Abandon

by Iyer, Pico

  He waited for a bus that would take him home, and when he stepped into the house, three hours later, the light flashing on the machine had a plaintiveness that might have been hers. “Hi,” the recording said, “I didn’t know if you were coming. Or if you’d decided you were done with me. If you haven’t, I’m at 818-416-3775.”

  He dialed the number and she answered on the first ring; she’d been waiting.

  “It’s you,” she said. “You’re back.”

  “I am. I said I would be.”

  “I know. But I thought—anything could have happened.”

  “It did. It didn’t. I’m here.”

  “Will you tell me about your trip?”

  I’ll put away my fears, the voice said, if you’ll say goodbye to yours.

  He opened the door at the sound of her knock—night had fallen, and the ocean was just foam around the rocks—and when she came in, for a moment he didn’t recognize who she was. Jet lag, he said to her wearily, but it was the effect she often had on him; as if—he thought to himself—he needed to turn and turn the lens till it came into sharpest focus and the blur resolved itself into a person he knew.

  She was wearing a long black dress, with a heart-shaped piece of jade around her throat. When she hugged him, perfunctorily it seemed, he felt her trepidation: a sister looking in on a brother with whom she’d never much got along.

  “You look well,” she said, though not happily.

  “I am. It was really something.”

  “I’m glad,” she said, and then looked away from him, as if to orient herself and remind herself where she’d come.

  “Scared, too.”

  “Scared? Why should I be scared?”

  “I don’t know,” she said. “You tell me.”

  He looked at her, but she was browsing, with ostentatious casualness, through the book he’d left by the armchair.

  “You said something about a production of Emma,” he said. “You were trying out for the lead?”

  “Don’t change the subject. It won’t make it go away.”

  He took a deep breath. “Orange juice? Some wine?”

  “You tell yourself you’re not frightened and then it’s worse. It rules you from the dark.”

  She was like someone who drives two hundred miles, he thought, to have someone say, “I don’t want to see you.” And he, no more mature, like the person at the other end, who says, “I do want to see you. You’d better go home.”

  He went into the bedroom, brought out the book he’d bought for her—the story of Ibn Arabi’s encounters with Sufism and romance in Seville—and when he handed it to her, she smiled briefly and put it down.

  “Do you want to take a drive?” In the car, he knew, she could let her defenses fall away a little; there seemed less danger of sudden closeness.

  She nodded, and they went out to where he’d parked, and drove towards the south. When they hit the freeway, she sat back and closed her eyes, and he could almost see her settling back into herself, and taking off a layer of camouflage. The light backstage that made one put up with the acting.

  The fog was coming in from the ocean by the time they rounded the great open turns that led to the Rincon; there was almost no traffic, and it was as if the whole great stretch of coastline was about to close down for the night. The little huts above the beach looked like birds, looking for their next perch, and the faroff pier, in Ventura, the branch on which they could alight. But by the time they drew closer to it, even the houses were gone from view, and all they could sense through the fog was the ocean, coming to shore a few feet away.

  They drove through the sleeping town, and then he turned off the freeway and they followed a country road down to the neglected main street of Oxnard, its sad line of fallen pool halls and cantinas. The workers had come in from the fields long since, and from out of the bars and jukeboxes came songs of palomas and sueños. As if he’d just turned off the main street in Seville and ended up in an orphaned side street.

  She picked up his hand as he drove, and as he threaded his way through the broken festivals of the farmworkers, they came to another road that ended suddenly at the beach. A souvenir store with illuminated seashells in its window. A liquor store with a few pickup trucks in front of a neon sign that said, LIQR. A café of sorts, where three men were walking around a small fenced garden, singing the day’s last love songs.

  They took a table in the garden—white Formica tables, and some flowers forgotten by a previous customer—and as they sat back, breathed the night air, they heard the sound of “Heimat” from the street: a German woman walking back to her motel. From farther down—the beach—the sound of Sting, lying down in fields of gold.

  “You hardly need a manuscript when it’s as beautiful as this,” she said, and he said, “Yes. But views don’t last for long.”

  She turned away, and he realized he’d said the wrong thing. Soon she’d be talking about fear again, and the headlines. People aren’t ashamed of all the things they’ve done, he thought (not certain if he was thinking about her, or himself); they’re ashamed of all the things they haven’t done. Embarrassed by their innocence, in a way, which they try to dress up with knowingness and glamour.

  They got back in the car, and drove back along the deserted road to Santa Barbara. Occasionally a pair of lights would shoot at them through the dark, and then there would just be two red dots disappearing in the rearview mirror. The sound of the sea through the fog, the world of men effectively erased.

  She pulled down the window, and the night air came in, so damp it felt as if it was on the brink of tears. Chill, too, as if to say that summer was now ending, and another cycle ready to begin. When he got to the house, she hesitated, and he realized she was wary of what was expected of her. “I’ve got to find something in my car,” she said (and he thought: The person she was before? The person she thought I might be?). When he came out, after many minutes—she was still struggling through the debris at the back—she said, “It’s here. I’m sure it is.”

  “I think I ought to sleep,” he said, and felt a whisper of gratitude as she kissed him on the cheek.

  When he awoke, long after midnight—close to midday now in Seville—he went to the edge of the bedroom to see if she was awake. “Anyone there?” he said, as softly as he could, so as not to rouse her. “I don’t think so,” said the figure on the sofa, and she struggled through the blankets to sit up. He came over and sat beside her on the couch, and, putting on the kitchen light, which wouldn’t be too strong, saw her hair falling all around her face, a golden tangle.

  “Did you find what you were looking for?”

  “I don’t know. I’ve lost a sense of what it is.”

  She shivered, drew the blankets around her for extra warmth.

  “What are the colors there?”

  “On the surface, white and brown. Deeper than that, lapis, gold.”

  She nodded, blearily. “Like Isfahan.” He remembered, with a start, that she’d been studying the area before he’d even heard of it.

  “I wrote you a letter, actually. Two. Though I didn’t know where to send it.”

  She said nothing in response to the opening.

  “How did it make you feel?”

  “On the surface, calm. Deeper than that, abandoned.”

  She didn’t respond to the word, and he looked over to see what she was saying.

  She was breathing deeply, eyes closed, away from him again.

  In the morning, when he went in, she was already packing, with a foreign air of purpose.

  “You’ve got a rehearsal today?” In all the time he’d known her, she’d never said anything about an audition or a production, or anything that might pertain to a real life.

  “No. Something you don’t want to know about.”

  “A meeting? A secret boyfriend?”

  “No,” she said. “I’ve got a manuscript to collect.” When he said nothing in response, she looked up at him, as if surprised. “That’s a
joke.”

  “I know. But I’d like to see you act in something.”

  “You will.”

  “In L.A.?”

  “Wherever,” she said, and then she was kissing him briskly and on her way.

  He watched the car struggle to the end of the road, turn away, towards the mountains, and then went back into the house, to clear up. He hadn’t unpacked yet, and he needed to get things in order before he visited Sefadhi. He collected the stray glasses from the table by the couch—the orange juice he’d brought her when he woke—and as he did so, he noticed a piece of paper peeping out from under the sofa. He picked it up and saw it was a page from her notebook, her hieroglyphics all over it. In one corner, what looked to be phone numbers, from West Los Angeles, scribbled down as she listened to the radio, perhaps. A list of names, he thought, in another corner. “T. E. Lawrence. Isabelle Eberhardt.” Something that could have been “Jensen” or “Javad.”

  At the bottom, what might have been notes to herself, the outline of a letter. “Feels like a new me. Except more like an old one. Need to tell him why he’s scared. If I don’t see you, it’s not because I don’t want to. The opposite. Your regretful, wine-dark C.”

  He put the piece of paper down, and then—suddenly fatigued (the hours were playing tricks on him)—he fell asleep. As he did, he saw a crowd, dark men all around, with beards, turbans, and someone was saying, “He knows she’s dead. He just won’t acknowledge it.” And someone else, “She’s only pretending to be like that. It’s what they do abroad.”

  Then, almost violently, he was awake again. Cries from the beach, and the sound of muffled music from next door. A dog’s bark, the sound of laughter. Someone shouting something about the coming football season, and a revved-up sports car in the street. He picked up his books, went to take a quick shower and then took himself to the department, to make his report.

  When he climbed the flights of stairs—the way he traditionally braced himself for Sefadhi—and got to the site of his advisor’s office, he found the door closed, as it almost never was. “A visitor,” said Eileen, trying to sound as casual as she could. “He could be quite a while.”

  “That’s fine. I’ll wait.” In the last issue of Islamic Quarterly there was a report of people going to Rumi’s birthplace in Afghanistan, to see if they could find traces of manuscripts that might have gone missing. The long-dead poet was a big commodity now; one such discovery, and matters both financial and political could be taken care of. He fumbled through the pages—they might have been written in Turkish, so little could he summon interest in them—and then, after thirty or forty minutes, the door opened and a figure stepped out.

  She could hardly have been less like what he expected to emerge. She was in her mid-twenties, he guessed, with a long rush of streaked hair, and an air of worldly elegance. She nodded to Eileen as she left, took him in quickly, and then walked down the corridor—on her way, he could more easily imagine, to a cocktail party in the eighth arrondissement rather than any academic office.

  “A friend,” said Sefadhi, as if some explanation was called for, as he came into the office. “From another life.” Then, realizing how that sounded. “Tehran. Many years ago.”

  “I’m sorry to interrupt.”

  “You interrupt nothng.” Though the smell of expensive perfume was everywhere, and a plate of pistachios sat on the desk.

  “So,” his advisor said, and fell into the guise he usually wore. “The world of intellect proceeds, I think.”

  “Like a treadmill.” He thought back to the whispered conversations in the bar. “You’re lucky you weren’t there.”

  “I was, I’m sure, in conversation.” It was his teacher’s way of issuing a warning: speak carefully.

  “I heard about Minasian, the curse he said hung about any manuscript that was sold instead of passed on. I got a list of the books he gave to Oxford, and the ones that went to UCLA. But no one had anything to say about fugitive manuscripts.”

  “They won’t,” said Sefadhi. “They can’t. There’s nothing for them to say.”

  “But if I could go to Iran, just for a week . . .”

  “You’d find nothing. There’s nothing to see in Iran.”

  “But a sense of context at least. A background for the poems.”

  “You can get that in West Los Angeles.” It was, ironically, the same thing he’d said to Martine when she’d asked him why he would ever go to California to study Sufism.

  “But the landscape, the inspiration for the words.”

  “I don’t think I ever told you about my uncle.” It was so unlike Sefadhi to say anything about his private life—even to acknowledge that he had a life outside of his office, his role—that he knew the offering was not casual. “He was born in Russia, many years ago, like my aunt. And then, when the Russian Revoluton came, they had to flee to Iran. Then, when the Iranian Revolution came, they had to flee. To Canada. Now they sit in Canada, in Toronto, and every day they wait for the next Revolution, so they can flee again.”

  “It’s not a field for dilettantes.”

  “Your words,” said Sefadhi, tapping his long fingers together. “Not mine.”

  Back home, he thought back to the sudden, strange story his advisor had offered him. The dates didn’t match—how could Sefadhi have an uncle alive at the time of the Russian Revolution?—and the whole story had the artificial air of a set piece: a packaged lecture a professor might offer to any student who showed signs of being too inquistive. And yet the fact that his teacher had issued it seemed more important than its substance: it was as if the more he pursued even the ghost of the manuscipts Khalil had alluded to, the more Sefadhi would try to throw roadblocks in his way.

  He picked up a book to read more about Shiraz—the famous city of nightingales and poets that had long been the cultural center of old Persia—and then, putting it down, recalled the images that had come up on TV in Syria. All day long, on the cable channel from Syria: just figures, dressed in white, walking silently around the Qa’ba. Great masses of them proceeding down the passageways of a mosque, taking off their shoes, preparing themselves for the ritual ablutions. All day long, amidst the chatter of the other stations, these silent images. No speech or music on the soundtrack: only the sound of their shuffling, their prayers.

  It was part of what made the faith so unsettling to the world at large. That sense of massed devotion; almost an accepted madness. People coming from every direction, at the end of day—he’d experienced it once in Arabia—old men, young, men in white, men in sandals, coming from all sides to file silently into the mosque together. And five times a day, if you were a good Moslem, even if you were eating or talking or making love, the call to prayer rose up and then . . .

  The phone on his desk began to shrill.

  “Hello.”

  “Johno. It’s Nicki. Is that you?” Her voice still had the faintly regimental air that blurred around the edges in Martine. As if, even now, you could hear generations of officers in the tropics bringing the sepoys to the front, or making sure all the trains were running on time.

  “It is,” he said. “Are you coming?”

  “Yes,” she said. “On Friday, if that’s all right for you.”

  “Friday, I’m actually rather tied up. Would Thursday work?”

  “ ‘Tied-up’! I can’t believe how American you sound. Martine’s never going to . . . Anyway, what shall we say, then? Thursday at eleven?”

  When the rap came on his door, at the stroke of eleven, he was back in England again, and a place where people pose their statements as questions for very different reasons from the Californian. She offered him her cheeks to kiss when he opened the door, and then handed him some flowers. “Perennials,” as she told him, while she came into the house and began looking round.

  “The famous lair at last,” she said, and before he could orient her, or offer her a drink, she was wandering around, as if casually, taking notes, he guessed, for the report she’d be sen
ding back to England. “So this must be your bedroom,” she was saying, and he imagined her looking around just long enough to note the color of the curtains and how the pillows were arranged, “and this must be where you get all your great work done.” She was in the study now, taking quick note of how many books were there, and where. “And this”—she walked past him again, in the corridor, so close they almost touched—“this, I’m assuming, is where you sit and think of England.”

  “When I can.”

  “It seems such a large place just for one.”

  “Two, if you count Rumi.”

  “Yes,” she said. “I do remember that part.” There was a pause. “Martine used to tell me.”

  She stopped her circling then and he looked at her: a long sleeveless yellow frock, as if for a picnic, and a pricking of something floral at her pulse points. Her sister was, of course, the one thing they had in common, and yet she was also the one topic they didn’t know how to broach. She sat between them as if she were sitting in the middle of the room, in a golden cage.

  “Have a seat,” he said, but she said, “I’ve been sitting for ages. I’d rather stretch my legs.”

  “Something to drink?”

  “Anything cool,” she said, and then turned her back on him as she went to the terrace, as if to savor the view. She’d always been his strongest supporter in the Chancellor camp, he knew; were it not for the claims of family loyalty, he and she could have been close.

  “So, how are you?” she said, when he came back with the drinks and a bowl of nuts. “How’s the New World treating you?”

  “Well enough. I’m just trying to get my thesis done before the beginning of next summer.”

  “So you can do what exactly?”

  “The usual. Look for ungainful unemployment far from home and try to make myself useful in some way.”

  “The Johno we know and love,” she said, in the tone he recognized. “Still a terrible creature of habit, I’m assuming.”

  “The opposite. I don’t know where I’m going.”

  “I see,” she said, just as her younger sister would have done. “You’re not seeing anyone, then?”