Abandon

by Iyer, Pico

  That night, of course, he couldn’t sleep. He walked through alleyways of argument, cul-de-sac leading to dead end, and then a small opening leading to another, and then a cul-de-sac. The “we” she’d mentioned that night—referring to him or to someone else? The gold necklace from an “old boyfriend”—meaning Alejandro, or someone he didn’t know about? The package itself in the closet: had she meant it to be a farewell, or was it her last, desperate chance to try to start again? If it was something personal, it would only sting; and if it wasn’t, it would sting more.

  What if he couldn’t sleep without her ever again?

  As soon as it was light, he pulled back the closet door and picked up the package, as heavy as the book he was sure it contained. He bounced it up and down a few times, and then brought it to the light. He slipped the pink ribbons off as once he had slipped off other straps in just this light. On the gift card she had written, only, “From your shadow.”

  Then, no longer patient, he tore the gold-and-silver wrapping off and found, as he’d suspected, a box of the kind in which people keep photo albums or scrapbooks. Maybe she’d given him a register of their times together; maybe an accounting of her life.

  It was neither. When he pulled the cover off the box he found a book, a thick book, its cover the color of night, with a heart, in gold, inscribed at its center. Here and there, across the dark-blue background, flecks of gold like desert stars.

  Inside, on the first page, as if it were a formal volume from the Ottoman court, was an inscription, though not in Turkish or Arabic, but classic Farsi. “Be wise, be generous, keep secrets close.” At the very bottom of the page, where in imperial documents there would be a title, another epigraph in Persian: “The love of fire, the fire of love.”

  Farther inside, as he carefully pulled back the pages, were poems: poems on every page, facing one another like mirrors on opposite sides of a long corridor. Nearly all the poems were of the same short length, and each was laid out at the center of the page, as if the text were from the Quran. Around them, as in a holy book again, avenues, tendrils of gold, containing the poems like a frame; but where in a Quran it would be the word for “Allah” that would be written in gold, here it was the word for “love.”

  Clearly the manuscript wasn’t “authentic,” in the sense of being old. Its pages weren’t worn, and it honored the traditional conventions just enough to take liberties with them. Yet that in no way detracted from its value, material or otherwise. Someone had copied and copied the poems, as a copyist of old would laboriously inscribe the verses of a master poet, taking up residence in the poet’s house over the months he reserved for the task. At the very end of the book, where again an imperial title would belong, this one read, in Farsi, “This Heart I give to the Beloved. All that goes in it, all that goes with it, belongs to the Eternal Friend. This is my only will and testament. All I have to give is everything.”

  He paged back and forth through the volume, careful about how he turned the pages. He thought of the Bibles he had seen at college, written out by candlelight in a cold dark cell, the very act of writing an act of worship, personal and impersonal. The calligraphy was of a kind no amateur could fake. At the very bottom of the last page, whoever had written the poems out had inscribed, “There is no god but God.”

  He thought back to the books like this he had seen in museums and at exhibitions; he thought back to Westwood and even to Hussein’s musty library in Jaipur. To someone who hadn’t worked with the texts, all these books would be similar. And yet the verses in this one were mysterious: they were not from the Quran, of course; nor did they all seem to come from Rumi, or some other classic poet.

  He carried the whole book, wrapped in a towel, to his desk, and closed the curtains and lit a candle, as if daylight would damage the gold lettering. He tried to minimize the number of times he turned the pages, though he knew he had to rough out a translation before he could put the whole thing away.

  He pulled his dictionary out of the desk, and, by the flickering candle, began to write.

  Woozy, we drain the glass.

  Again; then again; again.

  “We’re not ourselves,” you say.

  “We never were,” I answer.

  Subject, object of this sentence:

  Does it matter?

  The drummer drums.

  We turn.

  A secret turning in us,

  And the world turns and turns.

  Head is unconscious of Foot,

  Foot of Head. Who cares?

  They turn and turn.

  The last one, he knew, was Rumi, a verse known to every school-child in Iran. The others were like cousins of the same, outlines, though whether they were by disciples, taught to write in the same spirit, or whether they were poems by the master that he didn’t know, he couldn’t say.

  Outside, a few tourists sat beside their hampers, and an occasional surfboard could be seen at the point. He started down the steps and then turned back. He could no more walk away from the poems than from his own shadow.

  Why flail with sounds,

  When something else has taken light inside you?

  The translations muddied the issue, of course, placing a cloudy light over the poems, rendering them perishable, as it curiously seemed. And yet the meaning pressed through the syllables nonetheless. As when—why think of this?—her eyes suddenly filled with tears, on the rough road to the monastery, and he could imagine her a tent lit up in the fiery late-afternoon light.

  Were they code, of some kind? A present, and if so, from whom? Were they a message, written in a hidden script, or just some souvenir she’d picked up in L.A.? The only person who could tell him was the person he’d asked to leave.

  He ran through the map he kept in his head: Talmacz was too far away, and too closely implicated, in any case; Sefadhi was already “away on business,” adding fuel to the rumors that he dealt in antiquities on the side—and, besides, he would hardly rejoice at a glittering new distraction one month before the deadline. He thought of Alex, Mowbray, Pauline, and found himself in a maze again: it wasn’t even clear whether the book came from the Islamic world or the diaspora.

  He turned back, in spite of himself, thirsty, half possessed, to the poems running in perfect lines, innocuously, through the pages. Thirty percent or so, he realized as he translated, came from Sufi’s most famous master; the others were more like ghosts, or shadows, of Rumi’s impulse. And, more strangely still, they were like weak imitations of the “health club” Rumi of current legend: all his talk of transport, and none of the grief, the ache of an inner jihad. He put the book in the bottom drawer of the desk, and thought himself a “taken” man again.

  At night they went through his head, the lines in the foreign script, the words he’d translated: “Let me in, you cry at the door,” “Love himself has made a space inside me that is light.” A secret turning, a drummer drumming, figures seen only in outline. This one he’d first met many years ago, in Istanbul, with Martine; this one was like the pale sister of the famous couplet. He slept restlessly, bobbing on the surface of himself, and sometimes, when he descended deeper, he felt as if he were running through alleyways, the lines coming after him like footfalls. When it was daylight, he went straight to the desk, as straight as he’d gone to her in lieu of the desk for all these months. If she’d meant to release him to the other room, she’d succeeded beyond expectation.

  The crow caws and cackles.

  This bird is silent.

  Which of them has more to say?

  You come but I am nowhere.

  No when. No why. No you.

  You leave, and you are everywhere.

  No me.

  He thought, for some reason, of the two bearded men who had visited so recently, the one so rapt, an arrow on fire, the other a boulder who never moved. These terms, even in translation, were the same as theirs, but then that was the point of Sufism: The spokesman is emptied of himself and all that comes out from him is univer
sal. He speaks for everyone as the lover in his transport is every other lover.

  And besides, much of this might be him. In bringing the words into English he felt at times as if he were carrying jewels, kept under a special light in a vault, out into a dirty kitchen, where they looked just like any other baubles. It became hard to tell what was him, and what was they.

  You the sky, and I the astonished earth.

  What makes you grow new again inside me?

  How should the earth know what you have sown with her,

  It is enough that you know: she is big with you.

  Almost an insult again: another one of Rumi’s best-known poems. It was as if the book (he now thought of it as an unknown person) were playing games with him, deliberately taunting him with things he knew, so that the mix of false and true grew more confounding. As if someone were to include a soliloquy from Hamlet inside a newly published play, not as reference or allusion, but as if it were being written for the first time. Or else—and this would be most fitting—someone was trying to explode all thought of identity and authorship, as if to say (most Sufically of all), “Who cares who wrote this? It is itself, like any child.”

  Cause, effect; before, after.

  What need of terms?

  The moon is bright outside the city walls.

  Some men, far off, begin to turn.

  To pull himself away from the labyrinth into which he was beginning to be drawn, he walked into the other room, and thought: this is California, at the end of the twentieth century. These are cryptic poems of the kind I might, in certain circumstances, mock. I am a graduate student on a fast-fading scholarship, with chapters to complete. What do these poems mean to me?

  And then, back at his desk, he would be far away again, in Konya or Shiraz, and people were gathering under cover of dark outside the city walls. He was translating the loves, the longing, of someone he didn’t quite know, but recognized (maybe himself, maybe the one who kept him company at night); and yet, really, what was translated was himself. He fell into a deep and sudden dream and saw a figure all in black jumping out at him; he woke up, shaking, with an overwhelming sense of evil. She’d passed on even her dreams to him.

  Before you, there were shadows, fears.

  After you the same.

  Why do I feel transformed?

  What is that knocking?

  Who goes there?

  Not you, or he, but I.

  I knock at my own door

  And no one answers.

  Some of the poems—many of them, really—were like children’s toys, flimsy, so fragile it felt as if they’d break off in his hand; others had a dissonance, as of some modern copies of an old chant. Others still might have been deliberate fakes, or reminders, in some way, of how he’d misread the poems before. The more obscure the verse, he remembered reading in a book, the more likely it was to be authentic: since which impostor wishes to create something that can’t be understood?

  At times now he felt as if he were on the long early nights when the darkness had led them on and on, as if they were explorers: so intimate, she’d said, they’d hardly needed to touch. Skins, selves, everything had seemed to dissolve; as if they had crossed a threshold and now whatever passed between them was light. It was the other Californian tragedy, he’d thought at the time: once you see a spark in someone, or think you’ve found a Golden Age, you can’t settle to anything less. You become a wanderer for life.

  Now he picked up the phone and wondered how he might approach her. He imagined Greg or Kristina or the male voice that said, “Talk!” The only thing he could say to any of them, “Please tell Camilla to call,” was what she knew already: the point of the whole exercise (except, of course, she’d given him the book as a present for an anniversary: maybe she’d never expected it to be a goodbye present, too).

  The light began to fade and darken in the sky, and the wind came up outside. He saw the pieces of bush that would skip past on the pavement outside the abandoned house, heard the doors rattling in the place where they’d slept on the floor. It was as if he’d stepped out of himself, into some alternative life that had been waiting for him all along, just as the streets around him were back to their summer selves now, a ghost town.

  He lit the candle on the desk, his nightly ritual now, and as he looked over the running, skipping lines, their dots, their strokes, his eyes began to blur and he saw waves of sand running across the desert, and meaning nothing. The beautiful lettering became pure ornament, as when a Sufi, singing a ghazal, takes leave of meaning and flies off into a cry. Hundreds, thousands of bodies lined up in a great space, heads bowed as one, feet turned to the heavens, so many of them there was no individual body, just a mass, a great network of connected lines. And then he bent down more closely and thought he saw a hesitation here, a small amendment there. Perhaps a change in mood, a latter-day revision?

  When the knock came in mid-morning, he jumped up and ran to the door to open up, preparing his face to meet her, and found himself looking at the startled face of the mailman. “You know it’s a public hazard, not collecting your mail? People get the wrong kind of idea.”

  “I know,” he said wearily, and signed for the special shipment, from Los Angeles: a photocopy—he knew before opening it—from Sefadhi, of the scholarship stipulation. The Iranian way was always to push mildly, insistently at the back window.

  There was another letter, postmarked Bakersfield, and he recognized the writing almost without looking at it.

  John,

  Funny, isn’t it, how well we communicate on the page? But in person we’re always at one another’s throats—in every sense, I guess. It’s one of the things I miss. You told me you had to avert your eyes from my “official self ” to see the self you cared for; but then, I think, you began to avert your eyes from everything, or the “official self ” blotted everything else out, because you certainly weren’t seeing me any longer.

  Which meant, as you know, that I couldn’t, either. You were the way I forgave myself. You were the way I told myself I could be better, or at least that I had better things inside of me. I didn’t ask for that, it just came with the territory. You became the place where I put my better self.

  So now I’m gifted with this sense of who I am, or could be, but there’s no way I can get to it. You’ve shown me a better world and then walked off with the key. It’s all right for you, you have your books, your desk, all the places you can be when you’re alone. I have only you. That’s my equivalent. You are my books, my private space, my chance for something better. Not because I think you’re so great (God forbid!), but just because I find myself with you. What you found in New Mexico I find in your arms.

  Plain and simple.

  But not fair. Because you can go to New Mexico anytime you choose. But I can’t take myself to you. And if I do, it takes me weeks—months—to recover from the devastation. Or recover from the missing you. So I’m screwed either way, if I have a good time or a bad one.

  Which leaves me alone, with my heart in another town, in the safekeeping of someone who’s off reading poems. It’s unfair and unequal. What did I do to deserve this? Fall in love with you?

  You know I wish you well. But I feel like I’m alone here, in the dark. You were the best thing that ever happened to me. Until it stopped happening.

  Miss me lots—

  Love (even if you don’t want it),

  Camilla

  The next day, he took himself up into the hills. It wasn’t what he’d expected to do, and he still had to be careful to drive along streets he’d never driven along with her. But this predated all that: the first place he’d discovered in Santa Barbara, out on the southern edge of town, in the hills, near a grove of oak trees, the sky always unnaturally blue above the thin, deserted road.

  Off to one side was a seminary, and on the other a sign in elaborate calligraphy announcing the “Church of I AM.” Farther up, the community of nuns, belonging to an Eastern order. The first time he had co
me up here, he’d been amused to find that all the choice real estate was in religious hands: as in some old story in which the king has everything but peace, and so stands ready to give all his wealth to any wise man who can put his heart at ease.

  The congregation of sisters worshipped in a great temple set against the mountains, fragrant with sandalwood and incense, and all around it were flowerbeds and fruit trees. Down below, in the far distance, the misty outline of the coast, and the sea, usually deep blue, framed between the eucalyptus trees. On the steps of the temple, looking out at the great distances, he usually felt everything come into clarity.

  He parked the car and walked up to the space beside the moss-green bell. She’d given him a present, which perhaps she’d planned to explain to him, but he’d sent her away, and so turned it into a mystery. It might have been a way to pull him back to her (in which case, somehow, it had done all she might have wished). It might have been her ultimate act of generosity—to hand him over to what had always seemed to tug him away from her. It might have just been an attempt to help him in his thesis: in the New World they still believed in giving people what they wanted.

  He sat in the summer light, in the silent afternoon, and let the sun wash over him. One time, in Fez, he’d stolen out of the room while Martine was sleeping, and tried to go back to the Old City after dark. She’d admired a pair of amethyst earrings in the suq, and now he was determined to surprise her with them. But of course he’d got lost almost instantly—that’s one way locals stay ahead of visitors in Fez—and the more he’d tried to find his way out, or back, or anywhere, the more he’d felt like someone chasing his own past. Even in daylight it would have been hard to find; at nighttime it was impossible. Wild music came out of the stalls, and urchins pulled at him, offering him this place, that one; men in hoods appeared suddenly around corners, and then vanished again into the dark.