by Iyer, Pico
“And then, last week, I thought it might be better to be here alone together. If you see what I mean.”
“I’m touched,” she said, and then said no more, because she was shaking in some quiet way, at the fact he hadn’t given up on her, quite yet.
“I’m sorry. I didn’t know you’d be upset.”
“Don’t be. I’m really touched.”
The sun had nearly disappeared over the mountains by now, and already the heat of the day was leveling off.
“That—that you’d want to come to a special place with me,” she said, and then she couldn’t say any more at all.
They passed over a rickety bridge, gold in the sky now, and lavender, the imminence of dark, and when they pulled into a clearing, it was to see six or seven cars lined up, neatly, on a patch of grass. The air was singing when they got out, and the silence pulsed around them. She wiped her face clean, and they walked into the small bookstore that served as a reception desk, and the monk on duty, shrouded in a full white cowl, said, “Welcome. How was the drive?”
“Tumultuous.”
“Yes. If you go along quickly now, we’ll be singing vespers in five minutes.”
A straight path passed through the darkening desert, the chill of night coming on, the first stars above the peaks, and they walked into a clean, open space, with five wooden benches in a row, and a fresh, modern opening at one end. Behind the single cross that represented the altar was a large picture window that opened onto nothing but red rock. As if the real altar of the place was the cliff itself, its officers the light just visible at its tops and the noises, early lights of the desert.
There were ten or twelve monks lined up in rows, facing one another, at the front, and when they began to sing it had the sound of frail petitioners in the wilderness. Not rich and full and silvered, as in Westminster Abbey, but starker somehow, small and thronged, in this intimate, remote young space. The hymnal the two of them shared was old, cracked in places, and the words were all of warfare and blood. But the small space in the shadow of the cliff seemed consecrated to something other than the psalms. The monks bowed, as to the rock, and then, after a quick valedictory, proceeded in a straight line out into the dark, followed by the dozen or so laypeople in attendance. The sky now abundant with stars.
Dinner was served quickly, silently, in a room of blond wood tables, with windows everywhere: thick soup, large bowls, the lights of the desert outside, and the dark, making them feel as if they were dining with the heavens. When they walked out, they could just make out a silver trail of water running beside the “Enclosure,” as it was called.
They put their things into the room assigned them, and then, not wanting to smudge the place with talk, went out again, and walked into the desert night.
“Do you want to see what the chapel looks like in this light?”
She nodded, and they followed the path, lit by stars, to the large structure that towered over the whole community. A single candle glowed at its entrance. Another sat under a Virgin, by the altar; another under an ancient depiction of the Mother and Child. There seemed nothing but candles in the place, and they sat in chairs, on far sides of the room, and closed their eyes, caught their breath, said prayers.
Then he stepped out, and she came soon after. They made their way, saying little, to the stream, and walked beside it for a few minutes. They could hear small animals—a squirrel, perhaps, or rabbits— in the undergrowth; the water made a soft song as it ran over rocks in the dark.
“It’s calm here. It’s hard to think of anything else.”
“And when you do, it seems better than it really is.”
She smiled, and went exploring, picking up rocks, bending down to see how deep the water ran, and what was caught inside it. Far away, the few rooms in a circle sat with their faint lights in the dark. The sound of foraging, of water running over rocks, water everywhere in the distance, as in Granada.
“I like the person I am when I’m with you.”
“I’m glad.”
“You like the parts of me that I like. I guess I’ve said that before.”
“Not in the same way.”
“It’s never happened before.”
Then her voice stopped, and he didn’t pick up the thought. They sat, together and apart, on the rock, by the stream, the rooms in the distance. When it seemed time to go back, the little cell they entered was furnished with starlight and silence. Its two simple beds were pressed against opposite walls, and above each of them, on the wall, was a cross. A lectern sat by the window through which the stars, the desert came. A short typed list of rules asked for respect of solitude and silence.
When they awoke, the light coming in through the uncurtained windows, there were bells ringing with jubilation in the distance, and when they stepped out for breakfast, the day was immaculate. There was a desert sharpness in the air, and the monks were everywhere, going about their rounds, preparing food and cells, as precise as a regiment going through a well-practiced maneuver.
“I think I’ll go and explore,” she said, and he was touched by the gesture: a way of leaving him in the aloneness he’d said he’d wanted once. He sat in their small room in the morning sun and tried to think himself into another desert, where man felt vulnerable and alone with presences far greater than himself. The vast open space the mosque re-created.
When he looked out, towards lunchtime, she was sitting far off, against a rock, in a broad-brimmed hat, a sketchpad before her, intent. She had found the courage here to let go a little, and sat in her flowered dress, hair falling to her waist, like someone who’d kept D. H. Lawrence company. “I’m going off with Hilda,” she said when they met at lunch. “She knows a way into the mountains,” and he thought how wary she was of new contacts in her usual life.
In the evening, when they made their way back to the rocks on which they’d sat before, she said, “It’s amazing. I feel cleaned out.”
“I’m happy. That’s what I hoped.”
“And you?”
“Me, too. Like a cup left full of water in the sink, and all the impurities come to the top.”
“It’s what you write about.”
“Write about, but don’t experience.”
It became their daily rite, to walk out after dark to the rock and share what the day had brought, though their words grew more sparse with the passing days, and soon it seemed there was no need for any at all. They sat across from each other on the rocks, and nothing moved but stars.
One night, as he bent down to pick up a pebble, she stole up behind him and kissed him on the fleshy part of his ear. The sudden tingle went through him like a shock; the latent sensuality of the place released in a torrent. It was an arousing site, with its restraints, its barriers; it took them back to their early nights together.
The next night, when he slept, he was walking by some holy place beside a river—Greece, perhaps, with its great rocks and high blue skies—and then, for some reason, the person he was with, trying to make patterns out of words, was gone. He could see the answer she’d been looking for, and he hurried to go and tell her. But by the time he stepped into her room, she was gone. And he was left with a curious knelling sense about him. The same dream as before, in Damascus: he’d had the answer, but it had come too late.
When he drifted back into his waking self, he knew, with the certainty of dream logic, that they were over. They couldn’t be together. He looked across to where she slept, her hair spread out beneath her (she didn’t tie it up here), a faint smile on her pale face, and saw her perfectly at peace. The straps of her nightdress had slipped off her shoulder blades, and they looked so pale, so vulnerable in the faint light that he went over and kissed them, one time each.
She stirred in her sleep but didn’t wake, reached for his hand, and clasped it to the space between her breasts. Her skin was warm there, and he didn’t know how much she was in the room, how much somewhere else. He stood by the bed, his hand on her chest, her hand on his,
and then, suddenly, bells were ringing everywhere, marking vigils.
He went out into the dark, she still asleep, and saw the single line of monks, in white, all hooded, walking towards their prayer.
Their last night there, both calm and happy to forget what awaited them when they got home, they went to the rock they had appointed as their own and looked up at the stars, across to the mountains, following the trail of the silver stream for as far as it would take them. “On this rock I build my church,” he said, half joking, but serious, too, because the words were catching here. “That’s what I need,” she said. “Not a church necessarily; but a rock.”
The silence fell between them, they heard movement in the brush. It was the first time, he thought, they’d been out in the world together, presented themselves to others as a couple. This was not the real world so much as its annulment—its transcendence—and yet it was a start; they had the beginnings of a public life outside themselves now.
She had begun throwing pebbles into the stream, and it was he now who put a hand on her arm, lightly, to point out the star shooting across the skies. The pebbles, one after another, sent ripples all the way out to the bank, and then there was no room for anything but stillness; they were her way of saying she was happy, didn’t want to go. The place had not cured her fidgetiness, her habit of looking this way and that, so life wouldn’t catch up with her; in a sense it had agitated it, as if by reminding her of what she didn’t have. But she had been transfigured in the light—there was no other word for it— and a whole face she carried with her, of anxiety, had fallen away.
“It’s amazing,” she said at last, throwing the pebbles into the stream, again and again, watching the moonlight shake. “I feel really moved to be here, privileged in some way.”
“I’m glad. You’re moved by the place?”
“By the place. By you, by me, by everything.”
“By me?”
“I get to see you in your element here; what you’re like when you’re alone. I get to see the person who sits at his desk and prays for everything to work out right. And really believes it will.”
She looked across to him from where she sat, the world black and silver around them.
“But you look worried somehow?”
“Of course I’m worried.”
He reached a hand towards her. “Can I do anything to help?”
“No. You’re the problem.”
“But you said a minute ago . . .”
“I know I did. I said I was touched, and I am. Deeply touched, by everything I can’t be myself. I see you here, and you’re so content— yourself—so full of things you want to do, so free, and it makes me feel like a rock around your neck. Petty and unworthy and clinging. You don’t need me.”
“Of course I do. That’s why I brought you to a place I’d always thought I’d come to by myself.”
She looked at him, aghast.
“How can I take you away from this? You’re happy here. You need your time alone.”
“I’m happy with you.”
She went back to throwing pebbles in the stream, and he thought that the person whom he could speak to best in her—womanly and full and calm—was the one who was calm enough to see they couldn’t make it.
“It isn’t you. I mean, it is you. But it isn’t only you; it’s everything. I feel opened up here—I can say anything. And when I can, I see . . .”
She let the thought trail, as did he. In their cell that night they lay, each in a narrow bed alone, facing the same direction.
The next day, when they stopped in at the bookstore to say their goodbyes and offer thanks, she started talking to the monk on duty, and he could see that she was trying to do anything she could to keep them here. This more than ever for her a departure from what she saw as Eden.
“I feel stupid asking you this,” she said, though the monk was clearly not surprised, and was used to seeing people sorry to go back into the world, “but I couldn’t help thinking. You live here all the time, so I guess it’s not Paradise for you, but, I know it sounds crazy, and I’ll bet everyone asks you this . . .”
“They do,” he said, “and you’re right. I do miss things in the world. As much as you would; more, perhaps.” His face was tanned, but the glow in him seemed to come from something else. His words came out distinct and clear as pebbles he’d pulled out from the stream. “I’m not the master of all our disciplines. I never will be. Sometimes I wish we could sleep in. I wish there were more people to help out around the refectory, the store. This isn’t a peaceful place or an easy place, however it may seem to you. I have all the usual human wishes.” The sentences had been polished by the silence all around them.
“But”—now he looked almost embarrassed, for the first time— “if you asked me what I really miss, more than anything, I’d have to say, the chance to share the blessings of this place with someone I care about. There are all the brothers, of course, and the prior—we see him on a regular basis. But they have blessings of their own. I wish there were some way I could transmit this—whatever it is—to the people who need it most.”
“That’s where we come in,” he said, because he felt the monk had said all he wanted to.
“You do. Come in again. And drive safely home.”
After they reached the main road, and turned back in the direction of the interstate, they said nothing for a long time. Not out of emptiness, but the opposite: a fullness that doesn’t want to be disturbed. They were back on the early drives, he felt, up in the hills, or in the early nights, long, wandering explorations till the light came up. In the part where they were silent, there’d never be any difficulties between them.
They were still in the desert when night fell—it was a long, long drive—and at times they couldn’t see any other lights in the night around them. When they reached California, and the narrow roads of orchards and artichoke stands, she rolled down a window and let the wind come in, extending her legs into the darkness as they drove.
When he touched her thighs, as they passed through darkened villages, she raised her hips, so more of her was available to him.
As they arrived at the coast, however, and turned north, the lights, the signs growing more familiar, they could feel their daily selves waiting to take them in, devouring and unstoppable as in-laws, waiting to pull them back into the old pleasantries and arguments. “It’s like when you’re young, not wanting to go home again,” he said, and she said, “Not only when you’re young.”
At last they saw the small light of his house, fragile against the large expanse behind it, and, parking on the street, began taking out the boxes. “We can do it in the morning,” he said, because they were tired, and the air of finality would be too clangorous. When they went in, the red light was blinking, desperate, and there were letters on the table collected by the man next door.
“Welcome home,” she said, as if to say that the end had now begun.
The desert had cleared something out in them, even if it had left them in a seeming emptiness with no external props or supports. “It’s funny,” she’d said, as soon as the sanctuary began to fade from view behind them. “It’s like being lonely together. Except there it’s okay, because you’re not alone.” “I know what you mean,” he’d answered, for it was true: in the company of bells and monks and high, vaulting skies—the cliff itself a place of worship—it felt as if they were companioned in the deepest sense. But by the time they’d entered his house, their lives were cluttered again, and there was no way of being in this room (where the books lay, the thesis, and any foreseeable future) and that one (she sprawled across the sheets) at once.
When he turned towards her in the bed that night, she was flame, her skin so hot he thought she might be running a fever; but afterwards, when he turned away to sleep, he felt ice everywhere. As if the fever had passed from her to him.
“I ought to go to the library,” he said next morning, seeing her still in bed, and she, in her instinctual way, burr
owed deeper into her hole of blankets and pillows and sheets. “And there’s the seminar this afternoon. Do you think you’ll be here when I get back?”
She had buried herself under the covers.
“I just want to know, so I’ll know whether to hurry home or not.”
“No need to hurry.” The voice came up to him from her hiding place. “I have something in L.A.” After all this time, back in the wariness of the first afternoon, when each of them made up appointments that didn’t exist, as if afraid to step out into a clearing. Though now the wariness was not habitual, but earned.
“If you could just leave the key by the stove when you go.”
“Will do. Have a good seminar.”
He tried to find the perfect line from the poets, to make them laugh, to sweeten the moment. But nothing came to mind.
He had nothing really to do once he got to the library—it was just a way to be away—and when he arrived, the thesis further away from him than ever, he went up to the eighth floor, where no one thought of Sufis, and sat in one of the chairs overlooking the sea nearby. “In space things touch, in time they pass,” he thought, though why Adela Quested was coming to him now, just after the shock of the Marabar Caves, he couldn’t tell. “Man is in love and loves what vanishes, / What more is there to say?” When they’d learned the famous line at school, none of them had known the first thing about love or loss: it had been easy to quote Yeats.
Sefadhi had sent a message, through Eileen—he’d always choose to apply pressure indirectly—that an article in the Persian Review assessed the state of Iranian studies in the light of all the new materials that had come to light, now that the community was global. Texts had even been dug up in Italy, of all places, and there was an expectation that more would show up in California; but, having seen how his adviser frowned on such possibilities before, he knew it would be a mistake to rise to the bait now.
He looked out at the great open spaces that lay before him—what had brought him here, in a way. California had never learned what to do with limit; and yet without limit there was no faith. It was the loss of Shams that had caused Rumi to find faith in the truest way, not just the finding of Shams. It’s not dreams that belief gives us—that’s the easy part—it’s the strength to deal with the abolition of dreams.