by Iyer, Pico
“We won’t, for now. I brought you this as a small token of that.” He got out of bed, walked across the room, and took out from his case a small box. She took it from him, and inspected the top.
“You can open it, if you like.”
Inside was a bracelet, and a pair of earrings the color of tiles in the Alhambra. She put them both on, and then jumped up and twirled herself around, as if modeling the new person she could be. The room was washed in sunlight, and she smiled as if she’d never cry again.
“Thank you. It’s lovely.” She came back to where he lay, and threw her arms around him. Her cheeks, he felt, were wet.
“What is it? Did I upset you somehow?”
“Only by making me happy.”
“But unless you think things could be better, or imagine it . . .” And then he stopped, because optimism is largely learned, like any other kind of trick.
“It’s like these poems have given you a pretext for belief. An excuse. Which is fine for you.”
“But for you, it’s no help at all?”
When she nodded, and said nothing more, he said, feeling he was flailing, “Maybe that’s why we’re here. It’s a way to step outside our usual lives. We can be different.” But the words sounded hollow even to him, and by the time his reassurances got to her, he could see, they’d lost their meaning. In the poems there were rooms outside the world where something was suspended; but in the world itself ?
On the way home, they drove slowly, to keep their parting at a distance, stopping at an art gallery built around a redwood tank, dawdling around the hamburger stand that sat on the cliffs, in an area that grew emptier, less developed with every passing season. The only stretch of the coast he knew that slipped back into the past, as if the present were not holding on to it tightly enough.
When they crossed the mountains and came in sight of Santa Barbara, passing the illuminated phone booth, the piano he’d played the night they were stranded, the city looked like a circuit board beneath them, a grid of colored wires that they could rearrange at will. He left the car running at the house—she had an “errand,” of course, unspecified, in Los Angeles—and when she turned to him, it was as if she was losing a foothold somehow.
“See you soon, perhaps.”
“Perhaps.”
“You can come back anytime.”
She didn’t say anything, and she showed no sign of moving, so he turned the ignition off, and they waited in the silence.
“I tell myself it’s my imagination,” she said slowly, not looking at him. “And I can return to it even if you’re not around.”
“You can,” he said, with a sureness that made her look more frightened still. “If you see another space, you’re not trapped in the one where you are.”
“No. Only trapped in the space you want to get to.”
He said nothing for a long moment. “Maybe you need to be shaken up. Be thrown into something so foreign that you forget all your usual fears and step away from them without even knowing you’re doing so.”
“Easy for you to say. You’re used to living far from home.”
“You could be, too.”
She looked away again, towards the sea. “It’s something I’ve always wondered about you.” The words came from very far away.
“What’s that?”
“What you’d be like if you’d grown up with two parents, siblings.”
“Very different, I’m sure.”
She only asked these things when it was drawing close to time to go: it was a way of hanging on. “Well, I should let you go.”
“I think you should. You have a long drive ahead of you.”
She turned to look at him, her hand sliding up his leg, and he saw how she had kept men around in the past.
“I think we’d better go. Before we both freeze to death.”
“Can you give me one more minute? To write you something before I go?”
“Now?”
“So you can see what I look like when you’re not around. When I’m at home, waiting for the next meeting.” She’d come upon the one invitation he could not resist: a tangible reminder of her presence.
“As long as it doesn’t take too long.” He got out of the car, and as he did, he saw her fumbling in her case for a pen, a card, whatever it was she had brought in preparation for this moment.
He walked along the road to the small patch of grass that sits above the sea—an adult’s playground, as he’d thought of it when first he’d come here—and then walked back, as slowly as he could, to where the car was parked. Catching a glimpse of her through the windshield, he realized she was right: he could see the person who came out of hiding only when alone, bent over her book, frowning in concentration. Biting down on the top of the pen, and looking out into the dark as if counting syllables to herself. When she turned down again towards her card, her hair fell all about her face, and she had to brush it behind her ears again. She saw him looking at her through the window, and smiled as if the day were just beginning.
Finally, just as his patience was about to snap—it was cold and it was late, and he could feel Sefadhi nearby, the poems on his desk, the thesis deadline drawing closer—she rolled down the window. “Okay. Come and get it.”
She handed him the Oriental card, and he read, “Dear John,” though the letters were already smudged, crossed out here, a word added there, so many squiggles and second thoughts around the lines that it was already almost impossible to make out.
I still wake up, several times a week, and tell myself it can’t be true. That anyone who’s normal—kind of—with a normal life, could have any time for me. And sometimes I don’t wake up at all, and then it’s even better.
When I was young, I told myself that if I closed my eyes, everything in my usual life would disappear. My mother, my father, everything. And then I did, and opened my eyes, and everything was the same it had always been. I wasn’t in Samarkand, riding horses, and there wasn’t anyone coming along who thought and felt like me. Once I opened my eyes and there was someone coming along who felt like a part of me, but he had a different story in mind, and I had no place in it.
Now you tell me I should come out and open myself up to you. What can I say? If I say yes, maybe I get something good until it stops being good. Anything could happen. It’s like driving along the freeway with your eyes closed. If I say no, I get the same as usual: no happy ending, no ending at all. You’ve always got some poem nearby that talks about the beauty of surrender, but in real life surrender comes at a cost. I know.
So what do I do? I don’t know, and you don’t, either: you just tell yourself you do. But until you get well and truly sick of me, I want to say thank you for giving me a chance.
He put it down and, as ever, had nothing useful to say; the saddest thing about the sad is that they can see what’s going on at least as well as any onlooker. He looked at her briefly and kissed her on the brow; she got out and walked to her oversized truck, to drive away.
He’d put Rumi aside for a while, the way you try to put aside a song that’s going through your head—or, more likely, to drown it out, by playing something else. The something else right now was the famous perfumer Attar, Rumi’s inspiration, whose Conference of the Birds tells of thirty birds flying off together in search of their lives, whatever is lost within them. The hero of the story, the hoopoe, is prized in desert countries because he can see where water is running underground (as, he recalled, an early translator of Rumi had called one of his works “The Soul of Goodness in Things Evil”).
Now, though, he seemed to have lost his taste for explanations— everything he’d told himself about Camilla (and his adviser; even about himself ) so wrong that everyone became less and less visible as the days went on. He turned instead to the last chapter of his thesis, about the influence of the Islamic poets on the modern world. The Arabs, of course, had given us the way we count and drink and hide—“alcove” and “alcohol” and “alchemy”—and the Persians were
the ones who had given us the word “Paradise.” When Dante committed the Prophet to hell (to be eaten by pigs, no less), it was tempting to say that every good poet tries to bury his father (as Harold Bloom had said, half burying Freud); the obvious reason for Dante’s rancor was that his Divine Comedy read like a Christian version of the Miraj, or celebrated Night Journey, of Mohammed (and who was Beatrice but a displaced Shams?). Much of the world, in fact, if looked at with certain eyes, resembled a carpet with Islamic threads in every corner. The Sikhs, the Cathars, the troubadours—all of them were said to have got some of their ideas from the Sufi notion of a hidden order. Almost 250 pages of Emerson’s journals—someone had shown him once in the library—were devoted to homemade translations from the Persian.
And yet, he found himself writing now, not as he had expected to do, the real contribution of the Moslems to the outside world was not in the numbers they gave us, but in the ways they’d seen the limits of arithmetic. More precious than any of the numerals they invented was the “zero” they’d imported from India and Babylon; and, more than that, the sense that one plus one could equal zero. If two beings throw themselves fully together, they can so lose themselves in something higher that the result is what looks like nothing. In Attar—he turned back now—the dominant words were “die” and “abandon” and “burn.” Die to every notion of yourself, the birds kept saying; die even to what you think is good or pious. Abandon every notion you’ve ever had of faith, even of what the faithful say about abandonment. Burn everything you have, even if it is what you most value, not only in the world but in yourself.
All Islam asks that its servants give up everything, beginning with their lives: he thought of the photos he’d seen of the Martyrs’ Cemeteries around Iran, their endless rows of headstones in the desert, small pictures of the teenage boys who’d given up their lives for the Ayatollah on every one. Yet Sufism, as ever, went even further. The true Sufi gives up his very faith, his reason, everything he understands, of faith, and burning, and abandonment. “Abandon the search for God”—the Gnostic Monoimus’s words had stuck—“and the creation and other matters of a similar sort. Look for him by taking yourself as the starting point.”
He made his way, next afternoon, slowly along the bike path, over the scrubby grass, bald in summer but now richly green, and along the top of the cliffs; down below, birds pecking their way across the sand, tall surfers, a few lovers sitting among the rocks. Everyone in his own private dream; and hoping, somehow, that the dreams would somewhere intersect.
Sefadhi’s practice was to have his students read their essays aloud to him, “to take responsibility for their beauty and their foolishness,” as he was wont to say: a hangover, some said, from his days in Qom, and the last of the medieval disciplines. Words are important, it was a way of acknowledging: something more than markings on a page. You claim them formally, publicly, as if they were your children sent out into the world.
This time, reading what he’d written of Attar and the power of abandonment, the sentences coming out with more fluency than usual, he read himself into a state of near intoxication. When he was finished, his tutor looked at him, for a long, long time, and said nothing. There was nowhere he could turn his eyes except to the impeccably coiffed figure, his few hairs neatly combed, his cuffs and red tie immaculate, his black shoes polished every day.
“Well,” his teacher said, and looked at him again. Outside, the usual desultory cries, the day drifting on towards its end. “I admire your conviction,” Sefadhi began his assessment, slowly, “your willingness to incarnate, shall we say, the emotions and resolves of your subject. Your facts, insofar as you include them, cannot be quarreled with. This is a rendering of Attar that some of his disciples might be happy with. In the context of our project, however, it is”—he paused—“more unsuitable than I can say. As a piece of scholarship, it can be compared only to the ravings—or the pantings”—he made the words sound like a curse—“of a lovelorn boy.”
The professor moved his chair around, as if to collect himself, and looked away from him, as if not to see the damage he was inflicting. “You write—you write as if you are writing to some beloved, someone you care for more than you should. It is a rhapsody, a call to love, a gust of wind. As an offering to my colleagues, however”—he swiveled back—“and to myself, it could more easily be taken as an insult.”
There was nothing he could say to this; the man was his teacher, and born into the faith besides.
“You realize it’s all a fairy tale?” the older man said to him, as if holding his anger back. “You realize it means nothing, in the context of our thesis?”
“We have documentation for most of it,” he said feebly. “I haven’t departed from the record.”
“You haven’t departed in the few facts you choose to share with us. You spare us outright falsehoods. But to turn Attar—or any of his fellows—into a California surfer boy is worse than committing any falsehood. It is to translate him into a tongue in which he has no meaning.”
“I use his words, not my own.”
“And your meanings, not his own. For those who know and love this poet, what you’ve written is a kind of obscenity. Everything is there except what is everything to him: his God.” He paused to try to steady himself; both of them knew he was in no hurry to antagonize his most faithful student. “You have, if I may say so, smeared your own feelings all over him like a kind of paste. A graffito over the building he has taken pains to construct for us. You remember when I spoke about ‘textual rape’?”
He nodded and said nothing. Perhaps, he thought, his teacher was trying only to spare him from a grilling at more hostile hands, to give him a taste of what he might expect from the less sympathetic members of the Department. And perhaps his unease, volatile at the best of times, had been made acute by the confession at the beach, and all the sudden, unwanted talk of smuggled manuscripts. A part of this might just be personal, the moment and the mood talking. But the bulk of it, he knew, was not.
“You’ve worked hard on this, John, I realize that.” He was a doctor now, mapping out strategies at the dying patient’s bedside. “You have a perspective, even a depth of involvement, that is tonic. But you cannot turn these poets into mere carriers of fire without taking them away from everything that’s important to them. These poems are fragile things, esoteric in their way; to strip a text of a context is to leave nothing but a pretext.”
He recognized the line from a long-ago preface—Sefadhi’s own youthful excesses—but he felt he was in no position to answer back.
“What do you suggest, then? How can one begin to write about ‘mystery’ without trying in some fashion to unriddle it?”
“I suggest you keep your life quite separate from your studies. I further suggest you think of your audience: a generation of scholars training the next generation of scholars. I suggest that you leave your explanations behind and content yourself only with the words, the very particular words and meanings, of a poet whose meanings are far greater than you or I could aspire to. Rumi, Attar, Hafez, they are wise men in a complex tradition; please do not bring them onto your daytime television.”
Afterwards, there was nothing to say. He cycled back along the track, the light now going fast—the beach was already almost deserted— and, back in the house, it was all he could do to pour himself a drink and take it to a study that now seemed deeply empty, abandoned by its governing spirits. In his mind, arguments (lover’s arguments, lawyer’s arguments—the same) began to form: “If you weren’t so nervous about how Iran is seen in the West . . .”; “If you didn’t bring your own past and sufferings into this . . .”; “If you hadn’t been so wounded in love, and determined to box it out of your life . . .” But even he could see they were foolish, spiteful things that he had to say only so he could throw them away. He composed a four-page rebuttal to his teacher, and then put the treatise away in his desk and thought back on the evening just past. “You sound tired,” she said when she
called, late that night. “Has something happened?”
“Nothing much. Just the usual labors with my thesis.”
“Do you want to tell me about it?”
“No. It’s just the usual departmental stuff. Nothing important.”
“If it were nothing important, you wouldn’t be sounding like that. I guess I’m not the only one who’s bound by pride.”
“I guess not. Anyway, we’re on for tomorrow, yes?”
“We’re on for ever. Just stay where you are, and I’ll come and make it better.”
She arrived at his house just before dawn, as if to advertise her eagerness to help, but when he opened the door she didn’t come in. “Come on. I’m going to take you away from this.”
“It’s six o’clock, Camel. I haven’t even got up yet.”
“That’s why I want to get you now. While you’re fresh. You need a break from all your books.”
Letting her minister to him, he’d begun to see, was the best way to take her out of her troubles; like acupuncture of a kind, healing the soreness in some part of her by releasing the brightness and compassion in another part. He put on his clothes and got into the passenger seat of the truck, she flinging books, brown bags full of sandwiches and little bowls of pasta into the back to make room for him. Then they drove up into the hills, on the old mountain road they’d never been along before.
It was still early, the sun hardly up, and the roads were almost empty. Here and there an older man in a bright tracksuit walking fast around the curves, a dog running up ahead. A pair of cyclists, shocking in bright yellow and purple suits, whooshing round the turns from the mountains above. In the fast-food stand where she’d stopped to pick up coffee, two gulls were perched above the speakers, and you could smell the sea, feel the presence of kelp and seaweed, with the day yet unborn.
As they drove higher around the turns, towards the Pass, they saw more and more bulldozers, sleeping on half-deserted slopes, or resting in some valley, in a circle of brown earth. Contractors’ signs sat in front of every other driveway, next to the blue warnings that told of some security firm’s surveillance. He’d never been in a place where watchfulness and hopefulness were in such alliance—the construction of new lives everywhere, and hidden cameras, unseen watchers on all sides to make sure they didn’t slip back into the soil. Churches, companies, new institutions coming up everywhere, and every few years a fire or flood or earthquake to send them all back into the earth. Life could make no impression on this soil.