by Iyer, Pico
They made room for him when he came up, and soon the conversation was back to how America was in search of new enemies now that the Cold War was over, and how Jihad vs. McWorld was arguing that Islam would be the great enemy of the new postmodern order. Ever since the Revolution in Iran, their field had stakes, a new urgency; they were now, willy-nilly, people of the world.
“Sefadhi, too, right?” said the woman, though he couldn’t tell how much weight lay behind the question. “Don’t they say he’s an agent for the government in Tehran?”
“They say everything about Sefadhi,” he said, a loyal student, and a polished one.
“But you were in Damascus, I thought I heard,” she persevered. “You must have seen Khalil?”
“Insofar as anyone can see him.”
“What’s he like?” Like many of the stars of the field, the Syrian scholar had the glamour of the seldom seen; he so seldom left his little cell that all kinds of rumors and mysteries gathered around him.
“Hard to say. I think he’s learned to keep himself hidden from view.”
“But he’s an old friend of Sefadhi’s, right? From before the Revolution?”
“That’s what they say.”
“And Azadeh, too,” piped up the small man with the beard, suddenly engaged. “Ferdows Azadeh.”
“Twenty years ago, perhaps,” said Müller, not anxious to be left out, and then the talk drifted off, to why Sefadhi had chosen to put himself in Santa Barbara, so far from the Washington that most of the émigré professors sought out. The talk rose and crested around him, and he thought of a small room across the world, the ocean outside the window, someone hopeful and hidden lying across his bed.
As the evening went on, more and more empty glasses accumulating on the table, he felt a pressure, unspoken, from his right, and when he looked up, the woman beside him looked at him directly, and pushed her glass a little closer to his. Academics were natural spies.
“What’s the real reason you’re here?”
“The same as always. I have a paper to give tomorrow.”
“I know that. But I’d heard something else.” He didn’t rise to that—Sefadhi would have been proud—and she went on, “Something about looking for manuscripts. Kristina Jensen and someone else.”
The attempt at sounding casual was so strained, he didn’t make much attempt to dodge it. “Everyone’s looking for manuscripts. Just ask Hans.”
The large German looked at them from across the table, attention caught by the sound of his name.
“I’d been meaning to ask you, actually,” said the Englishman, seeing he had a chance now, “where exactly did all these manuscripts end up?”
“Everywhere,” said Müller, more relaxed now that his paper was over, and it felt like they were only making conversation. “Paris. Vancouver. Los Angeles. Everywhere the people go.”
“Those are the ones that came out early?”
“Why not? The ones the government steals, they send to Syria. Saudi. Through pilgrims on the hadj.” He raised his mug and took a long swig. “The keepers of the Islamic Revolution selling its treasures for BMWs!”
Then, as if realizing, belatedly, he’d said too much, he stopped and looked across at him. “You are very interested in this topic. From where comes your interest?”
“I have a fiancée,” he said, without thinking, “in Los Angeles. From Iran. She talks about them in the context of her family.”
“ ‘Her family,’ ” said Müller, repeating the words as if to show how implausible they sounded. And then, eager to be rid of the questions, drew them back into the larger conversation.
He gave his talk the following morning—or someone who seemed to be standing in for him, a stunt double, delivered it—and then he went up to his room and fell into a deep sleep. When he awoke—10:07, it said on the little clock by the bed—he didn’t know for a moment where he was, whether it was day or night. Then, stepping across to the window, he drew the curtains back and saw the Christian image of faith—he hadn’t noticed it before—above the minaret. Beside it, as before, the Islamic moon.
He was feeling revived now, as if he’d slept through half a lifetime, and, needing some fresh air, he got dressed quickly and went down into the lobby to take a walk. As he stepped out, he felt a tentative hand on his back and whirled around to see who was beside him.
It was the small dark man from the night before.
The man nodded, as if it was natural that they meet again, and as he stepped out, the man stepped out beside him, as if, without words, they’d agreed to spend the evening together. As they walked down the street, neither of them sure what exactly to say, it felt, absurdly, like an assignation.
“You’re studying in Germany, I take it,” he said, in the voice that Martine always mocked. “Your English voice,” she called it.
“Now,” said the man. “I was in England before.”
“Really? Where?”
Around them, the cobblestones of the central quarter, the old lampposts and balconies made up to re-create the city of Don Juan (the city that Teresa of Avila had called the most evil place she knew). Every now and then a couple came out of a bar, all elegant dishevelment: a hand around a waist, the sound of drunken laughter.
“I was in London,” said the man, in his shy, strange way. “Then America.”
He found the place he’d read about—there didn’t seem to be a way to avoid a conversation—and they walked into a raucous pub, all student laughter, and, here and there in the corners, people they knew from the conference trying very hard not to be seen.
He got drinks for them both—the dark man wanted only a 7Up—and then they sat down and tried to find ways around the silence.
“You’re originally from Iran?” he tried, and the man nodded.
“They called me a barbarian in England,” he said. His conversation was strange; his accent was good, and he’d clearly spent most of his life in the West, and yet he skipped from topic to topic the way a bad needle would on an old LP. “They showed our class a map and said, ‘This is where civilization ends.’ ”
“It’s not a very hospitable culture.”
“I didn’t know where my parents were,” the man went on, swerving again, though this was more likely a story he’d told often. “They were in Germany, they were in Turkey. Sometimes, for years, I didn’t hear anything about them.”
“It’s sad,” he said, inadequately.
“They sent me to America, like all the other people without a home. When the rebels took the embassy, they brought me in for questioning. The FBI office in San Diego.” He had about him the quality that Persia had carried through all its empires, of melancholy, the sadness that accompanies a fall from glory. And mixed with that, a bitterness, that insufficient attention was being paid.
“You haven’t been back?”
The man shook his head no. “You hear them in Santa Monica. These voices from eastern Iran, from places I’ve never heard about. Talking about what they had for dinner, what is happening in their village, how they dream of America, the land of plenty.” The bitterness again. “On the radio, the satellite. But the people in America are singing Sufi songs, reciting poems, the same people who never went to the mosque at home.”
“The exiles, you mean?”
The man didn’t answer. It was just a form of nostalgia, his silence said, a way to try to keep the community going far from home.
Then, as if he’d come to some decision, the man leaned forwards, with more attention. “I am hoping,” he said, “that you can help me.” His voice went low, though nothing he was saying seemed to be very confidential. “We have a group—it is an association—that is working to collect the body, the documents of Islam.”
“To bring it into one place.”
“Exactly.” He rewarded him with a smile. “FAITH. The Friends and Associates of the Islamic Tradition and Heritage.
“And I am thinking that you can help us. You give us information, you give us ad
vice. You tell us what you see when you make research trips.”
“I don’t think I’d have very much to say.” The very sound—his father’s voice—he’d gone to California to escape.
“Sometimes you are inside a circle when you think you are outside it,” the man said, warming to his theme. “You send us e-mails. You give us brochures. You help us to put together the broken body of our faith.”
“But I’m not necessarily the one who should be doing that.”
“Of course we have enemies,” the man said, though he’d said nothing about that. “ ‘Colonizers of the truth,’ they call us. ‘Intellectual mercenaries.’ They want us only to accept their reading of the tradition. But it is something important we are doing, I think you know.”
“I do,” he said. “I’m glad to hear about it.”
Then, as if he’d sat down in a seat that was being kept for someone else, he said—his formal voice again—“I think I should be going now. I have something to do.”
They walked back out into the street, and he said something implausible about having to check up on an Islamic building in some distant corner of the city. He tried not to look at the man trudging back to the hotel alone. The brief encounter had shaken him in some way he couldn’t explain to himself—like walking into a friend’s house and coming upon the friend in the kitchen, in a deep embrace, eyes closed.
He wandered around, to clear his head, following this lane, and then that one, into a very different area from the one he’d seen before, and everywhere around him were bolted doors and unlit lanes. He turned into a smaller street and felt as if he were walking past a line of fortresses. Just before a crossing, though, there was a sliver of light from behind a door, and, going up to the entrance—it was a small church—he pushed at the heavy bronze door; to his surprise, it gave.
He walked into a tiny, cold chapel, thick with the smell of incense.
At the altar was a body of thin white candles, wavering; around the sides of the place, taller, thicker candles, illuminating old canvases of Judas, Peter, the Last Supper. The Madonna’s sad, undefeated eyes followed him as he walked in and around the pews.
Then, sitting down—he needed to catch his breath, to put the evening behind him—he closed his eyes, and suddenly she was there, inches away, eyes narrowed and her hair let loose. She was working at something with her fingers, unclasping, unbuttoning, and her voice was at his ear, saying his name over and over.
He opened his eyes again, and there was nothing. Just a row of sacraments at the front of the altar—he hadn’t noticed them before, behind the candles—and the pictures of the Virgin on every side. Pulling out a postcard he’d bought in the hotel—the archways of the mosque in Córdoba, hidden inside the Catholic cathedral—he wrote, as before, without thinking:
Yearning makes the heart deep.
—AUGUSTINE
He had a few hours free before the train to Granada the next day, and, pulling out the letter he’d brought with him from California— the faded seal at its top more faded than ever—he called the operator to find the number of the Arabic Department at Cádiz. When he dialed the number she had given him, a woman answered, and, disconcerted by his fumbled Spanish, she transferred him to another woman. This woman seemed to have even less time for him, and soon he was back at the first. Finally, another voice came on, more commanding, male.
“¡Hola! Hello?”
“Yes. Professor Espinoza, por favor.”
“Digame.”
“Yes. You don’t know me, but I’m here for the conference in Seville, I’m a student of Sufi poetry, and Adnan Khalil . . .”
“You study in England?”
“In America, at the moment.”
“Where in America?”
“In California, as it happens.”
“You study in Santa Barbara?”
“Yes, for now. But what I wanted to ask you was . . .”
“I am sorry.” The voice closed every door he might have imagined open. “Please give my regards to Javad. I am very busy at this moment. I wish you success with your researches.”
The phone came down into his waiting ear.
He’d told himself he’d use his one day off to go and see the Alhambra, the most powerful reminder of Persia, so they said, still visible in Spain. He knew it was best to go when nobody else was around— you can only see the Alhambra when you can’t see very much. So he waited till the early afternoon to take the train to Granada. When he arrived, in late afternoon, he lost himself in the narrow whitewashed lanes of the Arab quarter, boys in thick sweaters kissing one another noisily on the cheek, and following with their eyes every woman who walked past.
From inside the cafés came the scratchy, plaintive sound of Arab love songs: a man crying out for his beloved, and ready, in his desolation, to start a riot.
The light fell slowly over the city, and when it was almost dark, he got up, paid for his mint tea, and began the long ascent of the hill. The hotels on both sides were full of noise and animation—the excitement of people who had made the building’s acquaintance— but the street itself was surprisingly deserted; few people knew that the palace opened its doors again on certain nights in the summer.
He walked up into the dark, towards what presented itself as a citadel, and as he came within a few hundred yards of the kiosk where they sold tickets—a tired face behind the bars—he saw a smaller building between the hotels, with a light still on. A young man, shaven-headed, was standing under a dim naked bulb, appearing to be reading. There was no one else in the place; it had the feeling of an afterthought. Drawn towards it by its very emptiness, he opened the blue door—a bell jangled dully above him—and walked in.
The man barely looked up, gave an almost imperceptible nod from the cash register next to which he was standing. As the visitor took stock of the shelves around him, he saw what seemed to be books about secrecy and love; a worn piece of paper on one of the shelves read, in fraying handwriting, “OCCULTISMO.” He picked one of the books up and opened it, and saw what seemed to be diagrams of human evolution, and whole sentences written out, too emphatically, in block capitals. Pieces of the text were in Aramaic, or some other esoteric language, and here and there there seemed to be astrological charts for what looked to be whole cultures.
“There is an Interworld,” he read, in a book in French (though it had been published in Geneva), “that belongs neither to the realm of gods nor to that of mortals. It is a separate zone, not real and not allegorical, and in it each one of us has a daemon, a guardian angel, if you will, who watches over our higher self while the lower struggles through its duties.” These things are known only to the elect, it went on, and at some point he felt as if he’d come upon the love letters of an acquaintance; he put the book back, feeling he’d stepped too far.
Then, walking towards the back of the shop, where works in English seemed to be kept, he ran his eye quickly along the shelves devoted to tomes in his native tongue. As he did so, almost perfunctorily, he happened to see the book he’d been looking for all along. Poems of Shiraz, said the title—gold lettering on a crimson spine, dating, he guessed, from around the turn of the century. He passed it by and quickly examined all the other titles, lest his ever-eager eyes be deceiving him. Then, at the same volume as before, he saw it once again: Poems of Shiraz.
He picked the book off the shelf and for a moment did not open it. He was shaking, as he did whenever he was coming closer to an answer that might end a quest. Then, very carefully, he opened the cover, and began turning through the pages. There were poems on every one, through almost the whole length of the book. Poems by Hafez, turned into English by Gertrude Bell. Beautiful poems, mysterious and deep, he could tell, yet tamed somehow in their Edwardian quatrains, reduced into something a clergyman might read to his sister before retiring for the night.
He put the book back and considered himself chastised.
To step into the Alhambra after nightfall is to step into patterned m
oonlight. No one else was visible except for the woman at the kiosk, and nothing could be heard but the sound of water everywhere. The occasional footsteps of a guard, making his regular patrol.
He stepped into the first room, to find it lit by a single candle, so that as much was in shadow as in light. An arched window let in the smells of the night, a faint breeze; far below, the lights of the city. The next room was a little dimmer, and the next one darker still; he felt as if he were on his recent drives again, the nights in Santa Barbara, each room less well lit than the last, and for that reason more mysterious, inviting.
He walked in from chamber to chamber. The doors were set at the sides of the rooms, and their archways—Damascus again—were low; so low he had to bow to walk through them. The sound of water everywhere, like a reminder of something you forget at your cost.
When he came to what seemed to be the innermost chamber, a candle at each side of it, he sat down against a wall. The steps of the guard approached, and then receded. The smell of oranges came from the garden. The sound of water. “It’s weird,” she’d said, not long before she fell asleep. “Did you ever notice there’s a ‘Camilla’ hiding out inside ‘Macmillan’?”
Pulling out a piece of paper, he wrote:
Dear Anagram,
Can you hear the sound of water, from the courtyard? Smell the orange trees outside, feel the early night wind? Can you hear the guard in the distance, almost as if you were here?
I hope you can, because you are.
Fondest regards,
John
When he stepped out of the terminal in Los Angeles, she was, of course, nowhere to be seen. There was a girl with long fair hair, stepping into a dark man’s Porsche; another in a sky-blue dress, leading along a child who stopped to gawk at every foreigner. People bumped into him, as lost as he, perhaps, and then apologized; a girl was saying, “I’m sorry . . .” in just the way she did, but it was someone different, darker-hued. She must have got distracted, he thought, or suddenly frightened; her life seemed to shoot forwards and then stop again like a car in the stop-and-go traffic.