor towards what earlier generations had called the “hot seat.”
“So,” he went on, when they were both settled in, “our friend with the broken heart is well?”
“Well enough. I’m going to argue that you need to break a heart to make a new kind of life.”
“Really?” the professor said, tapping the tips of his elegant fingers together. “I look forward to being enlightened.” And then, since more, perhaps, was expected of him, “We can be assured, then, that the taxpayers’ money is being well spent?”
“I think you’ll have to ask them about that. I’m not sure what any of this has to do with—that.” From where he sat, he could see bodies stretched out on the beach like pagan offerings. The call of gulls, a dog’s barking in the distance. The smell of kelp coming through the window, and the sight of Frisbees winging through the bright, blue day. The Sufis felt like an irrelevance.
“I apologize for Adnan,” Sefadhi went on, redirecting the conversation as smoothly as ever. “Life is not easy in Damascus.”
“I appreciate that.” It wasn’t like his adviser to say the same thing twice. “He gave me what he could.”
“He did?” There was barely a flicker of sharpened attention. “He’s not a man of many words.”
“No. He told me what he could.”
“So,” said Sefadhi, whose pride prevented him from inquiring further, “no more business for us to transact?”
“I don’t think so. He did say something about the Shiraz Manuscript, though.”
“Of course. People will say everything.”
“Though he couldn’t really tell me much about where it might be now.”
“How could he? People say this, people say that.” Sefadhi shot his stiff cuffs, white as ever, to go with his red tie. “There are no doubt Shakespeare first folios in the country houses of Hampshire. As scholars we work with what we have.”
“And he said something about a woman called Kristina.” At this, however, his teacher refused even to be drawn.
“So,” said the professor, getting up, “six more chapters, nine more months. The road is clear before us.”
“It is indeed.”
“I look forward to your presentation. My only words of advice: remember, please, to keep the poets higher than your thoughts of them. Don’t pull them down to your level; let them draw you up to theirs.” He paused, and began to turn towards the window again, as a sign of goodbye. “It is best to make sure always there is something in them you don’t understand.”
With that, his student was made to understand that he was on his own again.
It was raining when he came in from his morning run next day, and as he opened the back door, he could hear the phone ringing on his desk, and then his automated self, the voice double who stood in for him on the machine, announcing that he wasn’t there.
“Hello,” he said, cutting himself off in mid-sentence. “Hello.”
“Mahmoun?” said the voice at the other end. “Is Mahmoun?”
He could hear some kind of chaos far away: children shouting, and foreign music, and a voice, wild and rough, trying to make itself heard above the clamor.
“No. I think you have the wrong number.”
“Macmoun. John Macmoun?” As the voice went on, not ready to be shaken off, he could hear whispers behind it, urgent talk in a kind of Farsi he couldn’t follow, and the words “Damascus,” “Ferdows,” something else.
“Sorry. Who is it you want to talk to?”
And then, abruptly, another voice came on the line, and the image of cacophony receded.
“Mr. Macmillan: I apologize. My cousin’s new to the country. His English isn’t polished.” This voice was more than polished, clearly foreign, but with a finishing-school sheen to it.
“That’s quite all right. Why did he want to talk to me?”
“It’s all of us, Mr. Macmillan. We heard that you are interested in manuscripts from our country?”
One question, half a world away, and already the news was everywhere.
“Where did you hear that? From Damascus?”
“From friends.” He paused for a moment, as if to retrieve his line of thought. “My father has a shop here—we are in Westwood—and we were thinking you might be interested in us.”
“I’m a graduate student. Not a collector, or an expert or anything.”
“A graduate student with Javad Sefaredi is not just a graduate student.” The man spoke absurdly like a dark-suited villain from some bad movie, pronouncing Sefadhi’s name in its original form: maybe it was the range of foreign tongues here, and the fact that nobody quite understood the others, but California gave him often the sense of having wandered out of real life, into some place where people acted themselves, and not always very plausibly.
“I’m not sure I can be of help in any way.”
“Only because you are not aware of our situation. We have a manuscript here, and we were hoping you might care to look at it.”
“For what reason?”
“Simple curiosity. You could see what it means. Maybe, if you are interested, you can look some more. You are not interested, you know someone who is.”
“With a view to what exactly?”
“Only looking.”
Clearly he would get no more from the man, and clearly, now the man had got his number, there was little sense in playing hard to get.
“When’s a good time?”
“If you had time on Wednesday the twenty-eighth, we would be honored to receive you. My father’s shop is at 9763 Westwood, near Ohio. Islamic Arts.”
Mowbray had said something along these lines when first told about the fellowship: “You do know what you’re getting into? Throw out a question, and you’re liable to find people in every corner of the room coming up with answers.”
When first he’d arrived in Santa Barbara, he’d made it his practice to go every morning to the first-floor room in the library where they kept the foreign newspapers. Looking at last week’s copy of The Guardian had seemed a way of keeping up some kind of connection with home (even with Martine). Then he’d thought back to why he’d come here in the first place—saw his parents silently raging against the small house they’d inherited—and never returned to the room again.
The day after the phone call, though, almost on instinct, he went back to the small barred cell of fading print, and found a place among the homesick boys from Bangalore and the engineers from Taiwan, poring over their ideograms. The Iran Daily News, as it happened, was in the same aisle as The Independent, and as he lost himself in the exile paper from Los Angeles, he found himself with the I
ranians to the south, doing everything they could, far from home, to keep alive some memory of a place they loved.
“Black became white for us, north was south,” wrote a doctor from Shemiran, in the column the paper reserved each week for a reminiscence of Iran. “And all the things we loved were raped. Our Queen, we were told, was sending jewels, carpets, diaries to Palm Springs, and Jimmy Carter was reciting Saadi at a banquet in Tehran. The British ambassador was visiting the Pahlavis on Paradise Island, but he came to them with a false name, a false passport. Meanwhile, the people in the villages, in Qom, Mashhad, listened to the BBC World Service for news of their Hidden Imam.”
Now, of course—the man hardly needed to spell it out—it was he who was most likely living under a false name and identity: doctors from Tehran were working as antique dealers in West Los Angeles, and antique dealers moonlighted as immigration lawyers. At night, it was rumored, they gathered in somebody’s house, under cover of dark, and brought themselves together with their stories of escape: the nighttime flight across the mountains on horseback, the old woman next door stoned to death on the street.
He thought back to what Sefadhi had said, and realized that, as with all the professor’s comments, it hid more meanings than he had seen at first. If so little was known of Shakespeare (whom he loved, what he wrote, even who he was)—this had been his implication— how much less could we know of poets from a culture that had not even seen printing till five hundred years after their deaths? To search for a lost manuscript was like searching for a silent whisper; and even if you did come upon something that might be valuable, to say where it had come from was like picking up a grain of sand and saying which part of the desert it had issued from.
The seminar the following week passed painlessly enough: the Sufis were in such vogue now in California—Gloria Steinem writing on fanasha as a symbol of female power, Demi Moore and Madonna said to be reciting Rumi verses on a CD to be put out by Deepak Chopra—that no one looked very much askance when he began speaking of the hidden liberator, the unlikely stranger in Sufism who turned out to be a catalyst. “Love for the Sufis is not so much blind as a kind of higher vision,” he found himself saying, and one or two people around the table nodded. When he told the story of Nasruddin, the holy fool of Sufism, looking for a key under a lamppost, Elaine actually burst into laughter. Why did he look there? the eccentric old man was asked. Because, he said, though he’d lost the key indoors, there was more light to look for it out in the street.