by Iyer, Pico
“Well, thank you for your time. It means a lot to us.”
“Thank you,” the man said, throwing the cup away. “For your listening, thank you.”
They took their leave of him, and walked towards the car. As they did, suddenly he was at their side again, importunate.
“Excuse me? You have heard about the mujahedin, perhaps? They are in the airport, they tell you how terrible is our government, how they want to make things better? Like before. If they come to power, every one of us will be dead. Even our grandparents, our grandparents’ nurses. Everyone who is not a young man, they will kill.”
She was fighting back tears now, he could tell, and the man, seeing this, pulled himself back. “I am sorry to tell you these things. But is better you should know.”
“Thank you for your trust.”
And then he was away again, in the sun, and they were alone in the bright plaza, with students all around, talking about the next night’s party.
When they got back home, there was another topic they could no longer speak about, and they walked around each other as if there had been a death in the family. “I’m sure it can’t be as bad as he said,” she said, sounding a little disappointed, as she always did, when all her fears were confirmed.
“I’m sure it could,” he said, unable to conceal his unsettledness. “It makes you grateful to live where we do.”
“That’s why they come here, too, I bet,” she said, with a nurse’s tenderness; if he suffered, she did.
“At least it’s better than it was. When they had brigades on hand to block out pictures of Margaret Thatcher if she appeared on the cover of The Economist without a head scarf.”
“It’s much better than it was,” she said, and he had the feeling, suddenly, that it was she now who was giving reassurances, because she knew much more than he.
At his desk, Bach playing on the system to give him spirit, he felt himself more than ever going backwards, to someone alone in a darkened room, making patterns, doodling as if he were she during the lecture, drawing mazes, towers, boxes that soon became as tangled as a kitten’s ball of string. He’d been planning to write on Hafez now, but it all seemed more and more irrelevant. “She’s crying out for something,” Alex had said (about the “European girl,” he tried to remember now?). “But it’s nothing any mortal soul can give her.”
He got out a piece of paper to write on the theology of the Sufis, and then found himself making word games, seeing how he could find “fade” and “dies” hidden in “Esfandi.”
“What’s going on in there?” he heard her calling from the next room. “You sound suspiciously quiet.”
“Not much.”
“Are you busy making mischief ?”
“I wish I were.”
“Can you stand a visitor?”
“I think so, yes.”
He heard her get up, and then she was standing at his door, her hair tangled from where she’d been lying on it, and her face sleepy and open, as if she hadn’t yet come up through all the levels of herself to the surface. Her feet were bare; her hands clutched the glass of lemonade he’d left for her as if too small to hurt a soul. “What is it? You look distraught.”
“It’s nothing,” he said. “Just stand there. Like that. Nothing more.”
Early spring is radiant in California, and in the first few weeks, before the sharp light of winter is bruised and made fuzzy, the skies, blazing blue, look down on Persian carpets: the hills an arabesque of golden poppies and purple lupines, with blue-blossomed white lilac around the edges. “I tell myself sometimes that California is the place where Man plays God and locks himself out of Eden,” he wrote to Nigel, thinking of the Nasruddin story from his seminar. “It’s as if all you can see here sometimes is people walking around, looking at the ground, searching for something as if they’d just lost a contact lens, and saying, ‘It’s got to be here somewhere. I had it just a minute ago. Where can it be?’ And then the spring comes along and suddenly they find the key to the heaven they’ve locked themselves out of—except, being mortal, they let it slip again, and then they have to start searching all over again.”
They drove up into the hills and saw houses on every side coming up with new alacrity: the builders had decided that the year’s final storm had passed through, and now they could complete their constructions with impunity (until fire came, or mudslide, earthquake or flood). As they drove along the old road towards the Chumash caves, suddenly a black BMW with its top down veered out of a driveway— the driveway that led to “their house,” he realized—and a woman with affluent skin the leathery brown of an expensive handbag cursed at them as she swerved and drove towards the town.
“It makes me want to go to church and pray sometimes,” he said.
“What does? All these houses being built on such treacherous ground?”
“All of it. California makes me want to say a prayer for the undefended.”
She flinched away from him—she’d caught the hint—and then held on to his right hand as he drove up.
“Why did you come here, then?”
“Because it’s beautiful and free. It allows you to be something else. I only meant that, when you listen to someone like our friend from Iran, you remember how the rest of the world is living. Here it’s almost as if everything—even the hills and the rocks and the weather—is set up for us.”
She drew away her hand, and he could tell he’d gone too far. Someone from the outside world comes to California and finds it intoxicating; and then, the morning after, wonders what he saw in it.
“It’s something I’ve always wondered about you,” she said, a few turns later, and he could tell from her voice, all careful innocence, that she was hurt and wanted to push him away.
“What’s that? Why I don’t go somewhere more real?”
“No. What you do for church. What religion you practice. You’re always talking about it, and I know you’re a professional student of religion”—like everyone, she couldn’t help putting heavy quotation marks around the phrase—“but I’ve never seen you do anything that’s religious.”
“If it’s religious, it’s probably private. You wouldn’t see it.”
“You’re avoiding the question. Do you do it? Do you believe?”
“Of course I do. I believe the universe makes sense; that everything that happens, happens for a reason, even if it’s one that we can’t see. That everything—everyone—has the potential for some good. I trust things.”
“And I don’t.”
“That’s the difference between us,” he said, though the real difference was more profound and more desolate. She thought the angels he encouraged in her were temporary; he hoped—he had to hope— the devils were. Though they never talked about it, and in part because they never talked about it, they’d somehow put what was most essential to them, the very premises on which they’d built their lives, at stake here, and for either of them to admit defeat would be as much as to dismantle the whole structure of a lifetime. The little differences they talked about were ways of not acknowledging what was central.
They had reached the top of the old road now, and when it continued they were on the same road they’d come along their first time up here, in the mist. But more treacherous now, because they were driving into a past—and a comparison with the present—and every turn brought not new vistas but old ones, and questions about what had changed.
“It’s lovely in this weather,” she said. “You remember before. . . .”
When the twisting road ran out, it came to the “Road of the Heavens” that runs along the back of the hills like a line on a palm. He was tempted to remind her of the time she’d picked up his hand and seen whole heavens in it, found stars and crosses of fate, and said, “Your lines are so clear! Mine are a mess.” But any reference to the past is tricky when you don’t know where you’re going, so he simply said, “What’s your pleasure?”
They could drive up towards the mountaintop, wher
e the air was high and chilly: his choice always. Or back towards the things they knew. Two people look at a stretch of road—he thought of McCarthy’s example in his lecture—and one sees an opening, the other the terror of the unknown.
“Let’s go down today,” she said, and he thought how perhaps she preferred to be left in her unhappiness because it was what she knew: she knew the rules and how to make her peace with them. The first time they’d come up here, there hadn’t been choices or metaphors: they’d only been nosing through the mist, trying to while away an afternoon.
As he drove back towards the city, they passed the illuminated phone booth, drab now in the sunlight, the shuttered country store (“FOR SALE” chalked up on its window), the broken piano he’d played in the cold night.
“Do you mind if we get out for a moment?”
“Of course not. Let’s stop.”
He paused by the road, and she got out and ran up the hill, as if to be away from him, or the car. The meadows were a field of color, up the slope, passing over the top of the hill and all the way down to the lake beyond, the inner valley. When he caught up with her, she was standing in a sea of orange, triumphant.
He caught his breath, and she sat against a tree; in every direction, the space went on and on.
“What would feel nice?”
“A story.”
“What kind of story?”
“A story like the one you told me before when we were up near here.”
“There was once a man,” he said, making sure to think about nothing and just let the words come through him, out, “who was a careful and respected religious teacher. He had two children, a wife, a group of students; he was famous for his skills as an interpreter of the law.”
She sat with eyes closed, the sun sweet on her pale face.
“Then, one day, out of the blue, another man appeared. He was a wandering dervish from far away, and as soon as the two of them met, they knew: each was the hidden key to the other. They talked and talked—everything rushed out of them, as if it had been waiting for this moment; not exactly as lovers of one another, but more, and better, as two lovers of the same sight. The same books, the same thoughts, the same beliefs. Their talk made them feel as if they were climbing through mountains, through the mist, into fields full of flowers, and high sunlight. They looked around at the place where they had arrived and recognized it as the place they’d been coming towards, half thinking of, all their lives.
“But the ones who were left behind when the teacher disappeared into the mist, the ones who had enjoyed his company and were suddenly deprived of it, were less happy now. Who is this new stranger who’s taken our loved one away? they said. Why should we wait, after all this time, while he gets to have him to himself ? They plotted and plotted, and, one morning, when the teacher woke up, he found his new friend gone.
“For days he was bereft. He searched and searched, he asked in the marketplace, in the mosque: everywhere. But the friend was nowhere to be found. Then, at last, when he had quite given up hope, he had a dream that the man was in the oldest city in the world, a place called Damascus. He sent his loyal younger son to find him, and there the man was, in a tavern, exactly as in the dream. He returned with the younger son, and the two old friends fell at one another’s feet, weeping.”
There was a light wind in the mountains today, but otherwise everything was silent. They were the only travelers on the mountain road on this weekday afternoon, and, eyes closed, she was surrendered to the story, the wind blowing all around.
“Again the friends lost themselves in talk, more fervent and grateful than ever now, having come so close to losing everything. The religious teacher found a woman in his household for the traveler to marry, to ensure he’d never have occasion to leave. The two of them lived in the same house, and, especially at night, when everyone else was asleep, they talked of whatever was secret in them, which was not a dark thing but a golden one.
“But the students, of course, grew more restless than ever, cut off from the one they loved. And one day, when the teacher stepped out, it was to find his friend—his image of the Beloved—dead on the doorstep. The rumors said that the teacher’s own second son had organized the murder.”
“And so the man was left bereft?”
“He was left, after the grief had worn out and grown tired, ecstatic. He was left full up with all the things he wanted to say to the absent friend, all the pent-up feelings for which he had not found a voice before. For whatever they shared could not be lost; indeed, his friend was more present to him now, more durably so, than ever before.
“Poems came out of him, and songs: great poems of triumph and surrender. He could never be cut off from his friend now, and, more important, never be pushed out of all they had worshipped together. They were linked irreparably. So much so that he found a new companion—an old unlettered goldsmith in the marketplace, a friend for decades. He took a new wife, cultivated new students and protégés. He lived in the knowledge that no one could take away from him what he had known and shared.”
There were tears in her eyes when he came to the ending, and he didn’t know how much he’d touched her, how much offended. “After all this time, you choose to tell me the true story.”
“You knew it all along, though. Even when I told the other one.”
“Of course I did. I’ve heard about Rumi and Shams; I was at that lecture the first afternoon, remember?”
“Then you knew I was making something up before? The first time we came up here.”
“That’s why I loved you. Because you were kind enough to give it a different kind of ending. To protect me. Why did you have to tell me the true story now?”
There are many ways to be cruel, he remembered Martine’s saying, and he wondered if that was what coming to the top of the mountain meant, too. To tell her the truth—that they were drifting apart—was an unkindness; but to tell her a lie—that everything would be all right—was an even deeper act of cruelty.
Soon after it was light, the next day, she slipped out—“shopping,” she said vaguely, but it was clear she just needed to be away, if not from him then at least from her sense that everything was unraveling between them. He went to his desk and worked a little on his revisions, to incorporate the new material that had been unearthed by an Iranian at USC, and yet all he could see was the phone at the edge of the desk: the magic object in the children’s story that, if you touch it, leaves you scalded. He’d tried and tried for months not to think of the business card from Damascus, lying among his papers; to call the number on it seemed a betrayal. Yet not to call the number now seemed worse.
“Hello. Kristina Jensen,” said the voice at the other end, as brisk and efficient as if it were in the office.
“Yes,” he said. “This is John Macmillan.”
“Camilla’s friend,” she said, and let the ambiguity hang in the air.
“That’s right. And the reason I’m calling, actually”—he tried to make it sound slow and natural, though he’d practiced it time and time again—“is that I’m going to be in Damascus soon, and I wondered if you needed anything taken to your friend.”
“Damascus?”
It was a paltry fiction, but she seemed in no mood to call him on it.
“For my research. And I think I’ll be seeing Khalil.”
“Oh,” she said, as if she was somehow relieved. “You haven’t heard.”
“Heard?”
“He got taken in. For questioning. I don’t think we’ll be hearing from Professor Khalil for several months.”
“I see.” And then, as if he knew what she was talking about, “His activities?”
“The usual,” she said, either because she took him at his valuation, or because she pretended to.
“Well, if you hear anything . . .”
“I’ll tell you. I’m sure Camilla will know where to find you.”
“If she knows where to find herself.” She laughed, as she’d done the time they�
�d talked before Christmas, and he felt a twinge of guilt.
“She’s never been the easiest sister to keep track of.”
“But she does have a job, doesn’t she? A steady source of income?” If he didn’t ask now, the chance might never come again.
“Oh, she’s well taken care of as long as my father is around.”
“And she does act now and then?”
“In her mind, perhaps.” The voice that had been keeping Camilla company all her life.
“And the degree at Oxford must have helped?”
“Oxford,” she said, and there was quiet for a moment. She spoke about her sister as if she were a banker, talking about a troublesome account, in debt; and as she paused at the other end, he thought he saw someone in a marketplace, wondering exactly how many beans to place in the scales. “We think, sometimes, that Oxford’s where the problems started. She went off on this course that took her away from us, from everything. After she came back, she was never really in sync again.”
“But she had her degree, new qualifications?”
“Oxford was her great escape,” the cool voice asserted at the other end. “ ‘Women adventurers in the Middle East.’ ”
The voice, again, that had been putting Camilla in place since girlhood; he felt, suddenly, as if he were on the wrong side of the table, with the police, informing on Khalil.
“But it doesn’t pay the bills,” he said, to bring them back to the safer ground of cliché.
“It doesn’t,” she said carefully, and then, noticing perhaps that he’d been doing all the questioning, “What about you? Someone told me you were looking for Sufi manuscripts.”
“Was looking.”
“You didn’t find any?”
“If you’re in a desert, the most dangerous thing you can see is an oasis.”
“You sound like Sefadhi,” she said, with a small laugh, and he, surprised she’d left an opening, pounced.
“You’re a friend of his?”
“Not really. Anyway, I’ll give you a call if I hear anything from Damascus.”