Abandon

by Iyer, Pico

  At his side, he thought, someone who longed for nothing but history and tradition and a role: someone who had even become an actress so that people would tell her what to say and do, as if she could escape from a haunted house into a studio apartment that was empty, ready to be furnished according to someone else’s taste. She put on a cassette of Celtic folk music, looked out at the expansive sky, the rocks and sense of unvisited space. He felt as if something at last was moving forward: with each mile away from Los Angeles, she grew younger and freer, more full of animation. As if, in some child’s coloring book, the outline of a face was being filled now, and made piquant, by red, yellow, gold.

  As the road climbed and ran high above the ocean, the sense of spaciousness came and went, sometimes to their left nothing but clear air, not even a speck on the horizon in the distance; sometimes a sudden grove of trees, and a valley shadowing its darkness. Battered mailboxes in front of torn fences, as if milestones in the wilderness, and the lowering of trees making each sudden expanse of space and light a quickening.

  Finally, the trees and the shade grew more intense, and, after crossing a creek, everything woody now and gold, green and brown, the floating surfaces of Southern California far behind them, they pulled off at a little inn, tucked into a grove of redwoods. You could hear the gurgling of the creek from every room. Tall trees moved back, back towards the mountains as if pulling you towards something ancestral. There was a sense here of being in one of those sleepy hollows along the coast—Pynchonland—where the real world is forgotten and one slips into some other order, behind the rolling mist and in the protection of old trees.

  The meeting he’d fixed up was two hours farther north, so they followed the road up, the groves of trees thickening, enclosing them from the world, and then suddenly giving way to sunlit fields, a silver road above the cliffs, and great suspension bridges that seemed to bring them back into the world of men and moments.

  Then, as they began winding around the small rural trails that run like whims or quickly arrested thoughts around the Santa Cruz mountains, he veered right onto a dirt path—she reading the instructions he’d taken down over the phone—and, bumping along a pot-holed road, came at last to a small house built in a dark grove of trees. An aging Citroën and a motorbike were parked outside; a trailer ran alongside the main house; and behind it, as if it were a back room entered only by invitation, stood the woods.

  Talmacz was waiting for them, sitting on his porch nursing a beer and looking more like a rancher than a translator of Islamic poems. His yellow hair fell to his shoulders, and his shirt was partially unbuttoned; he seemed closer to the woods than to any library one might imagine.

  “Come in,” he said, “you’re just in time.”

  They followed him through into a cozy rustic room—rocking chairs and pillows and a few Islamic rugs here and there, eyetooth locks on the wooden doors as in a fairy tale.

  “What are you drinking?”

  He brought back a beer and a glass of wine and sat back in his rocking chair, moving with a deliberateness that enforced their distance from L.A.

  “So what is it I can help you with?”

  “Pretty much everything. You’re the only real person I know of in this field.”

  “That’s why I’m not in the field,” he said. “Like to keep my distance.”

  In another light the man would have seemed too much the laconic cowboy to be true, a Marlboro Man come into the candlelit room of someone who spent too much time reading. But in the context of Islamic Studies, he was just incongruous enough to be plausible. Ten years or so ago, having wandered into the field from his studies of Whitman and Longfellow, he’d started translating Sufi poems in a rangy, uncompromising vernacular that spoke right to the dancer down the street and the organic farmer over in Capitola. The books had begun selling and selling—Sufism, they said, the Tibetan Buddhism of the new millennium—and the academics, who for the most part distrusted him, began calling him the “Alan Watts of Modern Islam” or the “Ruminator of Santa Cruz.” Instead of finding obscurities in the poems, he dared to come out with simple, universal truths.

  “But where—if you don’t mind my asking—do you get your texts? How do you know they’re authentic?”

  “That’s a professional secret,” Talmacz said. “If I told you that, I’d be doing myself out of a monopoly. But my advice to my students is, ‘Stay well clear of it. The whole thing’s such a mess these days, you need an industrial-strength shovel to go into it.’ ”

  “Because of all the new translations?”

  “There’s that. There’s the Sufi boom—all the world getting off on these guys now, though most of them don’t know the first thing about what they mean or who they are. Even the scholars don’t know their asses from their elbows. Nicholson—the granddaddy of Rumi scholarship, the one who broke the whole thing wide open? Some of the poems he includes in his edition weren’t even written by Rumi! And the new guys you see, producing instant Rumi tapes and Top-Forty ghazals, they wouldn’t know a Farsi verse if it played a kazoo on their stomach. Even the Iranians: they see a market and they’re back in the bazaar again. There’s a guy doing Rumi now, native speaker of the language, he translates ‘two planes of existence’ as ‘two pairs of buttocks.’ ”

  She broke out in a laugh, her demureness suddenly forgotten.

  “I mean, it was always bad round here. All the poems getting copied out for five hundred years and no one knowing what’s being added or altered or taken out. And the guy himself cranking out so many poems, it’s no surprise most of them got lost. But now it’s even crazier. The biggest Rumi book out there now—its cover design is from Portugal! But they don’t know; they don’t care. People are grabbing at him here, translating from him there, grabbing pieces of the true cross like he was Dylan or something! ‘Give me a line I can use with my girlfriend, Jalaluddin!’ ”

  The way he pronounced the name—as if he were speaking of “McIntosh Jallaludin” in the Kipling story—showed that this was a cover, the mask he’d developed to pre-empt the criticism he heard. The leading modern translator of Rumi wasn’t the most obvious person to be talking of the Islamic tradition as if he were a backwoods hack. But people in the New World have their own defenses and strategies, and simply practice taqiyya by calling it plain-folks honesty.

  “You must be tempted to get out of the field into something else?”

  “Tempted, sure. I’ve gotten out, the way I look at it. I’ve translated the best poems and left the other scraps for the hyenas. I don’t think I’ll be doing much more Sufi work for some time to come. Students come up to me all the time and say, ‘I want to study Rumi; I want to learn about the Sufis; blah-blah-blah.’ I tell them, ‘Stay where you are. Do Ezra Pound instead.’ ”

  “But how did you get into them in the first place? It wasn’t the most obvious field to study.”

  “No,” said Talmacz, speaking a little more slowly now. “I don’t have your adviser’s vested interests, shall we say.” He drew out the syllables as if to stress their significance. “But I do have a regular person’s interest.” It was as if he’d been talking automatically before, and now the answers came out more deliberately. “It was the sixties, there was all this stuff in the air—Malcolm X, Marcus Garvey, Muhammad Ali, all of that. And the Moslems were always the big bad wolf in every story. I guess I just figured we were so busy making all these jokes about how they called us the ‘Great Satan,’ we didn’t stop to think we were calling them the ‘Great Satan’ ourselves. Except we didn’t have the balls to use words like ‘Satan’ and ‘infidel.’ ”

  “It was politics, then?” She’d offered, on the way up, to start asking questions if that would put their host at ease.

  “It was politics, it was economics, it was everything. I guess I just figured we picked on them because they had a belief, to the core. We just kind of said, ‘I know what I believe. I believe I’ll light up another joint.’ ”

  “But you’re still te
aching them, after all this time?”

  “Sure. No sense in keeping them to myself. But I don’t really teach them anything. I just take them places in the woods. Give them Blake, Dickinson, give them these flashlights they can use. First class of every semester, I say, ‘This is a course in Farsi epistemology. Anyone who wants to study mysticism, go somewhere else!’ That usually weeds the crazies out.”

  “And the secret poems, the ones that are in L.A.?” It was the first time she’d shown him her acting skills.

  Their host fell silent again. Then, looking straight at her, he said, “I’m not into any of that stuff. Way I see it, we’ve got plenty of good poems already. Too many. What do we need any more for? The regime figures Rumi and his buddies are the best PR tool they’ve got, outside of the cinema, more power to them. But you go looking for new poems and you might as well write a few yourself!”

  He took a long drink from his can, and they realized, suddenly, that the interview was over. They’d made a friend of sorts, and lost a contact.

  “I didn’t know you knew Sefadhi well,” he tried, but by now it was too late.

  “Guess I should be going back to my shop.” He’d kept his poems safe from prying eyes for decades now; there was nothing they could do to smoke him out.

  They drove back along the coast as the sun sank into the sea, and soon there were stars everywhere, promiscuous. There were few lights on the road, and the whole area was so undeveloped that there were almost no lights between them and the sea. They passed along the thin winding road in a world of stars, the foaming sea, silver places on the hills where fire had burned the bush bare, or where the moon happened to find a rivulet of stone.

  “So now I know what you’ll be like ten years from now,” she said, as a way of saying they were close. “Ornery and cranky and pretending you like nothing except six-packs and your gun.”

  “Except—being English—it’ll be port and my cigars. Comes to the same thing, though.”

  “It’s funny how all of you in this field seem so into pretending you’re something you’re not. Pretending you don’t like the work you study, pretending you’re after bigger game. Like teenagers who don’t want to let on they like girls.”

  “I suppose it is. What’s your father like?”

  “The same. I never know who he really is, what he loves. Love is for his study, which we were always told when we were growing up was forbidden ground. Life is for what happens outside. Which means us.”

  “But he looked after you, didn’t he? In his way.”

  “In his way,” she said, and he got the sense, as he often did, that the more he asked the less he’d know. “He just didn’t like us knowing too much about what he did away from us.”

  She put her head back against the seat, and he saw it as a way to let all talk fall away. Once, as they went round a sharp curve, headlights catching only a few feet of asphalt before them, they saw a deer, stationary, standing on a ridge a few feet above them, and then turning, running away into the woods, as if a tutelary spirit vanishing. The rest of the time there was only the ocean, flat as a plate beside them, stars above the hills, the outline of pine trees, and occasionally, very far away, a red light disappearing around a turn.

  They passed a small cluster of cabins as the trees began to close in on them again, and, off to the left, a sudden burst of lights, and Japanese lanterns hanging from a great building that sat upon the cliff like a spaceship waiting to take off into the dark. A little later, the small wooden sign, hand-carved, beside the road that told them they had arrived at their temporary home, and they turned up the short driveway, walked up the creaking stairs to their room.

  The place came with heavy comforters instead of telephones, and no televisions or keys, but odd pieces of whimsy: a straw doll in the closet, a book of Anaïs Nin left with a candle by some previous occupant. She buried herself under the blankets, and he went to the window, then came back: outside, the gurgle of the creek and, here and there, the lights of occasional cars, suddenly shooting through the trees.

  “It’s funny,” she said. “It feels different here. Like somewhere older.” Her sentences themselves had slowed down, and she’d gained the gift of concentration. “I feel like I could be anything I want to be here: the prettiest girl in class or the person I was abroad.”

  “You are,” he said. “The prettiest girl in class.”

  She kissed him on the nose. “I think it’s difficult for you—for someone with a normal family—being with someone like me. I don’t think you can understand what it’s like to be like this.”

  “All families look normal from the outside.” And then, when she said nothing, “I think I understand your fears, the ways you’ve been hurt.”

  “It’s more than that.” A car turned the curve on the road, and its lights lit up the room. Then darkness again, and the sound of the stream. “It’s a lot more than that. It’s like”—she fumbled for the words—“like I’m living in a hornets’ nest. All the time. All these things buzzing around me, and there’s no way I can ever be away from them.”

  “We all get like that sometimes.”

  “Not all the time. Not every hour of the day. It’s like this war going on inside me, and there’s nothing I can do”—the small voice cracked—“to keep the enemies beaten back.”

  “You need help,” he said, as tenderly as he could, and then realized that the sentence meant many things at once.

  “I know I do. I appreciate it, really I do.”

  She pulled herself closer into him and closed her eyes, as if to shut the whole world out. He remembered the time after Cephalonia, the last real night with Martine, when, in the small hotel in Athens, suddenly, with no warning, something had come over her. Her voice had gone low, and everything she said had been designed to destroy. She was possessed—a creature in a low-grade horror movie—and all he could feel in the small room was that he was with something dark, full of venom, so full that it wanted to tear apart everything it saw. He tried to expel it, but what can a young and undefended student do against a force that comes from somewhere at the core? Another reason, perhaps, he’d chosen to study the great poets of affirmation and alchemy.

  “What about you?” she said, and he could tell she wanted to be free of thinking about what she’d come up here to leave behind. “Did you have a place where you could be safe?”

  “I think the whole world is like that, in a way. I mean, I think things are benign, deep down.”

  She looked at him, and the brimming at her eyes offered wonder, envy, pain. “That’s why we could never be together.”

  “That’s why we have to be together. To round one another out— the black spot in the white circle and vice versa.”

  She got up and went into the bathroom, ice-cold in the night in the unheated cabin, and when she came shivering out, and running back to bed, something had turned in her, in even the short moment.

  “I think you just lie to yourself about it. You’ve set up your barriers so efficiently that even you can’t see they’re there.”

  “Maybe.” Thinking that this impulse in her, to read the world in terms of darkness, was the true reason they could never be together: they spoke a different language, in which nothing carried, and all he could do was wait for those moments when she allowed the girl in her to claim a tiny victory.

  “It’s like your adviser,” she went on, “all the ways he tries to keep you guessing.”

  “I didn’t know you knew him.”

  “I don’t,” she said quietly. “Except through you.”

  Then, sitting up, she looked down at him, and he could tell they were at a crossroads. She would never be calmer than she was now, but further discussion would lead them back into a forest after dark. He leaned forward and kissed her on the pulse of her throat. She shivered, as an actress would, and pulled him closer. Her neck when he unbuttoned her shirt was warm, and flushed, and when another car came past, taking the curves very fast—a sudden shaft of light into
their room—he saw the person of whom she was most afraid, rapt and stainless as a madonna.

  “I want to believe you, really I do.”

  “We’ll have to work on it,” he said, and, looking at the brightness in her face, he saw how easily it could be answered by going a little further and erasing everything they could see of past or future. A long kiss, a slipped-away sheet, a loosened self, an act of love would make everything better right now; but the next day, when they woke up, they’d have crossed to the far side of an abyss, and there’d be no way, ever, of finding their way back to the innocence they’d lost. California taught that lesson, if nothing else: restraint, and the meting out of pleasure, lest soon you’d be exhausted and have nothing to look forward to.

  In the morning, something was already gone. The day was fresh and reborn, and when he opened the door and looked out, they were in a pastoral clearing: someone was chopping wood outside a cabin, set at the top of a path that led into the trees, and early light came through the grove of pine trees to make the creek below sparkle. The world still had the dew on it (as she had, too, the night before). But with the weight of their imminent departure he could feel her running away again, back into the safety of her cave, and nothing he could do would pull her out.

  “What would feel nice?” he said. They were in bed, the sun was streaming in through the windows, and the rest of the morning yawned before them.

  “To stay like this. Forever.”

  “And failing that?”

  “Failing that, we could”—she thought for a moment—“go to a place where you’d never have to let me go.” She spoke as a girl to make the wish come true.

  “But right now, right here, at this moment, what would feel good?”

  “You could tell me we’d never be apart.”